Monthly Online Book Review and Listings Magazine ~ May 2009

Home page ::: Crime ::: Fantasy & SF ::: Popular ::: History ::: Nonfiction ::: Children's ::: Nostalgia ::: Comics

PHOTOGRAPHS FROM HEAVEN

Eric Newby (1919 – 2006): Travel-writer supreme.

by Jerry Dowlen 

The death of Eric Newby has robbed us of a foremost travel writer of our time. However, I console myself with the notion that he is probably now writing a travelogue of Heaven, and that he will somehow find a way to send this to us, with a few photographs!  

To try and explain that last remark I need to say that my favourite Eric Newby travel book is ‘The Big Red Train Ride’ (Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1978). It describes a journey on the Trans-Siberian Railway in 1977.

For me, it is the photographs that make the book special. In the Picador paperback edition the colour photograph on the front cover is a good match for the book’s title. A red train can be seen, somewhat faintly in the middle distance, traversing a bleak grey landscape in which one large and one small pylon provide the only other man-made objects for the eye to settle on.

And then look inside the book. You will find a small collection of black & white photographs. You won’t be thinking David Bailey. You won’t be thinking High-Resolution Megapixels. Rather, you’ll be thinking: Kodak Brownie … family snapshots … a bit grainy … what funny objects to take a photo of!

I consider nevertheless that these photographs are a marvel.

To appreciate fully the miracle that Eric Newby managed to take any photographs inside the Soviet Union and then smuggle them back to the other side of the Iron Curtain, you have to transport yourself back to the Cold War era when that secret and secretive country the USSR was not normally open to foreign tourists.

The Soviet authorities imposed very tight restrictions upon Eric Newby for his journey. He was accompanied throughout by Mischa, whom he describes in the book somewhat circumspectly as “A member of the Agency”.

Even before the rail journey had started, Eric Newby discovered one of Mischa’s duties:

Up at the head of the train, I was just about to photograph the big electric engine, Type CHS2 … Then, a large hand closed over lens and viewfinder and for the first of what was to be dozens of times I heard the dread words “Nyet razreshayetsa!” (“Not permitted!”).

You probably need to be a reader of a certain age to appreciate why I hold that the very ordinariness and greyness of the photographs in the book ‘The Big Red Train Ride’ is a virtue, not a defect.

In that unique time frame after World War Two and before the collapse of the Berlin Wall, few of us in the west ever saw any pictures from within the USSR, our sinister and mysterious Cold War enemy, save for the handful of propaganda-friendly images whose release to the outside world was firmly controlled by the Soviet ministries. Legions of smartly-drilled soldiers parading in Red Square Moscow, accompanied by tanks and missiles-on-wheels: yes. Portrait photographs of handsome Soviet government officials, astronauts, scientists or sporting heroes: yes. Raddled peasant-women tilling the crops or offering bedraggled vegetable produce for sale at a primitive market-stall: no.

Eric Newby’s clandestine photographs captured the essence of a Soviet and particularly Siberian interior that all of us had perhaps half-imagined, but only upon their presentation to us within the narrative of his ‘Big Red Train Ride’ could we confirm our suspicions that the Soviet Union was not entirely the modern and efficient Utopia that the Kremlin would have us believe.

Not that I am trying to rub the USSR’s noses in it by claiming that all of Eric Newby’s photographs reveal a backward and depressing country. Far from it. The scenes shown are in large part ones of drab poverty and unexceptional landscape, but for me this accentuates the charm of the hitherto unseen USSR rather than gives cause to mock it. There is something comforting, I feel, to see male and female railway workers (albeit somewhat aged-looking and bulky ones) engaging in horse-play during a relaxation break. Nor is there anything but warmth to be felt when we gaze upon very ordinary Russian or Siberian citizens partaking of mundane day-to-day activities such as waiting on a rather dingily-lit railway station platform or standing the front room of their house.

I love all these photographs. They are so – well, I have to use the word again – ordinary. This applies to the landscape shots too. I imagine Eric Newby surreptitiously aiming his camera at the railway carriage window and taking a quick snapshot while his wife Wanda distracts Mischa in conversation. The results: countryside scenes, a church, a monument, an entrance to a railway tunnel, and – an onomatopoeic delight – a dark and brooding photograph of “River Ob at Novosibrisk”. I bet too that Eric Newby derived huge satisfaction from getting his own back on Mischa and bagging a splendid photograph of “Steam Engine East of Krasnoyarsk.”

In the obituaries that were published after Eric Newby's death, praising his great writing skill, some much-mentioned themes were his lively wit, his British sense of the absurd, and his eye for extraordinary detail. I would hold all of this to be true of 'The Big Red Train Ride'.

In support of my claim that Eric Newby was a supreme travel writer I would like to highlight one other book, 'The Last Grain Race' (Martin Secker & Warburg, 1956). Indeed, I'm going to rewrite that last sentence and delete the word "travel": Eric Newby was a supreme writer. In 'The Last Grain Race' there is a passage of writing that had a physical effect upon me like no other book that I can think of.

At the age of eighteen, Eric Newby literally ran away to sea. This was in 1938. He chucked his office job and signed on as an apprentice crew member of a four-masted sailing-ship Moshulu to carry grain from Australia to Europe. 'The Last Grain Race' was his compelling published memoir of his rugged endurance test on the high seas. It was his debut travel book.

I am a landlubber, a complete ignoramus about sailing. Nevertheless I found 'The Last Grain Race' to be an enthralling and rollicking read. Of necessity Eric Newby had to include some maritime technical detail and jargon at various stages of the story, but, same as I found in that masterpiece of a book 'The Riddle of the Sands' by Erskine Childers, the writing is skilfully tempered so that the layman can enjoy and understand the sailing action without getting bogged down by the unfamiliar terminology.

It was an early chapter in 'The Last Grain Race' that sliced me open like no other piece of writing has done before or since. The chapter is entitled "Op the Rigging" and it describes how the young Newby, reporting for crew duty on his first day, was immediately ordered by the Second Mate, a Scandinavian, to climb "op the rigging".

On arrival at the dock Eric Newby had already noticed that:

The four enormously tall masts, fore, main and mizzen, and the less lofty jigger mast, towered into the sky.

And now he had been summarily ordered to ascend the tallest mast, 198 feet high above him.

There follows a detailed narrative description of the experience. I do mean "detailed". It is vivid too. No wonder that although this was Eric Newby's first published book, the critics immediately saw that an exceptional new writing talent had arrived.

I have no head for heights. Three or four rungs up a ladder is usually enough to set me off feeling dizzy and wobbly. Coward as I am, halfway through the chapter "Op the rigging" I found that so vivid and realistic was Eric Newby's account of his climb that I truly felt that I was right there with him, my head giddy, my chest tightening, my heart palpitating, the wind singing in my ears and my legs turning to water. In the end it became too much for me. I had to stop reading. I put the book down and when I came back to it I didn't try to read the end of that chapter. I moved on to start the next one.

Of course, the violently physical effect upon me was a testament to the superb quality of Eric Newby's descriptive writing. For similar gripping realism - conveying the sense that you the reader are there in person - I can also cite George Orwell's book 'The Road to Wigan Pier' and the chapter in which Orwell describes his journey down a coal mine.

Eric Newby began 'The Last Grain Race' with a whimsical mention of his office job in an advertising agency, and the circumstances that caused him to move on and try a life on the ocean wave instead. He was to expand upon this theme in a later book 'Something Wholesale' (Martin Secker & Warburg, 1962). This book was a light-hearted, knockabout account of his return to dry land and his largely disastrous and certainly hilarious attempt to master the fashion trade while working for the family firm Lane & Newby after the war.

In 'Something Wholesale' Eric Newby writes with fond affection of his single-minded father whose sometimes unpredictable behaviour included a propensity to lean out of the car window and shout "SILLY KITE!" at startled motorists who had just completed a correct manoeuvre on the road while it was Newby Senior's vehicle that was actually in the wrong.

My favourite character at Newby & Lane is the voluptuous office-girl named Lola - a dead cert to have been played by Liz Fraser had the book ever been filmed.

Eric Newby belongs to a category of writers whose work I much enjoy because they are writers who can make us see and enjoy "the extraordinary in the ordinary". Such books remind us of a simple truth that was once spoken by an eminent eye surgeon who went by the grand name of Dr Don Pedro de Obarrio: "Everybody is mad but they just don't know it!"

I wait to see next from Eric Newby his Photographs of Heaven! After hearing the news of his death in October 2006, one of his admirers posted the following message on the Yachting Monthly website:

Met him once at the old Island Cruising Club in the early 1980s. A lovely man, and I reckon he will have no difficulty navigating his way to Heaven.

Jerry Dowlen

February 2009

Books Monthly is published on the first day of every month. If you'd like me to publish a story you've written, please e-mail me at editor@booksmonthly.com ~ no payment, I'm afraid, as I don't make any money from the magazine. The length of your story is no problem - long or full-length stories can be serialised. Similarly, if you have a feature article on a book, author or artist you would like me to publish, e-mail it to me and I'll fit it in. Deadline for inclusion in the next month's magazine is 15th of the month