On the Road Again

...If anything, some of us do better without travel...

...in the heavy traffic of people, I lose my wife, granddaughter, cat (though why I am traveling with a cat is quite unclear...

...A beautiful scene, I decided, pleases but does not excite me...

...He visited Thailand, Hong Kong, and stuck a toe in China...

...Those incidents aside, flying has gone smoothly enough for me...

...The temperature has been in the eighties, sunny, with occasional breezes...

...With the exceptions only of Thoreau, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, all the important American writers traveled abroad...

...It is only upon arrival that I begin to grow edgy...

...All my foreign travel has been conventional, the most exotic being a few days in Turkey as part of a Swann's cruise of the Greek Islands...

...I make a mental note never to stop there...

...Whether to buy a Morning or an Evening, a Bay or a Port, I must leave to you, merely reminding you that I like things light and not dark, cheerful and not gloomy, and that above everything else I prefer something real but saturated with the feeling and imagination of the artist...

...If you've developed a strong character, why dissipate it in games and goofy costumes: The idea of, say, Henry Kissinger on a golf course, or Colin Powell and Dick Cheney playing badminton feels plain wrong, does it not...

...I began to feel about nature as Groucho, when confronted by the contestant on his quiz show who mentioned that she had some improbably large number of children, said he felt about his cigar: It gave him pleasure, he said, but he didn't want it in his mouth all the time...

...The great century of travel for Americans was the nineteenth...

...Graham Greene-ish, really— but these fantasies are more proper to a young person...

...But might this, instead, be a sign of a hardening not of the arteries but of the imagination and spirit...

...Walking through the Old City in Jerusalem, I kept an eye peeled for the serious shenanigans of the PLO...

...Sometimes, true enough, flying, which should always be an astonishment, has come to seem a punishment, at least if one is flying economy or coach, which I almost always do...

...One must be both rich and clever to find what Henry James called "The Great Good Place...

...I take his— and he makes my—point...

...You will not be shocked, I suspect, to learn that the place, great and good though it is so designated, doesn't exist, either in life or even in the story itself...

...Few things are more pleasing than to find what one thinks one's idiosyncratic views corroborated by someone whose mind one much admires...

...And when, in his ninetieth year, he became too ill to set forth again, something in him died...

...For a week's stay I brought four books with me: Balzac's Cousin Pons, The Collected Stories of J.F...

...I accepted the invitation because I love that magnificent book, and love quite as much that extraordinary, ironic little pudge who sat in his study in Lausanne chuckling away, as I like to think of him, while writing it...

...One of the problems with the world, I begin to discover, is that there are too many people in it just like me...

...Now that he is in the next I hope he is seated in first class...

...I used to fly with a copy of Pascal's Pensees, which never seemed more pellucid than at 30,000 feet...

...They remind me in some ways of my father, who traveled scarcely at all, and then, upon retirement, set out to see the world and did a fairly impressive job of it...

...they're crazy to give Bobby Knight a job...

...He had of course internationalized himself as no other American...

...My wife and eleven-year-old granddaughter are still asleep in the second of this two-bedroom condominium we have rented on Sanibel Island, Florida, which also contains two bathrooms and three television sets, all with VCRs...

...Some went farther than others: Charles Eliot Norton, looking after his family's shipping interests, spent more than a year in India...

...With so many miles on me already, I am terribly late in making this discovery...

...I pass a tallish man, the very type of a CEO, in an orange bathing suit, himself walking the beach, saying into his cell phone: "That's no problem...

...Parts of Greece and Flanders Field in Belgium excepted, I fear I am in something of the same condition with regard to visiting the great historical and religious sites...

...His wife, my mother, though a highly intelligent woman, had almost no geographical curiosity...

...And here I am...

...In 1915, with England at war, the year before his death, as a sign of his deep spiritual allegiance to the country, he became an English citizen...

...Still, the party line has long been that travel is good for the soul—so broadening, so widening— and for no souls is it better than for those of artists...

...They may have, for him—but not for everyone...

...I have—as I have only recently grasped—almost no vocation for vacation, and, to make matters worse, I am losing my taste for travel...

...I was only a week on Sanibel...

...Nothing further can, nor need, ever be said about airline food...

...There is the language and currency to get used to, of course, but in recent years I have become, while abroad, a poor sleeper...

...On that holiday, only Gibbon did not disappoint...

...Yet, for all Henry James's cosmopolitanism, when he came to write his story "The Great Good Place," that place, though never pinned down geographically turned out to be not "that happy land—far, far away," but "in the beloved British Islands and so near as we are to Bradford...

...But they are there for the same things one came for: as yet unseen works of art, fresh landscapes, different food...

...I have never been one of those for whom freedom has meant a hasty departure for foreign lands...

...I am a man who always thought he desired serenity but (to apply some roller-coaster-like prepositions here) when you come right down to it, I am not really up to it...

...Goethe acquired substantial intellectual dividends from his trip to Italy...

...Soon enough something similar had happened to her: Too many second-class poets and critics showed up, and so she moved on to Brazil where she lived with her friend Lota de Macedo Soares...

...In the morning hours, before the heat comes up, people on Sanibel are bicycling, rollerblading, smashing tennis balls, whacking away at golf balls, jogging, walking with grim looks of determination on their faces...

...Powers, A Short Life of Kierkegaard by Walter Lowrie, and Auden by Richard Davenport-Hines...

...I have given up on discovering any Great Good Place for me...

...Often they are older and rather wealthier than oneself, though lacking, it goes without saying, one's intrinsic charms...

...By the third day out I longed to be back at my desk...

...Israeli academics, fearful of intellectual isolation, are encouraged to travel, and of course the place they chiefly travel to is America...

...Anywhere you go, an old saying has it, there you are...

...Seeing them in such abundance, one after another, it occurred to me for the first time in my life that perhaps nature was overrated...

...Big Sky, Montana—but as soon as they are so declared they cease to be either great or good but just places where people keen on the fashionable like to squat...

...So, recently, I read, has the King of Norway, on a flight between Oslo and Mallorca, earning him the title, in the headline of an Oslo daily, "The King of Tourist Class...

...Seeing Alaska and the Panama Canal and much of the Caribbean by ship, he did more cruising than Captain Ahab and Christopher Isherwood combined...

...Not funny, McGee...

...I am not one of those who go to Venice to experience an emotion," wrote Jules Renard in his journal...

...She went with her husband to Israel, and together they flew to Paris on the Concorde, returning from London on the QE2...

...For me, I like it for a holiday, but I'd rather die than live permanently in a beauty spot, at least till I'm much older...

...As like as not, these same indigenes will be going about in American jeans...

...I open a light drape, slide back a glass door, and step out onto a screened-in balcony...

...Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden's biographer, remarks that, as of the 1930s, "he deliberately unsettled himself, and until the final years of his life was always a traveler or voluntary exile, spurred by the intellectual masochist's need of the neurosis of estrangement...

...But the chief travel fantasies have to do with meeting elegantly accented and extraordinarily beautiful partners on trains, in cafes, in the corridors of posh hotels...

...See this world before the next" was one of his standard joke lines...

...and they did not, you may be sure, go on the fourteen-day whirlwind tour but stayed for two or three years each time...

...Everything there is near at hand, order reigns, all is familiar, nothing unpredictable...

...But the people who sit in first-class seats do not otherwise appear to be very first class...

...I walked the beaches, looking for exotic shells and picking up snatches of mundane conversation: "It's a junk bond, what'd he expect...

...Have I become a dull boy...

...I am late, the gates are closing, people I love are inside the plane, taking off without me...

...My father took almost no photographs and said very little about these trips on his return...

...It probably won't come at all...

...I begin to see that, for me, such serenity as is available won't come with a background of blue water and palm trees, mountains shimmering majestically in the distance...

...In the late 1940s, WH...

...I find myself in the condition of Philip Larkin, who, its being known that he left England only twice in his lifetime, was asked by an interviewer if he wouldn't like to see China...

...A character touring Italy in one of his stories, upon remarking regretfully about not being Catholic to another character, says, "What a different thing this visiting of churches would be for us, if we occasionally felt the prompting to fall to our knees...

...True, but perhaps less true than it once was...

...I am much older than Auden then was, and it still doesn't do it for me...

...The closest I've come is a few years ago, when friends lent us their comfortable house in the village of Laconnex, twenty minutes outside Geneva...

...It is a place where the hero of the story "could read and write...

...You had to have money, though it could apparently be done without scads of it...

...But something about the combination of close quarters, bad food, largish bags stuffed into smallish overhead compartments, and the rest of it has encouraged a phenomenon that has now been given the name "air rage," in which while aloft one somehow flips, goes bonkers, makes specific threats, causing airport police to take one in custody upon arrival...

...I envy the first-class passengers chiefly the width of their chairs...

...The place turns out to be great and good because in it "The Great Want [is] Met...

...I have never actually lived in a European country, by which I mean settled in one place for four or five months or more...

...Non-sequiturial Africa, perhaps...

...A fun place to eat...

...In Florence I spent night after night twisting in the sheets while listening to the Vespa scooters roar under our window on the street outside our hotel near the Duomo...

...He went to Ecuador and Peru...

...servants, though always inconspicuous, are omnicompe-tent...

...I myself arrived in Sanibel with no golf sticks, skates, or tennis rackets with sweet spots twice the size of my fairly large head...

...In the same journal entry, after cataloging all that is wretched about London—"the fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosi-ty of society, the sense in which all this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity"— he ends by concluding that for him "London is on the whole the most possible form of life...

...In order to understand one's own country," said Somerset Maugham, "one should live in at least two others...

...I show up at the airport without my tickets, or money, or wallet, or passport, or suitcase, or—in one notable instance—shoes...

...Great good places are declared with some regularity—Aspen, Colorado...

...In these dreams, decisive things are always going wrong...

...Most Americans traveled to widen their culture among the monuments of Europe and the (presumably) more refined manners of the English, French, and Italian superior classes...

...Hope everyone picked up those words masochist and neurosis and estrangement, for travel has increasingly come to require a certain portion of all three...

...Have lotsa fun," says an older man, white-haired, tall, deeply tanned, as he loads the groceries in the back of my rented Nissan Altima...

...He toured Norway and Denmark and Sweden...

...I packed a Chinese red, beaked cap and several solid-colored polo shirts and a pair of "Rod Laver" tennis shoes from Adidas...

...This took us out of the hotel-restaurant flow of foreign travel—although during the better part of the days, apart from shopping for food, we remained tourists: listening to lectures at Madame de Stael's charming house at Coppet, museum-going, shopping, and the rest of it.But it's one thing to live in a country, another to visit it...

...Naipaul or Paul Theroux tend to have a reverse, or anti-aphrodisiacal effect...

...Montana, which I had not before seen, was part of what persuaded me to accept the invitation...

...Where am I going, anyway...

...This was his get-up—what you saw was what you got...

...Auden of Taos, New Mexico...

...What merriment...

...This past summer I was invited to sit for three days in a hotel conference room in Big Sky, Montana, where I rattled away with ten or eleven other people on the subject of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire...

...The weather was perfect, untoppable...

...He is always off, aloft, driving a Land Rover over rocky ground, high upon a Himalaya, or mounted on a French bicycle the mere sight of which is almost enough to make me want to consult a proctologist...

...Stevens's dahlias— but it's far from clear that the Europe of his imagining wasn't much more vivid than any actual Europe could have been...

...And why...

...Why do I find that so appealing...

...I suppose those who are committed to traveling feel a need to fill in the blank spots: to see those wonderful Velazquezes at the Pra-do, those charming Lorenzettis in Sienna, those magnificent lion statues at Delos, taste that fantastic risotto in Ravenna...

...But ten years later too many Englishmen arrived to spend their holidays, and so he moved on to buy another in the bleaker landscape of Kirchstetten, near Vienna...

...On many of his trips he took his still young grandsons, though on some he went alone...

...Insomnia and jet lag make a dreary cocktail...

...Walking along its white-sanded, shell-laden beaches yesterday I saw dolphins frolicking fewer than twenty yards from shore...

...Less true certainly if one is an American and the indigenes in the country you are visiting are wearing, say, Michael Jordan tanktops and Reebok gym shoes...

...The site of Troy, now in Turkey, left me disappointed...

...Jackson Hole, Wyoming...

...I alternate among the four, read none completely through, and instead spend a lot of my time making astonishingly small and dreary observations, most of them about myself: for example, how my very white legs, under water, look rather corpse-like...

...He visited the Soviet Union and saw it again when it was once more Mother Russia...

...I am no fun guy and have, perhaps you are coming to gather, a fun problem...

...I have a friend, older than I, who has probably spent more time in Katmandu than I have spent in Manhattan...

...imprinted T-shirts and baseball caps follow...

...to drive to The Hague to stand in line in the cold drizzle of a Dutch morning to get tickets to see twenty-six paintings by Vermeer as part of a crowd that was even more wall-to-wall than the carpeting...

...there, above all, he could do nothing—he could live...

...One's fellow guests are all exquisitely simpatico...

...He traveled to India under the auspices of—believe it or not—the B'nai B'rith...

...Europeans come to us...

...Why Stevens never went to Europe is something of a mystery—lots of talk about having to stay home owing to Mrs...

...I prefer the view of Ravel, who said that he obtained more, aesthetically, from an hour of joy than from a long stretch of suffering...

...It is likened to a retreat, but with the exercises of piety subtracted...

...I enjoy the tumult of O'Hare, Heathrow, LAX...

...My problem runs deeper...

...Yes, of course," Larkin replied, "if I could return home that night...

...Life is not easy for me, being a snob and a reverse snob simultaneously...

...I have made a mental note to visit India and Pakistan as soon as England once again makes those countries part of its empire, which is scheduled to take place, I understand, roughly two weeks after hell freezes over...

...I have not been in either Ischia or Key West, but I have been in Mystic, Connecticut, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and neither seems anything close to the great good place to me...

...The jolt of dislocation that a new country presents has begun to throw me more and more off balance...

...In the nineteenth century Europe was more open, less tumultuous, everyone wasn't rushing about as if waiting for the twenty-four-second shot-clock to go off...

...Byron was a great traveler and always went absolutely first class, taking along his own horses and a considerable library...

...it is also likened to a club, but without any newspapers or bores about...

...another time a plane out of Oakland skittered badly on the runway before takeoff, and had to return to the hangar...

...Auden bought a home on Ischia, an island in the Bay of Naples, and thought he had found it...

...The country here is dotted with the houses of second-rate writers and painters," writes WH...

...The Great Good Place replenishes the inner life, and contains so many of the Jamesian grace notes: "the cool plash [of the fountain] in the stillness," "the broad cloister of peace or some garden-nook where the air was light, a special glimpse of beauty or reminder of felicity seemed, in passing to hover and linger...

...While I stood in the great church of St...

...A turn in the road and, lo!, an azure lake, encircled by gigantic conifers...

...Travel in the Third World holds few enticements for me...

...Useful to recall that the Konigsburg Flash, Immanuel Kant, discovered the categorical imperative without ever leaving town...

...I chartered a boat to take my granddaughter fishing—a great success...

...I sigh and wish I were elsewhere...

...Before going off to Florida, I discovered that I owned no shorts...

...Might it be that I like home too much and seek no escape from it...

...Sometimes I watch bits of the movie without the aid of earphones, I nap, write in my journal...

...he seemed only genuinely happy when getting ready to set off on yet another journey...

...Why, moreover, do I have such dreams when I have had very little serious difficulty in my years of flying...

...Auden suffered under the belief that "exile and isolation had creative uses...

...The great want is for liberty, tranquility, comfort, simplification...

...The visiting, I contend, is wherein the pain resides...

...Up to that point an armchair traveler, seeing the world through PBS documentaries, he embarked in earnest at seventy-five to see it in the flesh...

...The travel writings of V.S...

...I am fairly convinced that, should I find anything resembling such a place, I am likely to ask if there is a fax machine nearby and worry about my phone calls, mail, and e-mail...

...Nor do I find any pleasure in card games, crossword puzzles, detective novels...

...I do not know what I am looking for abroad," wrote Montaigne in Italy, "but I know well enough what I am escaping at home...

...It extracted all the things in modern life it "was such rapture to be without...

...Tourism chiefly makes me edgy, morally uncomfortable...

...It's curious how beautiful scenery seems to attract the second rate...

...used to sell), "sometimes flopping over the bulky stomach in Bermuda shorts...

...A luftmensch to begin with, I read well in the air...

...and we, the passengers, were put up for the night and flown out first-class the next day...

...But he seems to have gone only to Berlin...

...In 1869, at the age of twenty-six, Henry James took up permanent residence there...

...Eliot said that James had turned himself into "a European but of no known country...

...There wasn't one Edmund Wilson for work and another Edmund Wilson for play...

...Elizabeth Bishop thought she had found her great good place in Key West, Florida...

...No hidin' place down here," the old gospel song has it, and it's beginning to seem so in connection with travel...

...An effect of traveling in distant places," wrote Auden, who did a fair amount of it in the 1930s (his itinerary included Iceland, China, and Spain during the Civil War), "is to make one reflect on one's past and one's culture from the outside...

...Europe was, for James, as he himself put it, "ever so many things at once, not only beauty and art and supreme design, but history and fame and power, the world in fine raised to the richest and noblest expression...

...I find I do not long for travel outside Europe...

...This last is a hypothesis that, like the late Duke and Duchess of Windsor, must be entertained...

...His need—make that his compulsion—for travel approached mania...

...But in Ischia and in Key West, Auden and Bishop were really the advance guard of the despoilers: their presence helping to make their retreats fashionable...

...Refer it to Jim...

...I'm not sure what my father got out of all his travel...

...Beyond are more palm trees, and beyond that, at perhaps two hundred yards distance, teal-colored at this early hour, is the gentle Gulf of Mexico...

...The artists arrive first, then the wealthy, then the tourists...

...It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of traveling . . . retains its fascination for all educated Americans," wrote Emerson, whose best book, English Traits, came out of his stay in England...

...beyond the age of, say, fifty, they become the fantasy of that fool like whom we are told there is no other, the old fool...

...He is pedaling away in Greece even as I tap out these lines...

...Here I would underscore the word live...

...I planned to travel west from there, to drive through Oregon, Washington, and parts of British Columbia, none of which I had seen before...

...More than a simple antipathy to what my countrymen have decided is fun is entailed...

...I sat out at the pool reading about poor Kierkegaard's troubles, which were manifold...

...Alfred Kazin described Edmund Wilson, at the beach at Wellfleet, arriving in stained Panama hat, cane, and long white shirt (of the kind Brooks Bros...

...Tourism is said to be a condition of moral rest, but I have never quite found it so...

...But then I'm no longer sure what anyone does...

...The Jameses returned to Europe when Henry was twelve and again when he was seventeen...

...Not if you have,as I have, woke in the Jan Luyken Hotel in Amsterdam at 4 a.m...

...Montana and the Northwest provided, as advertised, spectacular scenery: staggeringly dramatic mountains, lush redwoods, dense rain forests suggesting the prehistoric...

...they seem to be mainly salesmen and middle-managers with vast quantities of airline "miles" and rather too wealthy ninnies willing to pay an extra five hundred to two thousand dollars to avoid the rabble (which is to say, me...

...My leading subject for anxiety dreams for some years now has been travel...

...I saw him mentally ticking off each continent and country he visited, as if it were his goal to see as much of this planet as possible before departing it...

...A problem with foreign travel, if I may say so, is that one finds the great centers are infested by so many people like oneself...

...How nice, I think as I read the complaining accounts of their travel, that they have gone to Indonesia—now I don't have to do so myself...

...She had long before arrived at where I seem to be tending...

...her sophomore year at Tufts...

...He first went to Israel...

...Consider, to begin with, the people whom Henry James, prescient fellow, more than a century ago referred to as "one's detested fellow pilgrims...

...I am a poet," announced Kierkegaard, "I must travel...

...The view is of palm trees, shrubs trimmed to a topiary nicety, a swimming pool filled with warmish, turquoise-colored water...

...I wonder if he sat aisle, window, or got stuck with the middle seat...

...Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote that he thought about God all the time, except when in an Anglican church...

...I was once forced to spend a night in a motel near LaGuardia owing to bad weather in Chicago...

...Nature in the Northwest was relentless...

...I have never been abroad alone, and have no yearning to be so now...

...Keats, on a much smaller budget, longed to travel and was only able to do so when at the door of death...

...Mark's in Venice, all I could think of was what a vast clutter all this significance made...

...Packing them I was reminded of the generations of American men who owned no clothes whatsoever for leisure...

...Born in 1843 to a traveling family, James first went abroad at the age of six months and, in later years, claimed to have a memory even from that age "of the admirable aspect of the Place and Colonne Vendome...

...Or was I, possibly, always a dull boy...

...But it was in England that Henry James settled, and of England that in his journal he wrote: "J'y suis absolument comme chez moi...

...None of this is my idea of a good time...

...The only thing worse than "a fun place to eat," in my view, are those places that advertise "Family Fun," two words that, lashed together, automatically force my foot down heavier on the accelerator...

...People such as Renard and I, who live mostly in our minds, don't require travel as an expensive lubricant for the imagination...

...After two centuries of suffering cultural inferiority to Europe, America, for better and worse, is where the action now is...

...But no American got more—aesthet-ically, morally, spiritually—out of his travels than Henry James, who at various times referred to himself as "the passionate pilgrim," "the visionary traveler," and "the sentimental tourist...

...The Great Good Place is the dream of the story's greatly overworked hero, who feels himself at the outset weighted down and all but plowed under by the trivialities of existence at the level of success, when one is most vulnerable to losing one's sense of life's point and purpose...

...He spoke the most perfect French, but finally never quite, as he might say, "appropriated and took possession" of that country...

...Might it be that I am no longer capable of travel fantasies...

...What the motive behind all this expensive travel was remained unclear...

...I think of Wallace Stevens, that most cosmopolitan of poets, who never went to Europe, but wrote letters to Mademoiselle Paule Vidal, his art dealer in Paris, asking her to acquire paintings for him with an amusing unspecificity of detail combined with strong general advice: "I should definitely like you to buy one of the paintings of Rene Renaud...

...I bought two pair: one of khaki at the Gap, the other, of a lightweight gray, at Foot Locker...

...Would Italy have cured his melancholy," asks his biographer Walter Lowrie, "and perhaps quenched his peculiar talent...

...Gilligan's," a sign on Sanibel's Periwinkle Way reads, Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD...

...Hazlitt, who didn't do all that much travel, captured the fantasy nicely when he wrote that "the soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty to think, feel, do just as one pleases...

...Such comprise my "fun" clothes...

...I do not much mind air travel...

...But the crowds—Germans, Japanese, Americanos, detested fellow pilgrims all—make it less than easy...

...I remember my father walking down to the beach behind our apartment on Sheridan Road in Chicago wearing one of his ribbed underwear shirts, dark blue bathing trunks, black wingtips, and silk socks with arrows on them over legs the exact whiteness of mine today...

...I hereby sentence you," runs a standard judge-and-defendant cartoon in a recent New Yorker, "to the Vermeer show on a Saturday afternoon...

...The burden of success may be set down there, and also the weight of failure...

...He loved Italy above all European countries, and two of his greatest novels, The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove, owe much of their power to their tapestried Italian settings...

...Such trees were everywhere, causing me, at the wheel, to sing: You're non-deciduous now, so what're you gonna do...

...Might it be that the loss of a taste for travel is the price paid by people who love their work too much...

...Africa south of the Sahara was next...

...Yet the whole thing, I found, was a bit much: a much of a muchness, as the English say...

...Taste everywhere is perfect...

...The international subject—of Americans in Europe, but also of Europeans in America—was one of the chief benefits of Henry James's travel experience...