Madam Mayo blog’s “madmimi” email sign-up is finally working, over there on the sidebar. Subscribe and each Monday you will receive the latest post (and nothing else– no spam). Mexico, poetry, rare books, Texas, translation, the typosphere, occasional pug-sightings– if these tickle your fancy this is the blog for you! Second Mondays are for my workshop students and anyone else interested in creating writing; fourth Mondays are for a Q & A with another writer.
My holiday reading was Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids, which I found at once disturbing and a revelation. A revelation because Smith’s writing is so poetic, and so engagingly and vividly evokes some of the raunchy subcultures of 1970s New York City; yet disturbing because I have always rejected, and upon reflection after having read Just Kids, the more so, this notion so many young and not-so-young artists have that being a True Artist excuses, or even calls for, wantonly destructive behavior towards oneself and others. (Count me as more Flaubert than Rimbaud.) Reading Patti Smith is definitely outside my comfort zone— which means I’ll be doing more of it in 2020.
As those of you who follow this blog well know, for an age I’ve been working on a book about Far West Texas. It’s impossible to consider Texas without taking into account so many Texans’ rock-solid belief in their state’s exceptionalism, which is not one and the same, but closely tied to the idea of American Exceptionalism. As one who was born in Texas, raised in California, and then spent some 30 years living outside the United States (and so immersed in a radically different cultural perspective), I can attest that this sense of exceptionalism is at once powerfully ingrained in American and Texan culture and well, kinda weird. I’ve been trying to get my mind around it for a while now.
In Global West, American Frontier : Travel, Empire, and Exceptionalism from Manifest Destiny to the Great Depressionhistorian David M. Wrobel brings this question of exceptionalism into focus by way of travel writing. He delves back to the 19th century when American and European artists and writers first began traveling through the West and writing about it as it was then, not yet “the frontier West as the heart and soul of America” (p.26) but “a global West.”
Wrobel’s focus here is on idea of the West in the works of such travel writers of originality and literary merit as Isabella Bird, Richard Francis Burton, Alexander von Humboldt, Friedrich Gerstäcker, Ida Pfeiffer, Alexis de Tocqueville, Mark Twain, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Unlike so many post-WWII literary portraits of the West, in these, “travelers often placed the West in a broader, comparative global context, viewing it as one developing frontier among many and considering the United States as a colonizing power.” (p.22) The French were then in Africa and Indochina, the British in India, Germans in Namibia, and so on. The American West was not yet, in our post- WWII sense, “a unique place, a place apart from the world, rather than a part of it.” (p.27).
“travelers often placed the West in a broader, comparative global context, viewing it as one developing frontier among many”
(As a travel writer myself the higher qualities and role of travel writing is something that especially interests me. My own travel memoir is Miraculous Air, about Mexico’s Baja California peninsula, and the heart of it recounts my travels following the Jesuit conquest from the late 17th century until the expulsion in 1767. “Spanish padres,” these Jesuit missionaries are often called, but in fact, many were Italian, or German, or French. One was Honduran; another Scottish. And one key factor behind their authorized conquest of California– what we today call Baja California– was that the Spanish King, and therefore his viceroy in Mexico City, were concerned about British and French expansion in the Americas, and they most especially wanted to check Russian expansion– fueled by the fur trade with China– down the Pacific coast. How’s that for global context!)
When came the turn away from “a broader and largely deexceptionalized global context” towards “searching for a distinctively American frontier, a place like nowhere else on earth”? (p.85) Wrobel argues that it came at the turn to twentieth century with writers such as Jack London and Theodore Roosevelt, both celebrity world travelers keen on seeking fresh frontiers of adventure. Then came the slew of automotive adventure memoirists battling flat tires and breakdowns while in search of “presumed regional authenticity” (p.135) — “a search for a distinctive American West, for last American frontiers” (p.135), for example, Mary Austin’s The Land of Journey’s Ending (1924); Hoffman Birney’s Roads to Roam (1928); Emily Post’s Motor to the Golden Gate (1916); Winifred Hawkridge’s Westward Hoboes: Ups and Downs of Frontier Motoring (1921); Aldous Huxley’s Along the Road (1925); C.K. Shepherd’s Across America by Motorcycle (1922); Hugo Taussig’s Retracing the Pioneers: From East to West in an Automobile (1910), and Frank Trego’s Boulevarded Old Trails in the Great Southwest (1929).
Also crucial in forging this conception of a unique American frontier– the West–were the New Deal state guidebooks, part of the Federal Writers Project (FWP). These state guidebooks included general background information (folkways, culture, history, economics, etc.); descriptions of cities and towns; and suggested tours by car. Writes Wrobel: across the West, “the guides generally emphasized the western frontier heritage and pioneering tradition. In that regard, they collectively amounted to a clear statement about where the West began and ended in the public consciousness and in the estimation of the guides’ writers in the 1930s.” (p.144). As for the Texas state guide, Texas: A Guide to the Lone Star State (1940), that was “a veritable catalogue of Anglocentrism and Anglo-Saxonism, and of frontier-rooted state-level exceptionalism.” (p.151.) See for yourself in the copy now on archive.org.
In all, these memoirs and guides exemplified “how travel writing in the first four decades of the twentieth century constituted a movement inward, toward the national, and regional, and away from the global.” (p.180) So much may have been gained, yet so much lost. We became myopic.
For me, as both a reader and as a travel writer, Wrobel’s concluding chapter, “Enduring Roads,” was especially heartening. Yes, we live in this day of Tripadvisor.com and the heavily-marketed so-called “bucket lists,” nevertheless, I believe that good travel writing has and always will constitute a valuable contribution, both for individual readers (however dwindling their numbers) and the culture as a whole. Numbers of readers in the immediate aftermath of a book’s publication are not and have never necessarily been the best and only measure of its success. (More about the power of the book here.)
And I agree with Wrobel that the good and the true is not necessarily from some facile search for “authenticity.” Not that it’s often done, but it is possible to write brilliantly about a Disneyland ride or, for that matter, lazing in a hammock in one’s own backyard, surfing around Tripadvisor.
Writes Wrobel: “The real authenticity or value of the genre surely lies in the expansiveness of the vision of its practitioners… today it seems as vital as ever, even though getting to almost anywhere in the world in next to no time at all is now more a chore than a challenge… It is the ability of the traveler to experience and reflect on what is encountered along the way that is most important.” (p. 187)
“It is the ability of the traveler to experience and reflect on what is encountered along the way that is most important.”
And a final note from Wrobel’s Global West, mainly for myself: What’s been done to death is the search for “authenticity.” Yes, Virginia, there is a Walmart there on the highway by the ranch, and the ranch has wifi– and drone roundups, too. The hand-tooled wallet in the gift shop is made in China and the boots, probably, in India. What more interesting things can be said? Can we not compare parts of the Transpecos to the Tarim Basin (a fascinating exercise, by the way)? Or, say find the interweavings with the Middle Eastern trade traditions (there is a Lebanese trader’s grave down by the Rio Grande at Presidio– he was killed by Comanches, as I recall.) Why is there so little compare-and-contrast of the rock art of Lower California with that of the Lower Pecos? And what of visionary artists, immigrants from the east, such as Donald Judd? Or for that matter visionary oral historians? Or the pre-Texas Revolution history of the Alamo?
P.S. Speaking of Germans in Namibia, it quite strikes me how much the Erongo Mountains look like the Big Bend of Far West Texas:
