Newby and Thesiger: humour and lament in the Hindu Kush

Abstract

Eric Newby's A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) ends with an account of an apparently chance meeting in 1956 on a mountain side with Wilfred Thesiger. The account is, in many respects, typical of Newby's style: witty, well observed and self-deprecating. By contrast, Thesiger's account of this meeting in Among the Mountains (1998) is characteristically more serious in tone and is somewhat dismissive of Newby's endeavours. Their meeting has been perceived as a symbolic encounter between traditional travel writing and an emergent, modern form with their authorial personas seen as representing forms of postwar ‘imperialist nostalgia’. However, a comparison of these books reveals inconsistencies and variations in the authorial personas they portray and which others have ascribed to them. This paper will also examine the extent to which ‘imperialist nostalgia’ is manifest in their work. Whilst the term usefully helps situate Newby and Thesiger in a postwar context, the differences and instability of this theme in A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush and Among the Mountains warrants further exploration.

Keywords:

• Newby
• Thesiger
• postwar
• imperialist nostalgia
• travel writing
• colonialism

Notes

Notes

1. Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian Sands (London: Longmans, Green & Co Ltd, 1959). Wilfred Thesiger, The Marsh Arabs [1964] (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980).

2. Mark Cocker, Loneliness and Time: British Travel Writing in the Twentieth Century (London: Martin Secker & Warburg Limited, 1992), 142.

3. Eric Newby, A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (London: Picador, 1974), 246–47.

4. Cocker, Loneliness & Time, 140.

5. Patrick Holland and Graham Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters: Critical Reflections on Contemporary Travel Writing [1998] (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), 28–9.

6. Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, 29.

7. See, for example, Peter Hulme, ‘Travelling to Write (1940–2000)’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 88.

8. Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, 32–3.

9. Thesiger has published three versions of his account of his journey in the Hindu Kush. All are rather similar, however Among the Mountains contains the most detailed description of meeting Newby and Carless. See Wilfred Thesiger, ‘A Journey in Nuristan’, The Geographical Journal 123, no. 4 (December 1957): 457–64 (457). Wilfred Thesiger, Desert, Marsh and Mountain [1979] (London: Flamingo, 1995). Wilfred Thesiger, Among the Mountains (London: HarperCollins, 1998), 135.

10. Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, 28. See also, Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolution (Cork: Cork University Press, 1994), 1–17.

11. Wilfred Thesiger, The Life of My Choice (London: Flamingo, 1992), 18.

12. Alexander Maitland, Wilfred Thesiger: The Life of the Great Explorer (London: HarperCollins Publishers, 2006), 44.

13. Wilfred Thesiger, ‘The Awash River and the Aussa Sultanate. Maps and Illustrations’, The Geographical Journal 85 (1935): 1–23.

14. Maitland, Wilfred Thesiger, 81.

15. Maitland, Wilfred Thesiger, 197–200.

16. Thesiger, Arabian Sands, 106–7.

17. Robin Fedden, The Observer, October 25, 1959, 22.

18. Billie Melman, ‘The Middle East/Arabia: “Cradle of Islam”’, in The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing, ed. Peter Hulme and Tim Youngs, 112–19; see also Cocker, Loneliness and Time, 38–9.

19. Hulme, ‘Travelling to Write (1940–2000)’, 87.

20. Ben Cocking, ‘Writing the End: Wilfred Thesiger, Freya Stark and the ‘‘Arabist Tradition’’’, Journeys: The International Journal of Travel and Travel Writing 8, no. 1 (2008): 57–76 (67).

21. Cocker, Loneliness and Time, 70.

22. The National Archives (TNA): Public Record Office (PRO) FO371/82123, Mr Thesiger's journey to the Muscat area and his subsequent report (1950); FO371/104278, Discussion between FO and Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian explorer; Trucial States and Huqf force (1953); FO371/104288, Letter from Mr Weir, Sharjah, commenting on Wilfred Thesiger's evidence (1953); FO371/109839, Huqf area: views on Wilfred Thesiger, Arabian explorer, as possible member of UK arbitration team (1954).

23. Thesiger, ‘The Awash River’, 1–23.

24. See Newby's account of this period, including meeting his future wife, in Love and War in the Apennines [1971] (London: Picador, 1996).

25. John Moore, ‘Gone with the Wind’, The Observer, September 9, 1956, 14. Online at: http://archive.guardian.co.uk/ (accessed February 27, 2008). See also: Roy Perrott, ‘Adventure’, The Guardian, October 5, 1956, 10 [online] http://archive.guardian.co.uk/ (accessed August 14, 2009).

26. Cocker, Loneliness and Time, 140.

27. Newby, A Short Walk, 12. Further page references will be given parenthetically in the text.

28. Steve Clark, ed., Travel Writing and Empire: Postcolonial Theory in Transit (London: Zed Books, 1999), 179.

29. Hulme, ‘Travelling to Write (1940–2000)’, 88.

30. Edward Mace George, The Guardian, October 23, 2006 [online]. http://books.guardian.co.uk/obituaries/story/0,1929071,00.html (accessed February 27, 2008).

31. For discussion of some of these themes (and variations of them) in Arabian Sands, see Melman, ‘The Middle East/Arabia: “Cradle of Islam”’, 118.

32. Thesiger, Among the Mountains, p. 1.

33. Thesiger, Among the Mountains, p. 4.

34. This theme has been widely discussed in relation to one of Thesiger's best known books, Arabian Sands (1959). See for example, Rune Graulund, ‘Travelling the Desert: Desert Travel Writing as Indicator Species’, Studies in Travel Writing 10, no. 2 (2006): 141–59 (152). Melman, ‘The Middle East/Arabia: ‘Cradle of Islam’’, 112–19.

35. Thesiger, Among the Mountains, 13.

36. For discussion of this see, Maitland, Wilfred Thesiger, 264–65. Asked about his motivations for crossing the Empty Quarter, ‘Thesiger considered the ‘‘lure of the unknown’’, and the continual testing of his resolution and his endurance, absolutely crucial’ (265).

37. Thesiger, Among the Mountains. See 91 for reference to Hazarajat and 131 for reference to Nuristan.

38. Thesiger, Among the Mountains, 91.

39. Eric Shipton, Upon That Mountain (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1943).

40. Thesiger, Among the Mountains, 1.

41. Thesiger, Among the Mountains, 13.

42. Thesiger, Among the Mountains, 56.

43. For further details on this theme see Cocking, ‘Writing the End’, 57–76.

44. Newby, A Short Walk, 20. Newby was living in Hammersmith at the time.

45. Cocker, Loneliness and Time, 141.

46. Newby, A Short Walk, 31.

47. Cocker, Loneliness and Time, 142.

48. See, for example, Thesiger, Arabian Sands, 3–39. See also Thesiger, The Marsh Arabs, 19–23.

49. Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, 34. Their reference to camp is, however, not suggestive of a particular form of masculinity. Holland and Huggan do not equate the differences in style between Newby and Thesiger with different points in a hierarchy of masculine identities.

50. Newby, A Short Walk, 246.

51. Cocker, Loneliness and Time, 141.

52. Newby, A Short Walk, 247.

53. Thesiger, Among the Mountains, 134.

54. Thesiger, ‘A Journey in Nuristan’.

55. Thesiger, Life of My Choice, 443.

56. Thesiger's first book Arabian Sands contextualises his travels in the Empty Quarter with numerous references to earlier ‘great’ Arabian travellers, such as the reference to T.E. Lawrence in the Prologue, I.

57. Hugh Carless, ‘Eric Newby, The Hindu Kush and the Ganges’, in Asian Affairs 38, no. 3. (2007): 361.

58. Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992), 201.

59. Hugh Carless interviewed by Malcolm Mcbain, The British Diplomat Oral History Programme, Cambridge University, February 23, 2002 [online]. http://www.chu.cam.ac.uk/archives/collections/BDOHP/Carless.pdf (accessed August 14, 2009).

60. Newby, A Short Walk, 247.

61. Cocker, Loneliness and Time, 142.

62. Michael Meredith, college librarian at Eton College, has been able to confirm that Thesiger made no reference to meeting Newby in Nuristan in documents Thesiger bequeathed to Eton College, including his letters to his mother. Elaine King, archivist of the Foreign Office, confirmed that there are no surviving records of either Newby's or Thesiger's contact with the British Embassy, Kabul. The National Archives do not have any Foreign Office or other military intelligence documents on either author's journeys in Afghanistan.

63. Thesiger, ‘A Journey in Nuristan’, 457. See also, Thesiger, Among the Mountains, 133.

64. Thesiger, ‘A Journey in Nuristan’, 457.

65. I am not seeking to suggest that the nostalgia for British imperialism portrayed by Newby and Thesiger bears an association with Romanticism and its literary tradition. However, prevalent in Thesiger's writing is a lament for the irrevocable impact of Western modernity. This is particularly evident in Arabian Sands and The Marsh Arabs, where Thesiger frames the landscapes of the Empty Quarter and Iraqi marshes in a way that bears similarity to ‘the late Victorian penchant for barren and wild landscapes as well as the … earlier Romantic concepts of the “Great” in nature’. See Melman, ‘The Middle East/Arabia: “Cradle of Islam”’, 114.

66. For further details see, Lawrence James, Raj: The Making and Unmaking of British India (London: Abacus, 1999), 151–232.

67. Newby, A Short Walk, 57.

68. Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, 34.

69. Newby, A Short Walk, 72.

70. Newby, A Short Walk, 73.

71. See for example, Eric Newby, Slowly Down the Ganges [1966] (London: Picador, 1983), 49–50. Also, Eric Newby, Round Ireland in Low Gear [1987] (London: Picador, 1988), 16–18.

72. See note 64 above.

73. Thesiger, Among the Mountains, 197.

74. Thesiger, Among the Mountains, 197.

75. Michael Asher, Thesiger [1994] (London: Penguin, 1995), 464.

76. Thesiger, Among the Mountains, 116.

77. Maitland, Wilfred Thesiger, 358.

78. Thesiger, Among the Mountains, 93.

79. Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, 205.

80. Behdad, Belated Travelers, 1–17. For discussion of primitivism in Thesiger's work see, Melman, ‘The Middle East/Arabia: “Cradle of Islam”’, 116–18.

81. Behdad, Belated Travelers, 13.

82. Behdad, Belated Travelers, 14.

83. Cocking, ‘Writing the End’, 57–76.

84. Corinne Fowler, Chasing Tales: Travel Writing, Journalism and the History of British Ideas about Afghanistan (New York: Rodopi, 2007), 3.

85. Behdad, Belated Travelers, 13. For discussion of the ‘Arabist Tradition’, see Melman, ‘The Middle East/Arabia: “Cradle of Islam”’, 112–19. Also, Cocking, ‘Writing the End’, 57–76.

86. Behdad, Belated Travelers, 14.

87. Cocker, Loneliness and Time, 140.

88. Fowler, Chasing Tales, 9.

89. Wilfred Thesiger, My Kenya Days (London: Flamingo, 1994).

90. Charles Forsdick, Travel in Twentieth-century French and Francophone Cultures: The Persistence of Diversity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 12.

91. Holland and Huggan, Tourists with Typewriters, 34–5.

92. Newby, A Short Walk, 247.