The Quest for Mary Magdalene

The skull of Mary Magdalene in the crypt at Saint-Maximin-la-Sainte-Baume in Provence

The canonical gospels say little about Mary Magdalene; in fact until the crucifixion she is absent from all of them, except for a brief mention in Luke.  Yet Mary Magdalene is the only figure described in the Bible as a witness to all three defining events of the first Easter, the crucifixion, burial and resurrection of Jesus.  She suffers the death of Jesus at the foot of the cross, and when he rises from the tomb it is to Mary Magdalene that he first appears.  In one of the most moving moments in the New Testament he returns to her, but he is transfigured: 'Touch me not', he says, for he is no longer of this world; and it is Mary Magdalene who understands this, passionately and spiritually, and who carries this message to the disciples.  She is the mediator of the divine mystery, and she has remained a potent and mysterious figure ever since. 

Mary Magdalene is a larger figure than any text; she has taken on a life of her own.  In medieval times she was called 'the light-bearer', recalling her Gnostic epithet, 'inheritor of light' in her search for the truth.  In the manner of a quest, this book follows Mary Magdalene through the centuries, explores how she has been reinterpreted for every age, and examines what she herself reveals about man and the divine.

The Quest for Mary Magdalene by Michael Haag will be published by Profile Books in Britain and HarperCollins in the United States in 2016.

Lawrence Durrell's Panic Spring: to Alexandria from Corfu

Panic Spring published in the United States by Covici-Friede, first edition 1937

'Charles Norden', the author of Panic Spring, is really Lawrence Durrell.  His first novel, Pied Piper of Lovers, published by Cassell in London, had not sold well; when his new publishers, Faber and Faber, suggested that his second novel, Panic Spring, appear under a pseudonym, Durrell based the name on Van Norden, a Jew in Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer.  The Faber edition appeared in 1937 and in the United States the novel was published by Covici-Friede in the same year.  Neither sold well and copies are rare; a Faber copy in good condition will set you back many thousands of pounds and a good Covici-Friede edition will cost in the hundreds to a thousand or so; luckily my beaten-up copy cost a few quid.

Alexandrian themes.

Nowadays nobody needs to hunt far and wide nor pay an arm and a leg for a reading copy; both Panic Spring and the earlier Pied Piper of Lovers have recently been published by ELS Editions in Canada.

They make interesting reading.  As the blurb I wrote for the cover of Pied Piper of Lovers says, the book 'introduces in nascent form themes, techniques and characters that Durrell will develop in his later novels. Not least intriguing are his protagonists Walsh and Ruth who will appear again in the streets of Alexandria, Athens and Avignon; their mysterious relationship, which lies at the heart of Durrell's creative urgency, is first explored here in Pied Piper of Lovers'.  And, I should say, it is further explored in Panic Spring, set on a Greek island and written while Durrell was living in Corfu.

Even reading the front flap blurb of the first US edition of Panic Spring is to sense the familiar, what will become fully developed in The Alexandria Quartet - for the island read the city, for Rumanades read Nessim, for his beautiful young mistress read Justine, etc.     

But apart from all that there is the inscription in my copy which has its own story to tell - just as the inscription in my first edition of A Passage to India that I mentioned in an earlier post also had its tale.

My copy of Panic Spring is signed by its owner Harriet Bienstock and dated 6 June 1938.  Later it is stamped with Harriet's ex libris device; she has married Eric Fried and among the pleasures of the loving young couple is to lie before a fire with nothing much on reading books such as Panic Spring. 

Ex Libris: Nothing much on.

I was curious to know who this Harriet was, and what a nice girl like Harriet was doing reading this book by the unknown Lawrence Durrell.  I discovered one other book recorded as having been owned and stamped by Harriet and Eric; it is in the library at Wake Forest University and is called Unholy Memories of the Holy Land by the English lawyer Horace Samuel and published in London in 1930 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf of the Hogarth Press.  The book is a condemnation of British attitudes and policy towards the Jews during the Palestine mandate. 

A little bit of research revealed that seven months before Harriet read Panic Spring her father Samuel Bienstock died.  Born in Russia, he came to America and founded a drug company and a chain of drug stores; he also served as treasurer of the Jewish Telegraph Agency in the 1920s.  Samuel had two sons and three daughters; one of his daughters, Ida, married Jacob Landau, founder of the Jewish Telegraph Agency for which Ida became a correspondent during the Second World War; while one of his sons was Victor Bienstock, a journalist who worked for the Herald Tribune and then, when Hitler came to power in 1933, joined the Jewish Telegraph Agency for which he too covered the war and later supervised such writers as Theodore H White and the Nobel Prize winner Elie Wiesel.  The Jewish Telegraph Agency became intimately linked with the Jewish Agency, which acted as a kind of autonomous Jewish government for Palestine during the Mandate period, and continues to this day as an international news agency serving Jewish community newspapers and media.

A curiosity - an association of no significance, if there is such a thing - is that the Landaus were close to Albert Einstein, author of the theory of relativity.  In 1933 Einstein became godfather to Ida and Jacob Landau's son, and in the late 1940s, as the Landaus were working for the creation of the State of Israel, they drew on the public support of their friend.

Correspondence between Albert Einstein and Jacob Laundau, Harriet Bienstock's brother in law.

So Durrell wrote Panic Spring while living in Corfu before the war.  Perhaps the exotic location in the Eastern Mediterranean attracted Harriet to his book, though her family also had an interest elsewhere in the Eastern Mediterranean; they were Zionists who were actively involved in promoting Palestine as a Jewish state.  The war drove Durrell from Corfu; fleeing from the advancing Germans as they invaded Greece he escaped to Egypt where he spent most of the rest of the war working for the British Information Office in Alexandria.  There he met Eve Cohen who became his second wife; he also met the Zionist family of the woman who would become his third wife, Claude Vincendon; and when it came to writing what he described as the Einsteinian four-dimensional Alexandria Quartet Durrell would place at its heart a Palestine conspiracy, an attempt to create the State of Israel in the teeth of British policy.  Harriet probably read the Quartet too; she and Durrell had arrived at the same story, but the name Lawrence Durrell would have thrown her off making any connection with Charles Norden, the author of Panic Spring.

Nudism in Alexandria

'Ah! All will be truly exquisite when Alexandria is converted to nudism.'  So went the song in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1931.

The occasion was the annual review put on at the Alhambra Theatre at the bottom of Rue Safiya Zaghloul in aid of one or another Jewish welfare organisations; in 1931 it was La Société de Bienfaisance Israélite.

A prime mover behind the reviews was Claire Vincendon.  She designed the costumes and the sets and also illustrated the programme shown here.  And she sang and danced in the sketches as well as acted as compère, or rather commère as the programme describes her.

Claire Vincendon's father was Baron Felix de Menasce, a financier and one of the wealthiest men in Egypt.  Her brother was Jean de Menasce who converted from Judaism to Catholicism and became a priest and was in the words of T S Eliot 'my best translator': among other things he did The Waste Land into French.  Claire's half brother George de Menasce was also a financier and a collector of Greek island tapestries, Chinese jade and many other things; some of his collections are now in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge. The story of the Menasce family is included in Michael Haag's Alexandria: City of Memory.

During the Second World War George gave open house piano concerts in his home in Moharrem Bey attended especially by British servicemen and for which he was awarded an OBE.  Lawrence Durrell also went to the concerts and mixed socially with many people who moved in the same circles as the Menasce family.  But he did not meet Claire's daughter Claude who was only in her late teens.

Claire Vincendon, standing centre, with her husband Jacques at a Finney carnival party in Alexandria. This is a detail of a photograph in Michael Haag's book Vintage Alexandria.

Instead Durrell met Claude Vincendon in Cyprus in 1955 while he was writing Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet.  She later became his third wife.  By 1960 when Durrell completed the Quartet the mixed communities of Alexandria's cosmopolitan society had left or been thrown out of Egypt.

In the event, nudism never came to Alexandria.

A Passage from the Norfolk Broads

First edition published 4 June 1924.

In their lifetimes books pass through many hands.  Sometimes it is possible, and also interesting, to trace their passage.  For example some years ago I bought a beaten up hardcover copy of E M Forster's A Passage to India.  I bought it mostly because I needed it for writing Alexandria: City of Memory.  I could have had a copy for less had I bought the paperback, but this happened to be a first edition, so I splurged and paid the £8.

I did what I usually do with books and signed my name inside, though not on the title page this time, instead on the front flyleaf immediately below the signature of a previous owner, L H G Greenwood of Emmanuel College, Cambridge.  I cannot say that his name rang a bell.

Greenwood signed his name in the book sometime during June 1924.

I had read A Passage to India before and now I read it again.  And when I got to the end and read that final passage of broken friendship and loss - '"No, not yet", and the sky said, "No, not there"' - I noticed that Mr Greenwood had been scribbling in my book again. 

A passage on the Norfolk Broads.

'Read on the Broads aloud', Greenwood had written, 'to Frank and Ralph Leavis 29 June-4 July 1924'. So this was F R Leavis and his younger brother Ralph who were spending a week floating about the Norfolk Broads having A Passage of India read to them by F R Leavis' moral tutor (rather than his academic supervisor) who was a classicist, the translator of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics and who would later translate the whole of Cicero.

Leavis had got his BA at Cambridge three years before; at the moment of this idyll on the Broads he was completing his PhD and would eventually become one of the foremost literary critics in the English-speaking world.  He admired A Passage to India and would praise it for its 'qualities of intelligence and civilisation'.  This was all the more important as after the Great War, in his view, the world had been going to pot, sinking into degeneracy.  

The Norfolk Broads.

After the further horrors of the Second World War Leavis wrote his most famous and controversial book, The Great Tradition, published in 1948. 'Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Conrad, and D H Lawrence: the great tradition of the English novel is there'. He was not entirely happy about Lawrence but came round to him more as he wrote the book; as for writers like Dickens, they were not in the tradition, though he did allow that Hard Times was 'a completely serious work of art'.  Moral intensity, in Leavis' view, was the necessary criterion for inclusion in any list of the finest novelists.

Oddly Leavis found the time in The Great Tradition to dismiss a novelist who was almost entirely unknown in 1948, Lawrence Durrell.  Also dismissed for lowering the tone of Western civilisation was Henry Miller, who likewise was unknown except to a few.  It is strange that Leavis bothered to waste his breath, but then he was something of a finely-tuned paranoic and saw coming what others might have missed. 

Doing dirt on life: The Durrell-Miller Letters published by 
Michael Haag and Faber and Faber London 1988.

In certain writers, Leavis wrote, 'a regrettable (if minor) strain of Mr Eliot's influence seems to me to join with that of Joyce', producing 'in so far as we have anything significant, the wrong kind of reaction against liberal idealism. I have in mind writers in whom Mr Eliot has expressed an interest in strongly favourable terms: Djuna Barnes of Nightwood, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell of The Black Book. In these writers - at any rate in the last two (and the first seems to me insignificant) - the spirit of what we are offered affects me as being essentially a desire, in Laurentian phrase, to "do dirt" on life'. 

Leavis has it wrong about the dirt.  D H Lawrence was talking about pornography when he wrote of doing dirt.  ‘Pornography is the attempt to insult sex, to do dirt on it', Lawrence wrote in Pornography and Obscenity in 1929.  But neither Durrell nor Miller insult sex or life; quite the opposite.  But that is what Frank Leavis of the Broads has to say, and I mention it more in illustration of the conversation that opens up between present and past when you discover that someone has been scribbling in your book.

Alexandrian Women

Two young Slovene women in Alexandria.

In his film Aleksandrinke, Metod Pevec, a Slovenian documentary filmmaker, has told the moving story of the waves of young women from the Goriška region of Slovenia who from the late nineteenth century onwards migrated to Egypt where they worked as nannies, wet nurses, maids and governesses for the better off families of flourishing Alexandria.  The transition from impoverished village to cosmopolitan city could be liberating but the cost could be heartbreaking.  After years of sending money home, sustaining their families, sometimes literally paying for the houses their families lived in, these Slovene women, known in their home valleys as 'Aleksandrinke' - Alexandrians - left behind everything, friends, family, husbands, children, when they discovered that they were unable to return to and endure their former narrow lives.

Many Aleksandrinke spent the whole of their lives in Alexandria or Cairo and are buried there today. The film interviews several women who went to Alexandria, some a hundred years old, and who did after all return to their Slovenian homeland, and it interviews a number of their charges, the young children they nourished and loved in Egypt and who now remember them and love them still, among them Boutros Boutros Ghali.  Some married into cosmopolitan families, Greek, Italian, English, Egyptian; most lived comfortably and some became fabulously wealthy.

The most successful of these women was Josa Finney, who married the English cotton broker Oswald Finney, the richest man in Egypt in the 1930s.  The Finneys gave spectacular carnival balls at their house in Alexandria which became famous in Alexandrian lore and gossip, and served the novelist Lawrence Durrell well when he described the carnival ball in Balthazar, the second volume of his Alexandria Quartet. Michael Haag, who was historical advisor to the film, is also interviewed and talks about Josa and how she inspired one of the greatest scenes in The Alexandria Quartet.

A painted portrait of Josa Finney.

Metod Pevec has won a number of awards for his film Aleksandrinke. For more about Metod and the film, click here.

There is a website for the film in Slovenian and English. And quite apart from the text the website has some good photographs and also a snatch of the film. To go to the website click here.

Unfortunately the film, which has been produced with subtitles, is not yet available on DVD. Meanwhile you will have to make do with the trailer, which can be viewed on the website above or on YouTube. Click here.

Also there is a quite separate website devoted to the phenomenon of the migration of Slovenian women to Alexandria, with photographs, historical background, and so on. Click here.

More on Josa and Oswald Finney, including photographs, can be found in Michael Haag's books Alexandria: City of Memory, Yale University Press, and Vintage Alexandria, The American University in Cairo Press.

The Alexandria Quartet in The Guardian

The view from the Athineos Café across Alexandria's Eastern Harbour towards Fort Qayt Bey, built on the site of the ancient Pharos.

The Guardian newspaper's Reading Group is immersed in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  There are discussions online and also a gallery of photographs, many of them taken by Michael Haag or from his book Alexandria: City of Memory.

To see the Guardian's gallery of photographs relating to The Alexandria Quartet, click here.

Henry Miller and Tropic of Cancer in The New York Times

I was prompted to write the above letter to The New York Times after reading Jeanette Winterson's review of Renegade: Henry Miller and the Writing of the Tropic of Cancer by Robert Frances.  You can read her review by clicking here. And you can read the various letters to the editor published in reply (my own and others) by clicking here.

Winterson misses the point about Miller and Tropic of Cancer.  She appears to have no comprehension of the times in which it was written and therefore is unaware of its historical and moral significance.

I explained something of that significance in my original letter to The New York Times, but they prefer Tweet-length letters and so cut important passages referring to Miller in the context of Graham Greene, Louis Ferdinand Céline and Elias Canetti - and the atmosphere that poisoned and oppressed the Europe they knew.  The uncut version of my letter is given below.

Sir

Jeanette Winterson, who long ago decided to be happy rather than normal, seems to hate Henry Miller because he made the same decision and justified it by calling himself an artist.  That is how Tropic of Cancer begins.  Miller says he is an artist and then dances about on the pages in the most manic and delightful way. Writer, dancer, singer.  ‘I am going to sing for you, a little off key perhaps, but I will sing,  I will sing while you croak, I will dance over your dirty corpse. ... This then is a song.  I am singing.’  

I like Miller because of that all-singing-and-dancing act.  It makes me laugh.  As it happens I do not recall a single sexual episode in the book, but if he had a dozen women upside down or in the gutter or on slabs, good for him, as long as he was singing.  I buy the artist as free-to-do-what-he-likes not as a principle but when he proves himself a better singer and dancer than a social worker.  

Winterson faults Turner for offering too little social and political background and then announces the sort of background she has in mind, brothels, women’s suffrage, the pill.  In fact Miller was one of the very few artists of his times who knew what to say about the all transcending horrors of his moment.  

If I were introducing anyone to the great dark cloud lowering over the world in the early 1930s I would have them read four books, Graham Greene's Stamboul Train (1932), Louis Ferdinand Céline's Journey to the End of the Night (1932), Elias Canetti's Auto da Fé (1935), and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer (1934).  

Greene called Stamboul Train an entertainment; it is a pleasant introduction to the disease of antisemitism that had overtaken the whole of continental Europe well before Hitler was elected and made it official policy.  Journey to the End of the Night is a wonderful novel, a joyous vicious novel of ugliness and hatred, the ugliness and hatred having taken possession of Céline himself, though he is exculpated by the energy and brilliance of his book which does show you in magnificent prose how repellent the times could be.  Canetti’s Auto da Fé is pure disgust and horror, locked in claustrophobia.  

Greene the Englishman is cool and sane and observes clearly and lightly. But Céline the Frenchman and Canetti the Bulgarian in Vienna are defeated. Their books are about the decomposition of the world of which they are a part; they feel the gangrene at work within themselves.  They write out of defeat; they offer no way out. 

Miller, the late-arriving American in Paris, could have written a book of utter degradation in keeping with the times, but instead he sings. It is quite beautiful; the world is hideous and going down the drain, and Miller sings.  The all-American Miller did not choose death; he wrote an outrageous American novel full of energy, optimism and laughs.  That is what is so good about Henry Miller. That is why Tropic of Cancer is morally and historically an important book.

Cover Artwork for Tragedy of the Templars

The designers at Profile Books have been coming up with cover designs for The Tragedy of the Templars.  

This cover artwork is the favourite at the moment. 

The Tragedy of the Templars tells the story of the Arab and Turkish occupation of the Middle East, its recovery by the Crusaders, and the ultimate failure and tragedy of the crusader venture.  The Tragedy of the Templars will be published in autumn 2012 by Profile Books in Britain and in summer 2013 by Harper Collins in the United States.

Egypt for the Egyptians

The following is a letter written by Michael Haag immediately after taking part in the Liquid Continent programme at the Bibliotheca (see here and here) at Alexandria in March 2011. The letter may hold some interest in the light of subsequent events.

As we travelled by train to Alexandria I was looking at the Delta landscape and noticed how built-up the villages had become since I first made that journey back in 1973. The villages have expanded and also the houses, once one and two storeys high, are now three and four. They consist of upright concrete pillars which have the spaces between them filled in with brick. Then arriving at the outskirts of Alexandria I saw the same, the city expanding, growing ever denser, the buildings exactly like the Delta houses, the upright concrete pillars filled in with brick, but instead of three and four storeys rising to ten and more. And that was as much 'architecture' as they had; the Delta has moved into Alexandria, the fellahin and their villages complete. I looked to see if any of these new structures owed anything to the wider world, to the Mediterranean; but nothing, nothing at all, only to the simplest Egyptian notions of a box to live inside.

I was alert to these things because the Liquid Continent event at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina was all about Alexandria and the Mediterranean, what the city supposedly shared with other cities round the Mediterranean's shores. Once upon a time the influence did come across that sea; you see it still where the older buildings stand along the Corniche and a few blocks behind, the architecture of the late nineteenth century and early twentieth. But now Alexandria no longer looks out to sea; it is being buried by the Delta mud.

Meanwhile other seaports flourish, cities like Barcelona, Piraeus, Genoa, Marseilles, Haifa – Haifa, for example, handles as great an annual tonnage as Alexandria but the population of Israel is only ten million while Egypt is over eighty million. When the 'foreigners' were pushed out of Egypt Alexandria collapsed. Anyone who wants to seek their fortune in Egypt these days must go to Cairo; Alexandria is a dead city unless one has a position at the university or the Bibliotheca. Cairo has energy which makes it less oppressive, but there is nothing my heart warms to there outside the marvellous Fatimid and Mameluke architecture of the medieval city. Luxor has turned into a factory for taking tourists on coach tours of tombs, and Aswan, once so dreamy, is overbuilt. 

My feeling about these recent events in Egypt is that whatever the demands for democracy, an end to corruption, etc, they also mean a lurch forward in the evolution of the Egyptian identity – the Egypt that looks inwards not out across the sea. Nationalism, populism, conformism, religiosity will be more important than secularism and liberalism. The 'new Egypt' may well be nothing more than a fresh assertion of the old. The country is already heavily Islamist; despite the views of the youthful Tahrir idealists and the Western media I think Egypt will become more so; the Islamists are likely to form a powerful bloc in Parliament, likely to hold several portfolios in the government if not the premiership itself; they are moving patiently in that direction.

View towards the site of the ancient Pharos.

When I first came to Alexandria nearly forty years ago you could still hear Greek music spilling out from cafés and clubs along Sharia Safiya Zaghloul. That was how I began my talk at the Bibliotheca. The music was a reminder of the Mediterranean. But now the music is gone. Egyptians may shrug and say so what, but if they ask me what I think about Alexandria I can only say that I miss the wider world. I rather liked that waft of a foreign breeze. But then I am not an Egyptian. Egypt for the Egyptians, whatever that turns out to be.*

***

* In 1877 Yaqub Sanu, an Egyptian-Italian Jew and a follower of the Islamic reformer Jamal el Din Afghani, founded a satirical newspaper with a nationalist bent and coined the slogan 'Egypt for the Egyptians'.

To Alexandria with Eve Durrell

To Alexandria with Eve Durrell by Michael Haag first appeared in Deus Loci, the Lawrence Durrell Journal, NS11 2008-2009.

I met Eve Durrell in 1991, and we remained friends until her death in December 2004. We both lived in London, but I had been to Alexandria many times; it was a city I knew well, and I had glimpsed something of how it used to be. Now I was writing a book about the city, about the Alexandria of Constantine Cavafy, E M Forster and Lawrence Durrell, but also about the Alexandria that existed independently of literary creations, the vanished city of forgotten lives. I talked with many people about the city, I read diaries and letters, and I looked through photographs; I pieced together a history, something like my own memory of Alexandria. And when Eve would come for dinner, which was often, or for lunch or tea, we would talk of Alexandria, of an Alexandria we shared. Then one day she asked if I would take her back, and in January 1999 we visited Alexandria together.

Eve Durrell and Michael Haag on the roof of the Hotel Cecil overlooking Alexandria's Eastern Harbour

Eve was eighty then, a woman of great enthusiasms, remarkable stamina and tremendous energy. Throughout our stay in the city, Eve loved running in and out of shops, bargaining in Arabic, exchanging simple courtesies, enjoying what she called the easy gracefulness of the town. ‘Yes, everything has deteriorated’, she admitted, but she was stimulated by her memories. ‘I am on a high.’ We had arrived towards the end of the Muslim month of fasting; as darkness fell the Ramadan gun went off and was followed by the call to prayer. That evening when we dined at the Trianon, Eve became quietly reflective for a while and then smiled, saying ‘I was thinking of all the lovers I have had. All so very different. I have thought of writing a book about them, but there is no time’. As we stepped out into the night the streets were strung with Ramadan lights and lanterns and filled with happy people. Eve was thrilled. She was like a fish in water here in Alexandria, immersed in her youthful past.

Over the years in London Eve had told me a great deal about her life, especially about her youth in Alexandria and her relationship with Lawrence Durrell. But now arriving in the city was like walking onto a stage; the old familiar set was still there, and as we went from place to place Eve would tell me the stories again, this time showing me exactly how and where. Eve was dramatic, always stylishly dressed, and she remained a very attractive woman to the end; at the age of twenty-five she was stunning. She first met Durrell at Baudrot, a fashionable drinking hole on the Rue Fuad; it was offices now, but the building was the same, and it was there, she pointed, over there on the left, that Durrell was holding forth at the centre of a crowd of people. ‘Larry was attracting people like honey, like bees to a honeypot’. Curious and attracted, she pressed forward to see. Soon she was eagerly pressing herself against Durrell himself, almost body to body. 'He was frightened, terrified. I'd never frightened anybody in my life before. He was terrified. And he admitted it; it wasn't just my imagination; we discussed it afterwards. Probably he never had someone like me approaching him in that direct way'. It was a way she had with people, too many people, Durrell thought, and it left him uncertain about where he stood: ‘My pessimism guards me against your smiles to other people and your bloody gipsy familiarity with tout le monde’, he told her later. But her behaviour also thrilled him. ‘Gypsy Cohen’, he wrote to Henry Miller, ‘provides a cyclone every day with a real generous and mad beauty which is touching and exciting'.

Anyone who has known Eve has experienced that excitement, that urgency about her. But there was a vulnerability, a fragility too. There would come the moment when Eve cut off all contact and withdrew, sometimes silently, sometimes accompanied by the most terrible wailings as she plunged into the blackness of despair.

We went to Pastroudis, where Eve and Durrell had their first rendezvous and had talked late into the night. And to Moharrem Bey where they lived together at the Villa Ambron. She talked about those times and the years that followed; she could be critical of Durrell, ‘but I still love Larry’.

But the memories that most moved Eve were not those of her time with Durrell or any other lovers; instead it was the memories of her childhood days. Eve was three when her mother’s twin sister committed suicide; from then on ‘my mother wasn’t functioning’, and Eve depended on her maternal grandmother for attention and affection, but she in turn died when Eve was six. From then on, Eve saw herself at the mercy of an unstable mother and a possessive father infatuated with his own daughter. When we went round to what had been her parents’ flat off Rue Champollion, the first thing Eve did was to point to the balcony one floor up: ‘That’s where my mother tried to jump from to commit suicide’.

One morning we walked along the Rue Amin Fikri Pasha from the Ramleh tram terminus towards the Rue Sultan Hussein, looking for her school, the Scottish School for Girls. The school was behind a high wall that ran along the pavement; we only glimpsed it as we came up to the gate. At that moment Eve was overcome with emotion; her knees gave way and I steadied her in my arms. Eve had gone to other schools before, but this was the school she had gone to from the age of twelve; she had learnt English here and thanks to the loving attention of a teacher, Miss Melanie, this was where she gradually came out of the shell she had inhabited since early childhood.

The great event in Eve’s life, the single most important one, it seems from everything she said, was the day she fled from her parents’ flat. It was the break with the pain and oppressiveness of her life with them. This was soon after her long evening of talking with Durrell at Pastroudis, and he seemed her only hope; she came round to the British Information Office and gave herself to him.

This photograph of Eve Cohen was taken just days before her first rendezvous with Lawrence Durrell at Pastroudis in 1942

As we went from place to place in Alexandria, each place a different moment in her life, Eve would awaken to new memories and emotions, new images of herself: ‘At each place there is me’, she said. ‘I see me and me and me, all the several mes’.

I gathered her together and put her in my book, and I know that she was happy about that. But there are times when I have wondered if those several Eves were disconnected fragments, not sequences in her life; fragments from a broken childhood held together by her impulsiveness, her energy, her cyclone personality. What I do know is that Eve was headstrong, exasperating, generous and loveable. And sitting by her hospital bed, holding her hand in mine, I realised that she was also very brave. On her last day she put some lipstick on, she summoned glasses and brandy, and she raised a toast to life. I have been fortunate to share London and Alexandria with Eve, and she lives with me still in my memories.

   *

The story of Eve (née Cohen) Durrell and Lawrence Durrell, and of the Alexandria they knew, is told in Michael Haag's book Alexandria: City of Memory, published by Yale University Press in London and New Haven, and by The American University in Cairo Press in Cairo.

Egypt of Memory in the Paintings of Camille Fox

Camille Fox is a painter in Sydney, Australia, but as she says 'I come from an ancient land'. She was born in Alexandria when it was still a cosmopolitan city and she has distilled her childhood remembrances of Egypt into a series of delightful and magical paintings.

To go to Camille's website, click here.

Ahmed Hassanein: Writer, Diplomat and Desert Explorer

The following resume of the life of Ahmed Hassanein is from the Introduction by Michael Haag to the American University in Cairo Press' edition of The Lost Oases.

In The Lost Oases, one of the great classics of desert exploration, Ahmed Hassanein tells how he set out by camel from Sollum on the Mediterranean coast of Egypt west of Mersa Matruh, heading for the oases of Siwa and Kufra and into the unknown. The first man to cross the Libyan Desert, as the eastern Sahara is called, his perilous eight-month journey in 1923 was to take him round the western shores of the Great Sand Sea to El Obeid in the Sudan, a distance of 2200 miles, and lead him to the discovery of the lost oases of Arkenu and Uweinat at the extreme southwest corner of Egypt. At Uweinat, Hassanein was amazed to find rock drawings of animals, including lions, giraffes, ostriches, gazelles and possibly also cows. He was deep in the trackless desert, but what he had found, and photographed, was evidence of a flourishing human existence ten thousand years ago before desertification drove these mysterious people to the valley of the Nile.

Hassanein’s discovery – and indeed the pages of this book – excited the imaginations of later explorers such as Ralph Bagnold, who relied on convoys of stripped-down Model-T Fords (and who in the Second World War would create the Long Range Desert Group, the forerunners of the SAS), and Count Ladislaus Almásy who did his exploring by light aircraft and was the model for the eponymous character in The English Patient. But the significance of Hassanein's adventure and the achievements of his life amounted to a great deal more than that.

Hassanein's caravan approaching Arkenu early in the morning.

After returning from his remarkable journey across the desert and his discovery of the lost oases in 1923, Hassanein was offered $20,000 by American promoters if he would go on a lecture tour round the United States dressed in his Bedouin robes. The press in America had already dubbed him Egypt’s Lawrence of Arabia; Rudolph Valentino’s film The Sheikh had been big box office two years before; and the world was still agog at Howard Carter’s discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922. Egypt and deserts were the stuff of sensation and romance, and Hassanein was a hot property, a popular yet mysterious figure to the newspaper reading public in Europe and the New World. But Hassanein turned down the offer, saying that ‘my standing precludes earning money in such a manner’. And when he did go to America in 1924, it was in an entirely different capacity.

Approaching the hills of Uweinat.

In Egypt, where Hassanein’s expedition was celebrated as a great advance in geographical knowledge and as a patriotic achievement, there was a sense of satisfaction that while Europeans had explored Africa by its rivers, it was Hassanein who first successfully penetrated the Libyan Desert, traversing it from north to south, and was the first to cross the Great Sand Sea. ‘The Libyan Desert is part of our country’, he had said before embarking on his journey, ‘and it is incumbent upon us to ascertain our borders there, so that we may better know our country. By traversing the desert I will have established some of the rights of our nation’. Now in August 1923, after returning from the desert, Hassanein addressed a grand reception in Alexandria of princes, ministers, senior officials and prominent men of letters. He outlined the scientific benefits of his expedition, adding that he had pinpointed precisely the geographical location of every area through which he had passed, not least the oases of Arkenu and Uweinat (Ouenat in Hassanein's spelling), making it possible to draw a detailed map of Egypt’s western territories. In November that same year in Cairo, Hassanein was feted with a large ceremony at the Opera House attended by King Fuad who conferred on him the title of bey.

A member of Hassanein's expedition examines rock carvings at Uweinat depicting giraffes, lions, ostriches and possibly cows, indicating that the Sahara was once grassland and home to a sophisticated pastoral culture.

Yet Hassanein always understood that his greatest achievement was his discovery of the rock drawings at Uweinat; they were ‘the most interesting find of my 2,200-mile journey’, he would write in the September 1924 issue of America’s National Geographic magazine. He saw that they pointed to the passing of a sophisticated pastoral culture, the victim of dramatic climate change, which he placed at some time before the introduction of the camel to the desert in about 500 BC. But how much earlier than that, he could not guess, adding that ‘here is a puzzle which must be left to the research of the archaeologists’. In The Lost Oases, published in the following year, he describes how he tried to hide his excitement at the discovery, and even avoided visiting some other rock pictures half a day away for fear of arousing suspicions among the native Tebu who thought of them as the work of jinns. In fact Hassanein had discovered the first prehistoric rock drawings ever found in Egypt’s deserts, the first evidence suggesting that Egyptian civilisation may have started in a once greener Libyan Desert and not, as universally supposed, in the valley of the Nile. As Michael Hoffman, the eminent prehistorian wrote in Egypt Before the Pharaohs (1979), Hassanein had ‘uncovered an archaeological mystery whose solution is only now coming within our grasp’.

Hassanein would say that Bedouin blood ran through his veins, explaining the lure he had long felt for the desert. But he also belonged to the Turco-Circassian upper class, and by profession he was a diplomat who had asked the Egyptian Foreign Office for a leave of absence in order to undertake his expedition in search of the lost oases. Now that he was back, he was posted to the Egyptian embassy in Washington, where as First Secretary and still only thirty-three he held the number two position after the ambassador himself. Next he was sent to London, the plum overseas posting, where again he was number two, and where also he was awarded the Founder’s Medal of the Royal Geographical Society. He was recalled to Cairo in 1925 to serve as First Chamberlain to King Fuad, and for the rest of his life Hassanein remained close to the throne of Egypt, an influential and indispensable advisor, not least during the tumultuous years of the Second World War. Yet as a friend of Hassanein’s observed, ‘he would have preferred to have left behind the ceremonies, the trappings and the splendour to live in a tent in the desert. He loved the desert. It was like a garden of contentment for him’.

After discovering the lost oases Hassanein continued south into the Sudan where he photographed this Bidiat family in Darfur.

Ahmed Mohammed Hassanein was born in Cairo in 1889, where his father, Sheikh Mohammed Hassanein el Boulaki, was a distinguished scholar at the thousand year old mosque of al-Azhar, which was also a university, the oldest in the world. His grandfather was Ahmed Mazhar Hassanein Pasha, the last admiral of the Egyptian navy before the British occupation in 1882. When ordered to hand over his fleet to the British at their naval base in Malta, admiral Hassanein instead sailed about the Mediterranean for a while before giving his famous reply, Malta mafish, ‘Malta is not there’.

In his introduction to the 1925 edition of The Lost Oases, Sir Rennell Rodd loosely summarises Hassanein’s early education and career. Rodd himself was a diplomat and author, and had recently been ambassador at Rome and Britain’s representative at the League of Nations, while his son Francis, who was Hassanein’s friend from their days at Balliol before the war, had written The People of the Veil, a book about the Tuareg, which would be published in 1926. After Hassanein had studied for a year at Cairo’s Khedivial School of Law, his father sent him to Oxford University where he entered Balliol College in 1910, returning to Egypt in 1914 just before the outbreak of the First World War. There he joined the Ministry of the Interior and served as private Arabic secretary on the staff of Sir John Maxwell, Commander in Chief of British forces in Egypt.

In 1917, together with Francis Rodd, Hassanein was sent on a delicate mission to the Senussi Bedouin who roamed on both sides of the Egyptian-Libyan border. Libya was then still notionally part of the Ottoman Empire, and the Senussi, armed by Turkish and German agents, were persuaded to mount attacks on Egypt’s western frontier, which required thirty-five thousand British troops under Colonel Milo Talbot to contain them. The Senussi were not a tribe, rather they were adherents of a fundamentalist Sufi sect who were militantly protective of their independence, but after their defeat in battle, it was the negotiations in which Hassanein, a fellow Muslim and son of a holy man, played an important part that led the Senussis to adopt as their new leader Sayed Idris, who was friendly to the British and their allies.

This mission to the Senussis was the practical beginning of Hassanein’s long-cherished dream to penetrate to Kufra, the capital of the Senussi sect deep in the Libyan Desert. As Hassanein explains in the first chapter of this book, no outsider had penetrated as far as Kufra other than the German Gerhard Rohlfs in 1879, who was nearly killed in the attempt and had all his instruments and scientific records destroyed. With the war now over, Hassanein met again with Sayed Idris, and drawing on the earlier trust established between them, obtained his authority and permission to make the otherwise impossible journey to Kufra.

Francis Rodd planned to join Hassanein in the adventure, but when he was obliged to drop out, his friend the travel writer Rosita Forbes, a beautiful and vivacious divorcée in search of exotic adventure, pressed her chance. Hassanein cajoled a reluctant Sayyed Idris into allowing the Englishwoman to accompany him on the journey. Disguised as ‘Khadija’, she ‘dressed as a Muslim woman and posed as a female relative of mine, thus ensuring that the Bedouins could not address her or ask about her’. On several occasions they came close to being murdered by suspicious Bedouins and were saved only by Hassanein’s coolness and quick wits. Once they were challenged at Jalo, where they were asked about some merchants in Cairo to see if they really were Egyptian. Fortunately Hassanein had the answer, and their caravan was given the traditional Bedouin hospitality. At another point, north of Kufra, their expedition missed a vital well owing to Rosita’s lack of skill in taking compass readings, and they nearly died of thirst.

Hassanein was badly repaid for the effort and risks he took on Rosita’s behalf, for as soon as she returned to England she wrote The Secret of the Sahara: Kufara (1921), in which she represented herself as the sole organiser and driving force behind the expedition, and described Hassanein in terms that suggested he was nothing more than her hired servant. The book won her the reputation of being an intrepid explorer and made her famous throughout the world. But as the explorer and Arabist Gertrude Bell wrote at the time, ‘in the matter of trumpet blowing she is unique’, adding that ‘she doesn’t know a word of Arabic’, and that without Hassanein ‘she couldn’t have done anything’. Even Rosita’s entry in the Dictionary of National Biography, not normally given to critical remarks about its subjects, says that her book ‘decidedly under-played her companion’s share in the expedition and gave rise to resentments which long persisted’.

This probably explains Rennell Rodd's remarks in his introduction, where he says that Hassanein had consulted him 'in a very delicate matter' in which he proved himself to be 'generous in his judgements and, for I know no other way of expressing what I mean, a great gentleman'. Rosita had fallen in love with Hassanein, but the details are hidden behind Hassanein's discretion and Rosita's catty remarks. It was said in Cairo that she would climb into his tent and try to seduce him, but that Hassanein refused her. 'I was determined not to offend Allah and his mercy', Hassanein is remembered to have said, 'for we were in the midst of unchartered desert with the perils of death surrounding us on all sides.'

Rosita Forbes in desert costume.

Or maybe something did happen between them, but if so then it would seem that Rosita’s false compass readings chastened Hassanein’s desires. ‘On my first trip through the Libyan Desert I took a vow’, Hassanein writes in The Lost Oases. ‘We had lost our way and we had lost all hope. There was no sign of the oasis we sought, no sign of any well near by. The desert seemed cruel and merciless, and I vowed that if ever we came through alive I would not return again. Two years later I was back in the same desert, at the same spot where we had lost our way, and landed in the same well that had saved our lives on the previous occasion. The desert calls, but it is not easy to analyse its attraction and its charm.’ And again, describing his love of the desert: ‘It is as though a man were deeply in love with a very fascinating but cruel woman. She treats him badly, and the world crumples in his hand; at night she smiles on him and the whole world is a paradise. The desert smiles and there is no place on earth worth living in but the desert.’ But not if you are with a woman who does not know how to read a compass.

A mystical streak ran through Hassanein and was part of his charm and charisma. In a diary entry for 1927, Jasper Brinton, an American judge on the Mixed Courts of Egypt, described sitting at a state dinner. ‘I sit beside the wife of the Italian Minister – a dullish party, but enjoy talking to Hassanein Bey, who tells me of his proposed trip across Arabia, 900 miles by camel – a charming and lovable fellow. Spoke much of religion and said that most great religions have come out of the desert – the silence of the desert and its encouragement to meditation. He would be a fine man to travel with.’

Loutfia Hassanein née Yusri.

Clearly Hassanein still had his mind on crossing deserts, but he would never undertake such an expedition again. In 1926 he had married Loutfia Yusri, a beautiful and stylish woman whom he had met in Washington when he was First Secretary to her father, Seifallah Yusri Pasha, Egypt’s ambassador to the United States. Her mother was Princess Shevekiar, a woman of immense wealth whose town house in Cairo was of such gigantic proportions that it now houses the Egyptian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Shevekiar’s first husband had been Fuad, before he came to the throne; when he tried to confine her to his harem quarters, she escaped and divorced him.

Hassanein’s recreations included fencing, and he had fenced for Egypt in the 1920 Olympics at Antwerp. Now he took up flying, and in 1930 he attempted to become the first person to fly solo from Europe to Egypt. After taking off from Heston Air Park near London he got as far as Pisa where he smashed up his machine on landing. A replacement aircraft was put out of action by an accident at Naples, and when he was offered an Italian aircraft in its place, that crashed during a trial flight, killing its two occupants. At that point King Fuad lost patience with Hassanein and ordered him back to Cairo where the palace relied on his presence. He was also valued for the diplomatic bridge he created between Britain and Egypt, the British government honouring him with a KCVO (Knight Commander of the Victorian Order) in 1927, so that he was now Sir Ahmed Hassanein. But as a secret Foreign Office report on Hassanein made clear, ‘His knowledge of English and charm of manner leave many English people with the impression that he is unfavourable to Egyptian national aspirations. It would be a mistake to act on this assumption’.

Hassanein en route from London to Egypt.

After the death of King Fuad in 1936 and the accession of the sixteen year old Farouk, Hassanein was elevated from bey to pasha and was appointed governor of the Royal Household, by which he became responsible for the upbringing and education of the king. Both measures were instigated by Fuad’s widow, the still youthful and attractive Queen Nazli. By the terms of the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty signed in the same year, Egypt accepted a military alliance with Britain in the event of war but otherwise achieved total control over its own affairs. But that did not prevent Sir Miles Lampson, the overbearing British ambassador, from patronising ‘the boy’, as he routinely referred to King Farouk. ‘I quite realised’, said Lampson when Farouk ascended the throne, ‘that in the next little time things were going to be extremely difficult for the young King and that he was going to feel the want of someone to lean upon.’ But the more Lampson pressed himself on ‘the boy’, the more the king rebelled, and instead it was Hassanein that Farouk admired, almost to the extent of hero-worship at times, trusting him, imitating him, but fearing him as well. He was the only person able to speak to Farouk with entire frankness and sometimes he was blunt, but he always remained entirely loyal to his king.

Edward Ford, who was Farouk's English tutor, wrote of Hassanein at this time: ‘I sit next to him for most meals and his reminiscences of Oxford are a delight to me. He has a quick wit, great courtesy, an interest in all subjects and is a quite unusual type of Egyptian. Slim, sharply featured, with a sallow colour and grey hair brushed straight back from his high forehead, he has an unmistakable Bedouin look. … He has keen penetrating eyes, never looks sleepy and has an air of refinement that the coarse looking Egyptian type entirely lacks. He has never had political inclinations, and, though he is a firm believer in Egypt's right to govern herself and a fervid Moslem, he is quite without that aggressive conceit which marks other ambitious men in this country. Although his culture and his intellect are occidental, his mentality and nature are from the east. He has an eastern courtesy, and, in conversation, an eastern way of leading you off the path you have selected by a sympathetic evasiveness’.

Hassanein accompanying Queen Nazli whom he secretly married.

Meanwhile Hassanein and the queen fell into a romance, and after he divorced Loutfia amid a spectacular scandal, Hassanein and Nazli were secretly married in 1942 by Sheikh Mustafa el Maraghi of the Azhar.

In June 1940 Italy entered the war. With large armies in Libya and Ethiopia ready to strike at Egypt, the Italians posed a serious threat, and the British demanded reassurance that the Egyptian government would not stint in honouring the provisions of the military alliance in the 1936 treaty. A former ambassador to Britain became prime minister, an anti-British minister of defence was dropped, the suspect and uncooperative chief of staff of the Egyptian army was dismissed, and Hassanein was appointed to the important post of the Chief of the Royal Cabinet, which placed him in direct liaison with Sir Miles Lampson, the British ambassador.

Hassanein with Lady Lampson

The arrangements were made in time to meet the Italian invasion in September 1940, and when General Wavell counterattacked in December, Hassanein eagerly phoned Lampson to ask for news and was told of Wavell’s early success. ‘He expressed much gratification’, Lampson recorded in his diary, ‘and said that he would at once tell King Farouk. Hassanein is of course violently anti-Italian and he made no secret of his delight at their reported discomfiture.’ Which made it all the stranger that in February 1942 Lampson had Farouk’s Abdin Palace in Cairo surrounded by British troops and armoured cars and demanded the king’s abdication for supposedly being sympathetic towards the Italians.

In fact Lampson, together with Anthony Eden, Britain’s foreign secretary, were playing a deeper game. Farouk was taking himself too seriously as an independent king of an independent Egypt, Lampson complained to Eden, and they wanted someone more malleable on the throne, as well as a prime minister of their own choosing. Lampson’s show of force so overawed Farouk that he was about to sign the abdication document, but then Hassanein intervened, and whispered something in the king’s ear. Farouk conceded the British demand over the prime ministerial appointment but contritely asked to remain on the throne, an offer that Lampson, caught slightly off-balance, accepted. From Hassanein’s point of view, and in this he probably would have found support among almost the entirety of the Egyptian population, it was right that the integrity of the monarchy be preserved, whatever the merits of its occupant. Certainly Lampson’s action provoked nationalist outrage at foreign interference, destabilised constitutional government and introduced a bitterness between Britain and Egypt that would culminate in the Suez debacle.

Hassanein with admirers in Alexandria in the 1940s. This photograph appears in Michael Haag's Vintage Alexandria.

But long before that, Hassanein was off the scene. Since his days in the desert, he had often said that he had an appointment with death, but that so far neither he nor death had shown up on time. But in February 1946 the appointment was finally met, and he died in a freak motor accident when a British truck went into a skid and smashed into his car on a rainswept Cairo bridge. Thereafter, both Egyptian and foreign commentators agree, Farouk began to lose his grip over affairs. ‘This was the first of many unfortunate events’, wrote one British emissary, ‘which from then on seemed to dog our footsteps in our relations with Egypt, for Hassanein was the one cool and experienced advisor to the young King Farouk.’

He was interred in Cairo’s City of the Dead, his remains placed in a domed mausoleum built by his brother-in-law, the outstanding Egyptian architect Hassan Fathy. After a lifetime that took him thousands of miles across uncharted sands, that opened up the remote ages of the past, and that seemed to belong more to a tale from The Arabian Nights, Sir Ahmed Mohammed Hassanein Pasha was laid to rest. He was only fifty-six.