From China to Peru

Russell Fraser

Description

An invitation to tour the globe with a veteran world-wanderer in search of regional peculiarities and universal truths

"I fly to faraway places in the hopes of finding the distinguishing thing. The frequent flier miles are a bonus."

With a title borrowed from Samuel Johnson, insatiable globe-trotter Russell Fraser fondly recalls his travels in China, Peru, Italy, France, Russia, Scotland, the Persian Gulf, and the Antarctic in this series of meditations on the distinguishing elements of culture and history found in far-flung locales. Fraser establishes himself as a knowledgeable guide who combines an intimate familiarity with local history, a keen eye for culture, a companionable wit, and a penchant for speculation about the grip of the past on the present. Fraser's fascination with people leads him to banter and at times to argue with locals in his quest to discern the peculiarities of a given place, be it a communist training school near Milan or the best bar in St. Petersburg. His grand appreciation for discoveries that can be made only through travel is apparent in every poetically phrased description and artfully reconstructed dialogue.

Fraser begins each essay with an autobiographical passage before turning to the place and moment at hand. This technique establishes camaraderie with our learned, informative, and entertaining guide as we walk deserts and frozen plains, Old World neighborhoods and Far Eastern danger zones, the lobbies of plush new hotels and the aisles of centuries-old cathedrals. In his ruminations, Fraser circles strategically between personal and global pasts—traveling in time as well as space—to put our modernity in perspective and to ponder facets of human experience found amid the regions he describes so vividly. The heart of Fraser's memoir is a two-chapter sequence devoted to meandering through his ancestral homeland of Scotland, a narrative that ably couples family history and travelogue. In the concluding essay, the author's adventure in Antarctica parallels a trip taken decades earlier by his great-grandfather Alexander V. Fraser, the first commander of the U.S. Coast Guard, and again he deftly juxtaposes the personal with the global and the past with the present.

As Fraser advocates for the existence and importance of timeless truths about all corners of the world, he makes even the roughest of environments seem intriguingly beautiful with crystal clear prose evocative of the times and places through which he moves. His tales are peppered with the anecdotes, asides, and well-chosen quotations of a traveler steeped in knowledge of the world's history and its literature. A veteran of these escapades, Fraser uses his experience to hone his observations into a special brand of truth that comes from one who is equally adept at wandering the world and sharing authentic accounts of those sensational travels. From China to Peru is a welcoming invitation to traverse the globe, if only through the insightful memories of one well-versed in such passages.

Sujets

• Travelogues
• Essays
• His Woman
• King's shilling
• The Course of Empire
• Giaour
• Travel writing
• Cyane
• Eid al-Adha
• Coriander
• Empress Dowager Cixi
• Borscht
• Mogao Caves
• James Anthony Froude
• Travel
• Georges-Eugène Haussmann
• Pope Julius II
• Demographics of Peru
• Luddite
• Carroccio
• Bortsch
• China
• Savile Row
• Luddisme
• Georges Eugène Haussmann

Informations

• Publié par: University of South Carolina Press
• Date de parution: 23 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 1
• EAN13: 9781611171730
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

FROM CHINA TO PERU
BOOKS BY RUSSELL FRASER
Shakespeare A Life in Art
Moderns Worth Keeping
Singing Masters Poets in English 1500 to the Present
The Three Romes
A Mingled Yarn The Life of R. P. Blackmur
The Language of Adam
The Dark Ages and the Age of Gold
The War against Poetry
An Essential Shakespeare
Shakespeare s Poetics
From China to Peru

Russell Fraser
A MEMOIR OF TRAVEL
2009 University of South Carolina
Cloth edition published by the University of South Carolina Press, 2009 Ebook edition published in Columbia, South Carolina, by the University of South Carolina Press, 2012
www.sc.edu/uscpress
21 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
The Library of Congress has cataloged the cloth edition as follows:
Fraser, Russell A.
From China to Peru : a memoir of travel / Russell Fraser.
p. cm.
ISBN 978-1-57003-825-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
1. Voyages and travels. 2. Fraser, Russell A.-Travel. 3. Travelers writings, American. 4. Scholars-United States-Biography. I. Title.
G226.F73A3 2009
910.4092-dc22
2009004276
ISBN 978-1-61117-173-0 (ebook)
Let observation, with extensive view, Survey mankind from China to Peru.
Samuel Johnson, The Vanity of Human Wishes
CONTENTS
Preface
1. Wadi-Bashing in Arabia Deserta
2. Inca Dinka Doo
3. Little Red Schoolhouse in Italy
4. France s Two Cities
5. The Scotsman s Return from Abroad
6. Over the Sea to Skye
7. Peter at the Crossroads
8. Proserpine s Island
9. Paree Bis
10. China Boy
11. Flying Horses on the Silk Road
12. Antarctic Convergence
PREFACE
This book is personal memoir as well as an account of travel. Each chapter opens with a bit of autobiography, segueing into the travel piece that follows. What I say of myself isn t freestanding but ties one chapter to another, and the essays on travel have more than the unity of what comes next. Taken as a whole, they offer a reading of what we are like, gathered from observation of the world we live in.
In each chapter time moves between present and past. I begin in the present but return to the past, creating a multilayered account of place and history. As in my earlier book The Three Romes , I am writing nonfiction stories. Though they don t have a moral, they have an intention, describing the psychology that moves us. All the fact is true, reflecting firsthand experience, but the experience is filtered through characters, including the speaker. I watch what happens when the characters meet the experience and draw conclusions from the way they react.
The quotation I lead off with, from Dr. Johnson, suggests that observation, as wide-ranging as possible, comes first. But I haven t gone around the world to count the cats in Zanzibar, and I aim to throw a little light on the places I ve traveled to, including their mysterious soul. Seeing the world up close isn t guaranteed to make the heart beat faster. So much humdrum goes with traveling that I ve wondered more than once why I ever left home. To remind me where I ve been, I take notes and keep a record of my itinerary. But a skeptical voice whispers in my ear, wanting to know if the jottings in my notebook and the lines on my map add up to a meaningful pattern. When I sit down to write, this question is before me.
Travel writers for the Sunday paper find a pattern in their daily routine: for example, I breakfasted this morning on the Boul Mich, wrote a few postcards, and took the Metro to the Luxembourg Gardens. I have a garden in my own backyard, and to justify the expense of spirit that goes into traveling, not to mention the out-of-pocket expenses, I want a pattern with more to it than that. But even the daily round has a shape beneath the surface, though detecting it isn t easy. While the frothy stuff on the surface bobs along the stream of time, things of worth sink to the bottom. Thereabouts I take up my position.
I was a lot younger when I began to travel. Things I did then are beyond me today. I no longer aspire to ski the Mont Blanc, and I use a jigger to measure my drinks. I thought it important to see the Antarctic-and don t mind that it s safely in the past tense. But though the face I show the world is craggier than it was, the places I write about are preserved in memory, where neither moth nor rust can get at them. In this respect the written word beats the life every time.
Many friends and acquaintance bore a part in making this book. I single out George Core, without whom nothing would have got done, and the late Staige Blackford, a model editor, always helpful, never obtrusive. Most of the pieces brought together here appeared first in the Virginia Quarterly Review under his editorship. Annie Dillard included one in her Best American Essays 1988 , one comes from the Michigan Quarterly , another from the Iowa Review . My thanks to the editors of these publications. All the pieces I reprint have been revised, but I haven t sought to update them. Khomeini and the cold war were still going strong when I went to the Gulf, and in my time in Peru the Shining Path terrorists were threatening to take over the country. The Saudi Arabia today s papers are full of is and isn t the one I describe. Al-Qaida hadn t yet been heard from, but the enmity between Jew and Arab was already an old story, like their enduring sameness. Instead of keeping abreast of current events, my book aims at detecting what was true yesterday and is likely to remain true tomorrow.
Though it seems to tell of a man traveling alone, in fact I had company, my wife. She was the director on top of the flies who got me going in the morning and saw to it that I was home before dark. When the two of us lived in Rome, we spent a lot of time in Piazza del Popolo, admiring the paintings in its great church. Just outside the piazza an enterprising vendor sold a line of cotton dresses, cheap but stylish, and I bought a dress for Mary, colorful with the onion domes of Moscow s Red Square. That dress wore out ages ago, and I wish I could replace it with a brand-new one. Failing that, this book is for her.
1
Wadi-Bashing in Arabia Deserta
Straight out of graduate school and glad to have it behind me, I did what Horace Greeley told us to. I went west. But the flowers in California, though the biggest I d seen and gorgeous to look at, didn t smell. My teaching job at UCLA had strings attached. I d been at it only a few months when I was asked to sign a loyalty oath. Asked puts it politely, and before Christmas I found myself out of a job.
My colleagues were my friends, nice people you could count on. They cared about the environment, supported our schools, and belonged to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. All signed the oath, except one rancorous conservative who was damned if he d do what they told him. Most of my students came from Central Casting, blond young women with ponytails and golden skin, young men who smiled easily and had sun-bleached eyes and a great backhand. In some, what you saw was what you got. The best-looking coed in the class turned out to be the smartest, though, also a friend. When I got fired she went to her accountant uncle, who worked for the ILWU, the longshoremen. Jobs on the waterfront aren t easy to come by, but he wangled me a ticket, entitling me to shape up.
Every day at dawn I drove my ancient Dodge from my apartment in Venice around the coast to San Pedro, one of LA s three seaports. Standing on a chair in the hiring hall, the dispatch-accent on the first syllable-shaped us up. Men with seniority got the day s first assignments, posted to work warehouses alongshore. Those with know-how were dispatched to load and unload cargo in the holds of oceangoing ships. For men with a strong back, there seemed nothing to it. Appearances deceive, though, and unless cargo is stowed properly it will shift in rough seas, sometimes battering its way through the hull. At the bottom of the totem pole, I waited for my name to be called. If it wasn t I got back in the car and drove home.
Longshoremen come from every stratum of society, and generalizing about them is next to impossible. One thing I can say for sure, though, they weren t always what they looked like. Some were big-bellied brutes who drank too much and cheated on their wives. Some were disbarred lawyers and ex-doctors, and one I knew had a pianist s long tapering fingers. Some of the big bellies were nature s noblemen. I was glad to call them my friends.
But I didn t like California- it s cold and it s damp. Go east, young man, I said to myself when spring came round again and the flowers didn t smell. East meant East of Suez, however. The cold war was going strong then, and it boosted me into a job. My new employer, the U.S. Information Service, promoted America to the rest of the world. I was to serve as a conduit. In a world that made sense, they would never have hired me. But the government, then as now, couldn t tell its right hand from its left.
The locale they sent me to, one of date palms and desert, was different from any I d known. Especially the people, not like my next-door neighbors in West Wood. Some, squint-eyed and scrofulous from malnutrition or a disease I d never heard of, looked like rascals; others, movie-star heroic, would steal the last crust from their mother. My USIS host, a romantic expat, made no distinction among them. People the world over had in common their natural goodness, he said, and were much the same under the skin. Arabs were our brothers, cleansed by their alfresco life in the desert. Over the years I ve thought about this man, wondering if he got out in one piece.

For successful wadi-bashing, you need fo