When the going was good

Lake Tanganyika

Commercial travel by jet planes put a final end to the concept of travel as "exploration" or "adventure."  We romanticists often look back on the days before Lonely Planet guidebooks, hotel reservations by internet, and instantaneous sharing of experiences on social media as the good old days of adventure travel, "when the going was good."

Such, of course, is the title of a well-known 1946 travel book by Evelyn Waugh.  Waugh is best known today as the author of Brideshead Revisited, a novel that had been published a year earlier, in 1945.  Both Brideshead Revisited and When the Going Was Good are, in a sense, studies in nostalgia for pre-war life -- for the culture of the British class system in Brideshead, and for the freedom to travel the world in When the Going Was Good.

Early in his career, Waugh wrote often of his travel experiences.  Between 1928 and 1937, he published four books that were already out of print by 1946.  In his Preface to When the Going Was Good, Waugh finds these early books to have been, for the most part, "pedestrian" and boring, filled with "commonplace commentary" and "callow comments."  He notes with satisfaction that they were out of print, and that they would remains so. 

Each did contain certain passages that he found worth preserving, however, and -- in the awful post-war world of 1946, when tourism seemed dead for the near future -- serving as a nostalgic reminder of what travel was like "when the going was good."  He therefore collected his edited travel writings from the four books under that title.

Going Was Good contains five chapters, in chronological order -- (1) travels by sea throughout the eastern Mediterranean; (2) a humorous and condescending account of an impulsive visit to Abyssinia (Ethiopia) to witness the coronation of the new emperor, Haile Selassie; (3) travels in Aden and East Africa, concluding with a frustrating crossing of the Belgian Congo as a "shortcut" back to England; (4) travels through British Guiana (Guayana) and Brazil; and (5) a return to Abyssinia in 1935 as a "war correspondent' in response to the war with Mussolini's Italy.  (His misadventures as a correspondent also formed the basis for his comic 1938 satiric novel Scoop.

Having read (several times) Brideshead, as well as several of his satirical novels -- as well as interviews with him in his later years -- I had a fairly consistent image of Mr. Waugh.  Somewhere between "Bridey" in Brideshead Revisited and Mr. Toad in Wind in the Willows.  A rather stuffy, pompous man, immaculately dressed, and casting a sour eye on whichever of several eras he was living through at the time.  A man who was once asked how a Catholic convert could be so unpleasant toward other people, and who responded, "You have no idea how much nastier I would be if I was not a Catholic.

In Going Was Good, Waugh certainly displays his wicked sense of humor at the expense of others, and shares his compatriots' condescension toward the backwardness of "the natives" -- as well as his own interest in the cluelessness of the British Empire's bureaucrats.  But what surprised me was his eager seeking after physical adventures, enduring great hardships out of curiosity about the exotic places he visited, and displaying a willingness (not always without complaint) not only to get his hands dirty, but to live for weeks in conditions of total filth and deprivation.  He actually sounded (in his youth) like someone whose company I would have enjoyed (in my youth).

Some of his passages tend to focus on trivia of the sort that he was attempting to edit out, but more often his accounts are fascinating.  Subjectively, I liked best his Chapter Three, "Globe-Trotting in 1930-31," extracted from a book entitled Remote People (1931), (published in the U.S. as They Were Still Dancing).  On his way to the "glamour and rich beauty" he hoped to find on Zanzibar, he ended up -- without explanation in his edited account -- spending some time at the British crown colony and refueling port of Aden (now part of Yemen). 

Waugh enjoyed Aden, to his surprise, far more than he enjoyed Zanzibar.  He accepted the hospitality of many people -- both colonial authorities and local sultans.  He notes the initiative taken to organize the local children in a rational, English way -- by forming a scout troop.  He observed boys being tested for their Tenderfoot badge:

"What does "clean" mean?"
"Clin min?"
"You said just now a scout is clean in thought, word, and deed."
"Yis, scoot iss clin."
"Well, what do you mean by that?"
"I min tought worden deed."
"Yes, well, what do you mean by clean."
Both parties in this dialogue seemed to be losing confidence in the other's intelligence.
"I min the tenth scoot law."
...
"All right, Abdul.  That'll do."
"Pass, sahib?"
"Yes, yes."
An enormous smile broke across his small face ....
"Of course, it isn't quite like dealing with English boys," said the scoutmaster again.

This bit of reporting is typical of Waugh.  He doesn't point out a moral for the benefit of his readers.  He reports what he saw, and lets us draw our own conclusions.  Or, more accurately, he lets us think we're drawing our own conclusions. 

As he does in discussing local politics.

The Haushabi Sultan was an important young man, finely dressed, and very far from sane.  He sat in a corner giggling with embarrassment, and furtively popping little twigs of khat into his mouth.

After Aden, Waugh eventually shipped out to Zanzibar, whose heat he found intolerable and to which he gave short shrift.  He sailed on to Kenya, where he took the train from Mombasa, on the coast, inland to the higher and much more salubrious climate of Nairobi.  He seems to have enjoyed colonial life in Kenya -- often seen at the time as a Little England in the tropics.

By this time, Waugh was eager to return to England.  Rather than sail again back through the Suez Canal, he thought it might be faster to cross the Belgian Congo to the Atlantic coast.  He had been assured by a Belgian Congo agent in Tanganyika, while en route to Kenya, that an air service flew from Albertville (now Kalemie) on Lake Tanganyika's west coast to Boma on the Atlantic: "The fare was negligible, the convenience extreme."  Waugh therefore crossed by rail into Uganda and took a rickety steamer, through a frightening overnight storm, to Albertville.  He quickly learned that the alleged air service had never existed.  He was enticed into taking a train westward to Kabalo, then a tiny village on the upper Congo, where he was assured that air service did exist.  Arriving in Kabalo, everyone "giggled" when he asked when the next flight would be leaving.

He again was persuaded to plunge deeper into the jungle, sailing up the Congo for four days to Bukama, where a train purportedly would take him to the coast.  "I thought I had touched bottom at Kabalo, but Bukama has it heavily beaten."    Waugh doesn't mention having read Conrad's Heart of Darkness.  If he had never read it, perhaps it was just as well.

The rail from Bukama to the coast was "out of service." From Bukama, Waugh took a long train ride to Elizabethville (now Lubumbashi), on the border of what is now Zambia.  From there, he took a number of trains to Cape Town, South Africa, and thence -- finally -- home.  Quite a short cut.

The day after arriving back in London, Waugh was taken to the "in" nightclub of the moment.  He found himself in a "rowdy cellar, hotter than Zanzibar, noisier than the market at Harar, more reckless of the decencies of hospitality than the taverns of Kabalo or Tabora."  He marveled that the colonists back in Africa would have envied his ability to "enjoy" the experience of London civilization. 

As always, Waugh never seemed quite comfortable -- whether at home or abroad.