Travels With A Donkey in the Cévennes (#CCSpin)

 "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go."

These days: if only!

R. L. Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes is about a twelve-day trip he took through the mountains of southern France in September and October of 1878. 

That's already late in the year for the mountains, and Stevenson is told to expect cold weather, if not wolves and bandits. He takes a revolver. He designs a sleeping bag that will double as a sack to carry what he needs. And he acquires a donkey, Modestine, "a diminutive she-ass, not much bigger than a dog, the color of a mouse, with a kindly eye and a determined under-jaw."

The book is early in Stevenson's career, but not his first; he had previously written a book of travels The Inland Voyage and he identifies himself as a writer to people he meets. But he's more generally assumed to be a pedlar, though maybe of the higher sort: at one point he's taken for a dealer in brandy.

"In a little place called Le Monastier, in a pleasant highland valley fifteen miles from Le Puy, I spent about a month of fine days. Monastier is notable for the making of lace, for drunkenness, for freedom of language, and for unparalleled political dissension." The four factions of French politics in the 1800s are Bourbonists, Orleanists, partisans of the Napoleons, and Republicans. Le Monastier had them all. This is the start of his trip, where he commissions the sleeping bag of his own design and purchases Modestine. "At length she passed into my service for sixty-five francs and a glass of brandy."

Stevenson is raised a Scots Presbyterian of a moderately severe stripe, but has by this time lost his faith. He's discreet but honest about this loss with the people he meets and even with us readers in the text, but clear enough. Still religion interests him. Though he camps out as needed, he doesn't every night. One of his stops (the 26th of September) is the Trappist monastery Lady of the Snows: "I have rarely approached anything with more unaffected terror than the monastery of our Lady of the Snows. This it is to have a Protestant education." Nevertheless he quickly makes friends. "I was troubled besides in my mind as to etiquette. Durst I address a person who was under a vow of silence? Clearly not. But drawing near, I doffed my cap to him with a faraway superstitious reverence. He nodded back, and cheerfully addressed me. Was I going to the monastery?" An Irish deacon living at the monastery is thrilled to be delegated as Stevenson's guide: he's released from his vow of silence to play host and had had no occasion to speak English. (Though it would seem Stevenson's French is quite good.) 

But a couple of retreatants at the monastery try to convert him until he's finally forced to say they're being impolite, a little too pushy, when they immediately back off. 

Stevenson has done some reading in preparation for traveling the area. There's a legendary wolf of the area whose stories he's learned; of even more interest to him, the second half of his journey is in an area that's quite Protestant, and he's studied up on the history. The Camisards were French Huguenots whom Louis the XIVth tried to suppress in the early 1700s, and who took up armed rebellion with some success. Stevenson is full of their stories. (One of them involved a group of Protestants all stabbing a murderous Catholic Inquisitor, such that no one of them was responsible for the death, which reminded me of a certain Agatha Christie novel.) 

Phylloxera is destroying the grapevines of southern France at this time:

    "I could not at first make out what they were after, and asked one of the fellows to explain.

    'Making cider,' he said. 'Oui, c'est comme ça. Comme dans le nord!'"

The book has considerable charm; he's mildly ironic but forgiving about the people he meets. (Except for one man in Fouzilhac, who won't even give him directions; but that's OK, because these bad manners appal the people he meets in Fouzilhic. These would appear to be actual village names, now spelled slightly differently.) He's mildly ironic but forgiving as well about himself, about his inability to manage a donkey, or to load Modestine with the sleeping sack he commissioned.

I should say, I suppose, that while he's not cruel to Modestine by the standards of the time, he's certainly not enlightened by ours. In the end he sells her for thirty-five francs: "The pecuniary gain is not obvious, but I had bought freedom into the bargain." And even though he remembers her liking to eat out of his hand, Modestine's fate is no further to be thought of.

"The journey which this little book is to describe was very agreeable and fortunate for me. After an uncouth beginning, I had the best of luck to the end. But we are all travellers in what John Bunyan calls the wilderness of the world,--all, too, travellers with a donkey;..."

A French hiking club now maintains the route for walkers. 

The book is also available from Gutenberg.

Letters written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark

 "...I adhere to my determination of giving you my observations, as I travel through new scenes, whilst warmed with the impression they have made on me."

In the summer of 1795, Mary Wollstonecraft sailed from Hull, England for Scandinavia, making her first stop Gothenberg (Göteberg) in Sweden. 

By 1795 Wollstonecraft is an established author, with several important and popular books in her past, including Vindication of the Rights of Men (a response to Burke's attack on the French Revolution) and Vindication of the Rights of Women.

She travels with her older daughter, Fanny, and a French nurse. She mentions she has business reasons, though the text doesn't offer details. But it's also clear that it's an opportunity for a new book and while the 'you' of the letters, the 'you' of the quote above, is an actual person, it is also you, the reader.

But the original you is Gilbert Imlay, Fanny's father, who was capable of claiming to be married to Wollstonecraft without having done so, and had just left her for another woman. He was engaged in some dodgy commerce, likely trading confiscated Bourbon wealth for food, and the ship on which his goods were traveling had gone missing somewhere in Scandinavia. Wollstonecraft volunteers to go look, hoping to win Imlay back.

I liked this even better than Vindication of the Rights of Women. Vindication is, whether we've read it or not, a book we know--it's been that influential. And by and large (though, alas, not entirely) the grounds for debate have moved beyond it. This was more of a surprise. 

"Talk not of bastilles! To be born here, was to be bastilled by nature..." [of Sweden]

"...the Danes are the people who have made the fewest sacrifices to the graces." 

Of the three countries Norway is her clear favorite. Since the Other Reader is a quarter Norwegian, I was pleased to be able to report this. 

But it's not all snark--much as I enjoy a good snark. There's some fine nature writing, which leads her to meditate on our relative need for nature and civilization. 

"...the line of beauty requires some curves..."

She compares government and society in the three countries: at this time Sweden is going through a conservative, anti-Jacobin phase, and its finances are problematic because of a recent war against Russia and Denmark; Denmark is led by a Crown Prince who's an enlightened despot, which is (marginally) better than a plain despot; and Norway, nominally under Danish suzerainty, is suffering benign neglect, and its sturdy yeomanry little troubled by aristocrats. Anyway, that's what she says...

A map of her travels:

I read the book in the Oxford edition shown above, which has some nice additions: an introduction, the map, contemporary reviews, and several of the Wollstonecraft's original letters to Imlay. And notes. Glad to have them, though the description of England as 'impatient at the neutrality of Denmark' struck me as rather an odd phrasing. Not how the Danes thought of English actions when I was there. The book is also available from Gutenberg.

Then I read Sylvana Tomaselli's overview of Wollstonecraft, which came out from Princeton earlier this year. I think I would have preferred a more biographical approach, though this was quite good. Tomaselli organizes Wollstonecraft's thought by subject. Wollstonecraft is an important thinker, and one of the nice things about Letters is watching her think; still, for better or worse, she's a (successfully) practicing journalist, not an academic philosopher, and I'm not sure there's entirely a system there to be found. I'm suspicious of systems anyway. 

But it was fun to discover that Letters was Wollstonecraft's most successful book, rapidly translated into the Scandinavian languages. Coleridge was inspired by the book to plan a trip to Scandinavia, but like a lot of Coleridge's projects, it didn't come off. Likely he got no further than Porlock. 

The book works for a couple of my challenges this year:

"Adieu! I must trip up the rocks..."

Cees Nooteboom's Venice

"...in Venice, too, it is not difficult to lose your way, something to which, if I am not in a hurry, I do not actually object,..." 

Cees Nooteboom's book is not the product of a single visit to Venice, but of a lifetime of visiting: his first visit he tells us was in 1964; the book came out in Dutch in 2019, and was translated into English by Laura Watkinson. He had just been there, it would seem. It's formed of a long series of impressions, engaging, not systematic.

Nooteboom's Venice is a melancholic place, fed by ruminative recollections that circle around literary tropes and return again. What is it about Venice that brings this out? Thomas Mann's Death In Venice, Joseph Brodsky's Watermark, Valeria Luiselli's Sidewalks, Henry James, Ernest Hemingway--all of whom are mentioned by Nooteboom.

It may be that connoisseurs of Venice go in winter when it's dark, grey and cold, but there are fewer tourists. It seems that's Nooteboom's approach (as it was Brodsky's, at least on the evidence of Watermark.)

But the book isn't entirely occupied with the high-falutin'. Nooteboom is much taken with the mystery series set in Venice by Donna Leon and Michael Dibdin; at one point he goes around looking for the police office that would serve as headquarters for Commissari Aurelio Zen and Guido Brunetti. He tells us, "Those who do not believe in books have no business being here."

Commissario Aurelio Zen--I had long assumed it was just a fanciful name, but, as I learned from Nooteboom, it's not. It's a good Venetian family name--there was a doge Renieri Zen, who died in 1268. Zen in standard Italian would be Zeno, as in he with la coscienza in the novel by Svevo, but in Venetian dialect the name Zen is ordinary enough. Who knew? 

It made me want to go to Venice (go back to Venice in fact, though I haven't been there since 1984) and what more can a travel book do? 

Cees Nooteboom (pronunciation) is a Dutch writer (born 1933) of novels, poetry, books of travel. He's sometimes mentioned as a Nobel prize contender. This is the first thing I've read by him, but I will certainly be looking out for others.

The book is accompanied by lovely views of Venice taken by his wife, the photographer Simone Sassen:

And, pretty clearly, I was the first person to read this copy from the library. Nothing quite like the freshness of an unread library book!

 

Italy books: his and hers

His: Poets In A Landscape

In the mid-50s Gilbert Highet, then a professor in Classics at Columbia, took a trip through Italy. He seeks out places associated with the famous Roman poets: Catullus, Vergil, Propertius, Horace, Tibullus, Ovid, and Juvenal. The organizing principle is geographical, starting in the north: Catullus' birthplace is Sirmione, on the Lago di Garda; Juvenal is likely from Aquinum, the modern Aquino, southeast of Rome, also the origin of St. Thomas Aquinas. Highet and his traveling companion visit places from north to south. Some of the identifications are tenuous. Is the Villa d'Orazio Horace's actual villa? Who knows? But it doesn't really matter. Highet is a good travel writer. Italy, especially in the countryside, was still quite poor in the mid-50s, but Highet enjoys meeting people, his descriptions of the landscape are evocative, the things he sees are fun.

A second aspect of the book is the poetry. Highet gives his own translations from the poets. I think he's a sensitive and strong translator, with a real feel for the metrics. He's also an enormously civilized individual, quoting Eliot or Pound or Tennyson appropriately. For instance he cites Tennyson's witty 'Hendecasyllabics' in discussing Catullus. Highet isn't known as a translator, but based on this he could have been.

The weak link in the book is the criticism of the poetry. It's not exactly wrong, but it's terribly flat-footed. It wouldn't have been out of place in the Victorian era, but Highet was born in 1906. It's possible to read his criticism for amusement, but that's about all. Highet has the grace to quote Yeats' poem 'The Scholars' but doesn't manage to escape its mockery of 'bald heads forgetful of their sins' reading Catullus.

It would be a wonderful book to take with (or read in advance) should you be able to take a trip to Italy. ***Heavy sigh***

Highet dedicated his book to his 'Travelling Companion'. Turns out she was writing a book, too.

Hers: North From Rome

The introduction to Highet's book says if he's remembered at all, he's remembered for this, that, and the other. He was a famous enough man in his day, a great teacher, author of various books, judge at Book of the Month Club, editor at Cyril Connolly's Horizon, radio personality (you can hear him on YouTube). Still. Balderdash. If Gilbert Highet is remembered at all these days, he's remembered as Mr. Helen MacInnes.

I probably read North From Rome when I was teenager, but if so I didn't remember it, and it felt blissfully new. 

The American Bill Lammiter has written one hit play. He's there for rewrites in New York during the production; he goes to Hollywood to consult because they're going to make it into a movie. His fiancée Eleanor Halley has broken it off with him because of his unavailability and has subsequently announced she's going to marry an Italian count.

The novel starts with Bill living in a Roman hotel on the Via Vittorio Veneto, near the Pincian Gate. He's been there four months, making no progress either on his next play or in winning Eleanor back, and he's thinking about chucking it all and heading back to the U.S. 

Late that very night, smoking on his balcony, he sees a man jump out of a car and attack a pretty Italian girl. He yells, they run off, and our story is off, too. Pretty great.

It was amusing to read them together. At one point Bill visits a professor staying at the American Academy in Rome. Well, Highet in his acknowledgements gives thanks to the American Academy in Rome. I imagine Gilbert looking for signs of Propertius' farm in the countryside near Perugia, while Helen was there pacing off a possible shoot-out between Bill Lammiter and some Communist goons. 

Her dedication also reads, "To my travelling companion."

Good times.

Starting off this year's tour of Europe on a high note!

Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra

"The peculiar charm of this old dreamy palace is its power of calling up vague reveries and picturings of the past,..."

Washington Irving's Tales of the Alhambra (1832) relies upon the power and charm of the Alhambra to work its magic. Though no doubt Irving worked on those reveries for a while himself.

In 1829, Irving, already a professional writer, traveled to Spain, and in particular to Granada, where he had arranged to live in the Alhambra. Though he had originally intended to stay longer, he was only there six months before he was drafted into taking on the secretary role at the American embassy in London. But he gathered enough material in those six months to write this book.

It's structured as a travel or guide book, and it begins with his crossing the lonely mountains north of Granada and worrying about bandits. He arrives in Granada, establishes himself in the Alhambra, and hires Mateo as his guide/valet. He looks around the Alhambra and describes its various features, famous towers and halls, and here it functions particularly like a guide book.

But the truly fun part is the embedded tales, unsurprising from the man who brought us Rip van Winkle and the Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Irving knew Spanish and ten years later he was the U.S. Ambassador to Spain, and he presents these tales as picked up in conversation, quite often from Mateo. They're Romantic--Irving was influenced by Sir Walter Scott--but have an ironic humor to them that lightens the romanticizing. There's the tale of the three Moorish princesses in the Tower of Princesses, or the Two Discreet Statues that indicate (to those who know) where (one of the) buried Moorish treasures are. My favorite story was the longest, the story of Ahmed the Perfect, or the Pilgrim of Love. Ahmed is a Moorish prince, and the prophecies say he will live long and happily in a happy realm if only his father can keep him from thinking about love until after his teen years are done. Well, we know how that will go, don't we? (Or do we?)

His prose is a little fulsome, with more adjectives than it needs (see above) but also is also capable of amusing ironies like this, "Mohammed the Left-handed was acknowledged to be a wise king by his courtiers and was certainly so considered by himself." He's also, especially for a New England Protestant of that period, surprisingly tolerant of Catholicism and even of Islam.

Anyway, quite a fun book and a better read than I thought it was going to be. My edition is printed in Spain, in Granada in fact, and has an introduction by R. Villa-Real, though I bought it in Chicago. Mr. Royal House is almost too appropriate as the author of an introduction to a book on the Alhambra. It also comes with colored engravings from the 19th century of the Alhambra that are an amusing accompaniment.