Sunrise with Seamonsters (63 page)

When I wrote
The Great Railway Bazaar,
I included a chapter on Afghanistan, but I was persuaded to leave it out. There are no trains in Afghanistan. "Memories of Old Afghanistan", this chapter, first appeared in
Harper's
under the title "In Darkest Afghanistan." "The Night Ferry to Paris" was published in
Travel & Leisure;
half of "Stranger on a Train" appeared in
The Observer
(London) and the other half was the
first Thomas Cook Travel Lecture, which I gave in London in 1981; "An English Visitor" first appeared in
The New Statesman
, "Discovering Dingle" in
Travel & Leisure;
"The Exotic View" was commissioned by Mr Arthur'S. Penn in New York for a collection of nineteenth century photographs, which was never published; "Homage to Mrs Robinson" first appeared in
Playboy.
"My Extended Family" was commissioned by
The Sunday Times
(London) for their Pleasures of Life series, but was never published; "A Circuit of Corsica" was commissioned by
Travel & Leisure
but turned down by them and finally published by
The Atlantic.
"Nixon's Neighborhood" appeared in
The Radio Times
(BBC, London), and "Nixon's Memoirs" in
The Sunday Times.
"The Orient Express" was commissioned by
Horizon,
rejected by them, and published in
Holiday.

"Traveling Home: High School Reunion" was written for my own satisfaction, and it later appeared in
The New York Times Magazine.
When I wrote a play about Kipling in 1979 and could not get it staged I decided to write about this American period in Kipling's life. It is appearing here for the first time. "John McEnroe, Jr" was first published in
The Radio Times;
"Christmas Ghosts" in
The New York Times,
"Henry Miller" in
The Sunday Times,
and "V. S. Pritchett" in
The New York Times Book Review.
"Dead Man Leading" formed the introduction to Pritchett's novel, published by Oxford University Press. "The Past Recaptured" was the Foreword to
The World As It Was,
a book of old photographs, edited by Margarett Loke, and "Railways of the Raj" was the Foreword to a book of the same name (Scolar Press, London). "Subterranean Gothic" appeared in
The New York Times Magazine
under the title "Subway Odyssey". I am grateful to Faber & Faber for permission to use an extract from T. S. Eliot's
East Coker.
"Easy Money—Patronage" was my Gertrude Clarke Whittal Lecture at the Library of Congress (April, 1981) and was later published in a slightly different form by
Harper's
magazine. "Mapping the World" was the Foreword to the Annual Report, 1982, of The Hongkong and Shanghai Bank.

"The Last Laugh" was the Introduction to the posthumous collection of'S. J. Perelman's pieces, published by Simon & Schuster. "Graham Greene's Traveling Companion" was the Introduction to Barbara Greene's
Too Late to Turn Back
(1982, but first published in 1938 under the title
Land Benighted).
"His Monkey Wife" was the Introduction I wrote for John Collier's novel, published by Oxford University Press in England, and "Being A Man" first appeared in the column "About Men" in
The New York Times Magazine.
"Introducing
Jungle Lovers
" I wrote for a German edition of the novel (published by a Munich insurance company, Bayerische Rücksversicherung Aktien-gesellschaft, as a Christmas present for their clients). "Making Tracks to Chittagong" was published in
The National Geographic
in a different form, under the title,
"By Rail Across the Indian Subcontinent." "What Maisie Knew" was my Introduction to the Penguin edition of the Henry James novel, and "Sunrise with Seamonsters" appeared in a shorter form in
Vanity Fair
under the title, "Rounding the Cape."

Most of the pieces here first appeared in a slightly different form. English magazines have the lightest editorial hand, American magazines the heaviest, occasionally making so bold as to rewrite one's work. "I think our readers would like it better our way," an editor at
Mademoiselle
told me once over the phone, as she ran her blue pencil through one of my paragraphs. For the
Monitor
of course I avoided all mention of death, a concept that is at odds with Christian Science.
The New York Times
is unexpectedly fastidious, and even at times prissy ("Please don't use the word 'stinks'"). In my subway piece the graffiti I noted, "
Guzmán—Ladrón, Maricón y Asesino
" appeared on my proofs without
Maricón.
"We don't use that word in this newspaper," I was told. I pointed out that it was in Spanish and that it was part of a true quotation. This did not matter: it was not fit to print. I agreed to the cut but was left to ponder this newspaper of record, in the most violent city in the world, averting its eyes when it saw something it did not like; and printing the words "thief" and "murderer," but not the noun "gay."

* Note: What Naipaul actually said was, "Sadly, I reject Mrs. Macmillan's consolation that electricity will put an end to 'the long dark evenings in which ... the only possible recreation is sex.' Electricity or no electricity, there will soon be two million Jamaicans. It is hard to see what anyone can do except eat more Jamaican bananas without complaining. And perhaps—who knows?—a banana a day will keep the Jamaican away." (
New Statesman,
4 Jan., 1958)

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* see Coleridge's preface to "Kubla Khan" or the Robert Graves poem, which ends:
O Porlock person, habitual scapegoat,
Should any masterpiece be marred or scotched,
I wish your burly fist on the front door
Had banged yet oftener on literature!

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* "Exploration is the physical expression of the Intellectual Passion," Apsley Cherry-Garrard wrote at the end of
The Worst Journey in the World
(1929). This masterpiece of travel writing, which is an account of the Scott Antarctic expedition of 1910–1913, describes many instances of severe hardship and a satisfaction in enduring it that amounts almost to pleasure. Another explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, wrote, "Without privation there would be no struggle, and without struggle no life—" This was also Scott's feeling; in one of his last letters ("To My Widow") as he lay freezing to death in the tent on the Ross Ice Shelf, he wrote, "How much better it has been [struggling against blizzards] than lounging in too great comfort at home." Pritchett knew these sentiments from Stephen Gwynn's
Captain Scott
(1929).

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