All three of these books are written in the first person major. That, for me, is a compelling aspect of their style. They aren’t second-hand reports (except when they're recounting other people's stories or telling about historical events). Bailey, Sullivan, and Frazier were actually there – driving along the Iron Curtain (Bailey), driving across the U.S. (Sullivan), driving across Siberia (Frazier). They’re writing from personal experience, which, for me, is the most concrete form of reality.
But each of them has a distinctive way of “being there.” Their “I”s differ from each other. Sullivan and Frazier are more self-revealing than Bailey. Sullivan writes about his “worst cross-country trip ever,” in which, at his lowest point, he “broke down, as in wept.” He writes, “I would say I wept openly except that no one seemed too concerned with me: I wept in the vacuum of the landscape that is the side of the road.” Frazier also has a moment in his journey when, due to deteriorating relations with his two Russian guides, he nearly abandons his road trip. He says, “Following this incident [Sergei yelling at him for taking pictures of a “supposed prison”], I became deeply uncertain of everything around me and briefly considered asking Sergei to drop me off at a train station so I could continue on my own.”
There’s more personal context in Sullivan and Frazier’s narratives than there is in Bailey’s. We see Sullivan and Frazier preparing for their trips. Sullivan describes a visit that he and his family make to an AAA office in Manhattan to get a personalized TripTik (“We described our route, and as we did, his yellow highlighting pen made its way across the map”). Frazier tells about his Russian language lessons (“Now might be as good a moment as any to talk about what it was like learning Russian or attempting to”).
Sullivan and Frazier show more emotion than Bailey does. Sullivan constantly rages at his “shredded, moan-making” rooftop pack (“the pack on top of the Impala begins to freak out again and I have to pull over and rearrange the straps, and as I pull the straps tighter, I swear under my breath, repeatedly”). Frazier rages at his constantly malfunctioning Renault step van (“Multiple tries produced the same result. The van would not start. A red film of rage crossed my eyes”).
Sullivan and Frazier seem more prone to mishaps than Bailey. Sullivan experiences that nightmarish Minnesota journey – “the worst cross-country trip I have ever taken.” He also locks his car keys in the Impala’s trunk (“And then, when I finished packing the bags in the trunk, when I was feeling organized and purposeful, I locked the keys in the trunk. I realized that they were in the trunk during the half a second or so that it took for the trunk to slam down”). Frazier suffers food poisoning and laryngitis. He goes for a swim in the Severnaya Dvina River and is bit by leeches (“The water was warm and the bottom muddy to the point of inextricability. As I came out I found several ink-black leeches dangling from my legs. When I brushed them off, the holes they left bled impressively”). In one of my favorite scenes, he loses his laundry in the wind:
In the early afternoon, still with no sign of the guys, I decided to wash some laundry in the sink in the communal bathroom. After rinsing and wringing out the clothes, I draped them on the railing of the porch outside the TV room to dry. But I had forgotten the wind, which in just a few minutes had blown the clothes off the rail, whence they had fallen six stories onto the roof of the building’s entryway.
I ran to the elevator and went down to the first floor and outside. My clothes were in the middle of the entryway roof where I couldn’t possibly get them. I rode the elevator back upstairs depressed about the shirts, socks, and underwear I would be leaving permanently in Novosibirsk. But when I looked half an hour later, I saw that the wind had swept them away yet again, and they were now scattered on the sidewalk and across the lawn. People were walking around them. I hurried down and collected them.
In comparison, Bailey’s trip is smooth. The only rage he experiences is at the Russians for building the Iron Curtain. The only jarring incident is his encounter with a strange witchlike hitchhiker:
Just outside the next village of Croya a lumpy human shape was standing rather perilously out in the road, and as I swerved the car around it, it – an elderly woman – waved a hand up and down. I stopped. She approached the car. Then having worked out that she could not get in what she thought was the passenger door, she came around to the other side of my Saab (which has right-hand steering for British roads) and got in. Clearly, I was giving her a lift. She was wearing a sheet of clear plastic over the shoulders of an ancient black dress. (Although the morning was gray, it wasn’t raining.) She began to talk and I didn’t understand a word. I think that even if my knowledge of German had been magnificent, I would not have understood her. She was speaking or rather barking a country dialect, and it may have been that even in that she wasn’t making much sense. Now that she was seated next to me I noticed that she had in her lap an apparently empty shopping bag and wore plastic bags on her hands as if she had been brought up to wear gloves when going out. Bristly black hairs sprouted from her chin and upper lip. Her eyes didn’t seem to focussed on anything external. She was visibly filthy and gave off a strong smell of urine. All in all, she was an absolute shock – there in my relatively clean and tidy car on the well-maintained road running through prosperous West German countryside; for a few minutes her presence drove all thoughts of the border and the modern world out of my head. Possibly it was a test. If she wasn’t Howard Hughes reincarnated as a witch, she was perhaps one of the old gods or goddesses in disguise, checking up to see how friendly people might be to a distressed wayfarer of no obvious charm – rather the opposite. Maybe she had been sent to tell me something I ought to know. But if it was a test, I failed it. I had mentioned Wolfsburg as she got in, and this had produced no sign of disapproval, but now, passing through the small town of Rühen, gallantry and respect for the gods faded before the overpowering smell. I was afraid that I would have to discard or at least steam-clean the front passenger seat if she stayed aboard another minute. I pulled up, said that I was going to the post office and showed her how to open her door. She clambered out, bits of plastic hanging. When I came back from Rühen post office, having made a token purchase of a few stamps, she had walked on, still well out in the road. As I drove past I didn’t look at her for fear of meeting those strange vacant eyes. If it was you, Pallas Athene, my apologies.
All three of these books feature the kind of active first-person sentence I devour. Examples:
I turn inland from the beach and follow the border for its first kilometer or so south – first across the thin neck of the Priwall peninsula, summer cottages on one side, border markers and thick East German scrub on the other. [Along the Edge of the Forest]
Driving through Celilo, we see abandoned houses, and then a few houses that seem as if they might be abandoned but probably aren’t, and then a few houses that are well kept. We see trucks parked on the grass beneath the dry cliffs, trucks that appear to still work, and then fields of cars that probably do not. We see no people, but we do see a large longhouse, where, I have read, seasonal celebrations still take place. And we hear the soft rush of the interstate, acting like an echo of the long-silenced rush of the falls. [Cross Country]
I walked and climbed around the village for a couple of hours, stepping into a store or office now and then to get warm. I saw a frozen seal on the floor of the vestibule of the tribal health building, and a polar bear skin hanging on a wooden frame, and two boys shooting a small black dog out by the village dump, and a guy carrying cans of soda pop on his shoulders into the general store when the cans exploded in the cold and sent soda cascading all over him and down the back of his neck. I spent a good while examining a walrus-skin boat on a rack near a launching ramp at the bottom of town. [Travels in Siberia]
Early one morning I took a #29 bus from the Kurfürstendamm, off which, in a quiet side street, I had rooms in a small turn-of-the-century hotel of great charm. The 29 took me to the junction of the Kochstrasse and Friedrichstrasse, and I walked up to Checkpoint Charlie to join a U.S. military patrol for a trip along the wall. [Along the Edge of the Forest]
We cross the Maumee River, the river of Toledo, and we look left and see Toledo’s downtown bristle, and after a stretch of pretty much flat but sometimes rolling Ohio of the turnpike, we pass several men dressed in black T-shirts with cutoff sleeves, black pants, and silver belts, all surrounding a broken-down van, inspecting the engine that had broken down on the Sandusky County line. [Cross Country]
Soon after Bikin we suddenly entered a weird all-watermelon area. Watermelon sellers crowded both sides of the road under big umbrellas in beach-ball colors among wildly painted wooden signs. Sergei pulled over and bought a watermelon for a ruble, but as we went along, the heaps of them kept growing until melons were spilling into the road and the sellers were giving them away. A man with teeth like a crazy fence hailed us and in high hilarity thrust two watermelons through the passenger-side window. By the time we had emerged on the other side of the watermelon gauntlet, we had a dozen or more in the van. The watermelons were almost spherical, antifreeze green, and slightly smaller than soccer balls. We cut one open – delicious. This was not a part of the world I had previously thought of as a great place for watermelons. [Travels in Siberia]
An active verb, a line of specific description, and the indispensable “I”/“we” – these are the ingredients of my favourite kind of sentence. These three books abound with them.
Postscript: Another aspect of these great books that I relish is their nature description. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.
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