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All the Time in the World
Book by Williams, Hugo
- GenresTravel
279 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 2000
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Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews
September 22, 2022
“The best thing to do is get lost, or into some utterly ridiculous situation which will break down people’s reserves as they rescue you from it.”
That’s the young poet Hugo Williams’ advice on first arriving in a strange city when you have no contacts and little to no money in your pocket. For the most part, he seems to have followed it. All the Time in the World is a winning travelogue of his 1962 rag-tag trip around the globe. There’s a lot to like in this book but perhaps my favorite part is William’s meetings in Calcutta with Satyajit Ray and the Hungryalists. He draws the scene memorably:
“Howrah Bridge, Calcutta, is one of the ganglions of the world. Along its rails are tinkers, magicians, lepers, monkey-pipers, snake-charmers, doctors, astrologers, dying septuagenarians and glassware salesmen. The eight-lane roadway is blocked with bullock carts, taxis, phaetons, herds of goats, stray cows, double-deckers packed like pigeon crates, and coolies, crazy with merchandise, dodging them like matadors… In the sky were a hundred jigging kites, some twined in battle, others severed and tacking downwards. The trees were dotted with the fallen squares of colored paper. And the buildings with monkeys. On window sills, locked out, they sat like gossips, hearing, seeing and speaking evil.”
He had only one item on his to-do list in Calcutta:
“Next morning I half-heartedly looked up Satyajit Ray in the telephone book. If there was one man I wanted to meet in India, it was him, but I knew you didn’t just look up international film directors and ask yourself to tea. I didn’t even expect to find his name there, but there it was and almost before I had woken up properly I was speaking to him and arranging to go to tea with him the same afternoon.”
As it happens, my wife and I just tried to hunt down a copy of Satyajit Ray’s Two Daughters at the last-standing movie rental place in town. It’s a wonderful film we used to rent on VHS semi-regularly in the early years of our marriage. Unfortunately, it's not streamable, it seems never to have been issued on DVD in the United States, and we no longer have a VHS player.
Anyway, I won’t spoil the surprises of Williams’ time with Ray. After their first meeting, Williams spent an afternoon with the young Bengali poets known collectively as the Hungry Generation, or the Hungryalists. He found them gathered in a stifling, fanless room with a pile of poems on a bed. According to Williams, they had a three-part manifesto:
“1) To disclose the belief that world and existence are justified only as artistic phenomena.
2) To lash out against the values of the bi-legged career-making animals.
3) To abjure all meretricious blandishment for the sake of absolute sincerity.”
“But the face behind the mask of jazzing anarchy was meek and anxious,” says Williams. They were helplessly shy in each other’s company. Someone suggested they bus out to the botanical gardens to see a famous banyan tree covering three acres, and all accepted with relief. It was a long ride and the monsoon broke by the time they had arrived. “A smell of wet jasmine and creeper came temptingly through the high iron gates,” but for no clear reason (it was only three o’clock in the afternoon) officials were turning people away and the gardens were closed.
That’s the young poet Hugo Williams’ advice on first arriving in a strange city when you have no contacts and little to no money in your pocket. For the most part, he seems to have followed it. All the Time in the World is a winning travelogue of his 1962 rag-tag trip around the globe. There’s a lot to like in this book but perhaps my favorite part is William’s meetings in Calcutta with Satyajit Ray and the Hungryalists. He draws the scene memorably:
“Howrah Bridge, Calcutta, is one of the ganglions of the world. Along its rails are tinkers, magicians, lepers, monkey-pipers, snake-charmers, doctors, astrologers, dying septuagenarians and glassware salesmen. The eight-lane roadway is blocked with bullock carts, taxis, phaetons, herds of goats, stray cows, double-deckers packed like pigeon crates, and coolies, crazy with merchandise, dodging them like matadors… In the sky were a hundred jigging kites, some twined in battle, others severed and tacking downwards. The trees were dotted with the fallen squares of colored paper. And the buildings with monkeys. On window sills, locked out, they sat like gossips, hearing, seeing and speaking evil.”
He had only one item on his to-do list in Calcutta:
“Next morning I half-heartedly looked up Satyajit Ray in the telephone book. If there was one man I wanted to meet in India, it was him, but I knew you didn’t just look up international film directors and ask yourself to tea. I didn’t even expect to find his name there, but there it was and almost before I had woken up properly I was speaking to him and arranging to go to tea with him the same afternoon.”
As it happens, my wife and I just tried to hunt down a copy of Satyajit Ray’s Two Daughters at the last-standing movie rental place in town. It’s a wonderful film we used to rent on VHS semi-regularly in the early years of our marriage. Unfortunately, it's not streamable, it seems never to have been issued on DVD in the United States, and we no longer have a VHS player.
Anyway, I won’t spoil the surprises of Williams’ time with Ray. After their first meeting, Williams spent an afternoon with the young Bengali poets known collectively as the Hungry Generation, or the Hungryalists. He found them gathered in a stifling, fanless room with a pile of poems on a bed. According to Williams, they had a three-part manifesto:
“1) To disclose the belief that world and existence are justified only as artistic phenomena.
2) To lash out against the values of the bi-legged career-making animals.
3) To abjure all meretricious blandishment for the sake of absolute sincerity.”
“But the face behind the mask of jazzing anarchy was meek and anxious,” says Williams. They were helplessly shy in each other’s company. Someone suggested they bus out to the botanical gardens to see a famous banyan tree covering three acres, and all accepted with relief. It was a long ride and the monsoon broke by the time they had arrived. “A smell of wet jasmine and creeper came temptingly through the high iron gates,” but for no clear reason (it was only three o’clock in the afternoon) officials were turning people away and the gardens were closed.
November 24, 2018
One of the few delights lately has been this book by Hugo Williams, given to me by a friend, in which he recounts his adventures bumming - literally, bumming, with clothes on back, limited currency and thumb in the air - across the world. He started out hitchhiking through Europe, then caught a ship from Greece to the Middle East, thumbed his way across the desert, seeing his driver pick up Gypsies along the way, and then seeing his way across the Khyber Pass into India, where for millennia caravans have stole across the Silk Road, meeting a famous film director and underground poets alike, then made his way across the jungles to Cambodia where he crept among the ruins of Angkor Wat, where legendary kings had their way with their subjects, following which (Or was it before? A man loses track of such things), he spent 10 days with a lovely girl in Thailand before it's to Malaysia, another ship, out and about in Japan, thumbing his way with some fellow vagabonds in the Australian Outback and, finally, on to a couple of boats homeward bound, given curious prudish and segregated quarters most of the way. All this more than 50 years ago before the Internet and the remaining Westernization of the world. What a joy this book was. I can hardly wait to decide what to read next.
August 13, 2014
Found this book at a library book sale during their final 'free books' day, and I'm glad I did. As far as I can tell this is Hugo Williams' first book. This is a round the world travel memoir with an emphasis on Southeast Asia. He wrote this while still in his early twenties, so like most people his age he's a bit self absorbed. There's the typical hostel stays, run ins with border guards, brief stays with friends in various countries, at times it is humorous in a very reserved British sort of way. There's not a great deal of insight into the cultures he experiences, but as long as it's read as a look into travel during the early 1960's that's ok. The writing improves a great deal in the later chapters, during the Japan-Australia-Pacific islands-Panama Canal portion of the trip, where he does include some insight into the local cultures and where the writing hints at the poet he was to become. The Australian portion of the journey is especially memorable as he runs into a number of colorful local characters during a hitch hiking trip. Too bad these are fairly short chapters though. (Important to note that the book info listed here is wrong, this was first published in 1966, not 2000.)
July 19, 2010
A lost gem--- a fine, gentle, lovely travel memoir from the very early 1960s... Williams sketches out a languid world of steamships and pre-hippie wanderers and imparts a haunting sense of youth and a time still filled with possibilities.
January 4, 2008
Above-average travel memoir. Nothing remarkable happens, but then that really isn't the point.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews