If on a fall evening an explorer
First, the good news: New York City was back; I hadn’t seen Midtown this busy in a long while, at least not since the pandemic. There had been talk, then, of irreversible decline, a flight to the suburbs, and memories of that 1975 Daily News headline “Ford to City: Drop Dead.” People were packing up and moving on. “The energy, the traffic, the crowds are all gone,” the journalist Corina Knoll wrote at the end of March 2020. “Only the vacant streets remain, waiting for the actors to return to the stage.” Those dark days are encapsulated for me in a photograph taken by a colleague of a deserted Fifth Avenue by the New School with garbage floating in the wind like tumbleweed in a spaghetti western.
But now, even though the migrant crisis continued, the city was still mired in debt, and the mayor had been indicted for fraud and bribery, the suits were out in force; the place was humming, and not with that sham, pre-bonus look-like-you’re-busy vibe, either – this felt real enough.
As for the bad news: I wasn’t going to make my rendezvous. The trains were delayed and when they did arrive, they were too crowded to get on. So, I ditched the rush-hour crush and walked instead, texting my friend that I’d be late. “Take your time,” he replied, “I’ll be waiting in the bar.”
I was heading to the Explorers Club, an institution housed in a large, Jacobean revival mansion on East 70th Street, which had once been the home of the businessman and philanthropist Stephen C. Clark, grandson of the man who’d started the Singer Sewing Machine Company. The club had been established in 1904 to promote scientific exploration and its founder, Henry Collins Walsh, was the author of a book called Last Cruise of the Miranda: A Record of Arctic Adventure (1896), an account of an expedition he’d undertaken to study the Greenland glacier system “and to photograph, sketch, and study the Eskimos, and the animal and vegetable life to be found in the northern regions.”
As I half-jogged up Park Avenue, dodging commuters with a mile to go, I remembered the last time I’d misjudged rush hour delays and turned up late for a meeting at a club. This was years ago, when I was living in London and had been invited to a book launch at the Travellers Club.
The Travellers is the oldest existing Pall Mall club, established in 1819, following the Napoleonic Wars. The building it’s housed in, designed by Charles Barry – the architect of landmarks such as “Big Ben,” the houses of parliament (with Augustus Pugin) and Trafalgar Square – was inspired by the Palazzo Pandolfini in Florence. Membership was eligible to those (men only, of course) who had traveled “at least 500 miles from London in a direct line outside of the British Isles.” Which meant you were in the running after a vacation in Saint Tropez (840 miles) or Biarritz (772 miles).
Although I can’t remember what publication we were there to celebrate, I do recall a memorable encounter with the late Robert Browning – no, not the revenant Victorian poet, but a quiet spoken Glaswegian who happened to be a brilliant Byzantine scholar. “These days,” he told me, as we stood drinks in hand surveying the club’s well-heeled denizens in the columned library, “the principal criterion for club membership appears to be that you’re not a traveler.”
He was telling me – no, he was warning me as a young historian – that travel and club-membership weren’t fundamentally compatible. As a character observes in Paul Bowles’s The Sheltering Sky, a traveler belongs “no more to one place than to the next, moves slowly over periods of years, from one part of the earth to another.” Traveling means opening yourself up to other cultures and experiences on their own terms, rather than exporting and imposing your own assumptions upon the world. And it isn’t easy – in fact, it’s often a damn slog. Remember, the word “travel” has a common root with “travail,” meaning painful or laborious effort (deriving from a Latin word for an instrument of torture).
As a historian, Professor Browning – who must have been eighty, or so, at the time – had spent his life traveling to a foreign country where they did things differently (as L. P. Hartley famously described the past). But if travel could open eyes, it could also reaffirm blinkered visions. As G. K. Chesterton expressed it bluntly, “travel narrows the mind.” Or at least, a traveler had to make “a double effort of moral humility and imaginative energy to prevent it from narrowing his [sic] mind.”
If you know what you’re going to find before you set out, you might as well stay at home, as the reclusive aesthete Des Esseintes concludes in Joris-Karl Huysmans’s novel Against Nature (1884). After reading Charles Dickens, Des Esseintes decides to visit London, but while waiting for his train in Paris, dines at an English restaurant: “thick, greasy oxtail soup,” haddock, “a huge helping of roast beef and potatoes” with “a couple of pints of ale,” and “a bitter-sweet chunk of blue Stilton,” capped by rhubarb tart. What’s the point of going to England, if you can experience it in Paris without all the effort? As he puts it, “When you come to think of it, I’ve seen and felt all that I wanted to see and feel.” So, he forgets the trip and goes home.
We’re in the realm, here, of armchair globetrotters and their “non-journeys,” as described by Pierre Bayard in his book How to Talk About Places You’ve Never Been: On the Importance of Armchair Travel, originally published in 2012, a bluffer’s guide and polemic on the superiority of literary travel to the real thing.
By the time I’d reached the Explorers Club on East 70th, ruminating on Professor Browning words, I’d become a skeptic. Come on, a club for explorers in this day and age? A tour of the establishment didn’t dispel my doubts. This was exploration Tintin style, which equated with big-game hunting; a Boy’s Own universe of mustachioed jungle-ramblers in tropical waterproofs. Every room seemed to be filled with “native” spears and shields, fading hardbacks, photographs of over-kitted explorers like actors in a variety show, along with a sad menagerie of taxidermized animals, the star attraction being a polar bear presented to the club by the explorer Rudy Valentino, who’d “collected it,” according to the notice, on the Chukchi Sea in 1969 (apparently if a button is pushed the bear roars, though I can’t verify this).
The Explorers was homage to a muscular kind of nineteenth-century exploration which I thought had been forgotten, overshadowed by the brutish history of empire and colonialism. After all, by the late eighteenth century, “exploitation” and “exploration” had begun to merge, the latter term then also meaning the searching and testing of a place for the extraction of natural resources.
And yet afterwards, listening to my friend talk enthusiastically about space exploration and all the other scientific research activities that club members were involved in, I wondered whether I had it wrong; that within this carapace of dead exploration, something was alive and worth preserving. And maybe that went for the Travellers Club, too.
When I told a writer colleague about my visit to the club a few weeks later, she quoted lines from T. S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ at me: “We shall not cease from exploration/ And the end of all our exploring/ Will be to arrive where we started/ And know the place for the first time.”
Then, as if she was in on some clubland conspiracy, she asked me whether I’d ever been to the Travellers Club in London. “Yes,” I replied hesitatingly, “Yes, I have.”
Suddenly I was back where I’d started, standing beside Professor Browning who was peering quizzically at the crowd through his thick-lens specs, oblivious to the hullabaloo of the book launch, offering me directions for another kind of life, if I had the strength to choose it.