Last of the Cairo Poets

John Cromer Braun 1995.

John Cromer Braun, the last of the Cairo Poets, died yesterday at the age of ninety-seven.  As a lawyer he was known as John Braun; as a poet he was John Cromer, and it was in this guise, while serving with British Security Intelligence in Egypt during the Second World War that he co-founded the Salamander group which collected and published poems by men serving in the armed forces, publishing them in their Salamander literary magazine and their series of Oasis anthologies.

Here is one of John's poems published by the Salamander group at the time.  It is called Asleep in War.

I called you once, but you were sleeping,
Gold in your hair the moonlight gleamed.
I stood quite still, but my heart was leaping
Though I knew not what were the dreams you dreamed.

I called you again, you still were sleeping,
Pale was your face, no smile was there.
Your eyes were tired with too much weeping,
The splendid lustre had left your hair.

I called once more, you were not sleeping,
A trickle of blood lay by your head.
The sky was clear, no searchlights sweeping;
Raiders had passed - but you were dead.

In Cairo John became lifelong friends with Mursi Saad el Din with whom he later wrote Under Egypt's Spell: The Influence of Egypt on Writers in English from the 18th Century.  Mursi died last year; in this article in Egypt's Al Ahram newspaper he tells about the Cairo Poets. 

As Mursi explains, Salamander was one of two groups of poets in Cairo at the time, the other formed mostly of civilians and known for their literary journal Personal Landscape, its founders Lawrence Durrell, Robin Fedden and Bernard Spencer. 

When Durrell arrived in Egypt, having just escaped from Greece in 1941 with the Germans on his heels, it was John Cromer Braun in his role as Field Security officer who gave him clearance.  I interviewed John about that event for my book Alexandria: City of Memory, from which I reproduce this passage. 

In the darkness before dawn on 1 May 1941 an Australian transport making the perilous crossing from Crete arrived at the boom of the Western Harbour, the ancient Eunostos of 'safe return'. The boatload of refugees had been expected for some time, and John Cromer Braun along with two other field security sergeants assigned to meet it had spent several days in idleness, eating ice cream and drinking coffee at Pastroudis on the Rue Fuad and regaling themselves on beccafico, the little birds that are a Levantine speciality, washing them down with quantities of Mareotic wine. Now suddenly at four in the morning they were awakened in their barracks at Mustafa Pasha and told to bustle down to the docks where the near moonless night screamed with a barrage of tracer fire.

German air raid on Alexandria 1941

As the dawn call to prayer unwound from the dissolving darkness and the last enemy planes fled west with the night, the boom was opened and the waiting transport entered the harbour, passing along rows of camouflaged warships to its berth. Disembarkation began at mid-morning, Braun checking identity papers as the passengers filed off, 'for the most part a pathetic line of retired schoolteachers, professors, widows and other expatriates from Athens and the Peloponnese'. Amid the collapse and confusion of resistance in Greece, refugees fled southwards across the Mediterranean to Egypt where as a precaution against infiltration by Axis agents they were carefully screened. Braun was standing at the head of the gangway when 'a stocky, round-faced figure' came forward, his wife just behind and his infant daughter on his shoulders. He took his passport and read 'Lawrence Durrell'.'

'Writer?'

'Yes.'

'Once of the Villa Seurat?' 

'Yes.' 

'Friend of Henry Miller?' 

'Yes, anything wrong with that?'

This did not seem the best moment for Durrell's notoriety to proceed him: until the outbreak of war he had been living on Corfu, where in 1937 on his twenty-fifth birthday he completed The Black Book, his savage portrayal of a swaddled spiritual and sexual culture that he called the 'English death'. T S Eliot, a director of Faber and Faber, greeted the novel as 'the first piece of work by a new English writer to give me any hope for the future of prose fiction' but for fear of an obscenity prosecution would not publish it without cuts. Durrell refused, and instead an unexpurgated edition was published in Paris with the help of Henry Miller, whose own Tropic of Cancer, banned in Britain and America, was enjoying a succès de scandale.

'No, not at all', replied Braun, whose poetry had been published in London before the war and who was also a keen admirer of Miller, 'I would just like to talk to you about it.' After passing through Egyptian immigration, Durrell, Nancy and their ten-month-old daughter Penelope were placed in separate transit camps for men and women, Durrell at Agami, west of the city, where Braun went to join him that evening. 'We spent the whole night in a slit trench watching the air barrage while we talked about Paris and Henry Miller and literature till the next day when they were reunited - my recollection is that they were put on a lorry, the three of them, and sent to the Luna Park Hotel in Cairo'.

I had the benefit of talking with John many times, not only for my Alexandria book but also gathering information for the biography I am writing about Lawrence Durrell.  The London International Surrealist Exhibition of 1936 features in the early correspondence between Durrell, then in Corfu, and Henry Miller in Paris.  I wondered if John knew anything about it.  To my astonishment he produced the programme; he had made a special trip from Portsmouth up to London and gave me a first hand recollected tour.

The founders of the Salamander group, L to R: John Waller, Keith Bullen, Raoul Parme and John Cromer.

Later I returned the favour in a way.  John told me that he had read Durrell's The Black Book in Cairo; it was the first edition, the only edition available then, published by the Obelisk Press in Paris in 1938, but it had been stolen from him, he was fairly sure, by his fellow poet John Waller.  A few years later I was visiting a collector of Durrell's first editions who showed me his copy of The Black Book, a first edition.  Where had he got it?  It had been sold to him by John Waller.  'I know whom he stole it from!', I said.  Then after explaining to John that the collector had acquired the book in good faith and making him promise that he would not ask for it back, I put him in touch with the collector - solving the mystery and closing the circle after sixty-odd years.  John even did the collector the favour of adding a letter of provenance. 'This book was stolen from me by ...'

Lawrence Durrell's Introduction to Three Caravan Cities

Copies of Three Caravan Cities are very scarce.

Three Caravan Cities was published in Alexandria in 1945 by Whitehead Morris, the same firm that published the first (1922) and second (1938) editions of E M Forster's Alexandria: A History and a Guide. Its author was Paul Gotch who worked for the British Council in the city, at the opposite end of the same building where Lawrence Durrell was working at the British Information Office.

Gotch and Durrell also lived in the same house, the Villa Ambron, in Moharrem Bey.  They were close friends, and there was probably no one who had a closer round-the-clock eye on Durrell during those wartime days in Alexandria than Paul Gotch.

That explains how Durrell came to write the introduction to Three Caravan Cities.  Not that Durrell's name is on the cover or the title page, and I suspect that his contribution was overlooked by the second hand bookshop where I picked up my copy, because I got it for very much less than this rather rare book might be expected to sell for.  

Published by Whitehead Morris in Alexandria 1945; no mention of an introduction by Lawrence Durrell.

Three Caravan Cities describes Paul's visits with his wife and friends to Baalbek in Lebanon and Jerash in Jordan in July 1941, to St Catherine's Monastery in Sinai in April 1943, and to Petra in Jordan via Jerusalem in August and September 1944.

It was just after that journey to St Catherine's that Paul and Billy moved in with Durrell and his girlfriend Eve Cohen, first at an enormous dark and gloomy flat on the Rue Fuad, then moving all together to the Villa Ambron in October.  In the summer of 1944 when Paul and Billy went travelling for six weeks across Sinai to Palestine and Jordan, the occasion of their visit to Petra, they left their two infant daughters for the whole of that time in the care of a nanny under the supervision of Durrell and his future wife Eve Cohen who in many respects would be the model for Justine in The Alexandria Quartet. It was all very domestic, cooking meals, changing nappies, writing books, that sort of thing.

Paul Gotch and friends living among the ruins at Petra.

Two of Paul's friends on the journey to Petra were Harold Edwards, a teacher at the British Council in Alexandria, and his Greek wife Epy.  They had escaped the German invasion of Greece by the skin of their teeth, much as Durrell had done in April 1941 when he put to sea at Pylos in the Peloponnese in an overloaded caique with his wife Nancy and his year-old daughter Penelope. Evading dive-bombing Stukas, they managed to reach Crete, from where they went to safety in Egypt. Now Harold and Epy also lived at the Villa Ambron. 

So Paul's book, though it is about caravan cities, offers something of a glimpse into Lawrence Durrell's world in Alexandria during the war - often in ways that do not meet the eye unless you know where to look.  For example, that photograph, above, of Paul and Harold and Epy living amongst the ruins at Petra. They had driven first from Alexandria and across Sinai in a Standard Eight, then at Jerusalem's Damascus gate they took 'a tougher means of transport', a taxi in fact, for the final leg to Petra.

In Jerusalem Paul and Billy slept in the open on the terrace at Nancy Durrell's house, that is Durrell's wife Nancy who had been evacuated to Palestine at the time of the Flap in July 1942, where she got to know Billy who had been evacuated there too.  Later that year Nancy wrote Durrell to say she was not coming back; the worst of it for Durrell was losing his daughter whom he would not see again until long after the war when she was seven. 

But though Durrell was estranged from his wife and could not see Penelope, Paul and Billy could, and from Petra and Jerusalem they returned to Alexandria with photographs for Durrell of his child and reports of her; it was a bitter-sweet experience for Durrell, Paul's return from his caravan journey to the Villa Ambron - the theme of missing daughters runs through The Alexandria Quartet.

That might explain the brevity, the terseness, in Durrell's introduction to Gotch's Three Caravan Cities.  For Durrell the book was about a journey he could not make, a journey to Jerusalem, the recovery of a lost daughter, the reclamation of a broken life. 

Seeking clues in Durrell's introduction.

At the end of his introduction Durrell gives a clue to where his feelings lie when he mentions William Lithgow, 'one of the illustrious ancestors of Middle East Travel'.  Lithgow was the author of Rare Adventures and Painful Peregrinations, an account of his Eastern travels published in 1632.  Lithgow had come to Alexandria, this once 'most renowned city', in 1612 and found it 'greatly decayed' and 'mightily impoverished', with an 'infectious air' producing 'bloody fluxes and other heavy sicknesses'.  Which is not far off how Durrell felt about his situation.

But three years earlier, in 1609, Lithgow had been in Corfu, like Durrell himself.  'Corfu is an island no less beautiful than invincible: it lieth in the Sea Ionean, the inhabitants are Greeks, and the Governors Venetians; this Ile was much honoured by Homer for the pleasant gardens of Alcino which were in his time' - these were Lithgow's lines, capturing something of the island's charm, that Durrell quoted in Prospero's Cell, his book about the idyllic years he had spent in Corfu with Nancy.

At such moments we never speak; but I am aware of the brown arms and throat in the candlelight and the brown toes in the sandals. I am aware of a hundred images at once and a hundred ways of dealing with them. The bowl of wild roses. The English knives and forks. Greek cigarettes. The battered and sea-stained notebook in which I rough out my poems. The rope and oar lying under the tree. The spilth of the olive-press which will be gathered for fuel. The pile of rough stone for the building of a garden wall. A bucket and an axe. The peasant crossing the orchard in her white head-dress. The restless cough of the goat in the barn. All these take shape and substance round this little yellow cone of flame in which N. is cutting the cheese and washing the grapes. A single candle burning upon a table between our happy selves.  

The book that Durrell wrote while living in the Villa Ambron and while Gotch was visiting Jerusalem and the caravan cities.

The Tragedy of the Templars a Bestseller in France

La Tragédie des Templiers was published in France earlier this month where it immediately became the number one bestseller on French Amazon in the Middle Ages category.

The book has also attracted this comment from a purchaser on French Amazon by the name of Muhammed Arslan: 'I recommend it to people who are passionately fond of history, especially for those who want to know more about the Christian world and the Muslim world'.  (Je le recommande pour les passionnés d'Histoire, plus particulièrement pour ceux qui veulent en savoir plus sur le monde chrétien et le monde musulman.)

Click on image to enlarge.

Click to enlarge.

From Alexandria to Tangier

The graveyard of St Andrew's Church in Tangier.

A while ago I was contacted by Jonathan Dawson, a British resident of Tangier.  He had been wandering round the graveyard of St Andrew's Anglican Church in the Grand Socco and came upon the gravestone of a Commander Howell who died in 1967.  On the stone was engraved 'Beloved husband of Baronne Claire Andre de Menasce'. 

Gravestone of Commander H R B Howell, Royal Navy.

Jonathan Dawson had recently read my Alexandria: City of Memory and recalled that it had much to say about the Menasce family of Alexandria, including Claire de Menasce who married a Frenchman, Jacques Vincendon.  Among their children they had a daughter, Claude Vincendon, who became the third wife of Lawrence Durrell, author of The Alexandria Quartet. 

Commander Howell's gravestone, but there was no sign of Claire's.

I was able to inform Jonathan that Claire and Jacques Vincendon had divorced; he had gone to live in Paris after the war and she had married Commander Howell of the Royal Navy and had gone to live with him Tangier where she died in 1965 and was buried, though I did not know exactly where. 

The mystery was that though Commander Howell mentions his wife Claire de Menasce on his gravestone, her gravestone was nowhere to be seen. 

Claire's father was the financier Baron Felix de Menasce, one of the wealthiest men in Alexandria. He obliged his wife, a Frenchwoman called Rosette, who was raised a Catholic, to convert to Judaism before their marriage.  But though their son Jean became an ardent Zionist like his father, he converted to Catholicism and became a priest. As I explained to Jonathan, it was possible that Claire was buried in the Jewish cemetery, or in the Catholic cemetery, though I very much doubted she would care to be buried anywhere other than with her husband.

Jonathan's searches through the records of Tangier's Catholic and Jewish cemeteries drew a blank, just as he had discovered nothing when looking round the graveyard of St Andrew's.  But he had not yet searched the church records; the church warden was ill and was away for several months and Jonathan's search would have to wait.

Claire, Denise, Felix and Jean de Menasce. Felix' grandfather
Yaqub had been made a baron of the Austro-Hungarian Empire
and the title was inheritable by all his children, male and female.
Claire therefore was a baronne.

Meanwhile as we waited for the church warden to return, Jonathan and I discussed Claire's life in Alexandria and in Tangier.  In Alexandria Claire was an aristocrat, at the very top of society, and was involved in every kind of social and cultural activity.  During the war she organised support for the Free French in Egypt and throughout the Middle East.  And she loved theatrical events, writing, designing costumes and performing. 

More about Claire's life in Alexandria can be found by clicking here and here.

Claire Vincendon, née Menasce, far right, in a 1934 Alexandrian review which she presented, acted in and designed the costumes for.

Claire left Alexandria not long after the Second World War and eventually settled with her new husband, the Royal Navy commander, in Tangier where they lived quite simply.

Tangier was an international zone until 1956 and had a cosmopolitan atmosphere many years afterwards. It attracted literary figures like Paul Bowles and William Burroughs; the latter wrote Naked Lunch in Tangier.

Claire died of cancer in Tangier in 1965.  Less than two years later her daughter Claude, Lawrence Durrell's wife, died in Geneva, also of cancer. 

A 1905 view of the Grand Socco, an open square in the centre of Tangier, showing St Andrew's Church on the left.  It was built in 1894 on land donated by the sultan of Morocco and resembles a whitewashed mosque.

The return of the church warden and access to the burial records quickly solved the mystery of Claire's whereabouts.  She had been buried in front of her husband's own grave, divided by a wide path, but her stone had fallen flat, had broken into several pieces, and had become covered by yellow lantana.  Jonathan had the stone cleaned up and pieced together, but it has not been possible to make it stand up so it lies where it once stood.  The stone is not well engraved and Jonathan would like to make full repairs or replace it altogether if Claire's family agrees.

'It's a nice sunny spot', says Jonathan, 'and her neighbours include Sir Basil Scott, former Chief Justice of Bombay (1925), Caid Sir Harry McLean, I forget the date but during the 1920s and a great and flamboyant self-invention, trainer of the Cherifien military under Sultan Moulay Abdelaziz who abdicated in 1909; David Herbert - from Wilton and always known as the Queen Mother of Tangier but really a prickly, snobbish old monster (1995) ... so Claire is in "character corner"'.

Baronne Claire Andre de Menasce, beloved wife of Commander H R B Howell, died 5 February 1965, aged 63.

'Open cities are the mothers of open societies': John Fowles, Lawrence Durrell, E M Forster and Alexandria

Open cities are the mothers of open societies, and their existence is especially essential to literature - which is why, I suppose, we cherish our illusions about them, and forgive them so many of their sins. In the case of Alexandria, that prototype cosmopolis and melter of antitheses, we can hardly be blamed. Antony and Cleopatra, Cavafy, E M Forster, Lawrence Durrell ... there is a formidably distinguished list of foreign celebrants and from them we have taken an indelible image of the place. It is languorous, subtle, perverse, eternally fin de siècle; failure haunts it, yet a failure of such richness that it is a kind of victory.

          - John Fowles, introduction to
              Naguib Mahfouz' Miramar

The Tauris Parke Paperback 2014
reprint of Forster's Alexandria.

Two events have set me to recollecting the British publishing history of E M Forster's Alexandria: A History and a Guide and how it came to include an introduction by Lawrence Durrell.  One event is the publication today, 28 January 2014, of the Tauris Parke Paperbacks reprint of Forster's book. The other is a copy of my own Michael Haag Ltd edition of Forster's Alexandria which once belonged to John Fowles that I came upon in a rare and antiquarian bookshop.  

John Fowles' copy of the 1982
Michael Haag Ltd edition.
The cover is by my friend Colin Elgie.

I published the first British edition of Forster's Alexandria in 1982. I had approached John Fowles to write the introduction; Lawrence Durrell was the more natural choice, particularly because he had quoted from Forster's History and Guide in his Alexandria Quartet, but I was having difficulties with Durrell.

Durrell imagined that he had already written an introduction to Forster's Alexandria but could find no trace of it, so he wrote to The Times Literary Supplement where his letter appeared on 22 August 1980.  Not only had he written it, he said, but 'I saw and handled a copy with my preface. The little note even earned the approval of Forster, for he gave me a kindly passing mention as a "late lover of the city"'.

Durrell's letter to the TLS.

In fact I was pretty cross with Durrell and told him if he did not want to write the introduction he should just say so, and not give me a cock and bull story.  And so his letter to the TLS continues that the disappearance of his preface was so complete that the publisher, that is myself, who was asking him to write the introduction, was 'coming to believe that I am romancing' - which was putting it mildly.

Not only cross, but I had given up on Durrell and had written to John Fowles, author of The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman.  He had written a wonderful introduction to The American University in Cairo Press' translation of Naguib Mahfouz' Miramar, his novel set in Alexandria.  

Mahfouz was directly influenced by Durrell when writing Miramar and opens with lines that could have been written by Durrell himself: 'Alexandria. At last. Alexandria, Lady of the Dew.  Bloom of white nimbus. Bosom of radiance, wet with sky-water. Core of nostalgia steeped in honey and tears'.

The original AUC Press edition of Miramar.

Fowles' introduction to Miramar begins with the lines I have quoted at the top of this post, and then he adds, 'What we have conspicuously lacked ... is a view from the inside, from modern Egypt herself', and he welcomes Mahfouz' Miramar for providing it - and for continuing the tradition of writing about a city that when Mahfouz published his novel in Arabic in 1967 still had some afterglow, some memory, of having been an open city, those mothers of open societies.

But then I heard from John Fowles who admitted that despite his introduction to Miramar and having visited Cairo he had never been to Alexandria. He suggested I try Edmund Keeley or Philip Sherrard, the translators of Cavafy, or that I approach John Rodenbeck, who had been Fowles' host in Cairo.  Rodenbeck was professor of comparative literature at The American University there and the director of The AUC Press; he had excellent contacts and knew a fair bit about the literary dimension of Alexandria himself.

Meanwhile there was silence in the letters columns of the TLS. Then in September a rare books dealer replied to Durrell's letter, telling him that no such introduction by him existed, at which point Durrell wrote me a charming apology for 'the wild goose chase', saying 'I must have dreamed it'. And he immediately agreed to write the introduction to Forster's Alexandria.

Durrell's introduction turned out to be a beautiful piece of writing, one of the best short pieces Durrell ever wrote.  Forster and Durrell made a classic combination, and Durrell himself was immensely proud, I know, to have contributed to my edition, the first British edition, of A History and a Guide.

Durrell's original typescript of his introduction.

When my edition of Forster's book was published I sent a hardback copy to Fowles.  On the flap of the dust jacket, and on the inside cover of the paperback version, I included his wonderful description of Alexandria and its importance to literature and free thought.  What happened to his copy I do not know.  But recently, as I have said, I spotted a paperback edition bearing his signature of ownership and dated 2004; that is the one I have now bought, not that I collect books, but it seemed that this copy of Alexandria had made itself known to me in order to return home.

Fowles' signature on the frontispiece.

The inside front cover and half title page showing the quote from Fowles and his signature.

Fowles replied to my letter and the copy of the book.  'I am delighted that Durrell did in fact write the introduction in the end.  I could not have hoped to equal that.'

John Fowles' letter to me after my publication of Forster's Alexandria with Durrell's introduction.

But I wish Fowles' introduction to Mahfouz' Miramar was still in print; as far as I know it is not. His words about open cities being the mothers of open societies say everything about Alexandria, the city that was home to Cavafy, Forster and Durrell, its afterglow, its memory, all but gone now. 

Mummified Crocodiles

Mummified crocodiles.

I have recently acquired a new desktop computer.  I needed to install Microsoft Office in order to use Word, the software almost universally used for writing documents and which I have long used for writing books.  But unlike every other computer I have ever owned, it turns out that this one does not have a slot for CDs or DVDs.  So how am I to install Word?  And for that matter how do I back up files on CDs or photographs or anything else?  

Yes, I know about saving things in the clouds but that has seemed an airy-fairy thing to me.  Can you really believe that you have saved anything by surrendering it to some cloud thousands of miles away?  Not me; and so I have used CDs and DVDs as my last line of memory.

But now I have no choice.  My computer will not accept CDs or DVDs.  I had to install Microsoft Office by downloading it from a cloud.  And if the thing goes wrong I can go back to the cloud and download it again.  The plain fact, I realise, is that discs are on the verge of obsolescence; soon they will be no more.  This remote and hardly believable cloud is the present and the future.  All my memories, and all yours, will hover about somewhere in a cloud.  

I have been through this before, this serial obsolescence.  First there were big floppy discs; then they were replaced by smaller floppy discs; and they in turn were replaced by CDs and DVDs - which you would think would last forever, but they degrade surprisingly quickly ('disc rot' or 'laser rot', to give it the high tech term), within twenty years, even within a few months.  

Even if the memory storage object, the CD or DVD or floppy disc, did not degrade, the devices for operating them are not made anymore.  Try to find a machine that will operate a floppy disc.  Or a video machine that will operate a tape cassette.  It is easier to find an old record player, even a wind-up record player, to play your music collection of non-degradable vinyl records - the ones you threw out twenty years or so ago to keep up with the times and which always delivered higher sound quality than any disc. 

I will not go on about the virtues of yet earlier devices I have used for writing, such as the typewriter, or paper, pen and ink.  

But I have been thinking about mummified crocodiles.

Mummified crocodiles dug up at Tebtynis.

With the exception of our own times, there has been no period or place better documented and understood, right down to the smallest details of everyday life, than Graeco-Roman Egypt, that is Egypt from about 330 BC and for a thousand years onwards, when it was ruled by the Ptolemaic dynasty which ended with the famous Cleopatra at whose death it became a Roman and Byzantine province until the Arab invasion in 642.

The reason for this is to be found in the crocodile cemeteries of Tebtynis (also called Tebtunis) in the Fayyum oasis.
  

Digging for crocodiles at Tebtynis.

Searching for mummified crocodiles wrapped in papyrus.

How this came to be is described by the British Egyptologist and classicist Bernard Grenfell, writing in Fayum Towns and Their Papyri, published in 1900.  In 1899 he and his colleague Arthur Hunt had gone to the Fayyum in a search for human mummies; instead they made a momentous discovery.  

The tombs of the large necropolis adjoining Tebtynis proved in many instances to contain only crocodiles. One of our workmen, disgusted at finding a row of crocodiles where he expected sarcophagi, broke one of them in pieces and disclosed the surprising fact that the creature was wrapped in sheets of papyrus. As may be imagined, after this we dug out all the crocodile-tombs in the cemetery. The most remarkable characteristic of the Greek papyri from crocodile-mummies is their great size. For enfolding crocodiles 3 or 4 m in length small documents were useless, though they were employed as padding, in which case they had often not been unrolled or were hastily crushed together. For the outer layers the papyri used consisted of large unfolded rolls.

With the old order confronted by foreign influences, Egyptians of the Late and Ptolemaic periods increasingly clung to tangible shreds of belief, so that animal cults came to enjoy an astonishing popularity. At Saqqara the priests had long been giving magnificent burials to the Apis bulls, but now new and vast underground chambers were established - the Anubieion, sacred to Anubis, with a gallery for dogs; the Bubasteion, sacred to Bastet, filled with mummified cats; the temple of Thoth, its subterranean galleries piled high with thousands of baboons and millions of mummified ibises and falcons; and the Isieion, the temple of Isis, with underground galleries containing the sarcophagi of the sacred cows that had given birth to the Apis bulls. 

Most votive crocodiles were infants; adults have greater data storage capacity.

These uncountable numbers of mummified creatures were brought over hundreds of years by pilgrims as offerings to a favoured god, or as supplication by those seeking a cure. For the Egyptians animals carried within them the quality of the eternal, just as over the years it always seems to be the same bird that one hears singing in the branches of a tree, so that animal cults were a reassurance that Egypt was at one with the sacred and things would remain fundamentally unchanged. 

The intensity of Egyptians' feelings in the matter can be gauged from the incident witnessed in the first century BC by the Greek historian Diodorus Siculus in Alexandria, when a Roman diplomat accidentally killed a cat and was immediately lynched by the mob.

In other words mummified animals were a way of commemorating the past, remembering traditions, preserving culture and connecting with the sacred. 

Bernard Grenfell and Arthur Hunt.

But not only ethnic Egyptians indulged in animal worship and mummification.  Greeks and Romans who settled in Egypt and whose families lived there for centuries adopted Egyptian practices.  This was especially true in the Fayyum oasis where the crocodile god Sobek was worshipped and offerings of crocodiles made at his temples, in the capital called Crocodilopolis and elsewhere round the oasis, as at Tebtynis.  In Graeco-Roman Egypt Sobek was honoured as a protective deity, fierce in warding off evil while at the same time healing the sick and defending the innocent.  

A treatise on the medical properties
of plants.

Grenfell and Hunt's great discovery was not the crocodiles themselves but their papyrus wrappings which amounted to over thirty thousand fragments concerning everything from agricultural and irrigation management, leases, contracts, tax receipts, reports of burglaries and missing persons, to scientific, mathematical and medical treatises, and also literary works by Pindar, Xenophon, Sophocles, Euripides, as well as parts of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey.

A fragment of the Iliad,
Book XI, 11, 556-613.

Discarded pieces of papyrus, used to bulk up crocodile mummies or enwrap them, have given us a detailed understanding of the administrative, social and economic history of Egypt and the ancient Mediterranean world, as well as an intimate look into people's lives.  

A second century BC portion of Sophocles' lost play Inachus.

In these days when people no longer put pen to paper or even use a typewriter, when CDs and DVDs rot within twenty years, one wonders what will be left of us for future generations.  For all our tweets and text messages we are creating a world without a memory, a place without a trace, a time that will be immediately forgotten.  Unless you really believe that something will remain out there on a cloud - mostly collected and one hopes preserved by America's National Security Agency, Britain's GCHQ, and the French, German, Russian, Chinese, Israeli and Iranian intelligence services. 

Declaration of a birth AD 50.

But if you really want to be sure of saving what you write, a far superior memory device is a crocodile mummy with a proven life of over two thousand years. 









[For an update on the necessity of crocodiles click here.]

Christmas in Provence

A Provençal nativity with local villagers dropping in.

In Monsieur: The Prince of Darkness, the first book of his Avignon Quintet, Lawrence Durrell writes lovingly about Christmas in Provence. 'In my memory it will always be Christmas here', says Durrell's character Bruce, 'the Noel of 19-, the year that changed the direction and leaning of my life. Nothing had ever happened to me before - or that is how I felt about the events of that year.'

Bruce is visiting the chateau of Verfeuille in Provence where he and Sylvie fall in love.  The chateau is owned by Bruce's friend, Piers, who is Sylvie's brother, and you might as well know that Piers and Sylvie are also in love with one another. That is not so unusual in Durrell's novels; Pursewarden and his sister Liza in The Alexandria Quartet are lovers, for example, and there are many other relationships in the Quartet and elsewhere that are disguised brother-sister affairs - just as sometimes in E M Forster's novels, notably in Howards End, the relationships are disguised homosexual ones. 

Piers had gone ahead to Verfeuille, 

while Sylvie and I had elected to stay on in Avignon, and then pick up horses at the half-way house and ride the last few miles to the chateau. Our saddle bags were full of presents, coloured sweets for the children, confetti, crystallised fruit, and little bottles of cognac and liqueurs. Also we had brought a huge family of little santons of painted terracotta for the crèche. No Provençal Christmas is complete without these little figures which populate and deck out the family crèche which itself does the duty of our northern Yule-tide Tree. 

Santons pay their respects to the newborn child.

I became curious about these santons - the word means 'little saints'.  Curious about their place in the Christmas festivities of Provence but also because I wondered what they might signify, if anything, about Durrell's characters.  Just as in the Alexandria Quartet Durrell describes his characters in terms of tarot cards, so maybe these santons who have invaded the traditional nativity scene with the Holy Family also had some meaning.  But probably not - though Durrell can never resist a homunculus. 

Durrell goes on to explain.  

Originally the cast, so to speak, was a small one, restricted to the Holy Family and two or three other personages who figured directly in the legend, like the kings and so forth; but under the influence of the hardy Provençal sense of poetry the whole thing had flowered rhapsodically and we had found in the shops about forty santons, all different. Their verisimilitude might have been suspect but they brought the story up to date with characters out of stock like the village policeman, a poacher, a Camargue cowboy, and the like. All this gear was carefully wrapped against breakages and stowed in our capacious saddle bags before we attacked the slow winding ascent to the chateau.

In Caesar's Vast Ghost, Durrell's book about Provence, he says 'The little Christmas santons of Provence with their butcher-baker-candlestick-maker preoccupations must echo the same concern with the persistence of archetypes through the different vocations'.  

A santon produce-seller.

And so they turn out to do, and in a surprising way. For on the face of it there is nothing ancient about these santons, these figurines of painted terracotta; the tradition is barely two hundred years old. They owe their existence to the French Revolution and its suppression of religion and outward displays of belief, including the traditional nativity scene with its Joseph and Mary and Christ Child and magi and shepherds and sheep and cows and so on - all of this was banned.  But people liked them.  And there were artisans who had made a living turning them out.  And so everyone just continued on as before, but instead of the Holy Family the figures were butchers and bakers and fishwives.  And the santons thrived.  No Christmas in Provence is complete without a vast cast of characters who have nothing to do with the birth of the Son of God but everything to do with one's neighbours and local tradesmen and the passing gipsies and fishermen at sea.

As for Bruce and Sylvie making their way back from Avignon to the the chateau, their saddlebags filled with santons,

From time to time all visibility was reduced to nil, and then Sylvie, who was in a particularly mischievous mood, pushed her horse into a canter, to be swallowed at once in the mist. It was not a procedure to be recommended and the second time she did it I plunged after her and punished her with an embrace that left her breathless; feeling her cold lips and nose against my face, seeking me out. Such was its magnetism that we became fused into this posture, unwilling to detach ourselves from each other. I tried to at last - for I could feel the mist condensing into droplets on the collar of my old tweed coat; but she whispered 'Stay' and it was only too easy to obey her.

Santon woman with donkey.

Their arrival at Verfeuille was followed by a warming log fire and a magnficent Christmas dinner. (If you want to know about the traditions of a country, particularly the gastronomic ones, you could do worse than read a Durrell novel.)

The wine was going about now and the most important supper of the whole year was in full sail. By old tradition it has always been a 'lean' supper, so that in comparison with other feast days it might have seemed a trifle frugal. Nevertheless the huge dish of raïto exhaled a wonderful fragrance: this was a ragout of mixed fish presented in a sauce flavoured with wine and capers. Chicken flamed in Cognac. The long brown loaves cracked and crackled under the fingers of the feasters like the olive branches in the fireplace. ...

So it went on, our last dinner, to terminate at last with a whole anthology of sweetmeats and nuts and winter melons. The fire was restoked and the army of wine-bottles gave place to a smaller phalanx of brandies, Armagnacs and Marcs, to offset the large bowls of coffee from which rose plumes of fragrance.

Now old Jan's wife placed before the three lovers a deep silver sugar bowl full of white sugar. It lay there before them in the plenitude of its sweetness like a silver paunch. The three spoons she had placed in it stood upright, waiting for them to help themselves before the rest of the company.

For Bruce, that Christmas remained forever impressed into his mind.  

It was not a place or time easy to forget, and I had returned to it so often in my thoughts that it was no surprise to relive all this in my dreams. I must have unconsciously memorised it in great detail without being fully aware of the fact at the time. I know of no other place on earth that I can call up so clearly and accurately by simply closing my eyes: to this very day.

But the day itself came to an end as they moved off across the snow to midnight mass at the village church.

Painted terracotta figures coming to life.

By now the old man had discovered that it was nearly time for the village mass. 'We will have to hurry up,' he said consulting the old clock, 'we must set a good example on the day of the days.' The company donned hats and scarves and we straggled out into the night with its washed-out late moon trying to guide us. Our feet scratched the flinty path which led away to the tiny hamlet of Verfeuille whose ancient church was now so ablaze with candles that the whole fragile structure seemed to be on fire. I walked arm in arm with the brother and sister, silent and preoccupied and wondering about the future – the future which has now become the past.

Except that with Durrell nothing ever becomes lost within the past. Time plays itself out again and again, like the placing of familiar tarot cards and like santons introducing themselves into the world of ancient beliefs and mysteries, as the following volumes of the Avignon Quintet make clear.

Sommieres, the town where Durrell lived in Provence, with the Roman bridge crossing the Vidourle - recreated like a nativity scene and populated by santons.