When the Going Was Good

By Paul Gray

ABROAD: BRITISH LITERARY TRAVELING BETWEEN THE WARS by Paul Fussell; Oxford; 246 pages; $14.95

The urge to get away from it all grips everyone now and then, and the jet airliner has made most of the world accessible. Or has it? Author Paul Fussell, 56, thinks not: "I am assuming that travel is now impossible and that tourism is all we have left." The statement seems, at first, absurd: more people are going more places than ever before. But Fussell argues convincingly that there are too many of them, and that no one is doing it the right way: "Perhaps the closest one could approach an experience of travel in the old sense today would be to drive in an aged automobile with doubtful tires through Rumania or Afghanistan without hotel reservations and to get by on terrible French."

Abroad is a graceful elegy to travel in the old sense, which involved much more than missed connections and dubious food. Fussell quotes approvingly Samuel Johnson's dictum that "the use of traveling is to regulate imagination by reality, and instead of thinking how things may be, to see them as they are." There was a time when people went out into the world not knowing what they would find. Instead of cameras, they carried notebooks and writing implements. They wrote about what they had never seen before for people who would probably never see it at all.

Such literary journeying reached epidemic proportions during the '20s and '30s. It would be easier to list English authors who did not write travel books during the period than to name all those who did. These included D.H. Lawrence, Norman Douglas, E.M. Forster, George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood and Evelyn Waugh, among scores of others. The English had always been energetic travelers; the Empire had seen to that. But Fussell thinks that the modern exodus that began in 1918 was different and that the chief difference was World War I.

Trench warfare was ghastly enough to make any of its freezing, frightened participants yearn for almost any kind of escape. As for those who were restricted to England for the duration, the climate, which had once seemed a mild test of pluck and heartiness, began to seem intolerable. What Fussell calls the "I Hate It Here" syndrome became rampant, particularly among writers, malcontents at the best of tunes. When getting away finally became possible again, many left seeking not just adventure but permanent exile.

While the war inspired wanderlust, it also made travel a more complicated and anxious business. The passport, which had hardly existed in Europe before 1915, became ubiquitous. Fussell argues that this intervention by the state amounted to more than a bureaucratic inconvenience: "So small a phenomenon as the passport picture is an example of something tiny which has powerfully affected the modern sensibility, assisting that anxious self-awareness, that secret but overriding self-contempt, which we recognize as attaching uniquely to the world of P frock and Joseph K. and Malone." In addition, the war left Europe with a bewildering new set of national boundaries images of border crossings began cropping up in literature. Writes Fussell: "The way up to imitate an early Auden poem is to , as many frontiers into it as possible."

As he demonstrated in the classic j Great War and Modern Memory (1975), Fussell has the rare ability to move ( between literary and social criticism without stumbling. He is equally adept at explaining the rise of sun worship in the '20's or at arguing that the travel books of the period deserve attention as works of narrative art. Some of the volumes he likes best are no longer in print, a sad situation that his own book may help remedy. A single passage by Evelyn Waugh in Labels is more than enough to justify all that roaming around that so many did: "I do not think I shall ever forget the sight of Etna at sunset; the mountain almost invisible in a blur of pastel grey, glowing on the top and then repeating its shape, as though reflected, in a wisp of grey smoke with the whole horizon behind radiant with pink light, fading gently into a grey pastel sky. Nothing I have seen in Art or Nature was quite so revolting."

What began after one war ended with another. Travel writers were gradually; displaced by foreign correspondents, exotica gave way to political realities. Fussel likes to sound crotchety about the inferior modern substitute for travel, but he knows it is too late to deny people Disneyland or twelve nights and 13 days of prepackaged; fun. His book is a fitting substitute for the real thing; it is a journey in time and space, offering the serendipitous pleasures of the open road.

Excerpt "Sedulously avoiding the standard sights is probably the best method of disguising your touristhood. In London one avoids Westminster Abbey and heads in stead for the Earl of Burlington's eighteenth-century villa at Chiswick. In Venice one must walk by circuitous smelly back passages fair out of one's way to avoid being seer in the Piazza San Marco . . . Each tourist center has its interdicted zone: in Rome you avoid the Spanish Steps ... in Paris the Deux Ma gots and the whole BouF Mich area in Nice the Promenade des Anglais in Egypt Giza with its excessive!} popular pyramids ... in Hawai Waikiki. Avoiding Waikiki bring! up the whole question of why one'; gone to Hawaii at all, but that's exactly the problem."

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