Always keen to read travel books about Mexico, I picked up an elderly copy (printed by A. Appleton & Company in 1921) of Viva Mexico! by Charles Macomb Flandrau that I came across in a local bookshop.  The book, originally published in 1908, is still available in reprint.  I’d never heard of Flandrau, but a little research revealed that he was born in 1871 in St. Paul, Minnesota, to a local judge who sent him to Harvard, where he served as editor of The Harvard Monthly and was a member of both the Hasty Pudding and the Delphic Clubs.  After graduation he taught literature at his alma mater, and was subsequently made an editor of The Youth’s Companion.  He wrote a best-seller, Harvard Episodes, published in 1897, and after it The Diary of a Freshman, about his first year at Harvard.  Viva Mexico! was the fruit of his lengthy stay on his brother’s coffee plantation in southern Mexico.  It is a beautiful little book that recalls, though it does not quite rival, Sybille Bedford’s magnificent A Visit to Don Otavio (published first in 1960 as The Sudden View: A Mexican Journey).

Flandrau’s style is graceful and evocative, though rhetorical in the old-fashioned manner of the turn of the century.  His eye is nearly as sharp as Bedford’s, and his sensibilities almost as poetic.  He is never really funny (nor do I think he means to be), but he is always droll, which is a variation of funny and sometimes actually preferable to outright humor.  The Mexico he describes, which is the Mexico of President Porfirio Díaz before he was forced to resign during the Mexican Revolution of 1911 and went into exile in Spain, seems unrecognizable today—at least it is unrecognizable from the Mexico contemporary Americans read and hear about in the press and on television; though I’ve traveled enough in the northern part of the country to be able to imagine rural towns and villages that are little changed today from what they were in 1908, and in fact have actually visited some.  Flandrau’s Mexico is largely peaceful, despite widespread examples of the routine and apparently ineradicable private violence that surprise and worry no one and that still characterize the country, side by side with the massive and widespread violence perpetrated by the drug cartels, the army, and the police.  Certainly, there is no hint of the nationwide brutality unleashed by the civil war, only three years off at the time, as the new president, Francisco Madero, clashed with Pancho Villa, Emiliano Zapata, Victoriano Huerta, Pascual Orozco, Venustiano Carranza, and they with each other.  Indeed, Mexico as Flandrau describes her seems very recognizable from Sybille Bedford’s account 45 years later, though the two are separated by terrible violence and relentless tyranny.  From a vantage overlooking a

compact, tile-roofed, white-walled town [that] glared in the January sunlight—a town in a garden, or, when one for a moment lost sight of the outlying orange groves, fields of green-gold sugar cane, patches of shimmering corn and clumps of banana trees—an all-pervasive garden in a town.  For compact as the Oriental-looking little place was, green and purple, yellow and red sprang from its interstices everywhere as though they had welled up from the rich plantations and overflowed.  One gazed down upon the trees of tiny plazas, the dense dark foliage of walled gardens, into shady, flower-filled patios and sunny, luxuriant, neglected churchyards, and beyond, the mysterious valley melted away in vast and ever vaster distances—the illimitable valley of a dream—a vision—an allegory—slowly rising at last, in tier upon tier of faintly opalescent volcanoes, the texture of gauze.  Up and up and up they lifted and swam and soared, until, as with a swift concerted escape into the blue and icy air of heaven, they culminated in the smooth, inaccessible, swanlike snow upon the peak of Orizaba.

Not quite Sybille Bedford, but wonderful enough.