Truth in Travel Writing & Travel Memoir
Note: This interview was published in a slightly different form in
the Bloomsbury Review, January-February 2000.
Colin
Thubron, the prize winning (PEN Silver
Pen Award, Thomas Cook
Travel Award, Hawthornden Prize,) author who lives in London, reads from In Siberia
(Harper Collins, 2000) to an assembly of spellbound professors at a conference on travel
writing held at the University of Pennsylvania in 2001.
“We waded down its passageways as down a sewer,” Thubron
reads. “I lost count of the iron doors
awash with stench, the grilles giving on to blackness.
Each dungeon was still fixed with twin wooden platforms bound in iron, and
might have held forty prisoners. There were twenty such chambers in the basement alone. Their walls were sheathed in ice. Prisoners here, said Fedor (Thubron’s guide
who knew a prisoner there), used to press the bodies of the dead against the walls to
insulate themselves from the cold.” p. 273
Individuals in the audience tighten their flanks, others draw in
breath, there’s a nervous cough. We’re
listening to Thubron describe his wintertime visit to desolate and decaying Stalin-era
forced labor camps near Magadan in far eastern Siberia.
It is difficult to remember that Thubron wasn’t a prisoner in the
transit camp, so bleak and painful is the word painting he recounts.
There are travel writers aplenty in the marketplace today. Swathes of
them are gathered at this conference to parse intention and impact of several centuries
worth of travel narratives. Some of them
have written up their own travels. Some
publish scholarly accounts gleaned from the journals of long forgotten peregrinators. Most
are English professors who use the travel
format to coax young writers to improve their writing -- travel writing has found legitimacy with academia at last in English
Composition 101.
The difference that separates Thubron from other practitioners in the
genre, is that he digs deeper, knows the difference between fact based writing
(non-fiction) and writing based on facts (fiction and creative “non-fiction”). Whether a piece is literary or not doesn’t
turn on the writer’s precision with truth.
Later in the conference I sought Thubron and tried to pin him down on
truth in travel writing, an issue that buzzed during between-session parlays. The previous
evening, another writer had read from his book, a
narrative larded with obviously imagined and embellished events, which he claimed was
non-fiction travel writing. One of the
conferees had pointed out that all writing is invented, whether it is called fiction or
non-fiction. Others complained that the author from the
make-it-up style of travel writing insulted the audience.
“We expect truth within the form. I take exception when the reader expects truth
and the writer purposefully distorts the
event,” Thubron said. “A postscript or an editor’s forward alerts readers
that the writer is playing with images, but to present all as truth when whole sections
are invented, that’s wrong.”
“The caveat, of course, is that nothing written is truth,”
said Thubron, joining his hands around a thick white mug at a table in the hotel’s
dimly lit coffee shop. “Writers forget, they exclude information all the time,
creating a parallel text to what actually happened. When
you work from notes, it’s the author’s choice.
No travel book is entirely truth in that sense. But, when reality is so extraordinary, why invent?”
I asked the obvious: “How would a reader know when a writer
invents material.”
“If a reader knows
the culture, when a writer invents, the scenes ring false.”
“I really have to check facts out,” said Thubron. He
worries that travel writers prolong myths and clichés. We talked about the issue of
accepting hearsay when local knowledge may be the wrong information. How writers have to check the facts in libraries.
“People don’t mention what they don’t see.
They miss the things out there that might surprise them,” he said.
“I may do too much analyzing. When I’m obsessed with a subject, I’m
thinking how to get people to talk about it, how to describe the next landscape.”
- L. Peat O’Neil
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L. Peat O’Neil writes for National Geographic News, the
Washington Post and other publications. She
is the author of “Travel Writing” published by Writer’s Digest Books.
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