The huge cloud of poisonous ash, spewed forth from an Icelandic
volcano, was a painful reminder of our precarious dependence on air
travel. It shut down the airports of northwest Europe for a week
and left 20 million people stranded. One of my sons, on vacation
with his family in Tuscany, due to fly back direct from that
horrible place Pisa Airport, was obliged instead to use six
different and desperately crowded railroads, two hotels, and a taxi
to get home: for six people over three days it cost him a month’s
salary.
Thanks to terrorism, security mania, bad design, and mass
tourism, airports are now so un-popular that cruise lines,
operating from old-fashioned seaports, make frequent air-free trips
their leading advertising appeal. To many, Heathrow in August is a
paradigm of Hell. Not the worst example, though, if you take into
account foul, crammed roads from airports to city centers: Lagos in
Nigeria and Seoul in Korea take some beating.
The only thing to be said for air travel is speed. It makes
possible travel on a scale unimaginable before our present age.
Between the ages of 20 and four-score I visited every country in
Europe, all save two in Latin America, ditto in Africa, and most of
Asia, not counting eight trips to Australia and 60 to the United
States — all by air. When I compare my experience with the
globe-trotting of Evelyn Waugh in the interwar period, condensed in
his volume When the Going Was Good, I realize how lucky I
was to see it all so quickly and in comparative comfort.
On the other hand, the going was good then: before airlines
imposed monstrous uniformity, travel was enjoyable, full of
surprises, a cultural and human education, and slow enough to
change your outlook. In the early 4th century BC, Plato, traveling
by fast trireme from Athens to Syracuse, found Pythagorean
mathematics so absorbing he was away two years and returned a
metaphysician. Marco Polo, visiting Asia, spent two decades there,
getting about, and on his return was debriefed for a year in a
Genoese jail, using the time to write the best book of travel in
the entire Middle Ages.
In the 18th century, Benjamin Franklin crossed the Atlantic
eight times, a record beaten only by professional mariners and
perhaps one or two tobacco merchants. Jetters like, say, Rupert
Murdoch or David Frost would think nothing of that, but it took a
huge chunk out of Franklin’s life and energy. On the other hand, it
made him the most valuable of all human bridges between the New
World and the Old. In the age of the coach and horses you were
lucky to get one big trip and it changed you. Consider the fuss
over Elizabeth Bennet’s journey to the Peak District in Pride
and Prejudice, and its effect on her fortunes: it would be
small talk today, if that.
The real turning point came when steam downgraded the horse and
sail into sport. I often compare the reading matter of Surtees’
celebrated hunting man, Soapey Sponge, who when not riding had his
nose deep in the Official List of London Cab-Fares, the
only book he ever read, to Sherlock Holmes, at the other end of the
19th century, whose first reaction to a case would be to reach for
the latest issue of Bradshaw’s All-Britain Timetable, the
detailed guide to what was then the best and most efficient
railroad network in the world, to find out how quickly he could get
to the scene of the crime.
Rail hugely accelerated but did not dehumanize travel. As a
child I found railroad stations exciting, mysterious, and even
beautiful, as indeed they often were. Bombay station is perhaps the
finest neo-Gothic building in the world. There is in Paris the
magnificent Gare de l’Est by François Duquesne, built in 1847-52.
Broad Street Station Philadelphia, by the Wilson Brothers
(1892-93), is one of a great series of monumental creations in the
U.S., terminating in the magnificent Union Station of Cincinnati by
Roland Wank (1928). The best thing Mussolini ever did in his
unhappy career was to create three monumental stations in Florence,
Milan, and Rome (the last finished after World War Two) which, for
sheer grandeur and invention, would not have been out of place in
the empire of Trajan. It is a significant fact that whereas
airports, built by the hundred in the last half-century, belong to
the culture of Modernism at its most squalid and brutal, railroad
stations can still thrill and excite those who love architecture,
as witness the new station at Lyons in France, by the Spanish
master Calatrava. It uses ultra-modern materials and construction
methods but still contrives to suggest organic beauty. It has been
compared to “a giant butterfly enclosing the bones of a
dinosaur.”
Artists have, from the start, found railroads a source of
fascination. As early as the 1840s, Turner used their atmospherics,
as in Rain, Steam, and Speed, to create wondrous color and
chiaroscuro effects, and Claude Monet pursued the condensation
theme to the end of the century. Terminals were places where the
world gathered in sad and joyful congregations ripe for the artist
of genre. W. P. Frith used Paddington for his masterpiece
The Railway Station (1862) — its amazing arch also
produced one of G. K. Chesterton’s best poetic images. The
tradition still flourished when Norman Rockwell used the crowds at
Chicago Central as one of his best Christmas covers for the
Saturday Evening Post. No major artist has ever painted
airports.
I thank God that the two places I most care to visit, Paris and
Venice (plus Lake Como nearby), I can travel to comfortably by
railroad. For the first I use the Channel Tunnel Eurostar — faster
than air between the hated Heathrow and the still more detestable
Charles de Gaulle — and for the second the revived Orient Express,
which recalls the splendors of the interwar train de luxe.
Nostalgia for travel three-quarters of a century ago, if you were
rich enough to buy first-class tickets, is compelling, especially
if the mind dwells on those majestic North Atlantic liners: the
Mauretania, the Normandie, the Rex, and
the Bremen, later the Queen Mary and the
America. Men voyaged in those days with their valets,
women with their lady’s maids, the menus and wine lists were books,
the ambience a delicate blend of late Henry James and
A la recherche du temps perdu.
Is there any possibility of giving international air travel,
which we all need and use and hate, a touch of glamour, or even of
reliable, soulless efficiency? I suspect future historians will
puzzle over our failure. But by then, of course, we shall be in the
age of mass space travel, with its fresh and unimaginable crop of
horrors.
