Books: Traveling Men

TRAVELS: NEAR AND FAR OUT by Anthony Carson. 309 pages. Pantheon. $4.95.

PASSWORDS by Alastair Reid. 238 pages. Little, Brown. $5.

What is a young man to do today if he has a genuine urge to become a bum? The modern world is tougher on the vagrant than all previous civilizations. Hitler herded Europe’s gypsies into Dachau and Buchenwald along with the Jews; the Soviets liquidated the bez-prizornye; the Welfare State frowns on the free-roving tramp; the American hobo has nearly died out, and even the Australian swagman, so mournfully celebrated in the national song, has become almost extinct.

If, like Anthony Carson, you are born in London and have a taste for sunshine, girls, wine, and music extorted from goat’s bladders, your problem is pretty well insoluble. In a collection of 50 sketches, which add up to a zany autobiography, Carson has told just how he defied the odds and beat civilization’s big rap—the steady job—and still managed to eat, travel, get drunk and make love.

Great Lies. Carson’s trick was to become a tourist guide, and a more freewheeling, freeloading, freethinking travel agent there never was. A further device, for which the reader can be grateful, is to tell great lies about his adventures. There even seems to be some doubt about his real name, which he says is von Falkenhausen, though there are reports to which neither he nor his publisher refer, that it is actually Peter Brooke.*

Carson did not easily come by his vocation. Once he worked in an office—the Income Tax Office, of all inappropriate things. It could not last. His boss was a man called Beamish of whom he writes: “I was frightened of Beamish as I was frightened of all elderly administrators, officials, policemen, colonels and judges. There is a perpetual net for the butterflies. They can catch you for arson, witchcraft, sodomy, soliciting, contempt, vagrancy. They can prove you without means of support, unborn or dead. They can bury you in unconsecrated ground. You have to fly very hard to keep in the sun.” Beamish finally demoted him with the memorable words: “You write doggerel and have been interfering with Mrs. Stoat.” (Mrs. Stoat was a flirtatious taxation official.)

Nothing of the Beat. So began Carson’s wonderful travels. To those who follow Carson’s tormented trail, Spain will always seem madder, Germany more maddening, and Italy more wonderful because Carson has been there. He proves that the world does have an escape hatch.

In an introduction, Novelist Evelyn Waugh deftly sums up Carson’s rare special quality: “His associates are almost all of the underworld; his own condition is precarious; his morality, as he describes it, is extremely loose; but he betrays no resentment or scorn of those whose habits are more orderly. He is a hedonist and a sensualist joyfully celebrating the huge variety of life. There is something of Norman Douglas in him, something of Firbank, nothing at all of the ‘sick’ or the ‘beat.’ ”

Carson may be the most gifted anecdotist now writing. The result is the most engaging of travel books. It is mercifully free from useful information, unless the term can be held to include such items as: that sheep will follow you into bars if you blow certain notes on a Spanish bagpipe; that you get more consideration from European Express officials by pretending to be responsible for 100 unwell divinity students than by being actually in charge of one healthy priest; that conductors of two-price tours of Europe are expected to spend their time with the first-class guided tourists but find their girls with the second class; that suits of clothes made by tailors in tiny Italian villages are based on pictures in old American magazines, and sprout horsehair like old sofas; that the proprietresses of English teashops in Mediterranean seaports are not, as is generally believed, nymphomaniacs.

Pleasant Sundays in Scotland. By contrast, Alastair Reid, a 37-year-old Scotsman, has a widely broadened mind and deals in negotiable facts and research-tested opinions about gypsies, Basques, Catalans and others among whom he has traveled. One who can write pleasantly of a Scottish Sabbath has to be a pleasant man; Reid is all that, and a much more reliable one than Carson. Unhappily, he gives the impression that however far he traveled, he always had a return ticket tucked into an inside pocket. There is only one place where the paths of these men might possibly have crossed. In Gibraltar, Carson was arrested on suspicion of smuggling dope; Reid interviewed the mayor.

* It is.