Going Places

SUMMER is the season when laymen travel, and, so goes the publishers’ assumption, the season when travel books are most apt to be enjoyed, Leland Hall, who reviews for us four of the new volumes, has himself a record of far and understanding travel in some of the countries here described.

HERE are four travel books — blurbs, photographs, and all. Outside the publisher’s catalogue, the classification no longer has definite meaning. Too many travel nowadays: aspects of the most outlandish people have become conventionalized. Even the stock dangers are losing their punch. It is now fairly hard, or should be, for the white wanderer, armed to the teeth and backed by punitive governments, to make a hero of himself against primitive people; and we know that many primitive people live among wild beasts and defy them without guns. Between Science and Common Sense, the travel book is squeezed to autobiography. The First Person is indispensable,

In Green Hell (Century, $4.00) Julian Duguid, with two others, sets forth from England to cross a pocket of jungle in South America left untraversed for nearly four hundred years. This is a district of the forest belt, which he chooses to call Green Hell. The name promises horrors. Each of the trio has a purpose; the author himself will seize his first chance to see what he can do with his pen. But here, the writer tells us, we have only part truth: they are all ‘Ishmaels.’ The terrific expedition is ’copy’ from the start; yet, while the author continually hints at nameless terrors, the man’s common sense betrays the book. When tarantulas in Hell scuttle at being called ’Pussy’; when hostile Indians flee into the forest at a catcall; when, in the clutches of the grim enemy Thirst, the author decides to sound Tiger Man, the Russian guide, for his love life, the reader suffers from a veering, a recurrent veering, between narrative convention and a truth the man is too honest to conceal. That the author is sometimes conscious of this veering, and makes a virtue of it, does not help matters.

Jungle Ways (Harcourt, Brace, $3.50) is William Seabrook’s ‘Book out of Africa.’ It is very unworthy of him. He thinks perhaps a million people will read it. Money apart, that should be more disastrous to Mr. Sea brook than to the Africa which he so conspicuously fails to represent. He prances now like a showman, barking the phallus and fresh-killed man meat with a bowl of rice and a bottle of wine; and now he cavorts like the side show itself, with a lot of reek. Wamba, the black witch girl, told Mr. Seabrook he would never understand Africa. ’What then,’he asks for us, remains for me to offer as an observer in the present case? Undigested grass, an indecent offering, which I surely ask no other man to accept as nourishment.’ Fair warning to the million!

Licutenant Faustin Wirkus’s book, named, somewhat misleadingly, The White King of La Gonave (Doubleday, Doran, $3.00), presumably owes arrangement and clarity, often beauty of writing, to a collaborator, Taney Dudley. As to the matter itself, we have to do here, not with a man setting out to write a book or with a merchant of undigested grass, but with a soldier on active duty in Haiti. Through the soldier’s report appears the man himself, unwavering and understanding beyond his years. At first, as a very young sergeant of marines, his duties were military. In the suppression of the Cacos there were hardship and fighting. Out of the narrative one thing stands astonishingly clear: the simple, devoted courage of the black gendarmerie which made up his detachment.

Later, as lieutenant, the young marine was ordered to the administration of La Gonave, a large island well out in the Bay of Haiti, the natives of which were said to be living in a mysteriously backward isolation. He found a system of farm-labor guilds prevailing there. The natives called them Congo societies; and, while they were thoroughly practical socialistic organizations, they were not without their rituals. In the division of labor, as in the rites of dancing and sacrifice, were strong hints of an ancient African origin. Each local group had its own queen, and over all the groups ruled Queen Ti Memenne. As the soldier recognized in thisNegress the dignity of a true queen, so she recognized in him the good will and the strength of a true friend. Feminist politics came into it, and she had him anointed king of all the groups. But the act was less a coronation than an initiation, less a mark of submission than of trust.

The Polis-American lieutenant was aware from the first that the natives attributed to him some ‘spiritual power,’ by which he could read their minds, foretell their futures. ‘If believing I was a mystic working out the will of their gods made the people think more of me,’he says, ‘I saw no reason to explain that I was no such thing. For their belief in me — no matter what the reason — was half the battle in helping them to help themselves.’ There was real dignity in this acquiescence, the more striking since it was unequivocally as an officer of the marines, simply an efficient and up-todate administrator, that he worked with and for them, relieved them from corrupt taxations, improved their trails and their wells, doctored them, and secured and comforted their lives. He can only be silent when Ti Memenne says: ‘Do not laugh at an old woman when she says that we think the good God sent you.’ A government care for democracy snapped the idyll short, a care that seems both petty and ironical.

Warned that the presence of tramps like himself was undesirable in an uneasy Nicaragua, Alfred Batson hiked from Nicaragua to New Orleans. He took to the road alone; he had no money beyond what he could garner with his wits along the way: he had no backing, no authority. Batson’s book, Vagabond’s Paradise (Atlantic Monthly and Little, Brown, ,$2.50), glows from one end to the other; it casts a light over the countries through which the author passed. Thoroughly different from the marine’s story, Batson’s is nevertheless, like that, a luminous book. The source of the glow is not to be found in the manner of writing, in the varied quality of adventures: it is in the nature of the man behind the book, who, never preoccupied with heroic posturing, is so quick to recognize nobility and heroism — and humor — in others. In a light so clear as to reveal the hope of better understanding in this divided world, there emerge from Batson’s story an ignorant Honduran who died of snake bite rather than cast misfortune on an unborn child; a humble Guatemalan Indian and his wife who accompanied Batson in silence day after day up the long grade to Guatemal City; Juan Serres, an innkeeper; and even a nameless Mexican bandit. These, and others, Batson salutes, standing aside. So Wirkus saluted his black gendarmes, his black queens. Here is the new adventure, I suspect, and I should like to salute the authors.

LELAND HALL