Childe Harold by Lord Byron

I finished a novel recently. In Eileen McHugh, a life remade, I created a character called Alice, an art teacher close to retirement, as the principal character’s sculpture teacher during her first year as an art student. The structure of the book demanded that the story, set in the 1970s, should be told by contemporary survivors from today’s perspective. Alice would not have lived until now, so I passed the responsibility of her character to her son, a physics professor in a university in the north of England. I had already decided on the surname of the artistic household in which the son grew up. It was, by chance, Childe. These two artist parents, one three-dimensional, the other two, would certainly have chosen a one-dimensional name for their son, so I called him Harold, Harold Childe. It was a joke.

Then, a few days later, I heard a performance of Harold in Italy, the viola concerto in all but name by Berlioz. Somewhere in this drug-fuelled Romanticism there was an account, or perhaps the mere reflection, on Byron‘s Childe Harold’s travels through Italy. It occurred to me that I should re-read the poem. I read it first when I was the age that my character, Eileen McHugh, was in her art college and high most of the time. I could now remember next to nothing about it, despite myself never having ever got far off the ground.

It’s an heroic poem by the also drug-fuelled Lord Byron, written in nine lines stanzas, eight pentameters followed by the terminating Alexandrine. It rhymes ABABBCBCB, meaning that five lines in every stanza rhyme in a traditional manner. In it, our eponymous hero traverses the Mediterranean by sea, if that’s linguistically possible, and visits many places where an artistic education might recall classical allusion. Throughout the journey, he calls in to places with millennia of evident history and proceeds to show off much of what he knowns, all learned within the confines of an English private education. Childe Harold remains self-obsessed, always eager to place his own responses at the forefront of his thoughts, often in spite of external stimulation. But that’s Romanticism, isn’t it? And had I not just written about Eileen McHugh, a 1970s concept artist who imagined meaning into everything she might choose to juxtapose?

Some years ago, I wrote a novel that attempted a loose parody of Don Quixote. It was called A Search for Donald Cottee. I am the person who wrote it, so you will be unsurprised by my estimation of success. I was particularly proud of my updating of the episode in the Caves of Montesinos. I began to wonder how one might parody Byron’s Harold some 200 years on from its conception.

So rather than review Childe Harold, which has probably been done, what I offer here is a plan of parody that may never be written. The first two stanzas, for me, if experienced today, would be a Mediterranean cruise. Let’s not experience much at first hand but take pleasure in being dropped off for a passing couple of hours in the protected zone of somewhere famous, visited, historical, as specified in the brochure. A diary, kept by our cruiser, written in verse, is Childe Harold 2020, with sections copied from the handouts given on the onshore day trips. It’s not Childe Harold’s nor any other passenger’s reflections on experience that forms the gist but grab quotes from the tourist notes supplied to anyone who was paid for the excursion.

The later stanzas do travel inland. How we get from A to B is largely ignored, but Byron rarely strays anywhere off the Grand Tour. In contemporary terms. it’s surely a bus trip, a 50-strong group of the kind that marches, chattering, past the wonders of Neapolitan art in Capodimonte, to be loudly lectured in front of the Caravaggio, in Milan ignores the Brera to marvel at the Last Supper’s peeling plaster and congregates surround the copy of David in front of Florence’s Palazzo Vecchio. I think I jest. But Naples is rather too dirty to walk around, isn’t it?

What interests me in 2020, is the fact that the coronavirus pandemic would make both cruise and bus trips rather difficult to pursue. The barriers are obvious and I will not even try to list them. So how would Childe Harold 2020 manage to suffer his cascaded paroxysms of emotion?

Online, that’s how. WebCams, Wikipedia, TripAdvisor, Airb’n’b reviews, restaurant evaluations complete with owner’s apologetic comments about the service, that’s how our lockdown 2020 Childe Harold might play his viola. Imagine the locked-down pensioners at home. Where did you go today dear? I had a walk around the Uffizi. Ignored the crap. Just looked at the Canalettos. Read about them as well. Views of Venice, apparently. The poem will be epic.

The Shores of the Adriatic – The Austrian Side – The Künstenland, Istria, and Dalmatia by F Hamilton Jackson 1908

 

Interesting to read this account of a journey – not the author’s first to the area – while travelling through part of it. The writing makes me regret I did not include a trip to Aquileia in our itinerary. It makes one realise that it’s not possible to do everything and that there is an awful lot of human history to see.

The striking thing about Hamilton’s book is his forensic approach of church architecture and decoration. It seems that each and every ecclesiastical site is for him a veritable museum full of artefacts, artistic styles and architectural techniques. Even the smallest of churches is treated with the same meticulous eye and pen.

A second and utterly memorable part of his work is how his historical paradigm is so completely different from that of the contemporary traveller. He spends most of his time in Austria. It was indeed only in the 1950s that Trieste, for instance, became part of Italy. Piran was a Venetian city. Places have been part of Yugoslavia, Hungary, Papal States, Venice, Genoa – and more than once! Serbia, Byzantine empire, Roman empire, Greek, Slovenian, Croatian, Kingdom of Naples, Norman… Our eyes can only see the world it has experienced. And so when the contemporary traveller visits places like these, we somehow cannot shake off the assumption that the historical evidence ought to fit into the same paradigm. We all know that Maribor used to be Marburg, that Bratislava used to be Pressburg, that it was once the capital of Hungary… But how much of this is merely part of our specific and therefore biased assumptions? Hamilton seems fully aware at all times that the very identity of these places has been transformed many times, but he is also aware of the fact that the most powerful influence is always found in the identity of those who live there. His approach to culture is rather anthropological for today’s tastes, but he is usually sympathetic, except when exigencies of travel intervene. It must also be recorded that there have been, even recently, major population movements, expulsions and attempted genocides. It’s all part of the history… human, at that…

The quality of his portrayal makes me want to revisit the area quite soon and travel down the coastal towns and islands of the Adriatic. There is much to see, though the ramshackle quaintness he encountered is certainly no longer in evidence.

A surprising and often-encountered aspect of the book is the number of times he and his party of travellers are stopped by police, immigration officers and the like on grounds of security. They were carrying cameras and the official types could not comprehend that people wanted to record architectural details such as mullions and roofs. They must surely be spies or thieves or both. In an era where there is a photo every centimetre, where we travel freely without borders and even use the same currency across countries, one has to utterly thankful for the changes. Tell that to the British.

The Naples Riviera by Herbert M Vaughan

The Naples Riviera by Herbert M Vaughan is a travel book published in 1908. I read it recently during a trip to Naples, itself. When using old guide books in contemporary trips, it can happen that the traveler finds a must-see site has been demolished in the intervening years, but nowadays a cursory check via a search engine can avoid such embarrassment. But what can be gleaned from reading what are now historical accounts of travel is a sense of perspective that is almost always missing from much tourist literature. Yes, the historical fact is always available, but its interpretation is always a variable, and it is this variability that immediately enriches an experience of travel.

Vaughan describes Naples, Amalfi, Sorrento, Capri, Ischia and the nearby bays as seen at the start of the twentieth century. His account indicates that these descriptions were contemporary, but also that they not being experienced for the first time. This is clearly an experienced traveler. It is interesting to note that he regularly advises that certain areas have become overpopulated with foreigners, or regularly crowded with tourists, or more likely to serve an English Sunday lunch than any local speciality. Gone, perhaps, are the barefoot luggage carriers who are generally women and who apparently queue up near the ferry hoping to earn a living by carrying tourists’ suitcases up the hill on their heads. Gone also, perhaps, are the traditional dances, such as the tarantella, that Vaughan claims the locals strike up spontaneously at any time of day and in almost any place.

A surprising observation comes early in the text, when the author refers to the city of Naples, itself, as having been largely rebuilt, and thus containing predominantly modern buildings. The author immediately reveals his preference for a particular period of the city’s history, a preference that looks down on the baroque modernization of Gothic spaces, perhaps questioning even that the Renaissance should ever have descended into mannerism.

There is mild surprise when the author lists the number of places in the Campania region where malaria is either still endemic or was endemic until just before the account was written. Vaughan then discusses the possible causes of the disease. A modern reader, when confronted with the apparent contradictions of contemporary mores, is perhaps gently surprised. When confronted with the author’s incredulity at the idea of malaria being spread by mosquitoes, one approaches the state of being flabbergasted. But the modern search engine can again come into its own to remind the contemporary traveler that it was less than a decade before the writing of Vaughan’s book that the causational link had been confirmed. One lives and one learns.

Sitting in the narrow and sometimes hectic overcrowding of the matrix of the Spanish quarter near Via Toledo, the contemporary traveler is often confronted with the rasping noise and the odour of unburnt two-stroke as motorbikes speed past on what seemed to be collision courses, both with one another and pedestrians alike. The largely unhelmeted riders remind one of the fact that Naples was a lucrative market for diagonally striped T-shirts when the wearing of seat belts in cars became compulsory. One is also minded to speculate what the experience of Vaughan in the streets might have been without the noise of the internal combustion engine and the smell of unburnt fuel. Vaughan of course reminds us that before two wheels there were four legs and that these modes of transport used to leave different evidence of their passing, which also had effects on the nose.

When Vaughan visits Pompeii and Herculaneum, his descriptions are lyrical and vivid. But again the contemporary traveler realizes that it that the experience of these places in the early twentieth century was significantly much less than it is now, since much of the excavation and archaeological work has been done in the intervening century. Anyone who, like Vaughan, wants to contemplate what life might have been like in these ancient Roman towns with their single room shops and narrow streets need only pause for a while in Naples old town or in the Spanish quarter, where, apart from the motorbikes, life probably looks pretty similar to what might have been transacted along those ancient streets. From a distance the city even looks red and yellow, the same colors the decorated most of the dwellings in the two ruined cities.

Vaughan’s description of Naples Riviera comes across as surprisingly modern. It confirms that whenever and wherever we travel it is the experience that matters, the here and now, and crucially how that changes us, rather than confirms what we expected or anticipated when we decided to go there. And so it is both refreshing and enlightening to share another visitor’s insight from a different time as we explore a new any new experience of travel.

Voyagers, travel stories by Philip Spires

People should not do quite a number of things, including reviewing their own work. Well, I suppose that’s another resolution I have just broken, because here is Philip Spires’s review of Voyagers by Philip Spires. Voyagers is a set of short stories loosely based on the experience of travel. They all portray a srong sense of place alongside characters that find themselves in unfamiliar settings. Several of the stories have grown out of personal experience, or sometimes events I witnessed along the way. I have traveled a little over the years and it has always seemed to me that when a voyager ventures beyond the habitual comfort zone, then the potential for surprise and challenge increase, thus presenting opportunities to learn. And that learning, as often as not, is about oneself. Voyagers begins with Discoverers, a novella. Mr Tony has worked several contracts as an expatriate biology teacher in Brunei. We meet him as he sets off with yet another group of students on a field visit into the rain forest. These are jungles he knows well and loves. They are, however, under threat, and are being burned by people trying to establish building rights. Mr Tony has a campaign against these illegal practices and his efforts are about to uncover publishable truth. He learns over a long weekend, however, that people of power have their own schemes to stop his work. Assessors is a grovelling email written by a professional of the future who has seen his status redefined. The story was inspired by an interview with the physicist Michio Kaku. On a morning when London Heathrow’s new terminal could not match passengers with their luggage, he confidently claimed on BBC Radio that the near future would confirm our ability to tele-transport entire molecules in real time. Initiates is also set in Brunei. Aussies Ted and Sylvia have been invited to a Malay wedding. Ted works alongside the bride most days and knows her well, well enough of course to be invited to this normally wholly local event. Despite easy-going friendship and apparent shared experience, however, there is one part of the day’s custom that reminds both Ted and Sylvie that they remain mere guests in this place. I know that the principal characters of Protesters did in fact meet. One, a president of a Central American republic outlawed by the West was to address a solidarity group meeting in Westminster Central Hall. An aged writer – and a very famous one as well – is also present. His personal history suggests a pointed conversation between the two men, a conversation that forms the story. I put them together for a few minutes before they emerge to deliver their speeches. Predators is set in Nya Trang on Vietnam’s beautiful coast. A holidaying couple find themselves witness to predatory acts along the hotel corridor. Candid observation of the society and their surroundings suggest that such exploitation might not be too rare. A few decades later, the memory comes home. Seers is set in pre-war Yugoslavia. A group of Australian travellers are caravanning across Europe. In a Dubrovnik café they meet a bar-fly who likes to brag about the quality of his contacts. There may be truth in some of his words. He may even be the arms dealer he claims to be. Who knows? Strangers is the shortest of the stories. Set in England’s north Devon, a couple on a long weekend seek rest and recuperation in an idyllic coastal village. They idyll soon fades to a reality as they learn more of local lives. Victims is a set of emails. An aid worker finds herself caught up in the complications of struggle in Sri Lanka. She seeks advice on how to deal with the unique position she occupies by virtue of the information she has learned. Who does she think she is talking to? Whose interests will prevail? And is she, herself, now in danger? Wonderers follows a retired Englishman who is trying to pay his personal homage to wonders of the ancient world. These dependable, classical, trustworthy images of unquestionable greatness and significance offer him confirmation of the psychological stability and order he craves. His means of accessing them, alongside the contrasting and challenging experience of visiting them offer up difficult questions, however. He finds an answer that surprises him. Worshippers is set in Florence. A recent art school graduate finds her life at a crossroads. Her secular upbringing has created a near-religious commitment to art. But her own identity and self-obsession often appears at the centre of her universe. She meets a resting actor, a man whose pragmatism seems at first to be attractive. But he is troubled by something, an emotional response she resolves to uncover. They do seem to share a passion for art until, that is, aesthetics get in the way. Voyagers thus examines how a traveller’s identity might be simultaneously questioned and confirmed by the surprising moments that arise when we are beyond our own context. The voyagers themselves sometimes emerge both richer and wiser, but sometimes their limitations are merely confirmed. Voyagers is available both as a paperback and an ebook, including a Kindle edition.