BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "Ninety-Two Days"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 22: Ninety-Two Days. Ed. by Douglas Lane Patey. Oxford University Press, 2021. 9780198724186. lxxii + 331 pp. (A scan of the first ed. (1934) is also available on archive.org.)

It turns out that Waugh, besides writing fiction, also wrote several travel books; Ninety-Two Days is about his three-month trip to British Guiana and Brazil in 1933. The editor's introduction to the present edition was very interesting and I enjoyed it much more than the one in Helena. It appears that for Waugh, travel writing was not really something he would be interested in doing for its own sake; he did it partly to keep his name in the public's eye so that people wouldn't forget about him by the time his next novel was ready (p. xxviii), and partly as a source of a bit of extra money and of things that could serve as inspiration for his fiction. His trip to Guiana was the basis of a few articles for newspapers and magazines (which apparently weren't very good and he had a hard time getting them published; p. xxxvii), then for Ninety-Two Days, and then for a novel titled A Handful of Dust (1934).

Even his choice of destination was influenced by practical concerns. (Or was it? At one point Waugh joked that he chose British Guiana because “I had got it confused in my mind with New Guinea”; p. xxxi, n. 14.) It was the only British colony in South America, so Waugh naturally preferred to go there since he couldn't speak Spanish or Portuguese (but apparently this plan was partly frustrated by the fact that even there, Portuguese was the lingua franca amongst the locals in the interior of the country; p. xxxiii, n. 25). It was also one of the least well explored areas of South America; the 1930s were no longer really the age of 19th-century-style gentlemen explorers, but Waugh could, just barely, still claim to be doing something resembling anthropology. (Apparently he even toyed with the idea of enrolling in a university and getting a degree in that field; p. xlvi.) Nor would it be bad for publicity that a part of his trip was going to extend into Brazil, where Percy Fawcett had disappeared a few years before, generating an enormous amount of media attention.

Moreover, it turns out that Guiana had been exciting people's imaginations for a long time. Sir Walter Ralegh claimed it was the seat of the mythical El Dorado, an Indian chief so rich that he covered himself in gold dust (hence the name, ‘the golden one’ p. xl). Its unclimbable table-mountains (such as Roraima) tantalized naturalists with the prospect that otherwise extinct species may have survived there; and in the hands of fiction writers, these turned easily into monstrous ape-men and dinosaurs. I knew that Arthur Conan Doyle's famous Lost World is set in that area, but here I learnt of another interesting-sounding novel, though not widely known today: The Devil-Tree of El Dorado (1896), by Frank Aubrey (p. xliii).

The introduction also mentions a number of non-fiction books by earlier explorers and travellers to the area; I was particularly intrigued by Among the Indians of Guiana (1883) by Everard im Thurn (p. xliii) — German (and Austrian) noblemen with von were a dime a dozen in the 19th century, from time to time you encounter a zu, but an im is rare indeed. (According to the Wikipedia he was actually British, but his father had immigrated from Austria.)

I was pleasantly surprised to read that Ninety-Two Days is apparently very well-regarded in Guyana nowadays (pp. lii–liii, n. 100).

*

As for Waugh's travelogue itself, I really enjoyed reading it and I couldn't help being impressed by how he managed to take a journey in which, to be perfectly honest, nothing interesting ever happened, and turn it into a book that is practically never boring. Somehow he keeps managing to come up with something interesting to say on every page, finding some little event to describe or some observation to make, etc.

If there is any downside to this, it might be that all these little things don't really add up to anything bigger than that; you accompany Waugh on his journey, you have a good enough time (better than he did in the sweltering jungles of Guiana, one imagines), but when you reach the end you wonder what the point of the whole thing was. But this is not hardly really a downside; after all, there's no need why a journey like this should have some greater purpose, or why a book about it should impart some greater message to the reader. As Waugh says at the conclusion of the book, it “makes no claim to being a spiritual odyssey” (p. 158), but it was a bit of strenuous adventure for him and “I had seen several different sorts of life being led—rancher, missionary, Indian, diamond hunter—which I could never have imagined. I had added another small piece to the pages of the atlas that were real to me.” (P. 159.)

Interestingly, in the introductory chapter Waugh insists that “self-respecting writers do not ‘collect material’ for their books, or rather that they do it all the time in living their lives”; he travelled to Guiana simply because he had “a fascination in distant and barbarous places” (p. 2). Methinks he doth protest a little too much (see also the note on p. 166), but he has a point as well.

I didn't know that he had a brother, Alec Waugh, who was also a travel writer (“with a papal gesture” the two brothers divided the world amongst themselves :), p. 7). In his The Coloured Countries (1930), he described among other things a stay at a grotesquely bad hotel on the Caribbean island of Trinidad (included as an appendix in the present volume, pp. 317–22); and now on the way to Guiana, Evelyn Waugh stayed in the same hotel, wondering if he would have any trouble due to this “family connexion” (p. 1), but the manager was surprisingly good-humoured about it (p. 8).

Upon reaching Georgetown, the capital of British Guiana, he was interviewed by journalists from a local paper that had a policy of interviewing every first-class passenger upon arrival (p. 10). But he soon realized that he had a somewhat hard time explaining to people what exactly the purpose of his journey was. On one occasion he mentioned wanting to photograph the Indians; “‘We know what you want,’ they said with winks, ‘you want to take the girls naked. Well, your best plan is to go up to Bartika and get a few of the tarts there to pose for you. You can get the proper feather ornaments from the Self Help shop. That's what most of the American scientific expeditions do.’ ” (P. 13.) :))

The supplies he bought for the journey into the interior included chlorodyne; according to the editor's note, this was “primarily a mixture of laudanum, tincture of cannabis, and chloroform” which “quickly became one of Britain's most popular patent medicines, widely advertised for conditions from diarrhoea to insomnia and headache.” (P. 184.) Good times :)))

The staple foodstuffs of the country were cassava flour and tasso, or dried beef (“it is even, so I was told, put under the saddle above the blanket to keep it tender and protect the horse from galling”, p. 36 :S). Waugh found them uneatable (p. 71, 94). There was also a fermented drink called cassiri (“made from sweet cassava roots, chewed up by the elder members of the community and spat into a bowl”, p. 107; from time to time, Indians would hold parties where the whole village got drunk, consuming a whole vat of the stuff in the process).

On the way into the interior of the country, Waugh first travelled for a week together with one Mr. Bain, a garrulous government official; later he had to make his own arrangements. The travel was mostly on horseback, slow and laborious, first through jungles and later a savannah, areas with a very sparse population of ranchers, and I couldn't help feeling a bit sorry for Waugh and his Guianan servants, suffering the incessant heat, rain, insects and the like, though he does seem to bear all this with remarkable good humour. Motor vehicles were very rare in the interior, and gasoline expensive (p. 59); see p. 62 for a very short stretch where Waugh was the passenger in a motor van.

Waugh becomes the victim of a vowel shift: “ ‘Chief, do you want to see this boy's arse?’ / I misunderstood him and said no, somewhat sharply. / ‘Fine, young “arse”,’ said Sinclair. ‘Your “arse” plenty weary. You want new “arse” to go Bon Success.’ ” (P. 46.) :))

One of the ranchers he met along the way turned out to be an insane religious maniac. “You could always tell a Freemason, he said, because they had VOL branded on their buttocks.” (P. 55.)

He stayed for about a week at a mission, St. Ignatius, and remarks on the contrast between this small, modest establishment and the crowded ones he had seen in Africa (p. 63). Here there were just two priests, one of whom was away all the time, constantly on a “circuit” from one Indian village to another (p. 65).

There was a merchant operating on the Brazil-Guiana border, with stores on both sides of the Ireng river so that it was his customers and not himself that had to smuggle the goods across :) (pp. 67–8). “He has no competition within two hundred miles” (p. 68) — a good illustration of how remote this area was.

Waugh crossed the border into Brazil and went as far as the town of Boa Vista, which had been represented to him as prosperous and modern (p. 73); alas, it turned out to be a small, dilapidated dump of a town, with a sluggish, fever-ridden population more inclined to crime than work (“they are mostly descended from convicts [. . .] [t]hey are naturally homicidal by inclination”, p. 78; “a society in which murder was regarded as being as common and mildly regrettable as divorce in England”, p. 79 :))), and more to indolence than to either of those. What little brief, unnatural prosperity there may have been in the place a few years earlier had been the result of schemes by various investors to set up business ventures, all of which had foundered in very short order (pp. 79–82). But Waugh endured his disappointments with good humour, and wrote in a letter home that “the streets are paved with gold which gives a pretty effect especially towards sunset” (p. xli).

He stayed at Boa Vista for a good while, hoping to travel downriver to Manaos, but it proved impossible to get a boat and eventually he decided to head back to Guiana; and even that was hard to arrange — his efforts to procure a horse, saddle, attendants, and supplies were met with so many complications that the whole thing is downright ludicrous (pp. 85–9).

He got back to St. Ignatius, but then decided to return to the coast by a different route than the one he took on the way there; some of this was through very remote areas very rarely visited by Europeans (p. 105). He is not really pretending to be conducting anthropological research, but he does make some observations about the curious habits of the local Indians; e.g. when a woman gives birth, it is her husband that takes to the sick-bed and is treated by the whole community as if it were he, and not she, that had just been through an exhausting ordeal (p. 110). A woman giving birth to twins is regarded by them as an evidence of infidelity (p. 132). The Indians also believe in a malignant force called the Kenaima, but Waugh says that different people give such different accounts of it that it's impossible to decide what exactly this belief is really about (pp. 117–19). Elsewhere he remarks on the resemblance between the Indians and the English in that both have a retiring character (p. 25).

For a few days, Waugh even had to travel on foot, together with several porters and one of the missionaries from St. Ignatius (p. 117). Eventually he reached the camp of one Mr. Winter, a gold and diamond prospector whom he had previously met in Georgetown (p. 130). There's a funny story of an Indian girl who was raised in the town, then returned home only to find she now didn't really fit into either environment: “She found a strange, naked woman who was her mother, eagerly welcoming her to a one-roomed hut [. . .] More than this she found a naked young man who had been selected by her mother as a husband. [. . .] The original suitor, at last losing patience with her superiority and aloofness, married the mother and the two proceeded to make the hut still less habitable for her.” :)) (Pp. 139–40.) Fortunately the story has a relatively happy ending; the young woman was hired by Winter as a cook and proved to be excellent at her job.

The last stage of Waugh's journey was downstream by boat, though this wasn't exactly trivial either since the Potaro river, which he was travelling on, was interrupted at several points by waterfalls, including the famous Kaieteur (pp. 144–6). There he spent a night in a house that was being let to tourists (p. 150) — a sign that this area was not that remote any more, and he was rapidly returning towards civilisation. Still, his impression of the interior of Guiana was that of an area from which civilisation was retreating: some decades before people had been trying to farm or ranch, to gather rubber, prospect for gold or diamonds, but now all that was declining or gone (p. 151). I wonder what those parts of Guyana are like nowadays. It's nice to imagine that civilisation, which otherwise spreads everywhere like cancer, managed to leave some bit of wilderness largely alone; but even if that was true in Waugh's time, I doubt it is still true now.

About his fellow passengers on a boat: “I have occasionally heard it debated whether negroes have an unpleasant smell. These certainly had.” (P. 157.) :)))

In a few more days he was back in Georgetown, whence he returned to England. (“There was some slight discussion at the Customs as to whether stuffed alligators were dutiable as furniture, but in the end these were allowed in as scientific specimens.” :)) P. 159.)

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The present edition also contains about 60 pages of explanatory notes, which I found quite interesting, and about 115 pages of critical apparatus, in which I found pretty much nothing interesting whatsoever. It records countless small variants between Waugh's manuscript and the printed version, and on a few occasion there are variants between the British and the American edition, but nothing really important for a casual reader like me. In some books the critical apparatus gives you some bits of material that the author removed from the manuscript while preparing the final printed version, but there's nothing of that sort here. (Speaking of manuscripts, I was interested to read that Waugh's handwriting was hard to read; see pp. lvii–lviii.)

Errors

Much like in Helena, there are plenty of errors to be found. Sad!

• “my means of a balloon” (p. xlii, np. 59) should be “by”;
• “Boa Visa” (p. liii) should be “Vista”;
• “ ‘theatrical;” (p. lvi, n. 108) should be “ ‘theatrical’ ”;
• “Manoas” (p. 59) should be “Manaos”;
• “Canadian Healing Oil (according to a full-page advert in the Sydney Mail, 30 Jan 1987” (p. 204) — this is from a note about dubious patent medicines, and I was doubtful that something like that would have been advertised in 1987; and sure enough, the correct date is 1897, and moreover the ad is far from being full-page — it covers half of a column, and the page has four columns;
• “fans of a tiger” (p. 188) should surely be “fangs”;
• “‘Nother” (p. 239), in a quote from p. 21, where they correctly used the apostrophe, “’Nother”;
• “68.455–69.772” (p. 265) should say 472, not 772;
• “St. Petersberg” (p. 267), in a quote from p. 73, where it is spelt correctly “Petersburg”;
• “medieval Peru” (p. 214) in a quote from p. 112, where it is spelt “mediæval”;
• “in Appendix )” (p. 295) should be “in Appendix A)”;
• Everard im Thurn is described as a “German-born explorer and colonial administrator” (p. 313), but his Wikipedia page says he was “born in Camberwell, London, the son of an Austrian immigrant banker”;
• “Bback” (p. 317) should be “back”;
• “Arnold Bennet” (p. 317, n. 2) should be “Bennett”;
• “For the illustrative quotations” etc. (p. 322) — a whole paragraph of what was surely meant to be the editor's introduction to the notes in Appendix A appears mistakenly here in Appendix D, in an excerpt from Alec Waugh's The Coloured Countries.

ToRead:

• Paul Fussell: Abroad: British Literary Traveling Between the Wars (1980). Mentioned here on p. xxvii, n. 1. After WW1 prevented travel for a few years, there was apparently a “renaissance of travel literature” in the interwar period, and Waugh can be seen as a part of that trend.
• George Miller Dyott: Man Hunting in the Jungle: The Search for Colonel Fawcett (1930). Mentioned here on p. xxxiii, n. 22.
• C. Barrington Brown: Canoe and Camp Life in British Guiana (1876). Mentioned here on p. xlii, n. 59.
• Everard im Thurn: Among the Indians of Guiana, Being Sketches Chiefly Anthropologic from the Interior of British Guiana (1883). Mentioned here on p. xli, n. 57, and elsewhere.
• Frank Aubrey: The Devil-Tree of El Dorado: A Romance of British Guiana (1896). An adventure novel set in Guiana (pp. xlii–xliii). He also wrote Queen of Atlantis: A Romance of the Caribbean (1898) and King of the Dead: A Weird Romance (1903) “about a lost race in the Amazonas” (p. 311).
• Neil Whitehead: Dark Shamans: Kanaimà and the Poetics of Violent Death (2002), by an “anthropologist who claims to have had terrifying personal experience of the phenomenon” (p. 215).
• Alec Waugh: The Coloured Countries (1930). A travel book by Evelyn Waugh's elder brother, about various tropical countries; mentioned here on pp. 8, 166, 173 and elsewhere. It appeared in America as Hot Countries. Alec Waugh also wrote a number of other interesting-sounding books, some of which are on archive.org, e.g.: The Sugar Islands: A Caribbean Travelogue (1949) and Island in the Sun (1955), a novel set in a fictional Caribbean country.
• Arnold Bennett: The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902). A mystery novel, mentioned on p. 317, n. 2.