Dhamma

Thursday, September 19, 2024

THE CRUEL WAY Switzerland to Afghanistan in a Ford, 1939

 FOREWORD

By Jessa Crispin

When one goes about reintroducing a forgotten book to a contemporary audience, it can be hard to avoid that slight disorientation associated with all time travel. Ella Maillart’s The Cruel Way belongs to a different world than ours. A world where Hitler was just getting started. A world where Afghanistan could be described as Maillart does as being “hardly altered by the West.” A world with fewer heavily guarded borders. There would be so much in our world to show the sharp-eyed woman who wrote The Cruel Way if she could be here now. Like smoothies. Smartphones. Designer yoga pants.

Of course great books are capable of transcending their eras, but books that have been in circulation since their debuts probably have an easier time of it. Anna Karenina and Isabel Archer have been invited to all the best parties for decades now. They know how to stay in style with the change of a frock and a new do, but their insides stay the same. Their reputations precede. They need no introduction.

It’s been a while since we’ve seen Maillart in the States. And as a result there’s something a little bit . . . off about her. Oh, it’s not her fault. And at first glance you could hardly tell. After all, she’s written a book that could be distilled down to a tale of self-actualization against the backdrop of war. She should sit comfortably beside the hundreds of novels, some of which win very large awards, released every year, that also fit that description. You could also say it’s a memoir about a woman making an external journey alongside the more vital internal journey, learning about herself and the outer world along the way. She would have plenty of company in that particular bookstore shelf as well. She might even be picked for the Oprah book club. When she writes things like, “What I am trying to be? Unencumbered by possession, everywhere at home, intensely alive, without masters, unlimited by nationality,” you can almost picture her at a $5,000 Sedona yoga retreat, leading a guided inner meditation.

But look a little closer and she does not quite fit. She is not quite of our age. The displacement starts to show. That hat isn’t vintage inspired, it’s actually vintage. And her version of self-actualization, it is not our own.

On June 6, 1939, Ella Maillart left her home in Geneva, Switzerland, and drove with her friend Annemarie Schwarzenbach to Afghanistan. Hitler was devouring Central Europe, France was spinning itself uselessly into one government quickly followed by another, and the leaders of the Soviet Union were letting their masks of egalitarianism slip a little bit to reveal the tyrants beneath. And yet one of the goals of this trip was for Maillart to show Schwarzenbach that the world in itself, as is, was a beautiful place. Violent, yes. Despairing and terrifying, sure. But also worth being present for.

And Maillart does delight in the world around her. She is able to draw on a wealth of historical knowledge, seeing the land they are moving through as it has been moved through, settled, invaded, and defended for centuries. She is perhaps the ideal travel companion: able to whisper secrets about this mosque or that river in your ear while also remaining personable and friendly. The Afghanistan she sees and portrays is not the Afghanistan of our newspaper headlines. The inevitable clash awaiting Afghanistan when it is forced to introduce itself to the rest of the world is only just barely beginning. That relative peace allows Maillart to see the layers of the place, in a way that you never can as you’re running along the surface, looking for cover.

To me, the real heart of the story, and the source of its timelessness, is the friendship at its center. Schwarzenbach was in the grips of an addiction that scares both of them, and she seemed reluctant to face the world directly at all, let alone with any fondness. Schwarzenbach, whom Maillart calls “Christina,” is often pictured with head bowed, flinching from a blow that never comes, anticipating rejection in such a way that could drive away even the most loyal of friends. She discarded her past as an heiress and as the descendant of German aristocracy, but had not yet found a suitable identity to replace it with. She flirted with androgyny, being repeatedly mistaken for male along the journey, and her sexuality is just as fluid. And so she drifted along, sometimes a writer, sometimes muse, sometimes archeologist. Sometimes boy, sometimes girl. Maillart makes it her mission to bring Christine in from this confusion. “Briefly stated,” she writes at the beginning of their journey, “my main aims were to acquire self-mastery and to save my friend from herself.”

One almost believes that she can do it, that her will is so strong she can put all wrongs right. If Maillart can evade angry customs officials, cope with Afghan soldiers who want to confirm her gender by putting their hands up her shirt, and coolly deal with having guns pointed at her, surely she can drag her friend from the edge of the abyss, no sweat. There is something so sturdy about Maillart, and it comes across in her prose and in her biography. She skied, she hiked, she sailed. Before she wrote The Cruel Way she competed in the Olympics, she walked across Turkistan, she spent seven months traveling from Peking to Kashmir over paths considered impassable. And even still she is dissatisfied with herself, somehow thinking she must “mend my ways, . . . take myself in hand.”

All of Maillart’s accomplishments simply mask that she is as afflicted with the same longing, the same awareness of an emptiness at the center of her life, as her traveling companion. Maillart spins out less dramatically, but all of the wandering, all of the striving is her way of coping with its presence. After all, as travel writer Andrzej Stasiuk has pointed out, travel is just another narcotic, another way of attaining an altered state. Reality is heightened during travel, your surroundings change from the mundane to the fantastical. What used to be a chore in your daily life—finding breakfast, getting across town—becomes an adventure. It is a less destructive—to your body, at least—but just as addictive as many other drugs. Once you go a-wandering, and get hooked on that surreal sensation, it can be hard to go home again. Maillart tries to help Christina/Annemarie swap out her drug of choice and continues reroute their journey away from cities where drugs are more easily attained.

That empty spot in life haunts us always. The dissatisfaction at the heart of us. Stepping up to the edge of it to struggle with it, to let it challenge us—that is what makes great character and great art. To constantly fling things into it, in the hopes that the chasm will eventually fill up somehow, makes for an emptier life. Maillart sees an entire world trying to fling objects into that chasm, whether it be psychotic political parties, drugs, or money. She knows that her restlessness is connected to the restlessness of the rest of the Western world, the world that thinks if it just invents a faster car, if it just gets rid of these people over here, if it just does this one thing, everything will be okay again.

As everyone who has watched a friend slip into addiction eventually must realize, you can never will your friend safe and clear. Either they make the choice to head for shore or they do not. And while Maillart longs for stillness and for peace, she does not back down from the challenge. After writing The Cruel Way she settled herself in India, long before the age of yoga cults and Westerner-filled ashrams. And her encounter with the East is where she deviates from our era, because what she approached as a philosophical system has been turned into a lifestyle for the modern American. It’s become a whole new category of stuff to throw into that gap. We’re so overstuffed with stories of blonde women finding spirituality in the East, as they blithely overlook poverty and patriarchy in these countries and return to America to open up a vegan bakery/chakra cleansing studio. Our Western world went to the East, bought everything it could at the bazaar, and wonders why it doesn’t feel any better. We’re still picking international fights, we’re still looking for enlightenment that can be purchased with a credit card, and we think because we know two dozen yoga poses that we understand Hinduism.

And that’s why it’s time to start inviting Maillart to the party. We need her to challenge what we think the story of two women traveling to the East can do. We need her to disrupt our detachment. “May the little that I have found help you to find what each of us has to find by himself,” she wrote, and what she has found is a world of beauty and hope, a world worth going out into, even in its darkest age.

Berlin, September 2012

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