Sultry Climates by Ian Littlewood

Going all the way

As his indispensable literary companions to Paris and Venice show, Ian Littlewood has long since proved himself a discerning, perceptive and wonderfully well-read guide to intellectual and cultural landscapes. While working on those books, he tells, he noticed that alongside the officially recorded responses of travellers to these places there was a secret history unfolding too, of travel to territories of experience closed at home: territories of sexual encounter and awakening, of freedom and felicity, of release and long-pent sensual expression. For men and women both, travelling abroad always was and still is a journey to liberation, arriving sometimes at love but often at sexual pleasure for its own welcome sake.

Rich youths went on their 18th-century Grand Tours ostensibly to acquire languages and politeness, culture, and an insight into foreign ways, but in reality they also acquired gambling debts, sexual experience and often enough the pox. Sexual experience was an aspect of the tour secretly welcomed by parents at home; Chesterfield said of his son that "The Princess of Borghese was so kind as to put him a little upon his haunches, by putting him frequently upon her own. Nothing dresses a young fellow more than having been between such pillars, with an experienced mistress." As Boswell's frank record shows, the different mores and morals of Abroad offered a wealth of opportunities for the repressed tourist, a fact which, once grasped, was never afterwards forgotten - and remains part of the motivation for clubbers heading to Ibiza and Shirley Valentines making for Greece.

Littlewood classifies sexual travellers into connoisseurs, pilgrims and rebels. The first group comprised Grand Tourists, the second those Romantic seekers after self-discovery who expected (and often found) fulfilment in the holy places of antique culture, and the third those who travelled as a way of rejecting the restrictions of home. That this taxonomy is not exclusive is already implied in the idea that many in the first two categories also belonged to the third. A signal example of the rebel is afforded by Norman Douglas, who abandoned his diplomatic career when he discovered his homosexuality. Giving lunch to a visitor from England in a Florentine café, he pointed at a young waiter and said, "He hasn't got a hair on his body. It slips into him like a knife in butter. When are you coming out here to join us?" Douglas is the paradigm of the gay or bisexual man for whom escape from what he called the "murk" of England ­ a moral and emotional murk ­ was release into life itself. Italy, North Africa, and between-the-wars Berlin, were havens for such, from Oscar Wilde and André Gide to Christopher Isherwood.

Central to Littlewood's fascinating account is the thesis that sex and travel have a basic affinity. Our sexual vocabulary, he says, proves as much: "roving eyes and wandering hands, exploring, mounting, entering, penetrating, riding, galloping, coming, going all the way". And there is a link between travel and rebellion: "The moment of illicit sexual satisfaction is a brief erotic victory over the rest of the world," he writes, "a successful raid on the kingdom of propriety."

Although the chief geographical focus of the book is France and Italy, there is an important foray to Polynesia because of its significance as a sexual Eden in literature and legend, which from the Bounty's mutineers to the idyll of Gauguin riveted the attention and excited the longing of many. Imagine the amazement (and, among the po-faced, the horror) when news reached 18th- century England of a paradise where beautiful young girls swam naked to visiting ships, their long black hair streaming in the water behind them, offering themselves to the sailors in return for the gift of a single nail, so prized was iron among the Tahitians. Hawkesworth and de Bougainville reported the ease, the sensuality, the laughing unconcern with which the lovely island girls gave their favours. Predictably, when Christian missionaries set to work in the South Seas, it was with a grim determination to stamp out this "detestable licentiousness", part of the plan being to "extirpate" the bread-fruit from the islands so that their inhabitants would have to work, thereby disciplining themselves "in the sweat of their brows".

Littlewood follows Boswell and Byron, Evelyn Waugh, Scott Fitzgerald, Auden, Pierre Loti, Gauguin, Gide, DH Lawrence and many besides in an entertaining and illuminating journey into those aspects of their travels which meant more to them, and had more influence on their work and lives, than the accounts censored by themselves or posterity can show. The result of so much intriguing biography is that it yields a social history of travel too, and a commentary on the sometimes troubled, sometimes jubilant place of sex in the scheme of things.

There are many good things in this very good book, among them its account of the cult of the sun that brought life to the French Riviera (which until the 1920s used to close down in summer), the connection between hot weather and sex being too obvious and too enjoyable to miss.

But even though the shedding of dress and the shedding of moral restraint go together in our frosted northern imaginations, there is, says Littlewood, a subtler point at issue: "It's clear that the central link between sex and travel is not to do with the meeting of bodies, but with the working of imagination." That thesis is amply demonstrated here, and in style. *