Tilting at Windmills

Literary posterity is a fragile, arbitrary affair. Fashions and tastes change; the Zeitgeist moves on. For most writers little more than obscurity beckons; even for those acclaimed within their own lifetimes, temporarily sticking their heads above the parapet, oblivion is still the most natural of destinies. Only the truly, profoundly, universal survive.

Many tens of thousands of books are published in Britain alone each year. Among the half-acres of celebrity memoirs and miles of populist ephemera that clog our bookshops, the literary journeymen and women struggle to be heard. Simply getting published at all is becoming increasingly difficult. Few writers stand out, fewer still make a genuinely lasting mark. Who remembers Elizabeth Jennings now? Who reads Arnold Bennett? Whatever happened to Timothy Mo? The afterlife is an unforgiving place. Maintaining an audience after their death is probably incidental to most writers; immortality is too daunting and distracting a prospect. For the reader, though, the pleasure of discovering a seemingly forgotten or neglected writer is immeasurable, like chancing upon a new view within a familiar landscape. To encounter that writer at the very point of their ultimate departure seems to me to have an added piquancy and poignancy. I first came across Nicholas Wollaston in May 2007, on the Guardian obituary pages, a section of the newspaper that seems to exert an increasing fascination as one’s own remaining decades dwindle. Wollaston, who was 80 when he died, had been an admired novelist, well-received if not prize-winning, a respected travel writer and reliable jobbing journalist and book reviewer; he was also an intrepid adventurer, a naturally rebellious spirit and, the obituary seemed to imply, a resourceful, principled, singular man. Something about Wollaston touched a nerve and gave me pause for thought. I was drawn to this man, yet his entire oeuvre had passed me by during a time when, as a voracious consumer of contemporary fiction, I really should, at the very least, have heard of him. This was a man, I sensed, with whom it would have been entertaining to share a few pints. He sounded my kind of writer, too: passionate, eclectic, slightly maverick and a brilliant stylist to boot. But there was also something dark and regretful in the mix; and something sad or disappointed. How on earth had he escaped me? I set off to the second-hand bookshops in search of his work. Wollaston wrote seven novels and seven books of non-fiction. His novels, mostly written between 1967 ( Jupiter Laughs) and 1987 (The Stones of Bau), are almost forgotten now. All are elegantly crafted, consummately phrased and draw largely on the experiences he had accumulated during a lifetime of restless wandering. Unfashionably serious, and determinedly ‘literary’, they failed to find a wider audience and his modest critical acclaim never quite translated into book sales – about which, I suspect, he was probably quite bitter. Reading them now, they seem slightly dated, time-worn relics of a bygone age, better left undisturbed. His travel writing, on the other hand, does stand the test of time and still seems fresh and contemporary. These books deserve resurrection: some of the reportage in his Winter in England (1963) stands comparison with the best of J. B. Priestley; and his four-month journey through the Caribbean in 1962, recorded in Red Rumba, contains some of the most thoughtful and illuminating observations on the Cuban revolution I have come across. Of all his work, however, for me one book stood out, purely on the basis of its title – Tilting at Don Quixote (1990) – for I too have an enduring obsession with the gentle knight in Cervantes’ masterpiece. On publication, Wollaston’s book had received a few partially enthusiastic reviews, sold a few copies and then drifted inexorably towards oblivion; but it is the key work of this reserved and complicated man, who near the end of a lifetime of achievement and neglect and very much against his own inclinations, suddenly found his true métier. In May 1987 as a general election campaign in Britain was under way, Wollaston decided to escape the hullabaloo and head off to Spain for three weeks where, ironically, another general election was also in full swing. He appeared to have no real purpose for his journey and no real idea of what he was going to write about, merely a compulsion: ‘I sense an emptiness ahead, stimulating and alarming and all my own. Somehow, like my notebook I must fill it.’ For three weeks he roamed aimlessly round the flat, brown plains of La Mancha in pursuit of the spirit of Don Quixote, rooming in cheap hotels in characterless towns, dining alone in empty, bleak restaurants, waiting for buses that never came, watching the comings and goings in seemingly half-deserted Castilian towns. He encountered a few locals, mused on windmills, fate and Quixote’s love for Dulcinea, and slept badly. Hardly earth-shattering, I agree. But, as his obituarist noted, Wollaston was almost incapable of writing a dull sentence and in attempting to fill his notebook, he found himself, alone on the central Spanish plain, forced into mining the seam of his own existence, into recounting the story of his own eventful life. He had, reluctantly, found his subject. Tilting at Don Quixote is a book that will always be difficult to categorize: part-memoir, part-literary quest, part-travelogue, part-something else of its own devising. The chapters recording his Spanish journey and his seemingly purposeless pursuit of Cervantes et al alternate with his own reflections upon the colourful, often sad, events of his life, which include the murder of his father and the attempted suicide of his wife. His observations on Spain and its inhabitants are pertinent, witty and wry, if occasionally slightly tetchy; his understanding of Cervantes’ great novel is sensitive and thoughtful but not ground-breaking. Wollaston’s originality, it seems to me, lies in the way he uses the immediate surroundings of his quixotic quest as a counterpoint to his own messy existence: as he criss-crosses La Mancha, Quixote’s travails become a metaphorical yardstick against which to measure and reflect upon his own experiences:

Unlike Sancho who only saw what was visible, Don Quixote elevated it into a dream. He was the greatest conquistador of all, fixed on some inner vision – of the human soul, no less – blind to the facts around him. His story, though a picaresque adventure, is spiritual and universal – the revelation of oneself. Sometimes the facts may have proved him wrong but nobody, not even Sancho, was the better for facts.

What rapidly becomes evident is that Wollaston, by any measure, led a fairly remarkable life, and at times it is as though this thought is just occurring to him, too, for the first time. And so he takes us chronologically through a twentieth-century panorama that includes, inter alia, service on a minesweeper at the end of the Second World War, working in a Kenyan leather factory and briefly on an Australian sheep station, sailing around the world, climbing mountains and stints in a number of war zones, quite apart from the journalism, novels and works of non-fiction mentioned earlier. It seems profoundly ironic that this slightly reserved, wary man should end up writing his autobiography. Wollaston quotes Salman Rushdie on V. S. Naipaul – ‘When the strength for fiction fails the writer, what remains is autobiography’ – and ruefully admits that ‘self-revelation is a kind of suicide’. Yet for a reluctant autobiographer, he is brutally honest about his own shortcomings as writer, father, husband, human being; occasionally unreliable, he still manages to reveal himself with a disarming if slightly dyspeptic and disparaging honesty. Viewing his own life through the prism of Cervantes’ creation, he seems to achieve a kind of universality. Wollaston clearly identified more with Don Quixote than with Sancho Panza – both were tall and thin and bony, both ‘a little agonised by some misty private vision’ – and if all good travel writing is, in some sense, as much an exercise in self-exploration as it is a portrait of a journey through a landscape and its people, then Wollaston’s slightly eccentric, offbeat search for the man from La Mancha becomes a search for himself:

As a family man, trying to keep the rickety but irresistible show on the road, I was an adequate Sancho Panza, but as a writer I had to follow Don Quixote out into the big lonely desert. Though I dreaded going there, back into the unknown in search of the unimagined, it was where I belonged.

Of all the unknowns in Wollaston’s life it was the unfinished business with his father that was undoubtedly the most difficult for him to re-imagine – this father, who, when Nicholas was 4, was shot dead by a deranged Cambridge undergraduate. He dealt with it sparingly in Tilting at Don Quixote but chose to address it more fully in his memoir, My Father, Sandy (2003), fittingly, perhaps, his final published work. Wollaston senior was a man of considerable accomplishments: a doctor, a renowned naturalist, an African explorer only a generation after Stanley, and the official botanist on the first Everest expedition in 1921, before he settled down at the age of 48 to raise a family and became a tutor at King’s College, Cambridge, the scene of his fateful encounter. Wollaston’s book-length tribute to his father is first and foremost a thoroughly well-researched portrait of a fascinating man as much as an evocation of a Boy’s Own world of adventure and derring-do; but as coincidences and similarities between father and son gradually emerge – he discovers in a letter, for example, that his father was reading Cervantes on the banks of the Niger – the book takes on a much more moving and personal aspect. For Wollaston junior it became a journey of discovery. For the first time he came to an understanding of this distant figure who had hovered over him for much of his life and who ultimately came to define him: ‘Don Quixote was a hidalgo, a gentleman. But the word is a contraction of hijo de algo, son of something – a somebody, not a nobody. Was I too a son of something?’ Of course he was. Nicholas Wollaston died on 23 April, on the same day of the year as Cervantes. I think he would have appreciated that.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 30 © Simon Humphreys 2011