“Seventh Street,” set in post-World War I Washington, DC, opens and closes with the same short poem:

The page that is framed by this poem of urban modernity is both lyrical invocation and apostrophe of the black migrants who form a “wedge” of jazz songs and life driven into “the white and whitewashed wood of Washington.” “Seventh Street” is part modernist prose poem that expresses the rhythms and noise of the city of Prohibition, and part meditation on the meaning of migration. At its center is the repeated question, “Who set you flowing? Flowing down the smooth asphalt of Seventh Street, in shanties, brick office buildings, theaters, drug stores, restaurants, and cabarets?”

“Seventh Street” opens the second part of Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), and experimental book that marks the full arrival and a high point of achievement of American ethnic modernism. Published by the prestigious house of Boni and Liveright in 1923, still before Ernest Hemingway’s and William Faulkner’s first important books were to appear, Cane was a powerful contribution to the specific stream of modernism that included Stein’s Three Lives, James Joyce’s Dubliners, and Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, though Toomer also was inspired by modern poetry (Hart Crane’s poem The Bridge), Eugene O’Neill’s plays, Waldo Frank’s manifesto Our America, Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings, and Alfred Stieglitz’s photographs. An avid reader, Toomer was drawn to Shaw, Ibsen, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy, Baudelaire, Flaubert, and Melville.

In the course of the interwar period ethnic literature proliferated, turned to new themes, and developed a new tone. Among many other influences, Freud, Marx, and Hemingway made their presence felt in some of the new writing. Freudian issues were brought to the fore, for example, by the German Jewish immigrant and critic Ludwig Lewisohn whose marriage-as-hell novel The Case of Mr. Crump (1926) was termed “an incomparable masterpiece” by no less a person than Freud himself; and in his introduction Thomas Mann places Lewisohn – who also published the autobiographies Up Stream (1922) and The Island Within (1929) – “in the forefront of modern epic narrative” and praises him for his “manly style,” his “dry and desperate humor,” and his characterization: “even the woman, Anne Crump, remains human in all her repulsiveness,” Mann comments.

Lewisohn’s little-known novel The Vehement Flame: The Story of Stephen Escott (1930) was a particularly noteworthy attempt to represent the theme of repressed sexuality in the interaction among Jews and gentiles in New York at the turn of the century. The narrator is the lower-middle-class Southern Christian Stephen Escott (who is symbolically positioned between his Jewish immigrant hometown friend David Sampson and the upper-class Oliver Clayton). Stephen and David work as law partners in Manhattan; Oliver is a genteel publisher who is shocked by modernist literature. Their differing attitudes toward sexuality, class-based expectations of life’s rewards, and art come to a head in a traumatic murder trial of the Freud-savvy, avant-garde Greenwich Village poet Paul Glover, who publishes in the Little Review and Poetry, embodies the modern defiance of aesthetic and sexual conventions, yet kills Jasper Harris for having an affair with Paul’s wife Janet.

Introduction

'Travel literature' is the significantly generic descriptor that has succeeded the Modern Language Association Bibliography's pre-1980s 'travel, treatment of'. But as a tool it cannot complete a search for relevant critical and theoretical materials. Very early in the contemporary resurgence of interest in travel writing, relations with the analysis of ethnography, thus with the history and function (and future) of anthropology in the West, and with postcolonial theory generally, became vital and generative. The interest in travel writing - across a wide political spectrum - was part of the necessary reimagining of the world first occasioned by the post-World War Two resistance movements and wars of liberation in the former European colonies, as well as by the waves of immigration that followed. It is a vivid shock to walk into the room-sized stained glass globe of the world (1935) suspended in the Mother Church of the Christian Scientists in Boston. Not only because, with loud metaphorical resonance, you can hear the whispers of people on the far side of the glass world as if they were speaking in your own ear, but also because the various pieces, each a different jewelled colour, belong to a world on the point of explosion. Much of the work of observing, interpreting, articulating the explosion of that world, as well as the historical development of the imperialised world that led to it, was done through recovery and analysis of people’s writings about ‘foreign’ and especially ‘exotic’ places in which they had travelled and lived: as colonial masters, pilgrims, explorers, ambassadors, ambivalent wives, roving soldiers, ecstatic cross-dressers, conquistadores, missionaries, merchants, escaped slaves, idle students of the gentry and aristocracy, ‘adventurers’, and alienated modern artists.

Fact and fiction

The best-known Congo journey is a fictional one that does not name its setting. Marlow's voyage to find Kurtz, the agent who has 'gone native', in Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1899), operates on several levels: the story's critical engagement with colonialism is flanked by the mythical and psychological dimensions of the protagonists' experiences. All sorts of later travellers to the Congo refer to this tale. Most of the narratives discussed towards the end of this chapter (and still others that are not) cite it. Journalist Michela Wrong even turns to it for the title of her admirably self-effacing book chronicling the downfall of Zaire's President Mobutu, In the Footsteps of Mr Kurtz (2000).

Conrad spent six months in the Congo in 1890 working for the Belgian Société Anonyme pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo. His ‘Congo Diary’ records his 250-mile trek from Matadi to Kinshasa and notes the discomfort, obstacles, sickness, and the sight of murdered Africans. His ‘Up-river book’, written on board the steamer ‘Roi des Belges’, contains mainly technical information on the navigation of the river. The experiences of both journals inform Heart of Darkness and the short story ‘An Outpost of Progress’ (1898) but are different in kind from them. Curiously, the travellers who later take Heart of Darkness as their reference point tend not to mention these documents of Conrad’s actual travel. On the whole it is easy to tell such journals and fictions apart: Graham Greene’s Congo Journal, for example, which has Greene re-reading Heart of Darkness, after having ‘abandoned’ Conrad in ‘about 1932 because his influence on me was too great and too disastrous’, records a trip to the Belgian Congo in 1959 to research the novel A Burnt-Out Case. But Europe’s mythologising of Africa in general and of the Congo in particular means that fact and fiction do sometimes overlap.

The essence of adventure lies in taking risks and exploring the unknown, so it is hardly surprising to find that early travel accounts tended for the most part to be written by men, who moved more freely in the public sphere. The great European sagas of knightly questing (such as The Norse Sagas and The Arthurian Cycle) or seafaring exploration (such as The Odyssey and The Lusiads) are also male narratives with women the objects of desire or destination points rather than active co-travellers, though the figure of the warrior-princess roaming the world in search of adventure was popular in Renaissance epics like Orlando furioso and Gerusalemme liberata. The adventure quest in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, when men journeyed in search of fortune and renown to the new worlds that were opening up beyond the frontiers of Europe, was explicitly gendered, since the idea of man as heroic risk-taking traveller underpinned not only the great travel narratives of the next centuries, but much of the travel writing of the twentieth century also.

Alongside the myths of the heroic explorer, however, are other kinds of narrative, some of which have been produced by women. The travel text as ethnography or social commentary transcends gender boundaries and, increasingly in the twentieth century, male and female travellers have written self-reflexive texts that defy easy categorisation as autobiography, memoir, or travel account. There is also, in British travel writing, a tendency to self-deprecation and irony, a style of writing that has both Henry Fielding and Jane Austen as its antecedents, despite the fact that the latter did not move beyond the confines of southern England. Contemporary writers like Redmond O’Hanlon and Eric Newby subvert or satirise the image of the explorer-hero, turning themselves into anti-heroes in their narratives, a comic reversal of the dominant image of the male traveller who seeks to boldly go where no man has gone before.

Travel has recently emerged as a key theme for the humanities and social sciences, and the amount of scholarly work on travel writing has reached unprecedented levels. The academic disciplines of literature, history, geography, and anthropology have all overcome their previous reluctance to take travel writing seriously and have begun to produce a body of interdisciplinary criticism which will allow the full historical complexity of the genre to be appreciated.

The absence within the academy of a tradition of critical attention to travel writing means that this Companion, unlike most others in the series, whose areas of study are well-defined, has to bring its subject into focus in order to ‘accompany’ it. As a result, our volume offers only a tentative map of a vast, little-explored area. As far as practicable, we have opted for a broad definition of travel writing, with the huge range of potential texts leading us to focus on major shifts, on kinds and forms, on places written about, and on exemplary instances, rather than on particular travel writers. The two major limitations we have worked within are concentrations on the period since 1500 and on travel writing in English and published in Britain. The Anglocentric concentration is by no means exclusive: non-English travel writing has often been influential in Britain, with translations appearing soon after original publication, and travel writing has played an important rôle in recent years in the creation of an international literary field, so it would not make sense to operate rigid principles of exclusion.

Putting the world on paper

Among the many texts produced before, during, and after Sir Humphrey Gilbert's expedition to Newfoundland in 1583 - from patents and provision lists to narrative accounts and celebratory poems - was a detailed set of instructions for a surveyor named Thomas Bavin. Bavin was charged with compiling a cartographic, pictorial, and textual record of the east coast of America, and with acquiring the books, instruments, and drawing materials he would need for the task. His employers suggested that he pack an almanac, a pair of notebooks, several large sheets of paper, various inks and leads, and 'all sorts of colours to draw all things to life'.

Documentation had always played an important rôle in travel, particularly in overseas ventures. English merchants and mariners had long been instructed to keep careful records of their movements, to direct the travelers who would follow in their footsteps and fill in the gaps of geographical knowledge. But Bavin’s instructions – and the texts they were designed to generate – outline a more ambitious project. Bavin and his men were to move along the coast, mapping each successive region and writing accounts of any features that might be ‘strange to us in England’. The maps were to use a key of symbols for rocks, rivers, hills, and trees (which were to be copied onto a parchment card and kept handy at all times), and the notes were to pay special attention to any commodities the country had to offer. Finally, Bavin was instructed to ‘draw the figures and shapes of men and women in their apparel as also their manner . . . in every place as you shall find them differing [from us]’. This would require him to get close enough to the natives to study their social structure, religious customs, and relations with friends and enemies, and to record their language in an English dictionary brought along for the purpose.

The very first documents to emerge from the New World were travel accounts. Although this was not the earliest travel writing in Europe the encounter with the Americas certainly stimulated a vast production of such literature and arguably made textual experience of the exotic a much more mundane occurrence. At the time of the discovery of the New World, the horizons of colonial Europe were also being expanded by travel to the east and south, but the unanticipated discoveries of Columbus provided a frisson of mystery and a need for explanation. This was the basis not just for recurrent attempts to detail, catalogue, and locate the peoples, creatures, and geographies of the continents, but also for a particular sense of the possibility of encountering the marvellous, the novel, and the extreme. The cross-cutting of these themes and ideas has produced a travel writing in South America that is filled with the discovery of the fantastic, the survival of the anachronistic, and the promise of marvellous monstrosity.

In this way, South America – more than its northern counterpart – and particularly the Amazon region, has been largely imagined through such travel writing. This becomes very evident in attempts to define and locate the region. The ‘Amazon’ might be restrictively identified with the main river channel or the river basin, but the Amazon river basin actually has a watershed connection with that of the Orinoco, so that hydrology defies neat boundaries and definitions. Likewise, although western Amazonia has an intensity of rainfall that is unrivalled elsewhere in the river basin, the actual extent of the ‘tropical rainforest’ in South America exceeds the limits of the Amazon basin itself, stretching into Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Surinam, and French Guiana. The Amazon could therefore be seen to comprise not only the contiguous forests that spread beyond the river-system, but also savanna and scrub forest environments.

Itineraries and expectations

Travel is everywhere in eighteenth-century British literature. The fictional literature of the age 'is full of travelling heroes enmeshed in journey-plots', and 'almost every author of consequence' - among them Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Laurence Sterne, Mary Wollstonecraft - 'produced one overt travel book'. To these must be added the 'numerous essayistic and philosophic performances' that were cast in the form of imaginary travelogues, such as Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels(1726), Johnson's Rasselas (1759), and Oliver Goldsmith's Citizen of the World (1762). Writers seemed to be travelling, in reality or in their imaginations, just about everywhere. Paul Fussell speculates that travel's pervasive appeal may have owed something to the high degree of acceptance which philosophical empiricism had gained in Britain by the end of the seventeenth century. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) became a sort of bible for those who espoused a ‘blank slate’ conception of human consciousness and held that all knowledge is produced from the ‘impressions’ drawn in through our five senses. If knowledge is rooted in experience and nowhere else, travel instantly gains in importance and desirability. Following the great Renaissance age of colonial exploration and expansion, an articulated, systematic empiricism made travelling about the world and seeing the new and different ‘something like an obligation for the person conscientious about developing the mind and accumulating knowledge’. Merely reading about conditions elsewhere was not enough. Those who could travel, should – though of course precious few actually could.

The ethnographic impulse

The description of peoples, their nature, customs, religion, forms of government, and language, is so embedded in the travel writing produced in Europe after the sixteenth century that one assumes ethnography to be essential to the genre. In England this assumption became part of the justification for the most representative form of this writing, the travel collections published from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Already in 1577 one of the first of these collectors, Richard Willes, had announced that all branches of learning have their 'special times' of flourishing, and 'now' was the time of geography. In Renaissance learning geography, or cosmography, acted as an encyclopaedic synthesis for the description of the world. Therefore, the description of peoples became the empirical foundation for a general rewriting of ‘natural and moral history’ within a new cosmography made possible by the navigations of the period. As Awnsham and John Churchill wrote in the preface to their 1704 Collection of Voyages and Travels:

In December 1933 Patrick Leigh Fermor set out to walk from Rotterdam to Constantinople, a journey across many of the parts of Europe which would soon be devastated by fascism and war. After distinguished military service in Crete, Fermor made his career as a travel writer, finally narrating his account of that epic pre-war walk in A Time of Gifts and Between the Woods and the Waters. His compendious learning and literary style link Fermor to the 1930s tradition of Robert Byron and Peter Fleming discussed in the previous chapter. But A Time of Gifts was not published until 1977, coinciding with a raft of books by younger writers - notably Paul Theroux, Peter Matthiessen, Bruce Chatwin, and Robyn Davidson - which in different ways announced a decisive shift in modern travel writing and which will provide the pivot for this chapter's survey.

Post-war voices

Fermor’s first travel book, written after an extensive post-war tour of the West Indies, was The Traveller’s Tree (1950). Winner of the Heinemann Foundation Prize for Literature, The Traveller’s Tree signalled – in the continuity of its voice with pre-war writers – that a bridge had been successfully thrown over the turbulent decade of the 1940s, and that English gentlemen were still able to travel the world and to write with witty nonchalance about what they encountered. Wilfred Thesiger, Eric Newby, and Norman Lewis are other members of Fermor’s generation whose work spans the entire second half of the twentieth century and has proved enduringly popular.

When European ships began tracing the west coast of North America, the varied terrain and climate between Mexico and Alaska was home to many different societies. Within what is now California, indigenous peoples took advantage of the seasonal variety of food and climate in the three main geographic zones of coast, central valley, and the Sierra on the eastern side of the central valley. These peoples and their rich environment attracted Spanish missionaries in the late eighteenth century, who sought to convert them to Christianity, and to the rôle of labourers in the stock-raising and agriculture that constituted the economic basis of the missions. These missions notwithstanding, at the beginning of the nineteenth century California was still a remote and mysterious place for most Europeans and Americans, accessible only via the long ocean voyage around Cape Horn.

By 1850, however, California, a new state of the USA, was a destination for thousands of immigrants from elsewhere in the USA, from Europe, and from Asia, travelling by land and sea. Twenty years later, railways collapsed the six-month ocean or overland journey into a matter of a few days, and the telegraph and mechanized printing presses rapidly conveyed news of what travellers saw. Travel writing about California reflects the west coast’s rapid transformation from a remote non-place to a focal point of a powerful mythology, a development stemming from two centuries of European colonising experience in North America, newly stimulated by the rapid development of mass transportation and communications. The earliest published accounts of California are products of strategic and scientific explorations in the late 1700s, which were imitated by official overland expeditions between 1790 and 1840. But thereafter, we enter an era chronicled in a multitude of narratives of journeys around Cape Horn or across the continent, by trappers, farmers, would-be gold miners, journalists, and writers in search of a subject.

In his book, The English Novel, Ford Madox Ford comments that over the preceding hundred years a growing 'ease of locomotion' had profoundly changed the English-speaking world. 'The habit of flux', he says, had been born; people moved around in an unprecedented way. Ford, a romantic Tory, was in theory ambivalent about this change, but in practice he embodied it. A prefatory note to the book underlines his point. It was written, he tells us, 'in New York, on the S. S. Patria, and in the port and neighbourhood of Marseilles during July and August, 1927', though he 'made certain alterations' in Paris over the new year of 1930; appropriate creative circumstances for the editor of an avant-garde magazine called the transatlantic review, whose contributors were chiefly highly mobile cosmopolitan expatriates based in Paris, London, and New York.

The English Novel appeared in 1930, towards the end of the period covered by this chapter. Ford dated the beginnings of this increased mobility to the 1840s, a decade in which railway trains were already reaching thirty-five miles per hour, the first propeller-driven iron steamship, Brunel’s Great Britain, crossed the Atlantic (it cautiously carried a full quota of sails), Thomas Cook was already in business, and Karl Baedeker’s famous guidebooks for travellers had been in circulation for over a decade. Stephen Kern reminds us that by 1880 the American Transcontinental Railway and the Trans-Indian Peninsular Railroad had been built, the Suez Canal opened, and that if Jules Verne’s Around the World in 80 Days was a fantasy when published in 1873, by 1890 an American woman journalist, Nellie Bly, had been round the globe in a mere seventy-two. Railroads criss-crossed Europe and beyond and, as liners grew faster and more luxurious, steamship companies produced a crop of shipping millionaires. Increasing ‘ease of locomotion’ was not, however, simply the product of disinterested technological advance, and those on the move not only bands of tourists. Improvements in transport were fanned by, and helped to fan, the empire building, trade expansion and mass migrations of the late nineteenth century.