Ninety-Two Days by Evelyn Waugh

I doubt there is a travel book with as much of a throw-my-hands-up title as Evelyn Waugh's Ninety-Two Days. It's as if he was saying, "Look, I went to a place and spent some time there, and this is the book I wrote about it. Can't say it any more clearly than that."

I'm getting the sense that Waugh's travel books were often, perhaps always aimless and faintly mercenary - his older brother Alec had, I believe, already made a successful career as a travel writer, and maybe it took some time for Evelyn Waugh's novels to be seen as the magnificent things they are. [1] Whatever the reason, his travel books can be close to the pure old-fashioned "I am an Englishman, one of the world's aristocrats and a deeply cultured individual. I will go to This Strange and Foreign Land and tell you about it."

See my post, earlier this year, on Remote People, for some more detail. That trip had a slightly more obvious trigger, and yet also involved a lot of random bumming around in search of local color.

In December of 1932, Waugh went to Guiana, more or less because it was a British colony in a different part of the world, and he wanted to see how things there compared to what he'd seen in British Africa (in Remote People). He traveled up-country, by horse and foot, crossing the border into Brazil, and then came back, via a somewhat different route that also included some boats.

The point was not to visit some particular place or person, though he did pass by the famous Kaieteur falls, or to understand local government, or even any obvious anthropological interest in the people of Guiana. No, it purely seemed to be "this is a part of the world my people own; I want to take a look at it." And so he did, spending, as he noted, ninety-two days doing so.

If one were cruel, one would here note that there is no point to Ninety-Two Days. Waugh didn't plan to learn anything specific, and he succeeded at that. He wandered around what seems to be a fairly harsh, somewhat depopulated wilderness for three months, battling insects and heat and dehydration, meeting only a few particularly colorful characters (all white settlers), and spends most of his pages talking about logistics, privations, and hardships. He was supported by a variety of porters and guides and assistants, and makes some effort, in that very eugenics-era way, to make clear which of them were natives and which were black and which were various "mixed breeds," using the local terms and explaining them. But most of those people are just names, sometimes a few traits - usually that this one was lazier than Waugh would prefer for a local hired for a pittance to carry heavy burdens through a tropical wilderness - and that's it.

Of course, all this is written by Evelyn Waugh, who even this early in his career was a master of prose and deeply entertaining. It's an often-true cliché that travel books are better the more uncomfortable they were for the writer, and this trip was deeply uncomfortable for Waugh. There's a lot of insight and fine writing and thoughtful sentences throughout: the whole thing might seem vaguely pointless, but it created a deeply readable book, of the kind where the reader is happier the greater the contrast between Waugh's travails and the reader's comfort, perhaps in a nicely overstuffed chair.

Waugh's novels are more important than his travel books, and I suspect (only having read a few so far) that this is one of the least of his travel books. So I would not recommend coming to Ninety-Two Days early in one's Waugh reading. But if you've already read about a dozen Waugh books, it will definitely suit.

[1] There's a point in the book where Evelyn Waugh points out that he and Alec have divided the world between them - well, I think it's more that Alec declared particular regions (like North American and the Caribbean) as "his" and warned Evelyn off his turf. Guiana is allowed, but his journey there was out of bounds.