IT’S NOT A CLASSIC, and it wasn’t a formative work for me, but in recent times I’ve found myself increasingly haunted by Moritz Thomsen’s The Saddest Pleasure, last seen in a scanty edition from Graywolf Press in St. Paul, Minnesota. I’d always believed that a travel book should be a journey into life and self that revived them both and reinvigorated hope; to travel is to learn to live again. But Thomsen’s cranky and unassimilable book shocks and unsettles me by telling, in effect, of a journey towards extinction.
White-haired, improvident, just released from a Quito hospital and buried (almost literally) in his copy of Death in Venice as the book begins, Thomsen sets off on a tour of South America, at the age of sixty-three, not so much in the spirit of a traveller as of a cornered dog, backing away from a group of children throwing stones at him. He’s just been cheated out of his farm along the River of Emeralds in Ecuador (by his ex-partner, Ramon), and he has no home anymore in America; so he takes to the road, with nothing but a single blue bag, a thousand dollars he’s saved up and the reckless candour of one contemplating last things. He stays in two-dollar-a-night hotels, talks only to waiters and whores, and holds his loneliness to him like a security blanket. The highlight of his trip comes in an interview with a famous writer who won’t talk to him.
The Saddest Pleasure, in its opening sentence, introduces us to the despedida, or ceremonial farewell beloved of South Americans, with Thomsen bidding adieu to his treacherous partner and a family that’s the closest thing to his own. It continues on the more or less classic itinerary of the travel book, into the wastelands of memory and self, as its angry narrator struggles to make his peace with the affluent father and America he left long ago. But its endpoint, one always senses, is Samarra. In Belem, Thomsen sees—or dreams he sees—three women dressed in black. He sees them again in Recife, and then again in Natal, and it’s easy to suspect that the figures are his guides into the epic underworld.
The aim of every travel book, I’d always thought, is to surrender: to give oneself over to one’s surroundings so fully that a part of one (the workaday, habit-bound part) dies, and something more enduring comes to light. But Thomsen’s book is shadowed by a much more absolute surrender. He truly seems not to care what happens to him, or where he ends up. He loses his one bag and makes few attempts to retrieve it. He boards a boat on the Amazon—akin to Conrad’s Congo, he thinks (akin to the Styx, we think)—and scrupulously alienates his fellow passengers by telling them what he thinks of them. A pretty girl offers him her address in Paris, and he shocks her (and us) by refusing it: he’ll never see Paris again, he says.
Like a figure so far from hope that he’s living out the final sentences of The Sheltering Sky, Thomsen builds up what comes to seem a posthumous memorial. Burning his bridges wherever he can, pronouncing death sentences on missionaries and tourists and all those who would foist their ideas upon the world’s poor (in other words, himself when young, as a Peace Corps volunteer), he exerts his last will in completing his final testament. Yet just before the journey ends, he finds a kind of absolution in music (always in music), and when he steps out of the book’s concluding sentences, it is in the spirit of one stepping out of the confessional, with a conscience cleansed. Something has been purged in him, one feels, and he steps towards the women dressed in black with a sense that despedidas have their purpose. The final irony of The Saddest Pleasure is that Thomsen continued to live on till his mid-seventies, and his book came out a dozen years after the ceremonial leave-takings it records.