Holiday Reading – Reading about Holidays

A change of scene is an invitation to misbehave in various ways

Jul 18, 2023

Last week one of our neighbours posted an urgent all-points alert on our street’s WhatsApp group. She was in desperate need of books for her holiday. She and her family were on the point of taking the ferry to France and she didn’t have time to go to the library. I invited her into our library and she departed with four books under her arm. Meanwhile other neighbours offered their favourite books. We all understood her panic at the prospect of travelling without a stash of books to beguile the hours on the ferry and to relax with on the beach or in the tent at night.

assorted books on shelf — Photo by S O C I A L . C U T on Unsplash

Over the past couple of weeks What’s the Story? has been tracing the motif of travel in fiction and poetry from journeys in pursuit of errant parents* to pilgrimages which go from bawdy party to the growth of a soul. Travelling in these instances enacts a personal and intimate evolution.

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What childishness is it that while there’s a breath of life
in our bodies, we are determined to rush
to see the sun the other way around?
The tiniest green hummingbird in the world?
To stare at some inexplicable old stonework,
inexplicable and impenetrable,
at any view,
instantly seen and always, always delightful?
Oh, must we dream our dreams
and have them, too?
And have we room
for one more folded sunset, still quite warm?

(From ‘Questions of Travel’ by Elizabeth Bishop)

Meanwhile, newspapers, journals and other review sources recommend ‘holiday’ reading. Rather like clothes, these books are chosen to fit the occasion and location, ‘light’ for the beach, ‘heart-warming’ for the odd day of rain or cold nights, ‘absorbing’ for the tedium of departure lounges and long trips. It tells us something about our idea of a holiday that we crave a certain type of book to keep us company. We want to be taken out of ourselves, as the plane, train or boat carries us away from our daily lives and workaday responsibilities. Escape and escapism are the order of the day, or holiday. What then, of stories about holidays? The characters hardly sit around reading soft, romantic novels or gripping thrillers all day and night. By contrast, the story set in a holiday context usually involves an adventure in which the life of the protagonist is irrevocably changed.

If a holiday is an escape it also gives us a licence to be someone else when away from home. Just as we bring more colourful clothes and accessories than we would ever wear around our neighbourhood, or buy local gear, seduced by the heat, light and music of a new place, we behave in unlikely ways. Some of us dream of adventure, a fling, a dalliance or a sporting thrill. Others have adventure thrust upon them. Think E.M. Forster’s A Room With A View, Elizabeth Von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, Willie Russell’s play, Shirley Valentine, or Sally Vickers’ novels, Miss Garnet’s Angel and Mr. Golightly’s Holiday.

It’s no surprise that the first three have been filmed, given their sun-drenched Italian and Greek settings, providing a two hour holiday for those of us in northern climes. Yes, they all concern English people abroad, encountering a cliché of Mediterranean life and manners which encourage them to behave uncharacteristically and thus disclose new depths of feeling in themselves. Similarly, Henry James dramatized the sentimental education of Americans by bringing his characters to Europe where they are seduced and deceived.

In a darker mode, however, are the stories that draw a moral from the contrast between a glamorous location and the melancholy of the protagonists. There are the old spa town versions of this trope, such as Chekhov’s ‘A Lady with a Dog’ and Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier (or The Saddest Story) where infidelity and sexual exploitation are ironically juxtaposed with the curative properties of the waters.

Much nonsense is talked about the looseness of the morals in these parts, and he despised such stories, knowing that they were largely fabricated by people who would have been glad to misbehave themselves, given the aptitude! But when the young woman sat down at the next table, three paces away, he recalled those tales of trips in the mountains and easy conquests.
(From A. Chekhov ‘A Lady with A Dog’, trans. Ronald Hingley)

So begins Dmitry Gurov’s sickening conquest of Anna, the unhappy young woman with the dog. Well, actually, he approaches the dog first . . .

Percy and I wouldn’t give Gurov the time of day

Among the darkest of stories set on holiday are Kate Chopin’s novel The Awakening, originally entitled A Solitary Soul, and Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. In each book sexual initiation culminates in a death wish. At the end of Chopin’s novel Edna Pontellier, holidaying in Grande Isle, Louisiana swims out to sea until she drowns. Mann’s tragic character, Gustave von Aschenbach, on holiday in Venice is so fixated on a beautiful young man that he succumbs to the cholera that has infested the city. Unlike the doughty characters in Forster’s, von Arnim’s and Garnet’s novels these characters, having tasted sexual freedom and fulfilment can no longer face home, or by extension, the selves they inhabit at home. Estranged from themselves they die in a strange place.

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