Nanos Valaoritis: Poet and Friend of George Seferis and Lawrence Durrell

Nanos Valaoritis depicted on the cover of Pan Daimonium, published in 2005.

In an earlier post this year about Sterling Morrison, among other things, I mentioned Nanos Valaoritis whom I got to know some years ago in connection with my research into Lawrence Durrell.  Nanos knew Durrell in Greece in 1939; he also knew Henry Miller then; and in Miller's Colossus of Maroussi, which ends with a terrific letter by Durrell describing George Katsimbalis crowing from the Acropolis at dawn and waking every cock in Attica, Nanos was there and has told me all about it. Nanos is a monument, Nanos is memory, and Nanos is a beautiful man, always fascinating, always a pleasure.

So I was delighted to come across this video of Nanos being interviewed about poetry and language in his Athens flat, seeing him in that room where I have often sat, a room almost impossible to navigate for the piles of books and papers, with Nanos gently holding forth in the middle of it all.

Nanos Valaoritis interviewed in his Athens apartment about language and poetry.

Part of the magic of that room is that while Nanos is sitting there he is capable of reaching out his hand into the seeming chaos around him and plucking from towering and tumbling stacks of books and papers, from the scattered debris all over the floor, exactly the item he is looking for.  This video, though I have no idea what it is meant to be about, nevertheless gives a survey of Nanos in his kingdom.

After first meeting Nanos I wrote an article about him in the autumn 2006 number of The Anglo-Hellenic Review, which I also used to initiate the entry for Nanos Valaoritis in Wikipedia. The article follows and takes up the rest of this post.

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Nanos Valaoritis is one of the most distinguished writers in Greece today. He has been widely published as a poet, novelist and playwright since 1939, and his correspondence with George Seferis (Allilographia 1945-1968, Ypsilon, Athens 2004) has been a bestseller. Raised within a cosmopolitan family with roots in the Greek War of Independence but twice driven into exile by events, Valaoritis has lived in Greece, England, France and the United States, and as a writer and academic he has played a significant role in introducing the literary idioms of each country to the rest. The quality, the international appeal, and the influence of his work has led Valaoritis to be described as the most important poet of the Hellenic diaspora since Constantine Cavafy.

Valaoritis was born to Greek parents at Lausanne in Switzerland in 1921 but grew up in Greece where he studied classics and law at Athens University. He was also writing poetry, and in 1939 when he was barely eighteen, he saw himself published in the pages of George Katsimbalis’ review Nea Grammata alongside contributions from Odysseus Elytis and George Seferis, and was immediately taken into their literary circle. It was an ominous yet heady time, those early months of the war, during which Valaoritis was witness to the seminal encounter of Seferis and Katsimbalis with Henry Miller and Lawrence Durrell, which was to resonate within both Greek and Anglo-Saxon literature for years to come.

In 1944 Valaoritis escaped from German-occupied Greece across the Aegean to Turkey and from there through the Middle East to Egypt, where he made contact with Seferis who was serving the Greek government in exile as First Secretary of the Greek Legation in Cairo. In 1944, at the instigation of Seferis, Valaoritis went to London to develop literary links between Greece and Britain. He met T S Eliot, W H Auden, Dylan Thomas and Stephen Spender, and he worked for Louis MacNeice at the BBC. As well as studying English literature at the University of London, he translated modernist Greek poets, among them Elytis and Embirikos, and contributed to Cyril Connolly’s Horizon and to John Lehman’s New Writing. His own first volume of collected poems, E Timoria ton Magon (Punishment of Wizards), with decorations by John Craxton, was published in London in 1947. He paved the way for Seferis’ success in the English-speaking world by editing and translating, along with Durrell and Bernard Spencer, Seferis’ King of Asine which was published in 1948 to enthusiastic reviews.

The King of Asine by George Seferis was translated from the Greek into English by Lawrence Durrell, Bernard Spencer and Nanos Valaoritis.

Then in 1954 he moved to Paris where, as well as studying Mycenaean grammar at the Sorbonne, he was prominent among surrealist poets under André Breton, and where also he met his wife Marie Wilson, the American surrealist painter.

In 1960 Valaoritis returned to Greece, and between 1963 and 1967 he was publisher and chief editor of the Greek avant-garde literary review Pali. But when the junta came to power in 1967, he felt he had no choice but to go into voluntary exile, and in 1968 he went to America where he became professor of comparative literature and creative writing at San Francisco State University, a position he held for twenty-five years.

A self-described surrealist, Valaoritis sometimes creates a sense of carnival in his work through parody, pastiche and absurdity. But the bracket can be misleading, for surrealism alone fails to convey the depths of his mind and the richness of his work. As in his photographs so in his poetry you see at once the mage and the pirate, or the detached Olympian with an outsider’s bemusement yet a man who can also be intensely lyrical and sensual, as in these lines from Instead of Birds of Clouds:

I filled you once and the sea was born
Then I emptied you and the sky was born
The starry sky and the blue-black sky
The sky of dreams instead of birds of cloud.

Once again Nanos Valaoritis lives in Greece, where he has co-edited the literary review Synteleia (End of the World) and now, optimistically, its successor Nea Synteleia (New End of the World) and has published a remarkable body of work, including essays, translations, anthologies and books of poetry, short stories, a novella and four novels variously in Greek, English and French. His most recent novel, the bestselling Broken Arms of the Venus de Milo (Agra, Athens 2002, and soon to be published in France), is a literary and historical romp which has a basis in a true family story, for the arms of the famous Venus were lost at sea when a French naval vessel stole the statue from an ancestor of Valaoritis, a Greek who was the chief dragoman of the Ottoman navy. Valaoritis’ Anthology of Modern Greek Poetry, co-edited with Thanasis Maskaleris (Talisman, New Jersey 2003) is encompassing and commanding, an invaluable contribution to the dissemination of Greek poetry throughout the English-speaking world, while Pan Daimonium, his latest volume of poetry (Philos Press, Lacey, Washington State 2005) shows him as playful, wise and enigmatic as ever.

Nanos at home in Athens.

In 2004 the Athens Academy of Letters and Science awarded Nanos Valaoritis the prestigious prize for poetry in recognition of his life’s work, and the President of Greece presented him with the Gold Cross of Honour, given for his services to Greek Letters. And still he writes, explaining why he does so in this poem taken from Pan Daimonium and called Every Night I Dream.

Every night I dream of great poetry
Quite different from mine
Or what I will ever write
And yet – every night I dream
Of this very different poetry
Composed of lines so solid
So dense and grainy
They could have been made of granite I ask myself – what is their subject
What do they say these marvellous lines
Which to behold – will leave you aghast
They’ll take your breath away
But – however – in any case – I’m sorry to say
Impossible to guess what it’s all about
And I have tried and tried, believe me,
And puzzled over these lines
Day after day – and in the night
They keep on coming back
With new earthshaking and tremendous
Messages – of great import
That everyone should hear
But not a single word remains
When I open my eyes – they’re gone
They vanish in pure daylight
These huge edifices – those titanic
Workings of each night.

I Have a Dream - In Colour

In my previous post about the 28 August 1963 March on Washington I reproduced some of the photographs I took that day - though only as crudely done scans.  Now I have had the transparencies scanned properly, though the colours have faded over time.

I joined the March on Washington because I wanted to add my molecule to the effort.  Taking the photographs was incidental. I cannot recall what camera I had, but it must have been a fairly simple 35mm something or other with a standard lens.

The great speech of that day came from the last of sixteen speakers, Martin Luther King.  He had a prepared speech but it contained no reference to a dream.  And so to mild applause he began.

It was a very hot day.  Off to the right, visible in the distance, was the White House, President John F Kennedy inside.  Kennedy was watching the event on television in the Oval Room.  Kennedy had not wanted the March on Washington to go ahead; he feared that any violence would impair his own efforts to advance the cause.  And even as Martin Luther King spoke, Kennedy had his finger on the button, literally on the on-off control button for the sound.  If things got out of hand, Kennedy was able to shut the whole thing down.

None of us knew that at the time; that is only what we have been told later by the history books.  But for those of us who were there, the mood was quiet, earnest; a quarter of a million people sharing a kind of prayer.

And so Martin Luther King began to speak.  But no mention of a dream.  Until the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, who was standing just behind him, cried out, 'Tell 'em about the dream, Martin.  Tell 'em about the dream'.  And King put his prepared speech aside and a bit awkwardly made the shift ... 'So even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream'.  And then getting into his stride he wove that dream round and round into a wonderfully ascending chant of hope.

I still have a dream, a dream deeply rooted in the American dream – one day this nation will rise up and live up to its creed, 'We hold these truths to be self evident: that all men are created equal'. I have a dream . . .

The final mile from the Washington Monument to the Lincoln Memorial.

One man has marched into the water.

Approaching the Lincoln Memorial.

Fifteen people spoke, one after the other.  Martin Luther King was the sixteenth and the last.

A quarter of a million people stood in the heat listening to the speeches.

Two people standing next to me.

Like me, these two people must vividly remember that day.

Ovation for Martin Luther King. At the end of the speech I looked to the right, into the far distance where Kennedy sat in the White House.  And behind me the Capitol Building, home to the Senate and the House of Representatives.  How could anything remain the same after this?  Less than three months later Kennedy was dead. Four and a half years later King was dead. And right after that Robert Kennedy was dead.

Martin Luther's speech ended with these words.

From every mountainside, let freedom ring.  And when this happens, and when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual: Free at last!  Free at last!  Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

I Have a Dream

I was listening to the radio tonight as Barack Obama spoke from the Lincoln Memorial, commemorating the speech by Martin Luther King given there ten years or so ago.  At least it seems like ten years ago.  Twenty at the outside.  But they said it was fifty years.  Fifty years since Martin Luther King stood at the Lincoln Memorial and gave that speech about his dream.

On the radio tonight some fellow was interviewed, a black activist who was there at the time, and they asked him if he thought then, when he was there, that it was a great speech.  And he said no, not particularly.

I know that a lot of people thought that about the Gettysburg Address and they probably thought that about Pericles' Funeral Oration too.  It can take time for greatness to sink in.

But as for me, I was standing there that day listening to Martin Luther King talk about his dream, and I tell you that his dream was a magnificent speech on that day.  So many people, everybody listening, everything so quiet, like a great prayer.  I thought the whole world was going to move that day.   

After listening to that radio broadcast tonight I remembered that I took some colour photographs that day, 28 August 1963, as I marched with a quarter of a million people through Washington DC to the Lincoln Memorial.  After some searching I have dug them out.  This is the first time I have seen them in maybe all that time, in maybe fifty years.

I thought I would mark the day by posting the photographs on this blog; then I realised that they are transparencies and my scanner does not scan transparencies.  But I have read online - see here - of a way of scanning transparencies with an ordinary flatbed scanner.  And so I cut out my piece of paper and made my isosceles triangle and stood it like a tent on top of my colour transparencies and actually got a result.  But I could not get a result in colour.  So you will have to put up with grey.  And why not?  A bit of improvised verité to mark the day.

Maybe tomorrow I will get these transparencies put on a CD and I will upload them again and you will see them in colour, and I will be able to enlarge them in parts, and you will see, as I see in my memory, that Martin Luther King's great dream speech is not history; for those who were there it will always be today.

I have scanned these colour transparencies by primitive means, but that will have to do for the moment.  Here you see the march approaching the Lincoln Memorial, one marcher in the water.

I added captions to the transparencies at the time.  Listening.  A quarter of a million people quiet and listening as Martin Luther King spoke of his dream.

'I have a dream.'

It was a restrained, quiet, civil and intensely moving day.

(I have since uploaded these in colour.  You can see them by clicking here.)

Lawrence Durrell's Egypt

 

Handprints to avert the Evil Eye.

Yesterday, Sunday, for the first time in over 1600 years they did not say mass in Minya, a largely Coptic Christian town in Upper Egypt.  Muslim Brotherhood supporters of ousted president Mohammed Morsi destroyed the ancient monastery of the Virgin Mary at Degla just outside Minya, including the three churches within it.  For the safety of their lives, Minya’s Christians cancelled services in all their remaining churches in the town – click here to read the article in the Egyptian press.

A month ago I posted Lucette Lagnado’s article about Lawrence Durrell’s Justine.  After writing about the impression the novel made on her, Lucette had some thoughts on the way Alexandria and all Egypt had changed since the 1930s and 1940s, the period covered in The Alexandria Quartet. 

I have found myself wondering what Durrell would have said about Egypt today, where the tolerant, inclusive society he depicted has been almost utterly obliterated. In his time, beauties of every nationality—French, Greek, Italian, Armenian, Egyptian-Jewish and Egyptian-Muslim—would preen in their bathing suits along ‘the sand beaches of Sidi Bishr’, as he calls one popular seafront enclave. These days, the foreigners and Jews are gone, and women who venture to the public beaches must go into the water covered from head to toe.

Could Durrell ever have envisioned such a dark destiny for his city—for all of Egypt? ‘Jamais de la vie’, I can hear him reply.

Jamais de la vie was the name of Justine’s perfume, a fragrance that pervades the Alexandria of Durrell’s Quartet – the name means ‘never’.  But though Lucette may not realise it, Durrell’s use of the phrase carries the doomed sense of ‘nevermore’.  And that already tells you the answer.  As the further three volumes of the Quartet make clear, Durrell saw that dark destiny for Egypt coming.

Young women on the beach in Alexandria in the 1930s.

Alexandria was the ‘unburied city’; there was ‘the dusty, deathward drift of the place’.  ‘Unaware that their mother city was dying, the living still sat there in the open street, like caryatids supporting the darkness, the pains of futurity upon their very eyelids.’  These mood descriptions came from Durrell’s direct awareness of a change overcoming the country while he was there during the Second World War. No longer an Egypt looking out across the Mediterranean to the wider world, but an inward looking place where nationalism and religion were combining in a toxic mix that would persecute differences and minorities and drive the old cosmopolitan world into the sea. 'It was out of this varied and dying ferment that Larry invented his Alexandria Quartet', said Gwyn Williams, a friend of Durrell’s from those times.

In particular Durrell was made aware through conversations with his Alexandrian friend Gaston Zananiri (a Christian Syrian whose family had lived in Egypt over four hundred years) of how the religious exclusivity of political Islam would lead to authoritarianism.  ‘Islam transposed into a political movement’, Zananiri told Durrell, ‘can easily become a sort of oriental fascism’. 

In the way of things in Alexandria, Zananiri’s mother was Jewish.  In fact many of the people Durrell knew in Alexandria were Jewish.  The house where he lived was owned by a Jewish architect who lived downstairs.  Durrell’s Alexandrian girlfriend was Jewish; Eve Cohen was her name, and she was a model for the character of Justine; she later became his second wife. 

At the heart of the Quartet is a political thriller about a Palestine conspiracy in which some Egyptian Copts are working against the British to help the Jews establish an independent state of Israel as a bulwark against the total Islamisation of the Middle East.  The leader of this Coptic conspiracy is the wealthy Alexandrian banker Nessim Hosnani, a Christian who has married Justine, who is Jewish. Here he tells her for the first time about his secret activities. '"Yes, Justine, Palestine. If only the Jews can win their freedom, we can all be at ease. It is the only hope for us, the dispossessed foreigners."  He uttered the word with a slight twist of bitterness.'  

A Coptic funeral in Mohammed Ali Square, Alexandria, early twentieth century.

Of course Nessim as a Copt is not a foreigner.  The Copts are Egypt’s Christians – Egypt was a Christian country until the Arab invasion in the seventh century, in fact a majority of Egyptians remained Christian until at least the thirteenth century when they were overwhelmed by continuing and violent Muslim persecution and many converted to Islam, but even today around ten percent of Egyptians are Christians (Copt, or the Arabic Qibt, comes from the ancient Greek for Egypt, Aegyptos), and it is the Copts who can trace their ancestry back to pharaonic times and claim to be true sons of the Nile, the real Egyptians. 

But Egypt in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries did have a significant ‘foreign’ population.  Many of these were Muslims from North Africa, from Syria and Palestine, Turkey and the Balkans, from Sudan and Arabia – but because they were Muslims they were not regarded as foreigners.  

Baudrot on the Rue Fuad was a favourite watering hole of Durrell's during the war.

Also there were many Jews; some families had been there since before the Arab invasion; in Alexandria Durrell mixed with Jews who could trace their ancestry back to at least the advent of the Fatimids in the tenth century.  Other Jews came from Iraq and Syria or from Algeria and Tunisia, Jews who had lived in lands that fell to the Muslim conquests.  But for all that Egypt was their home, the Jews tended to be educated and progressive and outward looking, and they looked upon the Mediterranean as a sea they shared with Europeans and welcomed its influences and seized its opportunities. 

This meant that Egypt’s Jews were often lumped together with other ‘foreigners’, those Greeks and Italians mostly, and other Europeans whose families had lived there for generations and whose ancestors were recruited to Egypt in the nineteenth century by the rulers of the country with the idea that they would bring their expertise, their capital, and help develop and modernise Egypt, which they did. 

Many Copts found themselves in a similar situation; while entirely Egyptian, they also shared in that wider world, and because of that – and simply because they were Christian, not Muslim – they were discriminated against, marginalised and sometimes open to violent persecution and attack.

Greeks on the beach in Alexandria, 1930s.

In the Quartet Durrell described the atmosphere among these communities of Copts, Jews and ‘foreigners’, their growing sense of 'isolation from the warm Gulf Stream of European feelings and ideas. All the currents slide away towards Mecca'. 

The Jews of Egypt were driven out of their country in the 1950s as Durrell was writing his Alexandria Quartet.  When he wrote about Nessim and the Copts, Durrell was thinking about the Jews.  In fact it was to disguise that he was writing about Jews – Jews whom he knew intimately and wanted to protect – that Durrell wrote about his Palestine conspiracy as though it involved Copts. There were some, such as the American critic Kenneth Rexroth, who found the notion that Copts and Jews should enter into a conspiracy absurd but also ‘dangerous’ and bordering on ‘malicious’ – as though Durrell would be to blame if his story provoked outbreaks of violence against the Copts.

But as it happens, and even without Durrell’s help, the turn of the Copts has come.  When you start persecuting one people, there will be another people next in line.  First the Jews, at least some of whom could trace their roots in Egypt back to before the Arab conquest, were driven from the country; now the Copts, descendants of the true Egyptians of pharaonic times, are being attacked, killed and driven from their country by the Muslim Brotherhood – that same Muslim Brotherhood described in some quarters of the Western media as ‘moderate’ and ‘pro-democracy’, but otherwise known as a racist and persecutory organisation with a long history of political and religious violence and assassination, and interested in the devices of elections merely to impose absolute sharia law on Egypt.

In the year that the Brotherhood’s Mohammed Morsi served as president of Egypt and packed the administration and the legislature with Brotherhood stooges, and also attempted to pack the judiciary and impose a Brotherhood constitution, and announced a decree that placed him entirely above the law – giving him more absolute power than ever Mubarak or even Nasser had – in that year of ‘moderate’ and ‘pro-democracy’ activity by Mohammed Morsi during which his Muslim Brotherhood openly turned against Egypt’s Christians, murdering them, burning their churches, destroying their businesses, killing their livestock, throwing them out of their houses, a hundred thousand Copts fled their ancient homeland as refugees.  

Sandro Manzoni visits the school for Coptic children in Minya in March 2013.

I have received some photographs today.  Sandro Manzoni, an Italian engineer originally from Alexandria, has been involved in a charity to provide an education to Coptic children at Minya in Upper Egypt.  The top photograph shows Sandro and his wife visiting the school in March.  The bottom photographs show the charred ruins of the school after it was attacked by Mohammed Morsi’s Muslim Brotherhood on 14 August this year. 

On 14 August 2013 the Coptic school is burnt down by the Muslim Brotherhood.

Destruction caused by the Islamist supporters of Mohammed Morsi.

‘We have seen the best and last of the Middle East’, Durrell wrote to a friend after leaving Alexandria in 1945.  He did not expect conditions to get better.  He was nearly unable to take Eve; from 1938 Egypt would no longer grant citizenship to Jews and Eve found herself a stateless person; only after Durrell tried ‘every wangle known to man’ would the authorities issue her with a laisser passer. 

Towards the end of the Quartet Durrell looks back on the city which is already lost. ‘I feel it fade inside me, in my thoughts, like some valedictory mirage — like the sad history of some great queen whose fortunes have foundered among the ruins of armies and the sands of time!’

The Dreams of Naguib Mahfouz

My old Heinemann edition of Midaq Alley.

The book that first truly announced to Egypt the literary arrival of Naguib Mahfouz was Midaq Alley, published in Cairo in 1947.  I read it in the old Heineman Arab Authors paperback edition in 1979, and as soon as I could I went looking for Midaq Alley itself, discovering it buried away on the edge of Khan el Khalili, off Sharia el-Sanadqiya near the corner with the once fabulous Sharia al-Muizz, the high street of Fatimid Cairo.  

In his novel Mahfouz describes Midaq Alley like this.

Many things combine to show that Midaq Alley is one of the gems of times gone by and that it once shone forth like a flashing star in the history of Cairo.  Which Cairo do I mean? That of the Fatimids, the Mamelukes or the Sultans?  Only God and the archaeologists know the answer to that, but in any case, the alley is certainly an ancient relic and a precious one. ... Although Midaq Alley lives in almost complete isolation from all surrounding activity it clamours with a distinctive and personal life of its own.  Fundamentally and basically, its roots connect with life as a whole and yet, at the same time, it retains a number of the secrets of a world now past.

At the death of Mahfouz in 2006 I wrote an article in The Los Angeles Times describing the significance of Midaq Alley.  

After World War II, Mahfouz rejected the romanticizing nationalism then in vogue and abandoned writing novels about what he called "the grand avenues and boulevards" of history. Instead, he turned his attention to what we cherish most about his great works: life in the small alleyways, homes, cafés and mosques of Cairo's old quarter. It was a fateful decision: Writing a literature of everyday city life in the vernacular was a decisive step toward an Arab recognition of modernity and its challenges.

To read the complete article in The Los Angeles Times, click here.

I read other books by Mahfouz published in English by Heinemann in London and by The American University in Cairo Press in Egypt. But very few other people did.  Heinemann was selling not more than three hundred copies of all his works a year and regarded the enterprise as such a waste of their resources that they gladly surrendered the British publishing rights in early 1988 - a decision they very soon regretted when a few months later Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize for Literature, making him instantly marketable round the world. 

In 1994 Mahfouz was attacked by fanatical Islamists and stabbed in the neck; he survived but almost entirely lost the use of his right arm and thereafter had to dictate almost everything he wrote.  His troubles with Islamists began after 1959 when he published The Children of the Gebelawi, a religious and social allegory in which God, Moses, Jesus and Mohammed appear; the novel was quickly banned and Mahfouz was accused of blasphemy.

My copy of The Dreams signed 27 April 2005 by Mahfouz showing the effect of the murder attempt.

Earlier Mahfouz had found himself at odds with Nasser's regime, not an attitude shared at the time by the generality of Egyptian writers.  He expressed his criticisms of the regime in Miramar, published just before the 1967 war and set significantly in Alexandria whose cosmopolitan and outward-looking society was in its death throes.

By then it was clear to Mahfouz that apart from specific political and economic mistakes made by Nasser's regime, the real damage lay in its moral failure, where rhetoric and reality bore no relation to one another, where terms like 'social equality', 'freedom of the individual' and 'the rule of law' had no meaning, and where cynicism, nihilism, self-interest and self-contempt were the result.

Zohra, the peasant girl working at the Miramar pension, earns the admiration or resentment of the men around her by her desire to learn and emancipate herself - under various names this eternally striving female figure appears in Mahfouz's novels where she represents Egypt.

At the end of the book, as Zohra leaves the pension for what she hopes will be a better job, an old man long resident at the Miramar tells her, as Mahfouz might have said of Egypt in these recent years: 'Remember that you haven't wasted your time here.  If you've come to know what is not good for you, you may also think of it all as having been a sort of magical way of finding out what is truly good for you'.

Politics aside, Miramar marked a literary turning point for Mahfouz; his one Alexandrian novel was conciously influenced by Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet, and Mahfouz now began writing in a freer style with multiple narrative voices and interior monologues.

The Dreams published by The AUC Press.

But my favourite work by Mahfouz, though many might think it slight, is The Dreams, a collection of short stories, numbered dreams, published in Arabic between 2000 and 2003 and translated into English in 2004.  Lyrical, haunting and nightmarish, these fantastical dream stories are also utterly real. 

The last of these stories is Dream 104.

I saw myself in Abbasiya wandering in the vastness of my memories, recalling in particular the late Lady Eye.  So I contacted her by telephone, inviting her to meet me by the fountain, and there I welcomed her with a passionate heart.  I suggested that we spend the evening together in Fishawi Café, as in our happiest days.  But when we reached the familiar place, the deceased blind bookseller came over to us and greeted us warmly - though he scolded the dearly departed Eye for her long absence.

She told him what had kept her away was Death.  But he rejected that excuse - for Death, he said, can never come between lovers. 

Knights Templar Vault

On the eve of publication of the Harper Collin's American edition of The Tragedy of the Templars I have been interviewed on the Knights Templar Vault website.  Asked about the background to writing this new Templar book, I spoke of an account of travels in the East by Henry Maundrell called A Journey from Aleppo to Jerusalem at Easter, AD 1697.

I was haunted by something written by the English traveller Henry Maundrell.  Even four centuries after the fall of Acre in 1291, when the last Templars were driven from the coast of Outremer, the devastation wrought by the Mamelukes was still apparent.  In 1697 Maundrell recorded the ‘many ruins of castles and houses, which testify that this country, however it be neglected at present, was once in the hands of a people that knew how to value it, and thought it worth the defending’.

For the entire interview, click here.

And you can follow the Knights Templar Vault on Facebook, which also carries the interview, by clicking here.

Mick Jagger ... It's a Boy!

Mick Jagger, Hyde Park 1969, wearing what he called 'just another frock'.

A long time ago the idea of writing Mick Jagger's biography was planted in my mind after meeting his mother Eva.  And now today, Jagger's birthday, the recollection returns.  Seventy years old and strutting his stuff.

The newspapers have been full of stories about him, including this one in The Telegraph which particularly caught my attention because it refers to Jagger's failed attempt at writing his autobiography.  It seems that he cannot come up with anything interesting about his life; his one early attempt was returned by his publisher for being dull.  He may be supreme on the stage, but he feels that he could have made more of his life: 'It’s slightly intellectually undemanding being a rock singer, but you make the best of it'.

When I first introduced myself to Mick's mother, saying 'Hello, I'm Michael', Eva replied, 'Oh, I have a son called Michael'.  And added crossly, 'But I do not like the name Michael'.

'So why did you call your son Michael?'

'Well, I had to call him something.  I was forced to give him a name.  But I was furious, and I did not want to call him anything.'

Then Eva told me more.  Her child was born during the war, in 1943, when many things were rationed, including food, clothing and home textiles, fuel and even soap.  But Eva could claim for certain rationed things only when she gave the child a name.

'So why didn't you give him a name?'

'Because', Eva said, becoming crosser as her mind went back to the catastrophe, 'because he was a boy!  I did not want a boy.  I was expecting a girl.  I had baby clothes for a girl.  I had names for a girl.  And all that was spoiled when the baby turned out to be a boy'. 

So that was it, the story of Mick's life. Eva had wanted a girl.  She refused to accept that he was a boy.  'I refused to give him a name.  For a whole month I would not give him a name.  But finally, because of the rationing, I had to call him something.  I called him Michael.  But I do not like the name.'  

And I thought of Mick in makeup and skirts jumping around on stage like a crazed flower, an androgenous Pan, singing for his mother.  'No, you can't always get what you want.  But if you try sometime, you just might find, you get what you need.' 

Isn't that how biographies work?

Lawrence Durrell's Justine Revisited by Lucette Lagnado

Faber and Faber first edition 1957

Lucette Lagnado, writing in The Wall Street Journal, considers Lawrence Durrell's Justine and the Alexandria he knew against recent political developments.

Twenty years after he published Justine, the first novel of his Alexandria Quartet, Lawrence Durrell returned to the city of his obsession. The signs of decay were everywhere, but he fixated on one small but telling change: The colorful movie posters he had loved, showcasing films in numerous languages, were now exclusively in Arabic. Where was the multilingual, multicultural society he had chronicled so painstakingly and poetically? 

It was 1977, a quarter-century after the revolution in Egypt that toppled a king. After years of military rule, Alexandria's cosmopolitan culture was almost completely gone. According to Durrell biographer Michael Haag in his book, Alexandria: City of Memory, the novelist found the city "listless," declared that it had sunk "into oblivion" and was depressing "beyond endurance." 

Were Durrell to return again now, he might despair even more. Two years after the Arab Spring precipitated another revolution, Egypt has seen a repressive Islamist government followed, again, by military rule. And just a few weeks ago, a young American Jew was murdered in Alexandria, which had once been a beacon for a mix of cultures, religions, outsiders and the young. 

So begins the article in The Wall Street Journal by Lucette Lagnado, author of The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit.  To read the whole thing, click here. 

For more on Durrell's Alexandria and on Eve Durrell, who was a model for Justine, click here and here.

Joanne Drayton Arrives from Outer Space

A selfie of Joanne Drayton and Michael Haag

Joanne Drayton has arrived from outer space.  Well, from New Zealand, which is much the same thing.  And it has fallen to me to introduce her to Earth as we know it, that is to Hampstead NW3.

We have been to see George Orwell and John Constable and Johnny Keats - or rather the site of the bookshop where Orwell worked while writing Keep the Aspidistra Flying, the graveyard where Constable lies, and Keats' House where the poet's death mask floats eerily in the ether like the Mekon.  

Jo Drayton meets the dead John Keats

Jo has written biographies of two world famous New Zealand crime writers, The Search for Anne Perry, and Ngaio Marsh: Her Life in Crime.  She has also written a life of Rhona Haszard, the wonderful post-impressionist painter who mysteriously fell to her death from the tower at Victoria College in Alexandria, Egypt.  In fact I got to know Jo when tracking down a photograph of Rhona Haszard that appeared in her book Rhona Haszard: An Experimental Expatriate New Zealand Artist, which I reproduced in my own Vintage Alexandria.
   
To find out more about Joanne Drayton and her books, click here to see her website.  

Rhona Haszard watering flowers on the rooftop of Victoria College, Alexandria. She mysteriously fell to her death from the tower behind.

Lawrence Durrell's Paleocastrizza

A vintage postcard of Paleocastrizza on the northwest coast of Corfu.

I have a drawing done by Lawrence Durrell of Paleocastrizza in Corfu.  Today there would be beach umbrellas, tavernas and hotels in view, but my impression is that there was very little of all that when Durrell was on holiday there in 1965. The simplicity of his illustration compares to much older views of the place, like the vintage postcard above which dates from about 1910. Both capture the monastery sitting on the headland on the right.

A boat sails through the centre of Durrell's drawing.  It is more than a device for filling in the view and a way of suggesting the sea, the open waters of the Ionian, between the headlands.  When Durrell lived in Corfu in the late 1930s he would sail to Paleocastrizza from his home at Kalami on the east coast of the island.  The sailing boat is a memory of that pre-war idyll.  Durrell also had the notion that Paleocastrizza was the very spot where Odysseus, shipwrecked, washed ashore and naked, encountered and impressed the beautiful Nausicaa, nor was Durrell slow to identify himself with Odysseus. 

Lawrence Durrell's 1965 sketch of Paleocastrizza.

Footpath

The path between Dimbola Lodge and Freshwater Bay.

I took this photograph yesterday afternoon from an upper room of Dimbola Lodge in the Isle of Wight. A lane and a path run parallel to one another between the house and the sea.  That path, seen clearly in the centre of this photograph, was followed in the 1860s and 1870s by Charles Darwin, Thomas Carlyle, Lewis Carroll, the poets Alfred Lord Tennyson and Robert Browning, the actress Ellen Terry, the painters G F Watts and William Holman Hunt and the astronomer Sir John Herschel.  Each would call on Julia Margaret Cameron at Dimbola Lodge and be given a cup of tea - and be taken round to the back of the lodge, to a shed, where Julia kept her camera and related equipment.  Julia's photographs, mostly taken on albumin and therefore possessing the finest detail, represent a remarkable collection of Victorian 'celebrities'.

The story of Julia's life at Dimbola Lodge can be had by clicking here.

Julia's photograph of Charles Darwin at Dimbola Lodge.

Thomas Carlyle photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron.

Alfred Lord Tennyson photographed by Julia Margaret Cameron.

Ellen Terry at 16, photographed by Julia and later to become the greatest stage actress of the age

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Sterling Morrison of the Velvet Underground ... and the Books I Read

Having just finished writing a book at some speed I am now relaxing by reading a few books at leisure.  One of these is Paul Preston's A Concise History of the Spanish Civil War.  Another is E L James' Fifty Shades of Grey, which so far strikes me as a very sweet boy-and-girl love story, its adolescent appeal made acceptable to married women over thirty (which I gather is the main readership) by its scenes of flogging or whatever (I will know when I get further).  Ever since reading in Cicero about the scandalous adventure of Publius Clodius when he dressed as a woman and gate-crashed a girls-only booze-up given by the Vestal Virgins I have been interested in arcane rituals.  And then there is The Art of Memory which has set off a series of loosely associated thoughts.

Dante's Inferno has led me to begin reading The Art of Memory by Frances A Yates, first published in 1966. Her thesis is that before the invention of printing a trained memory was of vital importance and this was achieved by creating an elaborate memory system based on impressing images and places on the mind. The medieval love of the grotesque, she suggests, does not necessarily mean a tortured psychology, rather it serves as a mnemonic device.

So Dante's Inferno can be seen as the prudent man's handbook for memorising a theological landscape of sin and punishment, a landscape in which abstract concepts are converted to vivid and grotesque images the better to navigate one's way to salvation. 

Cerberus by William Blake

Not that Yates' says so, but her argument makes sense of Dante's use of contrapasso, by which a sin is met by a punishment that is similar or opposite but in any case serves as an apposite reminder of the transgression. Gluttons, for example, who in their lifetimes wallowed in food and drink, and who made nothing of their lives and offered nothing to God, now lie in their own excreta where they are forever ripped apart by the three-headed dog Cerberus.  Having produced nothing of value in their lives they are now reduced to so much rubbish and filth. Thus is the Third Circle of Hell memorably described and distinguished from the vivid horrors of the Second and the Fourth and the other circles of Hell.  By means of intense visualisation Dante's entire scheme of vices and virtues, punishments and rewards, is committed to memory.

Which may seem obvious and elementary, except when you think that such memory devices were essential, not only in literature but in architecture and many other fields, until just over five hundred years ago when a new memory device, the printed book, began to make itself felt. 

During the Renaissance one powerful idea that took hold was of the hermetic universe, which saw a link between that which is above and that which is below, that is between man and the cosmos. If the cosmos could determine the affairs of man, so man could determine the cosmos, and if a man possessed great powers - for example a highly developed memory system stocked with an understanding of the laws and forces of nature - he could use his powers to control the universe.  To the Renaissance mind the universe could be understood through memory devices like the book and operated by magic. 

Only in the seventeenth century did this magico-mechanical view of the universe begin to be replaced with a mathematical conception.  But meanwhile the underlying principle remained the same.  As Yates writes, 'The translation of this magical conception into mathematical terms has only been achieved in our own day. [The] assumption that the astral forces which govern the outer world also operate within, and can be reproduced or captured there to operate a magical-mechanical memory, seems to bring one curiously close to the mind machine which is able to do so much of the work of the human brain by mechanical means'.

And now by some process of magical or poetic association I have taken a book down from my shelves, and its old familiar cover reminds me of Sterling Morrison, a founding member of the Velvet Underground.

John Cale, Lou Reed and Sterling Morrison c1965.

The book is by Robert Graves, the English poet, novelist and eccentric, who died about thirty years ago.  He is probably best known for his historical novel I, Claudius, which has also been dramatised for television.  But the book lying on my desk is The White Goddess, whose thesis, as Graves himself said, ‘is that the language of poetic myth anciently current in the Mediterranean and Northern Europe was a magical language bound up with popular religious ceremonies in honour of the Moon goddess, or Muse, some of them dating from the Old Stone Age, and that this remains the language of true poetry'.  

It is a language of trees and leaves, which are an inspiration and a mnemonic as you realise if you spend a length of time in a forest where every shape and colour and form becomes part of a familiar pattern, immediately recognised and understood - like a fisherman reads the sea or magi read the stars.  

I bought my copy of The White Goddess in 1961 in the local drugstore, a general store really, which sold everything from lightbulbs and shoelaces to stationery and cigars, had a soda fountain for milk shakes and banana splits, a pharmacy at the back, and displayed magazines, newspapers and paperback books at the front.  All during high school I would go up to that drugstore and twirl its paperback racks, coming away with books by Thoreau, Whitman, Plato, Sartre and Freud, novels by Balzac, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Lawrence, Hardy, Huxley and Orwell, histories by Herodotus and Thucydides, plays by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes and Seneca, and some good ancient pornography like Petronius' Satyricon – Fellini later made a raunchy film of it.  (They would not sell books like that there today, but it was the beginning of the paperback revolution in America and publishers were fighting for market share, so they published any damn thing.) I still have some of these old paperbacks on my shelves, just as I have The White Goddess by me as I write.

My 1961 copy of The White Goddess.

The reason I bought The White Goddess was because Sterling Morrison raved so much about it.  Sterling was in the year above me, so I did not have him as a classmate, but I knew him through Tom Dargan, a good friend of mine at the time, who had two lively and appealing sisters, Dorothy, or Dot as everyone called her, and Martha, who became Sterling’s girlfriend and later his wife.

It was the summer of 1961 and as usual I was staying up late.  Sterling must have seen the lights; anyway he roared up on his motorcycle, rang the bell, and bounded through the door.  I should mention that he was fully clothed, but he told me that he sometimes rode his motorbike stark naked wearing only a Roman helmet.  We had some wine, and then he started talking about books.  He talked till close to dawn, and I sat there spellbound.  Most of all he spoke about Robert Graves and The White Goddess, and how the worship of the goddess and the knowledge of true woman who in her five-fold person encompasses Birth, Initiation, Consummation, Repose and Death, was not only the key to poetry but the remedy for the chaos of our times. 

I saw Sterling in Manhattan a few years later.  By then I was living in London but I had flown over to New York and met up with Tom and Dot and Martha, and we went to the club where Sterling was playing with the Velvet Underground. They were stroking and beating and scratching their instruments - John Cale on the electric viola, sometimes on the organ, Sterling on electric guitar and bass, alternating lead guitar with Lou Reed - and producing amazing droning, rasping, dissonant sounds; that was the fun of it, Sterling said, the energy, the inventiveness, not how well they played. The Velvet Underground were not well known at that time, hardly known at all I think, which I am not sure that Sterling entirely minded. I remember him complaining that Andy Warhol had just taken over as their manager and was imposing on them a German blonde vocalist called Nico to make them more commercial, an idea that filled Sterling with dismay, though he did co-write Femme Fatale for her.

Sterling in 1966.

That was the last time I saw Sterling (and Tom and Dot and Martha for that matter, though I have been in touch with them since), but from time to time I would catch news of him. In London I bought and would listen to the Velvet Underground's banana album.  Sterling broke with the band, I gathered, and did a PhD on the Anglo-Saxon poet Cynewulf at the University of Texas and then taught for a while at Austin, and also became a licenced master mariner and a tugboat captain. The Underground briefly reformed in 1993 for a tour of Europe where it played to packed houses; Sterling was interviewed in The Times and talked about his interest in poetry and also the novels of Lawrence Durrell.

Which takes me back to that copy of The White Goddess which has travelled with me from that drugstore.  In researching the biography I am writing of Lawrence Durrell I have been to Greece where I have interviewed a poet called Nanos Valaoritis who knew Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller when they came to Athens back in 1939.  Nanos talked about the sacred feminine, and he gave me the manuscript of a book he has written, inspired by The White Goddess, which finds the Moon goddess at work in the Iliad and Odyssey of Homer.  Nanos has also given me a copy of a CD on which, accompanied by strange music, he has recorded some of his own poetry dedicated to the goddess.

I filled you once and the sea was born
Then I emptied you and the sky was born
The starry sky the blue-black sky
The sky of dreams instead of birds of cloud

I feel that I am connecting dots, but that really Sterling should be here playing his electric guitar and singing Femme Fatale.

John Cale, Sterling Morrison, Lou Reed and Maureen Tucker.