Word: traveling
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...TRAVEL (567 pp.)-Henry James-Edited by Morton Dauwen Za-bel-Doubleday...
...tourists are snobs of sorts, chiefly two: newness snobs and oldness snobs. Two well-traveled igth century U.S. writing men, Mark Twain and Henry James, stand like archsentinels at these two poles. Twain, the apostle of modernity, prized Italian railroads "more than Italy's hundred galleries of priceless art treasures." Antiquarian Henry James found the restoration of Venice's St. Mark's "crude" and "monstrous," even though the basilica might otherwise have crumbled about the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco.*This conflict adds a fillip to two thoroughly engaging travel books that should please the chairborne...
...Traveling with the Innocents Abroad is actually a highly unscrubbed first draft of Twain's The Innocents Abroad, the most popular travel book ever written by an American. As special correspondent for San Francisco's Daily Alta California, the 31-year-old Twain was dispatched on "The Grand Holy Land Pleasure Excursion" of 1867. The excursionists were a sobersided group of about 75, "chiefly composed of rusty old bachelors," bound first for Europe and then the Holy Land. Twain's task was to write dispatches on the pilgrims' progress. This is the first time "those wretched...
...cultural relativist, full, as he put it, of "the baleful spirit of the cosmopolite-that uncomfortable consequence of seeing many lands and feeling at home in none." The virtue of that defect, as James saw it, was tolerance. Compared to Twain's polemic, The Art of Travel, Critic Morton Dauwen Zabel's splendidly edited sampling of James's travel pieces on England, France, Italy and the U.S., is sunny-tempered and severely self-controlled...
...taste sometimes seem like parodies of it. In one such solemn-silly moment, James gravely agreed with a British friend that a certain garden at Cambridge University was "the most beautiful small garden in Europe." James loved the undistinguished quick rather less than the illustrious dead; nowhere in his travel accounts was there a jot of sympathetic indignation about the plight of Europe's poor and humble; Twain's letters are aflame with...