Lockdown Reading: The Way of the World, Nicholas Bouvier
Reading travel writing during a near-global lockdown must seem a perverse form of masochism. Certainly, it is galling to be reminded of the experiences to be had exploring the world at a time during which summer plans have been cancelled and horizons narrowed. But despite all this, I spent the first days of lockdown re-reading Nicolas Bouvier’s The Way of the World. It is the story of the journey Bouvier and his friend Thierry Vernet, a painter, made from Geneva to the Khyber Pass in the 1950s. Published in 1963 as L’Usage du monde, and long a cult classic in France and Bouvier’s native Switzerland, it first appeared in English in 2007. Some books of travel writing recount feats of dogged endurance that compel their readers – rapt in admiration, and guilty of their own indolence – to their final pages. Others rejoice in the way travel renders time elastic, almost endless, free from commitments or deadlines. The Way of the World is part of this latter group: contemplative, wry and beguiling. Bouvier wrote, “we denied ourselves every luxury except one, that of being slow,” and was proud that it took him longer to reach Japan than Marco Polo. During our current limbo, his book makes for an ideal companion.
The two friends drove in a small Fiat through Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, Pakistan and Afghanistan, all of them ancient, proud cultures with memories of long-lost glory. What would become known as The Hippie Trail was, even at the time, hardly virgin territory for modern travel literature, and Byron’s The Road to Oxiana and Newby’s A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush stand as titans of the genre. That The Way of the World can be placed in such exalted company is down to the way its author draws out telling anecdotes, characters, and observations from mundane occurrences, supplementing these with old folklore, to deftly construct a personal, intimate picture of each country. His descriptions of the landscapes he passes through are on occasion beautiful, and are enhanced by Vernet’s striking illustrations, but it is the personalities of those he meets along the way that give the book most of its charm. His account is populated by a diverse array of characters, including a Macedonian schoolteacher who locks the best bagpiper in the country in his classroom until the two foreigners could arrive to hear him play (in the Balkans the pair’s tape recorder and accordion gave them an opening into the local music); a captain “who offered us hospitality in the prison”; a fellow prisoner accepting his unjust fate; and Terence, a gay former member of the Grenadier Guards who ran a bar in Quetta.
The bulk of Bouvier’s account occurs in Iran, where the snows force them to winter in Tabriz. There they sell articles and paintings to survive. The chapter on this period, entitled “The Lion and the Sun,” is both a prescient portrait of pre-revolutionary Iran and a timeless depiction of Iranian culture. A French priest who admits to “all the vices” tells him that “fanaticism … is the last revolt of the poor, the only one they can’t be denied”, twenty-five years before the Revolution swept Khomeini to power. Meanwhile, Bouvier’s account of a local election, in which the locals vote overwhelmingly for an old cynic at the expense of a teacher selling a progressive vision, remains a perceptive illustration of the cultural gulf globalisation has yet to overcome: “Whereas the West knows how to make good use of hypocrisy, they [the locals] much prefer cynicism … it involves one less lie; they may fool others but they don’t try to fool themselves.”
For Clive James, all a writer can do is “turn a phrase until it catches the light,” and The Way of the World shimmers with Bouvier’s prose. He recounts sitting in a teahouse, watching the porters, amongst the poorest people in Tabriz, whose “ageless faces, so bare and shiny with use that they let the light through, would begin to glow like old cooking pots.” Iran itself is “an old aristocrat with ivory hands, capable of bewitching charm in his lucid moments, at others, sliding into a deathly torpor of fading memories.” On their last night in Istanbul, Bouvier and Vernet were wished goodnight and good-luck by their previously haughty landlady, who then continued talking “without pausing, in tones of such desolate tenderness that it took us a moment to realise that she was no longer looking at us nor speaking to us, but to one of those ancient shadows, loved and lost, which accompany the old into exile and linger in the depths of their lives.”
For English-speaking audiences, Bouvier’s lyricism will recall the writing of Patrick Leigh Fermor (who called x a “flat-out masterpiece”), and the breathless hedonism of the road has led to frequent comparisons with Kerouac. But he wears his learning more lightly than the former and lacks the latter’s hint of conceit. Throughout the book, Bouvier is introspective and reflective, without ever making himself the star. I learnt more about his life from the brief biography given by his translator than from his writing, and yet I felt that it merely confirmed for me the man I had come to know. We see the journey through his eyes so we might glean aspects of his personality, until we have stitched together an image of him in our mind’s eye. Totally honest and without a trace of ego, Bouvier records his emotions, his innocence, naivety, despair and exultation. Though undoubtedly very brave, he is not foolhardy. He warns fellow travelers that it may sometimes be necessary to “give up on the idea of that particular street or mosque, taking that photo. The next day you will romantically berate yourself – quite wrongly … between Anatolia and the Khyber Pass are several places where poetic protestors, their hearts on their sleeves and ignorant as stones, wanted to risk everything and did not live to tell the tale.”
Indeed, one of the pleasures of the book are his musings on travel itself. Travel, he writes, leaves us “more open to curiosity, to intuition, to love at first sight.” His romanticism is tempered by his self-awareness. He is conscious that each person is “less aware of what they have than of what they lack. [The Anatolian locals] lack technology: we want to get out of the impasse into which too much technology has led us, our sensibilities saturated to the nth degree with Information and a Culture of distractions. We’re counting on their formulae to revive us; they’re counting on ours to live. Our paths cross without mutual understanding.” This incomprehension remains, but if an inhabitant of the developing world can be forgiven for not anticipating technological ennui, a traveler should know better than to wish for simpler times while forgetting the hardship involved.
I find it hard to believe anyone can finish The Way of the World without wishing to make a similar journey themselves. Since its publication it has encouraged generations onto the road, and in an age in which travel is increasingly commodified and there is widespread – and often justified – skepticism of the notion of “finding yourself” through tourism, Bouvier’s work is a welcome reminder of the real thing: charming without being lightweight, profound yet clear-eyed. “Traveling outgrows its motives. It soon proves sufficient in itself. You think you are making a trip, but soon it is making you – or unmaking you.” It reminded me of my own time in Iran, three years ago, where, like Bouvier, I often “dropped [a] wonderful moment to the bottom of my memory, like a sheet anchor that one day I could draw up again.” Lockdown is a period for drawing on old memories. For putting you in the right frame of mind, nothing beats The Way of the World.
“C’est le propre des longs voyages que d’en ramener tout autre chose que ce qu’on y est allé chercher” ~ Nicholas Bouvier, L’Usage du monde
Tom Shaw is a third year student at Durham University studying History.