Two very different train trips

First, Diary of a Pilgrimage by Jerome K. Jerome (TBR stacks, 2016)

I have no idea what finally inspired me to pick this up, after so many years on the TBR stacks. Orginally published in 1891, it is an account of a trip Jerome K. Jerome took with his friend "B" to see the Oberammergau Passion Play. I first learned about this play, presented every ten years since the 17th century, from Maude Hart Lovelace. In Betsy and the Great World, the title character visits the small town in an off-year, when the play is not being presented, meeting the villagers who play the different characters and enjoying the town's hospitality. Jerome's story begins in England with B's invitation. It reads like a travel journal, detailing their mishaps and adventures. The tone is familiar from To Say Nothing of the Dog, but I found it funnier and more engaging than his later account of a bicycle tour through Germany, Three Men on the Bummel. I was surprised by a sincere meditation on churches and religious faith, and a serious discussion of the Passion Play. Unlike the fictional Betsey, he was there in a presentation year (1890). He also had the chance to meet the villagers/actors, and some of the names were familiar from the fictional visit.

After I finished the book, I checked for biographical information on Jerome. I learned that he published an autobiography called My Life and Times in 1926, the year before his death. I also learned that on an American tour, he was horrified by the lynching of African Americans and protested during his talks, even in the South; and that he drove an ambulance in France during the Great War, after being declared unfit for service. I promptly located a copy of the book, and I am determined not to let it languish unread.

 

Second, The Wheel Spins, by Ethel Lina White (2024 purchase)

One of my favorite podcasts is Shedunnit, hosted by Caroline Crampton, which covers Golden Age detective fiction. I think I have said before that I don't read much modern crime fiction lately. The cosies often seem too twee, and the police procedurals have too many serial killers. Martin Edwards through his collections of Golden Age stories, and the British Library reprints, have introduced me to new authors, as has the podcast. One I have been anxious to read is The Wheel Spins, which inspired Alfred Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes. I saw the film years ago and remembered the basic plot, but not well enough to see where book and film diverge.

In the novel, Iris Carr has been on holiday in the Balkans with a groups of Bright Young Things. The rest of the groups leaves for England two days before she does (to the relief of the other British visitors, tired of their shenanigans). While Iris is waiting for her train on her own day of departure, she has an episode of sunstroke in the station. She is helped on to the overcrowded train, and in her compartment is a "tweedy spinster" named Miss Froy, who takes her to the dining car for tea, chattering about her work as a governess and the home she is returning to for a holiday. Afterwards, Iris falls asleep in her seat. When she wakens, Miss Froy is not in the compartment, and everyone else asserts she was never there and doesn't exist. Iris searches for her frantically, while being dismissed as ill and hysterical.

It is a very tense story, with Iris feeling very alone and vulnerable, particularly since she doesn't speak the language. She has one ally, who isn't actually that much support, since he doesn't completely believe her. I found his transition to her love interest the weakest part of the story. Despite having a general idea of how the story ended. I did read the ending early on to make sure it was a happy one. I don't know that I'll look for more of Ethel Lina White's books, especially since one of them features a serial killer, but I'll keep my eyes open for copies turning up.

On the bummel

Three Men on the Bummel, Jerome K. Jerome

I had already read and loved Three Men in a Boat when I came across a Penguin edition that combined it with Three Men on the Bummel, which I hadn't.  I immediately bought it, and then it sat on the TBR pile for too many years.  I always meant to re-read Boat before Bummel, and I never got around to it.  Helen's recent review on She Reads Novels made me move it up the stacks. I was also interested to compare Jerome's account of his German travels with Elizabeth von Arnim's picture of the country and its people in her novels (particularly her account of an English holiday in The Caravaners, whose Baron von Ottringel so despises the British).

I might as well confess straight off (and with a blush) that I initially thought "the Bummel" was a river, and that this would be Harris, George and J. off on another boating expedition.  Instead of course it is about what was meant to be a cycling tour of Germany, though the three of them spend much of their time, at least in J.'s telling, on trains or wandering around cities and towns.  Jeremy Lewis, the editor, points out that when this book was published in 1900, cycling was all the rage, and women particularly were finding in it a freedom they had never had.  This made Jerome's book very topical, and his typical digressions into the different kinds of bicycles, their equipment and repairs, and even the advertisements for them, provide some interesting social history.

Like the earlier book, this one starts off with the three men sitting around, complaining that they need a change, worn out with work and worry as they are.  But now Harris and J. are married men with families, and they can't just set off on a trip.  They hatch a cunning plan to get their wives to agree to a bachelor's holiday, to which the women just as cunningly agree.  So with a tandem bike and a single in tow, the three set off for Hamburg.  At that point, J. stops his narrative to explain that

There will be no useful information in this book.  Anyone who should think that with the aid of this book he would be able to make a tour through Germany and the Black Forest would probably lose himself before he got to the Nore. . . I do not regard the conveyance of useful information as my forte.

In one of my favorite digressions, he then goes on to recount his career in journalism, working on a paper that "combined instruction with amusement," such as how to make one's fortune keeping rabbits, or how to learn dance-steps by means of diagrams.  J. also wrote the advice column, "Straight Talks to Young Men," by "Uncle Henry," and his co-workers included a shabby little woman who wrote the cooking and fashion sections.  After an unfortunate article involving experiments with hydrogen gas, the editor advised him to avoid giving useful information in the future, and J. reluctantly came to accept that advice (though not before instructing a friend "about how to marry his deceased wife's sister at Stockholm" - I'd love to hear that story).

Returning to his main story, J. travels with his friends from Hamburg to Berlin and Dresden, and then to the Black Forest.  Along the way he has fun with the accidents of travel, and with the British abroad (especially their inability to speak foreign languages).  In turn he mocks the German passion for order, which in his telling leads them to "improve" nature out of all recognition, not to mention spoiling scenic areas with restaurants.  He also has great fun with German law and social rules, which the three are constantly if innocently breaking, running up quite a tally of fines. "This is the charm of German law: misdemeanour in Germany has its fixed price."

J. spends much more time discussing the German people and their society than his travels. On the one hand, he appreciates the good order and prosperity of the country, and he finds Germans themselves "an amiable, unselfish, kindly people."  He notes their proverbial kindness to children and animals, but he contrasts that with the universal habit of duelling among university students.  I was unprepared for his detailed account of a night spent watching young men slice each other to the bone, himself falling under the spell of the "curious hot odour of blood."  Jerome was troubled by what he saw as most people's overly-regimented life, under a paternal government. "In Germany you take no responsibility upon yourself whatever. Everything is done for you, and done well."  But all will be well, unless "by any chance something goes wrong with the governing machine."  As the editor also points out, there was at this time great interest and some concern about the German Empire, staking out colonies and building its navy, and Jerome was one of many British writers trying to get a handle on the country and its people.

I enjoyed this, though it was not what I expected.  Like the first book, there is great fun in the misadventures of the Three Men, and I particularly enjoy their sometimes snappish exchanges, like the debate over who has to ride the tandem and who gets the single bike.  In Three Men in a Boat, J. sometimes pauses in his story to muse on Life and Faith and other big topics, which really took me aback the first time I read it; I kept waiting for the punchline.  Here he follows the same pattern, mixing the comic and the serious, with the more serious sections focused on Germany and its people.

I have Mark Twain's A Tramp Abroad on the top of the TBR stack, an account of a European tour that also began in Hamburg, and it will be interesting to travel some of the same ground in his irreverent company.