For a writer there can be no limits to his life experience because it is the main source of his workâ€. The journalist David Jiménez agrees with this phrase that Graham Greene used to justify his excesses. “In my case, not because of the drugs, but because of my experiences around the world. They are my gasolineâ€. There are many in the East, a place that “captures, and a lot.” Not only him, but also those who preceded him: Orwell, Conrad, Maugham… “All of them fell into his traps and most entered the world of drugs and prostitution, although that spiral made them the writers they were” . Jiménez follows in the footsteps of several of them in The Opium Diaries (Ariel).
The title was not difficult to find, since it was that substance with which most flirted, like Rudyard Kipling, the youngest Nobel Prize for Literature to date. The man who would end up writing The Jungle Book traveled all over India as a correspondent and brought readers the life of clubs, villas and polo fields where the sons of the then British empire entertained themselves. What differentiated him from other chroniclers is that he did not stop there.
“I was looking for contrast. He wanted to know what was going on beyond the Delhi gate, which gave access to the old town and where the Indians were crowded. The imperial police were not responsible for what happened to those who crossed that border between two worlds. And that was the biggest invitation he could have.” Thus he ended up entering Lahore —now Pakistan—, where he “was dazzled by the opium smokers, the adrenaline of the gambling houses and the impudence of the Diamond Bazaar, with its women for rent and its promises of perditionâ€. Some experiences that he would end up recounting with pride in the short story The Door of a Hundred Sorrows and that would haunt him until the end of his days: “Giving up my new life would be like giving up writing.”
The debauched life also made Joseph Conrad a writer. His uncle Thaddeus got tired of paying for his nightlife, which led him to join the sea. In Africa he found the inspiration to write his most famous novel, Heart of Darkness. “Borneo offered him the characters, the communities, the exoticism and the settings,” says Jiménez.
Orient also made Orwell an author, but not because of drugs, but because of his experience as an imperial policeman in Burma. “Going into the bowels of totalitarianism allowed him to write 1984 or Animal Farm.” Somerset Maugham, on the other hand, was already a renowned author when he set out on his adventure through Burma, Siam and Indochina. He “he found the lack of inhibition that Victorian England could not offer him and that allowed him a threesome with his wife and Red Cross worker Gerald Haxtonâ€.
Asian magic equally captivated Alexandra David-Néel, who left everything in Europe, including her husband, to become the first Western woman to reach Tibet. A feat that she achieved at the hands of “an adolescent lama who is believed to have been her lover.” An adventure into the forbidden in every way, as were the places where Martha Gellhorn went to find stories for her reports. She plunged into the most decadent side of the Orient: brothels, opium dens, slums…places she preferred to visit without the company of her husband Hemingway, to whom she didn’t dedicate a line in Five Journeys to Hell .
Like Gellhorn, Nicolas Bouvier is also in favor of getting lost in those same corners. In Japan, the Swiss author “understands that he will not be able to integrate if he does not immerse himself in the red light districts, as well as the bars and cafes. In short, in any place where he can start a conversationâ€, points out Jiménez, who admits that the biggest challenge he faced during the writing was “realizing who is behind the myth. In the case of Manu Leguineche, it was painful to know that the Australian part of what he tells in his most famous travel book, The Shortest Way, never happened. In the end, we all have our unspeakable secret.
In the book, he also takes the opportunity to reflect on how the way of traveling has changed. “Visiting a shopping center in Bangkok like the one in your neighborhood is terrible. The world is becoming more homogeneous but, even if it is hard to find them, I still believe in authentic places. The day my adventurous spirit leaves me, I will be lost, â€she concludes.
