A month on the road, with Waugh on my mind

I leave in just a few hours for my month-long trek around eastern, central and southern Europe and I’ve yet to start packing. One of the toughest decisions is always what books to take. I take this decision very seriously and inevitably end up second guessing myself for most of the journey.

As for my pre-departure reading, that’s already been completed: Evelyn Waugh’s Labels: A Mediterranean Journey. It was the perfect preparation.

If I ever actually get round to writing something more substantial than this blog, I can only hope to emulate Waugh at least a little bit. His is one of the most refreshing, enlightening travelogues I’ve ever come across, and I’ve read a healthy dose of travel literature. Much of what I’ve endured over the years is good, a lot of it is utter crap, and every so often you find an undiscovered gem. Labels is one such gem. Though hardly known as a travel writer, this is easily one of Waugh’s finer works and definitely deserves a wider reading audience.

‘As soon as I set out on my own, things began to go so slightly against me.’

Many travel writers embellish way too much, recreating difficult-to-believe conversations in impeccably flawless English that took place at 3am between the writer, who often doesn’t speak the local language, and a drunk peasant after copious amounts of vodka had been consumed. When writers try and recount conversation after conversation, they start to lose credibility, in my book.

Another problem with a lot of travel writing, especially of the modern day variety, is how damn PC it is, especially guide books. People are afraid to put a bad word in about anybody or anywhere for fear of a public backlash. And the overwhelming positivity becomes demoralizing and banal very quickly. Waugh tells it like it is.

‘I can only be funny when I am complaining about something.’

Labels, which was published in 1930 and recaps Waugh’s journey on a cruise ship through the Mediterranean when he was 26, is full of wry and acerbic commentary. He’s also incredibly patronising, sexist and frequently irritable. While I am not saying I want to have all of his qualities, I found Labels to be one of the funniest, most engaging, and unpretentious travel books I’ve ever read. It’s a rollicking jolly read.

Waugh thought it was the novelist’s duty to deal with action and dialogue, whereas the travel writer has to get through interminable periods of inaction and silence. His challenge was to satisfactorily occupy himself during such times to avoid the ‘stark horrors of boredom.’

When I relate my travels, I am often hard-pressed to come up with nice things to say about people and places – I’m way too critical and condescending. I also struggle to adequately describe places, with my recent article on Kyiv (see previous post) one of my first major attempts to describe a city in any sufficient detail. Sometimes being critical and insulting is the easiest way to be funny, much as Waugh said.

Among my favourite bits:

His matter-of-fact complaints about the standards of customer service: ‘None of the servants spoke a word of any European language, but this was a negligible defect since they never answered the bell.’

His disdain for some of nature’s most allegedly splendorous sights: ‘I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset…[n]othing I have ever seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting.’

He doesn’t bother with superfluous details or commentary: ‘What can I possibly write, now, at this stage of the world’s culture, about two days in Venice, that would be an impertinence to every educated reader of this book?’

He has a wonderful self-deprecating side. On passengers buying tortoises in Greece to use for racing and entertainment purposes on the deck: ‘The chief disability suffered by tortoises as racing animals is not their slowness so much as their confused sense of direction. I had exactly the same difficulty when I used to take part in sports at my school, and was repeatedly disqualified for fouling the other competitors.’

Much like me, when he does quote people, he doesn’t change the language. From a Swede on the ship: ‘I do not find Lisbon so pretty town as I have been tinking about.’

Along the way he insults different cultures; people - dragomans are a particular source of his contempt and no one is spared his incendiary remarks: ‘there were two women in the room, a vastly fat white creature of indistinguishable race, and a gorgeous young Sudanese’, and ‘taxi drivers, as a race, are always constitutionally misanthropic’; and art and architecture, with particular venom directed at the Egyptians and Turks: ‘they seem to have been unable to touch any existing work or to imitate any existing movement without degrading it.’ And though he has a healthy appreciation for Gaudi’s delights in Barcelona, he can’t resist one small gibe: ‘He is a great example, it seems to me, of what art-for-art’s-sake can become when it is wholly untempered by considerations of tradition or good taste.’

He does like to complain, but this I disagree with: ‘I could continue this series of quite justifiable complaints for some time, but I think it would make dull reading.’ Not at all – though he can be funny a great deal of the time, Waugh is funniest when he complains.

But the moment that made me laugh out loud the most was this passage, on Gibraltar (where my mother lived for a number of years in her youth):

‘There is an idea, started, I believe, by Thackeray, that the Rock of Gibraltar looks like a lion. ‘It is the very image,’ he said, ‘of an enormous lion, crouched between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean, and set there to guard the passage for its British mistress.’ Everyone else on board was instantly struck by the felicity of this image, so I suppose that it must be due to some deficiency in my powers of observation that to me it appeared like a great slab of cheese and like nothing else.’

His parting words: ‘So, suitably moralising, I came near the end of my journey.’

As for my journey, I haven’t decided yet whether I’ll post throughout: we’ll play it by ear. Last May, when traipsing about in Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and Poland, I was determined to issue frequent dispatches, and then got stressed when I failed to find a suitably decent internet café or faced computer glitches, which was more often than not. This time I’m leaning towards not posting much at all, and taking a much needed break from computers. If I find myself within vicinity of an internet café and have a story that I urgently need to share, then perhaps I’ll put out something. But otherwise, you can no doubt expect a Waugh-like diatribe upon my return at the end of August, most likely in instalments.

The itinerary: western Ukraine-Slovakia (the High Tatras)-eastern Hungary-Budapest (where I’m joined by erstwhile Layman’s Guide character Dr Wasabi Islam)-Croatia-Bosnia-Serbia-Greece (where we wrap up with a week of rioting in Athens with Magnus and Murad and his wife).

See you in a month.