Books: Long Way to Nowhere

JOURNEY TO THE ENDS OF TIME (475 pp.)—Sacheverell Sitwell—Random House ($7.50).

England’s Sacheverell Sitwell is as sensitive to the beauties of the past as any other man alive. Like his famous brother and sister, Osbert and Edith, he is at least Edwardian in his attitudes, positively baroque in his tastes. His famous travel books and his less famous poetry exude a distaste for contemporary living, and few writers can bolster their eccentricities with a wider knowledge of music, books and architecture. Now, with 61 years and as many books behind him”, he moves into an area where he is about as much at home as a caveman with a shelf full of Sitwelliana. Journey to the Ends of Time (a second volume to come) is a long, discursive and often boring attempt to decide whether man has a soul.

Dogs Do Not. There are those who would argue that Author Sitwell starts with a crippling handicap when he admits: “One of my deficiencies is that I am not at all religious; and if the truth must be known, Christian neither by instinct nor inclination.” At times along Journey’s route, Sitwell leans toward the hope that a soul does exist, but he can never be sure who—if anyone—has one. He is certain that dogs do not have souls, and it is thinkable that God might have been hatched from an egg. As for man: “It might be that nature never intended us to have a soul. That all nature will allow is instinct, and that the soul is an importation and a foreign growth.”

But if Journey is short on the supports of religion and the structure of philosophy, it is an often fascinating excursion into the literary riches of a sensuous and cultivated mind. Sitwell begins his journey at the point where he dies. Traveling with other newly dead, part way by plane, part way on a craft called the Ship of Fools, he makes a voyage calculated to charm those who share a measure of Sitwell’s vast reading, just as it will surely bore those who want to get on with the business of man’s soul.

Skeletons That Walk. At times he is in purgatory, at times in hell, everywhere creating fantastic visions compounded of memories of life, and odds and ends of curious reading. At one point, he is in an elaborate casino which illustrates the sordid side of man’s instinct for gain; again, he and his fellow travelers find themselves in a terrifying place where there are only the skeletons of women, but walking skeletons who are taken sexually by visiting soldiers. The travelers visit many lands of the mind and spirit, but never do they find their souls.

At the end, doomed from the first to failure by Author Sitwell’s indifference to the search, the hero finds himself back home. Was he really on a Cook’s Tour of many possible purgatories, or was it all a dream? Apparently it was no dream. When Sitwell sees a kitten, the animal will have nothing to do with him, it arches its back and its tail goes up straight, for “I have been down among dead men and the cat knows it.” Sitwell’s final guess is typical: “As with human beings, so with all creatures, their god is in themselves and not in a high place in the sky . . . We, and all creatures, are left to fend for ourselves.” To the reader of the slightest religious instinct, Author Sitwell’s long and learned journey is about as enlightening as a snatch of nursery rhyme. And Sitwell, being a Sitwell, may have intended just that.