Ian Irvine
Janet Flanner, the New Yorker’s Paris correspondent, writes to her friend Natalia Danesi Murray about the flight to the moon of Apollo X in May 1969:
“I know your heart is in your throat during this flight to the moon, and I read with fear and trembling what those eagle men plan to do. Naming everything after the cartoon characters of Peanuts [The lunar module was named Snoopy and the command module Charlie Brown] seems a little more Amurrican than necessary, but it, of course, pleases the USA public.”
Richard Nixon writes in his memoirs:
“For me the most exciting event of the first year of my presidency came in July 1969 when an American became the first man to walk on the moon… On Sunday night, July 20, Apollo VIII astronaut Frank Borman, Bob Haldeman and I stood around the TV set in the private office and watched Neil Armstrong step onto the moon. Then I went into the Oval Office where TV cameras had been set up for my split-screen phone call to the moon. Armstrong’s voice came through loud and clear. I said, ‘Because of what you have done the heavens have become a part of man’s world. And as you talk to us from the Sea of Tranquillity, it inspires us to redouble our efforts to bring peace and tranquillity to earth.’
“After a journey of almost half a million miles to the moon and back Apollo XI landed less than two miles from the prearranged target about a thousand miles south-west of Hawaii. I was there to welcome the astronauts home. When I talked with them through the window of their quarantine chamber it was hard to contain my enthusiasm or my awe at the thought that the three men on the other side of the glass had just returned from the moon. I said impulsively, ‘This is the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.’ When I talked to Billy Graham a few days later he said, ‘ Mr President, I know exactly how you felt, and I understand exactly what you meant, but even so I think it may have been a little excessive.’”
Cecil King writes in his diary on 22nd July 1969:
“The big news for weeks and months past has been the landing on the moon. It is an immense technological achievement. The foresight involved has been miraculous. The men’s courage has been admirable. They have been in an unknown world and in great danger for a week, and have never faltered. But having said all that, it is hard to see what of real value has been achieved. The Americans are beset by problems: their big cities, the Negroes, Vietnam, inflation, the armament race etc. The moon is not urgent and not a purely American problem, and in any case the biggest problem facing all of us is a spiritual and moral one, not a political or technological one. I regard the moon as an escape.”
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Parag Khanna
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The final stretch on the road to Yarkand, about 125 miles from China’s border with Pakistan, feels like the middle east. Each village is a collage of single-storey mud-brick homes with turquoise door-gates. People travel by donkey cart or scooter-rickshaw. Men greet each other the Muslim way (palm to the chest and a slight bow); women wear headscarves. In small villages many signs are still in Uighur, the local language. But for how much longer?
The absorption of China’s far west begins with renaming cities—Yarkand, once a regional capital, to Yecheng, Kashgar to Kashi, Urumqi to Wulumuqi—followed by building a new city around the local population. From three miles outside the bustling tree-lined city of Yarkand, huge gated communities for Chinese army officers flank either side of the road. Propaganda posters depict happily resettled Han, the ethnic majority from eastern China—who are squeezing Uighurs into the ever tighter space around the central mosque and bazaar.
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William Dalrymple
Literary travel writing, usually associated with the drumbeat of hooves across some distant steppe, seems at the moment to be echoing instead with the slow tread of the undertaker’s muffled footfall. Within the last few years Ryszard Kapuscinski, Eric Newby, Norman Lewis and Wilfred Thesiger have followed Bruce Chatwin on their last journey. Others—notably Jan Morris and Patrick Leigh Fermor—have put down their pens or busied themselves with a final bout of anthologising.
At the same time, many of the most talented of the younger generation have turned their pens in new directions: Philip Marsden and Amitav Ghosh to the novel; Nick Crane and Sara Wheeler to biography; Anthony Sattin and Katie Hickman to social history. There are few new stars coming up to replace the old guard; of those who have written debut travel books within the last decade, only Suketu Mehta, Rory Stewart, William Fiennes and Jason Elliott can compare with the departing masters.
British travel writing is as commercially successful as it has ever been, but the books that are selling are not literary so much as frivolous “funnies”—comedians pulling fridges through Estonia and so on. Travel writing is still popular, but it is no longer the powerful literary force it once was. Even some travel writers themselves have doubted the status of the travel book as a serious work of literature. Paul Theroux, whose The Great Railway Bazaar (1975) helped kickstart the travel writing boom of the 1980s, selling over 1.5m copies in 20 languages, was one of the first to express his dislike of the publishing leviathan he had helped create: “Fiction is the only thing that interests me now,” he told one interviewer. “The travel book as autobiography, as the new form of the novel—it’s all bullshit. When people say that now, I just laugh.”
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Andrew Brown
From the 1960s to the 1980s, the world looked to Sweden as a socialist country that worked. Affluent, egalitarian, moderate, it seemed the blueprint for a kinder, more rational future. In 1977, I moved there with my Swedish wife, Anita. I lived an apparently utopian life—raising a child, working in a small factory, living in an efficient modern home, becoming a fisherman. I found it intensely frustrating. By the 1980s, the country and my marriage were falling apart. The prime minister was shot dead on a street in Stockholm. Swedish industry was crumbling. Through the cracks in the social dream, a very different vision of Sweden emerged: a disillusioned, nervous, greedy country, suddenly unsure of its identity and place in the world. Now, 20 years later, I have returned to travel the length of Sweden—and to reflect on my experiences of a country I have loved, hated, and come to love again.
Communists and detectives
Once my Swedish was up to the task, I learned a lot about my new country from the novels of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö, about the policeman Martin Beck. Between 1963 and 1975, this man-and-wife duo produced ten police procedurals set in Stockholm, which sold all around the world. They are excitingly written, realistic about police work and full of period detail. But most of all they illuminate the orthodoxy of the Social Democratic years. The strangest thing about Sweden, to an English eye, was always its conformity. It did not matter what the orthodoxy might be: the point is that everyone knew what was acceptable and proper to believe. The Beck stories taught me most when they were most absurd, because they exaggerated what everybody then believed about progress and society. Sjöwall and Wahlöö were communists, and in the 1970s there was an assumption that communism, while imperfect, was at least a form of socialism; and socialism then seemed as completely inevitable as global capitalism does now.
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Duncan Fallowell
There are plenty of things I’m happy to admit: I loathe Beethoven’s 9th symphony; that the spectacle of the disability Olympics makes me feel ill; that I wish I had a foreskin (consequently I’ve spent a lot of my adult life seeking the foreskins of others); that I am ashamed of my back—which is bowed, not flat. I should be happy to extend the list except that it would begin to involve other people (I’ve written somewhere that maturity is the growing capacity for candour, but that’s not the same as unnecessary betrayal of those close to us).
But the one thing it remains uncool to do is to have regrets. To the “do your own thing” generation, this was inconceivable. You could confess to the most appalling sins, but regret was another matter. It was a denial of selfhood; it was emotional suicide. For waverers there was propaganda: Edith Piaf’s song “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien,” or Frank Sinatra’s “My Way”: “Regrets, I’ve had a few/ But then again, too few to mention.”
For years I followed that path, but a few months ago I seemed to fly right into an asteroid belt of, well, regrets. I don’t actually wish I were another person—I simply can’t get my head round a question like “If you weren’t you, who would you want to be?” But I’m also a man for whom life and work, life and art indeed, form a seamless continuum. And that, it struck me, has been my big mistake.
It began quietly. I was lying in bed one night and thought—I wish I’d joined the Groucho Club when it asked me to become a founder member all those years ago. If I had, maybe I wouldn’t be battling for every damned book I write. From here, it wasn’t far to an orgy of cold sweat and self-pity. Why have I never had any recognition? Why am I still a struggling author? Why have I never been shortlisted for anything or even longlisted? Then it swerved back to—why didn’t I say yes when Mark Boxer asked me to become features editor of Tatler? Why did I refuse when Emma Soames asked me to be a restaurant critic? Pitiful, isn’t it. These weren’t regrets about people—only about work, career, worldly success.
Then the regrets about people arrived—and it got worse. People as a resource. Why did I never exploit my connections? Why did I say no to Anton Dolin and Ozzie Clark when they asked me to write their biographies? Why did I reject Richard Cohen when he offered me £40,000 for a biography of Jan Morris? Most of all, why on earth did I turn down Harold Acton when he asked me to be his authorised biographer and spend time with him on the project? I would have gone everywhere and come to know everyone.
I try to justify it by thinking, oh, if I’d gone to live with Harold Acton in his palace outside Florence, it would have turned me into some piss-elegant art queen, it would have fed my poncey side, I’d never have pushed the boundaries, I should have had to dance attendance on his every whim, I’d have been suffocated in archival drudgery and lost my independence. But now I think that’s not true. It would have enlarged my field of operations enormously. Harold would have opened for me the jewelled casket of secrets which he has since taken to the grave. I could have written a small masterpiece for posthumous publication.
No—the real reason I didn’t take on these biographies, and his in particular, was vanity. I’d already written one, of a transsexual friend of mine. It was my first book and I’d done it because I’d screwed up in London and needed to escape. But I wanted in future to write books which were devoted to my glory, not the glorification of others. I wanted to be the centre of attention.
Which brings us to another big regret. In the 1970s, I worked a lot with the avant-garde German band Can. Their Japanese lead singer Damo Suzuki left in 1973 to become a Jehovah’s Witness. I was invited to replace him and— after a long dark night of the soul—turned the offer down. If I hadn’t, I might now be filling the Dome along with Kylie Minogue!
After the Can offer, I hopped over to India, for a year, whereupon my editor at the Spectator accused me of neglecting my career. I was their film critic at the time but, you see, I had never had a boss or been part of an organisation. When I returned I became involved not with the straight press but with the punk glossies Deluxe and Boulevard and was still self-employed. This led to burnout and moving to Hay-on-Wye for a bit which brings us, soon afterwards, to that golden arm of Harold’s extending out through the doors of the Villa La Pietra, the kingdom which I spurned. That is what lingers most among the regrets, the rejection of Harold Acton’s proposal. His life was fascinating and he was fantastically rich. I’d be in clover by now, instead of worrying about who will publish my next book and how I’ll survive. So many great opportunities scorned by my prattish self-regard! Why the bloody hell did I have to do it my way? Why?
Mark Cousins
I have just spent an afternoon and the following morning with German filmmaker and writer Wim Wenders. A retrospective of his movies has just finished at the BFI Southbank in London and the Filmhouse in Edinburgh. Two of them—Alice in the Cities (1974) and Land of Plenty (2004)—are being released here for the first time. Spending time with him sent me on a train of thought about his cinema and my life.
Alice in the Cities, a road movie about a German man and a nine-year-old girl, was the first Wenders movie I saw, on a course at university in 1983. I still remember the opening sequence. The camera cranes down from a wooden walkway to actor Rüdiger Vogler sitting below it, alone, on a beach, singing “Under the Boardwalk.” I knew the Drifters’ version of the song, of course, but only in that scene did I realise what a boardwalk actually was. I hadn’t travelled much at that stage or, rather, I’d done so only through the proxy of cinema. Like most westerners born in the era of mass culture, American clothes, slang, songs, imagery, attitudes, movies, food, buildings and ideas were familiar to me but perhaps, like boardwalks, in an empty way.
I adored Alice in the Cities (pictured, below right, with Rüdiger Vogler and Yella Rottländer) in 1983. At one point Vogler, who’s driving around America, staying in cheap hotels, snapping everything with a Polaroid camera, says that he takes photographs not to speak, but to listen. Though I was only 18 then, I loved the daring idea that art—even if it was just a Polaroid—might not be about self-expression, but about paying attention. Soon afterwards I saw Wenders’s Kings of the Road (1976), another road movie starring Vogler, and was shocked when one of the characters squats by the roadside and defecates, in full view of the camera. Its European insolence punctured the decorum of entertainment cinema.
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Rob Gifford
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In the US, there are nine cities with more than 1m inhabitants. In China, there are 49. You can be travelling across China, arrive in a city that is twice the size of Houston, and think: I’ve never even heard of this place. That is how it is for many foreign visitors to Hefei (population 4.7m). I have been travelling to China as a journalist, or living here, for nearly 20 years and visited Hefei (pronounced Huh-fay) for the first time only last year for the book I have just written about the new China. There had never been any reason to come. But as in so many cities in China, the local government is trying to change that. After centuries of inland poverty, Hefei, like all Chinese cities, is opening up.
Like dye dripped upon a piece of cloth, a moderate level of wealth is seeping to inland cities. The new Route 312—which runs all the way from Shanghai to the western border with Kazakhstan—is part of the change, dramatically cutting the journey time for people and goods going to Nanjing, Shanghai and the coast. The spread inland of factories and companies in search of lower costs has helped too, as have remittances from migrants working near the coast. This growing wealth is in turn changing some of the patterns of inland migration. Shanghai is still the promised land for migrant peasants, but there are now more mini-promised lands: regional capitals such as Hefei, or other cities further inland, such as Xi’an and Lanzhou, to which people are travelling to find work because there is now work there. For the first time, some factories on the coast have a labour shortage, and one reason is that people can now find jobs (albeit not so well paid) in China’s interior.
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Nick Fraser
April 2004. In Tiananmen Square, standing under the giant image of Mao and surrounded by bright dragon kites, the oddity of my assignment finally strikes home. Twenty-odd young Chinese intellectuals have come to the basement of a Beijing hotel in order to pitch ideas for ten films about democracy. One hopeful would like to show how it is becoming possible, by struggling against the authorities, to own an apartment. Another shows how peasants are beginning to take the Party to court for corruption.
With two colleagues from South Africa and Paris, I am here on behalf of the BBC. This is a bold project conceived six months previously on a bright day near a Cape Town beach in a moment of collective enthusiasm.
?A squat Chinese filmmaker with the confident manner of the young Orson Welles gets to his feet. He explains to us that there is no point in looking for definitions of democracy in a country where it isn’t allowed to flourish. “Bureaucrats rule in China,” he says. “To be a bureaucrat you must be a Communist, and this is why every child wants to be a Communist.” He propose s to film in a schoolroom, where children will be given basic rules and encouraged to formulate their own democracy. “We have elections that are organised by the Party,” he says. “This will be the first real election—in which children choose their own class monitor. And this way we’ll see what democracy in China could be like.” The idea instantly appeals to us (see right).
May 2004. At pitches, we are asked whether we employ democratic methods when selecting films. Within Steps International, our tiny NGO based in Denmark, we do not make decisions by majority vote. The old anti-democratic habits of editorial individualism die hard, and for some colleagues, my own excessive use of the first person appears inappropriate, if not offensive. Meetings sometime descend into procedural wrangling; and as chairman I periodically despair of my own lack of political skills.
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Lesley Chamberlain
We’re not going on holiday this summer, so I thought I’d remind myself what I’m missing. Nietzsche talks of the enchantment of short-term habits. When I think how excited I get mastering another place’s bus timetables, I know he’s right.
Some of the joy comes simply from being away from home. Because the landscape is different, your eyes wake up. Because the food tastes different, your palate is tickled into making new distinctions. Whether or not the language is familiar, your ears enjoy the challenge of a different sound world.
You can lose yourself in the music of foreign streets—car horns, scooters, trams, even horses’ hooves. It’s almost a definition of being in the Mediterranean that you don’t mind the noise. Even the birds sing a different tune, so you get interested in birdwatching. The vegetation is more luxurious, so add to that plantspotting. You wake up with foreign words in your head. You cover your face with a different kind of detective story on the beach, which has to be read with a dictionary, and it doesn’t really matter that you never get beyond page three.
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Robert Jackson
Thursday 5th April
We arrive at Heathrow for our long-planned trip to Iran an hour or so after the Royal Navy “captives” fly in from Tehran. It will be interesting to see how British visitors to Iran are regarded. My previous visit, in 1999, was as a member of a parliamentary delegation, trying to promote détente, and we were pretty coolly received in Tehran.
On the Iran Air flight, I watch the Iranian film, with subtitles. This is an “Upstairs-Downstairs”-style comedy, starring a lovable but ridiculous manservant, and the efforts of the family in which he is employed to marry him off to a shrewish but also lovable kitchen maid. The employers—from the monied professional class—are generally presented as sympathetic and well-meaning, but definitely superior. The social atmosphere is that of an inter-war French farce. My Iranian fellow passengers watch the film with evident enjoyment—this is a self-portrait they seem to recognise.
Sunday 8th April
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