Travel literature

Jonathan Raban was largely responsible for changing the nature of travel writing. Back in the 1970s when he began, the genre still viewed the world from under the tilt of a Panama hat. ('I looked at the tops of the columns. Were they Doric or Ionic?') It was considered as ill-bred for a writer to reveal anything about themselves as to have illustrations —'the best travel books never do'.

Raban tore a lot of this up, and with glee. He had worked closely with confessional poets from America like Robert Lowell and John Berryman, producing what is still one of the best essays on Lowell's late poems about his messy divorce. He had even been Lowell's lodger for a while. Now he took the same transatlantic approach to travel writing, and elicited the same chorus of disapproval the poets had experienced for being so personal. Yet it was patently as absurd for a writer not to tell the reader if he was going through some emotional turmoil as it would be for a traveller not to tell a companion on that same journey. Even if they were English.

He also took as his subject matter not the Mediterranean or the Middle East, the traditional stomping ground for the men in linen suits, but the brash new world. He returned to America again and again with something of the questioning obsession that Naipaul brought to his books on India.

The best of all his American books is perhaps Hunting Mister Heartbreak, which takes its title from a poem by John Berryman. At the start of the book he announces that there is a sentence which always stirs the imagination of Europe and which promises to deliver the unexpected:'Having arrived in Liverpool, I took ship for the New World.' Raban unpicks the appeal of these lines. It is not just that they are'so jaunty, so unreasonably larger than life'. It is that what turned the Atlantic passage into the great European adventure was not so much the nature of the country that awaited the immigrants as the character of the ocean,'a space too big for you to be able to imagine yourself across'.