Optimist at Large

WOODCOCK, GEORGE

Optimist at Large THE OFFENSIVE TRAVELLER By V. S. Pritchett Knopf. 241 pp. $4.95. Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "To the City of the Dead," "Incas and Others" The Offensive Traveller...

...French motor scooter,' said my friend, and gave a nod telling them to buzz off...
...Back numbers of Holiday store more chaff than grain...
...He stoically endures discomfort and boredom, that guilty sickness of all pilgrims, and yet his eye is always ready for observation at the merest hint of an interesting experience...
...He remembers and uses the revealing remark or incident to illustrate the temper of a place or a period...
...After long, leisurely, impertinent stares they dawdled off...
...The first is that those who want to get a taste of Europe as it was before the last War should head as fast as possible behind the Iron Curtain where in some respects time still halts...
...For this reason few of the articles in tourist magazines bear second reading...
...The virtues of the true traveller Pritchett has in abundance...
...they also belonged to that melting half-peasant verge of Europe which he obviously finds most congenial...
...the Czechs are still cautious, the Poles reckless and the Hungarians incurably romantic...
...What's this?' "'What is what?' "'This,' nodding to the scooter...
...They guessed he was a Party member and were taking it out on him...
...Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Author, "To the City of the Dead," "Incas and Others" The Offensive Traveller is the kind of book I usually start with misgivings—the collection of essays on old journeys gathered from the pages of magazines and made into a book...
...The first five essays are far the most interesting...
...the rich have gone, and a different tyranny rules, but in the small towns and the villages of the Balkans and the lands near them life has gone largely unchanged...
...it sticks up into the light and the wind") to project that whole view convincingly on the page...
...It was all a littla like that man-to-man challenging that goes on in Spain, not quite dangerous but not quite safe either...
...the receding shadows of Hapsburgs, Romanoffs and Ottomans mingle with those of the Communist autocrats to produce a continuity of alien domination that has all too rarely and briefly been broken...
...Its local character persists...
...Pritchett sees his countries whole, and practice has combined with a natural alertness and a flair for the fresh, accurate image (of modern Madrid: "The once horizontal city has become vertical...
...It is a thinned-down version of the past, admittedly, with the sparkle of wealth taken away...
...Of Seville and Madrid, Pritchett has written better things in the past, and his focus blurs a little in Turkey and Iran as if those long roads of boredom were too much even for him...
...He rides in Warsaw, for example, on the pillion of a young journalist's motor scooter: "When my young friend got off his scooter in the old square, two young dandies came up and challenged him with a nod of amused contempt: 'Well...
...Slovakian peasants still wear their colored costumes and guzzle wine while Czechs grow fat on beer...
...Five of the countries are Communist satellite states—Czechoslovakia, Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria and Rumania, which have all been shaped by past as well as present subjection...
...There is a meretricious brightness about most journalistic narratives of this kind, a desire to impose the flashing impression of the writer on the wandering attention of the reader which wholly falsifies the relationship between a traveller and the land through which he passes...
...Finally, Pritchett discusses Spain's eastern counterparts, the two halfEuropean lands of Asia, Turkey and Iran...
...Oh,' they said, examining the situation to see if it offered an opportunity for trouble...
...Some astonishing but patently true impressions emerge from these essays...
...The Offensive Traveller presents an optimistic view of man, and not without reason...
...But some whole grain they do offer—including Pritchett's essays...
...If anything...
...Though the publisher does not acknowledge it, several of the essays in The Offensive Traveller appeared first in Holiday, and now, with a pleasantly ironical introductory chapter on the ways in which a travel writer makes himself offensive, they appear in a book which is gratifyingly re-readable, and which attains a surprising uniformity of mood and even of experience...
...The colored verbal picture, the sly anecdote, take precedence over the real business of travel writing, which is to present one man's view of as much as he can grasp of the whole fabric of a strange or sometimes a familiar country...
...But the satellite lands were not only new countries to Pritchett and sociologically fascinating as well...
...Two of the other essays are devoted to Madrid and Seville, the polar opposites of that half-Asian land of Spain which still smarts like a wound in many a liberal memory...
...In his nine long essays Pritchett describes the peripheral lands of Europe, the lands where democracy has always thinned out in favor of the extremes of passive acceptance and violent assertion...
...From Poland to Bulgaria, men may be disinclined to try again the adventure of violent revolt, but this does not mean that they accept, and what Pritchett's book illustrates more than anything else is the extraordinary triumph in Eastern Europe of Schweikism—that obstinate desire of men to live the life they like and to find, in evasion if revolt is impossible, the way to live it...
...Communism seems to have been less successful in imposing uniformity of behavior and attitude than the less organized but more insidious forces of mass culture...
...Bulgarian peasants still crowd into the churches and unhygienically kiss the images...

Vol. 47 • December 1964 • No. 26


 
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