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Before, when I first
read it, I liked it in spite of myself, although I was hoping for an
inexcusable blunder. Theroux was too bourgeois, too quick to judge, too
American with his politics and too literary, always going on about the books he
was reading as if he was trying to elevate himself into the pantheon. It was a
sin, I thought -- these occasional ruminations about books and writing --
rather like those poets who never tire of writing poems about writing poems, a
sort of narcissism that artists without a subject or a theme wrap themselves
in. Yet behind my aesthetic frown, I liked it; the man was writing about who he
was, not who he thought he should be. He wasn't Kerouac, although he moved like
Kerouac, let the impressions hit the mind like meteors entering the night sky.
His beat wasn't jazz, it was the clip of the carriage wheels over the expansion
joints. His game wasn't sex and death but rather politics and death. Yes, I
liked it, although I was somewhat annoyed that he had charmed Jorge Luis
Borges, the great Buenos Aires poet and short story writer, made their
encounter the spiritual climax of his journey. Surely this was too easy, I
thought, loading the action with literary journalism. But the plain fact was --
is -- that PT's meeting with the legendary Borges is fascinating, is more than
a groupie disciple astralizing with a statue of the Buddha in some dimly lit
temple. To begin with, this profiling of the great man is stunning in its
dramatic clarity, despite the apartment's chiaroscuro light being tuned to
Borges' blindness.
Borges was all the
rage in the seventies, emerging from the Argentine wilderness like a
Theosophical agent provocateur. He didn't write novels, he wrote poems
and stories that had the riddling surrealism and atmospheric metaphysics of a
South American Giorgio de Chirico. The Other... the Aleph... the Garden of the
Forking Paths... or my favorite, The Circular Ruins (although it was often
mocked as New Age trash... Colin Wilson thought it was a lazy rip-off of
Calderon's Life Is A Dream). Theroux doesn't mention it either in his
conversations with Borges or in his asides while travelling, most likely
because he preferred visiting Catholic churches rather than pagan ruins, so
probably it isn't one of his favorites. But for me the imagery and the
intellectual conundrum presented by the dreamer make it an arcane masterpiece,
in the fragmentary way that Coleridge's Kubla Khan is, that is, a vision left
on the broken ledge of mysticism.
"By degrees
(Borges) turned me into Boswell"
The empathy between
Theroux and Borges comes from more than a mutual admiration for Poe and Kipling
or a mutual love of English culture -- in 1968 Borges had a gig teaching at
Harvard and enjoyed his time there, especially Cambridge and Massachusetts,
PT's home state. But Kipling was the visa diplomatique. Paul Theroux had
just published a piece on Kipling in The New York Times Book Review which the
omnivorous Borges had just read... and wouldn't you know it, PT was the ideal
person to read the blind man some Kipling. PT's recounting of these readings in
the dim Buenos Aires parlour of the great writer is sublime -- Borges, early
seventies, protruding Oedipus eyes, formal suit and tie, sitting attentively in
an arm chair as the young Theroux reads stories from Plain Tales from the
Hills... does the Maestro interrupt? Of course: "That's good" or "You can't say
that in Spanish" with the odd pithy observation thrown in by Theroux himself.
The imagery and the atmosphere is like a painting by Vermeer, stillness
caressed by light and shadow. And it's no mere dramatization, a passing scene
from an esoteric play -- it's a beautiful lesson in the art of three writers --
Kipling, Borges and Theroux.
Kipling, these days
somewhat neglected, dismissed as a colonial apologist, was clearly an influence
on Borges. Anyone who has read Plain Tales can see its narrative shape in his
stories -- the brevity, the oral voice, the subtle humour, the axiomatic
moment. Yet there's nothing real about Borges; when you read him, you read what
he has read, not what he has seen. His autobiography is a life of books. He
completes the sentences of other writers, revises them into a mystic edit of
deja vu and new possibility. He is a fantasist of mathematical purity, which
places him beyond the usual cultural mash-up of lesser writers. He once said,
"I've never written a novel because I think that as a novel has a consecutive
existence for the reader it may also have a purely consecutive existence for
the writer." Interesting, right? So Borges writes paradigms, not plots. His
stories devolve to poetry, to the mnemonic imperative... perhaps the inevitable
consequence of his blindness, which he described as not unpleasant but rather
beautiful, like a slow dusk descending.
So Theroux reads to
Borges, concludes his description with: "I got my jacket from the chair. The
white cat had been chewing the sleeve. The sleeve was wet, but now the cat was
asleep. It slept on its back, as if it wanted its belly scratched. Its eyes
were tightly shut."
Ah... a sly analogue,
indeed. The cat... Borges... the 'Other'.
"There is nothing in
Patagonia," said Borges, dismissing Theroux's proposed epilogue. Why leave
Buenos Aires? You have arrived, senor.
The only books
Tschiffely took with him when he set out from Buenos Aires was a copy of
Charles Dickens' Pickwick Papers and a journal to record his journey in. But he
was also packing a Winchester 44, a 12 gauge shotgun, a Smith & Wesson 45,
a compass, a pair of goggles and a saddlebag full of silver coins. He wasn't
out to meet writers but rather Indian guides for certain sections of the Andes.
Deserts, swamps, quicksands, dangerous rivers and dangerous mountain passes
require a different talent.
It's a wonder that
Paul Theroux escaped from the intellectual spell of old Jorge Luis Borges at
all, didn't become his prisoner like the hero of Waugh's Handful of Dust who
ends up reading Dickens to an Amazonian headhunter. Fifteen years later, at the
end of his Mediterranean tour, PT finds the American writer Paul Bowles
confined to a darkened room in Tangier like a wounded fugitive... but this
time, despite his admiration for his fiction, PT doesn't stick around. Bowles
was old and ill, perhaps a little too insular, too aware of being a legend.
Besides, he'd gone native, just like Arthur C. Clarke in Sri Lanka.
PT talks to various
Latino writers in some of the countries he passes through, usually at American
Embassy/Consulate parties -- he was tapped in, a bonded cultural missionary for
whom doors opened if he needed doors opened. He was no outsider, a literary
loner who only worked one side of the fence... and can you really criticize him
for this? First time through back in 1979 I probably did, saw him as too
institutional, not down and dirty like the Beats. He was like a CIA agent,
wasn't he, sent to report on conditions in Central and South America with
time-outs in any town the Americans had a mission. And he didn't like being
called a gringo, did he? Et cetera.
"I gave a lecture in
Quito and dined out on it for days, meeting writers and teachers and Coca Cola
salesmen" (273)
But the fact is that
by the time PT wrote The Old Patagonian Express in 1978 he'd earned his
credentials -- several novels, a couple of travel books, one of them, The Great
Railway Bazaar (1975), a huge international success, although it cost him his
marriage -- a cruel price, so why shouldn't he have a few perks along the way?
Even when Jack London went native in the slums of the East End in London to
write The People of the Abyss, he could cross to the other side of the river
any time he wanted... same with Orwell, when he played being a tramp for Down
and Out in Paris and London. Writers are always voyeurs, image thieves, body
leapers, eavesdroppers, spies, so why shouldn't PT forage all levels of
society? In Ecuador -- of all places, he came across a great character with a
great story.
A North Irish priest
from Belfast... takes a sabbatical from the sectarian stress -- the
paramilitary bombings, the shootings, the knee-cappings that were constant in
the early seventies -- and goes to New York, gets a job as an insurance
salesman, does well, and when he eventually reports back to Belfast, is sent to
Ecuador where he finds a woman. He writes a series of letters, all lies. He
returns home, waffles, then quietly resigns from the priesthood, returns to
Ecuador, starts a family. All the while he has concealed his "other life" from
his mother who, like many Irish Catholic mothers, would die of shame if she
knew her "good son" had left the Church. So he had left one emotional prison
and entered another (so to speak) although he was happy living in exile --
everyone trusted him, because he had the trustworthy manner of a
priest.
So, here it was, it
was his turn to confess.
"I tell you what, Paul
-- you write it. It would make a good story, wouldn't it?"
So it goes. In the
course of a 10,000 mile journey, some characters are just minor props, others
stories onto themselves. The American slum landlady in Vera Cruz and her
complex tale of Mexican toy boy lovers... a violent soccer game in El Salvador,
an American mortician in Panama, the barfly pilot and the fat currency mule in
Costa Rica, the German budget traveller in Cusco, some affluent relatives (PT's
mother's side is Italian)... yes, he's a very social cat for someone who
travels alone. Perhaps it's the stress of 'aloneness' that makes him want to
shed his skin now and then, to remove his disguise -- the Latino moustache, the
slicked back hair, concealed money belt, vernacular Spanish, leather jacket and
waterproof shoes. He's like a pulp fiction double agent in a South American
comic book novel... the very thing he hates: "Comics are for kids and
illiterates, I wanted to say," he says about an Argentine salesman on El
Panamericano. Still, he's in character -- doesn't like jukeboxes either. No
hipster here, just a cultural missionary travelling light.
To some extent,
Theroux's journey to Patagonia turns out to be an exploration of his Catholic
past (or perhaps his moral future) where he skips the pagan ruins, hits the
churches of Central and South America, checks the hybrid religious art, buys
trophies, makes notes... notes... notes... sits in his seat or compartment,
writes, reads, drinks beer, dreams, suffers, dreams, watches, eats... eats
(he's never shy about eating anything indigenous... or travelling lst class)...
gets sick, gets well, makes it to Buenos Aires, hangs out with Borges, eats
steaks, drinks wine, talks the talk, writes it all down... and gets a free
ticket from the Minister of (Culture/Tourism) for the last thousand mile leg to
Esquel in Patagonia. It's a ridiculous set of contradictions, you think, a life
more charmed than Barry Lyndon's or Jan Cremer's.
On the last leg, as he
sits idly on the train -- The Old Patagonian Express -- he remembers and
fantasizes thus: "I remembered people who had been cruel to me; I rehearsed
cutting remarks that I should have uttered; I recalled embarrassments in my
life; I reran small victories and large defeats; I imagined being married to
someone else, having children, getting divorced; I elected myself president of
a banana republic, and tried to cope with a noisy opposition; I went to medical
school and set up a practice and carried out tricky operations; I told a long
humorous story to a large gathering, but in the end the prize went to someone
else; I died, and people talked very loudly about me. It was a fairly typical
afternoon travelling."
Brilliant. This droll
prose poem, this witty interior monologue, is something all of us occasionally
engage in, the psycho-babble of the super ego, the day-dreaming of the Other.
Our hero came all this way to end up dreaming nonsense in a shabby railway
carriage in the topographical nihilism of Patagonia? Parallel lines brought him
here, but as you know, they never converge except in the mind. By now, if not
before, it becomes clear that The Old Patagonian Express is a submerged novel,
a narrative completed by a "point of recognition" where you, the reader,
becomes the hero. It seems lofty to say so, but the narrative is both Homeric
and Beat in its sense of endurance, discovery and jive. PT descends to the
"underground", takes a commuter train in late winter and begins his
Felliniesque journey to Patagonia, a place that is no more than a figure of
speech, a Darwinian Eden of the mind. And when he finally gets there -- having
survived the grotesque and the sublime -- he finds himself marooned in a
minimalist landscape worthy of a Samuel Beckett play or an art gallery in
Manhattan.
It's the personalism
that makes this book so effective. Like a Beat novel, PT is his own hero, so
the narrative is both psychological and visceral (in Ghost Train to the Eastern
Star - 2012 -- PT quotes the Spanish filmmaker Almodovar: "If it isn't
autobiographical, it's plagiarism."). He suffers heat delirium, altitude
sickness, drunkenness, boredom, nightmares, hunger, pettiness, absurdity,
frustration... spells of excruciating loneliness... occasional generosity and
moments of contemplative rapture. He exists in two parallel landscapes -- the
external space that is North and South America, and the internal space that is
the books he reads on the trains -- which sometimes blur and fictionalize the
experience. In the Andes, he wounds his hand, and this becomes symbolism in
spite of himself, a fitting supernatural reward for his monologue defending the
mutilated statues of the suffering Christ to a group of American seniors
travelling in Peru, the statues' graphic misery seen everywhere in the local
Indian churches. Ergo, pain is the trigger of consciousness.
The one thing that
isn't "Beat" about The Old Patagonian Express is the lack of sex. Yes, he's a
married man. Yes, this is only a partial confession, as all books are. His
political sensibility and ethnocentrism -- that judgmental attitude that annoys
some of PT's readers -- might be a sublimation of the traveller's sexual
hunger; it might be, but if you've read other works by PT, especially his
fiction, you know that a pornographic soul exists somewhere in the blue ink. In
The Pillars of Hercules (his tour of the Mediterranean) he postulates -- using
Spain as an example -- that the soul of a culture is to be found in its
pornography. In Spain's case, you suspect he includes bull fighting as part of
the Spanish S & M psyche, provides another reason why he dislikes the death
machismo of Ernest Hemingway.
PT's non-fiction
writing is less self-conscious than his fiction, less guarded, less
manipulative. This isn't a criticism, as anyone who has tried writing fiction
knows that the exigencies for control far surpass those needed for non-fiction
(except, of course, in the legal sense). In The Elephanta Suite (2007) an
American business man in Mumbai (Bombay) is lured into a seedy sexual encounter
with a teenage girl pimped by her "mother" (if you've read The Eastern Star,
PT's redux journey of the one undertaken in The Great Railway Bazaar 1972
you'll recognize the source incident from when he was passing through Bombay
and that he actually wrote this novella later on the train through Malaysia and
Vietnam), which has the brutal allegorical possibilities of Ugly American
imperial overreach, duplicitous indigenous corruption, and Catholic (Christian)
Fall into sin and damnation. It's anti-erotic. Here, sex is a cruelty, the
lowest form of economic intercourse. The Sicily sex novella The Stranger at the
Palazzo d'Oro is more porno, more Beardsley in its imagery, although the young
flesh--old flesh axiom still persists, the sense that sex is corrupting, that
it's a bodily function, not a spiritual expression. The gap between vulgarity
and beauty is like a loose toilet seat.
"A hangover at 12,000
feet makes one feel close to death" he writes somewhere in the Andes. Good
stuff... the line leaves you with vertigo and you're already falling into the
ravine. PT writes in the "now" whereas the majority of writers stick to
reminiscence (unless they feel threatened) as it's the only way they can find
poetry. Somehow PT can find it in the present, which begs the question: when
does a report move from documentary to poetry? When does it becomes fiction?
Fiction is the color
code of the imagination. Figures of speech make you a liar and a prophet... or
perhaps a damn good writer if you know how to use them. Clarity through
concealment. In his 1989 novel My Secret History PT more or less removes
the mask, travels through some women with a confessional intensity that can be
verified by checking the topography against his non-fiction: Medford,
Massachusetts; Boston U.; Africa (Peace Corps); Japan/Siberia; England/India.
He gives the women names but of course the names have been changed to protect
the guilty. And of course you can never be sure if the writer is cheating on
some of the fact or the fiction, regardless of whatever genre the book is
called. Often the writer doesn't even know. You think Boswell's journals are
fact because several remained unpublished for a hundred and thirty years after
his death. The outrageous indiscretions and follies of the 1740-69 journal are
so vivid it's as if his body has been exhumed to find that his brain is still
intact and functioning like a recovered black box.
Yet history makes it
fiction, as you have no way of proving the fact.
Boston to Laredo and
the border barely registered. Mexico neither, although the sweating jungles of
the Yucatan and Chiapas gave him some discomfort. Central America -- pools of
volatility and stasis -- a drag. Panama... in those years an American colonial
outpost, so some perks. Colombia... now the journey begins in earnest, the
sense that finally he has a steady travelling companion: death. Ecuador... like
M.C. Escher, you have to go backwards to go forward. Peru... now he's in the
catacombs of Catholic fetishism, the Inca ghost, the cruel marriage of Machu
Piccu and Rome. Argentina... bourgeois. Patagonia... disbelief. He was warned
there was nothing in Patagonia and now he knows.
Tschiffely, somewhere
in the Matacaballo desert, Peru:
"My instinct for
finding the direction had developed to a notable degree, probably because I had
not very much to think about by this time besides keeping the horses' noses
facing the right way, but even when I knew exactly which way to go, fogs or
darkness... made me think it wiser to wait until I could see."
© LR June
2016
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