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4.0 out of 5 stars
"As If Thin Veils Were Lifted, One By One...", May 25, 2011
This review is from: Coming Down the Seine (Lost & Found: Classic Travel Writing) (Paperback)
Coming Down The Seine, Robert Gibbings; Readers Union, J. M. Dent & Sons (London; 1955)
"Shortly before dawn a band of lemon light appeared on the eastern horizon, & then a blood-red sheen. The light increased, not steadily, but as if thin veils were lifted, one by one. Five herons passed overhead on heavy wings & then a skein of ducks in urgent flight. The flame in the sky gave way to mottled grey & blue. A lavender mist hung over the water as I dipped my oars."
"Coming Down The Seine" has been fashioned & then polished by a jeweler working in ink.
Gibbings, dauntless at the age of sixty, rented a small craft & propelled himself, solo, down the Seine - incidentally, in the aftermath of a terrible storm.
From this came the story of his 400-mile voyage from the river's source to the English Channel. And it is almost flawless, complete with Gibbings' own lovely illustrations of the people & their buildings in the villages & cities flanking the river, liberally bestowed throughout a slender but substantial volume.
"My boat... in rough water...needed no small ingenuity...to circumvent her eccentricities. If left to herself...she would perform all of the gyrations...of a floating leaf...& where the [swollen] current sluiced through a labyrinth of fallen tress, the uglier the stub that reared its head above the surface, the greater for her its attraction."
OK, so it was occasionally dangerous. But it wasn't Chatterton & Kohler repeatedly risking death in their attempt to identify a sunken U-boat on the underwater shelf of the Atlantic Ocean.
And he did bag it, temporarily, after the flooded river proved to be impossible to navigate, after completing about a quarter of the journey (he beached the craft & hopped on a train to Paris; about a week later, with the flood waters having somewhat receded, he returned & resumed his river voyage).
But who cares? You get a carefully crafted & charming account of not only his trip, but also of Napoleon's being forced to bribe his Marshals Oudinot & Soult (the latter, otherwise, would have sat out the battle of Waterloo), & many other interesting historical tales of artists & kings, set in France & beyond.
You're always brought back to the present - swiftly, when he describes his sober encounters with the war wreckage in various towns, still piled up in the streets & inside uninhabitable, abandoned buildings - ten years after the end of WWII.
Also an outstanding wood engraver, Gibbings passed away three years after the publication of this book. This may well have been his final written work. And his life itself had been run in a series of rapids more demanding than anything this temporarily treacherous Seine could have thrown at him (having been most seriously wounded in Gallipoli during World War I).
By 1955, he was an astute observer as well as an experienced adventurer, reconciled by experience to reverses & tragedies. The sincere, disarming final words of a sensible mystic:
"There is great peace in old age; responsibilities have been passed to others, anxiety about our choice of road in life no longer exists. We see, too, the inevitability in the sequence of many events. What at one time seemed a climax to all adventure, was but a prelude to fresh enterprise. Unknowingly, we had gone stale, had lost interest in the old activities; without realizing it, a new focus for our energy had appeared."
Who also had a wry sense of humor...
"The village of Marcilly bordering the far side of another river, the Aube, the greatest of the many affluents of the Seine...it is the stronger of the two rivers when they meet; yet, comparable to the Missouri at its junction at the Mississippi, it yields up its name & sinks its personality [into] that of the weaker partner - a phenomenon not unknown in human matrimony..."
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