{"id":93311,"date":"2016-01-08T11:42:03","date_gmt":"2016-01-08T16:42:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=93311"},"modified":"2016-01-08T11:42:03","modified_gmt":"2016-01-08T16:42:03","slug":"the-countries-we-think-we-see","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2016\/01\/08\/the-countries-we-think-we-see\/","title":{"rendered":"The Countries We Think We See"},"content":{"rendered":"

For Lesley Blanch, travel writing\u00a0offered a chance to explore her preconceptions about a place as much as the place itself.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"1444223329-1444165207-lesley-blanch-1930s\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Every travel writer is a character in her own narrative, no less a part of the story than the \u201cforeigners\u201d that story depicts. In my own travels, I\u2019ve found that women in countries that discourage mixed-gender interactions often speak to me more openly about culturally illuminating subjects\u2014sex, love, motherhood\u2014than they might to a male writer. My femaleness, it seemed, wasn\u2019t simply a question of perspective; it was a question of action.<\/p>\n

When I raised this subject in a lecture last year, someone in the audience broke in with a question. Why did I feel the need to \u201cinsert\u201d myself into my narratives at all? She brought up the travel writer Colin Thubron, whom she cited as the paradigmatic example of the quiet, objective observer. \u201cHe doesn\u2019t insert himself into his writing at all!\u201d she exclaimed. <\/p>\n

Except, of course, he does. What we call \u201cobjectivity\u201d in Thubron\u2014powerful and affecting though his works are\u2014is what we recognize as normative: whether he\u2019s writing from Siberia or Syria, and whether that narrative I <\/em>has a prominent role in his prose, his work is no less grounded in his gender, his class, his Western-ness, than mine. Indeed, I once discussed this with the man himself\u2014telling him about the sheer self-consciousness that comes with being a woman in a traditionally male public space. He considered this for a while. \u201cOf course, I went to Eton,\u201d was his dry response. \u201cIt wouldn\u2019t occur to me to feel out of place anywhere.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet for the female traveler\u2014the female travel writer <\/em>most of all\u2014the question of bodily rootedness, of subjectivity, feels <\/em>more paramount. In a searching piece last year for the\u00a0Boston Review <\/em>playfully titled \u201cHow Not to Be Elizabeth Gilbert<\/a>,\u201d Jessa Crispin writes about the fine line female travel writers must walk. We push back against the seeming disengagement of what she calls the \u201ciconic travel writer\u201d\u2014Richard Francis Burton, Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux\u2014\u201can essentially masculine force, driven by the need to conquer, to experience life at its extremes, but most of all to explain,\u201d who \u201cnot only goes off to see what he can see but also becomes a kind of expert witness who explains the natives to interested parties at home.\u201d We find ourselves pulled into what Crispin sees as a narrative overcorrection: the idea that we are \u201cexperts only on [our] own selves.\u201d<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

At first glance, few writers embody this intense solipsism like Lesley Blanch (1904\u20132007): travel writer, novelist, painter, Vogue <\/em>editor, socialite, and unashamed orientalist. Blanch\u2019s writing\u2014be it travel narrative, history or biography\u2014was always a form of autobiography. And the women she profiled in her most famous work, 1954\u2019s The Wilder Shores of Love<\/em>, were Westerners who found themselves drawn to a lushly, if vaguely, drawn East; they always had something of the self-portrait in them.<\/p>\n

But Blanch\u2019s brilliance lies in her honesty about the subjectivity of her work. For her, travel carries none of Crispin\u2019s \u201cmasculine force\u201d: it\u2019s neither an act of discovery nor an explication by an \u201cexpert witness,\u201d but the endless attempt to bridge that vast land of otherness with the worlds we\u2019ve created in our own minds, the interior place where our experiences, from the books we\u2019ve read to the people we\u2019ve loved, came to reside long before we first set foot there.<\/p>\n

\"15254409095\"<\/a>Thus Blanch\u2019s 1958 memoir,\u00a0Journey into the Mind\u2019s Eye, <\/em>a love story devoted in equal parts to Russia and to the idea of Russia, as personified by the unnamed Traveler, a family friend of Russian extraction who is in turn Blanch\u2019s mentor, lover, and muse. The Russia Blanch falls for is a half-imagined place. It\u2019s rooted in memories of her Edwardian childhood nursery, where, in thrall to the Traveler\u2019s bedtime stories, a young Blanch pleads with her nanny to allow her to attach a sheep\u2019s stomach, in the manner of Genghis Khan\u2019s armies, to her tricycle. Later, on a Dijon night train, the seventeen-year-old Blanch and her forty-something Traveler at last consummate their romance while playing the \u201cRun-Away Game.\u201d They imagine Russia\u2014his past, her dreamed-for future\u2014all around them.<\/p>\n

Does Blanch love Russia because it is the Traveler\u2019s, or does she love the Traveler because of the Russia he represents? (The question is muddied further by the liberties Blanch seems to have taken with the Traveler\u2019s role in her life\u2014no frequent nursery visitor is known to have existed.) Russia is, for much of her narrative, both an unvisited place and a beloved memory. \u201cGradually,\u201d she writes, \u201cI became possessed by love of a horizon and a train which would take me there; of a fabled engine and an imagined landscape, seen through a pair of narrowed eyes set slant-wise in a yellow Mongol face.\u201d She loves what the idea of Russia evokes in her: a sense of otherness, a sense of exoticism (that so often in Blanche does spill over into the outright orientalist), a love for one man who in turn represents the wideness of the whole world beyond a London nursery\u2019s walls. She conjures the Traveler\u2019s homeland through his trinkets\u2014\u201ca chunk of malachite \u2026 a Kazazh fox-skin cap (which smelled rather rank), and once, a bunchuk, or standard, decorated with the dangling horsetails of a Mongol chieftain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Most of all, she finds Russia in and on his person:<\/p>\n

\n

With a turn of the shoulder, a movement of his hands\u2014the supple hands of a magician\u2014he could conjure up the gliding grace of the Lezghinka, evoking the Georgian noblewomen as they advanced or retreated, promising, denying, each step a stately ritual. Or, with another change of pace, or magic, crashing his foot down with that fury only Slavs and Spaniards know, he would summon up the dark fur-capped warriors of Elbruz leaping across steel in the dagger dance, or performing other strange, almost imperceptible steps, vibrations of passion.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

Throughout all this, Blanch does not pretend that her Russia is more than a fantasy. By the time she finally visits the country\u2014years after the Traveler, during their impetuous engagement, has abruptly performed a midcentury version of ghosting\u2014she\u2019s keenly aware that the Russia she sees both is and is not the country she has longed for. \u201cIn the shadow of Elbruz,\u201d Blanch writes, \u201cI was to watch these same fiery dances, the Dance of the Eagles or of the Partisans, and knew that I was seeing them for the second time; for their reality was in no way sharper, more true, than his sorcery.\u201d Only when she embarks on the last of the many journeys they\u2019d planned together\u2014the Trans-Siberian Express, with love letters replaced by Soviet visas and the Traveler\u2019s revenant swapped for an exasperated Intourist guide\u2014does Blanch at last experience a Russia that is not colored by her unlived memory of it.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

One might dismiss Blanch as a hack travel writer, a solipsist of the sort Crispin had criticized. But Blanch\u2019s self-awareness shields her from some of these reproaches. She knows full well that she\u2019s in thrall to the exotic\u2014but her ardor for \u201cforeignness,\u201d she writes, is no different from, say, that of the Russian aristocrat Marie Bashkirtseff, who, \u201cbeing Russian, saw romance in Anglo-Saxon terms, and invoked Heaven for an English nobleman.\u201d\u00a0This is\u00a0at the heart of what it means to travel: a wanderlust for something wildly outside oneself.<\/p>\n

Blanch can\u2019t be\u00a0too\u00a0different, then, from the acknowledged master of twentieth-century travel writing, perhaps the ultimate \u201cmasculine\u201d travel writer, Patrick Leigh Fermor. His A Time of Gifts<\/em> casts his fascination with the Europe of the thirties in no less subjective, if far less self-conscious, terms. \u201cImaginary interiors!\u201d he writes, perfectly unsurprised to find that the Holland through which he is traveling exactly resembles the Brueghels he\u2019d grown accustomed to seeing on weekends in friends\u2019 country estates:<\/p>\n

\n

A three-dimensional Holland had been springing up all round me and expanding into the distance in conformity with another Holland which was already in existence and in every detail complete \u2026 So compelling is the identity of picture and reality that all along my path numberless dawdling afternoons in museums were being summoned back to life and set in motion. Every pace confirmed them. Each scene conjured up its echo. The masts and quays and gables of a river port, the backyard with a besom leaning against a brick wall, the checquer-board floors of churches\u2014there they all were, the entire range of Dutch themes, ending in taverns where I expected to find boors carousing and found them, and in every case, like magic, the painter\u2019s name would simultaneously impinge.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

For Fermor, no less than Blanch, what he sees \u201cconfirms\u201d what his imagination expects to find. He, too, is playing a version of Blanch\u2019s Run-Away Game. Just as Blanch and the Traveler create a half-fictitious Russia to overlay their Parisian affair\u2014\u201cShall we take a boat down the Volga? Shall we go and dine in one of the little Armenian restaurants overlooking the river, in Tiflis? \u2026 Let\u2019s pretend the Black Sea is out there (it can be terribly rough) and those lights bobbing about are the boats of Tartar fishermen\u201d\u2014Fermor composes a Holland of all the things he\u2019s loved, Brueghel boors and checkboard churches.<\/p>\n

For Fermor, for Blanch, for all of us who travel, there are always two cities: the one we see in front of us, take notes on, and file copy for, and the one that exists in our mind\u2019s eye, populated with childhood associations and memories of lost love, paved with streets whose names we whispered to ourselves as children. If Blanch\u2019s Journey <\/em>isn\u2019t a traditional travelogue, it\u2019s not because she can\u2019t write about the Russia in front of her. It\u2019s because that Russia, like any city, can never be the only one she sees.<\/p>\n

Tara Isabella Burton\u2019s work has appeared in<\/em> National Geographic Traveler,<\/em> Al Jazeera America, the <\/em>BBC, <\/em>The\u00a0<\/em>Atlantic, and more. She is working on a doctorate in theology and literature at Trinity College, Oxford, and has recently completed a novel.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For Lesley Blanch, travel writing\u00a0offered a chance to explore her preconceptions about a place as much as the place itself. Every travel writer is a character in her own narrative, no less a part of the story than the \u201cforeigners\u201d that story depicts. In my own travels, I\u2019ve found that women in countries that discourage […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":650,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[489],"tags":[20715,17,10045,20710,3934,1102,399,20712,20711,20714,20709,950,2394,447,20713,1296,123,5143,36],"class_list":["post-93311","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books-2","tag-a-time-of-gifts","tag-books","tag-bruce-chatwin","tag-colin-thubron","tag-elizabeth-gilbert","tag-feminism","tag-holland","tag-how-not-to-be-elizabeth-gilbert","tag-jessica-crispin","tag-journey-into-the-minds-eye","tag-lesley-blanch","tag-patrick-leigh-fermor","tag-paul-theroux","tag-russia","tag-the-wilder-shores-of-love","tag-trains","tag-travel","tag-travel-writing","tag-women"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn Lesley Blanch and Women Travel Writers<\/title>\n<meta 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