Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart in China: travel writing as stereoscopic and polygraphic form

Abstract

This article studies the competing accounts of a 1935 journey undertaken by Peter Fleming and Ella Maillart, News from Tartary (1936) and Forbidden Journey/Oasis interdites (1937). It explores the ways in which these multiple textualisations permit reflection on the nature of such a stereoscopic rewriting of a shared journey, addressing the gendered comparatism to which this emphasis often lends itself, whilst outlining the potential pitfalls of reducing such comparison to questions of gender; at the same time, the study investigates also alternative approaches to Maillart's multiple re-textualisations of this journey in her own work, associating this with the concept of ‘polygraphy’.

Keywords:

• Peter Fleming
• Ella Maillart
• Xinjiang
• reportage
• stereoscopic journey accounts
• polygraphy

Notes

Notes

1. For an account of the journey, see Garry Hogg, With Peter Fleming in Tartary (London: Frederick Muller, 1960), and Kenneth Wimmel, ‘Ella Maillart and Peter Fleming: “More an Escapade Than an Expedition”’, in The Alluring Target: In Search of the Secrets of Central Asia (Palo Alto, CA: Trackless Sands Press, 1996), 215–41.

2. See, for example, Sara Steinart Borella, The Travel Narratives of Ella Maillart: (En)Gendering the Quest (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Matthew Graves, ‘Un voyage, deux voix: les récits croisés de Peter Fleming et Ella Maillart’, in Lignes d’horizon: récits de voyage de la littérature anglaise, ed. Jean Viviès (Aix-en-Provence: Publications de l’Université de Provence, 2002), 123–36; Maureen Mulligan, ‘“The Controversy Still Rages”: Ella Maillart and Peter Fleming: Forbidden Journeys to China and Beyond with the Odd Couple’, in Asian Crossings: Travel Writing on China, Japan and South East Asia, ed. Steve Clark and Paul Smethurst (Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press, 2008), 141-8; and Karin Veit, ‘Journey and Gender–Diversity in Travel Writing’, in Feminist Contributions to the Literary Canon: Setting Standards of Taste, ed. Susanne Fendler (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997), 109–38.

3. Other instances of competing narratives of a joint itinerary exist, of course: Johnson and Boswell in the Hebrides constitute one of the best known instances, and there is also the more contemporary example of the multiple narratives of the Croisière jaune, an ambitious 1931 journey in caterpillar-tracked vehicles from Istanbul to Xi’an, and a key point of reference for both Fleming and Maillart, since its participants had themselves endeavoured, with great difficulty, to cross Xinjiang. This second of the Citroën-sponsored croisières led to a proliferation of narratives, textual, visual and cinematic, which served to dramatise the journey for an interwar French public eager for new accounts of the travel permitted by the rapid mechanisation of transport and the modernisation of means of communication.

4. Graham Greene, Journey without Maps (London: Heinemann, 1936); Barbara Greene, Too Late to Turn Back: Barbara and Graham Greene in Liberia (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990 [1938]) [originally published as Land Benighted].

5. See Paul Fussell, Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (London and New York: Oxford University Press, 1980).

6. Ella Maillart, Oasis interdites. De Pékin au Cachemire (Paris: Payot, 2002 [1937); Forbidden Journey (London: Century Publishing, 1983 [1937]) [henceforth FJ; references will be integrated into the text].

7. Letter from Maillart to her mother, 21 December 1936, Maillart archive, Bibliothèque de Genève.

8. Peter Fleming, News from Tartary (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936) [henceforth NT; references will be integrated into the text].

9. Letter from Fleming to Maillart, 5 December 1935, Maillart archive, Bibliothèque de Genève.

10. James Clifford, Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century (Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1997), 25.

11. Eric Teichman, Journey to Turkistan (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1937).

12. See Cortazar and Dunlop, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute: A Timeless Voyage from Paris to Marseille, trans. Anne McLean (Brooklyn, NY: Archipelago Books, 2007); François Maspero, Roissy-Express: A Journey Through the Paris Suburbs, trans. Paul Jones (London: Verso, 1994), and Balkans-Transit (Paris: Seuil, 1997).

13. I will not have the opportunity to explore the implications of these journeys here: however, two biographers of Maillart, Amandine Roche, Nomade sur la voie d’Ella Maillart (Paris: Payot, 2005 [2003]), and Olivier Weber, Je suis de nulle part: sur les traces d’Ella Maillart (Paris: Payot, 2003), have both retraced the itinerary across Xinjiang, and Stuart Stevens's revisiting of the 1935 journey in Night Train to Turkistan: Adventures along China's Silk Road (London: Paladin Books, 1990 [1988]) has recently been supplemented by Bruno Paulet's Mémoires des sables: en Haute-Asie sur la piste oubliée d’Ella Maillart et Peter Fleming (Geneva: Olizane, 2007).

14. See Duff Hart-Davis, Peter Fleming: A Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987 [1974]), 158.

15. Fleming, ‘A Journey through Central Asia’, The Geographical Journal, 88, no. 2 (1936): 128–44 (144).

16. Sidonie Smith, Moving Lives: 20^th-Century Women's Travel Writing (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001), 32. The Afghanistan journey is described in The Cruel Way, a narrative best known to recent readers through its 1986 Virago reprint, and through Fosco and Donatello Dubini's 2001 cinematic adaptation in Reise nach Kafiristan.

17. See Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London and New York: Routledge, 1992).

18. Fonds Ella Maillart, Musée de l’Elysée, Lausanne, images 101317, 101356.

19. Percy Adams, Travelers and Travel Liars, 1660-1800 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962).

20. A recent debate at the Royal Society of Literature in London on the value of truth in travel writing turned into a standoff between Rory MacLean and Rory Stewart. For MacLean, travel writers offer a synthesised, fictional sense of a place, often populated by composite characters: ‘I travel in search of the story I want to tell. The real travel is at my desk.’ For Stewart, such an approach represents ‘a decadence, a falling-away in the travel-writing tradition’: ‘I’m just worried,’ he concluded, ‘that we’re being pushed into a backwater of elegant but ultimately disengaged prose.’ See A.E., ‘Travelling hopefully’, The Guardian, 15 September 2007. These are also questions central to the dialogue between Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs in their English Association pamphlet, Talking about Travel Writing, Issues in English, 8 (Leicester: English Association, 2007).

21. See Ben Tuffnell and Andrew Wilson, Hamish Fulton: Walking Journey (London: Tate Publishing, 2002).

22. ‘A woman's trek’, Reading Evening Gazette, 24 August 1937.

23. Jonathan Raban, For Love and Money: Writing-Reading-Travelling 1968–1987 (London: Picador, 1988 [1984]), 254.

24. Jean-Didier Urbain, Secrets de voyage: Menteurs, imposteurs et autres voyageurs invisibles (Paris: Payot, 1998).

25. See George Orwell, ‘More news from Tartary’, Time and Tide, 4 September 1937, and Evelyn Waugh, ‘Companion to Fleming’, Night and Day, 2 September 1937.

26. Ella Maillart, The Cruel Way (London: Heinemann, 1947), 45, 156.

27. ‘Arrêt sur image’, Maillart archive, Bibliothèque de Genève.

28. See Anne Deriaz, Chère Ella: élégie pour Ella Maillart (Arles: Actes Sud, 1998), 122.

29. Cited in Nicolas Bouvier, ‘Ella Maillart et la Chine centrale’, in Ella Maillart, Oasis interdites. De Pékin au Cachemire (Paris: Payot, 2002 [1937]), 10.

30. See Nicolas Bouvier, Oeuvres complètes (Paris: Gallimard, 2004), 827.