Second Best to Love

TIMETABLE FOR TRAMPS--Tlbor Koeves --Houghfon Mifflin ($3).

Tibor Koeves (pronounced Kovesh), a Hungarian journalist who writes in English, has been traveling most of the past 15 years. His Timetable for Tramps, purporting to be the first "textbook" on its subject, is a shrewdly organized, gracefully written set of casual essays on travel as a disease, an art, a religion. Blurred at times by a little too much literary charm, as a textbook it is suggestive rather than definitive. These faults aside, it is one of the more perceptive and engaging of "travel books."

Observing in himself and in hundreds of fellow travelers the same symptoms--"rapid pulse . . . labored breathing, dilated pupils, and a euphoristic tingling"--which characterize "all other major passions, such as love, greed, poetry, and the quintessence of them all, religion," Koeves dignifies travel as a "virus," as "a form of poetry whose raw material is life," as "an instinct second only to that of the passion of love. . . . Cities are more docile mistresses than women. Like women, they require time and money; but of the two they are by far the less demanding and more generous."

Advice to travelers: Don't be snobbish about Baedekers; you don't have to obey their stars. Don't think of city festivals as fake tourist atmosphere; they are your chance to see revealed the collective subconscious of the population. Choose a restaurant in a working-class neighborhood; get yourself accepted there as "an unobtrusive bastard in a kindly family." Make love to a neighborhood girl. Don't be squeamish about using keyholes.

Solitude, melancholy, the sense of death can become desperate problems; and plenty of travelers end their travels in alcohol or marriage. Yet "the number of suicides aboard trains is as small as that in church."

Timetable for Tramps contains excellent pages on New York City, Marseille, London, post-War Paris, and on the habits of those who live there. Well aware that, thanks to war, most of what he tells of will never be the same again, Koeves subtitles his volume "A European Testament." In a modest and genuine way, it is. It is also what it set out to be: a good book about travel, of which the chief regret is, that with so sharp a focus drawn on the theory of travel, the lens is trained so little on its practice.

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