Mary Magdalene - Companion of Jesus, Goddess, Whore and Icon

Detail of Noli Me Tangere by Fra Angelico.

From the Bible to the Gnostics, the Cathars and mystics, this quest for Mary Magdalene pursues the history and the legends of one of the most remarkable figures in Western culture - apostle to the apostles, goddess and whore, companion of Jesus, and icon of womanhood.

The Quest for Mary Magdalene by Michael Haag will be published by Profile Books, London, in March 2016.

Mary Magdalene is a figure larger than any text, larger than the Bible or the Church.  She has been portrayed as a penitent whore, a wealthy woman, Christ's wife, an adulteress, a symbol of the frailty of women and an object of veneration.  And to this day she remains a potent and mysterious figure. 

In the manner of a quest, this book follows Mary Magdalene through the centuries, exploring how she has been reinterpreted for every age, and examining what she reveals about man and the divine.  It follows her from the New Testament to the Gnostic gospels where she is extolled as the chief disciple of Christ, through the early Church's reimagining of her as a fallen woman, to the Renaissance artists for whom she became a symbol of compassion, sensuality and humanity and up to the present day, where we see Mary Magdalene as a symbol of a new and powerful femininity.

Ghosts of My Grandfather and Leopold Bloom in Dublin

Myself, David O'Toole and my aunt Eileen
with rabbit and chicks behind 56 Upper Clanbrassil Street.

Plaque at 52 Upper Clanbrassil Street.

Not that I knew it at the time, but my friend David O'Toole and I would play in the streets and alleys of Dublin that would have been familiar to the young Leopold Bloom, James Joyce's fictional hero in Ulysses.  My grandfather's house was at 56 Upper Clanbrassil Street and David lived almost next door; in fact he might have lived at 52 Upper Clanbrassil Street, the house in which Leopold Bloom was born. 

My grandfather's house at 56 Upper Clanbrassil Street, Dublin.

There is a plaque about Bloom on the facade of 52, while the side of 56 still bears the sign my grandfather Thomas Maguire painted the better part of a century ago.  To my surprise I discovered the sign still there when I had a look on Google Street View.  The house has been refurbished and converted into flats but 'Thos Maguire & Sons' has been left intact; it seems to have become an institution, a small part of Dublin's heritage, and I see it has also been included in the enjoyable website called Dublin Ghost Signs.

My mother's birth certificate, born at 56.

My grandparents Thomas and Elizabeth Maguire raised eleven children at 56 Upper Clanbrassil Street and my mother Maureen (Mary) was born there.  The house stands near the Grand Canal where it is crossed by the Harold's Cross bridge (now renamed the Robert Emmet bridge); the area is called Portabello and was heavily settled by Jews in the nineteenth century fleeing pogroms in Eastern Europe.  Little Jerusalem it was sometimes called, explaining why Leopold Bloom happened to be born here.

The Harold's Cross bridge leads over to the road running into the Wicklow Mountains.  There is a story about that.  My grandfather was a fierce republican; the British had a guard post at the bridge to intercept armed republicans coming down from the mountains; the position of my grandfather's house proved convenient for republicans during the Irish War of Independence.  But that is a story for another time. 

56 Upper Clanbrassil Street. left, and Bloom's birthplace at 52, right.

For the moment, back to Leopold Bloom.  'I, Rudolph Virag, now resident at no 52 Clanbrassil street, Dublin, formerly of Szombathely in the kingdom of Hungary, hereby give notice that I have assumed and intend henceforth upon all occasions and at all times to be known by the name of Rudolph Bloom' - that is Rudolph's declaration, in James Joyce's Ulysses, of his change of name. In 1866 his son Leopold was born at that same address.

Where Leopold Bloom was born.

All of Leopold Bloom's life opens up from 52 Clanbrassil Street (Upper was added later).

Ulysses first edition.

What is the age of the soul of man? As she hath the virtue of the chameleon to change her hue at every new approach, to be gay with the merry and mournful with the downcast, so too is her age changeable as her mood. No longer is Leopold, as he sits there, ruminating, chewing the cud of reminiscence, that staid agent of publicity and holder of a modest substance in the funds. A score of years are blown away. He is young Leopold. There, as in a retrospective arrangement, a mirror within a mirror (hey, presto!), he beholdeth himself. That young figure of then is seen, precociously manly, walking on a nipping morning from the old house in Clanbrassil street to the high school, his booksatchel on him bandolierwise, and in it a goodly hunk of wheaten loaf, a mother's thought. Or it is the same figure, a year or so gone over, in his first hard hat (ah, that was a day!), already on the road, a fullfledged traveller for the family firm, equipped with an orderbook, a scented handkerchief (not for show only), his case of bright trinketware (alas! a thing now of the past!) and a quiverful of compliant smiles for this or that halfwon housewife reckoning it out upon her fingertips or for a budding virgin, shyly acknowledging (but the heart? tell me!) his studied baisemoins. The scent, the smile, but, more than these, the dark eyes and oleaginous address, brought home at duskfall many a commission to the head of the firm, seated with Jacob's pipe after like labours in the paternal ingle (a meal of noodles, you may be sure, is aheating), reading through round horned spectacles some paper from the Europe of a month before. But hey, presto, the mirror is breathed on and the young knighterrant recedes, shrivels, dwindles to a tiny speck within the mist. Now he is himself paternal and these about him might be his sons. Who can say? The wise father knows his own child. He thinks of a drizzling night in Hatch street, hard by the bonded stores there, the first. Together (she is a poor waif, a child of shame, yours and mine and of all for a bare shilling and her luckpenny), together they hear the heavy tread of the watch as two raincaped shadows pass the new royal university. Bridie! Bridie Kelly! He will never forget the name, ever remember the night: first night, the bridenight. They are entwined in nethermost darkness, the willer with the willed, and in an instant (fiat!) light shall flood the world. Did heart leap to heart? Nay, fair reader. In a breath 'twas done but—hold! Back! It must not be! In terror the poor girl flees away through the murk. She is the bride of darkness, a daughter of night. She dare not bear the sunnygolden babe of day. No, Leopold. Name and memory solace thee not. That youthful illusion of thy strength was taken from thee—and in vain. No son of thy loins is by thee. There is none now to be for Leopold, what Leopold was for Rudolph.

Thomas Maguire, my grandfather.

As for myself, Dublin included days out with my grandfather who had a reputation for being stern but whom I always found kind.  He would take me as a child on outings round the city, to Phoenix Park, to Glendalough in the Wicklow Mountains, and he would give me a penny so that I would walk up Clanbrassil Street to the shop near the bridge where I would have a slab of ice cream cut from a block and put between two wafers, and where once I went into the nearby pub instead and lost the penny to a one-armed bandit.  Behind the house my grandfather kept a horse and he also kept a goat, and my grandmother kept chickens and my uncles kept racing pigeons.  They would race all the way back to Dublin from as far away as England.  There was a big dining table at 56 and the whole family would gather round, my grandparents, my aunts and uncles and cousins and friends like David O'Toole and people straying in.  I once counted forty-two immediate relatives in Dublin, but then I gave up counting.  And I remember, oddly, riding my bicycle along the Grand Canal and falling off, knocking my head hard, and losing my memory all day.  And many other things.  But I only found out about our neighbour Leopold Bloom later.

Dublin is not my universe; it is a small part of my world.  Even so, I understand Joyce when he said, 'For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.'

56 Upper Clanbrassil Street stands near the Grand Canal;
to the north is the river Liffey.

Zippy the Pinhead Meets Mick Jagger

Mick Jagger by Bill Griffith 1965

Before there was Zippy the Pinhead there was Mick Jagger.  At any rate that is how it was in the life of Bill Griffith, creator of the Zippy daily cartoon strip syndicated in hundreds of newspapers in the United States and beyond.   

Not Mick Jagger.

Zippy is the sort of person for whom 'care in the community' is designed; he is vague and disconnected and slightly saner than what passes for correct thinking in the world around him; a sort of wise fool.  Often he appears with Griffy, who is Bill's alter ego.  But Zippy was 'born' only in 1971 and became a regular strip only in 1976.  Before that Bill did 'art', though to my personal knowledge he was also drawing mushrooms and Mick Jagger.   

Zippy makes sense of the world for Griffy, Bill Griffith's alter ego.

Bill did this drawing of Mick Jagger in Manhattan in 1965; we had just been to see the second Beatles film, Help!.  Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive.  I liked the drawing very much and Bill unpinned it from his easel and gave it to me; I took it back to London and tucked it away.

A few years later I fixed it to the wall of my garden shed where I was writing at the time.  Chris Jagger came round and liked it and passed it on to his brother Mick to sign - faintly, as it turned out, in green pencil.  After that I decided to frame it; I like the gilt wooden frame holding Bill's rough sheet of drawing paper, and I like seeing the signatures there, Bill's in New York in 1965, Mick's later in London, marks of passage.  I have a stinkhorn mushroom somewhere too, also drawn by Bill.  

Signed by Mick Jagger, above, and Bill Griffith, below.

But Bill has moved beyond Jagger and mushrooms and flowers in vases to Zippy the Pinhead for which he is most highly regarded as this recent review of Bill's work by Paul Di Filippo explains. 

Contemporary readers of Bill Griffith's comic strip, Zippy the Pinhead, know with certainty that the illustrator is one of the most accomplished draftsmen working in comics today, his talents on a par with those of Robert Crumb. His art -- nuanced shading; economical linework; evocative textures; fidelity to dress, gesture, expression, architecture, automotive design, and the thousand and one other accoutrements of modern life -- is an unfailing daily marvel, especially considering the speed and regularity at which the strip is produced.

The Funny Little Bust of General Earle

The Funny Little Bust of General Earle. The peak of his hat
was damaged by rioters, perhaps in 1956.

Often I would look for 'the funny little bust of General Earle'.  E M Forster mentions it in his Alexandria: A History and a Guide when he talks about the buildings round the Place Mohammed Ali, among them the Anglican Church of St Mark, built on land granted to the English by Mohammed Ali himself.  'Looking through the railings of the churchyard', writes Forster, 'is the funny little bust of General Earle (k. 1885 at Kirbekan in the Soudan). It was erected by the European Community, and represents their chief incursion into the realms of art'.  The remark is wonderful Forster, and each time I would pass the church I would walk along the railings looking for that funny little bust of that funny little man who got himself killed while trying to relieve General Gordon at the siege of Khartoum.  But I never could find it.

Forster also describes St Mark's church, which 'considering its date (1855), and its pseudo-Byzantine architecture, is however a tolerable building'.  Forster was educated in an age when the medieval and especially the Byzantine were depreciated, and he had little appreciation of Islamic or Eastern Christian architecture.  Instead he admired the Banco di Roma, 'the finest building in the city', in the Rue Cherif Pasha, 'a modified copy of the famous Palazzo Farnese, which Antonio da San Gallo and Michelangelo built in the 16th cent., at Rome' - in other words, Renaissance, which was about the most that Forster's taste could handle.  St Mark's Church is a handsome and interesting building, built by James Wild who had already built the richly eclectic Christ Church, Brixton Hill, London.  Of his church in Alexandria, Wild said that though it 'agrees in plan and mass with the style of art used by the early church architects, it carries out a general sentiment of Arabian detail'.

St Mark's Anglican Church in Alexandria.

One day in 1986 I was walking past St Mark's again and went inside where I met the vicar, so to speak, Father Howard Levett.  Except that being the priest for St Mark's Alexandria, and despite having a parish of only a few score Anglican souls, Howard was in a direct line of apostolic descent from St Mark himself; he was Archdeacon of Egypt, North Africa and the Horn of Africa, a very grand title for a delightful man.  So I told Howard about Forster's funny little bust of General Earle and asked what he knew about it.  He had never heard of it, Howard replied, and that was that.

The next year, 1987, I was again in Alexandria and I called on Howard.  He took me aside.  'I have something to show you', he whispered, and took me to the vestry, where just outside the back door of the church, in a little courtyard sitting amid the geraniums was a funny little bust.  'We found General Earle!'

It seems that after I first asked about the bust of General Earle, Howard asked his gardener Mustafa if he knew anything about it.  Mustafa had been gardener at the church all his life and his father had been the gardener before him.  And Mustafa remembered that when he was a boy there had been a riot, it might have been 1956 but he was not sure, and the bust of General Earle that had been peering through the railings was attacked, knocking a few bits off the peak of his hat.  Mustafa's father took the bust away and buried it somewhere in the church grounds and the whole business was forgotten.  Maybe in a thousand years somebody would have dug up the funny little bust and wondered who he was and why he was there and what it was all about.  Or maybe General Earle would have remained lost to this world forever.  Instead Mustafa remembered the spot and dug the general up. 

But Howard was worried about restoring the bust of General Earle to its vantage point peering through the railings, reckoning there might always be another riot and the general would be attacked yet again and be forever shattered.  So the bust has been put round the back of the church, just outside the vestry door. 

Michael Haag, Mustafa and Howard Levett in 1987 with the rediscovered bust of General William Earle behind St Mark's church.

I mention this now so that the general is not forgotten.  I do not know if his discovery counts as a triumph of archaeology; he was hardly buried for more than thirty years.  But it was a triumph of a sort and good fun to find Forster's funny little bust.  I hope the church is able to preserve General Earle, who gave his life in trying to relieve Gordon at Khartoum, from further damage or theft or from being mistaken for a garden gnome.

By the way, apart from an appearance in Forster's Alexandria, General Earle also makes an appearance in Justine, the first volume of Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet.  The tense night and dawn of the duck shoot on Lake Mareotis is over and Darley, who half expected to be killed for having an affair with Nessim's wife Justine instead receives a letter from her, saying she has left him, has left everyone, has left Alexandria forever.  Durrell draws on Forster when he has Darley give us his reaction to the sudden news. 

It is as if the whole city had crashed about my ears: I walk slowly to the flat, aimlessly as survivors must walk about the streets of their native city after an earthquake, surprised to find how much that had been familiar has changed, Rue Piroua, Rue de France, the Terbana Mosque (cupboard smelling of apples), Rue Sidi Abou El Abbas (water-ices and coffee), Anfouchi, Ras El Tin (Cape of Figs), Ikingi Mariut (gathering wild flowers together, convinced she cannot love me), equestrian statue of Mohammed Ali in the square…. General Earle’s comical little bust, killed Sudan 1885…. An evening multitudinous with swallows …

Durrell's list closely follows Forster's itineraries, though where Forster wrote 'Rue Pirona', Durrell mistakenly transcribed it as 'Rue Piroua'.  

Where the Pope Goes, So Go the Templars

Crowds a million strong welcome Pope Francis in Seoul.

The papacy may have thought it was done with the Templars seven hundred years ago.  But as the latest news from Korea shows, the Templars are following close on the heels of the pope.

Crazy about the pope.

Pope Francis is visiting South Korea where over ten percent of the population are Roman Catholics. Catholicism was introduced to Korea two hundred years ago not by missionaries but by Koreans themselves who had travelled to the West and brought back the books by which they spread the word - and for which they were executed. These 124 martyrs are being beatified by Pope Francis during his visit to South Korea where he is attracting crowds a million strong.

Coinciding with the pope's visit I have received news that The Templars: History and Myth will be translated into Korean and published there next year by Cum Libro Publishing Co in Seoul.

Maybe the pope will someday beatify Jacques de Molay, the last Templar grand master, who was burnt alive at the stake.

The pope does selfies.

You know how to whistle, don't you?

One of the most famous lines in cinema occurs in To Have and Have Not when Shimon Peres says to Humphrey Bogart, 'You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve?  You just put your lips together and ... blow'.

You know how to whistle, don't you, Steve? You just put your lips
together and... blow.

Well, actually those lines were not spoken by Shimon Peres, the recent president of Israel.  They were spoken by his cousin Lauren Bacall - a relationship I discovered just today, the day after her death.  Or at least Bacall said that Peres was her cousin.  Peres is not so sure, though he does say that they were from the same family - she was born in New York as Betty Joan Perske to a Romanian Jewish mother and an American-born father whose parents were from Poland, while Peres, whose name at birth was Szymon Perski, was born to Jewish parents in what was then Poland and is now Belarus.

Peres describes his first meeting with Bacall here (free registration). 

And if you would like to see Lauren Bacall saying that famous line to Humphrey Bogart, click here.

To Have and Have Not was Lauren Bacall's first film and it was there that she met and fell in love with Humphrey Bogart.  But the film and her love for Bogart and the famous line might not have happened at all had Howard Hawks, the director and producer of the film, who was notoriously antisemitic, realised that Bacall was Jewish. 

For that matter Shimon Peres may never have become president of Israel, nor lived very long at all, had he stayed in his native Poland where those of his family who remained perished in the Holocaust, some being burnt alive in their local synagogue.

And this is Shimon Peres doing a little whistling of his own, wondering why those people who demonstrate against Israel over Gaza could not be bothered to demonstrate against Hamas when it first began firing rockets at Israel.   

Chinese Edition of Inferno Decoded

Botticelli and Dante in Chinese (Simplified).

Mao Tse Tung, eat your heart out.

Copies of the Chinese edition of Inferno Decoded were delivered to me yesterday.  The book has been translated into Simplified Chinese, if that helps you, and has been published by The Peoples' Literature Publishing House in Shanghai.  It is much more entertaining than Chairman Mao's Little Red Book.

Lawrence Durrell on Love, Life and No Escape

Auction dramatics at Sotheby's.

Yesterday I did a post about a typescript of Justine that was being auctioned today at Sotheby's in New Bond Street.  That was part of one lot.  A second lot was mostly copies of Durrell's books that Durrell had inscribed for a collector, and two or three of these were interesting.

One was a first edition of Reflections on a Marine Venus, his book about Rhodes where Durrell lived for two years immediately after leaving Alexandria in 1945.  His inscription, dated 1974, says that he spent 'a long period in this island at the end of the war – one of the nicest and best periods of my life'. I know from Eve Durrell that it was paradise for them - Durrell had taken his Alexandrian girlfriend Eve Cohen to Rhodes with him as his secretary and eventually they married there.  'We had the island all to ourselves', Eve said.  This inscription gives emphasis to Durrell's remark about Rhodes in his 1978 Greek Islands book, 'They were the happiest two years of my life'.

The Marine Venus in the Rhodes Museum.  'The sea-water had sucked at her for centuries, till she was like some white stone jujube ... the absence of firm outline
only lent her a soft and confusing grace'.

Anyone reading Prospero's Cell about his pre-war years in Corfu would have guessed that those must have been the happiest years of Durrell's life.  Prospero's Cell sparkles with delight in the island and everyone he knew there, not least the seemingly wistful figure of N, his first wife Nancy, who appears like a sylph in its pages. For good measure Durrell writes in The Greek Islands that 'Corfu and Cyprus are much more beautiful' than Rhodes.

But he was happiest in Rhodes. Happy that the war was over, happy that he had left Egypt, happy that he was back in Greece.  But most of all happily in love with Eve.  Eve said the same; they shared love and happiness in Rhodes, a happiness that Durrell recalled many years later despite the final disaster of his marriage to Eve.  Paradise for Durrell was Rhodes with Eve, not Nancy and Corfu. Yet oddly Reflections on a Marine Venus lacks that beauty and lightness of touch and subtlety and sadness that imbue Prospero's Cell.  The reason is probably very simple: Durrell was too busy living happily to waste his time writing about happiness.

Prospero's Cell, published in 1945, had been written in Alexandria in the immediate breakup of his marriage to Nancy.  Reflections on a Marine Venus took longer to write and was published only in 1953. But what Durrell did complete on Rhodes was a light book about people getting lost in a labyrinth, unable to escape.  During his last months in Alexandria and when he came to live in Rhodes he wrote Cefalu, published in 1947, later republished as The Dark Labyrinth.  The second lot up for auction at Sotheby's included a first edition of this too, inscribed in 1974. 'Human life is a damnable labyrinth out of which one never escapes.'

Human life is a damnable labyrinth out of which one never escapes.

That was one of Durrell's major themes, a gnostic notion that can be found in his notebooks already in the 1930s and which grows over time and dominates his thinking.  It is there in The Alexandria Quartet - the seductiveness of the city yet the need to escape, which his hero Darley finally manages to do because he has become a true writer at last, a creator, a person who knows how to play - divine play. 

But later the notion becomes oppressive, the attempts at play more desperate - in The Avignon Quintet, for all its multiple and dissolving and intertwining and infinitely begating characters, nobody escapes.

Montségur, last bastion of the Cathars. When they surrendered 220 Cathars were burnt en masse on the lower slope of the mount.

The key to Durrell is to understand why life seemed to envelop him in a lie. His anger and his resolve against the lie is palpable in his forward to the 1977 English translation of Jacques Lacarriere's The Gnostics, a people 'whose total refusal to believe in the world as outlined by the Christian theologians led to their destruction both in Egypt and in Bosnia, and lastly at Montségur, that Thermopylae of the Cathar soul'.  Lacarriere's book, wrote Durrell, possessed a 'burning topicality to a world which is also playing at Gnosticism - the pathetic cockroach world of the anti-hero with his anti-memoirs, not to mention his anti-poetry.  How noble in comparison with this shallow hippy defeatism is the grand poetic challenge of the Gnostics.  They refused to countenance a world which was less than perfect, and they affronted the great lie of Lucifer-Mammon with the hopeless magnificance of the Spartan three hundred'.

Durrell carried this gnostic sensibility around with him, and he was the one person he could not escape. But he may have made a mistake in settling in Provence.  For all its brightness and life, there is something dark about it, a darkness that Durrell explored in The Avignon Quintet through the Cathars and the Templars, both victims of what he called 'the gas chambers of the pope'.  Durrell might have been happier staying in Greece.   

A table waiting at the White House, Durrell's home in Kalami, Corfu.

Lawrence Durrell's Justine: The 'Final' Typescript

Sotheby's on New Bond Street.

Today I went to New Bond Street to visit Sotheby's, the auction house.  Tomorrow they are auctioning some books and papers to do with Lawrence Durrell that include what Sotheby's describes as the 'final typescript' of Durrell's novel Justine, the first volume of The Alexandria Quartet.

I thought I had seen every stage in Durrell's writing of Justine, starting with the notebook he called Notes for Alex, begun in Alexandria in 1944 - though one could go back before that, to a 1938 notebook written up in London, his originally intended setting for what he was then calling The Book of the Dead, set in Bloomsbury specifically.

I also thought I had seen the final working typescript of Justine, a typed-out version of the novel on which Durrell added some hand-written notes and from which a clean typescript would have been produced and handed over to Faber and Faber, his publisher.  So what was this so-called final typescript about?  I had to go and see.

A page of the so-called final typescript with Durrell's handwritten alterations, early 1956.

I compared the typescript to Faber and Faber's first edition of Justine, but any edition will do.  Take for example the typescript page 229 (see above); Nessim and Melissa are making love; a few pages later we come to the climax of the novel, the duck shoot on Lake Mareotis.  This typescript page corresponds to pages 204-5 of the Faber edition of Justine (both hardback and original paperback versions), and to page 166 of the four-volume-in-one Faber edition of The Alexandria Quartet, hardback and paperback.

If you look at the top paragraph of the typescript and count nine lines down you come to the sentence which originally read, 'They lay together for a long time in trembling silence'. Durrell alters that in red ink, so that it now reads, 'They lay together for a long time in perfect silence seeking through the darkness of their feelings for the way forward'.  And that is exactly as that sentence appears in the first edition of Justine (see the top of page 205 below).

The corresponding part of Justine, first Faber edition 1957.

But look at page 205 of the first edition again and you will notice that before 'They lay together ...' it says 'nakedness always gave her fulness and balance: the craft she lacked in the cabaret'.  That is what it says in the book, but it does not say that in the typescript.  Durrell would cut everything before 'They lay together', but he did not do it in this tyepescript; he did it in the final working typescript, the one I have seen and which is in the British Library.

Therefore Sotheby's is mistaken in describing this as the final typescript of Justine.  A simple comparison of the typescript with the published novel would have revealed that.

The carelessness does not end there.  The Sotheby's catalogue describes the typescript as 'seemingly lacking six leaves'.  But the typescript ends just before the duck shoot when there are still another forty pages of the published novel to come; 'lacking sixty leaves' would more accurately have described the typescript.

All the same, the truncated typescript being auctioned tomorrow is a valuable document because it allows anyone studying how Durrell composed Justine to see yet another stage that he went through.

In fact one of the most remarkable things about Durrell's composition of Justine is how much of the shaping took place in the last stages, as here in the typescript being auctioned by Sotheby's, and that so many of the most memorable lines and passages were composed at almost the last moment, written in by hand onto the final working typescript held by the British Library.

Basalt bust of the Egyptian goddess Sekhmet above the entrance to Sotheby's.  They have dated it to about 1320 BC and in this they are at least close enough.  It is the oldest outdoor monument in London.  It has been a Sotheby's trophy ever since the 1880s when it was sold at auction for £40 but the buyer failed to collect.

Japanese Edition of Inferno Decoded

インフェルノ・デコーデッド

The Japanese edition of Michael Haag's Inferno Decoded has been published by Kadokawa Corporation.

In fact it was published late last year but I have only just received my author's copies. For me the lettering adds another dimension of mystery to the cover; it will take me forever to decode the Japanese.

British, American, French, Italian and Brazilian editions have already been published. There are still Polish, Chinese and Estonian editions to come.

Alexandria's Hotel Cecil

Alessandro Loria, Alexandrian architect.

In a city whose architecture was playfully eclectic, no one played over such a variety of styles as Alessandro Loria, an Italian Jew from Tuscany who built the Italian Hospital at 3 Rue du Palais to the east of the Rond Point (now Sharia Dalal Dessouki off Midan Wabour el Maya); the Jewish Hospital at 40 Rue Moharrem Bey; and the National Bank of Egypt with its mosaic medallions and ascending arabesques on the Rue Talaat Harb in the centre of town.  

The one-time Lido House Hotel designed by Loria.

Loria also built several of the most delightful buildings along the sweep of the Eastern Harbour, including the Venetian-style Lido House Hotel. Long since given over to offices and rented rooms, the one-time Lido's crumbling though delicate tracery of arches and its intricately patterned coloured brickwork still lend the Corniche a carnival air. 

But Alessandro Loria most famously left his mark on the city with the Hotel Cecil, a crenellated moorish palace overlooking the Eastern Harbour near the Italian consulate. 

Alessandro Loria's Hotel Cecil in the 1930s.

Loria was commissioned to build the hotel by Albert Metzger, a Jew from Alsace who during the First World War had discovered the inconvenience of having a German passport and therefore being an enemy alien and had since become a British citizen.  When he opened his hotel in 1929, Metzger at first called it the Regina Palace but within a year renamed it the Cecil. It was immediately recognised as the finest hotel in Alexandria, and for Lawrence Durrell 'it was always preferable to Cairo's Shepheard's Hotel because of its proximity to the sea'.

The Cecil became a recurrent landmark in The Alexandria Quartet where Justine 'would perhaps be waiting, gloved hands folded on her handbag, staring out through the windows upon which the sea crawled and sprawled, climbing and subsiding, across the screen of palms in the little municipal square which flapped and creaked like loose sails'.

The entrance to the Cecil today.

The hotel figures also in Miramar, Naguib Mahfouz’ 1967 novel set in Alexandria.  ‘From my balcony at the Cecil I cannot see the Corniche unless I lean out over the railing.  It’s like being on a ship.  The sea sprawls right below me.  ... The sea.  Its guts churn with flotsam and secret death.’

The Hotel Cecil was seized by the Egyptian government after Nasser’s coup d’etat in 1952, and five years later the Metzger family was expelled from the country. In 2007, after a lengthy court battle, legal ownership of the hotel was returned to the Metzgers, who subsequently sold it back to the Egyptian government who now lease it to the French hotel chain Sofitel.

But why did Metzger call his hotel the Cecil?  The explanation is found in London where the Hotel Cecil, larger even than the Savoy, was built in the 1890s between the Thames Embankment and the Strand on land that had recently been sold by Lord Salisbury, the Prime Minister, whose family name was Cecil.  Even larger than the Savoy, the Cecil was the largest hotel in Europe when it opened, with more than eight hundred rooms. 

London's Hotel Cecil was largely demolished in 1930 and Shell Mex House was built on the site. Shell Mex has since moved and the building is known as 80 Strand. The Strand facade of the hotel remains, now occupied by shops and offices, while at its centre a grandiose arch leads to the 80 Strand building proper which, among other things, has become the headquarters of the Penguin publishing group.

Hotels round the world named themselves the Cecil after the grand hotel in London. 

Delhi and Agra, Patras and Brussels and Seville, Los Angeles, Vichy and Tangier all had Hotel Cecils.

But Metzger had another and more cogent reason for naming his hotel the Cecil.  

Cleopatra's Needles in Alexandria, 1853. The standing one went to New York's Central Park; the one lying prone now stands on the Thames Embankment in London.

Just twenty years before the London Cecil was built, Cleopatra’s Needle was raised on the Thames Embankment.  A gift from the Egyptian government, the obelisk had originally been raised by Tuthmosis III at Heliopolis for sun worship but the Romans brought it to Alexandria where they erected it, along with another, in front of a temple that Cleopatra had begun for one lover, Julius Caesar, and completed in honour of another lover, Mark Antony.  

The Caesareum, as it was called, stood directly outside what is now Alexandria’s Hotel Cecil, while the obelisks themselves stood on the site of Alexandria’s Hotel Metropole.  One obelisk was given to the United States and now stands in New York’s Central Park, the other was given to Britain and now stands on the Thames Embankment.  

In this early 20th century photograph, London's Hotel Cecil is on the left, overlooking Cleopatra's Needle at the centre of the picture. 

1920s advertisement in Country Life
for London's Hotel Cecil.

For two thousand years Cleopatra’s Needles stood near Alexandria’s Cecil Hotel but now they are gone. How long London’s Cleopatra’s Needle will remain standing on the Thames Embankment remains to be seen.

Certainly London’s Hotel Cecil is long gone – except as a distant memory preserved in the name of Alexandria’s most famous hotel. 



For more about Alessandro Loria and Alexandria's Hotel Cecil, see Michael Haag's Vintage Alexandria and his Alexandria: City of Memory.

Camille Fox, Painter of Cosmopolitan Alexandria, Flies into London

The grounds of Kenwood House this afternoon.

Selfie of Camille, Michael and Tony
at Kenwood in London today.

It has been a beautiful day today in London, bright sun and blue skies and so warm that Camille Fox nearly expired and had to be seated in the shadow of a large umbrella on the dining terrace at Kenwood House where we had lunch.


Camille and her husband Tony are passing through London on their way to Sydney from New York where Camille opened an exhibition of her paintings, Memories of a Vanished Past, at the Artifact Gallery in Manhattan.

Camille was born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt; her childhood memories there and the stories of her parents have become the stuff of many of her most delightful paintings - which have also been inspired, I am pleased to say, by the photographs in my book Vintage Alexandria.

Click here for an earlier post on my blog about Camille.  The full range of Camille's paintings can be seen by clicking on her website here.  
 

Picnicking amidst mountains of flowers at Kenwood.

After lunch on the terrace at Kenwood House we went for a stroll in the grounds where seeming flocks of tropical birds - as the English become the moment there is a bit of sun - were flapping their wings, preening their feathers and feeding their young.

A Barbara Hepworth sculpture, Monolyth Empyrean,
in the grounds of Kenwood House.

I very much enjoy Camille's Egyptian paintings which capture with charm and humour the days when Alexandria was a cosmopolitan city. 

Athinaios, a famous restaurant and café along the Alexandrian Corniche.

Dancing at someplace like the Cecil or Monseigneur in Alexandria.

The Rialto Cinema, an Art Deco landmark in the Rue Safia Zaghloul, where Lawrence Durrell and his girlfriend Eve Cohen went to see Casablanca during the war, in 1943. Very recently, suddenly and covertly, the Rialto was torn down; another piece of Alexandria lost.

An afternoon on the Mediterranean in Ramleh.