In spite of the fact that you'll find a preface to Christopher Isherwood's The Condor and the Cows: A South American Travel Diary (1949), oddly enough there is no explanation for his writing this book. Perhaps the motives for a travel book are self-explanatory. But why this particular trip and not some other? Why did he want to go south?

The book begins with the usual week on a cruise ship, stopping at Curaçao and several ports on the Venezuelan coast. Isherwood (1905-1986) and his friend start their continental sojourn in Colombia, traveling by ferry up the Magdalena River, eventually arriving in Bogotá.

At the time of his journey (1947-1948) Isherwood had already established a successful literary career. He had written several travel books with W.H. Auden, penned scripts in Hollywood, and could afford to wander. His traveling companion, William Caskey, is ostensibly along to take photographs for the book. Armed with the tools of their trades--a typewriter and a camera--the two of them made their way through Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia and Argentina.

Apparently the author kept a diary most of his life.ⁱ This account has all the pleasures of a lightly edited diary written by a practiced observer. The facts--and there are many--are transcribed in haste and rarely distilled. He seeks out the writers in the Colombian capital, recording his conversations. In the company of an ethnologist from the Smithsonian Institute, Isherwood is given an opportunity to spend All Souls Day among the Guambia Indians. His route through Colombia coincides with several appearances by Jorge Gaitán, then in the midst of his presidential campaign.ⁱⁱ The variety of intellectual life that he samples--often artistic-- makes for a remarkable sequel to the surveys of intellectual resources that Carl Sauer had sent back to the Rockefeller Foundation.

But Isherwood's ad hoc itinerary throws him further afield than might be expected. In Quito he tours the madhouse and the jail (offering genuinely thought-provoking commentary on both institutions). He travels with Shell representatives to the Ecuadorian oil fields. And Isherwood's dual national affiliations gain him easy and frequent access to both American and British embassies. In the company of these friendly officials he is introduced to many transplanted foreigners if not the natives.

Household Objects

In the last stages of World War II my mother got a few weeks leave. She and her two buddies, also nurses, flew to Lima for an adventure. In September of 1944 Gerda was all of 25 and married--to a husband whom she had not seen in the 3 years since the war began. On their trip Gerda wrote a long, long letter to her mother back home on Nantucket. Some years ago I ran across the letter but now it has disappeared, lost in the welter of belongings she has accumulated. At 79 Gerda has given up the ghost of cataloguing. It's enough for her to imagine that a lifetime of possessions are more or less under one roof. In moments of frustration she will say, "I've got too much shit." But her condemnation never progresses to a resolution. The idea of sorting through all of it overwhelms her with existential cynicism. "What's the point?" she'll ask. "You can take care of it after I'm dead." An observation which is, of course, probably true. However, actually saying this makes her feel guilty and a little scared, so she'll quickly change the subject or make a show of noisily vacuuming to demonstrate that she is, after all, engaged in the world (which is also true), even if it's only to dust around the edges of her life. "When do I get the time?" she will finally protest, anxious to turn the tables. And this complaint, when seen from a certain perspective, also has merit.

Perhaps the letter will turn up again. In the meantime there are her photographs, these black and white snapshots she took and then mounted in this small album.

From Panama she and her friends flew to the U.S. base in Talara. There they sat outside and hammed it up for a photograph one of the officers took. I've guessed she was working on the travelogue she sent home to her mother.

Then it was on to Lima. This shot of a city market seems remarkable to me because nearly everyone had stopped to stare at the photographer. Women military officers must have been very rare birds. Gerda would have been as much of a curiosity to the Limeños as the open-air scene was for her.

After flying to Arequipa the girls met a flock of Maryknoll priests headed to Puno. They traveled together by train as far as Juliaca.

Surprisingly I have only looked through these photographs now. When I was a child this album was buried so deeply in the cardboard boxes in our attic that it never came downstairs. However, certain parts of Gerda's trip were recounted many times, travelers tales that wove their way through my childhood and adolescence and even today will still animate me. And there were other mesmerizing touchstones of her pilgrimage to the lost civilization: the objects that she returned with. These curious items took up residence in our house in very unobtrusive places, or so it would have seemed to a stranger. In fact, so it seemed to me. I was barely aware of them. How would it be possible to take serious notice of Oswaldo Moncayo's miniature? Why it was no bigger than a postcard! Hanging on our living room wall, much higher than it was possible for me to see at eye level, as art it was... well, faintly batty I suppose.

Others of these magical objects were put away in places where I was not expected, if not outright prohibited. For example, that matchbox with the llama, tucked away in one of the cubbyholes of the forbidden desk. In that amazing desk, with its secret compartments and locked drawers, was a chaotic and incomprehensible cache of check stubs, insurance policies, financial statements, and other useless documents that my parents amassed. Although no one ever worked at this desk for me it was a place permeated with the allure of Pandora's box. Of just slightly less magnetism was the brightly colored woolen poncho folded up with the blankets in the wooden chest. This poncho was the same as those worn by the tiny Indians in Oswaldo Moncayo's painting. In his landscape mute natives stand outside their huts. Their woven ponchos are brilliant specks of intense color in an enormous openness beneath the snow fields of the volcano.

The objects that made the most dramatic appearance were the silver serving plates and the silver pitcher. These treasures would emerge from their hibernation next to the menagerie of Gerda's best china kept in the cupboard. She would shine them in the sink with a pasty polish so that they could take their place of honor at the table when guests came to dinner. "Those came from Peru," she would say with the unconcealed pride of a world traveler.

All of these objects scattered around the house lived separate and solitary lives, sequestered in their own sacred spaces. They only communed in her stories told to me, that me who did not understand that they made up a tenuous narrative web, in a mythical Peru, located somewhere on a lost continent. Nor did I grasp that they had once shared a passage from Guayquil to Panama in Gerda's suitcase, or, later, a berth in her steamer trunk sent back to the States when the war ended. How long it has taken to unpack that trunk.

The travels between Lima and Machu Picchu that Isherwood describes follow exactly the same route and utilize precisely the same modes of transportation that Gerda and her chums ventured three years earlier. Much had changed by 1947, at least on a geo-political level.

In The Condor and the Cows, there is a section of photographs. As I looked at them I found myself thinking that they reveal more about Caskey than they do about South America. For example, almost all of his photographs of the Indians highlight their pageantry, their exotic otherness, rather than the everyday conditions in which they endure. In the cities there are the usual tourist images of the public monuments, the cathedrals and plazas. There isn't a single photograph of any of the embassy people they have spent weeks and weeks with, nor even a snapshot of themselves. All of the prejudices, circumstances, and personal history of the narrator (the photographer) are censored from view.

On the other hand Caskey took one shot of a street photographer in Cuzco that is worth all of the others put together. It shows the photographer leaning forward into his lens, his camera mounted on a tripod. In front of him is a young couple stiffly standing face on. Behind them is a painted backdrop of an elegant interior and a magnificent stairway. The male is wearing a suit coat and shinny shoes. His wife--or girlfriend--is barefoot.

The technologies of the still camera and the manual typewriter, now on the verge of mechanical anachronism, were very sophisticated items in 1944, and loaded with a fair amount of symbolism. When Caskey and Isherwood crossed into Bolivia the local officials confiscated these tools. The devices were regarded with suspicion, as the equipment of potential subversives. (Sauer also had difficulty on this score. His cameras were impounded even before he set foot in South America--right on the dock in New York.) But in fairness to the camera-shy Bolivians, they had recently had reason to appreciate the power of photographs.

A Research Question

Of all things, I am holding Gerda's hand. Of all places, we are in the great reading room beneath Baker Library. And of all people, it is she and I standing at the fringe of a small group crowded about a woman explicating José Clemente Orozco's murals. What could have possibly brought us? Surely we don't belong here. At all of the massive tables there are men seated, their heads buried in weighty volumes spread out around them. Some have notebooks where they are writing important things with pens. The authoritative guide is speaking in whispers so that she will not disturb any of these scholars. And both Gerda and I are cowering under the panels and this vision that dwarfs us, this atmospheric hush that hovers over table after table.

The things we learn in school! Can you imagine, even though the instruction only took hold at the very last minute, I actually learned how to write then. For reasons that I will probably never know, I had a history teacher in my senior year who chose to make us read a book titled Parasitism and Subversion: The Case of Latin America (1969) by Stanislav Andreski. This book, very critical of American foreign policy, introduced a bright group of young kids to the notion that American intervention did not begin in Vietnam. Having read the book we were then asked to chose a related topic for our research papers, a final hurdle before graduation. We spent days discussing the formulation of a "research question" that would guide our investigations, the preparation of an outline, the accumulation of data on index cards that would be kept in a little tin box, and the proper forms of bibliographic record keeping.

How I hit upon Bolivian political circumstances during World War II is also a mystery to me. Maybe I had stumbled upon an account of President Villaroel's violent death and was drawn by the blood. The mental image of him hanging from a lamp post for days made a lasting impression. What was it all about?

Framing the research question was no small problem and involved some very tricky maneuvering. This research methodology argued that an ideal question was by definition open-ended. If honestly posited, this all-important question should be capable of being answered either affirmatively or negatively. Cast narrowly enough, the question should also limit the topic to manageable proportions.

God, what a morass I stepped into. Clearly some degree of U.S. involvement in the internal politics of Bolivia seemed to be at issue, had directly or indirectly contributed to that body hanging above the sidewalk. Leery of a Nazi influence within the Villaroel government, the U.S. had withheld recognition of the Colonel's regime following his coup. The Bolivian tin mines were an important natural resource that we could not afford to let slip from our grasp. Without foreign aid (only possible with diplomatic recognition) the Bolivian economy staggered and the government eventually fell.

But how could I cast my question? It seemed so knotted up in negatives and endless hypotheticals. Did American nonrecognition undermine the Bolivian government? Had American recognition of Villaroel’s administration come sooner would the life of the President been saved? What was my question?

I tentatively began work but in the back of my mind I sensed turmoil brewing because my question hadn't been approved. Every hopeful version I handed in came back with red ink. It was too broad. My key terms weren't defined. The answer was a foregone conclusion. None of my efforts measured up and the deadlines were looming.

But something happened to make me forget all of these conundrums. I found myself looking forward to spending afternoons in the basement of Baker Library. Immediately after school I would descend into the reading room and head for the microfilms of The New York Times. Once the film was loaded in the machine I would fall headlong into the foreign news reports of the 1940's. Perón rose to power. Secretary of State Cordell Hull did his best to rein in his ambitious young deputy assistant for Latin America, Nelson Rockefeller. Nazi sympathizers were dismissed from the Villaroel cabinet. The tin king, Paz Estenssoro, tiptoed onto the Bolivian political stage. Days passed into weeks. Time sped off somewhere, rumbling through the hollow metal chamber of the microfilm reader as I cranked the handle. Even the Orozco murals I passed every day became little more than wallpaper. I inhabited somewhere else, a place that came to life on the grainy white screen in the magic lantern.

In the end my paper proved to be an average effort. Without a coherent question, all of my index cards didn't illuminate anything. A lesson in the rational organization of thought and the pursuit of historical truth didn't take. A mob had lynched Villaroel and I had been swept up in an intellectual riot. Reams of paper and fifteen years would be consumed before another teacher confirmed a counter argument and defended terms without definitions, an organizational hierarchy of strategic metaphors, and a negotiated, lived truth.

Isherwood arrived in La Paz little more than a year after Villaroel's death. He states that packets of photographs of the events, including the lurid image of their President dangling from the lamp post, were sold in the capital. Was it any wonder that Caskey's camera had been confiscated? Could any Bolivian customs official have doubted the power of the camera (or a typewriter) to incite? From his conversations with the people of La Paz, Isherwood relays a far more immediate provocation for Villaroel's overthrow than the ones that I wrestled with. In this account the sadistic tortures overseen by the Chief of Police--a man who would go home after work and listen to Mozart--unleashed a student uprising that engulfed the government. His implication is that this was a local matter.

On this score Isherwood was wrong. In more than one instance he casually sloughs off the seriousness of political signs with a cheerful bravado that borders on foolhardy. To his credit though, on the general picture of a dramatic new enemy in South America he is dead on. The sudden emergence of the Cold War and the communist peril is a rhetorical vision being assembled everywhere he goes and he faithfully records it. And, while he may scoff at the rumors of Nazis fleeing to South America, he gives credence to the continental designs of Perón. I should also add that Isherwood has some truly thoughtful things to say about the role of the Catholic Church in Latin America, a balanced view that is rarely permitted in the political discourse of the region. As mechanical as the Pope's visits might seem from afar, it's hard to deny the importance of his impact as a spiritual leader or the importance of religious institutions in general.ⁱⁱⁱ

The final destination was Argentina. In Buenos Aires Isherwood has a chance to meet old friends and spend several days with Victoria Ocampo, the aristocratic owner and editor of the literary magazine Sur. Unfortunately he takes only passing note of a meeting with Borges. With time to go to the movie theaters he makes his only foray into matters of sexuality. In Argentine films, he comments, the sexual conquistador is usually a foreigner. Unfortunately it is an all-too-brief critical digression on social constructions of sexuality. Given his homosexuality (Caskey was in fact his lover) and his experience in Hollywood film making, this is a subject Isherwood was uniquely qualified to dissect.^iv But apparently these symbolic codes he was pondering were just too dangerous for open publication. Instead he's given to reflections on the nature of Peronism and Evita, then very much in the making as a demagogue. This vignette is some of the most interesting stuff in the book.

I cannot close without declaring that Gerda's story, or her part in this story, ends here. Her traveling companions in Peru, Gwen and Happy, both got married and had many children after the war. In a bitter coincidence of twinned destinies they would each die in car accidents during the Fifties. Gerda, on the other hand, returned to the States and got divorced. She later married somebody else--my father. At the moment she is reading The Condor and the Cows. From time to time she will set the book down to repeat stories about her trip, stories which, as I've said, are quite familiar to me, but seem to her to be entirely original and spontaneous.

-March 27, 1998

Endnotes

ⁱ Last year these diaries began to appear in print. The first volume, covering the years between 1936 and 1960 has no additional entries for the period during this trip that he took with Caskey. There's an interesting review of Isherwood's diaries written by The Nation columnist, Christopher Hitchens, another man straddling a U.S. and British national identity: “The Long Littleness of Life,” The New York Review of Books, February 20, 1997.

I don't think that The Condor and the Cows has ever been reprinted, nor is it included in these collected diaries. When it's stacked on top of the huge (1,000 + pages) volume just published you have to cringe at the sheer quantity of verbiage Isherwood compiled about himself.

Editor’s note:  Isherwood did make an effort to reconstruct a diary of his post-war life, recently published for the first time as, Lost Years: A Memoir, 1945-1951, New York: HarperCollins, 2000.

ⁱⁱ This candidate is of special importance in the history of modern Colombia. Within a year of Isherwood's meetings Gaitán was assassinated. That event marked the beginning of a murderous decade-long period referred to by the Colombians themselves as "La Violencia."

ⁱⁱⁱ The uncanny accuracy and blithe unconcern that Isherwood displays on political matters speaks to a possible explication for the two year silence in his diary following World War II as well as one reason why he may have taken this trip. In 1939 he left England and took up residence in Hollywood, essentially professing pacifism. Nagged by a feeling that he abandoned his country, he was shocked to learn of the extent of the Nazi brutality when Allied troops entered the concentration camps. These issues are discussed in more detail in Hitchens' review. While in Hollywood he became enamored with the teachings of an Indian swami. The Buddhist perspective may explain his fair judgments of the Catholic Church and the Protestant missionaries.

^iv Partly because of the huge success of Cabaret, based on his novel Goodbye to Berlin, Isherwood became an icon among gays. Another recent review of the newly published diaries, written by Alfred Corn, provides the flavor of that star status he had. The review is titled "I Am a Diary," The Nation, February 10, 1997.

© Copyright 2003 Eric Metcalf