20 June 2019
Men of Mystery
Travel writers – and politicians.
By Neil Tidmarsh
I read a lot of travel-writing thirty years ago. For a short while in the early 1980’s I worked in the travel department of Foyles, just as the genre was taking off into the golden age of popularity, critical acclaim and commercial success which it still enjoys. Bruce Chatwin, Norman Lewis – how I envied those two in particular, not just the exotic places they visited but the exotic encounters and exotic adventures which came their way. Not only did they have a marvellous command of the English language, they also had the knack of being in the right place at the right time – of witnessing significant events just as they kicked off, of bumping into extraordinary or expert or eccentric characters wherever they went. It was almost too good to be true. They both wrote novels as well, but their fiction was somewhat colourless and lifeless compared to their travel-writing.
And then, one day, out of the blue, a shocking thought struck me; perhaps it was too good to be true. Perhaps travel writers embellish the truth. Perhaps they make things up. Perhaps travel-writing is closer to fiction than to autobiography or journalism. Suspicion, revelation, disillusion. Yes, of course! How could I have been so naïve? How could I have believed every last word they wrote?
And from that day to this I haven’t read any travel-writing. Which is why Rory Stewart’s The Places In Between (2004) and The Marches (2014) passed me by, even though their reviews made my mouth water.
I was reminded of all this yesterday when I read Novelty Candidate, a leader in The Times about Rory Stewart. I was struck in particular by the comment “His exotic pre-political career as a diplomat, aid worker, travel writer and academic remains mysterious and possibly somewhat embellished.” Embellished! Even with the qualifiers ‘possibly’ and ‘somewhat’, that’s a pretty hard-hitting and damning word!
Many of us, I’m sure, were aware of Rory Stewart as an interesting character long before he stepped into the limelight of the Tory leadership punch-up. Interesting, and puzzling. Remember those pictures of a short, skinny, floppy-haired and very young Englishman in Iraq, surrounded by villainous-looking tribal chiefs? He looked about fifteen years old. Why isn’t he still at school, we wondered? How come he’s governing a province of a war-torn Middle Eastern country before he’s even taken his A levels?
Then we learnt that he was a product of Eton and Oxford. Ok, that opens doors, sure, but even so… Then we learnt that he was an officer in the British army, and was in the diplomatic service, and that made things a little clearer. And yet… What was an army officer / diplomat doing on an epic solo walking tour of Asia and the Middle East in the first place, and how come he just happened to drop by, just when and where a chap with his background and experience was needed?
And as the years went by, the puzzles increased. All that leisure to walk and travel and write books, and advise and mentor princes, and set up charities (I came across Turquoise Mountain years ago, buying a beautiful pair of lapis lazuli cuff-links as a gift, and I visited a magnificent exhibition about it at the Smithsonian in Washington twice, and that bowl full of apples over there on the sideboard is from Turquoise Mountain, but I didn’t know Rory Stewart was behind the charity until a few days ago) – how did all that stack up with a busy military and diplomatic career (the details of which were a tad hazy)? It all seemed almost too good to be true.
And when we were told that his father had been a high-ranking figure in the secret service, did that clarify things a bit more? Ah, like father like son! So that’s what “a background in the diplomatic service” means! But this week he denied ever having been a spy – while admitting that of course a spy would have to deny it. Was this suggestive ambiguity also the sort of thing The Times was hinting at with that word “embellished”?
Bruce Chatwin and Norman Lewis are both dead now. Chatwin – the golden, privileged public school boy who passed effortlessly out of Marlborough and straight into Sotheby’s – died in 1989 of an AIDS-related illness at the sad and relatively young age of forty-eight. Lewis – the rough autodidact from working-class Essex – lived to the ripe old age of ninety-five, still working to the very end, dying in 2003 more or less pen in hand. But both have since been well-served by biographers, who have been over their lives thoroughly and produced definitive tomes – Bruce Chatwin by Nicholas Shakespeare and Semi-Invisible Man by Julian Evans.
And you know what those biographers discovered? That it was all true. Their subjects hadn’t made things up. It all really happened – all the exotic adventures and the exotic encounters with exotic characters in exotic places. And what’s more, they didn’t tell the whole of it. A running gag throughout Lewis’s work was the way he – a mere travel-writer – was always being mistaken for a British spy because of his mastery of languages such as Arabic and his love for dangerous and far-flung places. Me, a spy? How amusing, how ridiculous! But what did Julian Evans discover after Lewis’s death? Yes, Lewis really was an MI6 agent!
We shouldn’t be surprised. After all, there have been many attempts over the last century to prove that T E Lawrence made up the ‘unlikely’ events he related in The Seven Pillars of Wisdom (or at least “embellished” them) – and they’ve all failed. In fact, the latest research on the ground – by archaeologist Neil Faulkner – has proved that Lawrence was telling the truth. And Marco Polo’s rejoinder to those who accused him of ‘embellishing’ the story of his travels, who gave him the nick-name Emilione (‘the million’ in Venetian) because they suspected him of exaggerating, was a scornful and convincing “I did not tell the half of what I saw, for I knew I would not be believed”.
My guess is that, when the dust settles and the truth is told, The Times will have to eat that word “embellished”. My guess is that Rory Stewart really is a kind of Churchillian figure and Lawrence-of-Arabia adventurer. The kind of hero that Boris Johnson would like to be, in fact.
