How to Disappear: A Memoir for Misfits
by Duncan Fallowell
Terrace Books (U. of Wisconsin Press) 237 pages, $26.95
HOW TO DISAPPEAR won the Pen Ackerley Prize for autobiography last year, which may seem odd, since the five travel essays that comprise it are not exactly autobiography, and Fallowell’s prose style could not provide more of a contrast to that of J. R. Ackerley, the author of My Father and Myself. Ackerley wrote an astringent prose in which not one word was wasted (perhaps because he’d spent years as an editor at The Listener, the BBC magazine), while Fallowell writes more like a splatter painter: a voluble, richly high-and-low explosion of language. Fallowell’s travel writing is so stream-of-consciousness, however, that it feels like autobiography. He started his career covering rock music for The Spectator, belonged to an avant garde German band called Can, has interviewed celebrities, and has written novels, an opera, and the biography of a transsexual—all of which leave traces in How to Disappear. That he’s not better known to American readers is hard to understand. Travel writing depends largely on the traveler, and Fallowell’s brilliance delights in every sentence, paragraph, and page.
Sometimes one detects the ghost of Ronald Firbank in his work, not only in the dialogue and the way it’s recorded, but in where Fallowell goes—places the bourgeoisie does not. (“I can’t stand being herded. It’s one of my problems in life.”) Not Malta, for instance (though the harbor may be the most beautiful in Europe), but Gozo, its nondescript sister. “Is Gozo like Sicily?” Fallowell asks some English residents of the island who are leaving for Palermo when he arrives. “Not in the least,” one replies. “Sicily is civilization.” Fallowell loves civilization—the destination in one of his other books is a town renowned for its baroque architecture—but he also likes the absence of civilization: the unvisited and overlooked. How to Disappear concerns the latter kind of place, and person.
The first essay is about Gozo. The second is about an Anglo–Indian beauty named Bapsy Pavry, whose photograph he finds in an issue of the Indian Yearbook while killing time one evening in the Ratan Tata Officers’ Holiday Home in Ootacamund. The third is set on an island in the Hebrides purchased by a German multimillionaire who never visits, despite the islanders’ eagerness to see what he will do with his new possession. The fourth is about a man Fallowell encounters in a pub on the west coast of England who, he learns, was the inspiration for Sebastian Flyte in Brideshead Revisited—an ex-boyfriend of Evelyn Waugh who wants nothing more than to be overlooked. The final essay is about the death of Princess Diana.
Death, of course, is the ultimate disappearance, but the book is even dedicated to “an old friend … whom I’ve never met,” though even when you grant the theme, one is tempted to think these pieces are also odds and ends that didn’t fit into his longer travel books (like 1989’s To Noto, or London to Sicily in a Ford or 1994’s equally enthralling One Hot Summer in Saint Petersburg). On Gozo, for instance, Fallowell finds himself one of only three guests at a decaying Edwardian hotel that is, he learns, slated for replacement by a modern structure that will qualify the owner for a bank loan. “This is the only hotel on Gozo with any history or personality,” he reflects after hearing the news. “Therefore it has to be demolished. Haven’t they learned, in this wretched ditch of blinkered bank managers, that these days you restore? Sense of place is in, mate!” And when the only other guests at the hotel, a couple in the adjacent room, begin to make love, the sound leaves Fallowell un-aroused, because, he says, “I have that in Palermo.”
If you’ve read To Noto, you’ll recall that while staying in Palermo, he knocked at the hotel room next to his because there was loud music coming from there and ended up spending the next seven hours with the young man who opened the door. This young man was only one of several to whom Fallowell was attracted, though sex itself is never described, only referred to, as in this recollection of a night spent with Greek sailors in Colombo: “All I remember is … I came to in a small cabin roused by a big soft cock tapping gently against my cheek.” The story of One Hot Summer in Saint Petersburg is about his falling in love with a young Russian naval cadet. But cruising—even in the Gozo essay—is not the point; the point, the marvelous point in all his travel writing, is his passionate response to everything else.
In other words, Fallowell’s travel books are about whatever’s on his mind, and what’s on his mind is simply the fate of the earth: over-population, modern development, industrial tourism, garbage, violence, even, as he drives to Sicily, the radioactive cloud spreading from Chernobyl. Although travel is escape, he claims, the drama in his books comes from the fact that one can’t escape the species that, in trying to control the world, is bringing it to ruin.
Written in the present tense, these travel books have the intimacy of a diary, though there are flashbacks and flash forwards, scenes omitted and tension created, in the interest of the narrative. The result is the smallest possible gap between experience and its printed version. We live these journeys with Fallowell as they happen (which makes the climax of To Noto so moving): the bad sleep, bad meals, bad taste, incredible views, national traits, food, weather, solitude (its pleasures and depression), highways, toilets, even the condition of his stools. The line between travelogue and novel is blurred here, but that’s what’s marvelous; the writing is so good it saves you the trip.
This collection of essays, however, whose subtitle is “A Memoir for Misfits,” has a theme (though it runs through St. Petersburg and Noto as well): the sin of non-communication. If Ackerley’s My Father and Myself is about something held back (a family secret), Fallowell is all about revealing. “You must never blank people when intimate relations have arisen,” he writes in his India essay, “you must never slam the door in their face. I’ve been the victim of it several times—and it’s the worst. It gives you no chance of dealing with it and working it through. You just stand there in the middle of the road wondering what happened, what did I do. … When the other party has a change of heart but will not tell you why they have, or indeed that they have—this is the cruelest mystery of all, for the mind cannot rest but cogitates ceaselessly.”
That is just what Fallowell does in these books: cogitate ceaselessly. “Amphetamine-orange pee in a bright yellow loo” is what he sees while peeing in India—in 1975—but one may wonder if the author of How to Disappear is still on speed. On Fallowell’s journeys, forward flow is everything. He loathes its opposite, we learn as he sits waiting for the German tycoon who’s bought the island to return his calls: “I don’t mind waiting for a while, for quite a long while very often. So much of my life has been spent waiting, because I don’t see that there’s any alternative if you are trying to achieve something. You get on with other things of course, but in your heart you are still waiting. For love, for success, for a cheque, for an answer, an acceptance, a telephone call, an email, a response, yes, a response, often that’s all one is waiting for, a human response. … But there comes a point when if you hang around any longer you’re a berk.”
(The American reader might think this is a typo for jerk, but it’s not. How to Disappear is replete with British words that the American reader may not know—“plimsoll,” “pong,” et al.; though that may not explain Fallowell’s comparison of Good Friday to “Sunday with knobs on,” or his aside that “worries are the banisters of life.”)
Stasis, non-communication, disappearance are anathema; the place no one has ever heard of, like the person who disappears, is a mystery that must be cleared up. The purpose of travel is to make contact. “Do you think the search for authentic experience is doomed in our modern world? I don’t.” This is a theme that gives rise to the longest of the digressions that pepper his prose—a rant, really, that’s launched when, sitting with an Italian companion in their hotel in the Hebrides, Luca mentions a job offer in Venice:
Travelers travel in search of freedom and therefore should avoid Venice which is under permanent occupation and where their minds will be incarcerated in cliché.
Unable to drown itself, Venice lacks even the power to drown others. The great drownees, Shelley and Le Corbusier for example, gulped their last elsewhere. Although people do not drown in Venice, they do get submerged, trapped in an aqua fantasy between life and death, and instead of expiring they go on and on and on about it in their semi-sozzled purgatory, about this or that church, this or that palace, this or that restaurant. But nobody has an adventure in Venice, as nobody has an adventure in Disneyland or Harrod’s. Adventure has been edited out of the programme because adventure is commercially unreliable. The true horror of Venice is that its fate, in a world of too many people, could well be the fate of all beautiful places: the fenced-off national park as much as the railed-off cameo township, trampled because protected, polluted because isolated, degraded because valued. Eventually the only beautiful places will be inside us. What a revolting thought.
If the essays in How to Disappear seem uneven, the importance of the theme wavers too. The reasons for someone’s desire to seclude himself, much less vanish, are not gone into here; there is not much that the various misfits have in common. The man who served as the model for Sebastian Flyte seems to be driven by a psychological imperative, but where it comes from we do not know. The German tycoon’s absence is simply irritating; the Harvard graduate on the beach in Gozo is unexplained, Bapsy Pavry is too remote, and Princess Diana dead. Still, this interest in vanishing has something to do, I think, with the author’s outrage at what we do to our history. When Fallowell learns the Edwardian hotel in Gozo is doomed to be demolished, for instance, he pours himself a glass of Bacchus, the local wine, and:
Suddenly the ghosts of the place are very strong—aroused by imminent obliteration—scraps of chat about garden parties and illicit sex, threaded by echoes of foxtrot music—yes, the English this way came, bearing cocktails and epaulettes—you can hear them laughing and sighing, drinking, ruling, playing gramophone records and tennis … nostalgia hisses into the room like a gas, as asphyxiating as a faceful of Pre-Raphaelite arum lilies. Nostalgia, loss, melancholy, are these not forms of love? [Although:] Actually I feel awful. More Bacchus wine please. … Because I shall leave Gozo now. Can’t live here for ever. The clock which stopped is moving once more. Time starts eating again, with a crunchy noise like that of the deathwatch beetle. [And finally:] “What was that about nostalgia and melancholy being forms of love? They are forms of paralysis! The sense of loss—enough of it! Let the pull of the past be succeeded by the pull of the future and the sense of loss replaced by the sense of expectancy. Our world is embodied contradiction, our lives possible only in the fluctuations of reciprocity, and now it is the turn of the future. Besides, I’ve run out of books and there is not a proper bookshop on the island. … Hot water gushes into the bathtub and shampoo makes fragrant foam. To-morrow—another boat, another destination.
Lucky us! These excerpts may sound cerebral, but Fallowell’s work is, besides the ceaseless cogitation, a highly entertaining mix of historical anecdote, human relationships, physical description, and genuine anguish over what people are doing to the planet, all of which make his books extremely entertaining. He may be a faultfinder, but he belongs to a great tradition: “In 1851 John Ruskin, outraged, reported that the arcades of the Doge’s palace were in use by tourists as a latrine; but the city had already been ruined for him by the arrival of the railway several years before. Mind you, travelling writers are always like this. I loved Penang before the airport was built.” Nevertheless, “Venice experienced the kiss of death the day Richard Wagner walked into the foyer of the Danieli.”
This is hard to resist. His last novel is called A History of Facelifting.
Andrew Holleran’s latest book is Chronicles of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath.
