White Sands by Geoff Dyer

Even now, after this spectacular renaissance, the Spiral Jetty is not always visible. If there is exceptionally heavy snowfall, then the thaw does for the lake what the globally heated polar ice pack threatens to do to the oceans. Once the snowmelt ends up in the lake, it can take months of drought and scorch to boil off the excess and leave the Jetty high and dry again. Was it worth traveling all this way to see something we might not be able to see? Well, pilgrims continued to turn up even during the long years when there was definitely nothing to see, so it seemed feeble not to give it a chance. (There is probably a sect of art-world extremists who maintain that the best time to have visited the Spiral Jetty was during the years of its invisible submergence, when the experience became a pure manifestation of faith.)

The first thing Geoff Dyer does when he arrives in Tahiti is lose his biography of Gauguin. This cataclysm comes to stand in for the whole excursion, which is defined for Dyer by its absences, the holes in the experience, as huge and gaping as the absence of Gauguin's massive Where Do We Come From?, which turns out not to be on display when Dyer arrives at the Louvre. Gauguin's Tahiti has become a Disneyland, expensive and crass, and though a fellow traveler encourages him, "Look out there... Look at that amazing sea," the view is lost on him. Traveling further to a remote island where Gauguin spent his days, Dyer writes, "[T]he question 'Where are we going?' was turning into its vexed opposite, 'Where are we not going?'--to which the answer was: all the places I really wanted to go. Other people thought Hiva Oa was paradise, but if this was the case it was a paradise from which I was becoming impatient to be expelled."

Is this working for you? Or do you feel, like I feel, supreme annoyance at the display of a guy traveling to somewhere I'll never be able to go, on a trip underwritten entirely by Tahiti's tourism board, telling me that it's not all it's cracked up to be? Dyer's disappointment is not any ordinary disappointment, it's a contemplative disappointment, that's supposed to tell us something about the gap between our mental scheme of a place and the actual experience of being there. Thank god for guys like this, who can go somewhere and tell us, and in such articulate language, that it's all so dull. Dyer's primary interest in Tahiti is the women, who are "total babes in a babelicious paradise of unashamed babedom," until "almost overnight, they get incredibly fat." (There are about two pages describing how fat Polynesian people get.) In the next essay, Dyer writes about how his lukewarm interest in Beijing's Forbidden City was supplanted by his interest in his female tour guide, and how he spent the rest of his trip hoping to bring her back to his hotel room.

Of course, it's not really Dyer in these essays. A note preceding the collection warns us that they are fictionalized, that the "I" is not really an "I." We are safe, then, to feel a little creeped out by the narrator's prurient interest in the women of Tahiti and China, or his lamentation for Polynesian obesity, because that's just a character. Presumably it's also a character who spends a trip to Svalbard in the middle of winter, hoping to see the Northern Lights, quibbling with his wife Jessica. The pair have a miserable time, but that's not really Dyer's wife. His wife isn't even Jessica; her real name is Rebecca. But it's hard to ignore the feeling that there's some sleight-of-hand going on, that Dyer really does think the Tahiti is a "babelicious paradise," and wants to say it without being perceived as truly having said it. Is there a Dyer underneath all this, somewhere, that had a pleasant morning in Tahiti, or enjoyed an afternoon in Svalbard? Or are the real Dyer and the fake Dyer in unison that travel often proves to be a joyless disappointment?

Let me be fair: it's not all like that. I was really grateful for Dyer's essay about traveling to Walter De Maria's The Lightning Field, an installation in the New Mexico desert made of hundreds of lightning rods. The Lightning Field seems primed to be a disappointment. Access is strictly controlled; you have to enter a lottery, and when you're given a date, you are picked up and driven to a remote cabin by the installation for a day and night. But lightning only strikes sixty or so days out of the year; most people who are lucky enough to visit The Lightning Field see no lightning. And Dyer doesn't. But he's captivated by the way the light unfolds on the installation itself--it's a work of time as much as art. "Part of the experience of coming here is the attempt to understand and articulate," Dyer writes, "one's responses to the experiences." So he has a sense of wonder after all.

Dyer is at his best writing about large-scale artworks like The Lightning Field. Another essay focuses on Spiral Jetty (which I too have seen), the seminal earthwork by Robert Smithson that has been at times invisible beneath the Great Salt Lake. (Though it was written only in 2016, it seems strange to write about Spiral Jetty without talking about the lake as a victim of climate change; someone who visits the jetty now will not have to entertain the possibility of not seeing it because the lake has shrunk well past the jetty and shows little sign of recovery.) Another essay about the Watts Towers of L.A., built single-handedly by an Italian immigrant named Simon Rodia, captures the sense of baffling human achievement that such works inspire. Dyer is at his best when he finds a way to care about these place--the Watts Towers are deeply connected to the world of jazz, and intersect in fascinating ways with another essay about exploring the L.A. of German emigres Theodore Adorno and Thomas Mann. If only Adorno or Ornette Colman had spent a few years in Tahiti or Svalbard.

Mr. Fortune by Sylvia Townsend Warner

He should say something like: "Your god, Lueli, was only made of wood, perishable and subject to accidents, like man who is made of flesh.  He is now burnt, and his ashes are lost among the other ashes.  Now will you not see that my God is a better God than yours, and turn to Him?  For my God is from everlasting, even though the earth shake He cannot be moved."

Yes, that was the sort of thing to say, but he felt a deep reluctance to saying it.  It seemed ungentlemanly to have such a superior invulnerable God, part of that European conspiracy which opposes gun-boats to canoes and rifles to bows and arrows, which showers death from the mountains upon Indian villages, which rounds up the negro into an empire and tricks him of his patrimony.

Timothy Fortune is an Anglican missionary who sets out to convert the Polynesian island of Fanua.  The islanders welcome him with open arms; they are charmed by his quirky ways: his apprehension around the scantily-clad women, the strange music he plays on his harmonium.  But even though he stays many years, he gains only one convert, a youth named Lueli, and Lueli's soul is constantly a source of anxiety for Mr. Fortune.  When he discovers Lueli's god--a small wooden idol that is "his" god in the way that all the islanders have their own hand-carved gods--at an altar in the forest, he despairs for his failure to convert Lueli properly.

Mr. Fortune--actually, Mr. Fortune's Maggot, the first of two slim novels collected in this edition--begins as a particularly sharp parody of European colonialism.  Mr. Fortune bumbles around the island, as unaware of his own priggishness as only a condescending white missionary can be.  He notes that Polynesians, even Lueli, have trouble conceiving of Jesus because they are "not sorrowful enough," without, of course, thinking through the logic of that statement.  And yet Lueli, his young protege, is attached to Mr. Fortune with great ardor and intimacy and accepts his teaching with great equanimity, even when the subject is a particularly bungled lesson in geometry.  What I expected, having heard a little about this book from Brent, was a barely sublimated gay romance, a love which Mr. Fortune represses through his own staunch religion.  And it's not exactly not that.  But while Mr. Fortune's blindness is played for laughs, the intimacy between him and Lueli never is.

About two-thirds of the way through, the novel changes in a way that is both obvious and subtle.  A volcano tremor destroys Mr. Fortune's house, crushing everything inside, including the idol that he had demanded Lueli burn.  Lueli's spirit dies with his own god, and he becomes despondent.  But remarkably, Mr. Fortune's faith dies also, and in the passing of a heartbeat he gives up his Anglican mission for good.  What follows is a meditation on love that took my breath away, a long-formulating realization that Mr. Fortune must leave the island to preserve Lueli, whom he loves above all things:

"I loved him," he thought.  "From the moment I set eyes on him I loved him.  Not with what is accounted a criminal love, for though I set my desire on him it was a spiritual desire.  I did not even love him as a father loves a son, for that is a familiar love, and at the times when Lueli most entranced me it was as a being remote, intact, and incalculable.  I waited to see what his next movement would be, if he would speak or no--it was the not knowing what he would do that made him dear.  Yes, that was how I loved him best, those were my happiest moments; when I was just aware of him, and sat with my sense awaiting him, not wishing to speak, not wishing to make him notice me until he did so of his own accord because no other way would it be perfect, would it be by him.  And how often, I wonder, have I let it be just like that?  Perhaps a dozen times, perhaps twenty times all told, perhaps, when all is put together, for an hour out of the three years I had with him.  For man's will is a demon that will not let him be.  It leads him to the edge of a clear pool; and while he sits admiring it, with his soul suspended over it like a green branch and dwelling in its own reflection, will stretches out his hand and closes his fingers upon a stone--a stone to throw into it."

Guh. I'd give my hands to have written a paragraph as perfect as that one.  It reveals something shockingly true about love: when it is real it comes out of a recognition of difference, seeing someone as a discrete person outside of yourself, and yet a difference that affirms its essential similarity.  How crazy it is to encounter another being as full of spirit as yourself, yet so alien.  And the same feeling produces a revulsion, a kind of anger.  Like Oscar Wilde says, "Each man kills the thing he loves."  But Wilde's pithiness is no match for Warner's lyrical elaboration, I think.

Warner felt so attached to Mr. Fortune that she revisited him years later in a smaller standalone novella called "The House of the Salutation."  Mr. Fortune, having left Fanua, travels miserably around the world until he comes upon a widow living with a handful of servants in an old rundown mansion in the Argentine Pampas.  The widow seizes upon Mr. Fortune's appearance with a love that is more recognizably romantic than the one he had with Lueli, but no less strange or reverent.  This angers the widow's young heir, who suspects Mr. Fortune as having designs on the estate.  "The heart is like a dog," she says.  "It barks, and lies down again."  The novella is strange and dense, without the touch of irony that lightens Mr. Fortune's Maggot, but touching, because Warner apparently could not forsake her apostate priest and was compelled to provide him, at last, with love.

Typee by Herman Melville

During the time I lived among the Typees, no one was ever put upon his trial for any offence against the public.  To all appearances there were no courts of law or equity.  There was no municipal police for the purpose of apprehending vagrants and disorderly characters.  In short, there were no legal provisions whatever for the well-being and conservation of society, the enlightened end of civilized legislation.  And yet everything went on in the valley with a harmony and smoothness unparalleled, I will venture to assert, in the most select, refined, and pious associations of mortals in Christendom.  How are we to explain this enigma?  These islanders were heathens! savages! ay, cannibals! and how came they, without the aid of established law, to exhibit, in so eminent a degree, that social order which is the greatest blessing and highest pride of the social state!

Brent expressed to me the other day the opinion that Melville gets something of a bad rap based on Moby Dick.  Truthfully, Melville was better known in his day for adventure novels like Typee, which details the life of a man who has abandoned his service in a whaling boat, only to fall captive to a native group of Polynesian islanders.  You can see that in Moby Dick, of course, which is an adventure novel that became something else entirely.  Typee doesn't have the explosive virtuosity of Moby Dick, but it does have the special benefit of being kind of true--Melville himself spent months marooned among the Typee, renowned for their vicious cannibalism.

For the narrator, Tommo, the Typee islanders fail to live up to their bloodthirsty reputation.  To the contrary, what he finds in the Typee valley is a utopian paradise with abundant food, natural beauty, no crime, and a life marked by leisure and camaraderie.  The Typee adopt him as, if not one of their own, something more sacred, marked by the mysterious "Taboo" that structures their religion and habits.  Tommo even has a gal Friday, a beautiful native named Fayaway who is devoted to him.

The Typees are your typical "noble savages," and Melville goes out of his way to point out that they lack institutions of law, as well as Christian theology.  What good is civilization, if the most prosperous places lack it?  He compares the Typees to the native Hawaiians, suffering under the introduction of white colonialism, disease, and social unrest.  Yet Tommo is unable to devote himself completely to the Typee lifestyle--he refuses, for instance, to let his face be tattooed in a scene that approaches slapstick comedy.  He schemes to get away, despite his ready admission that Typee society is far superior to his own.  Tommo's inability to relinquish his European life is another facet of Melville's criticism; why, he asks, can we not let go of what we know does us no good?

But the noble savage hypothesis is stupid, and it does the complexity of pre-colonial civilizations no real favors.  Typee is awesome not because of its politics but because it's a rousing adventure story, and a comedy of manners, although the manners are unfamiliar ones.  If you can go for the ride--unlike Tommo--it's a lot of fun.