isolated in ways scarcely imaginable to modern minds, stirred my own memories of reading in remote places. I trace the beginning of my true devotion to literature to a volume of Auden’s poetry given to me to read while in the Jiddat al-Harasis desert in Oman (though that properly belongs to another story). But the accounts of bush camps by Burton and others also cast new light on my own childhood, much of which was spent on safari in eastern Africa. I was born into a family of conservationists – my literary work is something of an anomaly, and a confusing one for them – so I spent most school holidays with my parents in areas chosen for their remoteness. These were, of course, entirely less dangerous affairs than the Victorian expeditions: convoys of Land Rovers, tented camps often with generators and two-way radios, and usually no more than a few hours from something recognizable as a road. What had not changed, however, since the time of those early adventurers, was the curious blend of luxury and primitiveness which characterized these travels. Even in the days of Land Rovers food supplies sometimes ran low, and among my clearest childhood memories is a scene of Samburu warriors in northern Kenya bringing to our camp the goat for which my father had bargained, its square and staring eyes as it bled out into a lip in its throat. Nothing was wasted, down to a coin-purse from the scrotum, and the goat meat was later fire-roasted by a cook as the adults had cocktails at sundown.
This blend of the primitive and the decadent seemed unremarkable to me at the time – simply part of how things were done – and it was only later that I became aware that many in Europe and America escape into nature with the conscious design of depriving themselves of life’s comforts. An early twentieth-century traveller, the self-styled backwoodsman Theodore Roosevelt, complained repeatedly about the self-indulgence he encountered during his two-year hunting safari in Kenya, which he gave himself as a present on his retirement as US President in 1909:
At Kapiti plains our tents, our accommodation generally, seemed almost too comfortable for men who knew camp life only on the Great Plains, in the Rockies, and in the North Woods. My tent had a fly, which was to protect it from the great heat; there was a little rear extension in which I bathed – a hot bath, never a cold bath, is almost a tropic necessity; … Then, I had two tent-boys to see after my belongings, and to wait at table as well as in the tent. … The provisions were those usually included in an African hunting or exploring trip, save that, in memory of my days in the West, I included in each provision box a few cans of Boston baked beans, California peaches, and tomatoes.9
The fine living which so disappointed Roosevelt would come to seem rather tame in comparison to the hedonism of later settlers, who added the fashionable sins of narcotics and promiscuity to these gastronomic indulgences; but it was certainly not entirely new either. While the porters held out, Burton’s readings of Shakespeare would have been considerably enlivened by the bottle of port he insisted on drinking each day in the belief that it would stave off fever. Something of Burton’s belief remained in my youth in the settler habit of drinking endless gins and tonic purportedly for the quinine in the Indian tonic water. But even as the medical justifications fell away, it remained customary for some of the trappings of safari life to be, if anything, more luxurious than they would be at home, even if the good wine had to be drunk from tin mugs.
These habits of indulgence also extended to art. For Burton it was Shakespeare; for Denys Finch-Hatton, the hunter whose relationship with Baroness Blixen was made famous in her memoir Out of Africa, it was the Greek poets and a gramophone that supposedly fascinated the houseboys on Blixen’s farm:
It was a curious thing that Kamante should stick, in his preference, with much devotion to the Adagio of Beethoven’s Piano Concerto in C Major; the first time that he asked me for it he had some difficulty in describing it, so as to make clear to me which tune it was that he wanted.10
Roosevelt may have considered his expedition to be a pattern of self-denial – though many struggled to agree, given that he bagged thousands of trophies from 269 species, some from the cowcatcher of his own private train – but he had less stringent standards when it came to cultural cargo. For his two-year hunt he commissioned a fifty-five-volume ‘pigskin library’; this was a veritable ark of Western culture to be carried into the wilderness, though Roosevelt (in his characteristic disregard for the proprieties of polite society) brashly mixed the undisputed classics of the Western canon with lighter fare from soon-forgotten authors. When the selection of books for the library, which are now kept at Harvard, occasioned a public debate with Harvard’s then president, C. W. Eliot, on Roosevelt’s return, Roosevelt quickly conceded that much of the selection was merely a matter of personal taste. The inclusion of three volumes of Shakespeare, however, caused no controversy; as Roosevelt suggested, there were only ‘four books so pre-eminent – the Bible, Shakespeare, Homer, and Dante – that I suppose there would be a general consensus of opinion among the cultivated men of all nationalities in putting them foremost’.11 For Roosevelt, as for the guests on the long-running BBC radio show Desert Island Discs, the need for Shakespeare was taken for granted when links with civilization were broken.
A souvenir print showing Roosevelt on his African adventure. (Library of Congress LC-DIG-ppmsca-36551)
Despite the fact that the library weighed sixty pounds and that it required a porter all of its own, Roosevelt insisted (as Burton had) on the practical nature of the volumes:
They were for use, not ornament. I almost always had some volume with me, either in my saddle-bag or in the cartridge-bag which one of my gun-bearers carried to hold odds and ends. Often my reading would be done while resting under a tree at noon, perhaps beside the carcass of a beast I had killed, or else while waiting for camp to be pitched; and in either case it might be impossible to get water for washing. In consequence the books were stained with blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes; ordinary bindings either vanished or became loathsome, whereas pigskin merely grew to look as a well-used saddle-bag looks.12
There is a curious sense in Roosevelt’s African Game Trails that these refined products of European literary culture somehow belong among the ‘blood, sweat, gun oil, dust, and ashes’, that reading them in the most inhospitable climes demonstrated both that the works’ seeming delicacy was illusory, and that the reader’s poetic soul was immune to the lures of barbarism.
As one quickly comes to realize in reading the accounts of explorers, naturalists, hunters and opportunists travelling the African wilderness, Roosevelt was following a tradition which had become firmly established between Burton’s time and his; the only unusual thing about the President’s actions was that he took so many books, whereas most travellers in the African interior publicly affirmed that they took Shakespeare as their only literary reading. Compiling an inventory of his own expeditionary supplies in 1886, Walter Montague Kerr protests at the meagreness of the baggage which accompanied him overland from South Africa to the Lakes, noting that his
baggage … would have made a poor show beside the enormous stores carried by some expeditions to the interior of the dark continent … I also had some books – a small edition of Shakespeare, a Nautical Almanac, logarithmic tables, and Proctor’s Star Atlas.13
Once again, a volume of Shakespeare is found nestled in among technical manuals, and after a while it does not seem out of place. It becomes, in effect, a cultural tool as necessary for survival as any of the cartographer’s manuals. Another traveller in the interior, Thomas Heazle Parke, writing from a sickbed just west of Albert Nyanza (in modern-day Congo), mentions that he is ‘filling up [his] time reading Shakespeare and Allingbone’s Quotations. The former, with the Bible, and Whittaker’s large edition, are the best books for Africa when transport is limited.’14 The printing of Shakespeare, like the Bible, in dense double columns on thin paper allowed for a great deal of powerful language to be squeezed into a small space. It is easy to forget, however, that Shakespeare’s works were made portable because they were thought