Negley FarsonCritiques

Ӕ

The first part of the autobiography of Negley Farson, a foreign correspondent for the Chicago Daily News in the 1930s taking him from his childhood in a well connected old American family fallen on hard times with servants whose parents had been slaves to the mid 1930s. What a life he led. Leaving the USA at an early age to try to make his fortune in imperial Russia he witnessed the beginning of the 1917 revolution. He voluteered as a pilot in the RAF in the First World War and then became a newspaper man. He obviously had a talent for friendship and telling a good story. he recycles a lot of work he submitted to his newspapers and from other books but he puts it all together well. |He would have made a great dinner companion.

Well that was a surprise. An old book I pulled off the shelves when I had nothing else to read. It had once belonged to an aunt and somehow in various moves and house clearances had managed to ovoid being thrown away.

Published in 1951 it is the recollection of Negley Farson of a journey he made in the Caucasus in 1929. At that time, the very early days of the USSR and Stalin, he was the foreign correspondent of a western newspaper. And a very good one he must have been. Great company too I have no doubt as he tells a great story.

He befriends an old English resident ex-patriate in Moscow, persuades his newspaper to provide expenses and sets off to the Caucasus to find horses to hire and a guide to take them over the mountain passes and down to the Black Sea. Mr Farson himself has experience of living in the backwoods of western Canada and is a keen fly fisherman. In addition to his rods he equips himself with a camping outfit from Fortnum and Mason, 1000 Gold Flake cigarettes and a small collection of Russian classic books for the evenings by the campfire. No matter what difficulties or discomforts confront him he remains in good humour, appreciates the wonders around him and does not forget to make notes even in the most dire circumstances.

He was a well known journalist in his day and published several books. I'm so pleased to have found this one.

I stumbled across this book without knowing what to expect. What I found was a marvelously entertaining autobiography by a man who really seems to have lived life to the fullest in pre-WWII America (this is the first of two volumes of his autobiography and ends just at the start of WWII). His name may not be recognized these days, but his book is highly recommended. This book has made me want to track down his other books (he wrote a number).

What a fabulous adventure. In 1925, an Anglo-American journalist Negley Farson and his English wife (a member of the Bram family of Dracula fame) , realizing a long-held ambition, sailed from Holland down through the Rhine, the river Main, the Ludwig Canal (Der Ludwigskanal) and Danube, through the fabled ’Iron Gates’ to the Black Sea in a small wooden cruiser. The cruise was a duplication of one a couple of decades earlier by British artists Donald Maxwell and Cottington Taylor told in the book ”A Cruise across Europe”(http://www.librarything.com/work/8041829/book/86875222), and amazingly, duplicated many decades later in a tiny Optimist Dinghy, (“borrowed” from a school where he had been teaching) by an Australian adventurer, A. J. Mackinnon , and recounted in his book The Unlikely Voyage of Jack De Crow (http://www.librarything.com/work/385803/book/71235140).

Unlikely voyage is a classic understatement … foolhardy, difficult, challenging … and for the reader, pure, thrilling fascination. This trip, undertaken so soon after the first of the World Wars, in which the author had served as a member of the then Royal British Air Force encountered many of the residuals of that conflict – prickly hostility to the USA flag of their cruiser ”Flame” in Germany, to the detritus of the various disastrously misled “Peace Conferences” in the ever-disputed and disrupted Balkans.

We are given charming descriptions of ‘roughing it’ in the little (8’x6’) cabin of the cruiser but delightful contrasts with going off on a shoot with the leader of Hungary, Admiral Horthy, Frason, with his varied and astonishing background so ably to mix with Presidents and peasant alike. He copes as equally and humorously with a mutiny from his ‘crew’ (his wife) and the disgusts of such ‘developing’ counties as Montenegro, where the prayer is offered to the new monarch…”Your Majesty, we pray that you will see to it that every man is permitted to emigrate”. He draws interesting comparisons with the Scots and the ‘wooly, wild’ peoples of his voyage, noting the presence of bagpipes and kilts (“skirts’) and hard-hitting free men.

Showing a marked tolerance of the Muslim world, mores, customs and attitudes to women that most of his more well-travelled readers would be challenged to match he draws his well-described, history-rich journey to an end at the very gates of the east, in the Black Sea.

All this and a sailing, cruising yarn among astounding rivers … highly recommended reading.

The American journalist Negley Farson and his wife (who is quaintly referred to throughout as "the Crew") sailed from Holland to the Black Sea in 1925 via the Rhine, Main, Ludwig Canal and Danube. This was essentially the same route followed twenty years earlier by the British artists Donald Maxwell and Cottington Taylor: indeed, if Farson's report of what he was told by the canal superintendent at Bamberg is correct, only one other pleasure boat apart from his and Maxwell's had been though the Ludwig Canal since the turn of the century. Given that the canal was in a pretty run-down condition by 1925, with work on its replacement due to start any day, Farson's passage may well have been the last by a non-commercial craft. (In the event, work on the new canal started in 1939 but was abandoned due to the war; it finally opened in 1992.)

Farson's account of the trip is a bit disjointed. Up to Vienna, it's written in more-or-less the standard self-deprecating style of cruising literature: accidents, near-misses, misunderstandings with foreign officials and shopkeepers, drinking sessions with friendly barge skippers, etc. It could have been written by any retired British doctor/lawyer/civil servant on a boating holiday. However, as we get into Hungary and what-was-then-Yugoslavia, Farson seems to pull off his mask and reveal himself as a good old-fashioned American foreign correspondent, veteran of the First World War and the Russian revolution, as much at ease on a shooting weekend with Admiral Horthy as he is roughing it with peasants and fishermen. The writing in these chapters is much more lively than in the Rotterdam-to-Vienna section, and there's much more interest in the world outside the boat, in particular the human suffering and complex political situation left behind by the war. Their actual journey gets rather neglected. However, when you read them as a book, you notice odd repetitions and jumps in continuity. One suspects that he was initially commissioned to write a series of separate articles on his travels in central and eastern Europe and only later had the idea of sticking them into a book, together with a new introductory section about his journey to the Danube. On the other hand, it might be that as someone with professional interests centred on Russia, he just couldn't work up much interest in Holland and Germany.

All the same, an interesting document of its time.

[I read the book as a pdf from archive.org, and the scanning quality wasn't really good enough to get much impression of Mrs Farson's photographs. However, they do look interesting, as far as you can make them out.]

I discovered this book on Andrew Herd’s website “A Fly Fishing History,” and I’m glad I did. Written in 1942, the book is as much a travelogue as a fishing book. Covering the post WWI years, the author’s clear, effortless writing transport the reader to another time and lets them enjoy some of the world’s best fishing waters. Broken into individual autobiographical stories, the book is easily consumed streamside or fireside. This book well deserves the title “classic.”