As only five months have passed, and as I'm only one and a half books into his
oeuvre, I won't say that Eric Newby is my "New Author of the Year" -- but he could turn out to be the one, much as I enjoyed my first Patrick Leigh Fermor book some weeks ago. Perhaps these two will have to tie for the honor. (I think of novelist Madison Jones as my "New Author of the Year" for 2012.)
The
Guardian's obituary ("The expenses he claimed made his colleagues gasp with admiration"):
Obituary
Eric Newby
Idiosyncratic travel writer from another age, and author of the classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush
Edward Mace George
Monday October 23, 2006
The Guardian
Nobody was better qualified to produce his own obituary than the travel writer Eric Newby, author of the classic A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush, who has died aged 86. Ever ready to spill the autobiographical beans, he was not one to sell himself short. The notice would have read splendidly, for at his best Newby, a former Observer travel editor, could conjure a scene as Canaletto could a painting or Berlioz an opera.
Newby was born at the tail end of the Victorian and Edwardian era, when Englishmen explored the world with purpose and intent rather than for frivolous pleasure, enduring gender-testing hardship wherever possible. By the time Newby got going the old spirit had diminished, but he did his best to keep it alive. When he was in London, he always gave the impression that he was on leave.There was more than a touch of Boy's Own about him, and of Baker Street. He invariably wore a smart trilby, but a deerstalker would have been equally appropriate. He had a passion for heavy boots and cumbersome waterproofs. He was a glorious combination of idiosyncrasy and beautiful manners, all the time bubbling with vitality and gob-smacking gusto. He wore the right clothes: his safari suits were immaculate. Even after he joined the Garrick, he continued to dress like a gentleman.
Born and brought up in Barnes, south-west London, Newby was sent to St Paul's school, his middle-class parents, George and Hilda, no doubt intending him for a thoroughly conventional future, perhaps a notch up socially, with a safe, well-paid nine to five job and a Joan Hunter-Dunn marriage. Small indications were noted early that events might turn out otherwise. In the fifth form, he was marked out as a boy who could spot a joke at 20 yards and who revelled in self-ridicule. All his life his humour had the equivalent in music of perfect pitch. Nevertheless, after leaving school at 16, he went to work for the advertising firm, Dorland.
Not for long. By 1938 Newby had got himself on the crew of a four-masted barque, first as an apprentice, then as an ordinary seaman, sailing in the last Grain race from Australia to Europe, by way of Cape Horn. He used to say that the masts which the crew had to climb were as high as Nelson's column. When the war came along, he served in the Black Watch, being decorated later, and the Special Boat Section. He was a PoW from 1942 until the end of the war.
Indeed, he was twice taken prisoner, and told the story of his recapture - "a very disagreeable experience" - in what many regard as his finest book, Love and War in the Apennines (1971), a superb reconstruction of how at the height of the guerrilla warfare against the Germans in Italy, he met Wanda, the girl he returned to find when the war was over and whom he subsequently married. Although A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush (1958) is the comic masterpiece Newby will be remembered by, Love and War revealed another side to what on the surface was an uncomplicated nature, a compelling tenderness and compassion. There are passages of great depth, quite beyond the range of ordinary travel writing.
In 1946 Newby went into the fashion business, an unlikely pitch where he remained for 10 years, breaking out occasionally from pinning up models for the catwalk in order to explore far flung places, always with the maximum discomfort. He changed tack in 1956 and went to the publishers Secker and Warburg for three years, before once again answering the call of fashion by joining the John Lewis Partnership. From 1959 to 1963, he was their central buyer for ladies' model dresses.
There was some divergence of opinion about how that worked out. Even Evelyn Waugh, who was sufficiently impressed by young Newby's writings to offer to contribute the preface to A Short Walk without a fee, confessed himself flummoxed by the contrasts in Newby's life. However, the two sides were probably less opposed than they may have appeared. Newby had a wife and a son and daughter to support, and full-time travel writing, let alone the expense of gathering the material, had severe limitations.
What was needed was a sponsor, and in 1964 it came. The Observer, under David Astor, was moving into a new ring in the quality Sunday newspaper circus. George Seddon, a brilliant journalistic innovator, was charged with bucking-up the ideas and appeal of the paper's review section. He was an admirer of Newby's style, and offered him the job of travel editor.
During Newby's almost 10-year tenure the paper produced distinguished travel pages, although, in truth, he was not a very good travel editor. The nuts and bolts of the job bored him, and the vulgarity of most modern travel journalism disgusted him. His talents were wasted on the minutiae that were required. He was lucky to enjoy the first-rate assistance of the self-effacing Diana Petry, without whose help the travel pages would sometimes have failed to appear. Newby would be off on his travels or, if at home, writing books about them. The expenses he claimed made his colleagues gasp with admiration. He wrote 25 books, all of them listed in his entry in his Who's Who entry. Three of them were written jointly, and it was typical of Newby not to mention who the collaborators were: he was not keen on sharing glory.
It was during his time at the Observer that Newby became an expert photographer, often with the help and advice of exasperated picture editors. He left the paper in 1973 to produce The World Atlas of Exploration (1975), on terms that were alleged to put him on a secure financial footing for good. Subsequently, he published books in swift succession, often going over the same ground; in 1973 he brought out two within months. The spring of rich, fruity prose seemed inexhaustible. Wanda, a splendid homemaker who stood little, if any, nonsense, saw to his creature comforts, finally settling him down, spectacularly well-fed, in a lovely house in Surrey.
Sadly, more did not mean better. Newby's journalism got repetitive and, by the late 1980s, slapdash. People began to hint, and then to say out loud, that he was written out. He may have known this, yet could not stop writing. His last title, A Book of Lands and Peoples, appeared in 2003.
Not that it matters. Few travel writers have left behind them such a blaze of fun and evocation, stimulants that affect a reader's imagination like an electric charge. It is very sad indeed that we shall never again see that ubiquitous trilby perched with the precision of a lightning conductor above that handsome, weatherbeaten face, or hear once more the heart-warming chuckle.
Wanda survives him, as do their childen Sonia and Jonathan.
· Eric Newby, travel writer, born December 6 1919; died October 20 2006
