I’ve been reading the Virago Book of Women Travellers and godsalive but I’ve got itchy feet. Fifty-two intrepid dames roamin’ an’ writin’ – indeed rewriting – the surface of the earth, from the early 1700s to the end of the 20th century. Some were prim, some were scandalous, some were ecstatic, some were sarcastic, but their combined visions and the concerted expression thereof have been an exhilarating read.
I picked that book up at a stall on the King Street footpath, Newtown, just as I was finishing another woman’s memoirs of a travelling life – Anything But Ordinary: the nine lives of Cecile Dorward, by the lady herself and journalist Ron Davidson. Cecile was born in 1911 to a European family in middle-class London, her childhood was happy enough though her education was sketchy. She married an English professor of philosophy, and they bought a canal-boat and traversed the inland waterways of England. But the professor left Cecile a childless widow in her early forties, and she spent much of the rest of her life in a succession of campervans, traversing several continents including Australia, where she settled in Perth, whence she made regular and gradually shorter excursions till her death in 2004 at the fine old age of ninety-three.
Unfortunately, the glow of her undoubted spirit, intelligence, wit, and charm is somewhat dimmed by rather turgid prose and occasionally downright flat-footed syntax:
“This amorous attitude by Italian men towards me, when I was just a few days short of fifty-nine, was extraordinary. It was not even as if I were wearing my chestnut wig which made me look ten to fifteen years younger and made some men in cars honk in excitement. Men are easily fooled I mused as I drove towards Rome, now only two hours away.”
See what I mean? Great material, clumsy arrangement. I turn back to the Virago anthology, to Margaret Fountaine’s reminiscences about her own travels in Italy, around 1880, catching butterflies and men:
“Almost like two children together, I and this dark-eyed youth would chase the glorious Charaxes Iasius… quarrelling and disputing sometimes in hot discussions, while the music of the beautiful language in which we always conversed would add power and grace to our words.”
Rhythm, romance, drama and precision. Likewise, consider a few lines from the delectable Maud Parrish, describing her unsuccessful attempt to get a divorce in 1890s San Francisco:
“As I rose to leave the courtroom, the fine old East delegation” – her husband’s family – “sneered a bit too much for my little five-foot-two mother who was born and raised in California. She knocked a couple of teeth down my still husband’s throat… Soon the whole courtroom was in an uproar… I heard a skull crack with a noise like a batted baseball. Even a heavy chair slid off a bald head in a way that made me wince as I held my hand over my eyes.”
Now that’s tone. Parrish ran away to the Yukon, where she worked as a dance-hall girl, so her story just gets racier and racier; by the turn of the century she was running a gambling house in Peking. Her memoir, Nine Pounds of Luggage, was published in 1939, and was the only book she ever wrote. I’d love to read it but it’s out of print. Amazon lists a couple of copies available for about US$150 – feel free to band together for my Christmas present.
In the meantime, there’s plenty more in the Virago. For example, the crisply sarcastic tones of a woman known only as Mrs F. D. Bridges (those would be the initials of her husband, with whom she was travelling), whose journal records a visit to Salt Lake City sometime around the late 1870s:
“Persecution is proverbially good for a Church, and the Mormons had plenty of it, and throve accordingly.” She is scathing about polygamy and the terms of a Mormon marriage: “”Till death do us part,” is easy of comprehension; but here you may marry for “Time and Eternity,” or you may enter into a matrimonial engagement for “Time,” or “Eternity,” or you may unite yourself in Celestial marriage to some defunct Saint; or a widow may, with the consent of the Church, arrange a marriage for her deceased husband with some eligible deceased friend; and at last I got puzzled and came away with the impression that in Utah a man may marry his own widow.”
Or Mary Kingsley’s droll description of an encounter with a crocodile while navigating a West African swamp in 1894:
“On one occasion… a mightly Silurian, as The Daily Telegraph would call him, chose to get his front paws over the stern of my canoe, and endeavoured to improve our acquaintance. I had to retire to the bows, to keep the balance right, and fetch him a clip on the snout with a paddle, when he withdrew, and I paddled into the very middle of the lagoon, hoping the water there was too deep for him or any of his friends to repeat the performance.”
Or, for contrast, the feverishly transcendent tones of Isabelle Eberhardt, who abandoned her aristocratic Swiss family to wander North Africa, a convert to Islam, dressed as a man, outcast, drug-addicted, paranoid and destitute. She died in a flash flood in 1904, aged 28, but during her last months she was keeping a diary:
“How long will I be able to hold out?
How can one explain the fact that at home, where I had warm clothes, an outstandingly healthy diet, and Mummy’s idolatrous care, the slightest chill I caught would degenerate into bronchitis; whereas here, having suffered freezing temperatures at El Oued… having travelled in all kinds of weather, while literally always getting wet feet, going around in thin clothes and torn shoes, I don’t even catch a cold?
The human body is nothing, the human soul is all.”
And savour this cracker of an opening line from Emily Hahn, writing for the New Yorker in 1937:
“Though I had always wanted to be an opium addict, I can’t claim that as the reason I went to China.”
Ah, they just make me want to toss my to-do list, give my real estate agent the finger, grab my laptop and jump in the Kombi.
