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Tuesday, Nov 10, 2009
Sometimes the shackles imposed on Grand Tourists came from within. Littlewood writes movingly of James Boswell's struggle to remain the good, dutiful son and resist the sexual opportunities his two-and-a-half year tour gave him. "Maintain character," one journal entry reads. "If you whore, all ideas change." Soon after, he is giving evidence of how cloistered his life had been by speaking of regaining his youth. He was only 23 at the time. In contrast to his earlier entries, Boswell eventually includes notes like "Be self. Be original. Be happy ... Marry not but think to have fine Saxon girls."
Littlewood charts the change from the spectatorship -- and thus distance (and thus the financial and social security) -- of the Connoisseur to the less detached participation of the Pilgrim. In "Italian Journey," Goethe records, "My purpose in making this wonderful journey is not to delude myself but to discover myself in the objects I see." Littlewood makes the point that travelers are beyond the scrutiny of their native land and thus freer to act on their impulses.
How though, do you reconcile those impulses on your return? Perhaps you don't. He writes of the enormous importance of Mediterranean travel for women like Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Sometimes their release was found in something as simple as a gondola ride, pleasure as indolence, freed of social duty. For homosexuals, the release was perhaps even more profound. Nothing in "Sultry Climates" better illustrates Littlewood's thesis of how the sexual side of travel was kept out of official accounts than his chapter on the classical and literary scholar John Aldington Symonds, whose "Memoirs" recounts the homosexual life of a married man with four daughters. "Memoirs" was not published until 1984. A visit to a London male brothel had been a revelation for Symonds, and yet his travels abroad were split between his physical impulses and his desire to sanctify male companionship.
Symonds' life, the relationship he formed with an adolescent, which Littlewood notes was "cemented" by Symonds' loan of £3,000 to get the boy's family out of debt, highlight two of the most controversial, and thorniest, areas of "Sultry Climates": the tourist's romantic glorification of prostitution and the Grand Tour as the first instance of the reviled contemporary practice of sexual tourism.
Both stem from the superior economic position that tourists are in. And both are subject to moralistic dismissal. While noting that he finds some of the behavior he records here "repulsive" (and being very clear that some of his subjects were pedophiles) Littlewood is also smart enough to know that that attitude won't get him very far. In the introduction he writes,
Most of the figures with a major role in this book behaved in ways that now excite public indignation: they went abroad and paid for sex, often with young people ... I have no interest in writing an apology for eighteenth- and nineteenth-century sex tourism, but nor do I intend to spend much time condemning it. Adult readers can presumably make their own moral judgments without reassurance from the author ... I am suspicious of moral outrage that finds sexual targets more congenial than others. Why, for instance, does sexual exploitation trouble us so much more than the various kinds of exploitation that provide us with cheaper consumer goods? ... At a comfortable distance ... we can deplore this rough commerce in human beings, confident of our own moral decency.
That flouting of conventional morality is, of course, particularly suited to the Rebel, a type among whom Littlewood includes Byron, J.R. Ackerley, Christopher Isherwood, and Joe Orton, with his ecstatic accounts of the pedophiliac joys he found in Morocco. Littlewood is suspicious of those who try to sanctify their sex-for-money arrangements. And of course we unfairly cut more slack for people whose literary talent we recognize than for the anonymous average middle-aged man frequenting Bangkok bars.
Still, Littlewood is aware how difficult it is to judge such relations. Who can say that some of the prostitutes those travelers encountered didn't make their lives sweeter? And who's to say that the money offered by some travelers, like the money Symonds paid his young lover, didn't make lives easier? That the arrangement is exploitive is undeniable; the question of whether it blights the life of everyone who participates in it is open to question. The labels "victim" and "villain" may certainly apply in many cases. Using them to automatically tar customer and prostitute alike is an abdication of making distinctions.
It may sound like faint praise to call "Sultry Climates" readable, but I intend it as high praise. I've lost track of how many times I've picked up some cultural study or history on a promising topic only to be stranded with the dullness that has become equated with seriousness of purpose. Littlewood is lively and accessible and erudite. He doesn't clutter up the text with footnotes, and (excluding notes) "Sultry Climates" runs to just 214 pages. He's also not too hoity-toity to take in bits of popular culture, like "Shirley Valentine" or the endless British soap "Coronation Street," that illustrate his themes. He may, for this season at least, have raised the level of beach reading. "Sultry Climates" is the perfect companion for anyone who wouldn't be caught dead with an airport paperback -- though I wouldn't want to wager which one provides more juice.
