Why was I not informed about Nicolas Bouvier before ? How come I’d never heard of this man, and after a full thirty six years on this planet stumble like a fool on his collected works, which I pick up with a blasé face, only to discover a Maestro travel writer, like Luke Skywalker finding out that the dirty little creature who’se stealing his food rations is Yoda the Master. I fully share the feelings of Mr Sammy Potts in this remarkable article ( this boy is only twelve years old ? Such talent !) about his discovering Bruce Lee:

http://www.theonion.com/content/opinion/why_was_i_not_informed_about

Yet I had heard of Paul Theroux, I’ve read “The Songlines” by Bruce Chatwin, “Slowly down the Ganges” by Eric Newby, “Among the Believers” by VS Naipaul ( well I’ve read most of it and I find it interesting. Why do my Muslim friends dislike it so much ? It’s nowhere as harsh as “An Area of Darkness”). It’s true that I hadn’t paid much attention to the French tradition of travel writing, because the British school is so much more famous. I think it’s Eric Newby who said: “The French endure much hardship in the name of commerce, religion and empire. Only the British travel to get as far away as possible from their land”.

Anyway Nicolas Bouvier is ( was, actually- alas) not French, but Swiss, from that respectable Huguenot bourgeoisie which Jean Cohen skewered in “Belle du Seigneur”. He grew up in a highly cultivated, but rather stuffy family ( How fortunate for us. Would he, at the age of eight have traced the course of the Yukon on the butter of his toast, as he did, if his parents had been anarcho-syndicalists living in a cellar in Barcelona ? Even the Lord needed a Judas to be there to accomplish his destiny. Did Judas have a choice ? Borges has made some dizzying hypotheses on this topic. But I digress) and at the tender age of twenty and three, did set on the road in a Fiat Topolino. Beforehand, he had dismantled it into its six thousand ( eight thousand according to another of his essays. But after one hundred nobody can count, unless you’ve got pointed ears and are the resident bore in an adventurous spacecraft) spare parts, and reassembled it, like a giant Mecano. Here, already , my envy starts for I am afflicted with two left hands, as the French say. But my envy has ample reason to puff and puff as I keep reading his adventures, until it bursts and I bend both knees, acknowledging him to be a true Master.

Let’s , for the sake of economy, bypass the ample matter of his mental and physical courage ( the fevers, the meager lifestyle, the terrible loneliness of his seven months in Sri Lanka. Along his travels, he writes articles for local magazines, thereby getting just enough money to survive for the next few weeks. The prospect of real starvation in Japan makes an art photographer out of him). Other people could have endured as much, but not become great writers. Not him. The characters he describes while on the road have an immediacy, a powerful presence such that you have the impression they are right next to your armchair. His style is limpid and precise, the images tumble on after the other as if, on a return from Bali, a playful uncle had lifted a suitcase and opening it wide, had let its cloth and trinkets tumble down in front of marvelling nieces and nephews, while the smell from there fills the room.

Of course, it’s not just cute exoticism. Whether in Yugoslavia, Iran, Korea or Japan, Nicolas Bouvier describes plenty of sharp misery. I particularly remember his poignant lines about the Japanese fondness for photographs ( sorry for the very imprecise translation, from memory): “It was an avidity to capture the few joyful moments in life.Wherever I would enter a house, I would be given first of all photo albums and looking at them, I learned more about the country than by going to a hundred art photography exhibitions. Gazing at the endless pictures of big eyed children under their school caps, I came upon a frugal, introverted and pathetic Japan which tourist brochures do not speak of”. Same could apply for China. I guess that like karaoke, photographs are a means of effusion for the stoic people of East Asia.

Nicolas Bouvier deeply empathises with the people he comes across in his travels. Wherever he meets awful setbacks, the smallest of which would have sent Naipaul musing about “sense of loss” and “sense of decay”, his immense patience and superb sense of humour lifts him to a joyous sympathy, like the ideal drinking companion to have at the bar after a bad day. I love the first page of his travel notes on Tabriz ( sorry for the very imprecise translation, made from memory):

“Travelling is full of surprises. After having breezed through Anatolia in three days, one arrives in Tabriz, in Northern Iran. There, while one is spending one’s first evening in a bar with an apatrid doctor, the night falls, and with it, the snow, which covers the roads further East. One ends up spending seven months there. Yet Tabriz was controlled to the military, and getting a residence permit is not easy. The apatrid doctor sent us to an officer whom he had cured from a tumour. The man had been trained in the Prussian military tradition and his interrogation was sharp, severe, impeccable. Yet , a few days later, his demeanour had changed. With a loving gaze, he told us that we had been granted the permits, and, blushing to the roots of his hair, he mumbled: “I have just spent two hours in the mosque, praying that we could become close, very close friends”. His wishes were not granted for a few days later he was transferred. The best laid plans of mice and men… “Had you noticed their swarthy yet rosy cheekbones ?” said Thierry [ Nicolas’ travelling companion] Yes, but my mind had been stunned by something else – what a Lord in Heaven [ Quel Bon Dieu – untranslatable], to whom one could ask everything”

The dark spot of his travels – from Switzerland to Yugoslavia, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Sri Lanka, Japan – is his seven months in Sri Lanka where, tortured by fever and loneliness, he scrapes past madness. I don’t know what to make of his alleged conversations with the ghost of a Jesuit who helps him with his articles in English for a Sri Lankan literary magazine. Is it an elaborate joke ? He describes the meetings in the same precise manner as when he writes of the great battle between an anthill and a termite nest in the courtyard of his inn. What about his seeing a goblin arise with a thunderous sound from the ground between his feet, to serve himself with a pickle jar, which the shopkeeper puts in her books in the credit accounts just like for any other customer ? And the swirling ectoplasm which arises in the shop of a watch repairer, only to be chased by a sleepy exorcist armed with a banana leaf?

Whatever it was, it was time for him to escape by way of a cruise ship, in which he was a lowly dishwasher, to Japan, which he loved to the point where he returned there twice, the second time with his wife ( A beautiful woman. Such a man deserved that. They can’t all end up with real estate tycoons).

In his later life, he was an iconographer, and has written several interesting articles on images, which I have yet to finish reading. In one of the few I’ve already read, he tells of the two pictures he keeps pinned on the wall in front of him. One is of a man with a donkey head, to remind himself of his “stupidity” ( this man is an erudite, but one of those about whom it is said: the pedant carries his learning like a man walking with a ladder through a crowd. The wise man carries his like a bunch of balloons). The other is a Japanese print of ghastly beauty, showing the face of a dead woman on whose lips a lizard rears its head. The woman’s face is contorted, yet a “malefic beauty” as he says, emanates from her fine, snowy features and the lizard’s supple, electric presence tells of the persistence of life.

He loved donkeys because he considered their endurance and quiet ability to be the marks of the good traveller. Nicolas Bouvier died in 1998 and in belated hommage to him, I reproduce here a poem which he liked, and to which I also am very much attached, Francis Jammes’ Prière pour aller au Paradis avec les Anes:

Lorsqu ' il faudra aller vers Vous, ô mon Dieu, faites
que ce soit par un jour où la campagne en fête
poudroiera. Je désire, ainsi que je fis ici-bas,
choisir un chemin pour aller,
comme il me plaira,
au Paradis, où sont en plein jour les étoiles.
Je prendrai mon bâton et sur la grande route
j'irai, et je dirai aux ânes, mes amis :
Je suis Francis Jammes et je vais au paradis,
car il n'y a pas d'enfer au pays du Bon Dieu.
Je leur dirai : Venez, doux amis du ciel bleu,
pauvres bêtes chéries qui,
d'un brusque mouvement d'oreille,
chassez les mouches plates, les coups
et les abeilles...
Que je Vous apparaisse au milieu de ces bêtes
Que j'aime tant parce qu'elles baissent la tête
doucement, et s'arrêtent en joignant leurs petits
pieds
d'une façon bien douce et qui vous fait pitié.
J'arriverai suivi de leurs milliers d'oreilles,
suivis de ceux qui portèrent au flanc
des corbeilles,
de ceux traînant des voitures de saltimbanques
ou des voitures de plumeaux et de fer-blanc,
de ceux qui ont au dos des bidons bossués,
des ânesses pleines comme des outres, aux pas
cassés,
de ceux à qui l'on met de petits pantalons
à cause des plaies bleues et suintantes que font
les mouches entêtées qui s'y groupent en rond.
Mon Dieu faites qu'avec ces ânes je Vous vienne.
Faites que, dans la paix, des anges nous
conduisent
vers des ruisseaux touffus où tremblent
des cerises
lisses comme la chair qui rit des jeunes filles,
et faites que, penché dans ce séjour des âmes,
sur Vos divines eaux je sois pareil aux ânes
qui mireront leur humble et douce pauvreté

à la limpidité de l'amour éternel