Gail Pool

“Worldwide travel is not compulsory. Great minds have been fostered entirely by staying close to home. Moses never got further than the Promised Land. Da Vinci and Beethoven never left Europe. Shakespeare hardly went anywhere at all―certainly not to Elsinore or the coast of Bohemia.”
―Jan Morris

Hindoo Holiday: An Indian Journal
By J. R. Ackerley. Introduction by Eliot Weinberger. First published in 1932. New York Review of Books Classics, 2000, 320 pp.

As a fan of My Dog Tulip, J. R Ackerley’s offbeat account of his relationship with his German Shepherd Queenie, I’m not sure why I’ve come so late to Hindoo Holiday. First published in 1932, this delightful book chronicles the author's months in India as private secretary to the eccentric, insecure, indecisive, and endearing Maharajah of Chhatarpur , or Chhokrapur, as the Indian state is called in the book.

In his excellent introduction, Eliot Weinberger describes the circumstances that drew Ackerley to India in 1923 at the age of 27. He had fought in WWI, returned to attend Cambridge, published some poems, and written a play. But finding no producer for the play, with its “implicit homoeroticism,” he was “adrift,” and took up his friend E. M. Forster’s suggestion to seek the post with the Maharajah, who, like Ackerley, was gay. Hindoo Holiday itself is explicitly homoerotic and the text was cut when the book first appeared. Indeed, this is the first unexpurgated edition to be published in the West. Read More 

Ginna Vogt, who has written a memoir about living in Yemen, recommends Yemen: The Unknown Arabia, by Tim Mackintosh-Smith. "It is a lovely book," she says, "and is intriguing even for people with no particular interest in Yemen." A flaw of the book, she notes, is that the author "writes about the place as if it is a complete account of the country, even though women are completely absent from the story."

Nonetheless, "the book is clever and erudite, and made up of somewhat distinct chapters which cover specific regions or issues in some depth rather than being global and boring." Read More 

"In a sense, all travel writers are novelists, with themselves as heroes."
―Malise Ruthven, Traveler Through Time: Photographic Journey with Freya Stark

High Albania.
By Edith Durham. With a new introduction by John Hodgson. First published in 1909. Beacon Press, Virago/Beacon travelers, 1985, 352 pp.

I have always been fascinated by those early, mainly British, women travelers who donned their thick skirts and set off on incredibly difficult journeys—to Africa, or Asia, or the southern Arabian deserts. How ill-prepared they should have been. How extraordinarily well they coped! Mary Kingsley credited her good thick skirt for a safe landing when she fell into a game pit!

For Edith Durham, according to John Hodgson’s introduction to High Albania, travel began as a curative for a personal crisis.  Read More