I wrote this for Gourmet in May 1993. (The previous autumn, for just over six electrifying weeks, at my wonderful house in Kyrenia, Turkish Cyprus, I'd finally succeeded in writing a complete first draft of The Polish Lover, a short novel whose structure had troubled me for years. It was the most autobiographical of my novels, and ushered in the rest. My third book published, my first sold.) So Poland was much on my mind in those days.
Early one Kraków evening this spring, I was sitting in an outdoor café, in an enclosed courtyard just off the main square. Kraków has a richer café life than any other Polish city; it is a tradition here to while away easy hours at dozens of cafés, sipping coffee, sampling pastries, reading, talking, dreaming. This particular café's fountain ceased while a woman singer and her accordionist played. Next to me three girls sat sipping coffee and a bony young man in jeans came up and politely asked if he could read them poems. They listened courteously, amused, and just when he finished, the applause for the musicians coincided—had he timed it that way?—as applause for his poetry.
In Poland today all the poetry making itself heard at last seems a result of lucky timing.
Kraków’s poetry had been less bold, more subdued, when I was here 1985. It was winter, and the magnificent medieval city was wrapped in fog and a kind of ashen snow which owed as much to pollution from nearby factories as to the heavens. The people, too, seemed fogbound and brooding, waiting for a profound change in the political weather that seemed it might never come—not in their lifetimes nor those of their children.
This May I went back to see how Kraków had blossomed with the unexpected liberation from the Orwellian nightmare. Or come back into its own; for to many Kraków is as great a treasure as Venice. (UNESCO designated it one of the world’s twelve most significant historic sites.) The old city, the Stare Miasto, has a completeness and antique grace probably unmatched in Eastern Europe—about four square miles of Renaissance, Baroque, and Gothic houses and monuments, along with seventy-two churches, the largest medieval square on the continent, and one of the grandest royal palaces. Kraków was the capital of Poland for five and a half centuries, through the end of the “Golden” 16th century, and it has steadfastly remained the nation's spiritual and cultural heart, right through the turmoil of the last two centuries. (Nearly all Poland's kings are buried here, and many of her poets.) In the recent decade of Solidarity, Kraków's communist-era steelworks suburb, the massive Nowa Huta (New Foundry), became one of the centers of uprising.
A Polish visit seems to consist of lucky accidental meetings. In another café I fell into conversation with a Kraków-born, now Canadian financier who’d defected twenty years earlier and was at last back on business. He told me,"Kraków is a strange, unique place, like a combination of Vienna, Rome, and Budapest—walk in the middle of the night and the streets feel old, solid, and calm—and almost mystical. You know, during the communist years of government parcelled out money for ‘cultural support’ all over the country. To Kraków they gave zero, nothing. They didn't have to. This city is different—its people were too intellectual to be manipulated like common workers or farmers. They never gave in."
In spring all Kraków was out strolling the Planty, the narrow belt of park that surrounds the old city—Poles always seem to be walking, not stuck in offices. Though Kraków managed to survive the Nazis without being bombed once, in nearly every other century it has endured attack after attack. Just past my hotel, entering the old city at the corner of Florianska Street I found the 19th and 20th century parts of the city confronting the medieval in the form of old city walls, an impressive series of turreted 15th century battlements known as the Gate of Glory. Back then the city was double walled, with a broad moat, seven gates, and forty-seven towers—with good reason, for during the Middle Ages alone, Tartar hordes attacked Kraków 91 times, followed by Germans, Russians, Cossacks, Turks, and Swedes. Several medieval towers still stand, bearing their traditional names: the Haberdashers’, the Carpenters’, the Joiners’.
The city grew up around the 8th century by the banks of Wisla (Vistula) River along important trade routes, and became the capital in 1038. In the 14th century King Kazimierz magnified its importance with two acts: the founding of the university, and giving Jews the right to live in Poland. (The once-Jewish quarter of the city was named after him.) Always more worldly, stylish, intellectual, and culturally adept than Warsaw, for several centuries Kraków became a prominent center of culture and learning in Europe; Montaigne spoke of it as lying between Athens and Rome. Its Jagiellonian University (whose most famous student was Copernicus) could attract students from Germany, Italy, England, and France. Today the oldest university in Poland, around it prestigious fine arts, music, polytechnic, and mining academies have grown up, and Kraków still has much of the feel of a medieval university town, a center of learning and argument and art. The late Tadeusz Kantor operated his avant-garde theater company from Kraków; and the renowned composer Krzysztof Penderecki lives here, along with the science fiction writer, Stanislaw Lem; diverse arts festivals are frequent.
After the capital was moved to Warsaw in 1596, and Kraków was sacked by invading Swedes in the mid-17th century, the city began a steady commercial decline. Incorporated into the Austrian-Hungarian Empire, it enjoyed an artistic and intellectual revival around the turn-of-the-century, located politically and artistically around the university. (Joseph Conrad spent his childhood in Kraków.) At that time the "Queen of Poland" was actually the Virgin Mary; the partitioned nation lived on officially as a whole only in the Church.
Poland's losses in the Second World War are well-known—one Pole in five died, and the Nazis did their best to erase utterly Warsaw. Though most of Kraków’s architecture survived, its human losses were enormous and the damage impossible to assess. All schools, at every level, were closed for five years. University professors, doctors, writers, artists, architects, priests, or government officials were automatically sent to death camps and their crematoriums. The Academy lost seventy members, murdered by the Nazis; a fifth of Kraków's teachers were deported and killed, and a quarter of the writers' union. Even Chopin's music was banned from performance.
Old Kraków is, really, a living architectural museum (despite the ecological ravage of Soviet-era factories). I have heard its proportions put at 25% Gothic, 30% Baroque, and 40% Renaissance. It contains a number of museums, the most remarkable being the collection of the 18th-century Princess Izabella of the Czartoryski family, who were collectors on a grand scale throughout Europe for generations. The Czartoryski Palace, near the Gate of Glory, contains an Ottoman tent and chess sets, 17th century tapestries, numerous portraits and Spanish chests; old armor, swords, shields, spears, cannon, and other fighting equipment from several countries, including a wide selection of Ottoman cavalry battle gear captured at the Battle of Vienna; ornate European and Oriental glassware; contemporary miniatures of Rousseau, Napoleon, and Ben Franklin; memorabilia of the Polish kings, ancient pottery, gilded sofas, and Polish porcelain. Best of all are a hall of religious paintings from the early 14th century on, a gloriously incandescent Leonardo (Lady Holding an Ermine), and a Rembrandt (Landscape with the Good Samaritan).
I made a leisurely walk down Florianska Street my morning ritual. There was always a group of five or six Gypsy musicians—violin, guitar, accordion—enjoying a cigarette and a plaintive tune and basking in the sunlight. A few art students had hung hundreds of paintings on the rough stone walls. One young man was selling earrings ingeniously made from bits of broken Soviet watches, a very Polish commentary on the current situation.
“They break, we make,” he said.
The Jama Michalika at 45 Florianska Street—since 1895, one of the most culturally important coffee-houses of Europe—is my ideal of an indoor café: a cavernous sanctuary in dark wood and comfortable armchairs, with three large but intimate rooms of progressively less light, crowded with paintings by illustrious former patrons, many of them young painters from the nearby Academy of Fine Arts who couldn’t afford to pay their bill and swapped art for confectionery. Beneath the chandeliers and the turn-of-the-century caricatures and the glass-cased, handmade marionettes, comforted by the moderately risqué stained-glass windows, in shadowy corners enlightened by inexhaustible pastry, eternal tea, and unending coffee with cream or chocolate, attended by the patient adoring waitresses, you can sit for hours and let the world recede.
The Rynek Glowny is one of those rare European squares which has been allowed to carry on all the classic functions of a square. Flagstoned, ordered by dignified houses and a monumental church, it draws you inevitably and absorbs your days. Because cars are all but forbidden in the Old City, the Rynek still belongs to people on foot, and partly because the development of the rest of Kraków has been slow, the square has never lost its status; it hasn't yet been superseded by the sprawl or ambiguity of a modern city’s growth.
Dating from 1257, in many ways the square remains medieval—it hasn't given way yet to Venetian-style tourist-touts or postcard vendors. (In early morning you can watch flower-sellers out pumping water by hand, as they have for centuries.) Every Pole can tell you that here the nationalist leader Tadeusz Kosciuszko made his call for unity and independence in 1794 when the country was partitioned between Russia, Austria, and Prussia. Most of all, the Rynek attracts people, which is the first purpose of a square. The square has everything: underground Italian restaurants, cabarets and theaters, a jazz club, bookstores, music shops, leather and clothing stores, even a Chanel boutique nearby. Here all Kraków sooner or later passes, shops, and congregates, from before dawn until late at night, when the last nightclub, theater, or café shuts.
The Market Square, irregular in shape, is dominated by the long central Cloth Hall (Sukiennice), built during the Renaissance: a rectangular arcade of pale yellow stone and brick of symmetrical balconies, turrets, Moorish arches, columns, and sculpted heads looking down on the bustling flower-carts below. Arrayed on its ground floor are cafés and stalls of wood-, leather- and woolen-goods sellers. Upstairs is a museum of 19th-century Polish art, useful because one sees easily in the old paintings how little the square has changed. Nearby a weathered dark clock tower rises, all that remains of an old municipal hall, with a satirical theater downstairs.
For me the most astonishing element of the “new” Poland is the explosion of art galleries everywhere. Kraków had at least a dozen art galleries worth exploring; it is difficult to believe that all these artists had, of course, nowhere to sell their work until the last couple of years. The widest selection of contemporary art I saw was at Galeria Art in Warsaw (ul. Krakówskie Przedmiescie 15/17), but in combination all Kraków’s galleries could rival it. They aren't difficult to find, but good starting points are Piano Noble at # 33 on the main square and Jan Fejkiel Gallery at #36 Florianska. For the best selection of local “naive” woodcarvings and religious figurines, try Galeria Camelot, ul. Tomasza 17.
Poland has had a richness of artists in many mediums for some time, but until recently the principal medium of public expression that was permitted was its poster art for films and theater—the most exciting in Europe for thirty years and equal to Paris’ at the turn-of-the-century. The “extra” posters from a national collection are available in Kraków at the Galeria Plakatu, ul. Stolarska 8-10, (and also at a similar gallery in the square of Warsaw’s Old City).
St. Mary's, on the Market Square, is to my mind one of the most magnificent Gothic churches in Europe; a Polish architect assured me it was the only Gothic church on the continent with no flying buttresses. In any case, its symbolic importance to Poles is incalculable. Founded in 1222, later destroyed by the Tartars, and rebuilt beginning in 1355, from the outside its appearance is appropriately military, with uneven towers topped with spires like raised spears, and even a crown and helmet. Every Polish schoolchild knows the story behind the trumpeter who, from the tallest tower, heralds each hour with a plaintive broken-off solo. This echoes the legendary 13th-century herald who, warning of a Tartar invasion, received an arrow in the throat in mid-note. For a country so often (and recently) invaded, condemned by location to be forever a buffer state, the story has enormous resonance.
To walk into St. Mary's is like entering a shadowy mountain pass with sunlight breaking through at the far end. Little inside is later than the 15th century: dark Gothic pockets of stone, carved wood, bursts of color in 500-year-old stained glass, black chandeliers, vaulting ceilings of blue and gold. All is faded, but built to withstand time. Arches upon arches culminate in the high altar, where at noon every day a nun armed with a long poker opens the dark triptych cover to reveal panel upon panel in gilded and ornately sculpted wood. (It is closed at six each evening.)
The Roman Catholic Church created in many ways the nation’s soul back in the Middle Ages, and much of the power of that initial creation still survives as a living force at St. Mary’s. About 90% of Poles are Catholic, and during the communist years the Church was the only national organization that didn’t have Soviet advisers attached to it. (Pope John Paul II was formerly Archbishop of Kraków.) And yet in the light of today’s independence, the Church’s power may be slightly on the wane, at least to a young generation; with freedom, it has lost one of its roles. A fashionable young woman running an art gallery remarked to me that the Church was clinging so tightly to its power these days that it was in danger of becoming yet another form of indoctrination. This view was echoed by several other young Poles I spoke to—perhaps part of the Polish tendency to argue with whatever seems to represent the established order at the time.
One evening after dinner I went to the Piwnica Pod Baranami in the corner building of a related name, (Palac pod Baranami, which means Palace Under the Rams—a center for tickets to many cultural events and a good stop in planning one’s evening out). Three decades old, the theater-cabaret, thought by many the finest in Poland, was underground, with still a slightly dissenting university-pranks air about it, held in a room like a medieval castle cellar packed to overflowing. There were songs, bits of inverted theater, jokes, poetry. Because I understood little of it I kept wandering out to the bar, where a few dozen people had come to drink and drink in the underground ambience of the place. Everything verbal was lost on me, since I don’t speak Polish, but I recommend it as a quick entry into a very particular and important aspect of the local culture—to see Cracovians being their inventive, sociable selves, and in the late 20th century. (The cabaret performances take place Thursday and Saturday nights around 10 p.m., but get there at least a half hour earlier for good seats.)
Erasmus called Poland “the country of the scholars,” and Kraków’s feel is still very much that of a university town. Many of those cafés flourish because there are so many young people to read and argue in them, and those nearer the university have a different mood than those on the square. “What I love about Kraków,” a Renaissance literature student told me, “is that so many cafés are still underground.” Her pun was deliberate.
I spent nearly an hour visiting the Jagiellonian University collection, in the Gothic-era Collegium Maius building, five minutes’ walk from the square. (You need to book a place on a guided tour in the morning, or better, a day before.) The great treasure here is a fairly small 16th-century clock in the shape of a world globe, the first to indicate America, “a newly discovered land,” small and right where it should be, next to Madagascar.
I hired a taxi for two unrelated expeditions one afternoon, through a countryside of fields and small brick-and-stone houses with slant roofs, rather like a poor version of Italy. It was only twenty-odd miles from Kraków to Auschwitz and Birkenau, the Nazi death camps where about four million people from over twenty European nations were murdered, two and a half million of them Jews. For personal reasons I had intended not to go; I am grateful I went, but I suggest that people think through carefully whether they truly want the experience or not. I will not do it the indignity of a brief description other than to say that to visit those two vast machines of death is the psychological equivalent of walking into a blowtorch. Nobody can see them and emerge unchanged.
The other expedition, as a kind of spiritual antidote, was to the salt mines at Wieliczka, only nine miles south of Kraków. The property of the kings of Poland, they have been in operation since the end of the 13th century. An 18th-century wag called them “as remarkable as the Pyramids and more useful”; they are surely one of the man-made wonders of the world. The mines reach 1200 feet underground, but a visitor descends on foot only some sixty-odd floors and emerges into wide and airy corridor upon corridor of what seems a soft gray stone—in fact salt. Here and there run tracks horses once pulled carriages of salt. More astonishing are the worried steps cut into the cavern-walls where, until the end of the 19th century, the salt was extracted by hammer and pick and carried up on men’s backs. Now it’s extracted by chemical solutions and mechanically lifted to the surface.
But one doesn’t go to this trouble to visit a mine. What these contain, unforgettably, are chapels going back three hundred years cut out of the salt walls so the fervent miners could worship every day. Here are larger-than-life statues of saints, kings, and elves, all carved by ordinary miners out of the dark gray salt, and so unexpected they take on the strangeness of a science-fiction film. These culminate, at nearly 400 feet underground, in an enormous high-ceilinged chapel, cathedral-like in scale, hung with three chandeliers of translucent salt and lined with sculpted statues and murals: the Nativity, the Last Supper, the passage from Bethlehem. The entire chapel was carved by three miners over the course of forty-five years, beginning at the end of the nineteenth century. No photographs can do it justice: it must be seen to be believed.
Led on a walking tour by a small and detailed guidebook, I spent another afternoon exploring the Kazimierz, formerly the Jewish quarter of Kraków, in search of echoes of one side of my family heritage. It lies just south of the Wawel Castle, an easy walk from the Old City. Before the war there were about seventy thousand Jews here; most were killed by the Nazis, and fewer than two hundred Jews remain in Kraków now, with only one of the several surviving synagogues still active—the Remuh, with one of the oldest Jewish cemeteries in Europe. Despite my guidebook’s enthusiasm, I sadly found little evocative of the community that flourished here once, and I considered it a wasted afternoon, though others might find more. For somebody intent on touching as much of that heritage as possible, the place to visit is the 15th-century Old Synagogue on Szeroka Street, now a careful museum of the history and culture of Kraków’s Jews. Inquire about its opening days and hours first, which vary according to season.
If any one building is the heart of the Polish nation, which at times over the centuries has ceased to exist as a cartographical entity, it is Wawel Hill, with its castle and cathedral, essentially unchanged for five centuries and beneath which many of Poland’s poets and monarchs are buried. Now they are a museum, and their importance can be gleaned from the fact that there are always even more Polish visitors than foreigners. The castle part of the museum is more palace than fortress, of a stately architecture outside and a royal splendor inside. The Polish kings ruled from here from the 11th to 16th centuries, and much remains, despite those innumerable invasions—the Swedes burned it, the Russians occupied it, the Prussians plundered it, and the Austrians tried to demolish it. The worst indignity was its use as seat of the Nazi General Government from 1939 to 1945—and yet this is probably what saved Kraków from the architectural destruction that Warsaw received. Here are room after room of rare tapestries, gilded and painted scenic ceilings, lavish Baroque furniture, and even a Renaissance trio filling one room with 16th- and 17th-century music.
The 14th-century Cathedral—“the sanctuary of the nation” as the Polish Pope has said—seems crammed with history, austere, dignified, dark, and noble. Here are enormous tapestries, steep and muscular stone columns; silver and marble sarcophagi; a sense of deep determination, but not the open exultation of St. Mary’s. All but four of Poland’s forty-five monarchs are entombed in the many side chapels, near illuminated texts and treasured royal artifacts. From the tower above is the finest view of Kraków; in the crypts below the tombs of the poet Adam Mickiewicz and the leader Tadeusz Kosciuszko.
In any other country this might seem mostly irrelevant to a visiting foreigner. In Kraków, to wander alongside little Polish schoolchildren, to see the reverence with which they are instructed in the distant past and the recent, that experience seems to sum up the passion and determination that lies beneath the vibrant poetry and life of all those cafés, the strollers in that square, the poetry in those preserved houses which have waited too many generations to be owned and looked after by their own people.
Saturday, May 8, 1993
Saturday, April 3, 1993
Happy Birthday, 007: James Bond at Forty
Written for Forbes-FYI in 1993.
Forty years have passed since Ian Fleming’s James Bond first put on evening dress and strode into the casino of our collective imagination. In 1953 a lucky British public first glimpsed 007 standing alone by a roulette wheel (where else?) amid the elegant baroque of the casino at Royale-Les-Eaux, observing the enemy:
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling—a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension—becomes unbearable, and the senses awake and revolt from it. James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired. He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough, and he always acted on the knowledge…”
From the opening pages of Casino Royale, 007 had it all: the sophistication we envied, the danger we dreamed of, the girls we desired, the life we wanted. The fingerprints of Fleming’s style—an apparent worldliness, a precise sense of physical sensation, the urgency of the man alone—were already there. By the time Fleming died in 1964, he’d created in fourteen books a mythological hero, one of the greats of the century, for Bond is part Sherlock Holmes, part Indiana Jones. And though the Bond films will probably go on forever and a series of book sequels has already gone on too long, we should celebrate his anniversary by looking fondly back at the original: the British secret agent licensed not only to kill but virtually print money. How, after all this time and nearly a hundred million copies sold, do Ian Fleming’s novels measure up? Can an outdated book-Bond ever hope to withstand an up-to-date film-Bond?
There is an enormous difference, of course. The films, which started as faithful adaptations of the books, became excursions into literally outer space. (Over half the earth’s population has seen at least one Bond movie, for those who are keeping track.) Film-Bond turned into a secret agent version of Superman, wearing a tux instead of a cape and destroying his enemies with quips and gadgetry. Sean Connery’s finesse aside, book-Bond—the archetype—remains a more complex character, and his exploits human and attainable.
What stuns the most, going back to the Fleming canon, is the books’ hypnotic power—a sheer drive and compelling readability that overcome the dull patches, Bond’s total lack of humor, and many implausibilities. (M. always seems to send our man into the teeth of an enemy who know every detail of his movements.) This headlong tension may partly be the result of the novels always being written quickly; they often seem less planned than vividly dreamt.
Eric Ambler, arguably the finest thriller writer of all, told me a couple of years ago that he thought the Bond books “definitely deserve to be read as literature.” Anthony Burgess went further: he called Goldfinger one of the 99 best novels in English since 1939, describing Bond as a “patriotic lecher with a tinge of Scottish puritanism in him, a gourmand and amateur of vodka martinis, a smoker of strong tobacco who does not lose his wind…against…megalomaniacs.”
Who, then, is James Bond? A civil servant, probably born 1924; entered the employ of the Ministry of Defence at age seventeen, went to work for the Secret Service (M.I. 6) after the war. He performs his duties, according to M., “with outstanding bravery and distinction” though “with a streak of foolhardy.” He likes his eggs boiled for precisely three and a third minutes, and definitely smokes too much, a blend of Balkan and Turkish tobaccos custom-made for him; each cigarette bears three gold bands. (At three packs a day, they must crowd his suitcase on long assignments.) He stands a little over six feet, weighs about 167 pounds; he lives in a comfortable flat in a square off the King’s Road in Chelsea, London, on an income (mid-Fifties) of about $4,200 a year. He has few friends. Several women notice a resemblance to Hoagy Carmichael, though it’s hard to see this in “the dark, rather cruel good looks” or “the thin vertical scar down his right cheek” or the “coldness and hint of anger in his grey-blue eyes.”
He is, however, emphatically not a spy: his job never involves stealing state secrets, blueprints for weapons, plans of invasion, etc. (The closest he comes to traditional espionage is receiving a stolen Russian cipher machine.) He is a secret agent, a loaded gun sent out to enact the will of his government without being caught. His ancestors are neither the actual Sigmund Rosemblum (“Reilly, Ace of Spies”) or John Buchan’s fictional Richard Hannay (The 39 Steps), but Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond, or Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden.
Despite some tentative passages—Fleming grew considerably as a writer in the first few books—Casino Royale still stands up as one of the best 007 novels. Bond has been sent to the slightly faded French casino by M. to win a 50 million franc game of baccarat against Le Chiffre, paymaster of Smersh, the Soviet organization for counterespionage abroad (Fleming’s version of one sector of the KGB). The prose is uneven but always vividly detailed; scene after scene are imprinted on the memory: Le Chiffre’s “obscene” benzedrine inhaler and the carpet-beater which he used to torture Bond genitally. The precise gestures of the card-games—no one has ever bettered Fleming at conveying the mano-a-mano drama of “polite” competitions like golf, bridge, vingt-et-un. The two Bulgar assassins blown up by a camera bomb (based on a real event from the war.) And cool, dark-haired Vesper Lynd, first of the Bond heroines, “with a touch of ironical disinterest which, to his annoyance, he found he would like to shatter roughly.”
The book, published by Jonathan Cape with a first printing of 4,750, was generally applauded by the British critics and sold well enough for a second printing. The Listener hailed it as “supersonic John Buchan,” the Sunday Times called it “an extremely engaging affair” and said Fleming could become the best new English thriller writer since Ambler if he could make his work more probable. The Spectator found it “lively, most ingenious in detail…except for a too ingeniously sadistic bout of brutality…” A year later, when the novel came out in the USA, it fared worse, and sales were poor. Anthony Boucher, who never cared much for Bond, wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Fleming “pads the book out to novel length, leading to an ending which surprises no one but Bond himself.” He did, however, admire the gambling scenes.
Thereafter a new Bond book appeared each spring—at the tail-end of the British Empire and the beginning of the British welfare state. Bond would prove a welcome antidote to both conditions. An independent, powerful Everyman who often sweats at the idea of his plane crashing, he is tied down to neither one setting, nor one woman, though he remains selflessly loyal to his country and gallant toward the heroine of each book. (The film formula of three lovelies per adventure, with one discarded or dead, one definitely dead, and one prize in his arms at the end, does not occur in the novels. Likewise, the gadgetry: the only sophisticated toys in the books are a few minor modifications to Bond’s Aston Martin in Goldfinger, and Nash’s lethal copy of Tolstoy in From Russia, With Love.)
The world of the books, then, is not that of John Le Carré, who crested the sixties’ 007 wave with his complex heightened realism, nor of Ambler’s cold, neutral political savvy. We are far from Philby’s treason or Graham Greene’s drab truths, and much closer to a romantic era of the Scarlet Pimpernel and even Gilbert & Sullivan. Bond is, no doubt, our last hero burdened with the weighty myth of empire.
Fleming himself, well after success arrived in spades, defended his creation thus: “Bond is not a hero, nor is he depicted as being very likeable or admirable…He’s not a bad man, but he is ruthless and self-indulgent. He enjoys the fight—he also enjoys the prizes. In fiction, people used to have blood in their veins. Nowadays they have pond water. My books are just out of step. But then so are all the people who read them…intelligent, uninhibited adolescents of all ages, in trains, aeroplanes and beds….”
As the poet Phillip Larkin points out, what strikes one first about the novels today is “their unambiguous archaic decency. So far from being orgies of sex and sadism, as some outraged academics protested at the time, the books are nostalgic excursions…England is always right, foreigners are always wrong…Girls are treated with kindness and consideration, lust coming a decorous third. Life’s virtues are courage and loyalty, and its good things a traditional aristocracy of powerful cars, vintage wines, exclusive clubs, the old Times, the old five-pound note, the old Player’s packet.”
Indeed, the only double agent I can find is Vesper Lynd, who obliges the secret service and Bond by committing suicide. (“The bitch is dead now.”) Villains are always foreign: Russians, Bulgars, Germans, Koreans, Mexicans, Corsicans, Chinese, Yugoslavs. And they are always memorable: Doctor No with his metal hands and a heart on the wrong side of his body, Auric Goldfinger with his flaming red hair and mania for gold, Blofeld with his clinical love of death in all its forms, Sir Hugo Drax with his courtly manners and his cheating at cards. Sometimes, of course, these foreign villains try to pass themselves off as British. They always fail.
When Ian Lancaster Fleming (1908-1964) built a simple house called Goldeneye above a private cove near the tiny banana port of Oracabessa on Jamaica’s north coast, he was hardly a writer. After a respectable war career in Naval Intelligence (his duties resembled M.’s rather than 007’s), he settled down to the London world of journalism, with the proviso that he be given two months' leave each winter. He would spend every winter at Goldeneye from 1946 until his death. “Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it.” It was on his seventh sojourn that Fleming conjured his secret agent, the man of action who was really a vicarious dream-self.
Of Scot ancestry (like Bond) Fleming had been a top athlete on the playing fields of Eton (like Bond) but never graduated (ditto). Without his father around—killed in WWI—and outshone by his elder brother Peter (the explorer who wrote one of the great travel books of the thirties, Brazilian Adventure), Ian already had a reputation for women and cars by the time he dismissed himself from Sandhurst, England’s West Point, after only one term. Like many writers in the process of forming, there was a good deal of the actor in him. In the Austrian Tyrol, then Geneva and Munich, he skied and played at being a young intellectual on the way to a career in the Foreign Office—but failed the exam. He saw Moscow as a young Reuters correspondent. By 1933 he was back in London at one of the better brokerage houses. There he stayed until the war.
Despite claims Fleming made after the Bond wave hit, his war career in Naval Intelligence, as assistant to Admiral Godfrey, was mainly administrative. (Fleming apparently came to believe—or at least convinced a few very close friends—that he’d actually had to kill an enemy agent on a secret mission, either by sandbagging him, or with a concealed revolver, or a mysterious black hat, or by drowning. This acting went too far to be mere play; he had authorial photos taken posing with a gun like Bond’s while vaguely claiming the books were based on his own experiences—“my autobiography” he half-joked.) A colleague recalled him in the war years as a “young fashionable man about town…fastidious about dress, which the old salts of the Admiralty viewed with scorn.” After the war he landed a plum job, as Foreign Manager for The Sunday Times.
That same fastidiousness flavors the novels; part of their early success was due to their cultivated veneer of sophisticated knowledge. This was Fleming the journalist at work, going to expert sources for his information, for as many friends pointed out, it was hard to think of a single subject on which he was truly expert.
All this time he was known for his philandering ways: he was far less protective towards women than Bond. His brother’s success and his own past as something of a black sheep still followed him. If he could not quite be a successful man of action, he could invent one. As John Pearson puts it in his perceptive biography of Fleming, “when [Bond] looks at himself in the mirror…we see just how closely Fleming identifies himself…James Bond is simply Ian Fleming daydreaming in the third person.” Pearson makes the point firmly: Bond is essentially “this odd man’s weird obsession with himself.”
When Fleming finally fell it was for another man’s wife, Lady Anne Rothermere. Soon Fleming was nicknamed “Lady Rothermere’s fan” in Fleet Street circles; her husband was a newspaper magnate. And in late January 1952, with ten weeks of Jamaican sunshine before marriage at the end of his bachelorhood, he sat down in front of a battered Royal portable and brought James Bond to life. Can it be mere coincidence that, just as Bond dreams of asking the book’s heroine, Vesper, to marry him, she frees him by committing suicide? For that matter, the novels’ villains (usually physically repugnant, as if seen through a child’s eyes) often treat Bond in a fatherly way—and Fleming, as a boy, called his authoritative mother “M.”
Casino Royale, utterly unplanned, took Fleming barely two months. At forty-three he had written fictionally not so much as a short story. The hero’s name was appropriated from “one of my Jamaican bibles, Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, an ornithological classic,” he once wrote. “I wanted the simples, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find. James Bond seemed perfect.”
Despite strong British reviews, the first few novels sold only moderately well in England and struggled in the States. But following the 1956 Suez Crisis, the visit of soon-to-be Prime Minister Anthony Eden to Goldeneye for a rest brought a flurry of attention to Fleming and Bond in the U.K., and the snowball began rolling. A similar exposure occurred when President Kennedy named From Russia, With Love as one his ten favorite books in 1961.
In our violent times it’s difficult to see how the books could have shocked: they pall beside the vindictive sadism of, say, Mickey Spillane, and Bond takes his fair share of the suffering. A list of 007’s injuries includes nerve poisoning, having his genitals mangled, his hand carved up, his little finger broken, a shoulder gnawed by a barracuda, and his spine rubberized by a traction machine, plus assorted knife wounds, burns, and the odd bullet. Unlike today’s screen heros, when Bond gets hurt he goes to hospital.
In the course of the novels he is hurt so repeatedly it’s a wonder he can manage to please women at all, much less those as demanding as Pussy Galore, Solitaire Latrelle, Tiffany Case, Honeychile Rider, and Tatiana Romanova. The books’ heroines are always integral to the plot, not a mere adjunct; several times they save Bond’s life. Though beautiful, they usually have a qualifying flaw: a broken nose, a limp, a difficult past, which arouses Bond’s sympathy alongside his lust. (His behavior is invariably gallant and gentlemanly.) They are of a type: usually a “bird with one wing down,” often semi-naked on first encounter, outdoor girls or elegant dressers, independent-minded yet needful of Bond’s protection, and aware he is not a man they can hold. He is almost always either the first real man in their lives or, unfortunately for them, the last.
After the first seven books Fleming began to “run out of puff.” This was part ennui and part ill health; Bond’s smoking and drinking justified his creator’s excessive habits. But it was no coincidence that the books’ decline in energy followed the first Bond films. Fleming had dreamed of best-sellerdom; in real life, fame exhausted and rankled. In interviews and letters he referred to Bond as his “cardboard dummy” or “a blunt instrument” and his books as “piffle.”
Fleming had long had his eye on the big film money, and for years offers came and went; Casino Royale was initially filmed as an hour-long American TV program. In 1961 Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli formed Eon Productions and acquired options on all but two of the books for a guaranteed minimum payment of $100,000 per film plus 5% of the producer’s profits. It was, for them, a steal.
Shortly before Fleming’s death, film-Bond began to replace book-Bond, in the powerful image of Sean Connery, as 007 became Britain’s most successful sixties export alongside the Beatles and the miniskirt. (Fleming saw only the first two, Dr. No and From Russia, With Love.) It is difficult to exaggerate the phenomenon of these movies, the most popular film series ever, and not just as financial blockbusters. In every man born after 1930, there surely still exists a part of his psyche which dreams of being James Bond.
Fleming died of a second heart attack in August, 1964, just before the release of Goldfinger, when the Bond boom exploded and paperback sales began to multiply many times over. For years he’d scrupulously neglected doctors’ advice to cut down on alcohol and tobacco; his words to the ambulance attendants were: “I’m awfully sorry to trouble you chaps.” (Fleming had also been weakened and embittered by continuing litigation over Thunderball, whose plot resembled a joint concoction with a film producer from years earlier.) It was estimated at his death that he had earned close to three million dollars off the books. The sale earlier that year of a controlling interest in his private company, Glidrose Productions, for a tenth that figure meant that his heirs would miss much of the really big money over the next three decades.
Fleming didn’t live to see 007 toiletries, bubble-gum cards, lunchboxes, board games, action dolls, spy kits, decoder rings, and a cartoon series for children. What he achieved temporarily within the thriller genre was to kill off (Bond’s greatest victim) the knowing detective as popular hero. Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey were now replaced by 007, the amateur sleuth by the professional secret agent, as the new magic formula was copied endlessly.
The Fleming Empire at first tried to satisfy readers’ lust for more Bond. By far the most successful Bond sequel appeared in 1968, four years after Fleming’s demise. Colonel Sun by “Robert Markham” was really written by Kingsley Amis, a fan whose James Bond Dossier (1965) remains the liveliest barnacle on the Fleming reef.
Despite a certain success, no other Bond appeared until 1981, when (with Glidrose Productions behind him) the British mystery novelist John Gardner took up the mantle with License Renewed. This effort has been followed, at last count, by eleven others, which threaten to equal the Flemings with library shelf-space; sure-fire bestsellers, they demonstrate a reading public’s hunger for Bond—or at least the familiar. One doesn’t have to read far in bloodless Gardner to miss the original. His Bond really is a cardboard dummy, and his books owe more to the late films, verging on self-parody, than to Fleming. Though Fleming’s confessed concern from the start was to make money, his books never read that way; Gardner’s do.
Often today the popular myth of a writer’s life comes to overshadow his work. But Bond has almost totally erased Fleming: it is thanks to the films, rather than the books, that the 007 saga provides a worldwide image of the man of action. (Perhaps after a suitable time has passed, the films will have aged like Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes series, and as with Holmes, we may live to see them nostalgically re-filmed for new generations.) Still, all the books remain in print in many languages, and 007 is now virtually in the public domain; in a Bulgarian bestseller of a decade ago, an east-bloc bludgeon bests Bond.
What, in the end, makes the 007 of the books more compelling than his screen double? Can it be simply that he is more like us, even while up against overwhelming odds—that like Sherlock Holmes, despite his many victories, he always carries with him the possibility of failure? Let the last word belong to the man himself:
“Bond had always been a gambler…he liked it that everything was one’s own fault. There was only oneself to praise or blame. Luck was a servant and not a master. Luck had to be accepted with a shrug or taken advantage of up to the hilt. But it had to be understood and recognized for what it was and not confused with a faulty appreciation of the odds, for, at gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck. And luck in all its moods had to be loved and not feared.”
007 A LA CARTE
Casino Royale (1953). Baccarat superb; ditto tragic heroine (Vesper Lynd); most violent tortures. The perfect martini, 007-style. Le Chiffre the first of Fleming’s outsize father-figure villains.
Live and Let Die (1954). Bad Harlem, good Jamaican voodoo atmosphere. Strong, sultry clairvoyante Solitaire; Felix Leiter (CIA) as shark bait. “Negro genius” Mr. Big. Pirate treasure. Uneven.
Moonraker (1955). Only all-England setting. Fine villain in Hugo Drax, outplayed by Bond at bridge in Blades, M.’s exclusive club; otherwise dull. Gala Brand defends her feminine honor to the end.
Diamonds Are Forever (1956). Hot rock smuggling, from Africa to Las Vegas. Settings and villains (mobsters) too diffuse, though gem lore shines. A lovely Tiffany Case loses her virginity to 007.
From Russia, With Love (1957). Radical, persuasive structure; severe Moscow and aromatic Istanbul; well thought-out plot earned admiration of Raymond Chandler. Perhaps finest Bond. Who can forget Tatiana Romanova on the Orient Express, Red Grant’s deadly book, Rosa Klebb’s poisoned knitting needles, the gypsy fight, a loyal Kerim?
Doctor No (1958) Evocative Caribbean settings, Jamaica and Crab Key. Extremist villain (half Chinese, great aquarium) and delectable shell-collector Honeychile Rider. Most inventive torture (obstacle course ending in giant squid); intense, measured pace nearly equals its illustrious predecessor. Oddly lyrical and touching.
Goldfinger (1959). A crock equal to Drax; attention to detail makes plot (knock off Fort Knox) go down. Great canasta and golf games. Two blonde Masterton sisters perished by Odd job, the strong silent type, but Pussy Galore survives. Settings a snooze, though.
For Your Eyes Only (1960). Five uneven stories. Relieves the novels’ standard pattern; aptly divides the Bond canon. Paris, Vermont, Bermuda, Venice, the Indian Ocean. For fans’ eyes only.
Thunderball (1961). 007 at a health spa? Fleming’s fatigue shows, but technique masterly and steady. Nassau beautifully rendered, Domino’s poisoned foot well worth sucking. SPECTRE the new bad guys. Underwater scenes more vivid and persuasive than ever.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1962). Short, told convincingly from female viewpoint (Vivienne Michel). Bond to the rescue against Spillane-esque hoods in the Adirondacks. Guns and knives. Only fair.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963). SPECTRE’s Blofeld plots to infect British livestock; 007 infiltrates Alpine Hideout posing as genealogist. Saves Italian countess Tracy from herself, only to doom her to death as Mrs. James Bond. Now he’s really bitter.
You Only Live Twice (1964). Most fantastic elements: Bond in Japan braves a garden of death run by Blofeld, slays him, escapes in a balloon. Kissy Suzuki dives naked for pearls and has to resort to aphrodisiacs to restore 007. Henderson, Bond’s guide to the Orient, based on Fleming’s old friend, legendary Aussie journalist Richard Hughes, also used by John le Carré in The Honorable Schoolboy.
The Man With The Golden Gun (1965). Left unrevised at Fleming’s death. London and Jamaica; a Soviet-brainwashed 007 tries to murder M. Rehabilitated, he is sent after Scaramanga, fastest gun in the world. Even Felix Leiter can’t salvage it as a weak end to series.
Octopussy (1966). Posthumous; two novellas; paperback contains a third story. Jamaica, Berlin, London. A last attempt to mine the Fleming mother lode. Finished work, at least, rather Maughamesque.
Dates given above are for British editions. U.S. editions may be a year later or nearly identical.
Staunch fans will want to try Kingsley Amis’ Colonel Sun (1968), publishing pseudonymously as “Robert Markham”). Also Amis’ The James Bond Dossier. Best all-round appreciation is Raymond Benson’s The James Bond Bedside Companion (1984).
Among first-edition biffs, Ian Fleming remains the most collected 20th century author. British first editions of the 007 books runs from, say $25 for the last to $1200 for the early ones.
Forty years have passed since Ian Fleming’s James Bond first put on evening dress and strode into the casino of our collective imagination. In 1953 a lucky British public first glimpsed 007 standing alone by a roulette wheel (where else?) amid the elegant baroque of the casino at Royale-Les-Eaux, observing the enemy:
“The scent and smoke and sweat of a casino are nauseating at three in the morning. Then the soul-erosion produced by high gambling—a compost of greed and fear and nervous tension—becomes unbearable, and the senses awake and revolt from it. James Bond suddenly knew that he was tired. He always knew when his body or his mind had had enough, and he always acted on the knowledge…”
From the opening pages of Casino Royale, 007 had it all: the sophistication we envied, the danger we dreamed of, the girls we desired, the life we wanted. The fingerprints of Fleming’s style—an apparent worldliness, a precise sense of physical sensation, the urgency of the man alone—were already there. By the time Fleming died in 1964, he’d created in fourteen books a mythological hero, one of the greats of the century, for Bond is part Sherlock Holmes, part Indiana Jones. And though the Bond films will probably go on forever and a series of book sequels has already gone on too long, we should celebrate his anniversary by looking fondly back at the original: the British secret agent licensed not only to kill but virtually print money. How, after all this time and nearly a hundred million copies sold, do Ian Fleming’s novels measure up? Can an outdated book-Bond ever hope to withstand an up-to-date film-Bond?
There is an enormous difference, of course. The films, which started as faithful adaptations of the books, became excursions into literally outer space. (Over half the earth’s population has seen at least one Bond movie, for those who are keeping track.) Film-Bond turned into a secret agent version of Superman, wearing a tux instead of a cape and destroying his enemies with quips and gadgetry. Sean Connery’s finesse aside, book-Bond—the archetype—remains a more complex character, and his exploits human and attainable.
What stuns the most, going back to the Fleming canon, is the books’ hypnotic power—a sheer drive and compelling readability that overcome the dull patches, Bond’s total lack of humor, and many implausibilities. (M. always seems to send our man into the teeth of an enemy who know every detail of his movements.) This headlong tension may partly be the result of the novels always being written quickly; they often seem less planned than vividly dreamt.
Eric Ambler, arguably the finest thriller writer of all, told me a couple of years ago that he thought the Bond books “definitely deserve to be read as literature.” Anthony Burgess went further: he called Goldfinger one of the 99 best novels in English since 1939, describing Bond as a “patriotic lecher with a tinge of Scottish puritanism in him, a gourmand and amateur of vodka martinis, a smoker of strong tobacco who does not lose his wind…against…megalomaniacs.”
Who, then, is James Bond? A civil servant, probably born 1924; entered the employ of the Ministry of Defence at age seventeen, went to work for the Secret Service (M.I. 6) after the war. He performs his duties, according to M., “with outstanding bravery and distinction” though “with a streak of foolhardy.” He likes his eggs boiled for precisely three and a third minutes, and definitely smokes too much, a blend of Balkan and Turkish tobaccos custom-made for him; each cigarette bears three gold bands. (At three packs a day, they must crowd his suitcase on long assignments.) He stands a little over six feet, weighs about 167 pounds; he lives in a comfortable flat in a square off the King’s Road in Chelsea, London, on an income (mid-Fifties) of about $4,200 a year. He has few friends. Several women notice a resemblance to Hoagy Carmichael, though it’s hard to see this in “the dark, rather cruel good looks” or “the thin vertical scar down his right cheek” or the “coldness and hint of anger in his grey-blue eyes.”
He is, however, emphatically not a spy: his job never involves stealing state secrets, blueprints for weapons, plans of invasion, etc. (The closest he comes to traditional espionage is receiving a stolen Russian cipher machine.) He is a secret agent, a loaded gun sent out to enact the will of his government without being caught. His ancestors are neither the actual Sigmund Rosemblum (“Reilly, Ace of Spies”) or John Buchan’s fictional Richard Hannay (The 39 Steps), but Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond, or Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden.
Despite some tentative passages—Fleming grew considerably as a writer in the first few books—Casino Royale still stands up as one of the best 007 novels. Bond has been sent to the slightly faded French casino by M. to win a 50 million franc game of baccarat against Le Chiffre, paymaster of Smersh, the Soviet organization for counterespionage abroad (Fleming’s version of one sector of the KGB). The prose is uneven but always vividly detailed; scene after scene are imprinted on the memory: Le Chiffre’s “obscene” benzedrine inhaler and the carpet-beater which he used to torture Bond genitally. The precise gestures of the card-games—no one has ever bettered Fleming at conveying the mano-a-mano drama of “polite” competitions like golf, bridge, vingt-et-un. The two Bulgar assassins blown up by a camera bomb (based on a real event from the war.) And cool, dark-haired Vesper Lynd, first of the Bond heroines, “with a touch of ironical disinterest which, to his annoyance, he found he would like to shatter roughly.”
The book, published by Jonathan Cape with a first printing of 4,750, was generally applauded by the British critics and sold well enough for a second printing. The Listener hailed it as “supersonic John Buchan,” the Sunday Times called it “an extremely engaging affair” and said Fleming could become the best new English thriller writer since Ambler if he could make his work more probable. The Spectator found it “lively, most ingenious in detail…except for a too ingeniously sadistic bout of brutality…” A year later, when the novel came out in the USA, it fared worse, and sales were poor. Anthony Boucher, who never cared much for Bond, wrote in The New York Times Book Review that Fleming “pads the book out to novel length, leading to an ending which surprises no one but Bond himself.” He did, however, admire the gambling scenes.
Thereafter a new Bond book appeared each spring—at the tail-end of the British Empire and the beginning of the British welfare state. Bond would prove a welcome antidote to both conditions. An independent, powerful Everyman who often sweats at the idea of his plane crashing, he is tied down to neither one setting, nor one woman, though he remains selflessly loyal to his country and gallant toward the heroine of each book. (The film formula of three lovelies per adventure, with one discarded or dead, one definitely dead, and one prize in his arms at the end, does not occur in the novels. Likewise, the gadgetry: the only sophisticated toys in the books are a few minor modifications to Bond’s Aston Martin in Goldfinger, and Nash’s lethal copy of Tolstoy in From Russia, With Love.)
The world of the books, then, is not that of John Le Carré, who crested the sixties’ 007 wave with his complex heightened realism, nor of Ambler’s cold, neutral political savvy. We are far from Philby’s treason or Graham Greene’s drab truths, and much closer to a romantic era of the Scarlet Pimpernel and even Gilbert & Sullivan. Bond is, no doubt, our last hero burdened with the weighty myth of empire.
Fleming himself, well after success arrived in spades, defended his creation thus: “Bond is not a hero, nor is he depicted as being very likeable or admirable…He’s not a bad man, but he is ruthless and self-indulgent. He enjoys the fight—he also enjoys the prizes. In fiction, people used to have blood in their veins. Nowadays they have pond water. My books are just out of step. But then so are all the people who read them…intelligent, uninhibited adolescents of all ages, in trains, aeroplanes and beds….”
As the poet Phillip Larkin points out, what strikes one first about the novels today is “their unambiguous archaic decency. So far from being orgies of sex and sadism, as some outraged academics protested at the time, the books are nostalgic excursions…England is always right, foreigners are always wrong…Girls are treated with kindness and consideration, lust coming a decorous third. Life’s virtues are courage and loyalty, and its good things a traditional aristocracy of powerful cars, vintage wines, exclusive clubs, the old Times, the old five-pound note, the old Player’s packet.”
Indeed, the only double agent I can find is Vesper Lynd, who obliges the secret service and Bond by committing suicide. (“The bitch is dead now.”) Villains are always foreign: Russians, Bulgars, Germans, Koreans, Mexicans, Corsicans, Chinese, Yugoslavs. And they are always memorable: Doctor No with his metal hands and a heart on the wrong side of his body, Auric Goldfinger with his flaming red hair and mania for gold, Blofeld with his clinical love of death in all its forms, Sir Hugo Drax with his courtly manners and his cheating at cards. Sometimes, of course, these foreign villains try to pass themselves off as British. They always fail.
When Ian Lancaster Fleming (1908-1964) built a simple house called Goldeneye above a private cove near the tiny banana port of Oracabessa on Jamaica’s north coast, he was hardly a writer. After a respectable war career in Naval Intelligence (his duties resembled M.’s rather than 007’s), he settled down to the London world of journalism, with the proviso that he be given two months' leave each winter. He would spend every winter at Goldeneye from 1946 until his death. “Would these books have been born if I had not been living in the gorgeous vacuum of a Jamaican holiday? I doubt it.” It was on his seventh sojourn that Fleming conjured his secret agent, the man of action who was really a vicarious dream-self.
Of Scot ancestry (like Bond) Fleming had been a top athlete on the playing fields of Eton (like Bond) but never graduated (ditto). Without his father around—killed in WWI—and outshone by his elder brother Peter (the explorer who wrote one of the great travel books of the thirties, Brazilian Adventure), Ian already had a reputation for women and cars by the time he dismissed himself from Sandhurst, England’s West Point, after only one term. Like many writers in the process of forming, there was a good deal of the actor in him. In the Austrian Tyrol, then Geneva and Munich, he skied and played at being a young intellectual on the way to a career in the Foreign Office—but failed the exam. He saw Moscow as a young Reuters correspondent. By 1933 he was back in London at one of the better brokerage houses. There he stayed until the war.
Despite claims Fleming made after the Bond wave hit, his war career in Naval Intelligence, as assistant to Admiral Godfrey, was mainly administrative. (Fleming apparently came to believe—or at least convinced a few very close friends—that he’d actually had to kill an enemy agent on a secret mission, either by sandbagging him, or with a concealed revolver, or a mysterious black hat, or by drowning. This acting went too far to be mere play; he had authorial photos taken posing with a gun like Bond’s while vaguely claiming the books were based on his own experiences—“my autobiography” he half-joked.) A colleague recalled him in the war years as a “young fashionable man about town…fastidious about dress, which the old salts of the Admiralty viewed with scorn.” After the war he landed a plum job, as Foreign Manager for The Sunday Times.
That same fastidiousness flavors the novels; part of their early success was due to their cultivated veneer of sophisticated knowledge. This was Fleming the journalist at work, going to expert sources for his information, for as many friends pointed out, it was hard to think of a single subject on which he was truly expert.
All this time he was known for his philandering ways: he was far less protective towards women than Bond. His brother’s success and his own past as something of a black sheep still followed him. If he could not quite be a successful man of action, he could invent one. As John Pearson puts it in his perceptive biography of Fleming, “when [Bond] looks at himself in the mirror…we see just how closely Fleming identifies himself…James Bond is simply Ian Fleming daydreaming in the third person.” Pearson makes the point firmly: Bond is essentially “this odd man’s weird obsession with himself.”
When Fleming finally fell it was for another man’s wife, Lady Anne Rothermere. Soon Fleming was nicknamed “Lady Rothermere’s fan” in Fleet Street circles; her husband was a newspaper magnate. And in late January 1952, with ten weeks of Jamaican sunshine before marriage at the end of his bachelorhood, he sat down in front of a battered Royal portable and brought James Bond to life. Can it be mere coincidence that, just as Bond dreams of asking the book’s heroine, Vesper, to marry him, she frees him by committing suicide? For that matter, the novels’ villains (usually physically repugnant, as if seen through a child’s eyes) often treat Bond in a fatherly way—and Fleming, as a boy, called his authoritative mother “M.”
Casino Royale, utterly unplanned, took Fleming barely two months. At forty-three he had written fictionally not so much as a short story. The hero’s name was appropriated from “one of my Jamaican bibles, Birds of the West Indies by James Bond, an ornithological classic,” he once wrote. “I wanted the simples, dullest, plainest-sounding name I could find. James Bond seemed perfect.”
Despite strong British reviews, the first few novels sold only moderately well in England and struggled in the States. But following the 1956 Suez Crisis, the visit of soon-to-be Prime Minister Anthony Eden to Goldeneye for a rest brought a flurry of attention to Fleming and Bond in the U.K., and the snowball began rolling. A similar exposure occurred when President Kennedy named From Russia, With Love as one his ten favorite books in 1961.
In our violent times it’s difficult to see how the books could have shocked: they pall beside the vindictive sadism of, say, Mickey Spillane, and Bond takes his fair share of the suffering. A list of 007’s injuries includes nerve poisoning, having his genitals mangled, his hand carved up, his little finger broken, a shoulder gnawed by a barracuda, and his spine rubberized by a traction machine, plus assorted knife wounds, burns, and the odd bullet. Unlike today’s screen heros, when Bond gets hurt he goes to hospital.
In the course of the novels he is hurt so repeatedly it’s a wonder he can manage to please women at all, much less those as demanding as Pussy Galore, Solitaire Latrelle, Tiffany Case, Honeychile Rider, and Tatiana Romanova. The books’ heroines are always integral to the plot, not a mere adjunct; several times they save Bond’s life. Though beautiful, they usually have a qualifying flaw: a broken nose, a limp, a difficult past, which arouses Bond’s sympathy alongside his lust. (His behavior is invariably gallant and gentlemanly.) They are of a type: usually a “bird with one wing down,” often semi-naked on first encounter, outdoor girls or elegant dressers, independent-minded yet needful of Bond’s protection, and aware he is not a man they can hold. He is almost always either the first real man in their lives or, unfortunately for them, the last.
After the first seven books Fleming began to “run out of puff.” This was part ennui and part ill health; Bond’s smoking and drinking justified his creator’s excessive habits. But it was no coincidence that the books’ decline in energy followed the first Bond films. Fleming had dreamed of best-sellerdom; in real life, fame exhausted and rankled. In interviews and letters he referred to Bond as his “cardboard dummy” or “a blunt instrument” and his books as “piffle.”
Fleming had long had his eye on the big film money, and for years offers came and went; Casino Royale was initially filmed as an hour-long American TV program. In 1961 Harry Saltzman and Albert Broccoli formed Eon Productions and acquired options on all but two of the books for a guaranteed minimum payment of $100,000 per film plus 5% of the producer’s profits. It was, for them, a steal.
Shortly before Fleming’s death, film-Bond began to replace book-Bond, in the powerful image of Sean Connery, as 007 became Britain’s most successful sixties export alongside the Beatles and the miniskirt. (Fleming saw only the first two, Dr. No and From Russia, With Love.) It is difficult to exaggerate the phenomenon of these movies, the most popular film series ever, and not just as financial blockbusters. In every man born after 1930, there surely still exists a part of his psyche which dreams of being James Bond.
Fleming died of a second heart attack in August, 1964, just before the release of Goldfinger, when the Bond boom exploded and paperback sales began to multiply many times over. For years he’d scrupulously neglected doctors’ advice to cut down on alcohol and tobacco; his words to the ambulance attendants were: “I’m awfully sorry to trouble you chaps.” (Fleming had also been weakened and embittered by continuing litigation over Thunderball, whose plot resembled a joint concoction with a film producer from years earlier.) It was estimated at his death that he had earned close to three million dollars off the books. The sale earlier that year of a controlling interest in his private company, Glidrose Productions, for a tenth that figure meant that his heirs would miss much of the really big money over the next three decades.
Fleming didn’t live to see 007 toiletries, bubble-gum cards, lunchboxes, board games, action dolls, spy kits, decoder rings, and a cartoon series for children. What he achieved temporarily within the thriller genre was to kill off (Bond’s greatest victim) the knowing detective as popular hero. Hercule Poirot and Lord Peter Wimsey were now replaced by 007, the amateur sleuth by the professional secret agent, as the new magic formula was copied endlessly.
The Fleming Empire at first tried to satisfy readers’ lust for more Bond. By far the most successful Bond sequel appeared in 1968, four years after Fleming’s demise. Colonel Sun by “Robert Markham” was really written by Kingsley Amis, a fan whose James Bond Dossier (1965) remains the liveliest barnacle on the Fleming reef.
Despite a certain success, no other Bond appeared until 1981, when (with Glidrose Productions behind him) the British mystery novelist John Gardner took up the mantle with License Renewed. This effort has been followed, at last count, by eleven others, which threaten to equal the Flemings with library shelf-space; sure-fire bestsellers, they demonstrate a reading public’s hunger for Bond—or at least the familiar. One doesn’t have to read far in bloodless Gardner to miss the original. His Bond really is a cardboard dummy, and his books owe more to the late films, verging on self-parody, than to Fleming. Though Fleming’s confessed concern from the start was to make money, his books never read that way; Gardner’s do.
Often today the popular myth of a writer’s life comes to overshadow his work. But Bond has almost totally erased Fleming: it is thanks to the films, rather than the books, that the 007 saga provides a worldwide image of the man of action. (Perhaps after a suitable time has passed, the films will have aged like Basil Rathbone’s Sherlock Holmes series, and as with Holmes, we may live to see them nostalgically re-filmed for new generations.) Still, all the books remain in print in many languages, and 007 is now virtually in the public domain; in a Bulgarian bestseller of a decade ago, an east-bloc bludgeon bests Bond.
What, in the end, makes the 007 of the books more compelling than his screen double? Can it be simply that he is more like us, even while up against overwhelming odds—that like Sherlock Holmes, despite his many victories, he always carries with him the possibility of failure? Let the last word belong to the man himself:
“Bond had always been a gambler…he liked it that everything was one’s own fault. There was only oneself to praise or blame. Luck was a servant and not a master. Luck had to be accepted with a shrug or taken advantage of up to the hilt. But it had to be understood and recognized for what it was and not confused with a faulty appreciation of the odds, for, at gambling, the deadly sin is to mistake bad play for bad luck. And luck in all its moods had to be loved and not feared.”
007 A LA CARTE
Casino Royale (1953). Baccarat superb; ditto tragic heroine (Vesper Lynd); most violent tortures. The perfect martini, 007-style. Le Chiffre the first of Fleming’s outsize father-figure villains.
Live and Let Die (1954). Bad Harlem, good Jamaican voodoo atmosphere. Strong, sultry clairvoyante Solitaire; Felix Leiter (CIA) as shark bait. “Negro genius” Mr. Big. Pirate treasure. Uneven.
Moonraker (1955). Only all-England setting. Fine villain in Hugo Drax, outplayed by Bond at bridge in Blades, M.’s exclusive club; otherwise dull. Gala Brand defends her feminine honor to the end.
Diamonds Are Forever (1956). Hot rock smuggling, from Africa to Las Vegas. Settings and villains (mobsters) too diffuse, though gem lore shines. A lovely Tiffany Case loses her virginity to 007.
From Russia, With Love (1957). Radical, persuasive structure; severe Moscow and aromatic Istanbul; well thought-out plot earned admiration of Raymond Chandler. Perhaps finest Bond. Who can forget Tatiana Romanova on the Orient Express, Red Grant’s deadly book, Rosa Klebb’s poisoned knitting needles, the gypsy fight, a loyal Kerim?
Doctor No (1958) Evocative Caribbean settings, Jamaica and Crab Key. Extremist villain (half Chinese, great aquarium) and delectable shell-collector Honeychile Rider. Most inventive torture (obstacle course ending in giant squid); intense, measured pace nearly equals its illustrious predecessor. Oddly lyrical and touching.
Goldfinger (1959). A crock equal to Drax; attention to detail makes plot (knock off Fort Knox) go down. Great canasta and golf games. Two blonde Masterton sisters perished by Odd job, the strong silent type, but Pussy Galore survives. Settings a snooze, though.
For Your Eyes Only (1960). Five uneven stories. Relieves the novels’ standard pattern; aptly divides the Bond canon. Paris, Vermont, Bermuda, Venice, the Indian Ocean. For fans’ eyes only.
Thunderball (1961). 007 at a health spa? Fleming’s fatigue shows, but technique masterly and steady. Nassau beautifully rendered, Domino’s poisoned foot well worth sucking. SPECTRE the new bad guys. Underwater scenes more vivid and persuasive than ever.
The Spy Who Loved Me (1962). Short, told convincingly from female viewpoint (Vivienne Michel). Bond to the rescue against Spillane-esque hoods in the Adirondacks. Guns and knives. Only fair.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1963). SPECTRE’s Blofeld plots to infect British livestock; 007 infiltrates Alpine Hideout posing as genealogist. Saves Italian countess Tracy from herself, only to doom her to death as Mrs. James Bond. Now he’s really bitter.
You Only Live Twice (1964). Most fantastic elements: Bond in Japan braves a garden of death run by Blofeld, slays him, escapes in a balloon. Kissy Suzuki dives naked for pearls and has to resort to aphrodisiacs to restore 007. Henderson, Bond’s guide to the Orient, based on Fleming’s old friend, legendary Aussie journalist Richard Hughes, also used by John le Carré in The Honorable Schoolboy.
The Man With The Golden Gun (1965). Left unrevised at Fleming’s death. London and Jamaica; a Soviet-brainwashed 007 tries to murder M. Rehabilitated, he is sent after Scaramanga, fastest gun in the world. Even Felix Leiter can’t salvage it as a weak end to series.
Octopussy (1966). Posthumous; two novellas; paperback contains a third story. Jamaica, Berlin, London. A last attempt to mine the Fleming mother lode. Finished work, at least, rather Maughamesque.
Dates given above are for British editions. U.S. editions may be a year later or nearly identical.
Staunch fans will want to try Kingsley Amis’ Colonel Sun (1968), publishing pseudonymously as “Robert Markham”). Also Amis’ The James Bond Dossier. Best all-round appreciation is Raymond Benson’s The James Bond Bedside Companion (1984).
Among first-edition biffs, Ian Fleming remains the most collected 20th century author. British first editions of the 007 books runs from, say $25 for the last to $1200 for the early ones.
Saturday, April 4, 1992
Letter from Rome
A memoir of writing "The Passionate Pilgrim." Written for Delta-Sky Magazine, 1992.
It is a mistake, perhaps, to have a favorite hotel. No stay there can be as fine as the first. The concierge who proved invaluable has retired, the beautiful tobacconist is married, this time your room has no view. Each successive visit the place seems worse, until that original memory hurts like an insult. For though we travel, as V.S. Pritchett says, to “un-self” ourselves, we return to beloved foreign places to find the selves we left behind there. No, one should not cling to a favorite hotel, not today.
But I have stayed more than a dozen times now at a particular small hotel in Rome, up on the Aventino—the hill that rises behind the Pyramid and the Protestant Cemetery where Keats and Shelley dream on nightingales and skylarks in an Italian eternity. And not once has the hotel failed to renew itself to me, to have improved: three fading villas among dignified palms, hidden past ruined ancient walls. These steep streets were home for the city’s aristocracy for twenty centuries—patrician lives behind statue-studded gates and high shutters, their gardens quiet.
In India, in Polynesia, in Syria, in the most unlikely places, I have met others who frequent this hotel. (Over the years it has gone from being Rome’s best-kept secret to very well-known indeed.) Each time we make the same conspiratorial jokes about not telling. And if I am not forthcoming, it’s because the hotel has a special, private meaning for me. On one of my first visits I stayed for two weeks. I wrote a short story; it was published, my first. Is it any wonder I continue to go back?
1983: I was on my way to Bahrain, in the Arabian Gulf, on assignment. I was twenty-five. It was April, a curious season in Rome. The light has a tangible newness, as if spring is an unexpected miracle that can still slip from one’s grasp. Business was slow and the hotel gave me a room at the top of it lesser villa, beside a school. Each morning I was awakened by the children assembling in the street, by the Piazza di Tempi di Diana; I knew it was eleven when several primary classes came out yelling for recess; at lunchtime I let the children leave first.
I doubt any of the other guests paid much attention or even noticed the children. But I was in Rome not on business, or to sightsee, but to bone up on the Middle East and rest after a difficult New York winter. My personal life was in disarray and I felt ill-prepared to write about a new part of the world for me. I was out of my depth, and knew it.
Arbitrary schedules suit the mental life of a writer. They lend organization to a day too easily left blank, time and pages waiting haplessly to be filled. Thanks to the children, I knew I had nearly two hours of unbroken silence in the morning, an hour around noon after a short recess, then a long break while I and a few hundred hungry Roman kids took lunch. Just down the Aventino, along the Piazza Albania, were a number of neighborly trattorias; I feasted, read, and tried to convince myself that all would go well.
After lunch there was the long slow calm of the Roman afternoon, the heat becoming acute every day, the light more direct; a time to nap or listen to the BBC World Service via my short-wave. Those weeks it was Great Rivers of the World. Stuffed with pasta, I went down the Nile, the Ganges, the Amazon every afternoon, then failed miserably at those literary quiz programs the British seem to invent to reassure themselves. And as a kind of solace for being a good student myself, I started writing a short story.
My villa, square and stolid and russet-colored, wore its age like elegance. One entered the garden via a heavy tall black iron gate. There were always three or four cats yawning at my return. White glass-top tables and curvaceous chairs sat neatly in the little garden. Every morning I would sit there for two hours over tea, reading Graham Greene’s essays and worrying about how I would write about the Arabs. My inexperience made the upcoming assignment seem not quite real, like a misfortune about to happen to someone else. The clay-faced woman who brought me breakfast and clucked at me as if I were an incorrigible son supported this notion: the Middle East, she said, was an invention of the newspapers.
But the incomparable beauty of my sixth-floor room was that the villa had only five floors. The tiled roof was a great terrace that none of the other guests had discovered, and rising from the terrace was a compact stone tower with a brief outer staircase: this was my room. Inside was a bed, a writing table, a bath with tub and shower, a couple of guest chairs—and out my windows on both sides with shutters flung open, Rome basking like a lion in the April sun.
And up there, in an eyrie the Brownings would’ve loved, my short story wrote itself. I had already a couple of unpublished novels behind me, but a novel sprawls as it grows and takes up most of the available space in one’s life, like a messy house-guest who installs himself and refuses to leave. I wasn’t yet familiar with the compact directness by which a short story can offer itself. And no story had ever offered itself so easily as that one, written looking down on that glorious domed city, and no story has been so easy since. Each morning after Greene and tea, or each afternoon after lunch, I climbed the six flights to my private study and got to work. Sometimes my bed would’ve been made by the elderly major-domo of the villa, sometimes not.
It didn’t matter to me. Each day, the next scene of the story seemed to be waiting in the room for my return, dancing patiently in the air above the portable manual typewriter that I balanced on one chair. Dialogue had never suggested itself so painlessly, so of its own accord. I had only to listen to the characters talking, and set down their words.
Afternoons I’d wander down the other side of the Aventino to look in at the Protestant Cemetery, one of my favorite places in Rome. Most cemeteries seem designed to help people forget rather than remember, but this one, sequestered happily behind high walls and the huge white stone Piramide, feels almost lighthearted, and memorably eccentric. Each gravestone is individual and remarkable. Its inhabitants are nearly all foreigners, guests who chose never to leave Italy. Shelley, or his heart (all that was salvaged from the shipwreck) lies there: Cor cordium the inscription, “heart of hearts.” And in a far private corner, thinking his green thoughts in a green shade, Keats, “whose name was writ in water.”
There were always a few doleful pilgrims around Keats’ memorial, usually American female grad students. I preferred to think of the story of him in his last days, in the now-famous Roman apartment. Taking his landlady’s horrendous food—she wasn’t about to waste good meat on a dying Englishman—and struggling to the window, coughing blood, Keats sent the tray and muck clattering down the Spanish Steps. They leave this lesson in Italian manners and English resourcefulness out of the guidebooks.
I go back to the hotel at least once a year now, usually en route through Rome to somewhere else. The hotel is an excellent decompression chamber from both directions. It attracts an international crowd, few Americans. The other guests are usually former clients or their friends; the hotel doesn’t need to advertise. But why be coy? Anyone who has read this far deserves to know: the hotel is the Sant’ Anselmo, on the Piazza Sant’ Anselmo, tel. (39 - 6) 57-81-325 or 57-35-47.
I dream, naturally, of having more than one night there, and in my tower again. (It’s always taken when I go back.) I have tried all three villas, and each has its charms. But in my dream I would have at least three months in that tower room, to take me from winter’s end through spring and into summer. Enough time for a novel. That sort of wish is a mistake, too greedy—like having a favorite hotel.
It is a mistake, perhaps, to have a favorite hotel. No stay there can be as fine as the first. The concierge who proved invaluable has retired, the beautiful tobacconist is married, this time your room has no view. Each successive visit the place seems worse, until that original memory hurts like an insult. For though we travel, as V.S. Pritchett says, to “un-self” ourselves, we return to beloved foreign places to find the selves we left behind there. No, one should not cling to a favorite hotel, not today.
But I have stayed more than a dozen times now at a particular small hotel in Rome, up on the Aventino—the hill that rises behind the Pyramid and the Protestant Cemetery where Keats and Shelley dream on nightingales and skylarks in an Italian eternity. And not once has the hotel failed to renew itself to me, to have improved: three fading villas among dignified palms, hidden past ruined ancient walls. These steep streets were home for the city’s aristocracy for twenty centuries—patrician lives behind statue-studded gates and high shutters, their gardens quiet.
In India, in Polynesia, in Syria, in the most unlikely places, I have met others who frequent this hotel. (Over the years it has gone from being Rome’s best-kept secret to very well-known indeed.) Each time we make the same conspiratorial jokes about not telling. And if I am not forthcoming, it’s because the hotel has a special, private meaning for me. On one of my first visits I stayed for two weeks. I wrote a short story; it was published, my first. Is it any wonder I continue to go back?
1983: I was on my way to Bahrain, in the Arabian Gulf, on assignment. I was twenty-five. It was April, a curious season in Rome. The light has a tangible newness, as if spring is an unexpected miracle that can still slip from one’s grasp. Business was slow and the hotel gave me a room at the top of it lesser villa, beside a school. Each morning I was awakened by the children assembling in the street, by the Piazza di Tempi di Diana; I knew it was eleven when several primary classes came out yelling for recess; at lunchtime I let the children leave first.
I doubt any of the other guests paid much attention or even noticed the children. But I was in Rome not on business, or to sightsee, but to bone up on the Middle East and rest after a difficult New York winter. My personal life was in disarray and I felt ill-prepared to write about a new part of the world for me. I was out of my depth, and knew it.
Arbitrary schedules suit the mental life of a writer. They lend organization to a day too easily left blank, time and pages waiting haplessly to be filled. Thanks to the children, I knew I had nearly two hours of unbroken silence in the morning, an hour around noon after a short recess, then a long break while I and a few hundred hungry Roman kids took lunch. Just down the Aventino, along the Piazza Albania, were a number of neighborly trattorias; I feasted, read, and tried to convince myself that all would go well.
After lunch there was the long slow calm of the Roman afternoon, the heat becoming acute every day, the light more direct; a time to nap or listen to the BBC World Service via my short-wave. Those weeks it was Great Rivers of the World. Stuffed with pasta, I went down the Nile, the Ganges, the Amazon every afternoon, then failed miserably at those literary quiz programs the British seem to invent to reassure themselves. And as a kind of solace for being a good student myself, I started writing a short story.
My villa, square and stolid and russet-colored, wore its age like elegance. One entered the garden via a heavy tall black iron gate. There were always three or four cats yawning at my return. White glass-top tables and curvaceous chairs sat neatly in the little garden. Every morning I would sit there for two hours over tea, reading Graham Greene’s essays and worrying about how I would write about the Arabs. My inexperience made the upcoming assignment seem not quite real, like a misfortune about to happen to someone else. The clay-faced woman who brought me breakfast and clucked at me as if I were an incorrigible son supported this notion: the Middle East, she said, was an invention of the newspapers.
But the incomparable beauty of my sixth-floor room was that the villa had only five floors. The tiled roof was a great terrace that none of the other guests had discovered, and rising from the terrace was a compact stone tower with a brief outer staircase: this was my room. Inside was a bed, a writing table, a bath with tub and shower, a couple of guest chairs—and out my windows on both sides with shutters flung open, Rome basking like a lion in the April sun.
And up there, in an eyrie the Brownings would’ve loved, my short story wrote itself. I had already a couple of unpublished novels behind me, but a novel sprawls as it grows and takes up most of the available space in one’s life, like a messy house-guest who installs himself and refuses to leave. I wasn’t yet familiar with the compact directness by which a short story can offer itself. And no story had ever offered itself so easily as that one, written looking down on that glorious domed city, and no story has been so easy since. Each morning after Greene and tea, or each afternoon after lunch, I climbed the six flights to my private study and got to work. Sometimes my bed would’ve been made by the elderly major-domo of the villa, sometimes not.
It didn’t matter to me. Each day, the next scene of the story seemed to be waiting in the room for my return, dancing patiently in the air above the portable manual typewriter that I balanced on one chair. Dialogue had never suggested itself so painlessly, so of its own accord. I had only to listen to the characters talking, and set down their words.
Afternoons I’d wander down the other side of the Aventino to look in at the Protestant Cemetery, one of my favorite places in Rome. Most cemeteries seem designed to help people forget rather than remember, but this one, sequestered happily behind high walls and the huge white stone Piramide, feels almost lighthearted, and memorably eccentric. Each gravestone is individual and remarkable. Its inhabitants are nearly all foreigners, guests who chose never to leave Italy. Shelley, or his heart (all that was salvaged from the shipwreck) lies there: Cor cordium the inscription, “heart of hearts.” And in a far private corner, thinking his green thoughts in a green shade, Keats, “whose name was writ in water.”
There were always a few doleful pilgrims around Keats’ memorial, usually American female grad students. I preferred to think of the story of him in his last days, in the now-famous Roman apartment. Taking his landlady’s horrendous food—she wasn’t about to waste good meat on a dying Englishman—and struggling to the window, coughing blood, Keats sent the tray and muck clattering down the Spanish Steps. They leave this lesson in Italian manners and English resourcefulness out of the guidebooks.
I go back to the hotel at least once a year now, usually en route through Rome to somewhere else. The hotel is an excellent decompression chamber from both directions. It attracts an international crowd, few Americans. The other guests are usually former clients or their friends; the hotel doesn’t need to advertise. But why be coy? Anyone who has read this far deserves to know: the hotel is the Sant’ Anselmo, on the Piazza Sant’ Anselmo, tel. (39 - 6) 57-81-325 or 57-35-47.
I dream, naturally, of having more than one night there, and in my tower again. (It’s always taken when I go back.) I have tried all three villas, and each has its charms. But in my dream I would have at least three months in that tower room, to take me from winter’s end through spring and into summer. Enough time for a novel. That sort of wish is a mistake, too greedy—like having a favorite hotel.
Sunday, February 9, 1992
Dominica
Written for Travel-Holiday in 1992.
“A wild place, Dominica. Savage and lost.” Thus the remarkable writer Jean Rhys (1890-1979) described her Antillean island birthplace. Spiked with mountains, Dominica rises precipitously from the Caribbean Sea, its undulant valleys dense with rain forests, waterfalls, and primeval rivers. Mists drift among the ghostly summits of the lush mountains; the few roads are rugged and empty save for an occasional rattling truck or a solitary figure trudging through the fervent landscape, a “cutlass” dangling from one hand. Columbus christened the island on his second voyage, in 1493, and sailed on without ever setting foot. Today the few villages that pepper the coast, and even Roseau, the small, innocent capital, give the impression that time moves more slowly here. Jean Rhys would still recognize Dominica; a local saying claims Columbus would too.
No other island has stunned or penetrated me—or still in Lafcadio Hearn’s phrase, “so far surpasses imagination as to paralyze it.” I first visited in 1982, to report on the last Carib Indians, the once-cannibal race who’d been annihilated by the millions on all other islands by the European invasion and survived on Dominica, their refuge for three centuries. It remains an island for lost things, for ways of life vanished elsewhere in the Caribbean—the national symbol is a parrot unique to Dominica. There is even a Boiling Lake and a Valley of Desolation. Only sugar-white beaches are missing, and this has kept away the resort developers, the casino operators and the big hotels. As Jean Rhys wrote, “Dominica will protect itself from vulgar loves.”
Once again I fell hard for Dominica: for its sense of nature run riot, its sweet-tempered and independent people, its tumbling capital. Roseau reveals itself like a fresh sepia image from the Thirties: intimate, poor, preserved, and lovely. The balconied houses with carved fretwork, jalousied shutters flung open; the immaculate Botanical Gardens, a gift of the British during 215 years of colonial rule; the languid Créole patois more French than English. Some narrow streets are still cobblestoned; all bear names like Cork Street, King George V Street, Old Street, Bath Road, Love Lane. Roseau houses characteristically are stone below and wood above, and subtly audacious in color; reds and blues and subtle yellows and a blinding white. Many still have the family shop at street-level and the home on the second-story.
One morning I walked along the waterfront to the market for fresh fruits and vegetables. (People here say, “Dominica could feed the entire Caribbean easily if everyone would just be organizing themselves.”) Set along the sea and the estuary, tomatoes, mangoes, bananas, limes, coffee, grapefruit, wild strawberries, cabbages, and fresh fish were spread on plastic sheets. Women squatted like Rodin’s Thinker on overturned boxes beneath shade umbrellas, and sprinkled water on the produce. Mounds of coconuts were being split expertly by men wielding machetes (“cutlasses”). It was so hot the Caribbean looked grey, and a boy was sculling in to market in a small skiff. Up the tall coast clouds wreathed the mountains.
On the filigreed balcony of the Guiyave Café I drank soursop juice mixed with milk and looked across gleaming tin roofs. An old lady was hanging out her washing on a balcony of Kings Lane. On the corner of Cork and Queen Mary Street I found the house where Jean Rhys grew up, described in Voyage In the Dark (1934) and in her autobiography Smile Please (1979). Though Rhys left Dominica in 1907 at sixteen, and only came back once, in 1936, the island haunts her novels and short stories like a remembered dream. The family dwelling is now a converted guest house, and the interior much divided, though the mango tree still remains “so big that all the garden was in its shadow.”
I’d chosen to stay several miles from Roseau at Papillote, a place I remembered fondly: two large bungalows perched against a steep hillside of steaming vegetation. Run by an American, Anne Baptiste, and her Dominican husband Cuthbert, Papillote has its own hot springs, extravagant tropical gardens with enormous exotic flowers and ferns, wandering geese and peacocks, magnificent food, and simple rooms with vines painted around the walls. Two days there can leave you in a delirium of serenity and good health.
Dominica is said to have a river for every day of the year. You can bathe nearly anywhere in the island and locals do. From Papillote I walked to Trafalgar Falls, two high chutes of water that begin way up the “morne” and run as rivers to Roseau. A young engineering student helped me across slippery rocks and we swam to where the water thundered down into a pool. A permanent rainbow arced across the rock face twenty feet away. I swam through the rainbow and sat beneath a course of hot water streaming down beside the cool falls. Later I languished in a hot tributary at Papillote.
Another day I hiked muddy trails up several mornes on the island’s high interior, passing through glades of sunlight, paths of towering growths, and tropical tempests that came and went in ten minutes. (In Dominica your right arm can be rained on while the left arm is getting sunburned.) I walked through clouds and through jungle until I was overlooking the vast, many-fingered Freshwater Lake: a sullen sea set among green peaks, whose sheen changed constantly as mists blew across. The lake lay at the sleeping center of a volcano, and it was extraordinary to be at water level 3000 feet up. And in the Tri Tro Gorge, I swam from a small pool between narrow overgrown cliffs through gorges of mystical light to a titanic waterfall. I am not much of a swimmer; working against the current, pulling myself along the gorge walls, I barely reached the next innermost chamber, where the echoes flew and the spray blew about like smoke. No words can do justice to that brief swim: the fractured verdant light above, the current turning below, the sense of navigating a secret passage through forested cliffs to an eternal roar of water.
One day I followed the coast south from Roseau toward the end of the island. Pointe Michel was a village built around a small bay and the grey ruins of an old lime factory and a red church. There a man with a mouthful of gold teeth sang to me that “Pointe Michel girls are the best / Sweet sweet sweet in the face”. Farther down the coast, at Soufriere, beside a stone wall I asked a friendly woman named Isabelle if she’d gone to market that day.
“I don’t have to. My husband’s a farmer.”
“Didn’t you buy any fish?”
“I don’t have to. My husband’s a fisherman.”
“What about fuel?”
“My husband makes coal also.” She smiled. “Things is easy.”
An elderly gentleman, Mr. Birmingham, walking with a cane, said, “I do nothing. My eyes no see, me legs no walk.” He looked fit, made of cast iron, at 74. “God give you something, you know he had it after he take it away. I go shave now for mass tomorrow.”
From Scot’s Head, the southernmost hook of the island, I could faintly glimpse Martinique. I thought: On a clear day you can see France. On one side of a tiny spit of land was the Caribbean, on the other the more aggressive Atlantic. The tan beach at Scot’s Head, among coconut palms, had blue and yellow and red canoes pulled up and children playing; their houses were just across the little road. Fish traps woven from bamboo lay waiting to be mended. Men were arguing over dominoes, emphatically slapping down each tile.
In a shanty bar a patient and persuasive proprietor, Bernard, got me to try three local concoctions, all made by pouring cask rum (as strong as jet fuel) into a jar and leaving an herb or root to soak for several days. The most popular are nani (made with aniset leaf), puev (spelled “poivre”, with a pepper flavor) and l’absinthe (made with wormwood), a first cousin of the infamous drink illegal throughout Europe since WWI. “I consider puev to be the strongest,” said Bernard. “Some of these fishermen drink four or five in a flash. Maybe twelve a day.” One vaporous absinthe—it tasted like smoke rolling through my mouth—was plenty for me.
At Portsmouth, the sleepy second largest town after Roseau, I met with Lennox Honychurch. At 36 Lennox is the island’s historian and well-known as writer and consultant throughout the Caribbean. Recently he pulled together “Lavi Dominik”, a museum in an old sugar mill, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of independence in 1988. He’s spent the last six years restoring an enormous 18th century fort, retaking it from jungle on the twin headlands known as the Cabrits that overlook the great curve of Portsmouth’s bay.
Lennox talked of the friendship (by letter) between Jean Rhys and another Dominican writer, Phyllis Shand Allfrey (1908 - 1986). Like Rhys, Allfrey spent time in England, though she returned to the island to run a newspaper. Active in West Indian politics, she wrote a good deal of poetry and one superb novel, The Orchid House (1953), set in Dominica, republished by the Virago Press and soon to be a mini-series in the U.K. In some ways Jean Rhys’ 1966 masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, echoes Allfrey’s earlier book. Lennox pointed out that the tonal similarities in their writing were strong. “I think it would be difficult to grow up on Dominica in that era and not end up writing as they did.”
Then Lennox said, “You remember the honeymoon house in the hills in Wide Sargasso Sea? It’s still standing. Up a trail from Mahaut village. You keep going up, up, up. It’s called Curry’s Rest. Ask anybody.”
It was an exhausting walk; in Jean Rhys’s day one was carried up by donkey. But it was satisfying to stand on the same high veranda where “…there had been a telescope…through which we could see distant Roseau Bay and the ships, the Royal Mail, Canadian and French steamers, and sometimes a stranger flying the yellow flag which meant there was an infectious disease aboard.”
I sensed in Dominica a verbal energy, a love of words for words’ sake, that is special even in the talkative Caribbean. This is an island that produces originals, from Rhys and Allfrey to the popular and eloquent Prime Minister, Eugenia Charles (who has prohibited package tours). It is a daily delight to ride the metaphors in the West Indian cricket reports in the Chronicle; on a tin house in the jungle I saw painted an epic poem, a proclamation that began, “Doctor Fixit the Stern King Has Arrived.” And on the radio a man with a preacher’s voice intoned: “Women love the power. When he drive she feel the power and since it is a question of quality not price—since they all same price—give her Texaco, 'cause women love the power….”
Dominica could take months or lifetimes to explore. Its size (29 miles by 15) tells nothing of its complexity: it is a vast place squeezed into a small space. To cross the island from Roseau to the golden meadows of palms at Castle Bruce takes an hour and brings you to another island, a more dazzling light. On the rough Atlantic the Caribs have a reserve, land ceded them forever by Queen Victoria, and here the last indigenous race of the West Indies has made its final home. Gradually dying out through inter-marriage, the Caribs still are distinct in appearance: copper-skinned, with blue-black hair, a delicacy of face that surpasses even the fine features of most Dominicans. It was the Caribs who gave us the words hammock and canoe and hurricane. I walked their tumultuous coast, among their neat, wide-planked houses on stilts, saw once again the Carib church of Sainte-Marie with its gommier canoes as altar—and remembered my happy stay with them years before. Since those days the roads had improved, electricity and in places running water had come to these remote villages, even a telephone or two; but they were still Caribs. Dominica’s wildness saved them.
That wildness had an otherworldly quality, too, a passionate strangeness that may be why the island has haunted me so. To travel up the Indian River by canoe is to float quietly into some past long before man appeared, through ruined metropoli of twisted mangrove trees, their limbs braided and half-grown, doubled by the reflecting water. Dominica changes you deeply.
My last morning in Roseau I went for an early stroll through the Botanical Gardens. Little girls in navy and white uniforms were on their way through to the convent school. An elderly woman was painstakingly brushing around a tree and singing in a high caroling voice. A breeze carried her hymn through the gardens:
La da di, la da dum, He is calling
Tomorrow will be too late….
Near us a magisterial tree, impossibly tall, was blooming like a blue cloud, an island levitating itself. I asked one of the gardeners the name of the tree. He pronounced a name like “pouier” and saw it was unfamiliar to me. And what he said then was all Dominica. “You can’t see it from down here. You go on up high, up the morne, and look down. It is so beautiful it will amaze you.”
“A wild place, Dominica. Savage and lost.” Thus the remarkable writer Jean Rhys (1890-1979) described her Antillean island birthplace. Spiked with mountains, Dominica rises precipitously from the Caribbean Sea, its undulant valleys dense with rain forests, waterfalls, and primeval rivers. Mists drift among the ghostly summits of the lush mountains; the few roads are rugged and empty save for an occasional rattling truck or a solitary figure trudging through the fervent landscape, a “cutlass” dangling from one hand. Columbus christened the island on his second voyage, in 1493, and sailed on without ever setting foot. Today the few villages that pepper the coast, and even Roseau, the small, innocent capital, give the impression that time moves more slowly here. Jean Rhys would still recognize Dominica; a local saying claims Columbus would too.
No other island has stunned or penetrated me—or still in Lafcadio Hearn’s phrase, “so far surpasses imagination as to paralyze it.” I first visited in 1982, to report on the last Carib Indians, the once-cannibal race who’d been annihilated by the millions on all other islands by the European invasion and survived on Dominica, their refuge for three centuries. It remains an island for lost things, for ways of life vanished elsewhere in the Caribbean—the national symbol is a parrot unique to Dominica. There is even a Boiling Lake and a Valley of Desolation. Only sugar-white beaches are missing, and this has kept away the resort developers, the casino operators and the big hotels. As Jean Rhys wrote, “Dominica will protect itself from vulgar loves.”
Once again I fell hard for Dominica: for its sense of nature run riot, its sweet-tempered and independent people, its tumbling capital. Roseau reveals itself like a fresh sepia image from the Thirties: intimate, poor, preserved, and lovely. The balconied houses with carved fretwork, jalousied shutters flung open; the immaculate Botanical Gardens, a gift of the British during 215 years of colonial rule; the languid Créole patois more French than English. Some narrow streets are still cobblestoned; all bear names like Cork Street, King George V Street, Old Street, Bath Road, Love Lane. Roseau houses characteristically are stone below and wood above, and subtly audacious in color; reds and blues and subtle yellows and a blinding white. Many still have the family shop at street-level and the home on the second-story.
One morning I walked along the waterfront to the market for fresh fruits and vegetables. (People here say, “Dominica could feed the entire Caribbean easily if everyone would just be organizing themselves.”) Set along the sea and the estuary, tomatoes, mangoes, bananas, limes, coffee, grapefruit, wild strawberries, cabbages, and fresh fish were spread on plastic sheets. Women squatted like Rodin’s Thinker on overturned boxes beneath shade umbrellas, and sprinkled water on the produce. Mounds of coconuts were being split expertly by men wielding machetes (“cutlasses”). It was so hot the Caribbean looked grey, and a boy was sculling in to market in a small skiff. Up the tall coast clouds wreathed the mountains.
On the filigreed balcony of the Guiyave Café I drank soursop juice mixed with milk and looked across gleaming tin roofs. An old lady was hanging out her washing on a balcony of Kings Lane. On the corner of Cork and Queen Mary Street I found the house where Jean Rhys grew up, described in Voyage In the Dark (1934) and in her autobiography Smile Please (1979). Though Rhys left Dominica in 1907 at sixteen, and only came back once, in 1936, the island haunts her novels and short stories like a remembered dream. The family dwelling is now a converted guest house, and the interior much divided, though the mango tree still remains “so big that all the garden was in its shadow.”
I’d chosen to stay several miles from Roseau at Papillote, a place I remembered fondly: two large bungalows perched against a steep hillside of steaming vegetation. Run by an American, Anne Baptiste, and her Dominican husband Cuthbert, Papillote has its own hot springs, extravagant tropical gardens with enormous exotic flowers and ferns, wandering geese and peacocks, magnificent food, and simple rooms with vines painted around the walls. Two days there can leave you in a delirium of serenity and good health.
Dominica is said to have a river for every day of the year. You can bathe nearly anywhere in the island and locals do. From Papillote I walked to Trafalgar Falls, two high chutes of water that begin way up the “morne” and run as rivers to Roseau. A young engineering student helped me across slippery rocks and we swam to where the water thundered down into a pool. A permanent rainbow arced across the rock face twenty feet away. I swam through the rainbow and sat beneath a course of hot water streaming down beside the cool falls. Later I languished in a hot tributary at Papillote.
Another day I hiked muddy trails up several mornes on the island’s high interior, passing through glades of sunlight, paths of towering growths, and tropical tempests that came and went in ten minutes. (In Dominica your right arm can be rained on while the left arm is getting sunburned.) I walked through clouds and through jungle until I was overlooking the vast, many-fingered Freshwater Lake: a sullen sea set among green peaks, whose sheen changed constantly as mists blew across. The lake lay at the sleeping center of a volcano, and it was extraordinary to be at water level 3000 feet up. And in the Tri Tro Gorge, I swam from a small pool between narrow overgrown cliffs through gorges of mystical light to a titanic waterfall. I am not much of a swimmer; working against the current, pulling myself along the gorge walls, I barely reached the next innermost chamber, where the echoes flew and the spray blew about like smoke. No words can do justice to that brief swim: the fractured verdant light above, the current turning below, the sense of navigating a secret passage through forested cliffs to an eternal roar of water.
One day I followed the coast south from Roseau toward the end of the island. Pointe Michel was a village built around a small bay and the grey ruins of an old lime factory and a red church. There a man with a mouthful of gold teeth sang to me that “Pointe Michel girls are the best / Sweet sweet sweet in the face”. Farther down the coast, at Soufriere, beside a stone wall I asked a friendly woman named Isabelle if she’d gone to market that day.
“I don’t have to. My husband’s a farmer.”
“Didn’t you buy any fish?”
“I don’t have to. My husband’s a fisherman.”
“What about fuel?”
“My husband makes coal also.” She smiled. “Things is easy.”
An elderly gentleman, Mr. Birmingham, walking with a cane, said, “I do nothing. My eyes no see, me legs no walk.” He looked fit, made of cast iron, at 74. “God give you something, you know he had it after he take it away. I go shave now for mass tomorrow.”
From Scot’s Head, the southernmost hook of the island, I could faintly glimpse Martinique. I thought: On a clear day you can see France. On one side of a tiny spit of land was the Caribbean, on the other the more aggressive Atlantic. The tan beach at Scot’s Head, among coconut palms, had blue and yellow and red canoes pulled up and children playing; their houses were just across the little road. Fish traps woven from bamboo lay waiting to be mended. Men were arguing over dominoes, emphatically slapping down each tile.
In a shanty bar a patient and persuasive proprietor, Bernard, got me to try three local concoctions, all made by pouring cask rum (as strong as jet fuel) into a jar and leaving an herb or root to soak for several days. The most popular are nani (made with aniset leaf), puev (spelled “poivre”, with a pepper flavor) and l’absinthe (made with wormwood), a first cousin of the infamous drink illegal throughout Europe since WWI. “I consider puev to be the strongest,” said Bernard. “Some of these fishermen drink four or five in a flash. Maybe twelve a day.” One vaporous absinthe—it tasted like smoke rolling through my mouth—was plenty for me.
At Portsmouth, the sleepy second largest town after Roseau, I met with Lennox Honychurch. At 36 Lennox is the island’s historian and well-known as writer and consultant throughout the Caribbean. Recently he pulled together “Lavi Dominik”, a museum in an old sugar mill, to celebrate the 10th anniversary of independence in 1988. He’s spent the last six years restoring an enormous 18th century fort, retaking it from jungle on the twin headlands known as the Cabrits that overlook the great curve of Portsmouth’s bay.
Lennox talked of the friendship (by letter) between Jean Rhys and another Dominican writer, Phyllis Shand Allfrey (1908 - 1986). Like Rhys, Allfrey spent time in England, though she returned to the island to run a newspaper. Active in West Indian politics, she wrote a good deal of poetry and one superb novel, The Orchid House (1953), set in Dominica, republished by the Virago Press and soon to be a mini-series in the U.K. In some ways Jean Rhys’ 1966 masterpiece, Wide Sargasso Sea, echoes Allfrey’s earlier book. Lennox pointed out that the tonal similarities in their writing were strong. “I think it would be difficult to grow up on Dominica in that era and not end up writing as they did.”
Then Lennox said, “You remember the honeymoon house in the hills in Wide Sargasso Sea? It’s still standing. Up a trail from Mahaut village. You keep going up, up, up. It’s called Curry’s Rest. Ask anybody.”
It was an exhausting walk; in Jean Rhys’s day one was carried up by donkey. But it was satisfying to stand on the same high veranda where “…there had been a telescope…through which we could see distant Roseau Bay and the ships, the Royal Mail, Canadian and French steamers, and sometimes a stranger flying the yellow flag which meant there was an infectious disease aboard.”
I sensed in Dominica a verbal energy, a love of words for words’ sake, that is special even in the talkative Caribbean. This is an island that produces originals, from Rhys and Allfrey to the popular and eloquent Prime Minister, Eugenia Charles (who has prohibited package tours). It is a daily delight to ride the metaphors in the West Indian cricket reports in the Chronicle; on a tin house in the jungle I saw painted an epic poem, a proclamation that began, “Doctor Fixit the Stern King Has Arrived.” And on the radio a man with a preacher’s voice intoned: “Women love the power. When he drive she feel the power and since it is a question of quality not price—since they all same price—give her Texaco, 'cause women love the power….”
Dominica could take months or lifetimes to explore. Its size (29 miles by 15) tells nothing of its complexity: it is a vast place squeezed into a small space. To cross the island from Roseau to the golden meadows of palms at Castle Bruce takes an hour and brings you to another island, a more dazzling light. On the rough Atlantic the Caribs have a reserve, land ceded them forever by Queen Victoria, and here the last indigenous race of the West Indies has made its final home. Gradually dying out through inter-marriage, the Caribs still are distinct in appearance: copper-skinned, with blue-black hair, a delicacy of face that surpasses even the fine features of most Dominicans. It was the Caribs who gave us the words hammock and canoe and hurricane. I walked their tumultuous coast, among their neat, wide-planked houses on stilts, saw once again the Carib church of Sainte-Marie with its gommier canoes as altar—and remembered my happy stay with them years before. Since those days the roads had improved, electricity and in places running water had come to these remote villages, even a telephone or two; but they were still Caribs. Dominica’s wildness saved them.
That wildness had an otherworldly quality, too, a passionate strangeness that may be why the island has haunted me so. To travel up the Indian River by canoe is to float quietly into some past long before man appeared, through ruined metropoli of twisted mangrove trees, their limbs braided and half-grown, doubled by the reflecting water. Dominica changes you deeply.
My last morning in Roseau I went for an early stroll through the Botanical Gardens. Little girls in navy and white uniforms were on their way through to the convent school. An elderly woman was painstakingly brushing around a tree and singing in a high caroling voice. A breeze carried her hymn through the gardens:
La da di, la da dum, He is calling
Tomorrow will be too late….
Near us a magisterial tree, impossibly tall, was blooming like a blue cloud, an island levitating itself. I asked one of the gardeners the name of the tree. He pronounced a name like “pouier” and saw it was unfamiliar to me. And what he said then was all Dominica. “You can’t see it from down here. You go on up high, up the morne, and look down. It is so beautiful it will amaze you.”
Wednesday, May 1, 1991
The Music-Halls of Paris
Written for European Travel & Life in 1989, published in 1991
At the mere mention of Paris, a cliché invades your starving imagination. Not the cliché about the food; the one about le music-hall. Closely related to the other Parisian cliché about the women, the image is half Toulouse-Lautrec can-can, half a more modern vision of nearly naked girls with fascination in their walk and feathers on their heads. Partly to shatter these vague ideas, partly because my French friends insisted, I recently visited four survivors: the Folies Bergere, the oldest; the Lido, the most touristic; the Crazy Horse, the most devoutly erotic; and L’Alcazar—the youngest, most creative, most deeply Parisian.
The music-halls go back more than a century. Originally they were dance halls for the public. Professional performers came on toward ten in the evening. Toulouse-Lautrec was famous one day after his first poster for the Moulin Rouge; such stars as Yves Montand, Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, and Josephine Baker made their names (and perhaps did their finest work) in the music-halls. Conventional wisdom holds that there was a golden age until WWII, when too much money (meaning American visitors) over-commercialized the music-halls, though what were they ever if not commercial? In the days when Paris was considered the hedonist’s capital of Europe, the music-halls were an early stop on any male’s visit. Today, too easily dismissed as fodder for tourists, one or two might still be considered necessary to an education. Meanwhile, Frenchmen who have never read her work know that the first bared breasts on a music-hall stage (the Folies Bergere, 1909) belonged to Colette.
The Folies Bergere, at age 103 arguably the oldest music-hall, has since 1927 illuminated a majestic art-deco theater whose lobby alone boasts mosaic-inlaid columns, gilded horses, and a Bal Musette accordion trio. The show thrives on the theater’s atmosphere; the lavish and lovely costumes, the insouciant mood are all from an indefinite Belle Époque—like the recreated can-can of girls in yellow and black who shake their bloomers (with the Tour Eiffel twinkling behind) to the thumping tunes of Bizet and Offenbach.
A family show, it had some daring moments and, surprisingly, as much male as female nudity, even a naked balletic pas de deux. Always famous for grand tableaus, especially for excessive decors that appear and vanish in seconds, this particular Folies en Folie ("Folies in Heat") included such stirring sights as a winter fête in the Tyrol, Venice at carnival time, four naked women in silver cowboy boots playing violins, a Viennese soirée at which Strauss creates the Blue Danube waltzes, a tribute to Josephine Baker and the Charleston, a fine abduction in a ship’s boiler room, a roller-skating duo, and a sumptuous Ancient Rome with everybody wigwagging in togas. It was rather like eating an entire dessert trolley. The Folies weren’t afraid to be a little silly, and this gave the kitsch a feeling of genuine music-hall, from a time when audiences were less jaded and in person was the only way to see something. Sadly, the talk is that the Folies may go under, though it was enthusiastically full the night I went.
The grandiose Lido, like the Moulin Rouge (now under similar management), takes the big-bang approach, so endlessly mimicked by Vegas and all the loud tourist nightclubs of the world that only its extravagance remains interesting. Electronic candles ascend and descend, an orchestra harrumphs along with a conductor; women in My Fair Lady furs, their breasts and buttocks barely showing, stroll beneath fountainous headdresses. Male dancers with toothpaste grins leap among them. Here the audience seems half foreigners, half French families from the provinces.
I sat at a table of three French boys in tuxes celebrating their school vacation. They enjoyed the inevitable salute to Broadway, the inevitable Polynesian panoramas complete with waterfall and erupting volcano, and especially the inevitable Chevalier tribute of thanking heaven for little girls who thankfully disrobe—though you can see more nudity on any French beach. Evening-dress couples descend stroboscopic staircases. An Ancient Egypt tableau features a delectable human sacrifice, a flaming inferno with a cobra, laser lights, and two camels; a pharaoh sings a torch song to a live mummy. In-between are bouncing rubberized acrobats, a genius who juggles ping-pong balls with his tongue to cha-chas, nude ice skaters, more acrobats, then some more acrobats. Each group tableau seems a finale, and the style is entirely derivative: everything but French. Like Liberace’s trousers, it is stupidity on an expensive, highly professional level.
The Crazy Horse Saloon isn’t really a music-hall. Cabaret-size, it calls itself erotic theater and boasts "the most beautiful femmes fatales in the world." Its origins lie in striptease and burlesque, but its high style is very much its own, continually under the guidance of its founder, Alain Bemardin. Since it opened in 1951, the Crazy Horse has become an institution in Paris nightlife and its lighting effects copied worldwide; faithful followers have included Dalí, Balanchine, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse. (Woody Allen built a scene in What’s New, Pussycat? around the Crazy Horse.) Inside, the theater was surprisingly small, the stage downright tiny. It was easy to pick out the French: veterans, they were at the bar, paying less for an equal view.
How to describe such a spectacle? For nearly two hours one’s senses are blasted by variations on a single theme: eighteen naked young women with perfect bodies more individual than their faces, very close yet not close enough. This you cannot see on any beach.
After a disappointing gym-class opening the solo acts began: Bernardin christens his girls with names like Zaza Vesuvio, Charly Commando, Polly Underground, Tiny Semaphore. A brunette with foaming hair did an incandescent striptease lying against a tilted platform while op-art circles of black and silver swirled across her. (Already the newlywed American bride seated next to us looked nervous.) The Three Graces, wearing only pearls, rotated to classical music. Lina Peccadillo in space helmet and space boots flew to Venus, amid interstellar smoke. A couple of expert magicians came on for comic turns. Vanity Obelisk sang I’m a good girl and recalled affairs with "a cute ayatollah, an emir or two". The fantasy of the girl in a cage became a fantastic rhythmic ballet of a naked beauty throwing herself from bar to bar. In group numbers the girls wore multi-colored or matching wigs, which made their faces fade into mere prettiness so one could concentrate on what Kenneth Tynan called their "incredibly healthy" bodies.
I spoke with Alain Bemardin, an elegant man in his late sixties whose work evidently keeps him several decades younger (he recently married a Crazy Horse star named Lova Moor).
"In 1962 we did a Nazi parody. The music was a German military march; Bertha von Paraboum wore a G-string in the shape of a swastika. The Americans were shocked, the Germans were shocked, the French were shocked. The publicity was enormous."
I asked what it took to be a Crazy Horse girl.
"First, she must have marvelous breasts. Then, she must have trained already as a dancer; this is why we have many English girls, because they’re better dancers than the French. She must be tall, say 5’6 "or 5’7" at least. And she must be a ‘good girl’. I don’t find them, they find me. From all over Europe. We have also girls from South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Russia; from Poland, Hungary, Romania. Since we have a corps of twenty-four girls, and they average about five years with us, we take about five new girls a year. Afterward they might become singers, or dancers on TV. Others get married. But everyone knows there’s no question of meeting the girls. The girls know and the clients know."
The net effect is a stunning, sublime eroticism; the tone is never leering, more a kind of holy lasciviousness. One marvels at the imaginative lighting and is disappointed by the acts which too easily fall short. But one goes for the superb girls, after all.
L’Alcazar, which calls itself proudly "Le Plus Parisien des Spectacles," is the music-hall least known to foreigners. Less than ten per cent of its clients are tourists and indeed, someone who doesn’t speak French will miss some good jokes. Here I found at last the creativity, wit, surprise, and joie de vivre that were the reasons the original music halls flourished.
The immediate difference, in the opening, was the sense of many characters: a grande dame, a vedette, a singing curé, a floating transvestite, a flamenco dancer. The intimacy of the place was one of the more cunning aspects of the show; the moment a young emcee came on, the waiters began to shout and scoff. Obligingly he introduced them as "our real stars" and insisted they come up onstage to do a disgruntled cancan, balancing their trays.
To the emphatic "The minute you walked in the joint. . ." there was a retelling of the famous murderer Landru, who burned beautiful widows in his oven. In L’Alcazar’s witty version, five widows stride on in black and do a competitive strip while Landru, looking suspiciously like Toulouse-Lautrec, covetously collects their black silk undergarments. ("Look!" calls out one waiter. "She lost her trousers!") The proud widows walk naked across the front tables then hop willingly into Landru’s oven. He closes it on all five but instead of turning up the flames—hops in after them.
A Cotton Club scene (the emcee announced that Coppola had been there the night before, directing) was a brilliantly detailed period piece. And for the first time in my music-hall week, the inevitable can-can recreation that followed was wonderful: the frou-frou girls protesting, waving their legs, squealing. ("Pigs!" screamed a waiter. "Please," implored the emcee.)
And now an homage to the tango. Before you: Buenos Aires, suggested by a street scene of men inventing a few steps for each other as women joined them, to the strains of accordion and violin. (The musical arrangements here were in a class of their own.)
An enormous man named Badabou came on dressed as Ines de la Fressange, the Chanel model. Unspeakably done up in wig, slinky dress, and plumed gloves, he mussed the hair of several men in the audience. ("Old friends?" suggested a waiter.) After a salute to Edith Piaf (an impersonation that stayed on the side of tribute) the emcee improvised a routine with—or against—a famous French radio personality in the audience. A dignified black singer in tails, tap-dancing brilliantly, explained "what they mean when they say gay. . . Paree." Blindfolded, the emcee did a mock ESP act with someone in the audience, ignoring her denials and protests.
To Sayonara, a samurai opera buffa: Badabou in a blue kimono and her warrior paramour crashed around the stage in a romantic, martial-arts pas de deux, using poles, daggers, and swords to demonstrate their love while silly geishas twirled umbrellas.
For Alice in Playback-land a schoolgirl listening to her radio summons up an Elvis impersonator, followed chronologically by an Alice Cooper and gang; a Boy George; Whitney Houston and soul singers; then Badabou as Madonna, followed by—James Brown!—while mini-skirted girls frug away with men in inflatable suits that suddenly inflate out of control. Prince struts on, accompanied by chicks in yellow leather and black stockings, then Michael Jackson. The schoolgirl remains bewildered.
Like many Alcazar acts, Alice works as tribute and very funny parody simultaneously. Afterward I spoke with the director and choreographer, Dominique Conte, about L’Alcazar’s special atmosphere. "What’s important is that the performers are involved with the spectators. This is very Parisian; the intimacy is what makes the real camembert."
She’d worked at the Folies for five years—"a good school." L’Alcazar had begun in 1968, "the year of France’s second revolution. Many numbers were derisive, like a nude girl singing in a bath with pictures of politicians. Now people don’t go to cabarets so much, it’s less a reflex, people think they’re dirty. We often do matinees for groups of elderly at low prices. They love to see the old days evoked, as in the Piaf songs. I try for fifty percent comedy; I want people at least to smile. One must always turn things upside down, otherwise it’s boring. You have to modernize traditions and hold on to them at the same time. The artists here stay sometimes a year, sometimes four years. The problem now is that young people would rather work at videos, or ads. The danseuse myth is finished. Here it takes a special esprit and fourteen hours’ work a day. I like tenacious people; I’m lucky to have some who wanted to do this all their lives."
Last year an effort to do L’Alcazar in New York failed; the promoters wanted to reproduce the idea and the costumes, not bring over the show and the incomparable performers. "They couldn’t keep their hands off it. In the end it wasn’t French. I wanted to export the real camembert, but it wasn’t to be." To this visitor, it was gratifying to find in the music-halls something still too Parisian to export.
At the mere mention of Paris, a cliché invades your starving imagination. Not the cliché about the food; the one about le music-hall. Closely related to the other Parisian cliché about the women, the image is half Toulouse-Lautrec can-can, half a more modern vision of nearly naked girls with fascination in their walk and feathers on their heads. Partly to shatter these vague ideas, partly because my French friends insisted, I recently visited four survivors: the Folies Bergere, the oldest; the Lido, the most touristic; the Crazy Horse, the most devoutly erotic; and L’Alcazar—the youngest, most creative, most deeply Parisian.
The music-halls go back more than a century. Originally they were dance halls for the public. Professional performers came on toward ten in the evening. Toulouse-Lautrec was famous one day after his first poster for the Moulin Rouge; such stars as Yves Montand, Maurice Chevalier, Edith Piaf, and Josephine Baker made their names (and perhaps did their finest work) in the music-halls. Conventional wisdom holds that there was a golden age until WWII, when too much money (meaning American visitors) over-commercialized the music-halls, though what were they ever if not commercial? In the days when Paris was considered the hedonist’s capital of Europe, the music-halls were an early stop on any male’s visit. Today, too easily dismissed as fodder for tourists, one or two might still be considered necessary to an education. Meanwhile, Frenchmen who have never read her work know that the first bared breasts on a music-hall stage (the Folies Bergere, 1909) belonged to Colette.
The Folies Bergere, at age 103 arguably the oldest music-hall, has since 1927 illuminated a majestic art-deco theater whose lobby alone boasts mosaic-inlaid columns, gilded horses, and a Bal Musette accordion trio. The show thrives on the theater’s atmosphere; the lavish and lovely costumes, the insouciant mood are all from an indefinite Belle Époque—like the recreated can-can of girls in yellow and black who shake their bloomers (with the Tour Eiffel twinkling behind) to the thumping tunes of Bizet and Offenbach.
A family show, it had some daring moments and, surprisingly, as much male as female nudity, even a naked balletic pas de deux. Always famous for grand tableaus, especially for excessive decors that appear and vanish in seconds, this particular Folies en Folie ("Folies in Heat") included such stirring sights as a winter fête in the Tyrol, Venice at carnival time, four naked women in silver cowboy boots playing violins, a Viennese soirée at which Strauss creates the Blue Danube waltzes, a tribute to Josephine Baker and the Charleston, a fine abduction in a ship’s boiler room, a roller-skating duo, and a sumptuous Ancient Rome with everybody wigwagging in togas. It was rather like eating an entire dessert trolley. The Folies weren’t afraid to be a little silly, and this gave the kitsch a feeling of genuine music-hall, from a time when audiences were less jaded and in person was the only way to see something. Sadly, the talk is that the Folies may go under, though it was enthusiastically full the night I went.
The grandiose Lido, like the Moulin Rouge (now under similar management), takes the big-bang approach, so endlessly mimicked by Vegas and all the loud tourist nightclubs of the world that only its extravagance remains interesting. Electronic candles ascend and descend, an orchestra harrumphs along with a conductor; women in My Fair Lady furs, their breasts and buttocks barely showing, stroll beneath fountainous headdresses. Male dancers with toothpaste grins leap among them. Here the audience seems half foreigners, half French families from the provinces.
I sat at a table of three French boys in tuxes celebrating their school vacation. They enjoyed the inevitable salute to Broadway, the inevitable Polynesian panoramas complete with waterfall and erupting volcano, and especially the inevitable Chevalier tribute of thanking heaven for little girls who thankfully disrobe—though you can see more nudity on any French beach. Evening-dress couples descend stroboscopic staircases. An Ancient Egypt tableau features a delectable human sacrifice, a flaming inferno with a cobra, laser lights, and two camels; a pharaoh sings a torch song to a live mummy. In-between are bouncing rubberized acrobats, a genius who juggles ping-pong balls with his tongue to cha-chas, nude ice skaters, more acrobats, then some more acrobats. Each group tableau seems a finale, and the style is entirely derivative: everything but French. Like Liberace’s trousers, it is stupidity on an expensive, highly professional level.
The Crazy Horse Saloon isn’t really a music-hall. Cabaret-size, it calls itself erotic theater and boasts "the most beautiful femmes fatales in the world." Its origins lie in striptease and burlesque, but its high style is very much its own, continually under the guidance of its founder, Alain Bemardin. Since it opened in 1951, the Crazy Horse has become an institution in Paris nightlife and its lighting effects copied worldwide; faithful followers have included Dalí, Balanchine, Gene Kelly, Bob Fosse. (Woody Allen built a scene in What’s New, Pussycat? around the Crazy Horse.) Inside, the theater was surprisingly small, the stage downright tiny. It was easy to pick out the French: veterans, they were at the bar, paying less for an equal view.
How to describe such a spectacle? For nearly two hours one’s senses are blasted by variations on a single theme: eighteen naked young women with perfect bodies more individual than their faces, very close yet not close enough. This you cannot see on any beach.
After a disappointing gym-class opening the solo acts began: Bernardin christens his girls with names like Zaza Vesuvio, Charly Commando, Polly Underground, Tiny Semaphore. A brunette with foaming hair did an incandescent striptease lying against a tilted platform while op-art circles of black and silver swirled across her. (Already the newlywed American bride seated next to us looked nervous.) The Three Graces, wearing only pearls, rotated to classical music. Lina Peccadillo in space helmet and space boots flew to Venus, amid interstellar smoke. A couple of expert magicians came on for comic turns. Vanity Obelisk sang I’m a good girl and recalled affairs with "a cute ayatollah, an emir or two". The fantasy of the girl in a cage became a fantastic rhythmic ballet of a naked beauty throwing herself from bar to bar. In group numbers the girls wore multi-colored or matching wigs, which made their faces fade into mere prettiness so one could concentrate on what Kenneth Tynan called their "incredibly healthy" bodies.
I spoke with Alain Bemardin, an elegant man in his late sixties whose work evidently keeps him several decades younger (he recently married a Crazy Horse star named Lova Moor).
"In 1962 we did a Nazi parody. The music was a German military march; Bertha von Paraboum wore a G-string in the shape of a swastika. The Americans were shocked, the Germans were shocked, the French were shocked. The publicity was enormous."
I asked what it took to be a Crazy Horse girl.
"First, she must have marvelous breasts. Then, she must have trained already as a dancer; this is why we have many English girls, because they’re better dancers than the French. She must be tall, say 5’6 "or 5’7" at least. And she must be a ‘good girl’. I don’t find them, they find me. From all over Europe. We have also girls from South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Russia; from Poland, Hungary, Romania. Since we have a corps of twenty-four girls, and they average about five years with us, we take about five new girls a year. Afterward they might become singers, or dancers on TV. Others get married. But everyone knows there’s no question of meeting the girls. The girls know and the clients know."
The net effect is a stunning, sublime eroticism; the tone is never leering, more a kind of holy lasciviousness. One marvels at the imaginative lighting and is disappointed by the acts which too easily fall short. But one goes for the superb girls, after all.
L’Alcazar, which calls itself proudly "Le Plus Parisien des Spectacles," is the music-hall least known to foreigners. Less than ten per cent of its clients are tourists and indeed, someone who doesn’t speak French will miss some good jokes. Here I found at last the creativity, wit, surprise, and joie de vivre that were the reasons the original music halls flourished.
The immediate difference, in the opening, was the sense of many characters: a grande dame, a vedette, a singing curé, a floating transvestite, a flamenco dancer. The intimacy of the place was one of the more cunning aspects of the show; the moment a young emcee came on, the waiters began to shout and scoff. Obligingly he introduced them as "our real stars" and insisted they come up onstage to do a disgruntled cancan, balancing their trays.
To the emphatic "The minute you walked in the joint. . ." there was a retelling of the famous murderer Landru, who burned beautiful widows in his oven. In L’Alcazar’s witty version, five widows stride on in black and do a competitive strip while Landru, looking suspiciously like Toulouse-Lautrec, covetously collects their black silk undergarments. ("Look!" calls out one waiter. "She lost her trousers!") The proud widows walk naked across the front tables then hop willingly into Landru’s oven. He closes it on all five but instead of turning up the flames—hops in after them.
A Cotton Club scene (the emcee announced that Coppola had been there the night before, directing) was a brilliantly detailed period piece. And for the first time in my music-hall week, the inevitable can-can recreation that followed was wonderful: the frou-frou girls protesting, waving their legs, squealing. ("Pigs!" screamed a waiter. "Please," implored the emcee.)
And now an homage to the tango. Before you: Buenos Aires, suggested by a street scene of men inventing a few steps for each other as women joined them, to the strains of accordion and violin. (The musical arrangements here were in a class of their own.)
An enormous man named Badabou came on dressed as Ines de la Fressange, the Chanel model. Unspeakably done up in wig, slinky dress, and plumed gloves, he mussed the hair of several men in the audience. ("Old friends?" suggested a waiter.) After a salute to Edith Piaf (an impersonation that stayed on the side of tribute) the emcee improvised a routine with—or against—a famous French radio personality in the audience. A dignified black singer in tails, tap-dancing brilliantly, explained "what they mean when they say gay. . . Paree." Blindfolded, the emcee did a mock ESP act with someone in the audience, ignoring her denials and protests.
To Sayonara, a samurai opera buffa: Badabou in a blue kimono and her warrior paramour crashed around the stage in a romantic, martial-arts pas de deux, using poles, daggers, and swords to demonstrate their love while silly geishas twirled umbrellas.
For Alice in Playback-land a schoolgirl listening to her radio summons up an Elvis impersonator, followed chronologically by an Alice Cooper and gang; a Boy George; Whitney Houston and soul singers; then Badabou as Madonna, followed by—James Brown!—while mini-skirted girls frug away with men in inflatable suits that suddenly inflate out of control. Prince struts on, accompanied by chicks in yellow leather and black stockings, then Michael Jackson. The schoolgirl remains bewildered.
Like many Alcazar acts, Alice works as tribute and very funny parody simultaneously. Afterward I spoke with the director and choreographer, Dominique Conte, about L’Alcazar’s special atmosphere. "What’s important is that the performers are involved with the spectators. This is very Parisian; the intimacy is what makes the real camembert."
She’d worked at the Folies for five years—"a good school." L’Alcazar had begun in 1968, "the year of France’s second revolution. Many numbers were derisive, like a nude girl singing in a bath with pictures of politicians. Now people don’t go to cabarets so much, it’s less a reflex, people think they’re dirty. We often do matinees for groups of elderly at low prices. They love to see the old days evoked, as in the Piaf songs. I try for fifty percent comedy; I want people at least to smile. One must always turn things upside down, otherwise it’s boring. You have to modernize traditions and hold on to them at the same time. The artists here stay sometimes a year, sometimes four years. The problem now is that young people would rather work at videos, or ads. The danseuse myth is finished. Here it takes a special esprit and fourteen hours’ work a day. I like tenacious people; I’m lucky to have some who wanted to do this all their lives."
Last year an effort to do L’Alcazar in New York failed; the promoters wanted to reproduce the idea and the costumes, not bring over the show and the incomparable performers. "They couldn’t keep their hands off it. In the end it wasn’t French. I wanted to export the real camembert, but it wasn’t to be." To this visitor, it was gratifying to find in the music-halls something still too Parisian to export.
Friday, March 15, 1991
Freighter to Paradise
I went to the Marquesas in March 1991, a surreal heaven after the concrete hell of Tahiti. On this voyage I met fellow passenger Ron Wright, whose superb book on Fiji I'd just read. Both of us put the actual figure of Falchetto in novels: he in Henderson's Spear (2001), I in The Land of Later On (2010). I wrote this article for European Travel & Life. Imagine my surprise at finding an article on the Marquesas by my buddy Paul Theroux in the magazine while I was at work on my own! The editor, more familiar with Europe, had lost track. This piece has never been published.
Anyone who is tired of islands is tired of life. Stevenson wrote that his first South Sea Island touched “a virginity of sense”—and even after journeying widely in the South Pacific, my first sight of the Marquesas was a profound awakening. Here were no coral reefs, no transparent lagoons and soft islets on the horizon, but a more savage beauty. Lush valleys swept up in a delirium of palms to sheer black pillars and weird spires that loomed like the towers of a surreal cathedral. Clouds hugged the highest spears of rock; wild waters surged about the volcanic coast and exploded into mist off its folds. The veined, massive body of the island lay like animals tumbled across each other in round sleep. I’d sailed nearly a thousand miles from Tahiti by copra freighter for this view.
It is ninety years since Gauguin came to the Marquesas to die and one hundred fifty years since Melville had his beginnings here as a writer. The dozen Marquesas are among the most unknown and isolated islands on earth. A fragrant world unto themselves, they shelter under the territorial umbrella of French Polynesia, along with the Austral, Gambier, Tuamotu, and Society Islands—130 in all, administered from Tahiti, spread over ocean as big as Europe, with Papeete bearing the brunt of half the entire population and France footing the bill to keep the islands going in return for atomic test sites in the southern Tuamotus. All the islands are served by copra freighters which carry cargo and passengers in return for dried coconut meat. These ships are notorious for their discomfort, dismal food, and stench, but the Marquesas are served by an exception. The Aranui (“Great Road”) is 1/4 spotlessly comfortable passenger ship, 3/4 hardworking freighter, and resembles no other copra freighter in the Pacific.
My fellow passengers for the 17-day voyage were as motley as the cargo: mainly French and American, a few Brits, a New Zealander, a Pole, a few Canadians. There were three French doctors, two engineers, a geologist; a banker with his Tahitian wife; an antiquary from Nice, a Parisian restorer of 19th century paintings; from the States, a directress of an artists’ colony, a literature professor, a boating-magazine publisher, and a Montana farmer.
The Marquesas lie three days’ steady sail from Papeete, Tahiti’s capital. Few first visitors are prepared for Papeete—once a sleepy port, now the busiest city in the South Pacific islands, “Gauguin on a motorbike.” We spent a full day on the wharf, Tahitian mountains pastel behind the tumbling city, watching muscular sailors load crate after crate that were raised by the ship’s crane and stowed in the ship’s enormous belly. The hold swallowed everything from tractors and cars to local Hinano beer and soap; and no wonder, for the 5000-ton Aranui keeps these islands alive. The ship was roughly the length of a football field, German-built twenty years ago, and refitted extensively two years ago to carry around 1500 tons of freight and a maximum of eighty cabin passengers. On an aft deck about a dozen others slept very comfortably and companionably, enjoying the same French cooking and wines, local fish and fruits, and well-guided shore explorations as everyone else at half price.
The Aranui carried about thirty sailors, mostly hard-working Marquesans like Timau, or Teiki; but all French Polynesia was there, from Toko of the Tuamotus to Pipier from the Australs. Tino from Papeete was the supercargo and supervised all the loading. They worked at maximum strength from dawn till midnight, scrambling onto fully-loaded palettes that swung down to a tossing whale-boat; or leaping in heavy waves, launching themselves ten feet from the gunwales up to a slippery wharf as if stepping up a single stair.
A day’s sea passage brought us to the Tuamotus, the largest archipelago of coral atolls in the world. Once known as the Low or Dangerous Archipelago because of their treacherous currents and reefs, these atolls have an unimaginable simplicity: long ribbons of sand and palm trees, often only a quarter mile across and ten feet above the surface. Sparsely populated, tremendously vulnerable to hurricanes, some have only a family or two and many are uninhabited. They are all beach, islands more of sea than of land, looping in a circle around gigantic interior lagoons that sometimes have perfect passes from the ocean. (Rangiroa’s lagoon, which we entered on our way back, could hold the entire island of Tahiti.) At dawn we passed Arutua and Apataki; while supplies were unloaded at Takapoto we snorkeled the afternoon away in the lagoon by the stilt-built shacks of perliers, for the Tuamotus survive by undersea farming of black pearls. It was a night and day and night’s sea passage before we reached the Marquesas, six of which are inhabited, six not. We saw no other ships.
On Ua Pou, our first Marquesan landfall, at Hakahau we walked up a winding trail that split the spine of the island. At the summit, by a lone cross I had a view across tumultuous valleys and soaring peaks belted by clouds. Known as “The Cathedrals” for its spires which are extreme even in the Marquesas, Ua Pou was the subject of a song by Jacques Brel.
That afternoon the Aranui slipped around the coast to Hakehatau, Ua Pou’s smallest village (pop. 199). This was our first entry via a double-ended whale-boat, which we reached by going down a metal gangplank hung along the ship’s side. At the dock a volleyball game was going on near a myriad of rock pools carved by tides from the lap of the cliffs. I met the Monsignor Le Cleach, a retired Boston priest who, after twenty years in the Marquesas, had translated the New Testament into Marquesan and was now working on the Old Testament. When I pointed out how busy the little village seemed, the Monsignor laughed and said, “But these islands are empty! We have only seven persons per square mile in the Marquesas.”
The Marquesas have not always been so unpeopled. The Te Fenua Enata (“The Land of Men”)—originally settled a century or two before Christ in the first wave of Polynesian expansion—had, despite their isolation, flourished. The culture, one of the most developed and refined in the Pacific, was probably at its height when the Europeans arrived in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Spanish, French, American, and English explorers, followed by their countries’ navies, brought death by military means on a small scale and death by imported disease on an unprecedented scale. As one historian wrote, “The age of exploration was the age of contamination.” By 1883, the population had fallen from a height of perhaps 150,000 to less than 5,000, the result of smallpox, tuberculosis, and venereal diseases. By this century only 1,500 Marquesans were left. Though the population hovers around 6,000 today, European disease, muskets, and missionaries had achieved the near-total destruction of Marquesan culture.
Until the European invasion, the Marquesans surpassed all other Polynesians in their carved stone figures, some eight feet high (second only to those of Easter Island, which was settled, like Hawaii, by voyaging Marquesans). They also carried farther the elaborate art of tattoo. Men were entirely covered (even their heads) with intricate geometric designs representing Marquesan history, legends, and genealogies. Except for their faces, women might be just as decorated, and anthropologists visiting in 1920 still found old Marquesans tattooed from head to foot. Tattooing was done slowly and painfully with bone combs dipped in an ink of soot or pulverized charcoal, then given a sharp blow with a tapping stick to knock the teeth of the comb into the wound. To set off the designs, they wore scanty coverings of white tapa bark-cloth, flower and feather headdresses and mother-of-pearl ornaments.
They lived in open houses of breadfruit or palm logs, with thatched roofs sloping at the back. The houses were built on huge paepae, or stone platforms, which evoke the enormous building projects of Central American peoples like the Maya. These paepae are everywhere in Marquesan valleys, composed of massive boulders of up to several tons each fitted ingeniously into place, often built ten feet high to compensate for a valley’s slope. They built small fishing and large war canoes, stabilized with outriggers, powered by large carved paddles or sails. They caught sharks with nooses and used the teeth to carve ornate wooden drums and nose flutes. It was a very rare polyandrous society—women took several husbands.
Marquesans are still fond of tattooing, and they maintain resolutely their own language, related to but very different from Tahitian. (Unlike most destroyed societies, they have held onto title to their land and their language.) As a people they are probably hardier and perhaps more child-like, less invaded by the outside world’s personality, than other Polynesians. And unlike the rest of largely-Protestant French Polynesia, the Marquesas are 95% Catholic. Despite the missionaries’ best efforts, couples often live together twenty years before getting married.
Fatu Hiva, the most eastward island, was the first discovered (Captain de Mendena of Spain, 1595). It receives the most rainfall and remains a lusher world apart even within the group. With about 500 people divided between two villages isolated by the difficult coast, (and with some hints of a traditional enmity between them), the island’s only outside contact is with passing ships.
At dawn we passed Hanavave, a village pocketed in the Bay of Virgins, perhaps the loveliest bay in all the Marquesas, with black basalt pillars rising from mango groves and palm beds, the light majestic across the glowing cliffs and trees. We hugged the coast until the bay and village of Omoa. In niches in the cliffs hung half-ruined wooden stages with bananas drying, a local delicacy. A whale-boat brought us in to a small stone quay, spray crashing and churning over it—the sailors in their plastic granny-shoes leaping the height of a man to land surely. A brief trail led into Omoa: a grey-black beach with boys surfing on makeshift boards in the shallows, a church, a soccer field with a brown horse, and the whole village running to see what had been sent and unloaded.
Fatu Hiva is the principal island still making tapa cloth. Here we saw women busy at the complicated process by which mulberry or breadfruit bark is pried and stripped from a branch, pounded, wetted, stretched, dried, cut; the designs pencil-sketched or stencilled on the cloth, then inked-in. Unlike, say, Tongans, Fijians, and Samoans, the earlier Marquesans were notable for rarely decorating tapa at all except for religious or chiefly fabrics.
I walked down the village path, past simple houses in lavender and yellow with ruined stone paepae in their neat gardens. A bare-chested man standing outside one house beckoned me in—a carver of rosewood ukeleles. I suggested he wander the quarter mile down the village path, as several fellow passengers wanted to buy a Marquesan ukelele. He said with a mild shrug, “It’s a bit of trouble to go find them, no? But tell them where I live.”
On my way back I fell into step with a woman who asked what I thought of the island. I said it was the most beautiful I’d seen.
She said, “If you say so. We wouldn’t know. We stay here.”
I asked if she wished they had an airstrip.
She laughed. “What do we want an airstrip for? Then we’ll have all those sick people coming in on the aeroplane!”
By sick people she meant tourists.
“How do you make a living here?”
“Copra,” she said. “Fish. Tapa cloth. Some people carve wood. What else is there to do here?” She smiled. “There’s nothing else.”
The sea passage by night to Nuku Hiva was exhilarating, the ship’s body like a horse plunging ahead by moonlight, the huge island gradually filling more and more of the immense sky with a black silhouette. Then came the lone lights of the harbor quay, for in the Marquesas people turn in early. Electricity is always at a premium; one of the freighter’s most important cargos was oil drums of generator fuel. In the morning I awakened to the unloading and the broad horseshoe bay of Taiohae, the largest town of the Marquesas, large enough to have a post office and a jail—even though the prisoners are given keys and only have to spend nights there.
From the highest point of Nuku Hiva, up a difficult winding road, I looked past brooding foreheads of cloud across valleys proceeding in green disorder to unexpected farther views of the blue Pacific and forested pillars and crags, all so miragelike that at times I couldn’t tell if I was looking at clouds or sea or mountains. I stood on a ridge of the Taipivai Valley. Here in July, 1842, a young sailor named Herman Melville, deserting his unsuccessful whaling ship the Acushnet, gingerly made his way down with a comrade, looking for a safer valley one ridge over. Instead he found himself among the most dangerous and warlike tribe in Nuku Hiva, the Taipis. Melville’s three or four weeks of friendly imprisonment among them (he claimed it was four months) inspired his first book, Typee, a fictionalized memoir and his most successful work in his lifetime.
As we descended by another rough road, the valley opened like a palm-forested rib cage with a river meandering thinly at the bottom, kept out of sight by impenetrable trees. At the valley’s foot the river flowed past the mile or so of village and became a wider creek opening to the bay and the sea. Inland, a makeshift track sliced across the valley’s ribs from the point where the village and the river parted company. The track wound tortuously through solid wilderness where Melville had wandered, all the way to the valley’s head. There two slender waterfalls hung down from mountains flattened by clouds, with trees tracing their heights like troops en masse.
I wanted a better idea of Melville’s terrain, and at the edge of the village I got lucky and fell into conversation with Jean Baptiste Falchetto, a light-skinned, burly man in his sixties with a headlong gait, a wooden cross dangling at his neck, and a face of great vivacity. At first I took him for a missionary half gone native; he denied this but admitted he’d had several visions. He spoke a native French, a bit garbled by being here so long, but the accent was unmistakably southern France. He had come as a boy, brought by his father Sebastien, a beekeeper in Nice, back in 1936. His father’s lungs had been damaged by gas in World War I and, given a choice of France’s overseas colonies to settle in for his health, he’d come out here. Falchetto lived on Ua Pou, but he had grown up in the Taipivai Valley and returned for a few weeks’ stay on behalf of his late wife, a Taipi woman who’d died a month earlier. One of Falchetto’s daughters ran housekeeping on the ship.
We followed the track by the jungle to the head of the valley and the twin cascades. Here Melville—who plagiarized chunks of Typee with verve and style—claimed he made his difficult way down. Astute scholars question how many of his so-called adventures were actually his own experiences, but it is difficult to be in the Taipivai Valley and not be persuaded by much of Melville’s narrative. The valley slopes on both sides were littered with more ruined black paepae, stone-house foundations, than I’d seen elsewhere, supporting the idea of a once-huge population.
Even in Melville’s time, every tribe was at war with its neighbors, rarely for territory, generally for sacrificial victims. Battles were fought with slings, spears, war clubs, and heavy stones. There was much cannibalism, and the skulls of enemies were decorated and preserved. Usually each tribe had its own valley. By early this century Taipivai, once home to perhaps 10,000 Taipis, had only a few families left.
Fired by the idea of searching for Melville, and perhaps rediscovering trails and paepae he’d known as a boy, Falchetto ran me ragged. Barefoot, he clambered down the steep jungled hillside, under and over all muscular vegetation, with such agility that, scrambling after and thirty years younger, I couldn’t keep up. I caught him where the ground levelled into a well-made winding path through dense trees—the ancient Taipi road of black rocks, in use until two decades ago. We went scrambling again and here, just below the ancient road and following the tiny trickling river for mile after mile, were the endless and imposing ruins of the Taipis whose last era Melville caught. Their staggering paepae were made of carefully-fitted boulders, some the size of a small car, moved down from the cliffs where they’d been cut and lifted into place without the use of a wheel.
We spent a good two hours exploring the mosquito-haunted and vine-choked stone metropoli. Here, in shaded pools, Melville had bathed with the lovely nude Fayaway, a dream of a Marquesan girl whose image—invented, half-invented, or not—inflamed the U.S. and British imaginations, made Typee a bestseller, and sent dozens of hopeful painters to the South Seas long before Gauguin. It is hard now to comprehend how steadily Melville’s career went downhill. Moby-Dick was considered a disaster and nearly finished him, and when Melville died in 1891, he hadn’t published a novel in 35 years, The New York Times spelled his name wrong, and his only remaining fame was as the man who had lived among cannibals. He was, in fact, one of hundreds of vagabond sailors the Marquesas took in; many families are descendants of deserters. The difference is that Melville wrote and published, without fear of bitterly criticizing missionaries or Western powers. “Thrice happy,” he wrote, “are they who, inhabiting some yet undiscovered island in the midst of the ocean, have never been brought into contaminating contact with the white man.” Stevenson, trailing Melville in 1889, was more succinct: “Death,” he wrote, “coming in like a tide.”
Later Falchetto led me to three enormous platforms of grey-black rocks in a glade high up the valley slope, a temple marae with twelve tikis—divine statues of obese men clutching their bellies, phalli dangling down, by women with great breasts and welcoming bodies. I could only assume this was the tabu, sacred marae that Melville wasn’t allowed to see till the end of his stay.
By the river the small village of Taipivai was flourishing, lined with banana, frangipani, and mango trees. A massive hillside of palms swept back from a pale blue wooden church with a rust-red tin roof and two hearts above the door. The whale-boats came up the creek to load the month’s copra sacks and, the tide going out, became too laden for the shallows and got stuck. We got out and helped push, and as twilight settled down we roared into the bay of open sea, past the dark beach where Melville had been rescued, to where the ship similarly awaited us.
Hatiheu’s square symmetrical bay with crashing six-foot surf was overlooked by a white statue of the Virgin, so high it was only a tiny white doll against the green. Put up on a black basalt pillar nearly a century ago by the first priest here, it was brought down painstakingly every year to be repainted. The mayor, a woman named Yvonne, ran a restaurant beside her general store and house, where she laid on a Marquesan feast: pig baked in a ground oven beneath leaves; marinated fish; fried tuna steaks; and kaaku—Melville’s favorite, breadfruit pounded into a dough and soaked in coconut milk. To make poipoi, a fermented paste, the women still pummelled the breadfruit with a stone pounder of ancient design. We were all given crowns of flowers to wear through the meal and the music that went on all afternoon. Later a boat-hand told me, “On one voyage at Hatiheu people were too drunk to get out of the whale-boat and up the ladder, so we lifted them up by crane in copra sacks.”
At Hiva Oa the Aranui could actually dock, just along the coast of prodigious mountains, at one end of the vast Bay of Traitors with an islet in its center. The second largest island, this was where the Frenchman Gauguin, who painted Polynesia for everyone forever, came to live at the turn of the century, and where little more than a decade ago the Belgian singer Jacques Brel made his home. Both came in the knowledge they were dying, and buried twenty paces from each other, they share a final view.
Atuona was, in Marquesan terms, a bustling town, with nearly a thousand inhabitants. Going to the cemetery, the road winds up the valley, past the small, squat, zinc-roofed wooden house Brel rented, surrounded by orchids in his day, still with the small pool he installed. Gauguin’s simple grave lies beneath a white frangipani tree, a single stone with the name and “1903” in white, and looks out over a rugged coastline and surf crashing on the beach where he often painted. No cross surmounts the grave. Instead a reproduction of his own pagan androgynous figure, Oviri-moe-aihere (“The Savage who sleeps in the wild forest”), stands beside him on a pedestal, a god/goddess charged with death. The gravestone, a round block of clay sculpted by Gauguin, was found in the artist’s studio and set in place by a friend, Tioka, who carved in the name and date. More than most, Gauguin was always actively shaping his gravestone.
Gauguin first arrived in Tahiti in 1891. Six months later he was already thinking about abandoning it for the Marquesas, where life would be less expensive, less civilized (“I am a savage,” he wrote repeatedly), and he would have a chance to study Polynesian art, which he thought might’ve survived in the Marquesas. By the time he actually made the move, in September 1901, he had been back to and returned from France in frustration (1893-5) and gotten fed up again with Tahiti. Syphilitic, dependent on laudanum and morphine, tormented with eczema, walking with great difficulty, he knew he was near the end. He would have twenty months on Hiva Oa.
And yet in his Marquesan period, Gaughin lived comfortably off a contract with a Paris dealer—his first near-affluence since throwing off his life as a stockbroker eighteen years earlier to become an artist. He worked all day, and his output in this time is astonishing for its variety of themes. He purchased a horse trap, the only vehicle in the Marquesas. He refused to pay his taxes and encouraged his neighbors to do the same; got the locals drunk and was sentenced to three months’ prison for disorderly conduct; even tried to convince girls to avoid attending the convent school and visit him instead. His paintings had more of a fable in them than ever, like “Riders On the Beach” showing two Marquesan horsemen with two spirit figures beside them. When he died in May 1903, either from an overdose of morphine or a heart attack, his neighbor Tioka bit him on the head—the Marquesan way of verifying death. The shopkeeper across the road bought Gauguin’s house (perhaps his Marquesan masterpiece, for Gauguin did as much wood-carving as painting) and tore it down. Most of the contents were auctioned off in Papeete. (The well-known story that a last, unfinished painting on his easel was a Brittany village under snow is a fabrication.)
I went looking for Gauguin’s house-site. It lay between the old Catholic mission and the Protestant church, and in a sense it was Gauguin’s largest work of art. He called it his “Maison de Jouir” (House of Pleasure) and decorated it with elaborate wood-carved panels, pornographic photographs, and, of course, his paintings.
I found the site across from a decrepit and lovely grey-green trading-post stocked to the rafters, with a shaded colonial balcony, where Gauguin had grocery-shopped and been be-friended by the American owner. Inside, in one corner, hung an antique clock. There is a certain mystique about this clock, so I asked.
“Yes, m’sieu, it was the clock of Monsieur Gauguin.”
“How long has it been here?”
“Since he died, I suppose.”
But it was simply another old clock. Across the road a gentle woman named Catherine pointed out the glade of palms where Gauguin’s house had stood. When I mentioned the controversial clock, she shook her head. “Nothing of Gauguin’s is still here,” she said. “Except Gauguin.”
Until recently that hadn’t been so. The kind Monsignor on Ua Pou had told me about Gauguin’s Marquesan daughter, born in 1902, who died two years ago on Hiva Oa. Her mother, age fifteen, left Gauguin when she got pregnant and never allowed him to see his daughter.
The Monsignor had also known Brel, the French singer and composer whose verbal deftness, by turns tender or sarcastic, loses much of its bite in translation. “He was a turbulent, sympathetic man,” said the Monsignor. “A poetic man, even in daily conversation. And tormented by the fate he knew was coming: cancer.”
Brel sailed here on his boat with his wife Maddly, a Guadeloupian, in 1976. They liked the Marquesans’ friendly indifference, and soon rented their modest bungalow with the convent school below, Gauguin buried above. Brel’s talents as a mimic were popular with Marquesans, expert mimics themselves. A qualified pilot, he had his small plane brought to the island and helped out in an emergency or by bringing passengers, mail, and medicine from Papeete. He also brought out a big open-air screen and feature films for the locals.
In August 1977 he went back to Paris to record. On his return he asked the convent girls up to his house to hear the suite Les Marquises, which mentions them—“songs of love that the sisters don’t know they don’t know.” His lung troubles ever increasing, in July 1978 he went back to France for treatment and died there in October, aged 49. He was brought back to Atuona for burial; his grave’s plaque shows him and Maddly. Les Marquises, the last song on his last record, captured the Marquesan state of mind:
They speak of death as you would speak of a fruit
They look at the sea as you would look at a garden well
And because there is no breeze, time stands still
In the Marquesas...
The pirogues go, the pirogues come
And only the oldest will remember me —
Do you want me to say it? Lament is never allowed
In the Marquesas....
Our society deifies its most popular artists; in the Marquesas, the gods took the form of men. At Puamau, on Hiva Oa, we went ashore to see a marae (temple) glade of the largest tikis in French Polynesia: one upended, two standing beheaded, the heads lying nearby. All had been castrated by the missionaries. The largest, with big saucer eyes looking out from every angle, stands triumphant. Nearby was a squat horizontal figure with a cartoon body that was nearly all smiling head, its meaning obscure—flying or swimming or giving birth. Just down the road, at the edge of someone’s garden, was the sacred paepae and now the grave of the valley’s last queen, Te Haumoenoa, who died around 1900. She was buried along with the bicycle given her by a French sailor, the first bicycle in the Marquesas.
The island of Tahuata, with 500 people spread over several bays and villages, lay only a few miles from Hiva Oa. An hour’s sea passage and an hour out of dream: the sharp-cut rough coast swooped on by wraiths of clouds, the deep sea worrying at the majestic flanks of the mountains beneath the slopes where wild horses grazed. Dolphins played about the ship. Pale desolate beaches appeared in tiny fiords, and suddenly we nosed into the small bay of Vaitahu—improbable, the sense of humans at all in this deserted beauty.
At the little landing-stage for the whale-boat the waters whirled furiously around barely submerged rocks; all the same, the boys pushed each other in and went leaping after. Vaitahu was an old white church, a new church of stone arches and polished-wood gables with a wood sculpture of the Virgin set in the steeple, a hillside punctuated by the ruins of an old French fort, small houses like terse comments on the landscape; little else.
Such a small place had suffered more than its share of European imperialism. It was here that the first missionaries had arrived in the Marquesas, in 1838. Tahuata then was 500 people, in several villages. Captain Halley landed in 1842, under Admiral Petit-Thouars, and annexed the island as a French protectorate—before Tahiti, in fact. A small dispute with the chief, who signed the treaty then retreated his people up the valley, rapidly escalated into a series of battles that ended with 200 Marquesans and the French captain dead and the chief’s power devalued. Such scenes would be repeated, over the next century and under different flags, on other islands.
Here the Aranui bought lemons, forty-pound frozen tuna, bananas, and burlap sacks of copra. By now I enjoyed the sickly-sweet smell of the dried coconut meat that, massed in heavy sacks, bullies all other scents for a quarter-mile. (For copra, France pays nearly 4 francs per kilo, even though the commercial price is only 1 franc.) On the stone landing-stage were piled the staples Aranui was selling to the village, along with the fuel: soy sauce, bags of cement, washing powder, spaghetti sauce, crackers, noodles, cheese, glassware, chicken legs (whole), and mackerel (in cans).
What would it be like, I wondered, to stay on here when the monthly ship left, bearing all its commerce and excitement away? It was evident we were seeing these quiet communities on the busiest day of the month, when the hand of the world touched an isolated village for a few hours, then withdrew. How would it be to watch the village return to its old round of hours, the children going by small boat to the other island for school, the daily sense of slow nothing peacefully happening except for the local arguments and gossips, the news by radio from Tahiti every night, the occasional boat putting in, the more occasional births and deaths?
Back in the village, a boy on a bicycle much too big for him pedalled in circles by a stream while a horse watched with infinite patience. Hibiscus blossoms and sand blew everywhere. That evening we sailed down the coast and anchored so the crew could fish.
At dawn we neared the spartan coast of Ua Huka; light seeped across the ocean, giving faces to the island’s shadowy profiles. Ua Huka was unlike the other five inhabited Marquesas. Barer, the scalped vegetation looked almost Mediterranean. The people had an appropriate dynamism. Vaipae had a small museum, run by Joseph Vaatete, one of the preeminent woodcarvers in the Pacific. This touching little museum at the end of the world was an assemblage of old photos, shells, stone artifacts, and Joseph’s recreations of old Marquesan objects: oars, hoes, war clubs; baskets carved of wood imitating every filigreed hair on a palm leaf; elaborate stilts with heads carved on the stirrups. “An old man in Nuku Hiva taught me how to carve,” he said. “With the stilts, the object was to balance on one stilt while knocking the other man’s stilts from under him. Or else they ran races. Sometimes we still do.”
In a four-wheel drive truck we bounced along a track that mounted steeply near the sea. Wild horses watched us pass. In Hokatu were more woodcarvers, and men playing boules with silver balls. At Hane, after the usual extravagant Marquesan banquet, we hiked through mud up a steep trail to a marae with three fine tikis in the midst of jungle, discovered only a few years ago.
When we came down from the palms the surf was rolling in with power to the pebbly beach and little boys were tossing a soccer ball and leaping on each other. The ship was still at other bays, so we spent the afternoon playing in the surf. These boys thought nothing of leaping through eight-foot waves and being dashed on the rocks if it would gain them the ball; we would watch five or six of them leap and go under, all refusing to relinquish their grip, get pounded on the rocks and come up grinning and shouting.
When afternoon waned we retreated from the water to a field and a soccer game with the big boys. Exhilarated, we barely noticed a light rain had begun to fall. The ship rounded the cape, lit up magnificently, and whale-boats rode into shore to get us. The surf was so rough that sailors had to carry several passengers out to the whale-boats like babes in arms as night came swiftly down.
It is hard to know what to make of the Marquesas; they seem to carry a meaning far beyond themselves. Rising in the farthest reaches of the Pacific, inhabited by a rugged and dignified people with a forgotten past, their spires of blasted rock and green-jungled hills, their lost bays, shattered capes, and unanimous sunsets still impart an ancient wonder. They are as strange as anywhere on earth, a vision of powerful and uncorrupted beauty that the imagination comes to humbly and leaves unwillingly. No one can sail among them and emerge unchanged.
Anyone who is tired of islands is tired of life. Stevenson wrote that his first South Sea Island touched “a virginity of sense”—and even after journeying widely in the South Pacific, my first sight of the Marquesas was a profound awakening. Here were no coral reefs, no transparent lagoons and soft islets on the horizon, but a more savage beauty. Lush valleys swept up in a delirium of palms to sheer black pillars and weird spires that loomed like the towers of a surreal cathedral. Clouds hugged the highest spears of rock; wild waters surged about the volcanic coast and exploded into mist off its folds. The veined, massive body of the island lay like animals tumbled across each other in round sleep. I’d sailed nearly a thousand miles from Tahiti by copra freighter for this view.
It is ninety years since Gauguin came to the Marquesas to die and one hundred fifty years since Melville had his beginnings here as a writer. The dozen Marquesas are among the most unknown and isolated islands on earth. A fragrant world unto themselves, they shelter under the territorial umbrella of French Polynesia, along with the Austral, Gambier, Tuamotu, and Society Islands—130 in all, administered from Tahiti, spread over ocean as big as Europe, with Papeete bearing the brunt of half the entire population and France footing the bill to keep the islands going in return for atomic test sites in the southern Tuamotus. All the islands are served by copra freighters which carry cargo and passengers in return for dried coconut meat. These ships are notorious for their discomfort, dismal food, and stench, but the Marquesas are served by an exception. The Aranui (“Great Road”) is 1/4 spotlessly comfortable passenger ship, 3/4 hardworking freighter, and resembles no other copra freighter in the Pacific.
My fellow passengers for the 17-day voyage were as motley as the cargo: mainly French and American, a few Brits, a New Zealander, a Pole, a few Canadians. There were three French doctors, two engineers, a geologist; a banker with his Tahitian wife; an antiquary from Nice, a Parisian restorer of 19th century paintings; from the States, a directress of an artists’ colony, a literature professor, a boating-magazine publisher, and a Montana farmer.
The Marquesas lie three days’ steady sail from Papeete, Tahiti’s capital. Few first visitors are prepared for Papeete—once a sleepy port, now the busiest city in the South Pacific islands, “Gauguin on a motorbike.” We spent a full day on the wharf, Tahitian mountains pastel behind the tumbling city, watching muscular sailors load crate after crate that were raised by the ship’s crane and stowed in the ship’s enormous belly. The hold swallowed everything from tractors and cars to local Hinano beer and soap; and no wonder, for the 5000-ton Aranui keeps these islands alive. The ship was roughly the length of a football field, German-built twenty years ago, and refitted extensively two years ago to carry around 1500 tons of freight and a maximum of eighty cabin passengers. On an aft deck about a dozen others slept very comfortably and companionably, enjoying the same French cooking and wines, local fish and fruits, and well-guided shore explorations as everyone else at half price.
The Aranui carried about thirty sailors, mostly hard-working Marquesans like Timau, or Teiki; but all French Polynesia was there, from Toko of the Tuamotus to Pipier from the Australs. Tino from Papeete was the supercargo and supervised all the loading. They worked at maximum strength from dawn till midnight, scrambling onto fully-loaded palettes that swung down to a tossing whale-boat; or leaping in heavy waves, launching themselves ten feet from the gunwales up to a slippery wharf as if stepping up a single stair.
A day’s sea passage brought us to the Tuamotus, the largest archipelago of coral atolls in the world. Once known as the Low or Dangerous Archipelago because of their treacherous currents and reefs, these atolls have an unimaginable simplicity: long ribbons of sand and palm trees, often only a quarter mile across and ten feet above the surface. Sparsely populated, tremendously vulnerable to hurricanes, some have only a family or two and many are uninhabited. They are all beach, islands more of sea than of land, looping in a circle around gigantic interior lagoons that sometimes have perfect passes from the ocean. (Rangiroa’s lagoon, which we entered on our way back, could hold the entire island of Tahiti.) At dawn we passed Arutua and Apataki; while supplies were unloaded at Takapoto we snorkeled the afternoon away in the lagoon by the stilt-built shacks of perliers, for the Tuamotus survive by undersea farming of black pearls. It was a night and day and night’s sea passage before we reached the Marquesas, six of which are inhabited, six not. We saw no other ships.
On Ua Pou, our first Marquesan landfall, at Hakahau we walked up a winding trail that split the spine of the island. At the summit, by a lone cross I had a view across tumultuous valleys and soaring peaks belted by clouds. Known as “The Cathedrals” for its spires which are extreme even in the Marquesas, Ua Pou was the subject of a song by Jacques Brel.
That afternoon the Aranui slipped around the coast to Hakehatau, Ua Pou’s smallest village (pop. 199). This was our first entry via a double-ended whale-boat, which we reached by going down a metal gangplank hung along the ship’s side. At the dock a volleyball game was going on near a myriad of rock pools carved by tides from the lap of the cliffs. I met the Monsignor Le Cleach, a retired Boston priest who, after twenty years in the Marquesas, had translated the New Testament into Marquesan and was now working on the Old Testament. When I pointed out how busy the little village seemed, the Monsignor laughed and said, “But these islands are empty! We have only seven persons per square mile in the Marquesas.”
The Marquesas have not always been so unpeopled. The Te Fenua Enata (“The Land of Men”)—originally settled a century or two before Christ in the first wave of Polynesian expansion—had, despite their isolation, flourished. The culture, one of the most developed and refined in the Pacific, was probably at its height when the Europeans arrived in the late 17th and 18th centuries. Spanish, French, American, and English explorers, followed by their countries’ navies, brought death by military means on a small scale and death by imported disease on an unprecedented scale. As one historian wrote, “The age of exploration was the age of contamination.” By 1883, the population had fallen from a height of perhaps 150,000 to less than 5,000, the result of smallpox, tuberculosis, and venereal diseases. By this century only 1,500 Marquesans were left. Though the population hovers around 6,000 today, European disease, muskets, and missionaries had achieved the near-total destruction of Marquesan culture.
Until the European invasion, the Marquesans surpassed all other Polynesians in their carved stone figures, some eight feet high (second only to those of Easter Island, which was settled, like Hawaii, by voyaging Marquesans). They also carried farther the elaborate art of tattoo. Men were entirely covered (even their heads) with intricate geometric designs representing Marquesan history, legends, and genealogies. Except for their faces, women might be just as decorated, and anthropologists visiting in 1920 still found old Marquesans tattooed from head to foot. Tattooing was done slowly and painfully with bone combs dipped in an ink of soot or pulverized charcoal, then given a sharp blow with a tapping stick to knock the teeth of the comb into the wound. To set off the designs, they wore scanty coverings of white tapa bark-cloth, flower and feather headdresses and mother-of-pearl ornaments.
They lived in open houses of breadfruit or palm logs, with thatched roofs sloping at the back. The houses were built on huge paepae, or stone platforms, which evoke the enormous building projects of Central American peoples like the Maya. These paepae are everywhere in Marquesan valleys, composed of massive boulders of up to several tons each fitted ingeniously into place, often built ten feet high to compensate for a valley’s slope. They built small fishing and large war canoes, stabilized with outriggers, powered by large carved paddles or sails. They caught sharks with nooses and used the teeth to carve ornate wooden drums and nose flutes. It was a very rare polyandrous society—women took several husbands.
Marquesans are still fond of tattooing, and they maintain resolutely their own language, related to but very different from Tahitian. (Unlike most destroyed societies, they have held onto title to their land and their language.) As a people they are probably hardier and perhaps more child-like, less invaded by the outside world’s personality, than other Polynesians. And unlike the rest of largely-Protestant French Polynesia, the Marquesas are 95% Catholic. Despite the missionaries’ best efforts, couples often live together twenty years before getting married.
Fatu Hiva, the most eastward island, was the first discovered (Captain de Mendena of Spain, 1595). It receives the most rainfall and remains a lusher world apart even within the group. With about 500 people divided between two villages isolated by the difficult coast, (and with some hints of a traditional enmity between them), the island’s only outside contact is with passing ships.
At dawn we passed Hanavave, a village pocketed in the Bay of Virgins, perhaps the loveliest bay in all the Marquesas, with black basalt pillars rising from mango groves and palm beds, the light majestic across the glowing cliffs and trees. We hugged the coast until the bay and village of Omoa. In niches in the cliffs hung half-ruined wooden stages with bananas drying, a local delicacy. A whale-boat brought us in to a small stone quay, spray crashing and churning over it—the sailors in their plastic granny-shoes leaping the height of a man to land surely. A brief trail led into Omoa: a grey-black beach with boys surfing on makeshift boards in the shallows, a church, a soccer field with a brown horse, and the whole village running to see what had been sent and unloaded.
Fatu Hiva is the principal island still making tapa cloth. Here we saw women busy at the complicated process by which mulberry or breadfruit bark is pried and stripped from a branch, pounded, wetted, stretched, dried, cut; the designs pencil-sketched or stencilled on the cloth, then inked-in. Unlike, say, Tongans, Fijians, and Samoans, the earlier Marquesans were notable for rarely decorating tapa at all except for religious or chiefly fabrics.
I walked down the village path, past simple houses in lavender and yellow with ruined stone paepae in their neat gardens. A bare-chested man standing outside one house beckoned me in—a carver of rosewood ukeleles. I suggested he wander the quarter mile down the village path, as several fellow passengers wanted to buy a Marquesan ukelele. He said with a mild shrug, “It’s a bit of trouble to go find them, no? But tell them where I live.”
On my way back I fell into step with a woman who asked what I thought of the island. I said it was the most beautiful I’d seen.
She said, “If you say so. We wouldn’t know. We stay here.”
I asked if she wished they had an airstrip.
She laughed. “What do we want an airstrip for? Then we’ll have all those sick people coming in on the aeroplane!”
By sick people she meant tourists.
“How do you make a living here?”
“Copra,” she said. “Fish. Tapa cloth. Some people carve wood. What else is there to do here?” She smiled. “There’s nothing else.”
The sea passage by night to Nuku Hiva was exhilarating, the ship’s body like a horse plunging ahead by moonlight, the huge island gradually filling more and more of the immense sky with a black silhouette. Then came the lone lights of the harbor quay, for in the Marquesas people turn in early. Electricity is always at a premium; one of the freighter’s most important cargos was oil drums of generator fuel. In the morning I awakened to the unloading and the broad horseshoe bay of Taiohae, the largest town of the Marquesas, large enough to have a post office and a jail—even though the prisoners are given keys and only have to spend nights there.
From the highest point of Nuku Hiva, up a difficult winding road, I looked past brooding foreheads of cloud across valleys proceeding in green disorder to unexpected farther views of the blue Pacific and forested pillars and crags, all so miragelike that at times I couldn’t tell if I was looking at clouds or sea or mountains. I stood on a ridge of the Taipivai Valley. Here in July, 1842, a young sailor named Herman Melville, deserting his unsuccessful whaling ship the Acushnet, gingerly made his way down with a comrade, looking for a safer valley one ridge over. Instead he found himself among the most dangerous and warlike tribe in Nuku Hiva, the Taipis. Melville’s three or four weeks of friendly imprisonment among them (he claimed it was four months) inspired his first book, Typee, a fictionalized memoir and his most successful work in his lifetime.
As we descended by another rough road, the valley opened like a palm-forested rib cage with a river meandering thinly at the bottom, kept out of sight by impenetrable trees. At the valley’s foot the river flowed past the mile or so of village and became a wider creek opening to the bay and the sea. Inland, a makeshift track sliced across the valley’s ribs from the point where the village and the river parted company. The track wound tortuously through solid wilderness where Melville had wandered, all the way to the valley’s head. There two slender waterfalls hung down from mountains flattened by clouds, with trees tracing their heights like troops en masse.
I wanted a better idea of Melville’s terrain, and at the edge of the village I got lucky and fell into conversation with Jean Baptiste Falchetto, a light-skinned, burly man in his sixties with a headlong gait, a wooden cross dangling at his neck, and a face of great vivacity. At first I took him for a missionary half gone native; he denied this but admitted he’d had several visions. He spoke a native French, a bit garbled by being here so long, but the accent was unmistakably southern France. He had come as a boy, brought by his father Sebastien, a beekeeper in Nice, back in 1936. His father’s lungs had been damaged by gas in World War I and, given a choice of France’s overseas colonies to settle in for his health, he’d come out here. Falchetto lived on Ua Pou, but he had grown up in the Taipivai Valley and returned for a few weeks’ stay on behalf of his late wife, a Taipi woman who’d died a month earlier. One of Falchetto’s daughters ran housekeeping on the ship.
We followed the track by the jungle to the head of the valley and the twin cascades. Here Melville—who plagiarized chunks of Typee with verve and style—claimed he made his difficult way down. Astute scholars question how many of his so-called adventures were actually his own experiences, but it is difficult to be in the Taipivai Valley and not be persuaded by much of Melville’s narrative. The valley slopes on both sides were littered with more ruined black paepae, stone-house foundations, than I’d seen elsewhere, supporting the idea of a once-huge population.
Even in Melville’s time, every tribe was at war with its neighbors, rarely for territory, generally for sacrificial victims. Battles were fought with slings, spears, war clubs, and heavy stones. There was much cannibalism, and the skulls of enemies were decorated and preserved. Usually each tribe had its own valley. By early this century Taipivai, once home to perhaps 10,000 Taipis, had only a few families left.
Fired by the idea of searching for Melville, and perhaps rediscovering trails and paepae he’d known as a boy, Falchetto ran me ragged. Barefoot, he clambered down the steep jungled hillside, under and over all muscular vegetation, with such agility that, scrambling after and thirty years younger, I couldn’t keep up. I caught him where the ground levelled into a well-made winding path through dense trees—the ancient Taipi road of black rocks, in use until two decades ago. We went scrambling again and here, just below the ancient road and following the tiny trickling river for mile after mile, were the endless and imposing ruins of the Taipis whose last era Melville caught. Their staggering paepae were made of carefully-fitted boulders, some the size of a small car, moved down from the cliffs where they’d been cut and lifted into place without the use of a wheel.
We spent a good two hours exploring the mosquito-haunted and vine-choked stone metropoli. Here, in shaded pools, Melville had bathed with the lovely nude Fayaway, a dream of a Marquesan girl whose image—invented, half-invented, or not—inflamed the U.S. and British imaginations, made Typee a bestseller, and sent dozens of hopeful painters to the South Seas long before Gauguin. It is hard now to comprehend how steadily Melville’s career went downhill. Moby-Dick was considered a disaster and nearly finished him, and when Melville died in 1891, he hadn’t published a novel in 35 years, The New York Times spelled his name wrong, and his only remaining fame was as the man who had lived among cannibals. He was, in fact, one of hundreds of vagabond sailors the Marquesas took in; many families are descendants of deserters. The difference is that Melville wrote and published, without fear of bitterly criticizing missionaries or Western powers. “Thrice happy,” he wrote, “are they who, inhabiting some yet undiscovered island in the midst of the ocean, have never been brought into contaminating contact with the white man.” Stevenson, trailing Melville in 1889, was more succinct: “Death,” he wrote, “coming in like a tide.”
Later Falchetto led me to three enormous platforms of grey-black rocks in a glade high up the valley slope, a temple marae with twelve tikis—divine statues of obese men clutching their bellies, phalli dangling down, by women with great breasts and welcoming bodies. I could only assume this was the tabu, sacred marae that Melville wasn’t allowed to see till the end of his stay.
By the river the small village of Taipivai was flourishing, lined with banana, frangipani, and mango trees. A massive hillside of palms swept back from a pale blue wooden church with a rust-red tin roof and two hearts above the door. The whale-boats came up the creek to load the month’s copra sacks and, the tide going out, became too laden for the shallows and got stuck. We got out and helped push, and as twilight settled down we roared into the bay of open sea, past the dark beach where Melville had been rescued, to where the ship similarly awaited us.
Hatiheu’s square symmetrical bay with crashing six-foot surf was overlooked by a white statue of the Virgin, so high it was only a tiny white doll against the green. Put up on a black basalt pillar nearly a century ago by the first priest here, it was brought down painstakingly every year to be repainted. The mayor, a woman named Yvonne, ran a restaurant beside her general store and house, where she laid on a Marquesan feast: pig baked in a ground oven beneath leaves; marinated fish; fried tuna steaks; and kaaku—Melville’s favorite, breadfruit pounded into a dough and soaked in coconut milk. To make poipoi, a fermented paste, the women still pummelled the breadfruit with a stone pounder of ancient design. We were all given crowns of flowers to wear through the meal and the music that went on all afternoon. Later a boat-hand told me, “On one voyage at Hatiheu people were too drunk to get out of the whale-boat and up the ladder, so we lifted them up by crane in copra sacks.”
At Hiva Oa the Aranui could actually dock, just along the coast of prodigious mountains, at one end of the vast Bay of Traitors with an islet in its center. The second largest island, this was where the Frenchman Gauguin, who painted Polynesia for everyone forever, came to live at the turn of the century, and where little more than a decade ago the Belgian singer Jacques Brel made his home. Both came in the knowledge they were dying, and buried twenty paces from each other, they share a final view.
Atuona was, in Marquesan terms, a bustling town, with nearly a thousand inhabitants. Going to the cemetery, the road winds up the valley, past the small, squat, zinc-roofed wooden house Brel rented, surrounded by orchids in his day, still with the small pool he installed. Gauguin’s simple grave lies beneath a white frangipani tree, a single stone with the name and “1903” in white, and looks out over a rugged coastline and surf crashing on the beach where he often painted. No cross surmounts the grave. Instead a reproduction of his own pagan androgynous figure, Oviri-moe-aihere (“The Savage who sleeps in the wild forest”), stands beside him on a pedestal, a god/goddess charged with death. The gravestone, a round block of clay sculpted by Gauguin, was found in the artist’s studio and set in place by a friend, Tioka, who carved in the name and date. More than most, Gauguin was always actively shaping his gravestone.
Gauguin first arrived in Tahiti in 1891. Six months later he was already thinking about abandoning it for the Marquesas, where life would be less expensive, less civilized (“I am a savage,” he wrote repeatedly), and he would have a chance to study Polynesian art, which he thought might’ve survived in the Marquesas. By the time he actually made the move, in September 1901, he had been back to and returned from France in frustration (1893-5) and gotten fed up again with Tahiti. Syphilitic, dependent on laudanum and morphine, tormented with eczema, walking with great difficulty, he knew he was near the end. He would have twenty months on Hiva Oa.
And yet in his Marquesan period, Gaughin lived comfortably off a contract with a Paris dealer—his first near-affluence since throwing off his life as a stockbroker eighteen years earlier to become an artist. He worked all day, and his output in this time is astonishing for its variety of themes. He purchased a horse trap, the only vehicle in the Marquesas. He refused to pay his taxes and encouraged his neighbors to do the same; got the locals drunk and was sentenced to three months’ prison for disorderly conduct; even tried to convince girls to avoid attending the convent school and visit him instead. His paintings had more of a fable in them than ever, like “Riders On the Beach” showing two Marquesan horsemen with two spirit figures beside them. When he died in May 1903, either from an overdose of morphine or a heart attack, his neighbor Tioka bit him on the head—the Marquesan way of verifying death. The shopkeeper across the road bought Gauguin’s house (perhaps his Marquesan masterpiece, for Gauguin did as much wood-carving as painting) and tore it down. Most of the contents were auctioned off in Papeete. (The well-known story that a last, unfinished painting on his easel was a Brittany village under snow is a fabrication.)
I went looking for Gauguin’s house-site. It lay between the old Catholic mission and the Protestant church, and in a sense it was Gauguin’s largest work of art. He called it his “Maison de Jouir” (House of Pleasure) and decorated it with elaborate wood-carved panels, pornographic photographs, and, of course, his paintings.
I found the site across from a decrepit and lovely grey-green trading-post stocked to the rafters, with a shaded colonial balcony, where Gauguin had grocery-shopped and been be-friended by the American owner. Inside, in one corner, hung an antique clock. There is a certain mystique about this clock, so I asked.
“Yes, m’sieu, it was the clock of Monsieur Gauguin.”
“How long has it been here?”
“Since he died, I suppose.”
But it was simply another old clock. Across the road a gentle woman named Catherine pointed out the glade of palms where Gauguin’s house had stood. When I mentioned the controversial clock, she shook her head. “Nothing of Gauguin’s is still here,” she said. “Except Gauguin.”
Until recently that hadn’t been so. The kind Monsignor on Ua Pou had told me about Gauguin’s Marquesan daughter, born in 1902, who died two years ago on Hiva Oa. Her mother, age fifteen, left Gauguin when she got pregnant and never allowed him to see his daughter.
The Monsignor had also known Brel, the French singer and composer whose verbal deftness, by turns tender or sarcastic, loses much of its bite in translation. “He was a turbulent, sympathetic man,” said the Monsignor. “A poetic man, even in daily conversation. And tormented by the fate he knew was coming: cancer.”
Brel sailed here on his boat with his wife Maddly, a Guadeloupian, in 1976. They liked the Marquesans’ friendly indifference, and soon rented their modest bungalow with the convent school below, Gauguin buried above. Brel’s talents as a mimic were popular with Marquesans, expert mimics themselves. A qualified pilot, he had his small plane brought to the island and helped out in an emergency or by bringing passengers, mail, and medicine from Papeete. He also brought out a big open-air screen and feature films for the locals.
In August 1977 he went back to Paris to record. On his return he asked the convent girls up to his house to hear the suite Les Marquises, which mentions them—“songs of love that the sisters don’t know they don’t know.” His lung troubles ever increasing, in July 1978 he went back to France for treatment and died there in October, aged 49. He was brought back to Atuona for burial; his grave’s plaque shows him and Maddly. Les Marquises, the last song on his last record, captured the Marquesan state of mind:
They speak of death as you would speak of a fruit
They look at the sea as you would look at a garden well
And because there is no breeze, time stands still
In the Marquesas...
The pirogues go, the pirogues come
And only the oldest will remember me —
Do you want me to say it? Lament is never allowed
In the Marquesas....
Our society deifies its most popular artists; in the Marquesas, the gods took the form of men. At Puamau, on Hiva Oa, we went ashore to see a marae (temple) glade of the largest tikis in French Polynesia: one upended, two standing beheaded, the heads lying nearby. All had been castrated by the missionaries. The largest, with big saucer eyes looking out from every angle, stands triumphant. Nearby was a squat horizontal figure with a cartoon body that was nearly all smiling head, its meaning obscure—flying or swimming or giving birth. Just down the road, at the edge of someone’s garden, was the sacred paepae and now the grave of the valley’s last queen, Te Haumoenoa, who died around 1900. She was buried along with the bicycle given her by a French sailor, the first bicycle in the Marquesas.
The island of Tahuata, with 500 people spread over several bays and villages, lay only a few miles from Hiva Oa. An hour’s sea passage and an hour out of dream: the sharp-cut rough coast swooped on by wraiths of clouds, the deep sea worrying at the majestic flanks of the mountains beneath the slopes where wild horses grazed. Dolphins played about the ship. Pale desolate beaches appeared in tiny fiords, and suddenly we nosed into the small bay of Vaitahu—improbable, the sense of humans at all in this deserted beauty.
At the little landing-stage for the whale-boat the waters whirled furiously around barely submerged rocks; all the same, the boys pushed each other in and went leaping after. Vaitahu was an old white church, a new church of stone arches and polished-wood gables with a wood sculpture of the Virgin set in the steeple, a hillside punctuated by the ruins of an old French fort, small houses like terse comments on the landscape; little else.
Such a small place had suffered more than its share of European imperialism. It was here that the first missionaries had arrived in the Marquesas, in 1838. Tahuata then was 500 people, in several villages. Captain Halley landed in 1842, under Admiral Petit-Thouars, and annexed the island as a French protectorate—before Tahiti, in fact. A small dispute with the chief, who signed the treaty then retreated his people up the valley, rapidly escalated into a series of battles that ended with 200 Marquesans and the French captain dead and the chief’s power devalued. Such scenes would be repeated, over the next century and under different flags, on other islands.
Here the Aranui bought lemons, forty-pound frozen tuna, bananas, and burlap sacks of copra. By now I enjoyed the sickly-sweet smell of the dried coconut meat that, massed in heavy sacks, bullies all other scents for a quarter-mile. (For copra, France pays nearly 4 francs per kilo, even though the commercial price is only 1 franc.) On the stone landing-stage were piled the staples Aranui was selling to the village, along with the fuel: soy sauce, bags of cement, washing powder, spaghetti sauce, crackers, noodles, cheese, glassware, chicken legs (whole), and mackerel (in cans).
What would it be like, I wondered, to stay on here when the monthly ship left, bearing all its commerce and excitement away? It was evident we were seeing these quiet communities on the busiest day of the month, when the hand of the world touched an isolated village for a few hours, then withdrew. How would it be to watch the village return to its old round of hours, the children going by small boat to the other island for school, the daily sense of slow nothing peacefully happening except for the local arguments and gossips, the news by radio from Tahiti every night, the occasional boat putting in, the more occasional births and deaths?
Back in the village, a boy on a bicycle much too big for him pedalled in circles by a stream while a horse watched with infinite patience. Hibiscus blossoms and sand blew everywhere. That evening we sailed down the coast and anchored so the crew could fish.
At dawn we neared the spartan coast of Ua Huka; light seeped across the ocean, giving faces to the island’s shadowy profiles. Ua Huka was unlike the other five inhabited Marquesas. Barer, the scalped vegetation looked almost Mediterranean. The people had an appropriate dynamism. Vaipae had a small museum, run by Joseph Vaatete, one of the preeminent woodcarvers in the Pacific. This touching little museum at the end of the world was an assemblage of old photos, shells, stone artifacts, and Joseph’s recreations of old Marquesan objects: oars, hoes, war clubs; baskets carved of wood imitating every filigreed hair on a palm leaf; elaborate stilts with heads carved on the stirrups. “An old man in Nuku Hiva taught me how to carve,” he said. “With the stilts, the object was to balance on one stilt while knocking the other man’s stilts from under him. Or else they ran races. Sometimes we still do.”
In a four-wheel drive truck we bounced along a track that mounted steeply near the sea. Wild horses watched us pass. In Hokatu were more woodcarvers, and men playing boules with silver balls. At Hane, after the usual extravagant Marquesan banquet, we hiked through mud up a steep trail to a marae with three fine tikis in the midst of jungle, discovered only a few years ago.
When we came down from the palms the surf was rolling in with power to the pebbly beach and little boys were tossing a soccer ball and leaping on each other. The ship was still at other bays, so we spent the afternoon playing in the surf. These boys thought nothing of leaping through eight-foot waves and being dashed on the rocks if it would gain them the ball; we would watch five or six of them leap and go under, all refusing to relinquish their grip, get pounded on the rocks and come up grinning and shouting.
When afternoon waned we retreated from the water to a field and a soccer game with the big boys. Exhilarated, we barely noticed a light rain had begun to fall. The ship rounded the cape, lit up magnificently, and whale-boats rode into shore to get us. The surf was so rough that sailors had to carry several passengers out to the whale-boats like babes in arms as night came swiftly down.
It is hard to know what to make of the Marquesas; they seem to carry a meaning far beyond themselves. Rising in the farthest reaches of the Pacific, inhabited by a rugged and dignified people with a forgotten past, their spires of blasted rock and green-jungled hills, their lost bays, shattered capes, and unanimous sunsets still impart an ancient wonder. They are as strange as anywhere on earth, a vision of powerful and uncorrupted beauty that the imagination comes to humbly and leaves unwillingly. No one can sail among them and emerge unchanged.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)