Faber & Faber

John Pemble here provides an Afterword to The Mediterranean Passion, his much-admired work of social history which explores the boom in the Edwardians' and Victorians' desire for foreign travel.

The Mediterranean passion was a mentalité, an historical state of mind, so attempting to recover it meant mixing and matching material from separate disciplines and scattered sources. It meant, most notably, compounding travel writing with tourist literature. This was unorthodox, because although they sound related, they’ve long been thought of as having little in common and living widely apart.

Travel writing is smart. It hangs around arts faculties, international conferences, literary festivals, and publishers’ parties, trailing bohemian chic. It’s loaded with favours and attention: reviews, articles, theses, monographs, ‘companions’, anthologies. The journeys it describes are as much inward as outward, and it’s more about departure than arrival - because ‘travellers’ never really arrive. They’re perpetually in search of an elusive elsewhere, knowing what they don’t want and wanting what they don’t know.

Tourist literature is different. It’s the books about places that travel writers don’t write. It’s part of the baggage of organized parties and package tours, and it’s more about arrival than departure - because ‘tourists’ never really depart. They don’t cross frontiers; they push them back, knowing what they want and wanting what they know. Tourist literature is closely connected with pilgrimage and its modern secular derivative - which is literary tourism looking for writers in birthplaces and for imaginary landscapes in the real world. Consequently it’s not well regarded in intellectual circles, where ruling dogma says that the author’s dead and there’s nowhere outside the text.

It might seem perverse to try to recover a Victorian state of mind by abrogating this divorce, since it was the Victorians who decreed it. The Grand Tourists never knew of it; but the Victorians discovered that in their age of democratized travel and globalized consumerism, everywhere was becoming much the same. Their universe of free exchange and open doors was turning into a prison, because it was increasingly difficult to get away - from anywhere, anything, or anyone. The only way to escape was to invent the myth of an elsewhere reserved to ‘travellers’, and then invent ‘the traveller’ who is always me and very seldom you.

A trawl through a lot of travel writing and tourist literature made it clear that the distinction between travellers and tourists was more fiction than reality. The stereotypes weren’t exactly false - social and cultural disparities between the British abroad testified to that. But the rift was more about inner conflict than outward segregation. Everyone I studied was in some measure both a ‘traveller’ and a ‘tourist’.  The preponderant division was not between but within individuals; and once Thomas Cook had set up business most individuals (even the customers of Cook) were tourists claiming to be ‘travellers’ who were vexed by ‘tourists’. This phenomenon of anti-tourism as an essential characteristic of modern tourism has since become well recognized, and James Buzard has explored it in a perceptive book (The Beaten Track).

So writing about Victorians and Edwardians abroad in terms of collective experience and shared responses seems, in retrospect, to have been justified. But I do now wonder whether, in my search for a generic passion, I had insufficient regard for various Mediterraneans. On the Victorian mental map ‘the Mediterranean’ wasn’t a space that could be recuperated as a whole or encompassed in a single geography. It wasn’t just ‘the South’. It was also ‘the Orient’, and what might be called the ‘the Far South’, or the ‘Deep South’.

I detected awareness of the Orient in responses to Venice, so when I wrote Venice Rediscovered I tried to show how understanding of the city changed when the frontier of the Orient was shifted, by the opening of de Lesseps’ canal, from east of the Adriatic to east of Suez.

Awareness of another, static frontier, bisecting the Italian peninsula, was apparent in perceptions of Basilicata and Calabria. This frontier ran from Salerno through Eboli and Potenza, to Taranto. It was evoked by a poignant local saying, later recorded by Carlo Levi and used as the title of his famous book: Cristo si è fermato a Eboli (‘Christ stopped at Eboli’). Beyond Eboli was the other Italy, forsaken and unredeemed: an Italy without sanatoria, pleasure resorts, or Culture. Between Paestum and the Straits of Messina the civilized gaze detected a hiatus in the diaspora of art. The Greek legacy had been all but obliterated, and the spirit of the Renaissance had been barbarized by Spanish, oriental, and aboriginal influences. Tourist literature therefore ignored it (in Murray’s and Baedeker’s guidebooks ‘South Italy’ was Naples, the Neapolitan hinterland, the Amalfi peninsula, and Sicily), and tourists stayed away. The foreigners who trod the toe of Italy were an intrepid, eccentric, or unfortunate few.

Best-known among British visitors to this region are George Gissing and Norman Douglas - writers to whom its present desolation was made almost unbearable by the fragments, pathetically broken and few, of a sunlit, Hellenic past. But if Gissing and Douglas disturb the idea of a homogeneous ‘Mediterranean’, they also validate the idea of a generic ‘passion’, since each of them, like all the rest, was to some degree both a ‘traveller’ and a ‘tourist’.

Gissing’s By the Ionian Sea and Douglas’s Old Calabria both describe a region reserved to ‘travellers’, and both are ranked as classics of travel writing. Gissing distils a hallucinatory, minor-key brew from a specific sense of place and a sensuous ache for beauty that must die. Douglas is a no less solitary, though outwardly much more rugged witness, exploring Calabria on foot, observing the passing of an immemorial way of life, and refusing to compromise his stoicism with too-deep regret.

Yet there’s a conventional tourist lurking in each of these distinctive figures. Gissing never strayed far from the littoral railway, and never discarded Grand Tour aesthetics. He knew what he was looking for before he found it, and when recognition failed, so too did his interest and his inspiration.

Douglas deliberately, and provocatively, destabilized the boundary between travel writing and tourist literature by constantly crossing and recrossing it. On one page he’s a citizen of the world, taking everything in his stride and scorning insular prejudice. On the next he’s the Briton abroad, complaining about foreigners in a cantankerous, colonial voice. And in each of these caricatures there’s a fundamental truth. His book is a dishevelled jumble of genres; a bricolage of confession and self-parody; an incoherent dialogue between tragedy and burlesque.  

To the connoisseur of fine travelogues it can be baffling and exasperating. To the historian it’s a salutary reminder, postmodern avant la lettre, that no one, and nothing, is always and everywhere. This and not That.