Viva Mexico by Charles Flandrau

Taken from Nicholas Shakespeare’s epilogue to Viva Mexico by Charles Flandrau

THE echoed sob of history. Coming to the final paragraph of Viva Mexico! one reader – a commuter from Pittsburgh – was stung to his own tears. “It was just so good that I had to have a good cry about it.” He was crying for pleasure, but the life of the author can also provoke a lachrymose response.

For most of it Charles Flandrau sought the same obscurity that his reputation has received since. If there was anything foppish about him, it was located in his fear of failure. “America’s most reprehensible loafer,” was the verdict of the New York Times when contemplating the modesty of Flandrau’s output. “His greatest book was the one he never wrote,” was the judgement of the Saint Paul Daily News. Flandrau’s view of himself was as stringent. “I always think that everything I have written is rotten.” Once, at New York’s Harvard Club – named after the university which had so unfit him for life – he was accosted by a tipsy alumni.

“Are you the Flandrau who wrote a lousy book?”

“I am a Flandrau who wrote five lousy books.”

About one of them, Viva Mexico!, he was wrong. Over eighty years on, despite numerous challenges, it remains where the critic Alexander Woollcott placed it when he applied the words “the best travel book written by an American”.

Charles Macomb Flandrau was born in Saint Paul, Minnesota in 1871, in a house which became the bar of the Metropolitan Hotel. His father was a wealthy lawyer whose happiest eleven years had been spent as an Indian agent. In New Ulm’s Main Street, Colonel Flandrau situated a barrel of whisky laced with strychnine. He had marked it poison in several languages – except Dakotan. He meant the barrel for the Indians, but worrying that illiterate soldiers might get there first, he dumped it. He didn’t get on with his son.

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Travel Tips: John Gimlette

From John Gimlette, travel writer

Carry pictures of your family.  They are a great way of communicating your harmlessness, especially where language is an issue.  If you don’t have family, take pictures of the Royal family.  They are often a source of interest.

Pack a tin of sardines in countries where foodmight become tricky.  They are good for emergencies but just sufficiently unappetising that you won’t be tempted to eat them prematurely.

Take your old work shirts (those with frayed collars etc).  Cotton is great in all climates, and you can give them awayas you go.  I often come back with an empty suitcase!

If you think you’re in an unsafepart of town, avoid eye-contact, look as if you know where you’re going and do not display a guide book.

Try and avoid Western-style food in countries that have their own distinct cuisine.  It may not have been cooked properly, and may have been sitting around for ages.  Even in big hotels, the Indian variant of the full English Breakfast can be lethal.

Summer News

Growing

Seven Years in Ceylon by Leonard Woolf reviewed in The Oldie magazine by Jan Morris

This fascinating book is a kind of parable. It opens when one October morning in 1904 Leonard Woolf, aged 24, sets sail from Tilbury for Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, thena middle-sized component of the British Empire. He is to become a member of the Ceylon Civil Service,  but he is  an improbable imperialist. Rather weedy-looking, he has lately come down from Trinity College,  Cambridge, where he has been an active member of the ultra-intellectual Apostles club. His luggage includes 90 volumes of Voltaire’s collected works, 1784 edition,  andhe is  never out of touch with the most prominent of the Apostles, Lytton Strachey.
 
Almost at once he is plunged into the ambience of imperialism, in the late heyday of the imperial idea: the true diligence of it, the latent prejudices, the red tape, the accountings, the rural courts, the horse-back journeys, the red tape, the petty disputes, the occasional floggings,  the demands of religions and feudalisms – together with the hockey,  squash, bridge, tennis,  gossipings and ambitions that were the consolations of the imperialists themselves. In Ceylon their own community was layered too, civil servants, army officers and planters one and all looking down upon the business people who were, after all, almost never members of The Club. As Kipling made clear, it was a very provincial sort of society,  and  a far, far  cry from Voltaire  and the Lytton Stracheys . . .

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The Travellers’ Film Club

We are delighted to announce that a new series of the Travellers’ Film Club hosted by Waterstones, Piccadilly (203-206, Piccadilly, London)  starts this week on Wednesday 27th January, 7pm.

Antony Wynn, author of Persia in the Great Game: Sir Percy Sykes: Explorer, Consul, Soldier, Spy  will introduce and discuss GRASS: A Nation’s Battle for Life.

This 1925 silent documentary follows Haidar Khan and his Bakhtiari tribe on their Spring migration across the flooded Karun River and the snowbound Zagros Mountains of southern Persia to their summer pastures.  Filmed on location between Turkey and Iran, Grass is the first ethnographical account of the nomadic Bakhtiari people and was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being ‘culturally and historically significant’.  

Directed and photographed by Merian C. Cooper,  Ernest B. Schoedsack (who would later go on to produce ‘King Kong’) and Marguerite Harrison, Grass is deliberately styled as a story of man’s triumph over nature, as much a mythic narrative of migration and settlement as a simple travelogue.  Venturing through deserts, mountains, rivers and snowy wastelands in search of the life-sustaining grasslands, the Bakhtiari’s 50,000 strong caravan - complete with 500,000 cattle and goats - become the sole focus of the camera’s gaze.

Antony Wynn, who is Chairman of the Iran Society, lived in Iran for many years and has visited each end of this migration -  he has yet to ride the middle part.  

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