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MARY McCARTHY
is
his
"straight" travel book. The type seems to go back to
Robinson Crusoe;
most of Conrad's heroes, in a sense, are
stranded Robinson Crusoes, demoralized by consciousness. In a
more conventional way, Dickens, Stendhal, Henry James all
published journals of travel-"impressions." Mark Twain,
Henry Miller, George Orwell
(Down and Out in Paris
and
London, Shooting an Elephant)-the
list is even more ar–
resting if you consider the theater and try to imagine Ibsen,
Shaw, or O'Neill as the authors of travel books. Yet Ibsen
spent years abroad, in Italy and Germany, and O'Neill, like
Melville and Conrad, went to sea as a young man.
The passion for fact in a raw state is a peculiarity of the
novelist. Most of the great novels contain blocks and lumps
of fact-refractory lumps in the porridge of the story. Students
often complain of this in the old novels. They skip these "boring
parts" to get on with the story, and in America a branch of
publishing specializes in shortened versions of novels-"cut for
greater reading speed." Descriptions and facts are eliminated,
and only the pure story, as it were the scenario, is left. But a
novel that was only a scenario would not be a novel at all.
Everyone knows that Balzac was a lover of fact. He delight–
ed in catalogues of objects, inventories, explanations of the
way institutions and industries work, how art is collected,
political office is bought, fortunes are amassed or hoarded.
One of his novels,
Les Illusions Perdues,
has a chapter which
simply describes the way paper is made. The chapter has
nothing to do with the action of the novel (it comes in because
the hero has inherited a paper factory) ; Balzac put it in because
he happened at the time to know something about the paper
business. He loved facts of every kind indiscriminately-straight
facts, curious facts, quirks, oddities, aberrations of fact, figures,
statistics. He collected them and stored them, like one of
his
own misers, intending to house them in that huge structure,
The Human Comedy,
which is at once a scale model of the
real world and a museum of curios left to mankind as though
by a crazy hermit who could never throw anything away.
