Travel Lit Criticism: When Professors Stop Making Sense

Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 06.03.08 | 12:24 PM ET

In the Wall Street Journal, genetics professor Steve Jones praises Charles Darwin’s The Voyage of the Beagle, arguing that, in contrast to Darwin’s other books, the travel memoir “sings.” Fine, but the professor loses me with this observation: “The joy of the journey was that it had a point. Bruce Chatwin and Paul Theroux have each written great travel books about South America—but why, in the end, did they bother? The smell of the agent, the contract and the advance hangs around their pages, but for Darwin (who was in no need of money) every paragraph exudes instead the heady scent of discovery.”

So let me get this straight: Chatwin’s and Theroux’s books were great, but they’re also tainted by commerce and the authors really shouldn’t have bothered to write them?

That logic exudes the heady scent of something else entirely.