Reconsiderations

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Travel writing in English has always been a byproduct of Empire: the servants of Victoria scattering across the exotic corners of the globe, notebook in hand, with a sense of having been born to rule. These travelers went in the manner of gentleman farmers riding out to the farthest expanses of their estate so that they could see how their subjects were, and how they might even extend their terrain a little. Up until around World War II, only people of means could travel for fun, and travel writing had the feel of a holiday diary or a scientist’s log, documenting the strange climates in which someone found himself—it was usually a he—and the curious ways of the natives that he met there.

Take Graham Greene’s 1939 book, The Lawless Roads, his record of a five-week trip to Mexico, during which he was sued by Twentieth Century Fox on behalf of Shirley Temple (he had accused the nine-year-old of “dimpled depravity” and “dubious coquetry” in his review of Wee Willie Winkie). Greene’s one big previous exotic trip—into the jungles of West Africa—had been, explicitly, a journey into fear and discomfort and the subconscious, since he looked upon the continent as a kind of diagram of the human heart. Later in his life, Greene would become something of a patron saint of travelers for his candor and intensity—he would speak on behalf of the oppressed, in Haiti and Vietnam and South Africa, with conviction and understanding—but in Mexico, as a thirty-three-year-old working in the travel form that his friends (like Evelyn Waugh) and his contemporaries (like Aldous Huxley [Italy, page 28]), helped develop, he was essentially a man of privilege holding his nose in an alien place.

Greene’s initial impression was of “dirt and darkness.” He confides, “There was a large cockroach dead on the floor of my room and a sour smell from the water closet.” He goes out to lunch and finds it “awful... tasteless... repellent,” before, rather speedily, concluding, “All Mexican food is like that.” He visits a market and finds it “far more squalid than anything I had seen in the West African bush.” Of course he is visiting some of his self-dislike on everything he sees—in San Antonio his main stop is a freak show and he declares, “You get used in Mexico to disappointment”—but the sour smell of his own displacement never relents. Burying himself in Cobbett and Trollope while surrounded by astonishing landscapes, he notes, “And one did want, I found, an English book in this hating and hateful country.”

When Greene worked up his notes of revulsion about Mexico into a novel, however—The Power and the Glory, published one year after The Lawless Roads—it became a landmark of compassion and fellow feeling, his breakthrough work, precisely because he was writing with a sympathy and tenderness that his earlier novels about England, such as The Man Within and Brighton Rock, had lacked. To read the novel and the travel book together is to see the limits of the latter. It feels like a holiday genre, in which the traveler leaves real thought, engagement, and even curiosity and conscience behind. As a travel writer, Greene registered everything grimly in Mexico, including beggars “like mangy animals in a neglected zoo”; as a novelist he could home in on the one issue—being a fugitive believer—that set his soul atremble, and could extend the reader’s sympathy by entering, rather than merely judging, the people that he saw.

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