Great Journeys: Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead

Here at the age of thirty-nine I began to be old. I felt stiff and weary in the evenings and reluctant to go out of camp; I developed proprietary claims to certain chairs and newspapers; I regularly drank three glasses of gin before dinner, never more or less, and went to bed immediately after the nine o'clock news. I was always awake and fretful an hour before reveille.
Here my last love died. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of its death. One day, not long before this last day in camp, as I lay awake before reveille, in the Nissen hut, gazing into the complete blackness, amid the deep breathing and muttering of the four other occupants, turning over in my mind what I had to do that day - had I put in the names of two corporals for the weapon-training course? Should I again have the largest number of men overstaying their leave in the batch due back that day? Could I trust Hooper to take the candidates class out map-reading? - as I lay in that dark hour, I was aghast to realize that something within me, long sickening, had quietly died, and felt as a husband might feel, who, in the fourth year of his marriage, suddenly knew that he had no longer any desire, or tenderness, or esteem, for a once-beloved wife; no pleasure in her company, no wish to please, no curiosity about anything she might ever do or say or think; no hope of setting things right, no self-reproach for the disaster. (p. 14)

This is Charles Ryder, out of love with the army, and about to revisit Brideshead, the home of his first love:

'What's this place called?'
He told me and, on the instant, it was as though someone had switched off the wireless, and a voice that had been bawling in my ears, incessantly, fatuously, for days beyond number, had been suddenly cut short; an immense silence followed, empty at first, but gradually, as my outraged sense regained authority, full of a multitude of sweet and natural and long forgotten sounds: for he had spoken a name that was so familiar to me, a conjuror's name of such ancient power, that, at its mere sound, the phantoms of those haunted late years began to take flight. (p. 24-25)

I know am probably stretching the category of great journeys here, as Brideshead Revisited (1945) is of course a work of fiction, and Charles Ryder a rather more sympathetic traveller than Waugh himself, who in his travel writing was not well-known for concealing his prejudices. But this book traces as great a journey as any other.

It is written in flawless high prose, and while Waugh felt compelled to apologise for just how high that prose got, what he referred to as "a kind of gluttony...for rhetorical and ornamental language" (p. 10), the "souvenir of the Second World War" that he produced is, to me, as seductive as this style of writing can be. Have a look, for example, at the structure of the third sentence of the second paragraph I have quoted - the sentence beginning One day, not long before. Would you dare punctuate this way?

It is nostalgic, and however much it may be the case that nostalgia takes more than it gives, I think nostalgia - the search for something that is gone - is such an elemental part of travel writing (and perhaps all writing) that when it is done well, most of us will set aside our high-minded forward momentum and indulge the author in his reclamation of the past.

And, in this case, the nostalgia works because of the complexity of Ryder's point of view: he has not journeyed to Brideshead on purpose; rather his is a forced revisiting that is in turn part of a much larger project, the War, that goes far beyond him. He is taken back to Brideshead, and in being re-introduced to his younger self he is offered the chance to do much more than revisit: he is being made to re-evaluate. Fate survives, even if love doesn't.

*

Brideshead Revisited is a book that I revisit at least once a year, and seemingly always for different reasons. In 2009, it was because I had been drinking with Bob Ellis, who in a pub in West End pulled a copy out of a black overnight bag, a well-worn copy he said he takes with him everywhere he goes. I don't have such a direct cause today, but perhaps in part it is because I have been reading The Year of Magical Thinking (2005) by Joan Didion. This memoir has much of the Brideshead effect: in a stunning opening, Didion captures not only the ordinariness of death, but also the sense that it is out of its ordinariness that the full shock is felt. Here my last love died. There was nothing remarkable in the manner of its death - these are Ryder's thoughts. The reason, of course, is because we know it is coming, and we live with it all the time. Life changes in the instant. The ordinary instant - these are Didion's.

Letter from Moreton Bay, by Stuart Glover

The idea of an island is simple enough: a piece of land completely surrounded by water. Unlike the continent whose extremities are sometimes arbitrary, or the nation whose boundaries are as much political as geographic, the island is a binary idea. There is water, and there is land. The island is land, and the clarity of it gives rise to an island’s very identity and story. But at the southern end of Moreton Bay, 30 kilometres south east of Brisbane, where more than a dozen small low-lying, mosquito-blighted locks of land guard the mouth of the Logan River, there are four larger islands whose stories are not at all clear. Instead, their status as “land” at all has often been under a mark. Their history reminds us that the word “island” is a verb as well as a noun. Islands come and go, and are forever being made and unmade.

The islands of Russell, Macleay, Lamb, and Karragarra are home to 5000 or so people—and many hundreds of often empty weekender-houses besides. They nestle together, further east than Coochiemudlo, but in the lee of the more glamorous North Stradbroke Island. And while “Straddie”, with its surf beaches, its Aboriginal and convict lore, and its shark attacks, is a fixture in the Brisbane imagination, the four Southern Moreton Bay islands are only sometimes remembered. They, like all islands, have been made and remade in local minds many times.

Scandal

I have two waterfront beach houses on Macleay Island. Two beach houses is excessive, but the early 2000s real estate boom encouraged me, like many on the island, to excess. This boom was an echo of Macleay’s history. Until the mid-1970s the islands had never been included under any local government area. Developers were free to do what they wished. A real-estate frenzy was whipped up in the press in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and hundreds of blocks on the neighbouring Russell Island were sold off the plan to foreign and interstate investors. But unforgivably, many blocks were underwater at high tide, or good blocks were swapped for bad after buyers had signed up. The scandal gave rise to the longest trial in Australian legal history—but one that eventually fell apart in 1983 after two years when a juror fell ill. No one was punished.

The names of the islands, particularly Russell’s, were sullied. The very geography of the islands, their mix of marsh and terra firma, was at issue. Were these even islands at all? What is land? What is sea? What will a house sink on or in? How many bedrooms and bathrooms can a piece of stripped littoral rainforest on an island’s foreshore support? Some of the small beaches on Macleay island feature houses nestled too low in the dunes and are subject to flooding. On a still day, the waters around Coochiemudlo have a plume of bacteria. Over time, the Redland Council, which took over the islands after the scandal, reluctantly coughed up the cash to buy back many of the low-lying blocks.

Ipswich by the Sea

Yet, when the real estate frenzy came again at the very end of the 1990s, the buyers and the speculators—both the canny and the deluded—came once more. The Sunday Mail promoted that the islands had the cheapest land in South East Queensland: bush blocks for $10,000; waterfront blocks for $60,000. On the day I first visited a small house sold for $49,000. Some days, they still sell for $200,000. Mortgages and rents are low—only the car ferry, fuel, and the groceries shipped from the mainland are expensive.

While Noosa to the north and Gold Coast to the south attracted rich sea-changers, the islands attracted the poor. While there is a ring of expensive houses around the 15km or so of foreshore on Macleay, the island’s centre is filled with kit homes, ham-fisted two-bedders by owner-builders, and glorified sheds. It often seems like the last ungentrified waterfront development—a haven for pensioned retirees, the working poor, and single mothers. The twenty-minute ferry to and from the mainland is often filled with men in fluorescent road-crew work wear. Since the GFC, house prices have begun to fall. Those surviving on welfare leave when the pressure from Centrelink to find work gets too much. The small primary school tanked on the Federal Government’s My School web-site. Too many kids from vulnerable backgrounds come and go too often. It may be an island, but the escape to the mainland is always close.

The Bridge Fantasy

If the mainland is always close, it is never close enough. If one thing unites island folk it is the dream of a bridge. For now, people travel back and forth on a slow and expensive car barge, or a fast passenger ferry. The passenger ferry means the need for two cars and means incurring parking costs on the mainland. If the community is made up in a large part of people escaping from the pressures of mainland life, transport and its costs is the one issue to draw them together into political action. Local flyers and presses are filled with schemes for a new ferry and pontoons, but always a bridge: it is only a kilometre or so from Rocky Point on the mainland to southern tip of Russell.

If only this expanse of water could be bridged the inconveniences of island life—the islandness of it—could be bridged also. The waterfront residents would be instant millionaires. But the cost—the estimate is often around the $300 million mark—and, for some, the insistence on being an island stand in the way. Developers to the south have turned Sovereign Island into a luxury enclave with the help of a series of short bridges, but Russell and Macleay remain adrift.

Hope among the Mangroves

If much of Macleay’s history has been shaped by the idea of being unknown, unchartered, unreachable, and unloved, there is hope. While the developers have been marginalised, the islands have been declared part of the Moreton Bay Marine Park. A large conservation area has been fashioned on Russell. Wetlands reserves have been protected on Macleay. When the convict Tim O’Shea became the first white settler on the island when escaped to there from Stradbroke in 1837, he hid in these wetlands. He was isolated enough to never learn that he had been pardoned. Now both the story and the beauty of these places have been preserved.

In what is perhaps the last reminder of the process of islanding, the islands continue to grow. In the late 1800s the mangroves on Macleay were often cleared to make life easier for the oystermen who were in search of stocks of lime. Now, the protected mangroves trap the sands, and the islands swell an extra inch or two every year. They creep ever closer to the shore. They resist the rising tides of global warming. They insist upon themselves. They declare themselves as islands once more.

Note: This letter appeared first as “Islanding in Moreton Bay” in the latest issue of LiNQ Journal (Literature in North Queensland) Vol 37, 2010.

Stuart Glover teaches writing at the University of Queensland. He lives, sometimes, on Macleay Island in Southern Moreton Bay.

Great Journeys: William Least Heat-Moon in America

I am adding William Least Heat-Moon's Blue Highways (1982) to my collection of great journeys, but my notes on this enchanting book are, I'm afraid, drawn entirely from memory, as I long ago lent my copy to a friend or colleague, and unsurprisingly it hasn't come back. If I were lent Blue Highways, I would steal it, too.

Blue Highways is a great journey because it is a book about looking and listening first, and commenting second. The opening premise, too, is perfect (in literary terms) if a bit shitty in terms of the author's actual life: Least Heat-Moon loses his university job, his wife leaves him, and, with the few hundred dollars he has left to his name, he decides to buy a van and take to the "blue highways", or the quieter roads that were once printed in blue on American road maps. He has nothing left to lose, and can really only gain by travelling.

As well as keeping off the big roads, he does his best to avoid cities, and sleeps in his van. His main food source is road-side diners, at the time a fading institution of road travel for which he develops a rating system based on the number of calendars hanging up on the walls: the fewer the calendars, the less likely it is that you're in for a good meal. He is seldom hastled, in fact only twice, and on both occasions it is by the police. Otherwise, he is left alone to do what he does best, which is to move slowly enough to be able to strike up conversations with the people who live by the blue roads he follows - that is, he is by no means a solitary traveller, even though he moves through America on his own.

Thus, the structure of the book reflects Least Heat-Moon's most important quality as a traveller, which is his willingness to stop and talk to strangers. Blue Highways records dozens of stories, patiently transcribed (one assumes during quiet nights in the van) and allowed, for the most part, to stand on their own right. Taken together, the conversations and potted autobiographies that they contain form an odds-and-ends collection of American stories from the late 1970s. And while Least Heat-Moon forms an obvious link between these stories, he allows us to listen and to make the connections between the stories for ourselves, as though they have merely been collected from the roadside and stored in the back of the van.

The book, when first published in 1982, was a stunning, unexpected commercial success, and still sells thousands of copies every year. It's probably time I got my second copy.

Great Journeys: Eric Newby in the Hindu Kush

Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) is a great journey because it announced Newby's arrival as one of the most constant and approachable travel writers of the twentieth century. The story tells of his decision to leave his post-War career in the rag trade and team up with a British Foreign Office friend to climb Mir Samir, a peak in Afghanistan's Hindu Kush, then as now one of the most alluring and difficult places in the world to visit.

At first, there seems something ho-hum about Newby's prose style, and the dialogue in particular strains to be jolly in that 1950s way where quick sarcasm is used a veil of pain and tiredness. A survival device left over from the War, perhaps. But now and then the reality of Newby's situation pierces through, especially when the two travellers learn about the troubles faced by the locals. The first horrifying event is a road accident, the second a robbery, the third an accidental shooting. In each case, Newby is merely a witness - although in the first incident is blamed for the fatality - but the intrusion of these deaths in the narrative lifts the bumbling tone from seeming too jolly English to rather tragic: the young travellers really are out of their depth. That the sarcasm fails to hide that fact makes the story better.

For the rest of his writing career, Newby managed a delicate balance of silliness, sarcasm and glimpses of awkwardness and uncertainty, and as a result his writing is always approachable. He has a distinctive, generational humour which he couples with a willingness to be exposed on the page, a fact that relates his writing to travellers like Bill Bryson who are prepared to seem as faulty as the countries and cultures featured in their books.

My personal favourite is On the Shores of the Mediterranean (1984), when Newby and his wife Wanda trace the whole of the Med - there's a particularly wonderful scene of them driving through the rain to Cetinje in Montenegro, a route that I re-traced with my wife Olanda in 2005. Newby had gone looking for the famous Hotel Grand to find only foundations and ruins, a disappointing result that came at the end of a terrifying climb along what really is one of the most confronting roads in Europe. Twenty years later, Olanda and I found a Hotel Grand of Soviet proportions: hundreds of rooms, mostly empty, a resident basketball team, and more waiting staff in the restaurant than customers. I doubted that Newby would have been impressed with the reconstruction, but I toasted him all the same.

Slowly Down the Ganges (1966) is another highlight for me, and also A Small Place in Italy (1994), which I suppose was taking part in that wave of expat memoirs that appeared in the 80s and 90s, but which in this case is much better for Newby's long connection with Italy - it was there that he met his wife Wanda, when as an escaped prisoner of war he tried to find a way out of enemy territory by walking the Apennines.

Walking to escape is part of the thematic geography of A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, too, and remains at the core of most of Newby's writing: you can laugh, but you also need to get away, and getting away means being unsettled, exposed, and ultimately more open. You might even find a wife.