Hans Magnus Enzensberger (now there’s a name to stop
a conversation in its tracks) wrote a marvellous little essay about holidays.
Perhaps that’s a little misleading. It isn’t exactly Adorno and Marcuse Go
To The Seaside – but it’s not that far off. It’s about the
industrialisation of relaxation, that is to say, the way in which people turn
their opportunity to get away from everything they normally do at work into an
opportunity to do everything they normally do at work, only in another
context.
Of course, it’s not just the people themselves who
are to blame. Organisational needs require people who have to get to a
particular place at a particular time or there’ll be trouble when they’re
working to get to a particular place at a particular time or there’ll be
trouble when they’re going on holiday, or going on the excursions that form
part of that holiday, or reporting to eat the meals that have been paid for and
come much cheaper as part of that holiday – after all, it’s not as though they
have any choice, or indeed want any choice. They wouldn’t know
what to do with it. It’d only worry them. And worry’s the last thing you need
on a holiday. A rest is as good as a change.
You can blame Thomas Cook (a temperance campaigner,
after all) for group travel and package tours. But guides, and guidebooks, were
around long before him – ever since, in fact, there were things and places that
were not only worth seeing, but worth going to see. Cicero’s name is
taken in vain, I feel, by modern Italians, who label the audio guides in their
cathedrals cicerone elettrico – he was an orator and an elegant
correspondent, not a travel-writer. Pausanias is the grand-daddy of them all,
visiting important sites (historical, mythological, religious) in Greece and
telling anyone who wished to know what there was left to see, and where, and
how. The sites themselves were famous, but old, and therefore obscure. Exactly which
heap of tumbled rocks…?
Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land (a very early
example of mass tourism, as John Arden points out) also needed stable guidance
– but they didn’t need the story told them, or its importance pointed out.
Later on, of course, as secular wonders multiplied, you did need a crib
to the Uffizi (Palma Vecchio, yes, but is there a Palma Giovene?) or St Peter’s
(which saint has one of those stuck in him?), and after a while The
Grand Tour came into being, with places and pictures you absolutely had
to have seen, my dear, or they wouldn’t let you back into the country. And
that’s the sort of industrial process that Enzensberger’s talking about: a list
of things that you have to do, once they’re ticked off, you can feel satisfied
with yourself.
In the past, such things had their own intrinsic
merit, and it wasn’t their fault that they featured in such a list. Nowadays,
when a tourist attraction is rated in terms of the income it generates, there’s
nothing to stop you manufacturing such a thing, provided you can persuade
enough people to come to it, and if you can persuade enough people to
come to it, then people will come to it, to see what it is that makes people
come to it, q.e.d. ad infinitum, as they say in Peckham, or at that spot
in America where they erected a column to mark the exact geographical centre of
the U.S. of A., which is remarkable only because they erected a column to mark
the exact geographical centre of the U.S. of A., which is, of itself, only
remarkable because they erected a column to mark it. Phew!
When I was younger, I used to read the guides avidly
before I went anywhere, for fear of missing something I might have wanted to
see. With increasing age and wisdom, I allow my imagination to fill in the
spaces between my knowledge, and go to places for their atmosphere, sensible,
of course, that that atmosphere derives from the history of the place and the
objects present there, but also aware that objects and history may be present
and atmosphere absent, and vice versa. As with wine, you try the stuff that
people say you ought to like, but taste is test and tongue can tell. Not all
malbec is good and not all merlot is bad.
Because I do not always want to know what is there
before I go round a bend (a bend, not the bend) – unless, of
course, it’s coming towards me on my side of the road – I was surprised the
other day, on what I thought was a culture-free stretch of road, to see the NT
oak-leaf and acorn. Freshly opened, halfway through the season, a recent
acquisition, “an undiscovered jewel” – a sapphire in the mud, I thought – I
wonder where the garlic is? (You have to forgive me these obscure references,
but it’s just the way my mind works: in one of the Four Quartets T.S.
Eliot writes Garlic and sapphires in the mud/ Clot the bedded axle tree
– a pair of lines so memorable in their emblematic and wilful
incomprehensibility that they typify for me the mid-twentieth century form of
posh poetry, designed to keep the plebs in awe. But I digress. Again.)
The drive was rather like one of my stories: it
swooped and swirled and seemed to be getting somewhere, gave you glimpses
through the trees of distant prospects and flashes of water afar off, settled
for a long straight between rows of tall dark trees, then veered off suddenly
to the right and was there – garden design by Capability Brown and Daedalus
(the man who invented the Cretan Labyrinth and the principle of one-way traffic
schemes).
And the house itself was a jewel. Elizabethan
red-brick centre, disguising a mediaeval hall-house, with stone-clad Palladian
wings either side, and at the back, overlooking lawn and ha-ha and just
surviving cedar, an elegantly pedimented eighteenth-century façade with
half-columns and just enough portico to stop the rain splashing into the room
if you had the doors open. And house-martins, too, bless them, their nests
built of mud from the banks of the stream in the middle distance (though goodness
knows where it had originally flowed, before Brown’s intervention). I actually
gave it a round of applause before I went in (at the side, for technical
reasons).
Because it wasn’t properly open yet, and this was
just a special concession to the Trust’s loyal members, we had to have a
strictly guided tour in groups of twenty-five. You can imagine what I think
about guided tours. But there I was, and what’s more, I was the twenty-fifth.
Well, actually, I was the twenty-eighth, but the people in front of me were a
group of three who refused to be split and said they’d eat their sandwiches and
mosey round the grounds for three quarters of an hour.
So, in we all went, with me at the back, as usual,
and then, suddenly, there was someone else behind me as the door was closed. I
didn’t see where he came from, and nobody else seemed to have noticed, so I
just kept quiet. Probably nipped off to the loo and came back, I thought,
though I did count, out of idle curiosity, and we were twenty-six, plus guide,
and the stranger wasn’t wearing one of those little volunteer badges, either.
Halfway through the opening spiel, he began
muttering, so I sidled across inconspicuously to hear. Mostly it was an
amplification of what the guide was saying, occasionally a flat contradiction,
but always revealing more knowledge, an effortless familiarity with background
and foreground and midground. You had the sense that he’d almost been part
of the place, whereas the official guide, conscientious though he was, had
learned it all up out of books and didn’t know what was over the page, or round
the corner, until he got there.
Of course, when it came to questions, I asked the
man next to me, because it was obvious that he’d know the answer. And he had so
much to say on the subject, that we almost got left behind as the group moved
on, and he was still telling me, in a very amusing fashion, when we got into
the next room and the guide started up again, so that I inadvertently
interrupted him with a great guffaw, which didn’t go down terribly well with
the rest of the group, who all looked at me and made me feel like a naughty
schoolboy – well, the way I imagine a naughty schoolboy must feel, because I
never was naughty as a schoolboy, just a bit bolshie as an academic,
talking at the back of meetings, you know, and once, when our professor said he
wanted to put a bomb under students who were late with their essays, but it had
to be a bomb with teeth, I drew it and showed it round. But I digress.
I was beginning to feel a little bit uncomfortable
about our impoliteness, but too fascinated with what I was hearing to want to
stop listening. Besides, for all I knew there might be quite a sub-text going
on among the volunteers – at Berrington Hall, at the end of the day, when I was
the last visitor, they nearly didn’t let me in because my entry might have
disrupted the result they’d already got for the sweepstake they were running on
visitor numbers! This man didn’t have the normal air of a volunteer,
enthusiastic but slightly reverential, slightly in awe. He wandered around the
place as if he owned it. In a way, I was quite glad that the tour was so short
and restricted – more rooms open next season, they said – because I was feeling
a bit embarrassed.
I think the man could sense that, because when we
reached the long gallery, which had been partly turned into a library, he
touched my elbow and nodded to an alcove, which concealed us. Meanwhile, the
guide was talking about the Joshua Reynolds portrait of Ensign Brewster, which
filled the far end of the room. “Couldn’t stand it,” said my companion, “said
it made him look as though he didn’t know how to get on a horse.” I didn’t ask
him how he knew that. I think I already suspected. But I had no time to
reflect, because he had flipped up the security catch on one of the grilles in
front of the books and was selecting a volume from the shelves. They were all
small, fat, red, cloth-bound, with gold lettering rubbed away by usage.
“Know about Baedeker?” he said.
“Guide-books,” I replied with certainty, though I
didn’t tell him I had first encountered the name of the Leipzig-based
phenomenon in Cold Comfort Farm, that marvellous parody of the rural
novel, where Stella Gibbons wickedly proclaimed she was adopting Baedeker’s
habit of marking must-sees (or, in her case, must-reads) with one, two, or
three asterisks.
“Come this way,” he said, “we don’t want to disturb
them,” and he touched something I couldn’t see, so that a section of the
bookcase swung back and we stepped into a small, plain white room, with a
half-open door on to a corridor. The bookcase clicked back into place, leaving
a smooth white wall behind us.
“Triest,” he said, and then he repeated it, with the
Italian pronunciation, “Trieste – that’s where I was, at the end of the war,
well, it wasn’t quite over, that was the problem. And there was always the
probability that another one would start, between entirely different people.
I’d come down through Styria on my motorbike, seen a few German patrols on
motorbikes and told them – from a safe distance of course – to get the hell out
before the partisans caught up with them. Of course, I had no idea where the
partisans were, but then nor did they. Still, I got them to retreat without a
shot being fired, which is always the best way.
“So, having done my business, I thought I’d have my
pleasure. Laibach, I rightly assumed, would be in a bit of a state, so I went
on to Trieste – well, the roads were empty. And as soon as I arrived, I fished
out my Baedeker. It was pre-war, of course – pre First War, that is –
but – well – that was my surprise, that things hadn’t really changed at all.
“I found all the cafés the book mentioned, Degli
Specchi, Orientale, Tergesto, Alla Borsa, Adriatico – even the Tedesco,
which surprised me: the German café! Though I suppose it was just a name, after
all, and no one in London had tried to get rid of Hanover Square. I popped my
head into one of the cafés, just to have a listen, and was surprised to hear a
bit of German being spoken, and in one corner a fellow with a moustache and
thick pebble glasses going on no end, sometimes in Italian, sometimes in
German, and sometimes in English with a marked Dublin accent.
“I had my book in my hand, and I walked round, and
it was all there, all as it should have been, and that, it suddenly struck me,
was really remarkable. Two wars and nearly fifty years later… And I was just
about to cross over an iron footbridge down by the harbour, when these two
policemen started shouting at me. I ignored them. They could see I was in uniform,
with an officer’s hat on, after all. But they kept on shouting, so I thought
I’d better turn round and see what they wanted, just in case they had guns and
got excited, because Italians do get excited easily, and that was when I
realised that there wasn’t a bridge under my feet any more, and I fell in the
water, and they fished me out and asked me what I thought I was doing, and I
told them I was crossing the ponticello, and they said the ponticello
was taken away in the 1930s, because it was rusty and it got in the way of the
shipping, and that that was why they had been shouting at me, because I seemed
to be about to step off the quay straight into the water. And that, of course,
was exactly what I had done. I’ve got a picture of them here, somewhere…” And
he turned round to rummage in some shoe-boxes stacked loosely against the wall
through which we had entered.
My attention was taken in the meantime by voices
from the corridor.
“Twenty-four!” came the voice of the guide. “There
are only twenty-four!”
“Twenty-five!” I called. “Twenty-six, actually,” I
was going to add, but as I turned round, I saw that I was alone in the room.
“How on earth did you get in here? It’s where we
store the family’s personal papers!”
“I came through the…” I began, pointing to the
“secret door” behind me – but then I noticed a large batten of wood nailed
securely across that tell-tale crack. “I must have taken a wrong turning,” I
said, apologetically and shamefacedly. “Sorry.”
“Well, no harm done,” said the guide as he escorted
me carefully down the stairs, “but you missed the end of the tour. I was
explaining about Captain Brewster, the father of the last owner. He made it
over to us years ago, but didn’t want to let it go finally until his father
died – there was always a hope that the old boy might – recover his mind.”
“Really?” I said. “What happened to him?”
“No one quite knows. He was found wandering round
Trieste at the end of the war – he had a head-wound – they put it down to
concussion, that he’d fallen off his motor-bike. Not raving, or anything, just
not living in the same world as the rest of us. Quite happy, though. You see,”
and he leant closer to me, as though he didn’t want anyone to overhear us, “in
the home where he lived, he got all the guidebooks he possibly could and walked
round foreign cities and stately homes and grand museums all – all in his head,
in the big lounge they had there. I’m told it was quite remarkable to see him
standing in front of – say – the Mona Lisa, and admiring it. Moving, really. You’d
almost have sworn it was there, they said.”
“And wasn’t it?” I wanted to say. But I didn’t. I
just said, “Hmm,” the way you do, and then, “Goodbye.” I didn’t need a guide to
get out of the house.
26th August 10pm
to 1st September 4.30 pm 2003