10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #3 Berton Roueché’s "Janine"

Illustration based on photo from hotelsafloat.com

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is Berton Roueché’s leisurely “Janine” (October 22, 1984). 

In this immensely enjoyable piece, Roueché travels to the heart of Burgundy aboard the passenger barge Janine. The hundred-and-sixty-mile trip takes six days. He starts in Lyon, goes up the river Saône, through the Canal de Bourgogne, and ends in Dijon. We meet Janine’s captain and crew. We meet the other passengers. We get a tour of the barge:

The Janine has an open forward deck (furnished with white iron garden chairs and matching parasoled tables), which opens into a red plush salon, a small bar, and a dining room with six tables, each of them seating four. Aft of the dining room (I later learned) is the galley, and aft of that, up some steep steps, is the pilothouse. The cabins are below— at the waterline, in fact—and all of them have names reflective of the region. I was assigned to Beaune. There were two small, head-high windows (with the river lapping almost to the sills), two narrow bunks, arranged foot-to-foot in an L formation, and a small closet. There was a plastic bottle of Evian mineral water on the washstand, a red rosebud in a vase on a shelf, and three framed reproductions of lifelike fruit and flower arrangements by Redouté on the walls. I stowed away my luggage and went back up on deck. Most of my fellow-passengers were already there, sitting or standing and chattering cocktail-party talk. Two or three idlers watched with interest from the street above the seawall and the quay. A pretty, dark-haired, blue-eyed, hugely smiling French girl (named Bernadette) passed among us with a tray of tall glasses of kir.

The trip gets underway:

We were moving. We had cast off and were sliding away from shore. The party chatter faltered. The Saône at Lyons is a beautiful river, and I stood and watched it reveal itself as we reached midstream and gently chugged upriver through a green allée, between orderly rows of leafy plane trees that lined the gray stone quays. Beyond the trees were rows of apartment houses—dusty yellow and faded orange, with tall windows flanked by faded blue shutters—in the formal style of the middle nineteenth century, and rising beyond the apartments were the delicate towers and spires and belfries of churches. The party chatter began again. We crept under a bridge. A racing scull appeared in the distance. It came skimming closer. And closer. And suddenly darted for shore, to sit there bucking and bouncing in our wake. The women from Michigan smiled and waved. The oarsman hunched his shoulders and looked away. The sky to the west brightened into a sunset blaze. A star came out. 

I love that detail about the racing scull. Roueché writes simply, but vividly – in the tradition of Chekov and Hemingway. Yes, he’s that good. His words call up pictures. Here’s his description of a pretty stretch of river between Tournus and Chalon-sur-Saône:

There was a feel of deep and peaceful country, but it was country ordered by man. The rows of plane trees, the poplar allées, even the patches of woods and the meadows of grazing sheep, had a look of arrangement, of traditional design. There were swans floating here and there along the riverbanks, geese grazing in the sheep meadows. A heron flapped from shore to shore. A flock of some cootlike ducks dived under our bow. A couple on horseback—a man and a woman in immaculate riding clothes—appeared on the left bank and cantered away on a path among the poplars. A village appeared on the right: thirteen stone houses, some long and low, some tall and thin, but all of them the color of yellowy autumn leaves, all of them with faded blue shutters, all of them roofed with rusty-black tiles—strung out in a tight little row behind a column of shapely plane trees, above a long stone quay.

The river journey features side-trips to a vineyard, an ancient abbey, a prestigious restaurant, an outdoor market. Sometimes, after the Janine ties up, Roueché goes for walks. Here, he walks Mâcon:

There were big wrought-iron planters spaced along the seawall, with geraniums and begonias in brilliant bloom. There was a large park with gardens and shade trees. Across the Saône I could see another old stone seawall and an orderly mass of forest. Mâcon is not a village. It is a town— an industrial town—with a population of almost forty thousand, and it has been an important river port for centuries. Walking under the trees and past the flowering planters, and looking out at the bright-green water, I thought of the river towns I had known at home, and their dingy and desolate waterfronts.

The meals are très French and très delicious. Day 2 of the trip, here’s dinner on the Janine:

It began with a soup: a mussel bisque. The main course was roast veal with a sauce au poivre. There was a green salad with a port-wine vinaigrette, and a selection of cheeses. Dessert was two Bavarian creams, apricot and vanilla, with a purée of whortleberries. With the roast we drank a Côte du Rhône. The white wine—golden green and smelling faintly of hazelnuts—was a Saint-Véran. When I went down to my cabin, I found a bedtime snack on my pillow: a chocolate thin-mint.

That "golden green and smelling faintly of hazelnuts" is very fine.

My favorite part of “Janine” is the last part, Day 6, when the barge enters the Canal de Bourgogne: 

We had come through half a dozen locks on the Saône, but they were modern locks, of generous size, lined with steel and equipped with great steel sluice gates that were opened and closed by a lockkeeper at a console in a control tower high overhead. The Canal de Bourgogne is a nineteenth-century canal, and its gates are operated by levers and wheels turned entirely by human weight and muscle. We crawled into a slot only inches wider than the Janine and with hardly a foot of clearance fore and aft. We sat for minutes deep down between two walls of dripping stone. There was the sound of rushing water. We began to rise. The earth slopes gently up to Dijon from the Saône at Saint-Jean-de-Losne. This was the first of twenty-two lifts, which would raise us a total of a hundred and ninety feet. We rose slowly, slowly, as slowly as an ancient freight elevator. My eyes came even with the top of the lock wall, with the top of an iron bollard. We kept rising. The lock-keeper’s house appeared, a small stone square with a red tile roof and a life preserver in a glass case. Above the door was a sign: “Écluse St.-Jean-de-Losne-Duon 29.4 km. St.-Jean-de-Losne 0 km.” We came gently to rest. The lockkeeper, a woman, was working a long iron lever. She was a burly figure in a long dress and a thick sweater. The canal stretched straight ahead, a boulevard of shining water lined with poplars, on a kind of causeway ten feet or more above the surrounding countryside. 

Roueché has breakfast. By the time he’s finished, the barge is moving into its second lock, Écluse Viranne. He can see the next lock in the distance. He says, “The towpath beckoned. It would be an easy walk.” He and several of his fellow-travellers leave the Janine, still sitting in the lock, and set off along the path. Roueché writes,

We walked in the dappled shade of the poplars. It was a countryside of plowed autumn fields and still, green pastures and scattered groves and flocking rooks and, far away, the clustered rooftops of a village. The canal was a deep, oceanic green. Its grassy banks were abloom with wildflowers: something blue that looked like chicory, something pink that looked like thistle, something yellow that looked like asters, and a delicate lavender flower that I had never seen before but somehow recognized on sight—an autumn crocus. We reached the next lock (Écluse Brazey) well before the Janine and walked on. 

Back on the Janine, Roueché goes through Écluse Beauregard and Écluse Longvic. The piece ends sensuously:

We passed a barge headed down-canal. It was a family barge—a load of gravel forward, and a cabin with white curtains at the windows just aft of the pilothouse. Its name was lettered on the stern: Espérance. We climbed through Écluse Romelet. There was a sudden rise of apartment buildings up ahead on the right. On the left were what looked like warehouses. The canal ran unchanged between its rows of trees, beside the grassy banks and the towpath. But the country was giving way. Beyond the apartments was a tract of identical little white houses with identical geranium gardens. Beyond the warehouses were storage tanks: “ESSO.” “TOTAL.” “MOBIL.” “ELF.” We climbed through Écluse Colombières. The canal still had its flanking trees, but the grassy banks had become a quay, and the towpath was now a street. Steep-roofed buildings rose up all around us. I became aware of a smell in the air. It was a pleasant smell, and a familiar smell. It was a smell I knew very well. But it was a smell I had never smelled in the open air before. And then I realized. This was Dijon. The smell was the smell of mustard.

A delectable conclusion to a delectable piece. Pure pleasure! 

10 Great "New Yorker" Travel Pieces: #8 Anthony Lane's "Because the Night" and Berton Roueché’s “Trans Europ Nuit”

Illustration by Christoph Niemann, from Anthony Lane's "Because the Night"

In this series, I choose ten of my favorite New Yorker travel pieces, one per month, and try to express why I like them. Today’s pick is actually two picks. I originally intended to choose just one – Anthony Lane’s “Because the Night” (May 11, 2020), a wonderful essay on the pleasures of traveling by night train. However, as I was rereading it, I was reminded of another great “night train” piece that I’d read many years ago – Berton Roueché’s “Trans Europ Nuit” (December 28, 1981). The two pieces complement each other beautifully. I’ve decided to consider them together – a rare double combo. Here we go! All aboard!

Lane begins,

If on a winter’s night a traveller is about to board a train, a fortifying drink is of the essence. Thus it was that I stood in line at Burger King, on the concourse at Central Station, in Glasgow, and asked for a hot tea. The only reason that I wasn’t seeking out a dram of whiskey was that I had already done so, dropping into a pub on my way to the station. In short, I was well drammed up—as was the Glaswegian beside me, who leaned on the counter and inquired what I was up to. Taking the Caledonian Sleeper to London, I replied. He fixed me with a canny eye and said, “Are you not afraid o’ the wee virus?”

That passage makes me smile every time I read it. So many interesting elements. As an opening paragraph of a travel piece, it’s almost unbeatable. Lane’s next paragraph is equally good:

The answer, foolishly, was no. I was too excited by the thought o’ catching the wee train to be worried about catching anything else. It was late evening, on February 28th; the year would soon leap into the twenty-ninth, and that touch of temporal rarity added to the occasion. The departure of a night train—by definition, a humdrum event for the station staff—exudes, for all but the most jaded travellers, the thrill of an unfamiliar ritual. By day, if late, you run for a train; if early, you tut and sigh at having to tarry so long. At night, on the other hand, you saunter, and deliberately show up in good time. Why? Not because of security, passport control, or the other chores that affront the airline passenger, shortening tempers and sapping every soul, but because you want to settle in and enjoy the show. Patiently, the train awaits you, with a theatrical air of suspense, and the moment of its leaving is akin to the curtain’s rise. 

Lane’s writing hooks me and reels me in. Part of its allure is his wit. Here’s his description of the interior of his sleeping compartment:

When turning from the window to the door, in my compartment, I had to revolve on the spot, as if roasting on a vertical spit, and, despite my being the sole occupant, both bunks had been let down, locked into place, and joined by a ladder. A printed notice offered advice: “Guests should use the ladders in the traditional manner, by always facing the bed as they climb up and down.” What other manner is there? Had the train recently hosted the cast of Cirque du Soleil, perhaps, who insisted on descending head first, arms outstretched, after crooking one knee over the top rung?

And here’s his description of the food:

No less baffling was the Room Service Menu. Pies, cheeses, broth, smoked venison on a platter, and a parade of wines and spirits: all these, and more, could be ferried to one’s bedside. Caledoniaphiles were urged to dine on “Haggis, Neeps & Tatties”—neeps meaning turnips, tatties meaning potatoes, and haggis meaning all your deepest terrors wrapped up in a sphere of stomach skin, then boiled. Precisely what you want to snack on, in other words, while passing through a tunnel at half past two in the morning. The entire feast could be washed down with a Ginger Laddie. Don’t ask.

At this point, as Lane begins a discussion of the history of the Pullman sleeping car, I think we’ll change trains and board Roueché’s Danish Express. He’s traveling from Copenhagen to Paris:

The train moved, was moving. It moved as silently, as smoothly, as naturally as a ship under sail. The platform slid away. In a moment, in half a moment, we were moving at speed, racing—out of the glare of the sheds and into a dusky daylight, through spreading railroad yards, past factories and warehouses, past blocks of apartment houses, past a deserted suburban station, past another spread of apartment s. Then we were in an open countryside of fields, pastures, hedgerows, an occasional mannered plantation of pine or white birch. Denmark is a small country, and Copenhagen is on two tiny islands, but I had a sense of space that was almost Kansan. There wasn’t a house as far as I could see. Then, suddenly, there were six or eight houses clustered together along a narrow street—little square houses, like doll houses, with steep, red-tiled, pyramidal roofs. American farmers live on the farm. In Denmark, farmers live in the village. The enormous countryside began again. It was a landscape made for snow, for blizzards, for raging winds. The dusk deepened. There was a spark of light in the distance, a spidery glint of water, and then it was dark.

Roueché’s trip is low-event, but if you want to experience the pleasure of night train travel, it’s perfect. He describes his compartment. He talks with the steward. He talks with another passenger. His train crosses the Baltic Sea by ferry. He describes having supper on the ferry. He observes other people in the ferry bistro. He returns to his train compartment. He sleeps. He wakes up around midnight. The train is in Hamburg. There’s joviality coming from the next compartment:

I thought I heard a guitar. I heard shrieks and roars of laughter. I heard glasses and bottles and what sounded like somebody dancing. I looked at my watch: it was almost midnight. I looked out at the station again. There were plenty of people about—walking, waiting, waving, embracing. And a variety of uniforms: brown, blue, green. Two youths were sitting on a bench, gazing at the train, eating ice-cream cones: it might have been noon in a park. They suddenly slid away. We were moving, but moving backward. We moved out of the station, past pillars, past stairs, past benches and people, past signs for Marlboro and Coca-Cola in German, and into a yard, past a string of freight cars on a siding. They were painted bright red, and on each, in white, was the name “Blue Star Lines.” The joviality next door continued. The train stopped, waited, and moved forward again. We pulled in to a platform—a different platform. A woman sat on a bench, slumped in sleep, a cat in a box at her feet. We waited, we moved, we slipped away backward again. I dropped onto my pillow. There were footsteps, running footsteps, in the corridor.

In the morning, Roueché gets up, shaves, and packs his things. He talks with the steward. He watches the French countryside fly past. And then he’s in the Gare du Nord in Paris. He leaves the train and has coffee in the station. Ho hum, you might say. Not at all. It’s total bliss. Lane says the same thing at the end of his piece: “Such was the non-event of the journey. Yet I relished every mile of it.”

5 Great "New Yorker" River Pieces

James Graves, "St. John River" (1976)

I love rivers and I love river stories – especially factual ones. The New Yorker has a long history of great river writing. Here are five of my favorites, with a choice quotation from each in brackets:

1. Berton Roueché, “The River World,” The New Yorker, February 26, 1972; included in Roueché’s 1978 collection, The River World and Other Explorations (“At the head of the tow, where I am sitting on a coil of rigging near the bow of the starboard barge, there is the feeling of a raft – a peaceful sense of drifting, a sense of country quiet. The only sound is the slap of water under the rake of the bow. I am alone and half asleep in the silence and the warmth of the mild midmorning sun. The river is empty. There is only the bend ahead, a sandy shore of brush and willows on the near bank, and a steep bluff crowned with cottonwoods a quarter of a mile away on the other – no towns, no houses, no bridges, no roads, not even another boat”).

2. John McPhee, “The Keel of Lake Dickey,” The New Yorker, May 3, 1976; included in McPhee’s 1979 collection, Giving Good Weight (“We are a bend or two below the Priestly Rapid, and we can see more than a mile ahead before the river turns from view. Bank to bank, the current is running fast. It is May 28^th. The ice went out about a month ago. We have seen remnant snow in shadowed places on the edges of the river. The hardwoods are just budding, and they are scattered among the conifers, so the riverine hills are bright and dark green, streaked with the white stems of canoe birch”).

3. Bill Barich, “Steelhead,” The New Yorker, March 2, 1981; retitled “Steelhead on the Russian,” in Barich’s 1984 collection, Traveling Light (“From my available gear, I’d assembled a kitful of lures and a makeshift steelhead rig – an eight-foot fiberglass rod and a medium-sized spinning reel wound with twelve-pound test – and I took it in hand and walked off into a seemingly static landscape that could have been painted by Hokusai: twisted live oak trees, barren willows, new winter grass, and vineyards laced with yellow mustard flowers, everything cloaked in river mist”).

4. Alec Wilkinson, “The Riverkeeper,” The New Yorker, May 11, 1987; included in Wilkinson’s 1990 collection, The Riverkeeper (“I went out with him one evening in December to look at a cove that is so choked in the summer with water chestnuts that he can’t get the boat into it, and we came home in the dark, and it was really cold, and the water was so smooth that the sensation of crossing it was almost like flying. I have been out with him on hot, hazy days when the river is gray and the sky is white and the hills in the distance are blue. I made a trip with him one spring day from Cold Spring to Catskill Creek – sixty miles. In Poughkeepsie, we stopped and watched police divers haul the body of a drowned man from the river. We spent the night in a slip at Hop-O-Nose Marine, on Catskill Creek. Herring jumped all night in the creek. It sounded like someone spooning water from a basin with his hands”).

5. Ian Frazier, “Five Fish,” The New Yorker, October 8, 2001; included in Frazier’s 2002 collection, The Fish’s Eye (“Storm clouds moved in, and the afternoon light became a wintry gloom. Snow began to fall hard, hissing in the bare branches of the cottonwood trees. The river scenery – bare-rock bluffs, dark-red willows, and tawny grasses along the shore – faded like something you see as you fall asleep. Daryl and I waded in deeper, crossed the river, tried different spots. The water in the Bitterroot actually felt warmer than the melted snow trickling around our ears. My fly line began to make a raspy sound in the line guides as it passed over the edges of ice building up in them. Steam rose from the water and moved in genie-sized wisps with the current”).

Credit: The above illustration by James Graves is from John McPhee’s ““The Keel of Lake Dickey” (The New Yorker, May 3, 1976).  

Roueché's Rhythm

Pikonganna stood on watch at the bow in a shiny translucent raincoat made of walrus intestines. If you find simple, sturdy, gloriously specific sentences like this as delightful as I do, you’ll likely enjoy the work of long-time New Yorker writer, Berton Roueché. He was a master of plain-style writing. William Shawn described his technique as follows: “Certainly his is the art that conceals art. His words are so plain, his sentences so chaste, his rhythms so natural that one can overlook the presence of the writer and see straight through to the matter at hand” (quoted in Whitney Balliett’s obituary of Roueché, The New Yorker, May 16, 1994).

The “matter at hand” was often an intriguing medical case. As Balliett points out in his tribute, “Roueché’s medical pieces became doubly famous: lay readers found them scary and exciting while doctors, impressed by their learning and clarity, used them as medical texts.” By the time of his death in 1994, Roueché had written fifty-eight “Annals of Medicine” stories for The New Yorker. A number of them are collected in his The Medical Detectives (1980).

Roueché also wrote about a wide variety of other matters for the magazine, e.g., a towboat trip down the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers (“The River World,” February 26, 1972), a visit to the Whalers’ Church in Sag Harbor on Long Island (“The Steeple,” March 5, 1949), a canoe trip down the Meramec River (“Countryside,” October 27, 1975), garlic (“A Friend in Disguise,” October 28, 1974), a trip by barge from Lyon to Dijon (“Janine,” October 22, 1984), apples (“One Hundred Thousand Varieties,” August 11, 1975), Appalachian coal miners (“Forty Flights of Steps,” July 16, 1973).

Roueché loved train travel. “I have a fondness for trains,” he says in “Trans Europ Nuit” (The New Yorker, December 28, 1981). In “On the Terrace,” he writes, “A train moved through a different world. It was a world of change and surprise. It was a world of back doors, back roads, back country. It had a backstage intimacy” (The New Yorker, September 15, 1980). In addition to “Trans Europ Nuit” and “On the Terrace,” he wrote three other train pieces – all of them marvelous: “The Best Medicine on the Market” (The New Yorker, January 20, 1962), “Rapido” (The New Yorker, December 29, 1980), and “En Vitesse to Rome” (The New Yorker, February 21, 1983).

My favorite Roueché piece is “First Boat to King Island” (The New Yorker, October 22, 1966), a memorable account of a Bering Sea trip he and two companions made with a group of Inuit in a heavily loaded open boat “made of walrus hide stretched over a wooden frame.” I think it may have been one of Roueché’s favorites, too; he included it in two of his collections: The River World (1978) and Sea To Shining Sea (1985).

Here’s a passage from “First Boat to King Island” that exemplifies the “rhythms so natural” that Shawn mentioned in his description of

Roueché’s style:

The boat edged into the passage. The water was thick with chips and chunks of floating ice. We moved carefully between the embankment of anchored ice and the moving floe on one throttled-down motor. Norbert kept the boat inching along just off the lip of the floe, away from the height and bulk of the ice embankment, but every time I looked, the ice seemed higher and closer. I could already feel the cold of its breath. Kunnuk reached out with an ice lance and jabbed at the edge of the floe. He jabbed again, hard, and a slab of ice came loose and slid slowly into the water. The boy at the stern with Norbert poked it safely past the boat with an oar. It was rotten ice. The whole rim of the floe was rotten ice.

Ten deft, simple, fluid lines – the equivalent of ten short brushstrokes by a master artist (Cézanne, say) – and a dynamic, vivid scene springs to life. Note the economy of his line, the use of compact, tactile words (“thick,” “chips,” “chunks,” “bulk,” “hard,” “slab”), and the brilliant use of repetition (“jabbed at the edge of the floe” / “jabbed again”; “It was rotten ice” / “The whole rim of the floe was rotten ice”). This is quintessential Roueché - plain, simple, direct, evocative. With a moderate number of words, he evokes a world. Don’t let his simplicity fool you. There’s an art to it – selection, shaping, plus that intangible “something” – call it inspiration. Roueché had it. It’s there in his sensual apprehension of the dangerous ice ("I could already feel the cold of its breath").

Credit: The above photo of Berton Roueché is by Nancy Crampton.   

January 10, 2011 Issue

Mike Peed’s “We Have No Bananas” in this week’s issue is interestingly structured. I didn’t really notice its form until near the article’s end when it suddenly jumps from Honduras back to Brisbane. Maybe I’m slow on the uptake, but it was only then I realized that what Peed had done was show (as opposed to tell) the two approaches that the banana industry is taking to combat a devastating blight called Tropical Race Four that’s wiped out the Cavendish banana in Asia and Australia. One approach is genetic modification (inserting a gene into the banana that makes it Race Four resistant), which is being researched at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane; the other approach is traditional plant breeding (growing many different banana varieties in hope of finding a Race Four resistant one), which is being developed at a La Lima research station in Honduras. Obviously, Peed’s piece is not just an exercise in banana appreciation like the article that Berton Roueché wrote for the magazine thirty-eight years ago (“The Humblest Fruit,” The New Yorker, October 1, 1973; collected in Roueché's 1978 The River World). Nor is it solely about the market’s acceptance of genetically modified produce like, say, John Seabrook’s piece about Calgene’s Flavr Savr tomato is (see “Tremors in the Hothouse,” The New Yorker, July 19, 1993; collected in Seabrook’s 2008 Flash of Genius). Nor is it strictly about Tropical Race Four the way, say, Elizabeth Kolbert’s article “Stung” (The New Yorker, August 6, 2007) is about the phenomenon (colony-collapse disorder) that was wiping out the bee population a few years ago. Pead’s article is about all these things – banana, blight, and genetic modification. He does a good job laying it all out in a relatively tight design. His best move is the way he brings Race Four alive on the page. To do this, he leads with an arresting account of a visit he made to a banana plantation in Humpty Doo, near Darwin, Australia. The manager shows him around the plantation. Peed’s report contains this memorable passage, perhaps the most pungent of the piece:

As we walked through the fields, Tropical Race Four seemed abundant as the mosquitoes circling our heads. “There’s one,” Smith said, pointing. “That’s two. You can see that one there? He’s coming out. There’s another one.” Some plants were just turning yellow; others were a desiccated mass of raw umber. At one point, Smith unsheathed a cane knife, which is similar to a machete, but with a shorter, wider blade. An axe is not needed to cut down a banana plant, which is not a tree but, rather, the world’s largest herb. The part that is usually called the trunk is the pseudostem – a barkless staff composed only of leaves waiting to unfurl. In one stroke, Smith sliced through a diseased plant. The inside resembled a crushed-out cigar, and the fetid odor was overwhelming. Smith said, “You smell that, and you think, Ah, fuck.”

There’s a low-key, workmanlike quality to Peed’s writing that I like. There are no flashy metaphors or similes. He knows he’s got an interesting (and important) story to tell; he more or less gets out of the way and lets it tell itself. I like his use of the first-person (e.g. “That afternoon, Dale and I drove east of Brisbane to a state-owned greenhouse”), and I like the sharp, bright dabs of detail (e.g., “Dragon flies buzzed, and a stray cat pawed the dirt”). For all of these reasons, Mike Peed’s “We Have No Bananas” is this week’s Pick Of The Issue.