Inland Voyage: photographs by Quentin Pruvost, text by Robert Louis Stevenson Publisher: Light Motiv
Reviewed by John Quin
NOWHERE is uninteresting, not even Belgium. So argues Jonathan Meades, who made a strange and brilliant programme about the country in 1994.
One imagines Robert Louis Stevenson in complete agreement. As the latter wrote: “The world is dull to a dull person.”
In 1876 Stevenson set off for Europe – “out of my country and myself I go” – with his friend Walter Simpson. A book would come of it, Inland Voyage, Stevenson’s first. Published in 1878, it gives an account of their canoe journey along the Oise River from Belgium through to France.
Issued in an edition of 750 it, was virtually ignored by the critics. Still, Stevenson found what he wasn’t looking for: love. In the September of his travels he met Fanny Osbourne and would write: “The most beautiful adventures are not those we go to seek.”
Quentin Pruvost is a French photographer based in the Pays de Mormal where much of Inland Voyage takes place and his pretty volume follows in Stevenson’s tracks.
Pruvost’s bosky images match Stevenson’s visions where “leaves flickered in and out of the light in tumultuous masses”. Canal locks delay the travellers: “Such a life is both to travel and to stay at home.” Pruvost’s evocative photographs capture this impression.
From the off, the beauty of Stevenson’s tone is set: the narrator of Inland Voyage is cordial and armed with an urbane wit inured to disaster. Robert is This Charming Man incarnate, desolate on rainy hillsides, asking himself if nature will make a man of him yet.
Stevenson and Simpson are named after their Rob Roy canoes rigged with a sail – respectively Arethusa and Cigarette. Soon “other ‘long shore’ vanities were left behind”.
Why do it at all? Stevenson had never been in a canoe but he liked confronting the unknown. Soon he was amongst the reeds and willows bordering the waters and brickyards. Pruvost has shots of both – the eldritch gloom of the forest and the run-down industrial landscape.
Arethusa and Cigarette end up in taverns with lads who “were all (in the Scotch phrase) barnacled”. Pruvost matches these with a pub grotesque of today clutching his chest with laughter. Another sees a tattooed bloke with keys on a pocket chain, man-spreading, bugging the barmaid no doubt: as Stevenson quotes men “are such encroachers”.
The Edinburgh writer’s taste for the aphoristic is on immediate display saying this of his journey: “Discomfort, when it is honestly uncomfortable and makes no nauseous pretentions to the contrary, is a vastly humorous business.”
Inland Voyage precedes the laugh riot that is JK Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat by 11 years. In an episode worthy of Limmy, Stevenson encounters “crop-headed children” who “spat upon us from the bridges we went below”. That’s the flip side to Stevenson’s contention that there’s no business more entertaining than “fooling among boats”.
There’s lots of rain and the pair get soaked to the skin, a dampness caught in the chill of Pruvost’s fluvial illustrations, Stevenson’s trunks of hedgerow elms are caught in all their unworldly glory. “Trees are the most civil society.” You can near smell the sweetness of Pruvost’s forest photography.
As for the river we flow, looking at these shots, along with Arethusa and Cigarette, via a gentle pull of “enchanting purity”. One suspects Pruvost, like Stevenson, hates cynicism – both are unapologetically romantic. Their river workers, the poorer classes, are portrayed as being “much more charitably disposed than their superiors in wealth.”
Stevenson’s wisdom can be granitic: “If the English (he means the Scots also incidentally) could only hear how they are spoken of abroad…”
Or there’s this too: “There’s no coming back … on the impetuous stream of life.” But he softens as with: “After a good woman, and a good book, and tobacco, there’s nothing so agreeable on earth as a river.”
Stevenson meets an older couple, the Bazin’s, still much in love: “She nestled up to her husband and laid her head upon his breast.” Pruvost has a similar image here, roles reversed, modern-style. Both Stevenson and Pruvost have “a thirst for consideration”. Isn’t that what life is about? There are those who consider others and those who do not.
Despite a near drowning after capsizing Stevenson pulls through. He imagines his tomb and its inscription – “He clung to his paddle”.
