A man’s guide to travelling in style: It starts with packing

Joan Didion’s best-known line is not a line at all. It is a packing list, inserted midway through her 1979 book about counterculture, The White Album. It is considered the perfect example of its species. It is comprehensive, concise, tasteful and evocative. Starting with skirts and leotards, passing through bourbon and toiletries, it lands, with poetic circularity, on the key that will let her back into her house at journey’s end.

People forget that Didion did not consider the list a success. On the contrary, it stood for the failure of all our efforts to impose order on things. “It should be clear that this was a list by someone who prized control, yearned after momentum, someone determined to play her role as if she had the script,” she writes.

The White Album’s opening sentence, “We tell ourselves stories in order to live”, is also misunderstood. It is quoted as a trite testimony to the power of stories. Didion’s point is that stories ultimately aren’t up to the job, that the script is never found, and yet we keep trying.

Her list lacks a watch, which she misses during long nights in motel rooms. She resorts to calling home and asking her husband the time. “This may be a parable,” she offers. It sure is. She can’t break the story habit.

Neither can we. When we get dressed in the morning we are, like it or not, successfully or not, telling a little story about who we will be that day. Packing is the same, but more so: it is inventing a whole portable self. It is practical, but there is much fantasy in it (as there was in Didion’s list).

Anyone who has given themselves over to the satisfaction and entropy of family life knows this form of magic. A packed bag, a step out of the door, and you go from treading on pieces of Lego and washing dishes to Didion’s “momentum”. Will life stick to the script? Never. But it will be worse if you stop writing.

How might a man in 2024 emulate Didion’s effort? Start with the bag itself: Small enough to carry in one hand. Wheely bags are a highly functional, deeply depressing admission that you lack the courage to travel light. A weekend bag in black leather, instead.

Clothing. Starting at the bottom. Clunky British brogues, well broken in. Can be polished up for a meeting, look well under jeans. Socks: Thin wool, dark blue or green.

Trousers: Ripcord twill, dark, with one pleat. Indestructible, presentable and comfortable. Two blue collar shirts; white ones look nicer but are harder to clean in a sink. A slightly heavier cloth will show the wrinkles less.

Tweed, or tweedy, jacket with a pattern. Not really formal enough for work, but people expect this sort of eccentricity from a journalist. Tweed doesn’t mind being folded, and the businessman’s blue sportcoat is suffocatingly boring. Knobbly-knit silk tie, monochrome, probably orange. 

Jeans. Two newish black T-shirts. Underwear.

Moving on: Minimalist running shoes and shorts. Exchange for swimming trunks and goggles if there is water where you’re going. Hopefully there is.

Your toiletries: Pills, razor, toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant. That is absolutely all. Use the soap in the hotel. It’ll clean your shirts, underwear and socks just fine.

Didion did not mention a book, probably because this is something she would never forget to pack. A bag without a book is not packed. It is a comfort, like Didion’s mohair throw and robe. On the spectrum running from a paperback detective novel to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit you need to land somewhere in the middle. Something long enough to kill a lot of dead hours, but not exhausting.

It is also good if it conveys to your seatmate that you are not chatty. The platonic form of the travel book is probably Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror.

“Notice the deliberate anonymity of costume,” Didion writes of her list, “I could pass on either side of the culture.” What am I trying to pass for? A professional? A member of the intellectual middle classes? Neither, really; just a seeker of movement and order in a stuck, messy world.

Robert Armstrong © 2024 The Financial Times

This story originally appeared in The Financial Times