Two for the Road--and the Soul

THE WORLD, THE WORLD: Memoirs of a Legendary Traveler by Norman Lewis (Henry Holt, $27.50).

ANATOMY OF RESTLESSNESS: Selected Writings 1969-1989 by Bruce Chatwin (Penguin, $12.95, paperback).

In this century, Norman Lewis and Bruce Chatwin stand with the best of British travel writers. Which is like saying they are equal to the best of French wine, the best of equatorial sunsets, the best of New York bagels. Tops. The finest there is.

So we enjoy an especially rich season, now, with both of these men on publishers’ lists.

Lewis has been roaming the world since before World War II. This volume, his 23rd, is Lewis’ distilled, elegantly crafted remembrance of his travels: Vietnam during the war with France, revolutionary Burma, class struggles in Latin America, Hemingway’s Cuba, the mob and Sicily, remote India.

He retreats to rural Spain to write, crosses home to England to become a favorite of legendary publisher Jonathan Cape. And along the way he demonstrates that interesting people find each other somehow among the multitudes.

In contrast to the fashion of travel writers today--to put themselves on display--Lewis is startling for how far back he stands in his writing. He is reserved even in his own memoir. Graham Greene called him one of the great writers of the age.

But this is not period work. Lewis has an eye for lasting landscape and enduring humanity. Dates and even eras fade to inconsequential as Lewis brings forward that which is luminous and entertaining. He did not much like Hemingway, but the two writers shared an innate understanding about what to leave out of their work: that which Hemingway called “the underwater part of the iceberg.” How else could Lewis move us with the sights, touches, people and events of 50 years in only 293 pages?

In what could be the author’s own explanation of his urge to wander, Lewis mentions a Chinese friend. The man was wealthy and bound to his family business, but his real passion was bird-watching. The friend explained, “Every man needs some invisible means of support.”

The second author, Bruce Chatwin, is one of the most imitated writers of his generation; not just in prose style, but in his attitude toward travel and in his tastes. Since his death in 1989 at the age of 49, his stature has only grown for his ability to blend scholarship and fancy, terrain and travail, art and character into starkly beautiful and stimulating writing.

He pursued his wanderlust with a philosophy that humans are by their nature nomads. He gave us classics such as “In Patagonia” and “The Songlines” and, just before his death, a collection of his other work called “What Am I Doing Here.” Last year, his publishers culled the file cabinets one more time and produced this collection of his shorter writings, which is now being issued in paperback.

Often the bottom drawers of file cabinets yield disappointment. Imperfect work. A beginner’s efforts. But not in “Anatomy of Restlessness.” The profiles, sketches, reviews and musings will satisfy any Chatwin reader and send newcomers back to the bookstores for more.

His account of finding a flat in London, “A Place to Hang Your Hat,” is a fully realized travel story in only 6 1/2 pages. If I faced a class in creative travel writing, it would be my first recommended reading. I would tell students this sketch/remembrance/treatise stayed with me for more than a year after I read it.

This collection is particularly rich with Chatwin’s own philosophy of literature, art and travel, which, ultimately, become unified in his life. The essay “The Morality of Things” is a rumination for the 1990s, exploring why possessions have value, our urges to acquire them and the satisfactions of relinquishing them. This book is one acquisition you’ll be pleased about and want to pass along to a friend.

Quick trips

CUBA by Andrew Coe (Odyssey Passport, $17.95, illustrated, maps). Even as America stumbles over itself to court Communists in Vietnam and China (enemies in two wars; 112,417 U.S. deaths, combined), we persist with a national policy forbidding travel to our neighbor, Cuba (our supposed ally in the Spanish-American War). For those of you who find the idea absurd and are drawn to the illicit, Cuba beckons. It is both charming and eye-opening; joyful and heartbreaking. This guide is better than any I could find when I traveled there in 1994, but far from great.

CARIBBEAN: Traveller’s Literary Companion by James Ferguson (Passport, $22.95, illustrated). Now that we agree that literature reveals a place like nothing else, we are being flooded with supplemental literary guides to our travels. Their forms are many and quality uneven. This one is so comprehensive as to be a full-blown reference book, sampling the riches of writers representing the entire sweep of the Caribbean, from Christopher Columbus to Russell Banks.

GREAT LODGES OF THE WEST by Christine Barnes, photography by Fred Pflughoft and David Morris (W.W. West, $29.95, illustrated). The sentence above should read not just illustrated but “beautifully illustrated.” If it’s not too early to think about the holidays, here is a gift book to dazzle any national park traveler. Included are some historical photographs, but the heart of this coffee-table volume is its contemporary color illustrations of the old and romantic park lodges of the Western U.S. and Canada. I notice that all the modern photographs show our parks without crowds of people in ball caps and plaid shorts--perhaps the most romantic notion of all.

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Books to Go appears the second and fourth week of every month.