|
|
She went to Mexico with an unidentified American woman just as literary, conventionally snobbish and idiosyncratic as herself. “Don Otavio” is exactly what a travel book should be: an unpacking of all one's moral, intellectual and esthetic luggage in a foreign place. Mrs Bedford has an opinion - one worth having - about everything. Naturally, she has many prejudices, for prejudice is the vehicle of the British literary traveller, and long may it wave. She is generally either provoked, bored or amused, and these moods are like three wines served with each mean. She is provoked when “Something Else” creeps in: some unclassifiable quirk that is not consistent with her conception of the country. She is bored when her trip bogs down in the mechanics of travel, when “the proposed enchantment is seen as our planned and burdened crawl about the earth,” or because a place is “forlorn to make one cry.” She is amused when Mexico produces a grand eccentric with the face of one of “Goya's minor courtiers” and a beautiful house on a lake, where he presses Mrs Bedford and her friend to stay forever, She is dissatisfied with D. H. Lawrence's Mexican novel, “The Plumed Serpent.” “Something,” she says, “was being constantly expostulated and one never knew quite what.” Her own expostulations are never ineffable. She observes, for example, of Mexican folk music that “it strives to be at once virile and melancholy, and succeeds in sounding military and yearning.” At a museum, she and her companion are shown “the embalming syringe” used on the corpse of the Emperor Maximilian. Like the poet Elizabeth Bishop, who said of Brazil that there were “too many waterfalls here,” Mrs Bedford's companion finds a volcano de trop. About the attitudes of the Conquistadors and their descendents toward Mexico, Mrs Bedford observes that “the distinction between the spirit of adventure and the spirit of inquiry had not yet been drawn.” And when a man on a bus offers them tortillas he has been carrying inside his shirt, she reflects that “hygiene has cut off man from man more than any class distinctions.” About two-thirds of the way through her trip, she says, “I was in that tertiary state of fatigue where the nerves and senses lie bared to direct contact with the world and there is no longer distance or matter between the vision and the absorption, where the mind races, recording, lucid but empty, and beauty can become ours through osmosis.” That's travelling.
|
A Visit to Don Otavio has been sporadically in and out of print and very hard to find. We should be grateful to Eland Books for bringing it out again. Mrs Bedford is a well-known British novelist who also published a two-volume biography of Aldous Huxley, and “Don Otavio” is regarded by aficionados as a classic of British travel writing.