Softly, softly, catchee English

Hooray for Signal Books, publishers of the ‘Lost and Found’ series of classic travel writing. Not long ago I reviewed in these pages The Ford of Heaven by Brian Power, a memoir, first published in 1984, of Power’s childhood in north China. The notable thing about Power was how deeply embedded he was in the city of his childhood, how much more he was a Chinese boy than the child of Westerners who much of the time had no idea what their son was up to.

Now Signal revives Chiang Yee (1903-1977), who tells an opposite story, of a stranger in a strange land. A gentleman from a rich, artistic family in a middle-sized city on the lower Yangtze, with all the living generations under one roof, he studied chemistry at university — for reasons he couldn’t remember. Later a soldier and a minor official, he came to England in the early Thirties. There he developed a modest reputation as an authority on Chinese art and calligraphy, but mostly as ‘The Silent Traveller’, the author of a series of books reaching from Lakeland and London to New York and San Francisco. People liked those books because of their evocative drawings and watercolours in a Chinese-Western style, and his quaint, wry, appreciative take on the towns and cities he lived in or visited.

A bit of a tuft-hunter, Mr Chiang became friendly with cultural bigwigs of the time, like Herbert Read and Gilbert Murray, but he liked ordinary people too — coalmen (and their horses), porters, butlers, policemen and landladies all walk onto his uncluttered stage, have their brief say, and pad off into the mist. He truly was quiet: in The Silent Traveller in London he describes three or four meetings with the painter and critic Roger Fry in which Fry said a bit and as far as I can make out Chiang said not one word.