The essence of travel is putting yourself in a different place—and coming back changed. If you go somewhere and don't come back, you haven't traveled, you have simply moved. If you go and come back but are not changed, you haven't traveled, you have simply been a tourist. There is an element of pilgrimage (physical travel for a spiritual purpose) in all genuine travel, and the urge in human beings to do so is timeless.

On the other hand, we have been reminded, by people as diverse as the medieval Cistercians (who discouraged pilgrimage) and Henry Thoreau (who said explore your inner spaces before exploring outer ones), that spiritual and intellectual quests are also a form of travel. The greatest discoveries, they argue, are not over the horizon, but within the soul and mind.

But why not both? Why not put both body and mind in motion and allow them to feed each other? This, David Farley claims, is exactly what some modernist writers did in the middle of the 20th century. In Modernist Travel Writing: Intellectuals Abroad, Farley explores the travel and the writing of four modernists: Ezra Pound, E. E. Cummings, Wyndham Lewis, and Rebecca West. He claims that the latter three especially traveled to distant places in order to gather material for thinking about the crises facing the Western world in the years between two great wars. They were trying, says Farley, to bring something back—from Russia, Northern Africa, and the Balkans—that would be helpful in the more politically engaged forms of modernism that informed the 1930s.

Farley begins with Pound, a writer whose life illustrates as well as anyone's the intimate link between modernism and travel. Literary and artistic modernism came about, in no small part, because writers and visual artists and musicians and dancers and impresarios from all over the world traveled to and shared lives together (sometimes briefly, sometimes for decades) in a handful of European cultural capitals (Vienna, London, Paris and others). Pound, Eliot, Fitzgerald, Stein, and Hemingway came from America; Yeats and Joyce from Ireland; Picasso and Miro from Spain; Stravinsky, Nijinsky and Diaghilev from Russia, and on and on. They came to these cosmopolitan cities, met in the bars and salons, ingested each other's work, changed their styles more often than they changed their clothes, and remade large chunks of modern culture. Without travel—in both the superficial and profound senses—this wouldn't have happened.

Farley limits his treatment of Pound largely to a discussion of the contrast between a 1912 walking tour Pound took of southern France and his later more difficult travels around a post-World War I Europe that had become a thicket of bureaucratic obstacles to free travel and free thinking: border crossing stations, passport requirements, petty officials, and paperwork. Pound, ever on the lookout for a "luminous detail" (any small fact that casts light on larger realities), saw in these obstacles to free travel a cultural decline that inhibited the exchange of ideas and therefore threatened the "new Renaissance" for which he was working.

Farley uses an interesting discussion of the rise of passport requirements as a lead-in to offering a fresh explanation of a brief allusion in Canto 7 of Pound's masterwork The Cantos. The couple of lines begin with the words "Damn the partitions," often exegeted as a reference to Pound's feeling cut off from great literary eras of the ancient past. Instead, Farley links the passage to a maddening encounter Pound had in 1919 with a Parisian bureaucrat that briefly prevented him from returning to England. It is a believable explanation because Pound, as was characteristic of modernism, liberally sprinkled his work with esoteric references to his own life.

Unfortunately, the offering of this small insight is about all that Farley does with The Cantos, illustrating a weakness—or, more charitably, a missed opportunity—in the book as a whole. He says that Pound gave up travel writing early—as something for writers of prose—and while Farley more than once generalizes about how travel is important throughout Pound's career and to The Cantos, he accepts too readily a hard distinction between travel writing and other genres.

How much more interesting, and significant, it would have been to explore The Cantos as travel writing rather than as simply passingly influenced by travel. Other critics have suggested that one approach to this notoriously difficult epic is to see Pound traveling, like the Odysseus he invokes in the poem's beginning, through time on a voyage to various islands and continents of knowledge and artistic achievement—18th-century America (Jefferson, Adams), Renaissance Italy (Malatesta), China (early dynasties and Confucius)—in search for something to bring home for his new Renaissance in the early 20th century. If Farley could have linked that intellectual and spiritual travel more closely to Pound's physical travel—and outlined the same for other great modernist works—he would have written an important book.

Turning to Cummings, Lewis, and West, Farley suggests that while all three writers produced modernist travel books, only Cummings' Eimi is unambiguously modernist in form. The book chronicles a 1931 trip Cummings made to Russia, a path well worn by enthusiastic Western observers of the great Communist experiment going on far, far away.

Cummings was not impressed. Eimi, written in a cryptic and elliptical style worthy of a true modernist, records the uncomfortable travels (in many senses) of a maximal individualist (the book title is Greek for "I am") in an authoritarian and conformist society. A hotel clerk presses Cummings to identify in what capacity (and with what attitude toward the Revolution) he has come, suggesting "you wish to go to Russia as a writer and a painter? Is that it?" To which Cummings, refusing the categorizing instinct, replies, "I wish to go as myself."

Farley argues that the distancing, experimental style in Eimi highlights a tension within the work between high modernist aestheticism and late modernist political engagement, a tension many writers felt. Cummings both reveals and conceals his responses to post-revolutionary Russia in the indeterminacies of his poetic prose. Two passages, however, clearly reveal his core rejection of the collectivist mentality that smothers the individual and spiritual impulses of art. The first is a description of the famed Saint Basil's Cathedral on the Kremlin grounds, which Cummings simply calls "Something Fabulous" (the following approximates his self-consciously idiosyncratic punctuation and spacing):

a frenzy of writhing hues—clusteringly not possible whirls together grinding into one savage squirtlike ecstasy : a crazed Thinglike dream solemnly shouting out of timespace,a gesture fatal,acrobatic (goring tomorrow's lunge with bright beyondness of yesterday)—utterly a Self,catastrophic; distinct,unearthly and without fear.

In contrast to this onion-domed testimony to traditional Russian spirituality and imagination, Lenin's tomb is for Cummings a testimony to Marxist materialism:

a rigid pyramidal composition of blocks;an impurely mathematical game of edges : not quite cruelly a cubic celebration—equally glamourless and emphatic , withal childish … perhaps the architectural equivalent for "boo—I scared you that time!"

Has there ever been a more unexpected, and yet marvelously apt, architectural description of the emotional impact of a building? Cummings went to Russia to find out what was going on and he came home not greatly changed, but with firsthand information about the most important purely political event of the 20th century.

In the same year that Cummings went to Russia, Wyndham Lewis headed in the opposite direction, to North Africa. But the impulse that prompted him, according to Farley, was similar. Both in an earlier book on Hitler and in Filibusters in Barbary, Farley writes, "Lewis is attempting to find some political or social structure that would prevent a recurrence of the events that led to the First World War."

This seems a little grand (inflated claims being a recurring problem in this book) for a work that Lewis created, as he so often did in prose and in painting, to keep the pot boiling. Farley never cites Lewis himself making this claim for the book, nor does he show clearly what, in fact, Lewis may have found in his travels that would serve this enormous purpose. Nor, for that matter, does he show convincingly why Filibusters in Barbary should be considered a modernist work.

Though the chapter on Lewis doesn't live up to its stated goals, it does offer insights into Lewis as a writer and extracts some provocative points he makes about the enterprise of travel and culture-crossing in the modern world. Farley encapsulates a great deal of Lewis' entire career as both a writer and visual artist when he says the satire in Filibusters "ranges between personal slander and a kind of cultural critique." Lewis had previously applied both in books like Time and Western Man (1927) and The Apes of God (1930). In the latter he savaged what he took to be the artistic phonies and snarky cultural gate-keepers of Bloomsbury—"parlor-room nihilists" and "revolutionary simpletons," in his words. In Filibusters he was widening his attack to Western colonialism and, by implication, the broader stupidities of the modern world.

Farley depicts Lewis as both a critic of Western imperialism (the "filibusters" of the title refers to pirates or pillagers, in this case the French) and, of course, as complicit in it. Lewis admires the Berbers for their impassive resistance to being westernized (while predicting that, sadly, in a hundred years they will "be just like us"), but Farley claims that he also victimizes them by not seeing them in their long historical context. (Where can one find any critic in our time who does not assert or imply his or her moral superiority to the benighted thinkers of the past?)

One of the targets of Lewis' satire is the modern traveler. In both an earlier work, The Art of Being Ruled (1926), and here, Lewis argues against doing exactly what he is doing—traveling to experience other cultures. He says people wouldn't do it if advertising didn't seduce them, and because the great majority are not prepared to do it critically, the result is a messy "homogenizing" (Farley's word) of cultures. (When you arrive in a new country, Lewis says, "your head is stuffed with preconceived anticipatory pictures" that make it difficult even to experience virginally what you are experiencing.) Travel has become just another object of consumerist desire. You can buy cross-cultural "experiences" just as you buy a new pair of shoes.

Cummings went northeast to Russia, Lewis southeast to Morocco, and Rebecca West went in between to the Balkans (three times during the 1930s). I found the chapter on her book, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, the most engaging in Modernist Travel Writing, perhaps because Rebecca West is the writer among the four I know the least. Hers is the most explicitly political and passionate of the works considered. She very consciously (and beautifully) writes as an almost resigned Cassandra against the impending return of the bloodlust in Europe, feeling "a revulsion from the horror of history, and a dread that it might really be witless enough to repeat itself." (Not least because in their pacifistic response to Stalin's and Hitler's threats, British intellectuals were "fleeing towards death.")

Farley argues that what makes West's book modernist is its self-consciousness about the slipperiness of truth claims in any historical account of human experience, and her awareness of how history is turned into myth—often with violent and tragic results. Nowhere, for West, are these things seen more clearly than in the Balkans ("there is no end to political disputation in Croatia. None"), and she greatly fears that the hatreds and prejudices and nationalistic complexities of the Balkans prefigure what is in store for Europe as a whole. (One cannot help but think when reading her words of the current Middle East, among other places.)

A key part of the mythologizing process is the role of symbols. One such symbol is the iconostasis, the large wooden screen in Orthodox churches that separates the congregation from the altar. West probes throughout her book the ties between the political and the religious and sees the symbols of each tied up in the other. "For West," Farley observes, "the iconostasis serves not just as a metaphor for history where the real is always both masked and enlivened by a screen of words and perspectives but as a site where the very process of history continues as people are drawn to it in prayer and out of ritual."

West sees religion—in the Balkans and elsewhere—as complicit in bloodletting because it has long linked salvation and sacrifice (an intriguing, if contestable, claim). She witnesses a black lamb (as in her book title) having its throat cut on a rock as part of a fertility rite and sees it as a symbol of an irrational human equation of spilled blood and blessing, demonstrating our inability (and even lack of desire) to avoid violence. In that inability lies our tragedy, a tragedy that will unfold one more time in a second world war: "A part of us is enamored of the rock and tells us that we should not reject it, that it is solemn and mystical and only the shallow deny the value of sacrifice."

One thing that links these four writers in addition to their travel and their modernism is a fundamental dissatisfaction both with modern, consumerist culture and with their fellow intellectuals. West identifies the emotion that most often stimulates her to travel as "rage," and brilliantly skewers the spiritual and intellectual emptiness that each of these writers felt around them: "Our enemy is commerce: The frenetic distribution and exchange of ugly things made by unhappy people confuses the earth." (See Pound's Canto 45 for his poetic expression of the same sentiment.)

Farley claims, a bit too vigorously at times, that travel writing is an important part of modernism and that the books he deals with are themselves of great importance. Perhaps they should be, but they aren't, and herein lies a complaint about Modernist Travel Writing. He barely touches on The Cantos. I am one of a handful of people in the world who can walk to his bookshelf and pull down a copy of Filibusters in Barbary (a first edition, no less!), an accident of my own graduate education. Eimi is largely unread and West's book, though better known than the other two and championed by some discerning readers as a classic, is mostly read by historians and diplomats. I would very much like to see Farley apply his theses and his skills to some of the major works of literary modernism, which I believe could be significantly illuminated by his approach.

The Waste Land, for instance, does not simply employ "the vocabulary of travel indirectly through the citation of foreign literary works and traditions" as Farley claims (as though Eliot was stuck in a library). During the poem's gestation and execution, Eliot was traveling—both physically, to Germany, England, Margate, Lausanne, and Paris, and intellectually, to Jerusalem, Alexandria, and Carthage. Similarly, why settle for identifying a single allusion in Canto 7 when one can explore the travels of Pound that resulted in the famous USURA of Canto 45, or the Pisan Cantos, which Pound composed in part in a dog cage after his arrest in Italy? Why not explore how Joyce's travels in Europe affected his vision of distant Dublin in Ulysses, or how Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises—with its contrasting settings in Paris, Burgette, and Pamplona—is a travel book at the same time that it is a novel.

Having said that, Modernist Travel Writing breaks some new ground in highlighting a genre, travel writing, that is only recently getting its deserved attention and linking it to modernism, a large-scale movement in Western culture that we are still trying to make sense of. It is a book that prompts intellectual travel.

Daniel Taylor is the author most recently of Creating a Spiritual Legacy: How to Pass on Your Stories, Values, and Wisdom, just published by Brazos Press.

Copyright © 2011 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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