Taccuino

“In the summer holidays I travelled east,  as far as Afghanistan, and wondered if I was capable of writing an article on Islamic  architecture. But something was wrong. I began to feel that things, however beautiful, can  also be malign. The atmosphere of the Art World reminded me of the morgue...

After a strenuous bout of New York, I woke one morning halfblind. The eye  specialist said there was nothing wrong organically. Perhaps I'd been looking too closely  at pictures? Perhaps I should try some long horizons? Africa, perhaps? 

I went to the Sudan. On camel and foot I  trekked through the Red Sea hills and found some unrecorded cave paintings. My nomad guide  was a hadendoa, one of Kipling's 'fuzzy-wuzzies'. He carried a sword, a purse and a pot of  scented goat's grease for anointing his hair. He made me feel overburdened and inadequate;  and by the time I returned to England a mood of fierce iconoclasm had set in.  Not that I turned into a picture siasher.  But I did understand why the Prophets banned the worship of images. I quit my job and  enrolled as a first-year student of archaeology at Edinburgh University.  My studies in that grim northern city  were not a success (...) For the second time I quit.  

Gradually the idea for a book began to  take shape. It was to be a wildly ambitious and intolerant work, a kind of 'Anatomy of  Restlessness' that would enlarge on Pascal's dictum about the man sitting quietly in a  room. The argument, roughly, was as follows:  that in becoming human, man had acquired,  together with his straight legs and striding walk, a migratory 'drive' or instinct to walk  long distances through the seasons; that this 'drive' was inseparable from his central  nervous system; and that, when warped in conditions of settlement, it found outlets in  violence, greed, status-seeking or a mania for the new. This would explain why mobile  societies such as the gypsies were egalitarian, thing-free and resistant to change; also  why, to re-establish the harmony of the First State, ail the great teachers - Buddha,  Lao-tse, St Francis - had set the perpetual pilgrimage at the heart of their message and  told their disciples, literally, to follow The Way.  

The book grew and grew; and as it grew it  became less and less intelligible to its author. It even contained a diatribe against the  act of writing itself Finally, when the manuscript was typed, it was so obviously  unpublishable that, for the third time, I gave up.  

Penniless, depressed, a total failure at  the age of thirty-three, I had a phone call from Francis Wyndham of the Sunday Times magazine,  a man of outstanding literary judgement, whom I hardly knew. Would I, lie asked, like a  small job as an adviser on the arts? 'Yes,' I said.  We soon forgot about the arts, and under  Francis's guidance I took on every kind of article. I wrote about Algerian migrant  workers, the couturier Madeleine Vionnet and the Great Wall of China. I interviewed André  Malraux on what General de Gaulle thought of England; and in Moscow I visited Nadezhda  Mandelstam (...) Each time I came back with a story,  Francis Wyndlham encouraged, criticised, edited and managed to convince me that I should,  after all, try my hand at another book. His greatest gift was permission to continue.  One afternoon in the early 70s, in  Paris, I went to see the arcliitect and designer Eileen Gray, who at the age of  ninety-three thought nothing of a fourteen-hour working day. She lived in the rue  Bonaparte, and in her salon hung a map of Patagonia, which she had painted in gouache.  'I've always wanted to go there,' I said.  'So have I,' she added. 'Go there for me.' I went. I cabled the Sunday Times: 'Have  Gone to Patagonia'. In my rucksack I took Mandelstam's Journey to Armenia and  Hemingway's In Our Time. Six months later I came  at. this time, did get published. thought  that telling stories  was the only conceivable occupation for a  superfluous person such as myself. Eileen Gray's map now hangs in my apartment. But the future is tentative.