The Tao of Travel

IN A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, Newby traveled with Hugh Carless. In Slowly Down the Ganges, The Big Red Train Ride, and Through Ireland in Low Gear, he took his wife, Wanda, and in these three books he continually describes her expostulating in her Slovenian accent, "Horrick, vye you are saying zat to me?" But he is often funny and has a sharp eye for detail.

Rudyard Kipling and Carrie

WIDELY TRAVELED, NEVER alone. Known for his jingoism and his bombast, Kipling was, in fact, an enigmatic and melancholy figure. He was marked by his lonely childhood, spent in a cruel household ("the House of Desolation," he called it) in England, away from his parents in India (from the ages of five to eleven; see his story "Baa, Baa, Black Sheep"). He never mentions his wife, Carrie, who was American, a Vermonter, but she was always at his side. Much of his work is based on travel, especially in India, South Africa, and the United States, and his book of travel pieces, From Sea to Sea (1899), is superb.

Graham Greene and Companions

BEGINNING WITH HIS first travel book, Journey Without Maps, his long walk through the hinterland of Liberia, which he took (leaving his wife and children at home) with his cousin Barbara, Greene always had a traveling companion or a driver or a lover on board. He could not cook, drive a car, or use a typewriter, so he was helpless alone. Greene seemed to require the mateyness of another person—his friend Michael Meyer, who traveled with him through the Pacific, or later in his life the priest Father Duran, who appears in Monsignor Quixote. Greene claimed to be manic depressive, sometimes suicidal, and lonely. He had numerous love affairs, many of them passionate. He remained married to the same woman, Vivien Greene, the whole of his life, but never went anywhere with her.

D. H. Lawrence and Frieda

LAWRENCE ALWAYS TRAVELED with his wife, Frieda von Richthofen (her cousin was the Red Baron), beginning with their elopement in 1912, two months after they met (she was then married to Ernest Weekly, a French professor). Although they quarreled constantly, they lived in and traveled through Italy, the United States, Mexico, and Australia—and he wrote books based on his travels in all these places, notably Mornings in Mexico and Sea and Sardinia, sometimes mentioning Frieda, usually not.

Somerset Maugham and Lover

ON HIS LONGEST trips—to China, which yielded On a Chinese Screen, and to Southeast Asia, which resulted in The Gentleman in the Parlour —Maugham traveled with his lover, Gerald Haxton, though he does not disclose the fact, largely because he was married to Syrie, who resented his two-timing her with this young American drunkard, and because at the time he was traveling, the 1920s and 1930s, homosexuality was a crime in Britain. But Maugham had a terrible stammer, and he needed someone to converse with locals and bring back colorful stories and dialogue for his books. "Master Hacky" was just the man to help. Also Maugham loved him deeply. After Haxton died, Maugham traveled with Alan Searle, a greedy young Londoner who had sent him fan letters and became his lover and literary executor.

Rebecca West and Henry

PROBABLY NO TRAVEL book is fuller of the expressions "My husband said..." or "My husband told me..." than Black Lamb and Gray Falcon (1941), Rebecca West's account of her various trips through Yugoslavia, and since it is a book of some 1,200 pages, the words "my husband" appear numerous times. He was a banker, named Henry Andrews, and full of theories and explanations, which she approvingly recounts in the book.

John Steinbeck and Elaine

STEINBECK TRAVELED WITH his dog in Travels with Charley, as he said, but (though he never mentioned them) he had many conjugal visits en route: his wife, Elaine, met him every few weeks on the road to cheer him up. We know this from the letters that were published after his death; for example, on October 10, 1960: "I'm glad you came out and it was a good time, wasn't it? It took the blankness off a lot" (Life in Letters). This "blankness" he speaks of is never disclosed in the jolly book.

Patrick Leigh-Fermor and Friends