Fasten your seat belts. Anticipation is the breath of life.
Unexpected and great article from Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca and Jamaica Inn, about a trip to Athens and Crete from the 1971 issue of Holiday magazine.
Daphne du Maurier transports her readers from the wild, rainy winter of Cornwall to the bright sunshine of Crete via reminisces of youthful journeys to Greece.
Nothing surpasses the feeling of excitement that comes with the first sight of scenes unglimpsed before.
In contrast to the rough, vagabond trips she made when she was young, du Maurier opts for luxury and after treating herself some pre-trip shopping takes the plane to Athens. After a short spell sight-seeing, she continues on to Crete and picks up a rental car to reach her destination, the fishing village Hagios Nikólaos.
In this enthusiastic piece, du Maurier conveys the excitement of realising a travel dream and finding an idyll abroad. She happily makes comparisons with fishing villages in her beloved West Country while unabashedly acknowledging the change in her travelling style. Bouncing bus journeys may have been amusing once but having someone being sick on her feet (or her velveteen slacks) on this trip would have been less than funny.
Holiday is a testament to the fact that some things still manage to get lost in an age when almost everything is archived, or at least mentioned, online. (Josh Lieberman)
Holiday was an American magazine published between 1946 and 1977 well known for employing famous authors to write travel essays which drew its readers into the jet-set lifestyle of the post-war years – when travel by ocean liner was still common and air travel glamorous and new.
Boasting among its contributors Jack Kerouac, Arthur Miller, James Michener, Eric Ambler, Paul Bowles, John Steinbeck, Lawrence Durrell, Ian Fleming and VS Pritchett the magazine was also famous for its striking and original artwork as this article in Vanity Fair explains.
In a loving tribute to Holiday in the Paris Review, Josh Lieberman explains how he stumbled across the magazine in an old bookshop and started collecting it after realising it was a trove of lost masterpieces. Although a “handful of the pieces are dated”, Lieberman notes, “like the greatest travel writing, many are timeless.”
Holiday was relaunched as a bi-annual publication in 2014. A collection of full text stories from the original magazine appear on Josh Lieberman’s blog.
