IT IS 7 A.M. AND I HAVE JUST ARISEN, two hours later than usual. My wife and eleven-year-old granddaughter are still asleep in the second of this two-bedroom condominium we have rented on Sanibel Island, Florida, which also contains two bathrooms and three television sets, all with VCRs. I open a light drape, slide back a glass door, and step out onto a screened-in balcony. The view is of palm trees, shrubs trimmed to a topiary nicety, a swimming pool filled with warmish, turquoise-colored water. Beyond are more palm trees, and beyond that, at perhaps two hundred yards distance, teal-colored at this early hour, is the gentle Gulf of Mexico. Walking along its white-sanded, shell-laden beaches yesterday I saw dolphins frolicking fewer than twenty yards from shore. The temperature has been in the eighties, sunny, with occasional breezes. I sigh and wish I were elsewhere. “Have lotsa fun,” says an older man, white-haired, tall, deeply tanned, as he loads the groceries in the back of my rented Nissan Altima. “Gilligan’s,” a sign on Sanibel’s Periwinkle Way reads, “A fun place to eat”; I make a mental note never to stop there. The only thing worse than “a fun place to eat,” in my view, are those places that advertise “Family Fun,” two words that, lashed together, automatically force my foot down heavier on the accelerator. I am no fun guy and have, perhaps you are coming to gather, a fun problem. More than a simple antipathy to what my countrymen have decided is fun is entailed. My problem runs deeper. I have—as I have only recently grasped—almost no vocation for vacation, and, to make matters worse, I am losing my taste for travel. In the morning hours, before the heat comes up, people on Sanibel are bicycling, rollerblading, smashing tennis balls, whacking away at golf balls, jogging, walking with grim looks of determination on their faces. I myself arrived in Sanibel with no golf sticks, skates, or tennis rackets with sweet spots twice the size of my fairly large head. Nor do I find any pleasure in card games, crossword puzzles, detective novels. For a week’s stay I brought four books with me: Balzac’s Cousin Pons, The Collected Stories of J.F. Powers, A Short Life of Kierkegaard by Walter Lowrie, and Auden by Richard Davenport-Hines. I alternate among the four, read none completely through, and instead spend a lot of my time making astonishingly small and dreary observations, most of them about myself: for example, how my very white legs, under water, look rather corpse-like. What merriment! Before going off to Florida, I discovered that I owned no shorts. I bought two pair: one of khaki at the Gap, the other, of a lightweight gray, at Foot Locker. I packed a Chinese red, beaked cap and several solid-colored polo shirts and a pair of “Rod Laver” tennis shoes from Adidas. Such comprise my “fun” clothes. Packing them I was reminded of the generations of American men who owned no clothes whatsoever for leisure. I remember my father walking down to the beach behind our apartment on Sheridan Road in Chicago wearing one of his ribbed underwear shirts, dark blue bathing trunks, black wingtips, and silk socks with arrows on them over legs the exact whiteness of mine today. Alfred Kazin described Edmund Wilson, at the beach at Wellfleet, arriving in stained Panama hat, cane, and long white shirt (of the kind Brooks Bros. used to sell), “sometimes flopping over the bulky stomach in Bermuda shorts.” This was his get-up—what you saw was what you got. There wasn’t one Edmund Wilson for work and another Edmund Wilson for play. Why do I find that so appealing? If you’ve developed a strong character, why dissipate it in games and goofy costumes: The idea of, say, Henry Kissinger on a golf course, or Colin Powell and Dick Cheney playing badminton feels plain wrong, does it not? This past summer I was invited to sit for three days in a hotel conference room in Big Sky, Montana, where I rattled away with ten or eleven other people on the subject of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. I accepted the invitation because I love that magnificent book, and love quite as much that extraordinary, ironic little pudge who sat in his study in Lausanne chuckling away, as I like to think of him, while writing it. Montana, which I had not before seen, was part of what persuaded me to accept the invitation. I planned to travel west from there, to drive through Oregon, Washington, and parts of British Columbia, none of which I had seen before. On that holiday, only Gibbon did not disappoint. Montana and the Northwest provided, as advertised, spectacular scenery: staggeringly dramatic mountains, lush redwoods, dense rain forests suggesting the prehistoric. A turn in the road and, lo!, an azure lake, encircled by gigantic conifers. Such trees were everywhere, causing me, at the wheel, to sing: You’re non-deciduous now, so what’re you gonna do? Yet the whole thing, I found, was a bit much: a much of a muchness, as the English say. Nature in the Northwest was relentless. A beautiful scene, I decided, pleases but does not excite me. Seeing them in such abundance, one after another, it occurred to me for the first time in my life that perhaps nature was overrated. I began to feel about nature as Groucho, when confronted by the contestant on his quiz show who mentioned that she had some improbably large number of children, said he felt about his cigar: It gave him pleasure, he said, but he didn’t want it in his mouth all the time. Few things are more pleasing than to find what one thinks one’s idiosyncratic views corroborated by someone whose mind one much admires. “The country here is dotted with the houses of second-rate writers and painters,” writes W.H. Auden of Taos, New Mexico. “It’s curious how beautiful scenery seems to attract the second rate. For me, I like it for a holiday, but I’d rather die than live permanently in a beauty spot, at least till I’m much older.” I am much older than Auden then was, and it still doesn’t do it for me. I was only a week on Sanibel. I chartered a boat to take my granddaughter fishing—a great success; I sat out at the pool reading about poor Kierkegaard’s troubles, which were manifold; I walked the beaches, looking for exotic shells and picking up snatches of mundane conversation: “It’s a junk bond, what’d he expect?”; “…her sophomore year at Tufts”; “…they’re crazy to give Bobby Knight a job.” I pass a tallish man, the very type of a CEO, in an orange bathing suit, himself walking the beach, saying into his cell phone: “That’s no problem. Refer it to Jim.” The weather was perfect, untoppable. By the third day out I longed to be back at my desk. “I do not know what I am looking for abroad,” wrote Montaigne in Italy, “but I know well enough what I am escaping at home.” Might it be that I like home too much and seek no escape from it? Everything there is near at hand, order reigns, all is familiar, nothing unpredictable. But might this, instead, be a sign of a hardening not of the arteries but of the imagination and spirit? This last is a hypothesis that, like the late Duke and Duchess of Windsor, must be entertained. I have never been one of those for whom freedom has meant a hasty departure for foreign lands. All my foreign travel has been conventional, the most exotic being a few days in Turkey as part of a Swann’s cruise of the Greek Islands. I find I do not long for travel outside Europe. Travel in the Third World holds few enticements for me. I have made a mental note to visit India and Pakistan as soon as England once again makes those countries part of its empire, which is scheduled to take place, I understand, roughly two weeks after hell freezes over. I find myself in the condition of Philip Larkin, who, its being known that he left England only twice in his lifetime, was asked by an interviewer if he wouldn’t like to see China. “Yes, of course,” Larkin replied, “if I could return home that night.” I have a friend, older than I, who has probably spent more time in Katmandu than I have spent in Manhattan. He is always off, aloft, driving a Land Rover over rocky ground, high upon a Himalaya, or mounted on a French bicycle the mere sight of which is almost enough to make me want to consult a proctologist. He is pedaling away in Greece even as I tap out these lines. None of this is my idea of a good time. Have I become a dull boy? Or was I, possibly, always a dull boy? My leading subject for anxiety dreams for some years now has been travel. In these dreams, decisive things are always going wrong. I show up at the airport without my tickets, or money, or wallet, or passport, or suitcase, or—in one notable instance—shoes; in the heavy traffic of people, I lose my wife, granddaughter, cat (though why I am traveling with a cat is quite unclear). I am late, the gates are closing, people I love are inside the plane, taking off without me. Where am I going, anyway? (Non-sequiturial Africa, perhaps?) And why? Why, moreover, do I have such dreams when I have had very little serious difficulty in my years of flying? I was once forced to spend a night in a motel near LaGuardia owing to bad weather in Chicago; another time a plane out of Oakland skittered badly on the runway before takeoff, and had to return to the hangar; and we, the passengers, were put up for the night and flown out first-class the next day. Those incidents aside, flying has gone smoothly enough for me. Sometimes, true enough, flying, which should always be an astonishment, has come to seem a punishment, at least if one is flying economy or coach, which I almost always do. (So, recently, I read, has the King of Norway, on a flight between Oslo and Mallorca, earning him the title, in the headline of an Oslo daily, “The King of Tourist Class.” I wonder if he sat aisle, window, or got stuck with the middle seat.) I envy the first-class passengers chiefly the width of their chairs. But the people who sit in first-class seats do not otherwise appear to be very first class; they seem to be mainly salesmen and middle-managers with vast quantities of airline “miles” and rather too wealthy ninnies willing to pay an extra five hundred to two thousand dollars to avoid the rabble (which is to say, me). Nothing further can, nor need, ever be said about airline food. But something about the combination of close quarters, bad food, largish bags stuffed into smallish overhead compartments, and the rest of it has encouraged a phenomenon that has now been given the name “air rage,” in which while aloft one somehow flips, goes bonkers, makes specific threats, causing airport police to take one in custody upon arrival. I do not much mind air travel. I enjoy the tumult of O’Hare, Heathrow, LAX. A luftmensch to begin with, I read well in the air; I used to fly with a copy of Pascal’s Pensees, which never seemed more pellucid than at 30,000 feet. Sometimes I watch bits of the movie without the aid of earphones, I nap, write in my journal. It is only upon arrival that I begin to grow edgy. The jolt of dislocation that a new country presents has begun to throw me more and more off balance. There is the language and currency to get used to, of course, but in recent years I have become, while abroad, a poor sleeper. In Florence I spent night after night twisting in the sheets while listening to the Vespa scooters roar under our window on the street outside our hotel near the Duomo. Insomnia and jet lag make a dreary cocktail. Might it be that I am no longer capable of travel fantasies? I have never been abroad alone, and have no yearning to be so now. But the chief travel fantasies have to do with meeting elegantly accented and extraordinarily beautiful partners on trains, in cafes, in the corridors of posh hotels. Hazlitt, who didn’t do all that much travel, captured the fantasy nicely when he wrote that “the soul of a journey is liberty, perfect liberty to think, feel, do just as one pleases.” Graham Greene-ish, really—but these fantasies are more proper to a young person; beyond the age of, say, fifty, they become the fantasy of that fool like whom we are told there is no other, the old fool. The travel writings of V.S. Naipaul or Paul Theroux tend to have a reverse, or anti-aphrodisiacal effect. How nice, I think as I read the complaining accounts of their travel, that they have gone to Indonesia—now I don’t have to do so myself. “An effect of traveling in distant places,” wrote Auden, who did a fair amount of it in the 1930s (his itinerary included Iceland, China, and Spain during the Civil War), “is to make one reflect on one’s past and one’s culture from the outside.” True, but perhaps less true than it once was. Less true certainly if one is an American and the indigenes in the country you are visiting are wearing, say, Michael Jordan tanktops and Reebok gym shoes. As like as not, these same indigenes will be going about in American jeans. Israeli academics, fearful of intellectual isolation, are encouraged to travel, and of course the place they chiefly travel to is America. After two centuries of suffering cultural inferiority to Europe, America, for better and worse, is where the action now is. Europeans come to us. Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden’s biographer, remarks that, as of the 1930s, “he deliberately unsettled himself, and until the final years of his life was always a traveler or voluntary exile, spurred by the intellectual masochist’s need of the neurosis of estrangement.” Hope everyone picked up those words masochist and neurosis and estrangement, for travel has increasingly come to require a certain portion of all three. Auden suffered under the belief that “exile and isolation had creative uses.” They may have, for him—but not for everyone. I prefer the view of Ravel, who said that he obtained more, aesthetically, from an hour of joy than from a long stretch of suffering. Still, the party line has long been that travel is good for the soul—so broadening, so widening—and for no souls is it better than for those of artists. Goethe acquired substantial intellectual dividends from his trip to Italy. Byron was a great traveler and always went absolutely first class, taking along his own horses and a considerable library. Keats, on a much smaller budget, longed to travel and was only able to do so when at the door of death. “I am a poet,” announced Kierkegaard, “I must travel.” But he seems to have gone only to Berlin. “Would Italy have cured his melancholy,” asks his biographer Walter Lowrie, “and perhaps quenched his peculiar talent?” Useful to recall that the Königsburg Flash, Immanuel Kant, discovered the categorical imperative without ever leaving town. “In order to understand one’s own country,” said Somerset Maugham, “one should live in at least two others.” Here I would underscore the word live. I have never actually lived in a European country, by which I mean settled in one place for four or five months or more. The closest I’ve come is a few years ago, when friends lent us their comfortable house in the village of Laconnex, twenty minutes outside Geneva. This took us out of the hotel-restaurant flow of foreign travel—although during the better part of the days, apart from shopping for food, we remained tourists: listening to lectures at Madame de Staël’s charming house at Coppet, museum-going, shopping, and the rest of it. But it’s one thing to live in a country, another to visit it. The visiting, I contend, is wherein the pain resides. Consider, to begin with, the people whom Henry James, prescient fellow, more than a century ago referred to as “one’s detested fellow pilgrims.” A problem with foreign travel, if I may say so, is that one finds the great centers are infested by so many people like oneself. Often they are older and rather wealthier than oneself, though lacking, it goes without saying, one’s intrinsic charms. But they are there for the same things one came for: as yet unseen works of art, fresh landscapes, different food. They remind me in some ways of my father, who traveled scarcely at all, and then, upon retirement, set out to see the world and did a fairly impressive job of it. Up to that point an armchair traveler, seeing the world through PBS documentaries, he embarked in earnest at seventy-five to see it in the flesh. He first went to Israel. Africa south of the Sahara was next. He toured Norway and Denmark and Sweden. He visited Thailand, Hong Kong, and stuck a toe in China. He visited the Soviet Union and saw it again when it was once more Mother Russia. He went to Ecuador and Peru. He traveled to India under the auspices of—believe it or not—the B’nai B’rith. Seeing Alaska and the Panama Canal and much of the Caribbean by ship, he did more cruising than Captain Ahab and Christopher Isherwood combined. His wife, my mother, though a highly intelligent woman, had almost no geographical curiosity. She had long before arrived at where I seem to be tending. She went with her husband to Israel, and together they flew to Paris on the Concorde, returning from London on the QE2. On many of his trips he took his still young grandsons, though on some he went alone. My father took almost no photographs and said very little about these trips on his return. What the motive behind all this expensive travel was remained unclear; I saw him mentally ticking off each continent and country he visited, as if it were his goal to see as much of this planet as possible before departing it. His need—make that his compulsion—for travel approached mania; he seemed only genuinely happy when getting ready to set off on yet another journey. And when, in his ninetieth year, he became too ill to set forth again, something in him died. “See this world before the next” was one of his standard joke lines. Now that he is in the next I hope he is seated in first class. I’m not sure what my father got out of all his travel. But then I’m no longer sure what anyone does. I suppose those who are committed to traveling feel a need to fill in the blank spots: to see those wonderful Velázquezes at the Prado, those charming Lorenzettis in Sienna, those magnificent lion statues at Delos, taste that fantastic risotto in Ravenna. But the crowds—Germans, Japanese, Americanos, detested fellow pilgrims all—make it less than easy. “I hereby sentence you,” runs a standard judge-and-defendant cartoon in a recent New Yorker, “to the Vermeer show on a Saturday afternoon.” Not funny, McGee. Not if you have, as I have, woke in the Jan Luyken Hotel in Amsterdam at 4 A.M. to drive to The Hague to stand in line in the cold drizzle of a Dutch morning to get tickets to see twenty-six paintings by Vermeer as part of a crowd that was even more wall-to-wall than the carpeting. One of the problems with the world, I begin to discover, is that there are too many people in it just like me. “No hidin’ place down here,” the old gospel song has it, and it’s beginning to seem so in connection with travel. One must be both rich and clever to find what Henry James called “The Great Good Place.” In the late 1940s, W.H. Auden bought a home on Ischia, an island in the Bay of Naples, and thought he had found it. But ten years later too many Englishmen arrived to spend their holidays, and so he moved on to buy another in the bleaker landscape of Kirchstetten, near Vienna. Elizabeth Bishop thought she had found her great good place in Key West, Florida. Soon enough something similar had happened to her: Too many second-class poets and critics showed up, and so she moved on to Brazil where she lived with her friend Lota de Macedo Soares. But in Ischia and in Key West, Auden and Bishop were really the advance guard of the despoilers: their presence helping to make their retreats fashionable. I have not been in either Ischia or Key West, but I have been in Mystic, Connecticut, and Santa Fe, New Mexico, and neither seems anything close to the great good place to me. Great good places are declared with some regularity—Aspen, Colorado; Jackson Hole, Wyoming; Big Sky, Montana—but as soon as they are so declared they cease to be either great or good but just places where people keen on the fashionable like to squat. The artists arrive first, then the wealthy, then the tourists; imprinted T-shirts and baseball caps follow. (Life is not easy for me, being a snob and a reverse snob simultaneously.) While I stood in the great church of St. Mark’s in Venice, all I could think of was what a vast clutter all this significance made. Walking through the Old City in Jerusalem, I kept an eye peeled for the serious shenanigans of the PLO. The site of Troy, now in Turkey, left me disappointed. Malcolm Muggeridge once wrote that he thought about God all the time, except when in an Anglican church. Parts of Greece and Flanders Field in Belgium excepted, I fear I am in something of the same condition with regard to visiting the great historical and religious sites. “I am not one of those who go to Venice to experience an emotion,” wrote Jules Renard in his journal. I take his—and he makes my—point. People such as Renard and I, who live mostly in our minds, don’t require travel as an expensive lubricant for the imagination. If anything, some of us do better without travel. I think of Wallace Stevens, that most cosmopolitan of poets, who never went to Europe, but wrote letters to Mademoiselle Paule Vidal, his art dealer in Paris, asking her to acquire paintings for him with an amusing unspecificity of detail combined with strong general advice: “I should definitely like you to buy one of the paintings of René Renaud….Whether to buy a Morning or an Evening, a Bay or a Port, I must leave to you, merely reminding you that I like things light and not dark, cheerful and not gloomy, and that above everything else I prefer something real but saturated with the feeling and imagination of the artist.” Why Stevens never went to Europe is something of a mystery—lots of talk about having to stay home owing to Mrs. Stevens’s dahlias—but it’s far from clear that the Europe of his imagining wasn’t much more vivid than any actual Europe could have been. The great century of travel for Americans was the nineteenth. You had to have money, though it could apparently be done without scads of it. In the nineteenth century Europe was more open, less tumultuous, everyone wasn’t rushing about as if waiting for the twenty-four-second shot-clock to go off. With the exceptions only of Thoreau, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson, all the important American writers traveled abroad. Some went farther than others: Charles Eliot Norton, looking after his family’s shipping interests, spent more than a year in India. Most Americans traveled to widen their culture among the monuments of Europe and the (presumably) more refined manners of the English, French, and Italian superior classes. “It is for want of self-culture that the superstition of traveling…retains its fascination for all educated Americans,” wrote Emerson, whose best book, English Traits, came out of his stay in England. But no American got more—aesthetically, morally, spiritually—out of his travels than Henry James, who at various times referred to himself as “the passionate pilgrim,” “the visionary traveler,” and “the sentimental tourist.” Born in 1843 to a traveling family, James first went abroad at the age of six months and, in later years, claimed to have a memory even from that age “of the admirable aspect of the Place and Colonne Vendôme.” The Jameses returned to Europe when Henry was twelve and again when he was seventeen; and they did not, you may be sure, go on the fourteen-day whirlwind tour but stayed for two or three years each time. In 1869, at the age of twenty-six, Henry James took up permanent residence there. The international subject—of Americans in Europe, but also of Europeans in America—was one of the chief benefits of Henry James’s travel experience. He had of course internationalized himself as no other American. T.S. Eliot said that James had turned himself into “a European but of no known country.” Europe was, for James, as he himself put it, “ever so many things at once, not only beauty and art and supreme design, but history and fame and power, the world in fine raised to the richest and noblest expression.” He spoke the most perfect French, but finally never quite, as he might say, “appropriated and took possession” of that country. He loved Italy above all European countries, and two of his greatest novels, The Portrait of a Lady and The Wings of the Dove, owe much of their power to their tapestried Italian settings. A character touring Italy in one of his stories, upon remarking regretfully about not being Catholic to another character, says, “What a different thing this visiting of churches would be for us, if we occasionally felt the prompting to fall to our knees.” But it was in England that Henry James settled, and of England that in his journal he wrote: “J’y suis absolument comme chez moi.” In the same journal entry, after cataloging all that is wretched about London—”the fogs, the smoke, the dirt, the darkness, the wet, the distances, the ugliness, the brutal size of the place, the horrible numerosity of society, the sense in which all this senseless bigness is fatal to amenity”—he ends by concluding that for him “London is on the whole the most possible form of life.” In 1915, with England at war, the year before his death, as a sign of his deep spiritual allegiance to the country, he became an English citizen. Yet, for all Henry James’s cosmopolitanism, when he came to write his story “The Great Good Place,” that place, though never pinned down geographically turned out to be not “that happy land—far, far away,” but “in the beloved British Islands and so near as we are to Bradford.” The place turns out to be great and good because in it “The Great Want [is] Met.” The great want is for liberty, tranquility, comfort, simplification. The burden of success may be set down there, and also the weight of failure. It is likened to a retreat, but with the exercises of piety subtracted. Taste everywhere is perfect; servants, though always inconspicuous, are omnicompetent; it is also likened to a club, but without any newspapers or bores about. One’s fellow guests are all exquisitely simpatico. It extracted all the things in modern life it “was such rapture to be without.” The Great Good Place replenishes the inner life, and contains so many of the Jamesian grace notes: “the cool plash [of the fountain] in the stillness,” “the broad cloister of peace or some garden-nook where the air was light, a special glimpse of beauty or reminder of felicity seemed, in passing to hover and linger.” It is a place where the hero of the story “could read and write; there, above all, he could do nothing—he could live.” You will not be shocked, I suspect, to learn that the place, great and good though it is so designated, doesn’t exist, either in life or even in the story itself. The Great Good Place is the dream of the story’s greatly overworked hero, who feels himself at the outset weighted down and all but plowed under by the trivialities of existence at the level of success, when one is most vulnerable to losing one’s sense of life’s point and purpose. I have given up on discovering any Great Good Place for me. I am fairly convinced that, should I find anything resembling such a place, I am likely to ask if there is a fax machine nearby and worry about my phone calls, mail, and e-mail. I am a man who always thought he desired serenity but (to apply some roller-coaster-like prepositions here) when you come right down to it, I am not really up to it. Tourism is said to be a condition of moral rest, but I have never quite found it so. Tourism chiefly makes me edgy, morally uncomfortable. Might it be that the loss of a taste for travel is the price paid by people who love their work too much? I begin to see that, for me, such serenity as is available won’t come with a background of blue water and palm trees, mountains shimmering majestically in the distance. It probably won’t come at all. Anywhere you go, an old saying has it, there you are. And here I am. With so many miles on me already, I am terribly late in making this discovery. Joseph Epstein is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard.
