Yanks at Home, Brits Abroad

I never felt so American as when I visited Northern England a few years ago. I often found myself trying to strike up a conversation with a stranger in a situation where there seemed nothing else to do — for example, while sitting with the stranger on a bench at a bus stop. In this situation, I found the silence between us to be barely tolerable. My stranger, I soon discovered, found anything other than silence to be barely tolerable. I checked my loquacity and became interested in an odd looking building across the street.

This incident is, one might say, merely the tip of the diverging sensibilities of Yanks and Brits iceberg.

This divergence, between two peoples puzzled by their sense of kinship with each other, can be illustrated endlessly, and has been, and will be. I recently became aware of a most radical and vivid disjuncture of Yank and Brit sensibilities in the matter of travel and travel’s literary by-product, travel literature.

Both Yanks and Brits like to travel. The difference is that Yanks like to travel where they can go without a passport, while the Brits go all over the planet.

When Dinah Shore sang “See the USA in your Chevrolet”, America listened. The newly built interstate highway system beckoned. Americans travelled hundreds, nay thousands of miles for the privilege of sitting at a lunch counter and enjoying a hamburger and a coffee just like the hamburgers and coffee at home. In fact, Americans perfected the art of traveling without leaving home. So passionate is an American’s attachment to home that he can now buy a true mobile home — in essence a three bedroom apartment on wheels.

American travel literature reflects the American passion for home. The journals of Lewis and Clarke record the wonders that they saw — buffaloes, plains Indians, wild rivers, prairies, stupendous mountains, deserts — all now incorporated into the immense and majestic space that Americans think of as home. William Bartram and John James Audubon left us classic accounts of soon to disappear wilderness east of the Mississippi. Mark Twain wrote a sublime book called Life on the Mississippi. Henry David Thoreau wrote another classic, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Theodore Dreiser and John Steinbeck and Jack Kerouac and William Least Heat Moon wrote about the sort of travel made possible by the internal combustion engine. Henry Beston made travel an interior philosophical journey in The Outermost House.

Of course, certain foreign destinations remain popular with Americans: London, Paris, and Rome, in particular. But for the most part, Americans find America to be world enough.

The Brits are really different in this respect. Really different. They travel to places that are Not Home. Insularity is a British trait too: of course. A King of England once said “Abroad is bloody.” Still, the Brits are on the move.

Of course, until recently, they were the head of an empire on which the sun never set, and they were understandably curious about their possessions. But they not only traveled more, they traveled with a difference: they knew something about the lands and peoples that they visited, and they came home knowing even more. And they wrote books about the lands they traveled to — some of which have become classics of English literature.

I am 73 years old and when I consider how little of this remarkable planet I have seen with my own eyes, how little of it I have set foot on, how exceptionally few places I have left money behind in, I wonder what the hell I did with my decades. My only consolation as I reflect on the unpardonably insular life that I have led is to read the best books by traveling Brits.

So here is the list of British travel books that I intend to read if the Lord and kale grant me time.

Cities and Cemeteries of Etruria, by George Dennis (1814 – 1898). This classic work is one of the earliest scholarly studies of the mysterious people who furnished Rome with some of its kings and its calendar and some of its religion and who paid dearly for being a mature civilization when Rome was still inventing the Cloaca Maxima. Rome got rid of its kings, declared itself a republic, and then, some think, went about systematically destroying any evidence that it had ever been dominated by the Etruscans or owed anything to them culturally. Dennis explored Etruscan tombs, pondered the remains of their art, and regretted the indecipherability of their language. He also wrote well.

Eothen, by Alexander Kinglake (1809 — 1891). The author was a friend of Tennyson and a successful London lawyer who was bored by the practice of law and who sought fulfillment in writing a highly regarded history of the Crimean War, in hating Napoleon III, and in traveling in the Levant and Egypt. Eothen (Greek for “from the east”) is the book that he wrote about his travels. The book is said to have been influenced by the Greek historian Herodotus. (Say it like a Brit: her o DO tus.). He wrote charmingly.

The Historical Geography of the Holy Land by George Adam Smith (1856 — 1942). Smith was a Scottish theologian known for his commentaries on the book of Isaiah. He traveled widely in what is now Israel and Syria, and came to believe that the Old Testament cannot be understood without detailed knowledge of the physical nature of the land with which the Biblical narratives are concerned. He writes vividly about a part of the Earth that he assumed would be forevermore a “museum of church history”.

Travels in Arabia Deserta, by Charles M. Doughty (1843 – 1926). The books I have noted above are neither odd nor eccentric, unless you consider passionate curiosity about the past to be odd and eccentric, in which case it’s too bad you are a chump. Doughty’s book is odd and eccentric. It describes the time he spent in the Arabian peninsula circa 1880, accompanying a pilgrimage to Mecca and living with beduins. His life was often in danger and the rigors of life in the desert almost destroyed his health. He published the account of his travels, his masterwork, in 1888.

This book is written in pre-Elizabethan English, with a few Victorianisms thrown in. Doughty said that the style resulted from his quest for linguistic purity. Here is the first paragraph of Travels in Arabia Deserta:

A new voice hailed me of an old friend when, first returned from tbe Peninsula, I paced again in that long street of Damascus which is called Straight; and suddenly taking me wondering by the hand “ Tell me (said he), since thou art here again in the peace and assurance of Ullah, and whilst we walk, as in the former years, toward the new blossoming orchards, full of the sweet spring as the garden of God, what moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia ?

I don’t know how many of these books I will live to read, but I am optimistic. I believe that longevity is promoted not so much by kale in the diet or by exercise in the daily routine as by waking up each morning excited by the thought of all the great books that you are going to read.