Journey to the East Book

As an official part of his education, a traditional European young man of means and expectations would take himself off on a 'grand tour' of the Continent, in the years of the 18th and 19th centuries. It would be understood that he would return with some acquaintance of the fine arts, the salons of society and their denizens -- the disparate and unsettling ways of the world, more or less. And then, having had a mad dash at life, the courtly, bohemian, and maybe even not-so-reputable ways of the continent-- return to promptly immerse himself in the lifelong drudgery of administering his father's concerns.

Here's the journal of Charles-Edouard Jeanneret at twenty-four, long before his self-induced transformation into the architect and design-polemicist Le Corbusier, eventually one of the founders of International Style in the 1920s.

But this is 1911, and the world is a Nineteenth Century one. And Journey To The East is most notable, I think, as a period piece, an illustration of a time we can't imagine any longer, as encapsulized by a young man who was enraptured by it (and a little by his own impressions). At the turn of the century, The East meant only Central Europe and beyond, so an itinerary starting in Berlin and headed down the Danube toward the Balkans fit the bill.

Jeanneret's voice isn't so much unique as it is of-it's-day, and highly impressionable; orientalisms abound --add to the mix the idea of who he would become, and there's an intriguing, slightly arriviste charge to the account. A world where electricity, the idea of 'traffic', and even the telephone are conspicuously absent-- becomes a kind of Conradian up-river affair for Little Corbu; the imagery becomes a bit hallucinatory at times, matched by long stream-of-consciousness passages.

But he also offers beautiful little line-drawings of what he sees all along the way, showing how he sees it, with a young man's enchantment in the framing. The sketches are well-proportioned, and draw the eye; exactly the effect a later traveller would attempt with photographs, but made by a draftsman who trusts his hand to take visual notes accurately.

It must be said, though, that all the while he really wants to go native and can't quite manage the full leap of faith. Until he sees the Parthenon that is, whereupon truth, golden dimensions, and angels singing seal the deal. Odd, though, that the resulting epiphanies are had at the shrine of the Western Ideal, in what is titled a journey to the East...

There is some discussion as to whether Jeanneret had met Gropius & Mies van der Rohe in Berlin before he left, where he had worked for an architect called Peter Behrens; whether he had yet seen the world in the stark terms of Toward A New Architecture, his vertical assualt on style. But it doesn't matter; there is also the engaging thing of seeing him come alive to the cultures he encounters in direct response to what they build. His discussion of the Hagia Sophia is still very illuminating to the western reader, and the Parthenon experience surely has resonant chords for many.

Another aspect here is that this is before the war and the Paris peace accords of 1919, which would redraw the world; rather than boundaries as we know them, Jeanneret travels through what was the Austro-Hungary of the Hapsburgs, and into the Ottoman empire of the last caliphate. Bounded on the far shore by British East Africa, and on the eastern edge by the crumbling old Persian empire, this Grand Tour takes him through long-forgotten conceptions of the world, dim memories now of a euro-centric globe.

Here's a snip of the bazaar at Stamboul in Constantinople [Istanbul:] :

Here, in effect, is Sesame, because one discovers and dislodges from beneath the piles of coarse earth the most sumptuous nuggets of the East, from the Islam of Europe to as far as the jungles, brought here piece by piece across the sands, mountains, and brush by solemn caravans.
It is a labyrinth (Baedecker recommends that one carry a compass), a maze of arcades, without a glimpse of sky for several kilometers. It is closed in, suffocationg, and secluded. Here and there tiny windows pierce the low barrel vault, and yet it is well lit. It is deserted at night and frenzied during the day. At sunset, the heavy doors are drawn, enclosing the fabulous wealth, and the great clamor subsides.
Upon arriving, forewarned by the cries of these strange people, I could always imagine a metal god seated on the lintel of the door, rubbing his fat gold belly with both hands. His lips would be greedy , and his forehead would recede like that of an orangutan. His nostrils would be flared, and his gaze restless. He would have long donkey's ears. The hierophant sits there and in his slimy manner overhears the glib and deafening voices; he has the same features as his master, and as for his claws he has stolen them from the oldest of the bridges tolltakers, who died of grief. He speaks all languages, badly, is dressed like us, and his hair is fuzzy...
Meanwhile, carpets are not retrieved from their fall, nor embroideries from their swoon, nor pottery, now rendering every movement perilous. You are utterly seduced by a young persian girl dressed in scarlet, beneath a golden canopy in an Ishfahan garden with tulips and hyacinths everywhere.... Truly, you cannot be cold-blooded any longer; there are too many crazy things before your eyes, too many delightful evocations that throw you into a foolish stupor. You are intoxicated; you cannot react at all. This torrent, this flood, this avalanche of charlatanism brutalizes and annihilates you.

Anyway, a little bit trying at times, irrationally exuberant at others, the reader who wants to enjoy this has to go with the flow, both of the journey, and Jeanneret's purplish rendering thereof... Well worth the trip, worth relaxing overly-strict tolerances for tight prose, allowing, even appreciating, the self-conscious persona of Youth. "Have a look at this, I'm in on the joke, I get the picture", the narrator tells us again and again. Well, yes, nearly that. Lovely period-travel memoir, in the knowing voice of youth.