Paul Bowles' THEIR HEADS ARE GREEN AND THEIR HANDS ARE BLUE

Travel writing is really time travel writing, an attempt to capture place and time in a form that can be shared with those of us who weren't there, who  never can be there, who missed our chance. That this has always been the case is the chief, melancholy lesson to be learned from Their Heads are Green and Their Hands are Blue*, a collection of essays from Paul Bowles' extensive travels through the "non-Christian" world as it was in the mid-20th century.

In most cases, Bowles got there before globalization, before electricity and modern communications and other technology changed local lives forever in Sri Lanka (still called Ceylon when he was there), North Africa, South America*, the Middle East. Or he was there just as the changes were starting, as in southern India when he observes a pair of government officials pulling up at  his hotel with a keyring on which is the only existing key to the box that turns on the hotel's electricity, which is on only for the duration of the officials' lunch before it is shut off again. Which lunch Bowles declines to observe because he has rushed up to his room to enjoy 15 minutes with the fan on because southern India is really, really stiflingly hot and breezeless, even near the sea.

But of course it's in North Africa, where his most famous fiction is set, that Bowles is most interesting, and most aware of his secret status as a time traveler, or at least a person in some way at war with time as he tries to capture the feel of a place:

"...Writing about any part of Africa is a little like trying to draw a picture of a roller coaster in motion. You can say: It was thus and so, or, it is becoming this or that, but you risk making a misstatement if you say categorically that anything is, because likely as not you will open tomorrow's newspaper to discover that it has changed."

Hardly only North Africa, am I right? Hardly just in the 1960s, am I right? Plus ça change...

The best part of the collection is Bowles' musical mission through Morocco, "The Rif, To Music" in which he recounts his efforts, along with a few very interesting friends, to capture the unique music of several tribes before it gets contaminated by globalism. A sample of what he captured can be found here. There's more at the Libary of Congress' website, I think, but the government shutdown has made that impossible to verify. I shall be seeking it out, though!

Also notable is "Baptism of Solitude", in which Bowles confronts the immense silence of the Sahara desert, and which has left me with a tremendous longing to watch again Werner Herzog's extraordinary Fata Morgana, which thank goodness I own:



Now you probably want to as well, no?

I have a biography of Bowles on tap for later this winter, and plan to investigate his own musical compositions soon as well. Fascinating, fascinating man. But if one is really interested in this guy, on whom the character of Tom Frost in the film adaptation of William S. Burroughs' Naked Lunch (if not the book, exactly; it's been so long since I read that I can't remember if Tom Frost is explicitly named in the book) is based, this essay collection highlighting his strange love for the discomforts and inconveniences of travel, his pursuit of music and his awe at the variety his world still had to offer, is an indispensable read.

*The title is drawn from some wacky lines of poet Edward Lear's, meant to evoke the sense of genuine difference and novelty which travelers, if not tourists, usually seek when going abroad.

**Wherein he teaches us that "All Parrots Speak" and if that essay doesn't charm your socks off, you probably weren't wearing any.

Sigrid Undset's THE WILD ORCHID

Wow, does it seem criminal that this book, and its sequel, The Burning Bush, seem to be out of print, at least in English. I know Sigrid Undset is best known for her great sprawling historical fiction (Kristin Lavransdatter, The Master of Hestviken, etc) but she didn't just get a Nobel for being the Dorothy Dunnett of Scandanavia, you guys.*

The Wild Orchid is little read now, I suspect, because its theme is very much out of fashion. It is, at bottom, the first half of a novel of conversion, specifically conversion to Catholicism, which was just re-establishing itself as a valid, legal religion in Undset's native Norway during her lifetime. As such, it's perhaps more than a little autobiographical, this book, in spirit if not in fact. Undset herself converted to Catholicsm as an adult, after years and years of dwelling emotionally and mentally in the pre-Lutheran Norway of her most famous novels.

About a third of the way through the book, she presents what I think must have been her own feelings about her decision in a nutshell, as her protagonist witnesses a historic event, somewhat bemused:

"If one could only reach out with one's soul and come in contact with an invisible one -- who would help one to a deeper or higher vision of all that was irritating and disturbing, to look past the stupidity and platitudes and ridiculous expressions, into what was valuable in those one associated with, a common charity, a common vow which bound one to them."

Hell, it's enough to make me miss organized religion myself!

But a religious journey isn't the only thing that's going on here; The Wild Orchid, first volume of a two part novel published as The Winding Road (the second book, The Burning Bush, is one I'm planning to read very soon, if not indeed right away. We all know what a fickle reader I've become) is also a portrait of its age, the turn of the last century (ca. 1905 as the novel opens), that is, perhaps startlingly, not all that unfamiliar to a 21st century reader.

Paul Seller is the child of divorced parents. His father remarried a blowsily bourgeois woman for whom Paul has no respect, preferring his own mother, Julie, who is a distractingly awesome character that surely any son would prefer to a fussy, conventionally motherly showoff like Paul's stepmother. Julie, finding herself divorced with four children to raise, cheerfully struck off for the country, found a nice plot of land, built herself a house and furnished it very simply, and set about planting and raising crops and carpentering and turning herself to all sorts of other traditionally masculine tasks, never once, it seems regretting not having a man about the house to whom she didn't herself give birth. Oh, I would gladly read a novel just about Julie Selmer! But as it is, she merely serves as background, as the early example of womanhood against whom Paul will compare other women, to their detriment; more importantly, as establishing Paul's starting position of regarding religion as a quaint folly of days gone by, not to be taken at all seriously.

At times The Wild Orchid, in its long passages of dialogue between its hero and various avatars of Catholocism, chiefly a woman of his own age whom he has known since childhood who grew up in the faith that  he only ever observed from the outside, reads almost like a religious tract as the woman holds forth for pages and pages about the necessary role dogma plays in human society and how non-Catholics are always more interested in the one priest who breaks his vows than in the 200 who uphold them and how it wasn't really the Church that burned heretics but Society. A reader with zero skin in that game, as I am, is challenged to read through such passages with patience and sympathy, but it's good to make that effort once in a while, no?

And that effort is quite often rewarded, in this book, for it is still Sigrid Undset after all, which means lovely prose and an infectious love and enjoyment of her native land, its seascapes and wildflowers and saeders and farms and little towns and pieces of folk art and buildings old and new, which she shares with her characters and thereby with her readers. I now want to visit Norway almost as much as I want to visit Iceland. Fjord.

*Though really, chronologically, I suppose Dorothy Dunnett was kind of the Sigrid Undset of Scotland?

**It's pretty hard not to think of Scotland's current efforts to secede from the United Kingdom, reading about this. I don't think Scotland will offer to take on, say, Prince Andrew to be their replacement king the way Norway took Hakon, though.

John Fowles' THE COLLECTOR

People who know me and my love for insects might be a bit surprised to learn that I really don't approve of, and don't understand, the mania for collecting them. I had to for an assignment once in college -- for a whole semester, I was out there with a killing jar and a set of pins and all the other accoutrements. I was going to be graded on my collection, on its variety and the quality of its specimens and all the rest. As excuses for being outdoors when everybody else was (supposed to be) studying in the library or whatever, it was all right.

But I would have rather been given a quality camera and a notebook to scribble down observations about how the insects behaved while they were, you know, still alive.

The male protagonist, Frederick "Call me Ferdinand" Clegg, in John Fowles' astonishingly creepy The Collector feels differently about things. To see a rare or unusual butterfly -- he only collects butterflies, though he thinks of going into moths -- is to want it dead and pinned in a box. And since he's a very socially maladjusted man, as certainly all insect fanciers are*, he takes the same attitude towards certain specimens of other species as well. Such as lovely (human) art student Miranda, whom he encounters in one of those unfortunately magical moments in which a young man is prone to mistake an anima projection for true love, right around the time he also happens to win the football pool at work, meaning he has stumbled into the mid-century equivalent of Eff You Money.

To his credit (I guess) he decides that this specimen is better enjoyed alive, the better to someday live out his fantasy that she is going to, I guess, succumb to Stockholm Syndrome** and fall in love with him and marry him and have his babies. So he takes most of his pool winnings and buys and furnishes a human-sized terrarium for her, in the cellar of a secluded country cottage. As one does.

The fascinating thing through these early chapters is watching our man engage in some serious mental gymnastics: he's not really going to do this thing, but what if he did? He pretends to himself that he's treating it all as an elaborate thought experiment and is thus astonished, in a way that we readers are not, to find himself actually doing the things he's thought of. Buying the house. Fixing up the cellar. Stalking the girl. Carrying a cloth soaked in chloroform in his coat pocket.

This would all be very interesting reading right there -- watching a still-pretty-ordinary-despite-his-peculiarities-guy fighting this impulse he's had. But Fowles takes us from thought to deed, and just as we're thoroughly squicked out and sick of this character, Fowles seems to agree and flips the perspective; the second half of the novel is told from the perspective of Miranda, the collected, the victim.

And that's the other fascinating thing in this book, because we learn, long before Miranda becomes the author of chapters of The Collector, that while Clegg may think he's captured a pretty, helpless butterfly, he's really captured something much more powerful. Some kind of bee, maybe; Miranda has a sting. Miranda is smart and self-possessed and has a highly developed emotional intelligence that leaves Clegg floundering from their first face-to-face onwards. Not one scene between them goes according to Clegg's script; its only his extraordinary grip on his delusion, or his delusion's grip on him, that defends him from her deft emotional manipulations.

Unfortunately, that's all either of these characters turn out to be: fascinating, Clegg in his maladjusted inability to resist his icky and absurd impulses, Miranda in her repulsive fixation on class and on her idea of herself as one of the few rare and talented special ones who must battle against the ugly ordinary people. She's a mid-century epitome of the know-it-all feel-it-all fix-it-all College Girl Who Is So Much Better Than You. Though her fate is horrifying, the reader (at least this reader, who may have personality problems of her very own, oh yes) winds up kind of relishing watching her endure it, a little bit.

Which means that Fowles is a genius at eliciting reader complicity in the horrors he is depicting. This one goes on the strongly-disliked-but-undeniably-admired shelf next to Robert Silverberg's Book of Skulls. It wasn't quite the hate read that Book of Skulls was, but it certainly was not a pleasure read, either.

But it sure is remarkable.

*Sideshow Bob Grumble.

**Though that phenomenon and its terminology were not described until ten years after The Collector was first published.