A travel book may be many things, and Moritz Thomsen’s The Saddest Pleasure seems to be most of them – not just a report of a journey, but a memoir, an autobiography, a confession, a foray into South American topography and history, a travel narrative, with observations of books, music, and life in general; in short, what the best travel books are, a summing up.
Thomsen, the most modest of men, writes at one point, ‘though I have written a couple of books I have never thought of myself as a writer. I had written them in those predawn hours when the land still lay in darkness, or in days of heavy winter rains when the cattle huddled in the brush dumb with misery … I had always considered that all my passion was centered around farming.’ The books he refers to are Living Poor (1971), the best book I have yet read on the Peace Corps experience, and The Farm on the River of Emeralds (1978), which is a sort of sequel, and describes a maddening and exasperating series of reverses as part-owner in a farm (with an Ecuadorian) on the lush and muddy coast.
To my mind, this farmer is a writer to his fingertips, but he is an unusual man and his writing life has been anything but ordinary. Writing for him is a natural and instinctive act, like breathing. It is obvious from this book and his others that he loathes polite society and shuns the literary world (meeting João Ubaldo Ribiero in Bahia he is meeting a kindred spirit). He is no city slicker, he is not possessive or acquisitive; he mocks his physical feebleness, he jeers at his old age and his sense of failure. He wishes to write well and honestly, he is not interested in power. A great deal of foolishness or a little wickedness makes him angry. He always tells us exactly what he thinks, in his own voice. He is the least mannered of writers, and he would rather say something truthful in a clumsy way than lie elegantly.
I liked him the instant I met him, and even then, eleven or twelve years ago, he seemed rather aged, frail and gray-haired, wheezing in the thin air of Quito. I knew he was a good man and that he was tenaciously loyal and that he was a serious writer. He was in his middle sixties and had published his Peace Corps book, and he told me he was working on several others, including a memoir of his father. He hated his father, he said, and since literature is rich in such hatreds, I encouraged him in his memoir. He tantalized me with stories of his father’s odious behavior – the time he hanged his wife’s pet cat, the time he tied a dead chicken around a collie’s throat with barbed wire because the collie had been worrying the hens. I think I’ve got that right. His father was a poisonous snob and a liar, and he made poor Moritz’s life a misery. And clearly it went on for some time. We read in his travel book of how, at the age of forty-eight, Moritz was still being berated by this paranoid maniac for joining the ‘communistic’ Peace Corps. The only other person I have met in my life who hated his father as much was a German who told me that his father had been a member of the precursor of the SS, the SA – Sturmabteilung – and, long after the war was over, was still ranting. Indeed, Thomsen Senior and this Nazi would have got along like a house on fire.
I am happy to see this monster in the narrative. Whatever else travel is, it is also an occasion to dream and remember. You sit in an alien landscape and you remember all the people who have been awful to you. You have nightmares in strange beds. You remember episodes that you have not thought of for years and but for that noise from the street or that powerful odor of jasmine you might have forgotten. Details of Thomsen’s life emerge as he travels out of Ecuador, through Bogotà and around Brazil – his childhood dreams, his shaming memory of a shocking incident one long-ago Halloween, his years in the war (twenty-seven combat missions flown in a B-17 in 1943 alone), his father’s death and funeral, his disastrous farming ventures, and the outrages he witnessed in various coastal villages in Ecuador …
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