Written in 1997 for the New York Times Magazine
Anyone who lives on Cape Ann, Massachusetts, and actually leaves from time to time, gets used to explaining the map and the world in this way: No, we’re the other cape. North of Boston. That’s right, the small one . . . . And after a few years (to those of us who aren’t natives) this becomes a method of assessing one’s allegiance, because everybody who lives here eventually realizes that we are really inhabiting an island, linked to the big mainland only on sufferance and by a couple of mere bridges which emphasize the disconnection each time they let us on and off.
Cape Ann is surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean on three sides and poked into by salt rivers on the fourth. It is a floating world complete unto itself. Though its corpus is all jagged granite, marsh, and moors, its psychology is that of an island drifting seaward, snagged only tenuously alongside the continent by steel and concrete, feeding for centuries off the fish of the sea. The people are islanders in mind and personality, insular through and through, with all the obsessions, satisfactions, faiths, frustrations, and pleasures of islanders. We know our cape in detail and claim you can never truly know more than a smidgin of it. We go to Boston, 38 miles away, as reluctantly as possible. We begrudgingly call ourselves the other cape, then snicker inwardly when strangers think they have misheard the name—and we are quietly relieved.
Socially, Cape Ann is two towns that are quite distinct; in shape it might be a liquefied clock by Dalí. Between five and seven there is Gloucester, once the busiest fishing port in the country, ever unsure how to deal with a depleted profession. Even today the small city mostly resembles the Edward Hopper paintings that caught its hilly, vagrant harbor light, its forlorn cemeteries and rail yard, its glowing clapboard-lined streets. It can still boast a fleet of lobstermen, and for half the year whale-watch boats go out to sport alongside the agile humpbacks, while at least one schooner under full sail plies the great embrace of Gloucester’s harbor.
Rockport, at two o’clock, is a strenuously picturesque boomtown, its summer streets lined with tourist flypaper and endless, self-parodying art galleries selling paintings of what you see when you turn around. Those streets in winter are barely recognizable, blocked with snow and devoid of human life, with a few boats rocking in a muttering and senile sea. This is maybe a Gloucesterite being envious of the town’s summer lucre: in fact Rockport has a superb setting, with grand oceanic vistas, seaside inns, Twin Lights (the only double lighthouses in the world), and the cunning to keep day tripper money visiting the motley shops year after year. If much of it seems immeasurably more bogus than when I was a kid—except for a wonderfully rickety art movie-house, upstairs in an old meeting hall—many of us are grateful that Rockport’s hullabaloo is confined to one season, and that its dread of liquor until very recently kept it a dry town which sent visitors to Gloucester restaurants in search of a drink.
There is more to Cape Ann than these rivals. There are the satellite communities of Magnolia, with its gray castle built in a Gothic-medieval hodgepodge by the millionaire inventor John Hammond; and of Essex, with a shipbuilding museum on the river by idyllic marshes where an industry once flourished, and a long honor-guard of clam shacks and antique shops, each waiting for its inventive millionaire. Both are “up the line” or “over the bridge”—meaning off-cape. Beaches of grandeur stretch within easy reach: Wingaersheek, Crane (in Ipswich), Singing Beach (in Manchester-by-the-Sea, formerly mere Manchester). Still, the only way to get to know Cape Ann is to drive all the way around it, on the shore road (127). This takes less than an hour.
You follow the coast through a litany of brief villages, and personalized coves which look as if the inflatable sea-monster that appears on 19th century maps has taken big bites out of the shore. Goose Cove, Bay View, Lobster Cove, the Mill, Halibut Point, Annisquam, Pigeon Cove, Riverdale, Plum Cove, Lanesville, Bass Rocks, Folly Cove: many have their own idiosyncratic beaches and perhaps a tiny post office, a softball field, a few old barns hidden in trees, a futuristic home dominating a point, a variety store amid a strip of stalwart houses huddled together, an art gallery shut tight, lanes heading down to the glittering water, offshoot roads leading you astray. Though these villages have no validity to the census takers, their limits and their personalities are quite real to their denizens.
One tributary of 127 worth pursuing is along Gloucester’s East Main Street to Rocky Neck. The Neck, which gazes out on wooden houses standing precariously above Smith’s Cove, can be a mini-Rockport in the summer, with waterside restaurant-bars where you can try the fried piece of cod which passeth all under-standing. But the view of fishing boats is an eternal image of the town, and the switchback lanes are shaded and lovely. From the Neck the road becomes Eastern Point Boulevard, and just past Niles Beach it leads down Eastern Point to the cape’s largest mansions and most majestic views. A little farther on is the so-called Back Shore, with its big fair-weather hotels gazing over the rocks, and eventually the stunning sweep of Good Harbor Beach.
Settled in 1623, Cape Ann was early on a fishing center, but in the last two centuries its other lifeblood was granite. (Stone for Union Station in Washington, D.C. came from here.) Today the abandoned rock quarries behind Lanesville and Rockport are fresh water swimming-canyons in the summer, access permitting. The huge stone walls that one sees everywhere belong to another age, as does a fishing fleet that historically numbered 350 boats and is now a few dozen and going down—the once-teeming banks overfished, the rooted way of life tottering. The lobstermen and clamdiggers will keep on, Gloucester’s frozen fish factories will survive on catch from all over the world, but whether fishing itself will be successfully replaced by light industry or, as a cynical friend says, by “cuteness and overdevelopment,” is an open question.
Visitors all see the harbor and the remnants of the fleet, and the famous fisherman’s statue along the boulevard—the man at the wheel staring out across the enormous arc of the harbor, past Ten Pound Island. (He was recently joined by a nearby statue of the fisherman’s wife.) Yet no site is more moving in this regard than the Gloucester City Hall, an 1870 Victorian edifice which resembles a French mairie. Within are vibrant WPA murals, a marble Winged Victory gracing the prow of a dory, a tin-roofed auditorium upstairs where Buffalo Bill and P.T. Barnum held forth. And, all around, reminders:
A Shipwrecked Sailor,
Buried on this coast,
Bids you set sail.
Full many a gallant ship,
When we were lost,
Weathered the gale.
So reads a carved wooden bas-relief of waves. Lining the walls of a dark staircase are more sobering plaques, the death toll of men who perished at sea from 1874 to 1978. (At the end of the 19th century, the fleet routinely lost fifteen boats and a hundred men a year.) The names make clear Gloucester’s immigrant influx. Largely Yankee and Irish before the Civil War, they were soon joined by Nova Scotians. Next came Portuguese, and Italians early in the 20th century; each successful generation whose sons could quit fishing thus made room for another immigrant group. The Italians helped bring in gas-powered boats that would gradually replace the large fleet of sailing schooners.
Much of Gloucester’s appeal lies in the fact that it has one of everything, in that small-town way which is in fact highly efficient. On two blocks of Main Street, for example, there is a school of art for children; a higgledy-piggledy antiques store whose treasures regularly surprise the proprietor; a bistro to equal any in the state; a thriving Mexican restaurant; fine vintage clothing, record, and photo shops; a health food emporium, an Army-Navy store, a barber shop with a whirling tricolor pole; several fishermen’s bars whose shadows remain a respite from the glare of daylight; and a genuine caffé whose pastries rival any in Sicily. There’s the added warmth of an unexpectedly superb local library, a bookstore defending its terrain against the internet, and one prodigal used bookshop. (A few miles away, little Lanesville has arguably the very best in the country specializing in nautical works.) There is also an active local symphony, a strong jazz scene built around the late, inspirational trumpeter Herb Pomeroy, and a busy repertory theater, the creation of Israel Horovitz—who often writes plays set here.
At Halloween one sees the mordant humor of the Gloucesterite writ large. For at least a month you find mock-corpses everywhere—lynched from tree limbs, upended in trash barrels, flung over hedges, pinioned on roofs. These murdered scarecrow dummies are more ghoulish than any pumpkin grin, with echoes of a pagan respect for and mockery of death. When the Vietnam Moving Memorial came to town a decade ago, half of Gloucester turned out to see it; the list of locals who gave their lives in that war was astonishingly long. This is not only a deep-bred patriotism. The equivalent toll of lost fishermen over the decades reminds you that people here are not afraid of punishing labor, nor are they afraid to die.
Every exceptional locale has its singular wisdom. I like to believe that T.S. Eliot, whose boyhood summers here were absorbed into his imagery, was invoking Cape Ann in Ash Wednesday:
Teach us to care and not to care
Teach us to sit still
Even among these rocks . . . .
The bestseller and film about a storm that swallowed one of Gloucester’s vessels a few years back generated nationwide interest in its fishing heritage and its bars. With luck this glimmering fame may provide something more lasting than a few perfect T-shirts. It would be providential if Gloucester could find more in the mythos of, say, Kipling’s Captains Courageous than just a name for a restaurant; if it could make more fitting use of its past. God knows the place has suffered enough.
Cape Ann has magnetized American painters for a hundred and fifty years. John Sloan complained to Van Wyck Brooks early in the century that “. . . there was an artist’s shadow beside every cow in Gloucester, and the cows themselves were dying from eating paint-rags.” Those today who turn the sausage-crank of harbor and seascapes are battening off a strong tradition of painters who saw more than the standard lighthouse, pier, fisherman’s shack. The list of regulars in the first half of this century includes Maxfield Parrish, Milton Avery, Childe Hassam, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Maurice Prendergast. Unlike many scenic spots, Cape Ann drew them back steadily, season after season. The coast and the town views that so attracted them survive intact; streets whose charged geometries Hopper caught are still virtually identical except for the cars.
These modern luminaries were in turn feeding on the example of Winslow Homer, who visited twice and put his artistic blessing on the cape, and native son Fitz Henry Lane, now one of the most prized 19th century American painters. Beyond the precise realism and romantic hues of Lane’s wide-angle harbor views, his work is imbued with a deep mysticism, a reverential glow for the place that awakened him as an artist.
You can find work by most of them at the Cape Ann Historical Association, a Gloucester museum that is an ideal starting-point for any visitor. It has a diorama of the 19th century waterfront, with a fish packing house, schooners, piers, a smoke house, and a marine railway. There is also the boat of Howard Blackburn, the town’s most celebrated schooner captain. Blackburn managed two single-handed Atlantic crossings after having lost his fingers to frostbite in a shipwreck years before; no wonder Main Street’s largest tavern used to be named after him. (Winslow Homer stayed upstairs.) In 1901 Blackburn set the record for a solo crossing, 39 days Gloucester-Lisbon, in this actual “Gloucester sloop”—a standard turn-of-the-century vessel. A local fisherman, Alfred Johnson, had been the first to sail the Atlantic solo, in 1876.
Cape Ann has also drawn writers (this is a somewhat personal subject), who find it a good place to work with few distractions, no pretenses, an inspiring prospect of the sea, and rock slabs that conveniently turn into trampolines you can bounce ideas off. Kipling’s novel is the great evocation of local hard labor, which remains strangely absent from many painters’ work—though it is crucial to Horovitz’s plays. An ongoing poetic tradition includes Charles Olson (constructing a Cape Ann cosmology) and Eliot, who in The Dry Salvages speaks of Gloucester’s magnificent Portuguese church, Our Lady of Good Voyage:
Lady, whose shrine stands on the promontory,
Pray for all those who are in ships, those
Whose business has to do with fish. . .
Repeat a prayer also on behalf of
Women who have seen their sons or husbands
Setting forth, and not returning. . .
Also pray for those who were in ships, and
Ended their voyage on the sand, in the sea’s lips
Or in the dark throat which will not reject them
Or wherever cannot reach them the sound of the sea bell’s
Perpetual angelus.
Naturally, many people move here to get away from the warp and woof of the world —not just the requisite artisans and backyard philosophers, but venture capitalists and commercial filmmakers too. They are often attracted not simply by the physical beauty, which has a distinct personality, but by the pagan sense of Cape Ann as a place of mysterious power generated somewhere deep in the earth. Outsiders dismiss this as island malarkey, and maybe it is—but then again, they don’t live here.
The source of this mysticism is not simply the ocean. Its geographical heart is the vast wooded area known as Dogtown, the cape’s central ice-age tract, crisscrossed with rocky foot (now mountain bike) trails. Dogtown is crucial to the psychology of the Cape Anner: it is our barbaric hinterland, our Amazon basin, on which all our houses are turning their backs to gaze seaward. Dogtown reminds us that an ancient untamed chaos—the wild, unknowable New England woods—is lurking right behind us.
Summer here is the season that brings the visitors. As a friend of mine puts it, “Cape Ann is ten weeks.” He means July through mid-September, because May and June can easily be dismal. Still, soon enough the magic begins, and there comes the steady clatter of shutters taken down, lawns mowed viciously, weekenders trundling about the back roads; the ceremony of unheated houses being opened and sailboats made ready and launched. For those freshly arrived there is sometimes a new bakery to try, and always the antique and junk shops to plunder—that stampede of white elephants. We year-rounders regard the summer residents with a fishy glance, but it is rejuvenating to have fresh faces to unsettle us, to shatter the claustrophobia of a long winter that was followed by bitter spring rains and mud.
Autumn is the happy reverse: the summer people are leaving and we’ll soon have the place to ourselves again. It is, we like to tell each other, the best time. This isn’t true, because the summers here are pure glory, with a thunderous beach light that invades our houses and drives out the grayness of the rocks and details the coast and brings out the excited blue of the sea. Yet the satisfaction of autumn is feeling the edge of a summer that will soon be imaginary linger, just before the sky turns to gunpowder and the leaves to sudden flame; of watching the year’s warmth hover in place for a few more weeks before it all changes.
Sunday, December 7, 1997
Thursday, August 14, 1997
A Childhood in Nassau
Written in 1997 for Sky magazine
For a writer, childhood is the treasure chest; one has the rest of life to share out by the fistful the amazing, gleaming pirate’s hoard buried many layers deep in the imagination.
When I was a boy growing up in the Bahamas, I used to get up mornings at dawn and go out on our little second-story terrace to look over the jumbled town of Nassau and, beyond its quiet streets, the gradually awakening ocean. Nothing meant more to me then than the startling sight, two mornings a week, of the ocean liners from Miami edging over the horizon, plumed with pipe-swirls of smoke. I would watch each slow ship slip across the water towards me and make the prim turn into harbor and sound its horn, waking everyone on that side of the island. I learned to count on ships’ funnels; I learned geography from watching boats unload their different cargoes.
We didn’t live in Nassau year-round—that would’ve been too good to be true. My mother was a ballet teacher, a Londoner based improbably in Georgia; my father, an American journalist, was perpetually abroad. Soon after I was born in 1957 it made sense for my mother to escape Southern heat every year and assuage her homesickness by bringing us to a guest house in Nassau for the whole summer.
In those bright days Nassau was small, elegant, sophisticated, and intimate (we had the same taxi-driver year after year). Most shops closed Friday afternoons; there was only one casino, run like a private Mayfair gaming club. The town of uneven streets was suffused with the fragrance of oleander and poinciana. Even the architecture had a languor: low, balconied, pink, yellow and lavender buildings in wood or stucco, all shutters, jalousies, and fruit trees in high-walled gardens. Those walls’ modern counterparts, just coming in, were discreet “offshore” banks for the nervous big money of Europe, worried about tax laws and the nuclear threat. Nassau was inexorably British (the Bahamas remained a crown colony until 1973), in ways that are difficult to describe now without sounding like an exercise in nostalgia for Empire.
This was undoubtedly because I saw the place through my mother’s eyes—determined that I would not be brought up wholly American, and delighted at being able to get the latest English novels at the Island Bookshop, or pharmaceuticals and chocolates unavailable in the States, or catch up on London theater gossip in chance conversations on the beach.
Nassau was also very safe. At age five I was allowed to walk around by myself. I’d go down to the Prince George Wharf to gaze at boys my age diving for tossed shillings and the cruise ships disgorging passengers where the fringed horse-buggies awaited them patiently. Here, too, local sloops would be unloading fruit, vegetables and fish, while the mail-boats got ready to “tie loose” for the Out Islands. What is now the Straw Market was then the city marketplace for produce and fish; the straw work was done by Bahamian women sewing away outside under umbrellas (“Can I sell you something, darling?”). The “native” paintings and sculptures, often of real finesse, were mostly done by Haitians.
The only danger for a child alone was that I might get lost, in which case any Nassavian would’ve pointed me back to our guest house. Like my Bahamian playmates I’d mastered a greeting popular then among local men which I was sure would distinguish me from an average tourist brat. It was done by an upright forefinger held around eye-level, flipped forward in a brief gesture with a mix of studied casualness and a hint of the Bogartian toughness copied around the Caribbean then.
Our guest house, the Ocean Spray, was on Bay Street up from a cream-yellow queen called the British Colonial Hotel—ramparts on an imperial scale, flags of visitor countries, and the slowest service in the islands. The little Ocean Spray stood across from what was then a private beach owned by the hotel, a beach divided by a wall too high to see across. One side was for hotel guests, or anyone who paid a beach fee. The other side was public, for Bahamians—who from their side could come up the private side only as far as the tide-mark. This was not quite a color law; that would’ve been too precise for Nassau. It made for a curious counterpoint within my racial education, since in Georgia all my friends were white, and in Nassau they were all black.
I can still see that beach, its sugary expanse punctuated by two coconut palms growing from a common base. It looked across to the western tip of Paradise Island, with its lighthouse set like a candle marking the entrance to Nassau harbor. We’d spend most days there; occasionally there’d be a commotion, as when some Italian sailors caught a shark in the shallows and heroically hauled it in. At day’s end we had only to cross the street to be home. The guest house was run by a family of Syrian emigres called Moses. The daughter, my babysitter, ceaselessly gyrated and shrieked to Elvis Presley records; the mother made wonderful stuffed grape-leaves—they kept vines out back.
I had my own passions, of course. One was mangos, which I resisted trying (they looked too ugly) for years, until my mother persuaded me one hot July afternoon. A plot formed immediately; I feigned sleep that night, waited till she was in bed, then got up stealthily and in darkness assaulted the other mangos ripening on the table. My punishment was being sick for days—little boys shouldn’t consume three mangos singlehanded. Equally addictive were caneps, a sour fruit the size of a large marble that pops out of a green skin into your mouth and refreshes you instantly.
I learned to read there the summer I was four. My favorite haunt quickly became the library, a domed octagonal 18th century building in a little park just behind the main colonial square and post office. Originally the town prison, the bookshelves were in what had been the cells. This added greatly to the lurid allure of books about former Nassau colleagues like Blackbeard—any boy feels an instinctive kinship with pirates.
Another treat, high tea outdoors, often followed a library visit. Nearby soared one of the grandest hotels in the Caribbean, the Royal Victoria, a lovely balconied 19th century wooden manse like a tropical Tara, built for rum-runners and surrounded by glorious, cathedral-like botanical gardens. At the center was a huge banyan tree whose arms cradled a stage where a band played calypsos from tea-time on. Years later it closed, fell into ruin and was recently razed. It would’ve made a great movie set.
Nassau was a calypso town then. Today calypso seems, outside of Trinidad, like a nostalgia-ridden word, conjuring up a phony 1950s Caribbean with all the allure of stale suntan oil. But the music began as an authentic local expression of musicality and wit, and if the Bahamian version (“goombay”) was less sardonic and more melodic than those farther south, this is significant too. A look at a faded 1965 tourist guide reminds me that there were a good dozen fine calypso clubs in Nassau: Dirty Dick’s and Blackbeard’s, the Big Bamboo, the Drumbeat, the Junkanoo. Listen:
When Papa beats his Goombay Drum
From miles around the people come
To hear the rumble of his jungle drum . . .
He beats the rhythm that can give them heat
From swaying hips down to their dancing feet
Recreation, culmination, agitation, great sensation!
When Papa beats upon the Goombay drum . . . .
The greatest Bahamian drummer—he still has his own nightclub—was Peanuts Taylor. Singers? I remember mostly men: Vince Martin, Richie Delamore, and a Haitian, André Toussaint. My favorite was always a grinning toothless man named George Symonette, the tallest man in Nassau, now deceased, with the face of a walrus; he played piano in church on Sundays and calypso till all hours the other days. A few old recordings, long out-of-print, are around again on cassette, with his out-of-tune piano and that delicate croak of a voice. He used to plop me beside him on a piano bench and muse those gentle rhymes that were Nassau, like the one about the king who became Governor-General of the Bahamas:
It was love, love, love alone
Caused King Edward to leave the throne.
I glimpse it all with the vibrancy of a repeated dream, for it was in Nassau with my mother, in childhood, I first had that most adult of sensations—of knowing I was happy, knowing why, and storing it all up against a time when perhaps that would not be as inevitable. So that thirty years on, I have only to hum one of those calypsos, and there my Nassau is again. As she is, too.
For a writer, childhood is the treasure chest; one has the rest of life to share out by the fistful the amazing, gleaming pirate’s hoard buried many layers deep in the imagination.
When I was a boy growing up in the Bahamas, I used to get up mornings at dawn and go out on our little second-story terrace to look over the jumbled town of Nassau and, beyond its quiet streets, the gradually awakening ocean. Nothing meant more to me then than the startling sight, two mornings a week, of the ocean liners from Miami edging over the horizon, plumed with pipe-swirls of smoke. I would watch each slow ship slip across the water towards me and make the prim turn into harbor and sound its horn, waking everyone on that side of the island. I learned to count on ships’ funnels; I learned geography from watching boats unload their different cargoes.
We didn’t live in Nassau year-round—that would’ve been too good to be true. My mother was a ballet teacher, a Londoner based improbably in Georgia; my father, an American journalist, was perpetually abroad. Soon after I was born in 1957 it made sense for my mother to escape Southern heat every year and assuage her homesickness by bringing us to a guest house in Nassau for the whole summer.
In those bright days Nassau was small, elegant, sophisticated, and intimate (we had the same taxi-driver year after year). Most shops closed Friday afternoons; there was only one casino, run like a private Mayfair gaming club. The town of uneven streets was suffused with the fragrance of oleander and poinciana. Even the architecture had a languor: low, balconied, pink, yellow and lavender buildings in wood or stucco, all shutters, jalousies, and fruit trees in high-walled gardens. Those walls’ modern counterparts, just coming in, were discreet “offshore” banks for the nervous big money of Europe, worried about tax laws and the nuclear threat. Nassau was inexorably British (the Bahamas remained a crown colony until 1973), in ways that are difficult to describe now without sounding like an exercise in nostalgia for Empire.
This was undoubtedly because I saw the place through my mother’s eyes—determined that I would not be brought up wholly American, and delighted at being able to get the latest English novels at the Island Bookshop, or pharmaceuticals and chocolates unavailable in the States, or catch up on London theater gossip in chance conversations on the beach.
Nassau was also very safe. At age five I was allowed to walk around by myself. I’d go down to the Prince George Wharf to gaze at boys my age diving for tossed shillings and the cruise ships disgorging passengers where the fringed horse-buggies awaited them patiently. Here, too, local sloops would be unloading fruit, vegetables and fish, while the mail-boats got ready to “tie loose” for the Out Islands. What is now the Straw Market was then the city marketplace for produce and fish; the straw work was done by Bahamian women sewing away outside under umbrellas (“Can I sell you something, darling?”). The “native” paintings and sculptures, often of real finesse, were mostly done by Haitians.
The only danger for a child alone was that I might get lost, in which case any Nassavian would’ve pointed me back to our guest house. Like my Bahamian playmates I’d mastered a greeting popular then among local men which I was sure would distinguish me from an average tourist brat. It was done by an upright forefinger held around eye-level, flipped forward in a brief gesture with a mix of studied casualness and a hint of the Bogartian toughness copied around the Caribbean then.
Our guest house, the Ocean Spray, was on Bay Street up from a cream-yellow queen called the British Colonial Hotel—ramparts on an imperial scale, flags of visitor countries, and the slowest service in the islands. The little Ocean Spray stood across from what was then a private beach owned by the hotel, a beach divided by a wall too high to see across. One side was for hotel guests, or anyone who paid a beach fee. The other side was public, for Bahamians—who from their side could come up the private side only as far as the tide-mark. This was not quite a color law; that would’ve been too precise for Nassau. It made for a curious counterpoint within my racial education, since in Georgia all my friends were white, and in Nassau they were all black.
I can still see that beach, its sugary expanse punctuated by two coconut palms growing from a common base. It looked across to the western tip of Paradise Island, with its lighthouse set like a candle marking the entrance to Nassau harbor. We’d spend most days there; occasionally there’d be a commotion, as when some Italian sailors caught a shark in the shallows and heroically hauled it in. At day’s end we had only to cross the street to be home. The guest house was run by a family of Syrian emigres called Moses. The daughter, my babysitter, ceaselessly gyrated and shrieked to Elvis Presley records; the mother made wonderful stuffed grape-leaves—they kept vines out back.
I had my own passions, of course. One was mangos, which I resisted trying (they looked too ugly) for years, until my mother persuaded me one hot July afternoon. A plot formed immediately; I feigned sleep that night, waited till she was in bed, then got up stealthily and in darkness assaulted the other mangos ripening on the table. My punishment was being sick for days—little boys shouldn’t consume three mangos singlehanded. Equally addictive were caneps, a sour fruit the size of a large marble that pops out of a green skin into your mouth and refreshes you instantly.
I learned to read there the summer I was four. My favorite haunt quickly became the library, a domed octagonal 18th century building in a little park just behind the main colonial square and post office. Originally the town prison, the bookshelves were in what had been the cells. This added greatly to the lurid allure of books about former Nassau colleagues like Blackbeard—any boy feels an instinctive kinship with pirates.
Another treat, high tea outdoors, often followed a library visit. Nearby soared one of the grandest hotels in the Caribbean, the Royal Victoria, a lovely balconied 19th century wooden manse like a tropical Tara, built for rum-runners and surrounded by glorious, cathedral-like botanical gardens. At the center was a huge banyan tree whose arms cradled a stage where a band played calypsos from tea-time on. Years later it closed, fell into ruin and was recently razed. It would’ve made a great movie set.
Nassau was a calypso town then. Today calypso seems, outside of Trinidad, like a nostalgia-ridden word, conjuring up a phony 1950s Caribbean with all the allure of stale suntan oil. But the music began as an authentic local expression of musicality and wit, and if the Bahamian version (“goombay”) was less sardonic and more melodic than those farther south, this is significant too. A look at a faded 1965 tourist guide reminds me that there were a good dozen fine calypso clubs in Nassau: Dirty Dick’s and Blackbeard’s, the Big Bamboo, the Drumbeat, the Junkanoo. Listen:
When Papa beats his Goombay Drum
From miles around the people come
To hear the rumble of his jungle drum . . .
He beats the rhythm that can give them heat
From swaying hips down to their dancing feet
Recreation, culmination, agitation, great sensation!
When Papa beats upon the Goombay drum . . . .
The greatest Bahamian drummer—he still has his own nightclub—was Peanuts Taylor. Singers? I remember mostly men: Vince Martin, Richie Delamore, and a Haitian, André Toussaint. My favorite was always a grinning toothless man named George Symonette, the tallest man in Nassau, now deceased, with the face of a walrus; he played piano in church on Sundays and calypso till all hours the other days. A few old recordings, long out-of-print, are around again on cassette, with his out-of-tune piano and that delicate croak of a voice. He used to plop me beside him on a piano bench and muse those gentle rhymes that were Nassau, like the one about the king who became Governor-General of the Bahamas:
It was love, love, love alone
Caused King Edward to leave the throne.
I glimpse it all with the vibrancy of a repeated dream, for it was in Nassau with my mother, in childhood, I first had that most adult of sensations—of knowing I was happy, knowing why, and storing it all up against a time when perhaps that would not be as inevitable. So that thirty years on, I have only to hum one of those calypsos, and there my Nassau is again. As she is, too.
Tuesday, August 12, 1997
TRAVELERS' TALES
Written, at bargain-basement rates, for a cruise-line magazine that got inserted in ships’ cabins for several months. They did their best not to pay me. Had they given me more space, my list would’ve been ten times as long.
The travel narrative is probably the oldest form of story-telling—dating back to some early hunter who persuaded his fellow men that over behind that weird rock there was something remarkable, well worth going to see or even to eat. The point of travel is to satisfy a hunger; and whether leaving home feeds the imagination or fills a more prosaic need, the person who brings back the news and views and perfumes of faraway lands is part of an honorable tradition.
A great travel book is an intimate encounter not only with foreign places but with a total stranger—the author. First, there's always the question of: How much is he making up? As a travel writer for magazines (and lately, of a book) for many years, I can vouch for the accuracy of most of my colleagues. The way all travel writers do lie is what they leave out: the days when nothing happened, or the trip to the bazaar that was a bore, or the conversations with foreigners who had nothing new to say.
A good travel book is partly a fib, because it gives to messy, sprawling reality the neat, compelling shape of a good novel—by leaving out the daily meaninglessness. Yet a great travel book doesn't make me want to go anywhere; instead it makes me feel I don't have to, because reading already took me there.
What makes a travel book great? It lets me not only see a place but also hear the way foreigners speak and grasp how they think. It surprises me on every other page. Such a book not only assesses the past of a place, but predicts the future as well.
The following five are among my favorites.
THE INNOCENTS ABROAD (Mark Twain)
Back in 1867 the Grand Tour was Europe and the Holy Land, which for an American meant success and enlightenment. A young writer pseudonamed Twain was sent by his San Francisco newspaper on a Grand Tour package cruise for nearly a year. His serialized report still remains one of the funniest, most savage, and cleverest accounts of a journey—and fellow passengers—ever written.
Though the itinerary (New York-Spain-France-Italy-Greece-Constantinople-Jerusalem-Damascus-Egypt-Gibraltar-Bermuda-NY) and the price ($1250, all-inclusive) belong to another century, this is the first modern travel book. The ironic wit, the casual yet packed language, the sense of a frank narrator, and most of all the dialogue are closer in tone to, say, Paul Theroux than to any of Twain's erstwhile predecessors. Here he is on the delights and disappointments of Constantinople, before it became Istanbul:
"When I think how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast. . . Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however."
THE TRAVELLER'S TREE (Patrick Leigh Fermor)
The quarter-century following the Second World War were the boom years in the Caribbean, when the archipelago became chic and affordable for Americans and Europeans, when it changed the most, and when its hot style—from calypso to the ideal of a tropical beach— seemed to permeate popular culture. The finest travel book to deal with its motley history, moods, and peoples—for there are many Caribbeans—was written by a British high school dropout turned war hero, who had captured a German general in Greece behind enemy lines and turned to writing in peacetime.
Though Fermor's book appeared in 1950, and the islands it describes have altered irrevocably, anybody who visits Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, and several others should know it. Fermor can range easily from the obscene lyrics of a popular song to a dense, allusive description of a voodoo rite or a rain forest, to citing a monk's 18th century journal, to simply sitting in a tiny harbor and setting down what happens. A century from now, this book will be the best record of what that flourishing, fervent Caribbean was, because Fermor stayed fascinated by it all, and especially by the unexpected encounter:
"A young Haitian of extraordinary beauty was standing at the bottom of my bed when I awoke. His shoulders and arms were draped with snake skins. Observing without a word that my eyes had opened, he spread all these treasures across the bedclothes and placed a little stuffed alligator on my breast. Many of the skins had beautiful markings, and one, which, judging by its breadth, must have sheathed an enormous brute, was over seven feet long. But our finances were in such a bad state that I had to refuse them."
ARABIAN SANDS (Wilfred Thesiger)
Wilfred Thesiger—the last British nomad, now nearly ninety—has enjoyed and endured one of the most extraordinary lives of our century, largely spent in difficult, beautiful terrain among little-known and often dangerous tribes. He has set a standard by which all other travelers and explorers can measure themselves. From Abyssinia to the Sudan, Kurdistan to Iraq, Chitral to Hunza, no man has dared more, seen more, or so completely opened himself to experiences outside his culture. What Thesiger saw was almost unknown before him and vanished afterward—like his years in the marshes of southern Iraq, recounted in The Marsh Arabs. His few books stand well outside and above the body of travel literature. They read as great creative journeys of the soul.
His masterpiece, Arabian Sands, details his years spent in the Empty Quarter, the vast desert within a desert spread across Oman and Saudi Arabia. It was then (post–WWII) known only to the bedu who chose to wander its unmappable dunes. No plane had ever flown over it; it could be traversed only by camel. Thesiger explored it for five years, taken in by a bedu tribe, and a decade later wrote a classic account of those years and journeys.
"Their bodies were lean and hard, tempered in the furnace of the desert and trained to unbelievable endurance," he says of his companions. "It was continuous thirst. Sometimes it was twelve days from one well to the next. Sometimes there was no food for several days. . . No man can live there and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him, weak or insistent according to his nature, the yearning to return. For that cruel land can cast a spell no temperate clime can match."
ON FIJI ISLANDS (Ronald Wright)
No region has spawned more books of travel than the South Pacific, going back to the voyages of Cook and continuing through the neglected Robert Dean Frisbie. In our own era the fashion has been for the foolhardy effort that tries to swallow the giant ocean and its many societies in one vast gulp; the result has been a lot of third-rate books. One master who knew better is Ronald Wright, author of Cut Stones and Crossroads, Time Among the Maya, and Stolen Continents (which traces the invasion of the New World from the viewpoints of several Native American cultures).
Paradise has a way of stifling, not igniting, even the best writers, but Wright is so knowledgeable and unpretentious, with so much humor and clear-eyed skepticism, and an effortless way of putting characters before the reader, that Fiji ceases to be merely another beautiful set of islands but instead emerges in many-minded depth. All Wright's astringent portraits of history, of island arguments and gossip and intramural warfare, of daring exploration in great sailing-canoes, and of cannibalism, emerge with a calm, deft touch and much perspective. As he puts it:
"More than one writer has used the metaphor of a leaky roof to characterize Fijian society under the assault of the modern world. . . Impending ruin has most often turned out to be change; and change has not yet proved ruinous. Bau, once the terror of the archipelago, is now the shrine of Fijian identity. If the shrine appears slightly neglected, it is worth remembering that the ancient Fijians often neglected the houses of their gods whenever they felt secure."
THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR (Paul Theroux)
Every once in a while a book comes along which defines a genre. When Theroux's masterpiece appeared in 1975, subtitled By Train Through Asia, he was not quite 34, with ten books to his credit, most of them novels. His route, from London on the Orient Express through Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, and back on the Trans-Siberian Railway, played to his diverse strengths as a writer. ("All travel is circular," he remarks. "The Grand Tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.")
His book is full of unforgettable character sketches, taut glimpses of landscape, and tart social observation; of personal opinion delivered with enormous humor, all in a prose at once musical, flexible, and full of great jokes. The passage of nearly a quarter-century has made the book seem even wiser than it did then, for most of Theroux's political predictions have come true, and he saw certain risky countries right after they opened up or right before they closed down. His writing is so superb it looks easy, but this book will not be bettered anytime soon—and I cannot think of any more fitting last words than Theroux's first:
"Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink. . .Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues. . . I sought trains; I found passengers."
The travel narrative is probably the oldest form of story-telling—dating back to some early hunter who persuaded his fellow men that over behind that weird rock there was something remarkable, well worth going to see or even to eat. The point of travel is to satisfy a hunger; and whether leaving home feeds the imagination or fills a more prosaic need, the person who brings back the news and views and perfumes of faraway lands is part of an honorable tradition.
A great travel book is an intimate encounter not only with foreign places but with a total stranger—the author. First, there's always the question of: How much is he making up? As a travel writer for magazines (and lately, of a book) for many years, I can vouch for the accuracy of most of my colleagues. The way all travel writers do lie is what they leave out: the days when nothing happened, or the trip to the bazaar that was a bore, or the conversations with foreigners who had nothing new to say.
A good travel book is partly a fib, because it gives to messy, sprawling reality the neat, compelling shape of a good novel—by leaving out the daily meaninglessness. Yet a great travel book doesn't make me want to go anywhere; instead it makes me feel I don't have to, because reading already took me there.
What makes a travel book great? It lets me not only see a place but also hear the way foreigners speak and grasp how they think. It surprises me on every other page. Such a book not only assesses the past of a place, but predicts the future as well.
The following five are among my favorites.
* * *
THE INNOCENTS ABROAD (Mark Twain)
Back in 1867 the Grand Tour was Europe and the Holy Land, which for an American meant success and enlightenment. A young writer pseudonamed Twain was sent by his San Francisco newspaper on a Grand Tour package cruise for nearly a year. His serialized report still remains one of the funniest, most savage, and cleverest accounts of a journey—and fellow passengers—ever written.
Though the itinerary (New York-Spain-France-Italy-Greece-Constantinople-Jerusalem-Damascus-Egypt-Gibraltar-Bermuda-NY) and the price ($1250, all-inclusive) belong to another century, this is the first modern travel book. The ironic wit, the casual yet packed language, the sense of a frank narrator, and most of all the dialogue are closer in tone to, say, Paul Theroux than to any of Twain's erstwhile predecessors. Here he is on the delights and disappointments of Constantinople, before it became Istanbul:
"When I think how I have been swindled by books of Oriental travel, I want a tourist for breakfast. . . Mosques are plenty, churches are plenty, graveyards are plenty, but morals and whiskey are scarce. The Koran does not permit Mohammedans to drink. Their natural instincts do not permit them to be moral. They say the Sultan has eight hundred wives. This almost amounts to bigamy. It makes our cheeks burn with shame to see such a thing permitted here in Turkey. We do not mind it so much in Salt Lake, however."
THE TRAVELLER'S TREE (Patrick Leigh Fermor)
The quarter-century following the Second World War were the boom years in the Caribbean, when the archipelago became chic and affordable for Americans and Europeans, when it changed the most, and when its hot style—from calypso to the ideal of a tropical beach— seemed to permeate popular culture. The finest travel book to deal with its motley history, moods, and peoples—for there are many Caribbeans—was written by a British high school dropout turned war hero, who had captured a German general in Greece behind enemy lines and turned to writing in peacetime.
Though Fermor's book appeared in 1950, and the islands it describes have altered irrevocably, anybody who visits Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, Barbados, Trinidad, Jamaica, Cuba, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts, St. Lucia, and several others should know it. Fermor can range easily from the obscene lyrics of a popular song to a dense, allusive description of a voodoo rite or a rain forest, to citing a monk's 18th century journal, to simply sitting in a tiny harbor and setting down what happens. A century from now, this book will be the best record of what that flourishing, fervent Caribbean was, because Fermor stayed fascinated by it all, and especially by the unexpected encounter:
"A young Haitian of extraordinary beauty was standing at the bottom of my bed when I awoke. His shoulders and arms were draped with snake skins. Observing without a word that my eyes had opened, he spread all these treasures across the bedclothes and placed a little stuffed alligator on my breast. Many of the skins had beautiful markings, and one, which, judging by its breadth, must have sheathed an enormous brute, was over seven feet long. But our finances were in such a bad state that I had to refuse them."
ARABIAN SANDS (Wilfred Thesiger)
Wilfred Thesiger—the last British nomad, now nearly ninety—has enjoyed and endured one of the most extraordinary lives of our century, largely spent in difficult, beautiful terrain among little-known and often dangerous tribes. He has set a standard by which all other travelers and explorers can measure themselves. From Abyssinia to the Sudan, Kurdistan to Iraq, Chitral to Hunza, no man has dared more, seen more, or so completely opened himself to experiences outside his culture. What Thesiger saw was almost unknown before him and vanished afterward—like his years in the marshes of southern Iraq, recounted in The Marsh Arabs. His few books stand well outside and above the body of travel literature. They read as great creative journeys of the soul.
His masterpiece, Arabian Sands, details his years spent in the Empty Quarter, the vast desert within a desert spread across Oman and Saudi Arabia. It was then (post–WWII) known only to the bedu who chose to wander its unmappable dunes. No plane had ever flown over it; it could be traversed only by camel. Thesiger explored it for five years, taken in by a bedu tribe, and a decade later wrote a classic account of those years and journeys.
"Their bodies were lean and hard, tempered in the furnace of the desert and trained to unbelievable endurance," he says of his companions. "It was continuous thirst. Sometimes it was twelve days from one well to the next. Sometimes there was no food for several days. . . No man can live there and emerge unchanged. He will carry, however faint, the imprint of the desert, the brand which marks the nomad; and he will have within him, weak or insistent according to his nature, the yearning to return. For that cruel land can cast a spell no temperate clime can match."
ON FIJI ISLANDS (Ronald Wright)
No region has spawned more books of travel than the South Pacific, going back to the voyages of Cook and continuing through the neglected Robert Dean Frisbie. In our own era the fashion has been for the foolhardy effort that tries to swallow the giant ocean and its many societies in one vast gulp; the result has been a lot of third-rate books. One master who knew better is Ronald Wright, author of Cut Stones and Crossroads, Time Among the Maya, and Stolen Continents (which traces the invasion of the New World from the viewpoints of several Native American cultures).
Paradise has a way of stifling, not igniting, even the best writers, but Wright is so knowledgeable and unpretentious, with so much humor and clear-eyed skepticism, and an effortless way of putting characters before the reader, that Fiji ceases to be merely another beautiful set of islands but instead emerges in many-minded depth. All Wright's astringent portraits of history, of island arguments and gossip and intramural warfare, of daring exploration in great sailing-canoes, and of cannibalism, emerge with a calm, deft touch and much perspective. As he puts it:
"More than one writer has used the metaphor of a leaky roof to characterize Fijian society under the assault of the modern world. . . Impending ruin has most often turned out to be change; and change has not yet proved ruinous. Bau, once the terror of the archipelago, is now the shrine of Fijian identity. If the shrine appears slightly neglected, it is worth remembering that the ancient Fijians often neglected the houses of their gods whenever they felt secure."
THE GREAT RAILWAY BAZAAR (Paul Theroux)
Every once in a while a book comes along which defines a genre. When Theroux's masterpiece appeared in 1975, subtitled By Train Through Asia, he was not quite 34, with ten books to his credit, most of them novels. His route, from London on the Orient Express through Europe, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Burma, Malaysia, Vietnam, Singapore, Japan, and back on the Trans-Siberian Railway, played to his diverse strengths as a writer. ("All travel is circular," he remarks. "The Grand Tour is just the inspired man's way of heading home.")
His book is full of unforgettable character sketches, taut glimpses of landscape, and tart social observation; of personal opinion delivered with enormous humor, all in a prose at once musical, flexible, and full of great jokes. The passage of nearly a quarter-century has made the book seem even wiser than it did then, for most of Theroux's political predictions have come true, and he saw certain risky countries right after they opened up or right before they closed down. His writing is so superb it looks easy, but this book will not be bettered anytime soon—and I cannot think of any more fitting last words than Theroux's first:
"Ever since childhood, when I lived within earshot of the Boston and Maine, I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it. Those whistles sing bewitchment: railways are irresistible bazaars, snaking along perfectly level no matter what the landscape, improving your mood with speed, and never upsetting your drink. . .Anything is possible on a train: a great meal, a binge, a visit from card players, an intrigue, a good night's sleep, and strangers' monologues. . . I sought trains; I found passengers."
Sunday, October 13, 1996
Thomas Coryat
Written in 1996 for Sky magazine
The English are well known for producing the world's greatest travellers and also the world's greatest eccentrics. It should therefore come as no surprise that nearly four centuries ago, in the Elizabethan Age, those two superlatives met in one odd, self-mocking, self-hawking, perpetually talking, perpetually walking gentleman—Thomas Coryat (1577-1617). A singular character in an age that produced titans of personality, Coryat was befriended and insulted by the luminaries of his day. He also walked from London to Venice and back, and wrote a book about it; and when that didn't make him as famous as he wanted, he walked to India.
Born in Odcombe, Somersetshire, the son of a clergyman who wrote Latin verse, Coryat from an early age showed irrepressible wit and a loquaciousness buttressed by a need for attention. He also had patience, exuberance, strong legs, and a large memory. These served him well at Oxford, which he left after only three years (in those days that meant merely that he didn't take holy orders). After a few years back home and his father's death in 1607, he went to London with little but his classical education.
James I had just taken the throne, and Coryat talked his way into the court of the king's son, Prince Henry. There he managed to survive as a kind of glorified jester, a "privileged buffoon," the butt of jokes who also gave as good as he got—a living version of a type found in many plays of the era. As one diarist of the Prince's court noted, "Sweetmeats and Coryat made up the last course at all court entertainments." He was also part of the regular crowd at the Mermaid Tavern, arguably the wittiest bar-cafe of all time, alongside Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Inigo Jones. None of this, however, meant cash or celebrity.
Then Coryat hit on the notion of gaining fame as a traveller—surely this would satisfy his deep need to be taken seriously. (He was evidently a natural target for teasing; his eagerness for attention doubtless increased others' marksmanship.) His big idea was to walk to Venice and back, via France, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. He left in May 1608 and was back in October, having covered nearly two thousand miles in one pair of shoes. These Coryat took home and proudly hung in Odcombe's church, and they would be immortalized by Shakespeare, who in Measure for Measure speaks of “brave Master Shoetie, the great traveller.”
It took him three years to publish the book of his journey, Coryats Crudities, hastily gobled up in five moneths travells ...Newly digested in the hungry aire... and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling Members of this Kingdome. An odd, overlong work, with passages cobbled and altered from others' books, it was still Coryat through and through, the "Odcombian Leg-stretcher," as he called himself. The great curiosity of the Crudities is its extensive preface, which consists of verses by much of the roster of Elizabethan literary talent, alternately praising and roasting Coryat. It is back-scratching unsurpassed, a shameless and waggish blurbdom, and much of it was unsolicited.
There are verses in English, in Greek and Latin, in French, Italian, and Spanish, in Welsh, Macaronic, even in "Antipodean" and "Utopian." Ben Jonson contributed a rhymed acrostic on the letters of Coryat's name; several verses were set to music, one was shaped like an egg. When Coryat saw how many there were, and how sardonic his "friends" could be, he got cold feet, but the Prince insisted he print all of them. Suddenly it was fashionable to make fun of this extraordinary traveller while commending his book. One poet referred to him as a "single-soled, single-souled and single-shirted Observer." Jonson called Coryat "an Engine, wholly consisting of extremes, a Head, Fingers, and Toes. For what his industrious Toes have trod, his ready Fingers have written, his subtle head dictating." He was "irrecoverably addicted" to travel, this "great and bold Carpenter of words."
And the book was a success. What this meant back then was several hundred copies printed, for the reading market was tiny. Coryat had to endure one penalty of fame: a pirated edition of the Preface to the Crudities, those verses that all London was talking about, available at a fraction of the cost, with a title page making fun of our hero's lengthy tome. Coryat was enraged, but at least everyone knew him, or of him. He was thirty-five.
He was also elated. Why not go farther? Why not walk from Constantinople all the way to India, see the Great Mogul, and ride an elephant? Let them make fun of Tom Coryat then!
He left in October 1612 by ship and reached Constantinople in April 1613. En route he visited the purported ruins of Troy and was there dubbed a knight by a fellow-passenger, much to the disappointment of several local onlookers who thought him about to be beheaded. Coryat was a master at accepting hospitality, and he stayed as the guest of the English trading agent until January, when he left Constantinople by sea for Iskenderun, now most of the way along the Turkish coast. He then started walking.
He walked to Aleppo, to Damascus, and on to Jerusalem. There he had his wrist tattooed with a Crusaders' cross—a popular souvenir among Christian pilgrims to the Holy City. He had a look at the Jordan River and walked back to Aleppo for a hot four months' wait for a caravan. Eventually he got lucky, and started east in September, via Diyabekir, where a Turkish soldier robbed him of most of his limited funds. Fortunately Coryat had adopted the habit of local dress, and kept a few emergency coins stashed in strategic folds of his robes. Remarkably undaunted, he pushed on with the caravan across Persia to Tabriz, Isfahan, and Kandahar.
Near the Indian frontier Coryat had a stroke of traveller's fortune, and ran into Sir Robert and Lady Sherley, on their way back west from the Court of the Mogul Emperor Jahangir. English being rare in these parts, they must've looked like the happiest of mirages to Coryat, and Sir Robert even had the Crudities with him, picked up in London. Sir Robert also offered to speak highly of its author to the Persian Shah so that Coryat might enjoy the ruler's hospitality on his return trek. This was guff, but Lady Sherley was sensible and kind enough to give Coryat some money.
In Multan Coryat got into an argument with a Muslim who had learned Italian as a slave and who called Coryat an infidel. This earned the hapless Mohammedan a long, florid, scurrilous reply before a large crowd who cannot have possibly understood what Coryat was saying, likewise in Italian. Coryat recounts this brave oration in one of the few letters home (mostly to his mother) which are, sadly, all that survived of his Great Walk.
He was now in the territory of "the Great Mogul" and from Lahore he walked what we call the Grand Trunk Road to Delhi and Agra, then to nearby Ajmer to meet the Emperor. This walk of 450 miles took him only twenty days, at a cost of about twopence a day (Coryat remarks on the locals' generosity). With typical gusto he called the road, with its regular shade trees, "the most incomparable shew of that kind that ever my eies survaied . . . I traversed afoot, but with divers paire of shooes, having beene such a propateticke . . . that is, a walker forward on foote, as I doubt whether you have heard the like in your life..." He had covered over 3300 miles from Jerusalem, the first European to thus reach India on foot since Alexander the Great's infantry.
At Ajmer Coryat settled in with ten fellow Englishmen, local representatives of the East India Company—that strange trading and eventually military organization which soon enough controlled most of India. In the meantime any Englishman was welcome at a Company table, and they happily put up Coryat for fourteen months while he planned further travels (Samarkand and Ethiopia) and polished his Persian, Turkish, Hindustani, and Arabic. A dedicated wordsmith, he liked linguistic brawls and, in his native garb, came to be looked on as "a half-witted English fakir" by the locals.
Coryat earned the admiration (and a donation) of the Mogul emperor one morning, at Jahangir's regular appearance before his people. His need was great: he had all but run out of money. But Coryat's Persian was eloquent. He spoke of the ruler's "glorious court" and said he had come all this way to see "Your Majesties elephants" and the Ganges, "captaine of all the river[s] of the world." He had on this journey "sustained much labour and toile, the like whereof no mortall man in this world did ever perform, to see the blessed face of Your Majesty . . . ."
The speech worked; Jahangir replied in Persian and threw him 100 silver rupees, about ten pounds sterling. Later the English Ambassador complained to Coryat that it was most unbecoming for a countryman to beg. Coryat was at home duelling with wits like Ben Jonson; he could eviscerate a mere bureaucrat. "I answered . . . in that stout and resolute manner that he was contented to cease nibling at me."
Coryat kept walking. He saw Agra again during a plague, and Hardwar and the Punjab; but the climate and his exertions proved too much. He had fainting spells and managed to make his way to the East India Company's hospitality in Surat. Their kindnesses did him in. In December 1617 he became the first Western tourist to die in India from a bad stomach, brought on by an English diet of too much local beer on top of meat in hot weather. Yet to him belongs the very real honor of being the first Westerner to visit the subcontinent with no thought of either trade or conquest.
What, in the end, does Coryat amount to? Scholars of Asia relish him as much for his humor and exaggerations as for his observant eye; he is far more entertaining than the usual traders and missionaries. One goes to him not for his facts but for his personality. He travelled not for plunder or science or God but for his own personal pleasure, and to our eyes he seems modern in this regard. He was an exceptional linguist, the first English travel-writer, and the greatest pedestrian of his era. He well understood that speed not only erases the detail but blurs the mind. He rarely complained of hardship. People made fun of him, but then again this is the protest of the stay-at-home against the incessant adventurer even today. And if Coryat didn't exactly have the last laugh, perhaps he had the best one. Here we are four centuries later, still praising his enthusiasm and his shoe leather: he would surely puff with pride. Plus he saw the world.
The English are well known for producing the world's greatest travellers and also the world's greatest eccentrics. It should therefore come as no surprise that nearly four centuries ago, in the Elizabethan Age, those two superlatives met in one odd, self-mocking, self-hawking, perpetually talking, perpetually walking gentleman—Thomas Coryat (1577-1617). A singular character in an age that produced titans of personality, Coryat was befriended and insulted by the luminaries of his day. He also walked from London to Venice and back, and wrote a book about it; and when that didn't make him as famous as he wanted, he walked to India.
Born in Odcombe, Somersetshire, the son of a clergyman who wrote Latin verse, Coryat from an early age showed irrepressible wit and a loquaciousness buttressed by a need for attention. He also had patience, exuberance, strong legs, and a large memory. These served him well at Oxford, which he left after only three years (in those days that meant merely that he didn't take holy orders). After a few years back home and his father's death in 1607, he went to London with little but his classical education.
James I had just taken the throne, and Coryat talked his way into the court of the king's son, Prince Henry. There he managed to survive as a kind of glorified jester, a "privileged buffoon," the butt of jokes who also gave as good as he got—a living version of a type found in many plays of the era. As one diarist of the Prince's court noted, "Sweetmeats and Coryat made up the last course at all court entertainments." He was also part of the regular crowd at the Mermaid Tavern, arguably the wittiest bar-cafe of all time, alongside Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, John Donne, and Inigo Jones. None of this, however, meant cash or celebrity.
Then Coryat hit on the notion of gaining fame as a traveller—surely this would satisfy his deep need to be taken seriously. (He was evidently a natural target for teasing; his eagerness for attention doubtless increased others' marksmanship.) His big idea was to walk to Venice and back, via France, Switzerland, Germany, and the Netherlands. He left in May 1608 and was back in October, having covered nearly two thousand miles in one pair of shoes. These Coryat took home and proudly hung in Odcombe's church, and they would be immortalized by Shakespeare, who in Measure for Measure speaks of “brave Master Shoetie, the great traveller.”
It took him three years to publish the book of his journey, Coryats Crudities, hastily gobled up in five moneths travells ...Newly digested in the hungry aire... and now dispersed to the nourishment of the travelling Members of this Kingdome. An odd, overlong work, with passages cobbled and altered from others' books, it was still Coryat through and through, the "Odcombian Leg-stretcher," as he called himself. The great curiosity of the Crudities is its extensive preface, which consists of verses by much of the roster of Elizabethan literary talent, alternately praising and roasting Coryat. It is back-scratching unsurpassed, a shameless and waggish blurbdom, and much of it was unsolicited.
There are verses in English, in Greek and Latin, in French, Italian, and Spanish, in Welsh, Macaronic, even in "Antipodean" and "Utopian." Ben Jonson contributed a rhymed acrostic on the letters of Coryat's name; several verses were set to music, one was shaped like an egg. When Coryat saw how many there were, and how sardonic his "friends" could be, he got cold feet, but the Prince insisted he print all of them. Suddenly it was fashionable to make fun of this extraordinary traveller while commending his book. One poet referred to him as a "single-soled, single-souled and single-shirted Observer." Jonson called Coryat "an Engine, wholly consisting of extremes, a Head, Fingers, and Toes. For what his industrious Toes have trod, his ready Fingers have written, his subtle head dictating." He was "irrecoverably addicted" to travel, this "great and bold Carpenter of words."
And the book was a success. What this meant back then was several hundred copies printed, for the reading market was tiny. Coryat had to endure one penalty of fame: a pirated edition of the Preface to the Crudities, those verses that all London was talking about, available at a fraction of the cost, with a title page making fun of our hero's lengthy tome. Coryat was enraged, but at least everyone knew him, or of him. He was thirty-five.
He was also elated. Why not go farther? Why not walk from Constantinople all the way to India, see the Great Mogul, and ride an elephant? Let them make fun of Tom Coryat then!
He left in October 1612 by ship and reached Constantinople in April 1613. En route he visited the purported ruins of Troy and was there dubbed a knight by a fellow-passenger, much to the disappointment of several local onlookers who thought him about to be beheaded. Coryat was a master at accepting hospitality, and he stayed as the guest of the English trading agent until January, when he left Constantinople by sea for Iskenderun, now most of the way along the Turkish coast. He then started walking.
He walked to Aleppo, to Damascus, and on to Jerusalem. There he had his wrist tattooed with a Crusaders' cross—a popular souvenir among Christian pilgrims to the Holy City. He had a look at the Jordan River and walked back to Aleppo for a hot four months' wait for a caravan. Eventually he got lucky, and started east in September, via Diyabekir, where a Turkish soldier robbed him of most of his limited funds. Fortunately Coryat had adopted the habit of local dress, and kept a few emergency coins stashed in strategic folds of his robes. Remarkably undaunted, he pushed on with the caravan across Persia to Tabriz, Isfahan, and Kandahar.
Near the Indian frontier Coryat had a stroke of traveller's fortune, and ran into Sir Robert and Lady Sherley, on their way back west from the Court of the Mogul Emperor Jahangir. English being rare in these parts, they must've looked like the happiest of mirages to Coryat, and Sir Robert even had the Crudities with him, picked up in London. Sir Robert also offered to speak highly of its author to the Persian Shah so that Coryat might enjoy the ruler's hospitality on his return trek. This was guff, but Lady Sherley was sensible and kind enough to give Coryat some money.
In Multan Coryat got into an argument with a Muslim who had learned Italian as a slave and who called Coryat an infidel. This earned the hapless Mohammedan a long, florid, scurrilous reply before a large crowd who cannot have possibly understood what Coryat was saying, likewise in Italian. Coryat recounts this brave oration in one of the few letters home (mostly to his mother) which are, sadly, all that survived of his Great Walk.
He was now in the territory of "the Great Mogul" and from Lahore he walked what we call the Grand Trunk Road to Delhi and Agra, then to nearby Ajmer to meet the Emperor. This walk of 450 miles took him only twenty days, at a cost of about twopence a day (Coryat remarks on the locals' generosity). With typical gusto he called the road, with its regular shade trees, "the most incomparable shew of that kind that ever my eies survaied . . . I traversed afoot, but with divers paire of shooes, having beene such a propateticke . . . that is, a walker forward on foote, as I doubt whether you have heard the like in your life..." He had covered over 3300 miles from Jerusalem, the first European to thus reach India on foot since Alexander the Great's infantry.
At Ajmer Coryat settled in with ten fellow Englishmen, local representatives of the East India Company—that strange trading and eventually military organization which soon enough controlled most of India. In the meantime any Englishman was welcome at a Company table, and they happily put up Coryat for fourteen months while he planned further travels (Samarkand and Ethiopia) and polished his Persian, Turkish, Hindustani, and Arabic. A dedicated wordsmith, he liked linguistic brawls and, in his native garb, came to be looked on as "a half-witted English fakir" by the locals.
Coryat earned the admiration (and a donation) of the Mogul emperor one morning, at Jahangir's regular appearance before his people. His need was great: he had all but run out of money. But Coryat's Persian was eloquent. He spoke of the ruler's "glorious court" and said he had come all this way to see "Your Majesties elephants" and the Ganges, "captaine of all the river[s] of the world." He had on this journey "sustained much labour and toile, the like whereof no mortall man in this world did ever perform, to see the blessed face of Your Majesty . . . ."
The speech worked; Jahangir replied in Persian and threw him 100 silver rupees, about ten pounds sterling. Later the English Ambassador complained to Coryat that it was most unbecoming for a countryman to beg. Coryat was at home duelling with wits like Ben Jonson; he could eviscerate a mere bureaucrat. "I answered . . . in that stout and resolute manner that he was contented to cease nibling at me."
Coryat kept walking. He saw Agra again during a plague, and Hardwar and the Punjab; but the climate and his exertions proved too much. He had fainting spells and managed to make his way to the East India Company's hospitality in Surat. Their kindnesses did him in. In December 1617 he became the first Western tourist to die in India from a bad stomach, brought on by an English diet of too much local beer on top of meat in hot weather. Yet to him belongs the very real honor of being the first Westerner to visit the subcontinent with no thought of either trade or conquest.
What, in the end, does Coryat amount to? Scholars of Asia relish him as much for his humor and exaggerations as for his observant eye; he is far more entertaining than the usual traders and missionaries. One goes to him not for his facts but for his personality. He travelled not for plunder or science or God but for his own personal pleasure, and to our eyes he seems modern in this regard. He was an exceptional linguist, the first English travel-writer, and the greatest pedestrian of his era. He well understood that speed not only erases the detail but blurs the mind. He rarely complained of hardship. People made fun of him, but then again this is the protest of the stay-at-home against the incessant adventurer even today. And if Coryat didn't exactly have the last laugh, perhaps he had the best one. Here we are four centuries later, still praising his enthusiasm and his shoe leather: he would surely puff with pride. Plus he saw the world.
Saturday, June 15, 1996
Petra
Written in 1996 for Gourmet magazine
To journey in the Middle East is to tread the dust of ancient history; and in the classical world no other ruin has the reputation of Jordan’s Petra, that “rose-red city half as old as Time.” Forgotten for centuries save by a few scholars and bedouin tribes, it had been the wealthy capital of the Nabateans, who flourished around the time of Christ. On “rediscovery” in the early 19th century Petra became a metaphor: the legendary lost city of Arabia.
Having admired the Scotsman David Roberts’ lithographs from his daring 1839 visit, I’d long wanted to see Petra—hidden like a sandstone dream after a winding, narrow passage through rock. Even today, to reach it summons an ancient wonder.
I went later than I should have, in early June, when the south of Jordan is already too hot. Petra lies amid stupendous valleys reminiscent of the most dramatic American southwest: huge folded waves, hills, and gnarled fists of stone, seemingly impenetrable. To travel here is to trace Biblical events—first you cross the spring of Moses. Then past the new sand-colored town of Petra, nestled on switchback roads that descend. A few modern hotels, a ticket, a gate. You are walking a dusty road with thistly hillside rising on one side. Horses are chuffing; women pass, swathed in black.
The road winds through lunar outcroppings, many of which are tombs with gaping temple-entrances carved out. A red-headdressed bedouin on a white horse canters past; Petra has long been in bedouin hands and they still have the concessions, like providing visitors with horses, donkeys, or buggies. Then a canyon starts, and you enter the siq, the serpentine corridor of rock.
Though it goes on only about a mile, you might as well be moving back centuries. The time-travel sensation is increased by the remains of an ancient dam and diversionary tunnel the Nabateans cut to protect against flood—for the enclosed city’s perpetual enemy was onrushing water. The siq descends; rock walls tower on both sides with carved niches, missing their statues. Welcoming shade, complex outcroppings with occasional trees, bird calls, pools of light. Your footsteps crunch the sand as the shadows deepen, and a darting lizard seems disrespectful.
A paved Roman road and a water gully begin. More niches, a flowering oleander—then abruptly it rises before you, through a convenient cleft where the shadowy walls nearly meet: a fragmentary vision of civilization in a burst of light, a glimpse of elegant floral columns, a winged goddess carved on a facade. This moment will be remembered as one of the architectural epiphanies of your life.
A few steps more, you come out of the siq, and a temple known as the Treasury is revealed entire, a camel kneeling appropriately before it—that miraculous moment to which no photo can do justice, when everyone becomes an explorer discovering Petra (“the rock”) for the first time.
Like most names for Petra’s buildings, the Treasury—El Khazneh in Arabic—is misleading. Originally a cult-temple of a king, the formal perfection of its twenty columns and its high stone urn had bedouin convinced for many centuries that this was where Petra’s riches were still hidden; numerous bullet-marks on the urn are a result of potshots to remove the lid. The treasure, of course, is the building itself, to rival any in classical Greece.
The Nabateans were a desert trading people who, from the 6th century B.C. on, developed a genius for urbanism and commerce. They soon controlled the region’s spice trade, expanding until they were less middlemen than overlords; Petra made an ideal trading crossroads, protected by the siq. Natural diplomats whose language and culture were a truce of East and West, the Nabateans were known for a humane system of justice and prowess at water management. Myrrh and frankincense—resins collected from trees in southern Arabia—could reach Petra by camel caravan in a mere two weeks, and Mediterranean ports like Gaza a week later.
These long caravans paid escort taxes on entering Nabatean territory and were led swiftly across by cameleers. Each city acted as rest-stop (at Petra, caravans stayed outside the siq) and also as a clearing-house. Fresh camels and crews were provided, goods traded, local items like Dead Sea bitumen added to the merchandise.
Petrans were both merchants and bankers for the caravans, investing large sums over vast trade routes outside their territory, and this way the Nabateans could reach out to most of their known world, exchanging goods and ideas. They maintained trade representatives as far away as East Africa, Italy, and the Aegean; hence the cosmopolitanism evident in every carved rock, where Greek, Assyrian, Egyptian, and Roman architectural details jostle each other in a singularly Nabatean style.
In 106 A.D. the Nabateans fell under Roman rule, which was typically benevolent and constructive. As cities to the north rose in trading power Petra lost its importance, and in the 2nd century the Nabateans became more agricultural and moved their capital up to the Sinai to recapture commerce from the Arabian Gulf. Massive earthquakes every two centuries hurt Petra’s viability, and it was mostly abandoned in the 7th century.
For a thousand years bedouin tribes kept silent on its existence. Its name was familiar only to classical scholars until the courageous young Swiss explorer and linguist Johann Burckhardt, disguised as a Muslim student, entered in 1812. Soon all Europe learned of Petra.
Early travelers and artists often took their time seeing the site; Petra now tends to get included as a single arduous day stop on a week tour of Jordan. But to allow Petra only a day is an injustice; not to see every individual monument (there are over 800) but to let memory absorb one of the man-made wonders of the world. It’s too overwhelming to take in hurriedly, and the Petra I describe in this article can be seen in one very active day only if you’re in great shape.
The difficulty of any visit to the deep past is completing the picture. The paradox here is that most of what survives are tombs of several types: much of Petra is a carved, palatial necropolis. A motif of columns around gaping dark tomb entrances gives an obsessional unity; still, one should imagine those temple-like tombs in a bustling city of the living, those valleys and hills covered with mud houses and stone villas, pre-earthquake.
After a wider second siq, with tombs on both sides, the cliffs open to reveal the grandeur of the city valley. First the huge, commanding amphitheater, the site of plays and the struggles of gladiators and animals. The amphitheater seated about 5,000 before an earthquake collapsed the stage and the backstage columns, and it’s worth going up an interior passage to come out like a spectator on the cheap high seats. (There’d have been cold drinks for sale on the way.) In another part of Petra a smaller theater was filled with water in the rainy season, so that mock naval battles could be enacted.
The valley broadens gradually, and to the east along one cliff-face a long array of Royal Tombs has been carved in a line like a majestic honor-guard. Here the size of the site takes hold and the distinctive local bedouin souvenirs, of sand in many colors dripped carefully into little bottles to make pretty images, seem appropriate, the many hues of Petran rock writ small. They bring to mind the visit of the artist and nonsense poet Edward Lear in 1855, who wrote that “All the cliffs are . . . in stripes.” His cook, Giorgio, put it more vividly: “Oh, Signore, we have come into a world where everything is made of chocolate, ham, curry-powder and salmon.”
The Royal Tombs convey the enormous scale of the city. The Palace Tomb with four massive columned Roman doors; the Corinthian Tomb, more eaten away but with a floral urn above; and the Urn Tomb itself, tremendously high, a colonnaded courtyard on its upper level, used as a Byzantine church in the 5th century. It is difficult to parse the magic of these grand edifices that flow with a precision and silken grace from the rock. Half-eaten by time, they are no less wonderful, and in contemplating them, incongruous details emerge—like raised geometric designs, with hints of art deco.
By the theater a sloping path climbs to the High Place of Sacrifice, the most well-preserved of the ancient world. (I suggest hiring a guide for this two-hour walk; it’s easy to take a wrong path.) Heading up the gorge the view back is spectacular, past whorled and mottled continents of otherworldly rock in rust and rose and cream, striated like marble cake. Eventually a worn processional path begins, its indentations the weathered steps of priests, up and around desert cliffs with pink oleander blossoms everywhere. Near the top are twin stone obelisks, representing the fertile male and female Nabatean deities. In typical fashion they weren’t brought here; Petrans simply carved the mountain out around them.
On the summit, after a bit of a scramble, is the High Place itself, a small sunken courtyard of stone with an altar and space for, presumably, only priests and honored guests. Here, before a vista of layered mountains and valleys, animals and sometimes humans were sacrificed for nearly ten centuries.
The descent follows a different route, via steps and paths both recent and ancient, by ravines and grottos. After many staircases there was suddenly a carved lion fifteen feet long, slender and sinewy. Once water had sluiced from its missing metallic head and run in cunning tunnels all the way to the city far below.
Extremely steep stairs lead down to elegant tombs which all resembled temples hewn out of rock, the most illustrious with three Roman soldiers on its facade. Across what was once a courtyard and portico—now bare rubble—is a funerary banquet hall hollowed from the cliff, with fluted columns along the interior walls and Petra’s most gorgeous patterns.
Beyond is the elaborate Renaissance Tomb, whose arch and six urns make it arguably the most sophisticated design in Petra. The way continues down Wadi Farasa (wadi means riverbed), finishing at the valley’s head after astounding views of giant temple-tombs shaped from a cliff and visible only from here. They add to the staggering immensity, the otherworldliness of a city not built but carved out of sandstone. At the valley’s head the impressive colonnaded main street ends in Roman paving stones and an arched temple, one of the few free-standing buildings that survive; it was originally dedicated to Dushara, the principal Nabatean deity, and later to Zeus and Aphrodite.
There are two museums in Petra, one by a little restaurant and the other in a tomb on the adjacent cliff-face. Both collections give a sense of the city’s daily life: small oil lamps, gold jewelry, bronze statuettes, terracotta figurines, coins, jars, gaily decorated bowls and pots, glass bottles, and larger statues of gods—some Egyptian, some Roman (Dionysus and Venus) and their Nabatean equivalents—along with enormous sculpted heads, winged angels, griffins, and gorgeous flowering pediments. Ceramic pipes attest to the Petran skill at supplying a metropolis of 20-30,000 with plenty of water via channels, aqueducts, and cisterns.
Most startling were the heads of winged lions, which were always delicate—whether in the earlier geometric style, or the realist style that followed the Roman invasion. Around both museums, stone tablets with animal and human figures in relief added a missing element to the site’s empty niches and broken torsos.
A nearby path meanders up to the largest and most impressive monument in Petra, known as Ed-Deir or “the Monastery.” No one coming down agreed as to how far away it was; in the end it took me under an hour, with rests to admire stone medusa heads and extraordinary views.
The path up is like a mountain equivalent of the siq. After many hundreds of worn steps and a couple of mildly steep moments, at 4,000 feet a pass leads through the usual scrub trees and boulders alongside a jumbled rock massif. I ambled into a kind of open courtyard past an abutment of rock, took a few steps, turned, and nearly fell to my knees.
Much wider and taller than the Treasury far below, the Monastery seems cataclysmic, carved to a deliberately inhuman scale—its muscular columns eerily smooth, its great urn towering over a doorway already four times the height of a man. It looms like a carved palace of justice eight stories high on a desert mountaintop, its softest colors revealed by the polished light of late afternoon.
Beside the Monastery a rough-hewn staircase traces a canny path up. I saw a daring young man make his way around, over, and emerge on the roof—then somehow clamber onto the lid of the urn, up the tulip handle, and then on top of that—while far below we all gasped and placed bets on whether he would jump or try a handstand. When I left he was still relaxing on the lid, admiring the view.
On my way down, I passed a bedouin goatherd playing a metal flute and singing to his flock. At the bottom, donkeys were braying to Arab music, the camels chewing and resting in the dirt as their owners lolled beneath canvas tents, enjoying a gentle peace at the end of the day.
A last sight of the Treasury, in lustrous light, just before the siq: here Petra ends in absolute glory, the decoration so ornate, so balanced and graceful—those human and mystical figures, the leaves and flowers on the columns. I stared at the bare rock beside it and thought: They started with only this. Art is not progressive; twenty centuries have not bettered their result, produced any structure more stately or more moving. That stone could be carved to such a softness and a classical formality, and with such freedom, seemed a miraculous statement of civilization.
SIDEBAR: WADI RUM
Wadi Rum, the vast desert valley with dramatic mesas that provides the most memorable landscape shots of David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia, lies about an hour and a half by car south of Petra. Inhabited since prehistoric times, for centuries it’s been the terrain of a semi-nomadic tribe, the Howeitat. T.E.Lawrence, who wrote of Wadi Rum’s marvels (“vast and echoing and God-like”), was drawn to it again and again.
A visitor today begins at the Rest House at the conclusion of the Rum Highway, beside a modest village. A Bedouin guide with a 4-wheel drive vehicle can be hired for a tour of Wadi Rum—three hours, say, in early morning or late afternoon. Riding in the back of an open Toyota truck, we headed into the wadi (the Arabic word for a dried-up riverbed), which is mostly soft, pale red sand tufted with sparse grasses. All around, monumental mountains like massive sentinels rise from the desert floor: continents and honeycombs and fists and mushrooms and ridged pillars of rock.
In a mountain defile we examined Nabatean inscriptions, touching in their simplicity—stick figures holding hands, a camel with an arcing neck, two small drawn footprints. Miles on, we made our way up a lone outcropping to a natural rock bridge with an astonishing view, miles and miles of strange immensity. We stopped at a Bedouin tent for tea with a goatherd and his sons.
We passed a herd of camels feeding on scrub grass, wary at our noise, and got out. Barefoot, we slowly climbed a dune of rose-red sand sliding underfoot, past a few brittle bushes, and stood above, in the quiet majesty of giant islands of rock around us. The desert floor lay spread below. Lawrence was still right: a mere glimpse of this place brings on premonitions of God.
And summoned as if by our whim, two robed men on haughty camels appeared over a dune: the Royal Wadi Mounted Police, sometimes known as the Camel Corps. They exchanged unhurried greetings with our guide as their camels chewed air, then they ambled on.
Had our guide seen the movie? we asked. Oh, yes, he had a video of it at home—that pass to our right had been the famous long shot. Could he be sure? Why, of course: his father had been on hand during the filming.
To journey in the Middle East is to tread the dust of ancient history; and in the classical world no other ruin has the reputation of Jordan’s Petra, that “rose-red city half as old as Time.” Forgotten for centuries save by a few scholars and bedouin tribes, it had been the wealthy capital of the Nabateans, who flourished around the time of Christ. On “rediscovery” in the early 19th century Petra became a metaphor: the legendary lost city of Arabia.
Having admired the Scotsman David Roberts’ lithographs from his daring 1839 visit, I’d long wanted to see Petra—hidden like a sandstone dream after a winding, narrow passage through rock. Even today, to reach it summons an ancient wonder.
I went later than I should have, in early June, when the south of Jordan is already too hot. Petra lies amid stupendous valleys reminiscent of the most dramatic American southwest: huge folded waves, hills, and gnarled fists of stone, seemingly impenetrable. To travel here is to trace Biblical events—first you cross the spring of Moses. Then past the new sand-colored town of Petra, nestled on switchback roads that descend. A few modern hotels, a ticket, a gate. You are walking a dusty road with thistly hillside rising on one side. Horses are chuffing; women pass, swathed in black.
The road winds through lunar outcroppings, many of which are tombs with gaping temple-entrances carved out. A red-headdressed bedouin on a white horse canters past; Petra has long been in bedouin hands and they still have the concessions, like providing visitors with horses, donkeys, or buggies. Then a canyon starts, and you enter the siq, the serpentine corridor of rock.
Though it goes on only about a mile, you might as well be moving back centuries. The time-travel sensation is increased by the remains of an ancient dam and diversionary tunnel the Nabateans cut to protect against flood—for the enclosed city’s perpetual enemy was onrushing water. The siq descends; rock walls tower on both sides with carved niches, missing their statues. Welcoming shade, complex outcroppings with occasional trees, bird calls, pools of light. Your footsteps crunch the sand as the shadows deepen, and a darting lizard seems disrespectful.
A paved Roman road and a water gully begin. More niches, a flowering oleander—then abruptly it rises before you, through a convenient cleft where the shadowy walls nearly meet: a fragmentary vision of civilization in a burst of light, a glimpse of elegant floral columns, a winged goddess carved on a facade. This moment will be remembered as one of the architectural epiphanies of your life.
A few steps more, you come out of the siq, and a temple known as the Treasury is revealed entire, a camel kneeling appropriately before it—that miraculous moment to which no photo can do justice, when everyone becomes an explorer discovering Petra (“the rock”) for the first time.
Like most names for Petra’s buildings, the Treasury—El Khazneh in Arabic—is misleading. Originally a cult-temple of a king, the formal perfection of its twenty columns and its high stone urn had bedouin convinced for many centuries that this was where Petra’s riches were still hidden; numerous bullet-marks on the urn are a result of potshots to remove the lid. The treasure, of course, is the building itself, to rival any in classical Greece.
The Nabateans were a desert trading people who, from the 6th century B.C. on, developed a genius for urbanism and commerce. They soon controlled the region’s spice trade, expanding until they were less middlemen than overlords; Petra made an ideal trading crossroads, protected by the siq. Natural diplomats whose language and culture were a truce of East and West, the Nabateans were known for a humane system of justice and prowess at water management. Myrrh and frankincense—resins collected from trees in southern Arabia—could reach Petra by camel caravan in a mere two weeks, and Mediterranean ports like Gaza a week later.
These long caravans paid escort taxes on entering Nabatean territory and were led swiftly across by cameleers. Each city acted as rest-stop (at Petra, caravans stayed outside the siq) and also as a clearing-house. Fresh camels and crews were provided, goods traded, local items like Dead Sea bitumen added to the merchandise.
Petrans were both merchants and bankers for the caravans, investing large sums over vast trade routes outside their territory, and this way the Nabateans could reach out to most of their known world, exchanging goods and ideas. They maintained trade representatives as far away as East Africa, Italy, and the Aegean; hence the cosmopolitanism evident in every carved rock, where Greek, Assyrian, Egyptian, and Roman architectural details jostle each other in a singularly Nabatean style.
In 106 A.D. the Nabateans fell under Roman rule, which was typically benevolent and constructive. As cities to the north rose in trading power Petra lost its importance, and in the 2nd century the Nabateans became more agricultural and moved their capital up to the Sinai to recapture commerce from the Arabian Gulf. Massive earthquakes every two centuries hurt Petra’s viability, and it was mostly abandoned in the 7th century.
For a thousand years bedouin tribes kept silent on its existence. Its name was familiar only to classical scholars until the courageous young Swiss explorer and linguist Johann Burckhardt, disguised as a Muslim student, entered in 1812. Soon all Europe learned of Petra.
Early travelers and artists often took their time seeing the site; Petra now tends to get included as a single arduous day stop on a week tour of Jordan. But to allow Petra only a day is an injustice; not to see every individual monument (there are over 800) but to let memory absorb one of the man-made wonders of the world. It’s too overwhelming to take in hurriedly, and the Petra I describe in this article can be seen in one very active day only if you’re in great shape.
The difficulty of any visit to the deep past is completing the picture. The paradox here is that most of what survives are tombs of several types: much of Petra is a carved, palatial necropolis. A motif of columns around gaping dark tomb entrances gives an obsessional unity; still, one should imagine those temple-like tombs in a bustling city of the living, those valleys and hills covered with mud houses and stone villas, pre-earthquake.
After a wider second siq, with tombs on both sides, the cliffs open to reveal the grandeur of the city valley. First the huge, commanding amphitheater, the site of plays and the struggles of gladiators and animals. The amphitheater seated about 5,000 before an earthquake collapsed the stage and the backstage columns, and it’s worth going up an interior passage to come out like a spectator on the cheap high seats. (There’d have been cold drinks for sale on the way.) In another part of Petra a smaller theater was filled with water in the rainy season, so that mock naval battles could be enacted.
The valley broadens gradually, and to the east along one cliff-face a long array of Royal Tombs has been carved in a line like a majestic honor-guard. Here the size of the site takes hold and the distinctive local bedouin souvenirs, of sand in many colors dripped carefully into little bottles to make pretty images, seem appropriate, the many hues of Petran rock writ small. They bring to mind the visit of the artist and nonsense poet Edward Lear in 1855, who wrote that “All the cliffs are . . . in stripes.” His cook, Giorgio, put it more vividly: “Oh, Signore, we have come into a world where everything is made of chocolate, ham, curry-powder and salmon.”
The Royal Tombs convey the enormous scale of the city. The Palace Tomb with four massive columned Roman doors; the Corinthian Tomb, more eaten away but with a floral urn above; and the Urn Tomb itself, tremendously high, a colonnaded courtyard on its upper level, used as a Byzantine church in the 5th century. It is difficult to parse the magic of these grand edifices that flow with a precision and silken grace from the rock. Half-eaten by time, they are no less wonderful, and in contemplating them, incongruous details emerge—like raised geometric designs, with hints of art deco.
By the theater a sloping path climbs to the High Place of Sacrifice, the most well-preserved of the ancient world. (I suggest hiring a guide for this two-hour walk; it’s easy to take a wrong path.) Heading up the gorge the view back is spectacular, past whorled and mottled continents of otherworldly rock in rust and rose and cream, striated like marble cake. Eventually a worn processional path begins, its indentations the weathered steps of priests, up and around desert cliffs with pink oleander blossoms everywhere. Near the top are twin stone obelisks, representing the fertile male and female Nabatean deities. In typical fashion they weren’t brought here; Petrans simply carved the mountain out around them.
On the summit, after a bit of a scramble, is the High Place itself, a small sunken courtyard of stone with an altar and space for, presumably, only priests and honored guests. Here, before a vista of layered mountains and valleys, animals and sometimes humans were sacrificed for nearly ten centuries.
The descent follows a different route, via steps and paths both recent and ancient, by ravines and grottos. After many staircases there was suddenly a carved lion fifteen feet long, slender and sinewy. Once water had sluiced from its missing metallic head and run in cunning tunnels all the way to the city far below.
Extremely steep stairs lead down to elegant tombs which all resembled temples hewn out of rock, the most illustrious with three Roman soldiers on its facade. Across what was once a courtyard and portico—now bare rubble—is a funerary banquet hall hollowed from the cliff, with fluted columns along the interior walls and Petra’s most gorgeous patterns.
Beyond is the elaborate Renaissance Tomb, whose arch and six urns make it arguably the most sophisticated design in Petra. The way continues down Wadi Farasa (wadi means riverbed), finishing at the valley’s head after astounding views of giant temple-tombs shaped from a cliff and visible only from here. They add to the staggering immensity, the otherworldliness of a city not built but carved out of sandstone. At the valley’s head the impressive colonnaded main street ends in Roman paving stones and an arched temple, one of the few free-standing buildings that survive; it was originally dedicated to Dushara, the principal Nabatean deity, and later to Zeus and Aphrodite.
There are two museums in Petra, one by a little restaurant and the other in a tomb on the adjacent cliff-face. Both collections give a sense of the city’s daily life: small oil lamps, gold jewelry, bronze statuettes, terracotta figurines, coins, jars, gaily decorated bowls and pots, glass bottles, and larger statues of gods—some Egyptian, some Roman (Dionysus and Venus) and their Nabatean equivalents—along with enormous sculpted heads, winged angels, griffins, and gorgeous flowering pediments. Ceramic pipes attest to the Petran skill at supplying a metropolis of 20-30,000 with plenty of water via channels, aqueducts, and cisterns.
Most startling were the heads of winged lions, which were always delicate—whether in the earlier geometric style, or the realist style that followed the Roman invasion. Around both museums, stone tablets with animal and human figures in relief added a missing element to the site’s empty niches and broken torsos.
A nearby path meanders up to the largest and most impressive monument in Petra, known as Ed-Deir or “the Monastery.” No one coming down agreed as to how far away it was; in the end it took me under an hour, with rests to admire stone medusa heads and extraordinary views.
The path up is like a mountain equivalent of the siq. After many hundreds of worn steps and a couple of mildly steep moments, at 4,000 feet a pass leads through the usual scrub trees and boulders alongside a jumbled rock massif. I ambled into a kind of open courtyard past an abutment of rock, took a few steps, turned, and nearly fell to my knees.
Much wider and taller than the Treasury far below, the Monastery seems cataclysmic, carved to a deliberately inhuman scale—its muscular columns eerily smooth, its great urn towering over a doorway already four times the height of a man. It looms like a carved palace of justice eight stories high on a desert mountaintop, its softest colors revealed by the polished light of late afternoon.
Beside the Monastery a rough-hewn staircase traces a canny path up. I saw a daring young man make his way around, over, and emerge on the roof—then somehow clamber onto the lid of the urn, up the tulip handle, and then on top of that—while far below we all gasped and placed bets on whether he would jump or try a handstand. When I left he was still relaxing on the lid, admiring the view.
On my way down, I passed a bedouin goatherd playing a metal flute and singing to his flock. At the bottom, donkeys were braying to Arab music, the camels chewing and resting in the dirt as their owners lolled beneath canvas tents, enjoying a gentle peace at the end of the day.
A last sight of the Treasury, in lustrous light, just before the siq: here Petra ends in absolute glory, the decoration so ornate, so balanced and graceful—those human and mystical figures, the leaves and flowers on the columns. I stared at the bare rock beside it and thought: They started with only this. Art is not progressive; twenty centuries have not bettered their result, produced any structure more stately or more moving. That stone could be carved to such a softness and a classical formality, and with such freedom, seemed a miraculous statement of civilization.
SIDEBAR: WADI RUM
Wadi Rum, the vast desert valley with dramatic mesas that provides the most memorable landscape shots of David Lean’s film Lawrence of Arabia, lies about an hour and a half by car south of Petra. Inhabited since prehistoric times, for centuries it’s been the terrain of a semi-nomadic tribe, the Howeitat. T.E.Lawrence, who wrote of Wadi Rum’s marvels (“vast and echoing and God-like”), was drawn to it again and again.
A visitor today begins at the Rest House at the conclusion of the Rum Highway, beside a modest village. A Bedouin guide with a 4-wheel drive vehicle can be hired for a tour of Wadi Rum—three hours, say, in early morning or late afternoon. Riding in the back of an open Toyota truck, we headed into the wadi (the Arabic word for a dried-up riverbed), which is mostly soft, pale red sand tufted with sparse grasses. All around, monumental mountains like massive sentinels rise from the desert floor: continents and honeycombs and fists and mushrooms and ridged pillars of rock.
In a mountain defile we examined Nabatean inscriptions, touching in their simplicity—stick figures holding hands, a camel with an arcing neck, two small drawn footprints. Miles on, we made our way up a lone outcropping to a natural rock bridge with an astonishing view, miles and miles of strange immensity. We stopped at a Bedouin tent for tea with a goatherd and his sons.
We passed a herd of camels feeding on scrub grass, wary at our noise, and got out. Barefoot, we slowly climbed a dune of rose-red sand sliding underfoot, past a few brittle bushes, and stood above, in the quiet majesty of giant islands of rock around us. The desert floor lay spread below. Lawrence was still right: a mere glimpse of this place brings on premonitions of God.
And summoned as if by our whim, two robed men on haughty camels appeared over a dune: the Royal Wadi Mounted Police, sometimes known as the Camel Corps. They exchanged unhurried greetings with our guide as their camels chewed air, then they ambled on.
Had our guide seen the movie? we asked. Oh, yes, he had a video of it at home—that pass to our right had been the famous long shot. Could he be sure? Why, of course: his father had been on hand during the filming.
Thursday, May 16, 1996
The Lost Levantines of Istanbul
Written in 1996 for Boston magazine
Istanbul, perpetually schizophrenic, cannot make up its many minds about anything. Here, eyeing each other across the hurrying Bosphorus, Europe and Asia realize they have little in common save this inspiring city, whose skyline of minarets and floating domes can belong to none other. As the most powerful place in the world for over a thousand years, at one of the planet's crossroads, Istanbul remains energized even as its glories fade.
There are certain Boston echos. Both ex-capitals share a sense of power surrendered; both retain their stature as centers of learning, deriving energy from transient youth. Both carry a financial self-importance which slightly exaggerates the facts, but are of irreplaceable grandeur in each country's idea of itself, with all the historical vibrations of a place where Great Events occurred. Both are, despite an up-to-date veneer of stylishness, deeply old-fashioned and class-conscious. And each city suffers stresses that threaten its core identity.
Istanbul is changing radically. A milion peasants from the Anatolian heartland arrive every year looking for non-existent work, while a city designed for horse cart and trolley is force-fed more cars than it can handle. And even as a fundamentalist movement is on the rise—I saw female joggers swathed in black, head to foot—a Brahmin class, once powerful, is disappearing.
They are called Levantines. Though the term usually means anyone from the eastern Mediterranean, here it refers to a particular class of Istanbullus—Europeans who immigrated in the 19th century, in the waning Ottoman Empire. Most were Italian, French, British; some were Russians fleeing revolution.
The first Levantine I met was actually called Mr. Levante—an old Italian Jew who'd run the Orient Express office here for decades. With his fin-de-siècle gestures and a colonial, almost courtly manner, he was a gentleman through and through. Like many Levantines, while maintaining his foreign nationality he'd been a citizen of the Turkish Republic (begun by Ataturk in 1923) and before that of the Ottoman Empire. Nearly ninety, impeccably tailored and fluent in at least four languages, he still resolutely swam from Europe to Asia several times a year with his chauffeur (a mile across the Bosphorus at the narrowest point), despite the risk of being run down by Russian oil tankers and freighters headed up to the Black Sea.
I remember him waving his hand in exasperation one morning at the jam of belching cars along the Bosphorus up in Bebek, a fancy suburb—home to diplomats, successful businessmen, and the odd Levantine family who'd hung on in style. "Do you believe it?" he asked. "Not long ago the water was clean enough for me to swim here every day, without fail. When I was already an old man there were sheep grazing these hills, and perhaps two cars. Now there are no sheep, only thousands of automobiles."
We were speaking French, though his English was excellent—Mr. Levante's generation of older Levantines had always spoken French among themselves. Still, as worldly as they seemed (for there was no mistaking them for foreign tourists on Istanbul's better streets), they had a stale and provincial if colorful air too. It was as if, knowing they'd never leave, they just didn't get out much anymore. Born here, well-educated before the war either in Europe or a Europeanized Istanbul University, they'd all remained Christian or Jew, and never converted to Islam.
The Levantines were not simply arrivistes and refugees; they had actually impelled the growth of the large Belle Epoque part of the city, known as Beyoglu, where indeed few Muslims ever lived until the 1960s. Across the Golden Horn from Stamboul, the oldest part of the city (once ancient Byzantium, later home to the sultans), for centuries Beyoglu was the modern, purely European third of Constantinople. Architecturally modeled on Paris, it was the natural locale of foreign embassies and fashionable hotels, the commercial and cultural center of the city.
Here an entire society of 19th century European merchants set up shop, bringing a finished, definitive way of life that rapidly seduced the Turkish upper class. As a genteel, vigorous Turkish gentleman of eighty-seven recalled, reliving that patrician city, "In those days we all spoke French, we carried walking sticks, we dressed as elegantly as gentlemen in Paris, not the drab clothes you see today. And the beautiful Constantinople women! Well, that has not changed. But those were more decorous times."
Leap two generations: Turkey, led by the secularist Ataturk, risen for two decades from Ottoman ashes, has managed to stay neutral during WWII. These transplanted Europeans—or their children's children—remain a highly visible, respected class. Nominally Turkish, the Levantines also resolutely keep up the old nationalities of their grandparents and still find the city airy, manageable, and green. Ankara, the newly-built and landlocked capital, lags far behind Constantinople, now renamed Istanbul.
Over the next decades, though, the city changed inexorably. Some Levantines stayed wealthy, through their parents' banks or import and shipping companies. Their children mostly emigrated—either to France after the Istanbul riots against minorities in the 1950s, or else to the States, for English was now becoming the preferred language over French. Poor or affluent, all Levantines were careful the children maintained at least two passports.
And by ten years ago Levantine society was collapsing. As a veteran Turkish journalist pointed out, "Until well after the war the Levantines were happy. 'Sweet-water Europeans' we called them, because they liked the good life. Like fish who can't live in salt water, eh? Then suddenly the Anatolian peasants began to flood the city, and it was like when the Nile floods its banks. When the water recedes nothing is left and you start over. That's what happened to these Levantines. Their city, their whole world, got swept away."
Once the heart of a cosmopolitan city, now they were simply stranded, with fond memories of a more amusing place that had changed irreversibly around them. How could surviving profoundly lonely teas at the French consulate compare to bygone afternoons at the Cafe du Luxembourg or soirees at the Pera Palace ballroom? And where were the spies? Gone forever, with the walking-canes?
There are still survivors. On a sloping lane in Beyoglu, past the abandoned Spanish Embassy, past the Italian Consulate where Casanova spent the summer of 1744 without a conquest, I met a finely-made white-haired man standing in a narrow doorway. In polished French he said, "Come in, come in, sir. I am resting at the moment. I am a furniture maker, you see." His manner seemed more a diplomat's. He ushered me into a grotto of shadows and sun shafts. "Vladimir. And you . . .? I have worked here for thirty-six years."
I asked about his flawless French. "I went to a French lycée here when I was a boy. That of Saint Benoit. I speak Greek also—my wife is Greek, but from Istanbul. I speak Russian too— my parents were both Russes Blancs, they fled here back in 1917. Naturally, since I was born here I also speak Turkish. And because here my neighbors are the Italian government, I speak a practical Italian. I learned it on this street."
To move fluidly from language to language and culture to culture was in his blood.
He presented me to his six cats, pointed out the delicate workmanship of his cabinets, and offered me water for the uphill climb. He seemed much of the history of Beyoglu, in human form.
"Less than one hundred Levantine families left now," an antiquarian bookseller who specialized in liquidating their libraries told me. A few kept the Brahmin profile high: one Levantine daughter married the heir to one of Turkey's largest fortunes last year, and a son went into administrative work for the royal family of Jordan. Breeding paid—but most Levantines had died off, and their children and grandchildren were long gone. In the antique shops of Beyoglu you could buy up their abandoned furniture and bric-a-brac. "Kids here no longer look to Paris for inspiration," a Frenchwoman at the consulate remarked. "They're transfixed by America, by whatever looks newest." At least in the Grand Bazaar, the shopkeepers—shifting fluently from English to Italian to French to German to Dutch to Polish to Spanish in search of a sale—remember.
Istanbul, perpetually schizophrenic, cannot make up its many minds about anything. Here, eyeing each other across the hurrying Bosphorus, Europe and Asia realize they have little in common save this inspiring city, whose skyline of minarets and floating domes can belong to none other. As the most powerful place in the world for over a thousand years, at one of the planet's crossroads, Istanbul remains energized even as its glories fade.
There are certain Boston echos. Both ex-capitals share a sense of power surrendered; both retain their stature as centers of learning, deriving energy from transient youth. Both carry a financial self-importance which slightly exaggerates the facts, but are of irreplaceable grandeur in each country's idea of itself, with all the historical vibrations of a place where Great Events occurred. Both are, despite an up-to-date veneer of stylishness, deeply old-fashioned and class-conscious. And each city suffers stresses that threaten its core identity.
Istanbul is changing radically. A milion peasants from the Anatolian heartland arrive every year looking for non-existent work, while a city designed for horse cart and trolley is force-fed more cars than it can handle. And even as a fundamentalist movement is on the rise—I saw female joggers swathed in black, head to foot—a Brahmin class, once powerful, is disappearing.
They are called Levantines. Though the term usually means anyone from the eastern Mediterranean, here it refers to a particular class of Istanbullus—Europeans who immigrated in the 19th century, in the waning Ottoman Empire. Most were Italian, French, British; some were Russians fleeing revolution.
The first Levantine I met was actually called Mr. Levante—an old Italian Jew who'd run the Orient Express office here for decades. With his fin-de-siècle gestures and a colonial, almost courtly manner, he was a gentleman through and through. Like many Levantines, while maintaining his foreign nationality he'd been a citizen of the Turkish Republic (begun by Ataturk in 1923) and before that of the Ottoman Empire. Nearly ninety, impeccably tailored and fluent in at least four languages, he still resolutely swam from Europe to Asia several times a year with his chauffeur (a mile across the Bosphorus at the narrowest point), despite the risk of being run down by Russian oil tankers and freighters headed up to the Black Sea.
I remember him waving his hand in exasperation one morning at the jam of belching cars along the Bosphorus up in Bebek, a fancy suburb—home to diplomats, successful businessmen, and the odd Levantine family who'd hung on in style. "Do you believe it?" he asked. "Not long ago the water was clean enough for me to swim here every day, without fail. When I was already an old man there were sheep grazing these hills, and perhaps two cars. Now there are no sheep, only thousands of automobiles."
We were speaking French, though his English was excellent—Mr. Levante's generation of older Levantines had always spoken French among themselves. Still, as worldly as they seemed (for there was no mistaking them for foreign tourists on Istanbul's better streets), they had a stale and provincial if colorful air too. It was as if, knowing they'd never leave, they just didn't get out much anymore. Born here, well-educated before the war either in Europe or a Europeanized Istanbul University, they'd all remained Christian or Jew, and never converted to Islam.
The Levantines were not simply arrivistes and refugees; they had actually impelled the growth of the large Belle Epoque part of the city, known as Beyoglu, where indeed few Muslims ever lived until the 1960s. Across the Golden Horn from Stamboul, the oldest part of the city (once ancient Byzantium, later home to the sultans), for centuries Beyoglu was the modern, purely European third of Constantinople. Architecturally modeled on Paris, it was the natural locale of foreign embassies and fashionable hotels, the commercial and cultural center of the city.
Here an entire society of 19th century European merchants set up shop, bringing a finished, definitive way of life that rapidly seduced the Turkish upper class. As a genteel, vigorous Turkish gentleman of eighty-seven recalled, reliving that patrician city, "In those days we all spoke French, we carried walking sticks, we dressed as elegantly as gentlemen in Paris, not the drab clothes you see today. And the beautiful Constantinople women! Well, that has not changed. But those were more decorous times."
Leap two generations: Turkey, led by the secularist Ataturk, risen for two decades from Ottoman ashes, has managed to stay neutral during WWII. These transplanted Europeans—or their children's children—remain a highly visible, respected class. Nominally Turkish, the Levantines also resolutely keep up the old nationalities of their grandparents and still find the city airy, manageable, and green. Ankara, the newly-built and landlocked capital, lags far behind Constantinople, now renamed Istanbul.
Over the next decades, though, the city changed inexorably. Some Levantines stayed wealthy, through their parents' banks or import and shipping companies. Their children mostly emigrated—either to France after the Istanbul riots against minorities in the 1950s, or else to the States, for English was now becoming the preferred language over French. Poor or affluent, all Levantines were careful the children maintained at least two passports.
And by ten years ago Levantine society was collapsing. As a veteran Turkish journalist pointed out, "Until well after the war the Levantines were happy. 'Sweet-water Europeans' we called them, because they liked the good life. Like fish who can't live in salt water, eh? Then suddenly the Anatolian peasants began to flood the city, and it was like when the Nile floods its banks. When the water recedes nothing is left and you start over. That's what happened to these Levantines. Their city, their whole world, got swept away."
Once the heart of a cosmopolitan city, now they were simply stranded, with fond memories of a more amusing place that had changed irreversibly around them. How could surviving profoundly lonely teas at the French consulate compare to bygone afternoons at the Cafe du Luxembourg or soirees at the Pera Palace ballroom? And where were the spies? Gone forever, with the walking-canes?
There are still survivors. On a sloping lane in Beyoglu, past the abandoned Spanish Embassy, past the Italian Consulate where Casanova spent the summer of 1744 without a conquest, I met a finely-made white-haired man standing in a narrow doorway. In polished French he said, "Come in, come in, sir. I am resting at the moment. I am a furniture maker, you see." His manner seemed more a diplomat's. He ushered me into a grotto of shadows and sun shafts. "Vladimir. And you . . .? I have worked here for thirty-six years."
I asked about his flawless French. "I went to a French lycée here when I was a boy. That of Saint Benoit. I speak Greek also—my wife is Greek, but from Istanbul. I speak Russian too— my parents were both Russes Blancs, they fled here back in 1917. Naturally, since I was born here I also speak Turkish. And because here my neighbors are the Italian government, I speak a practical Italian. I learned it on this street."
To move fluidly from language to language and culture to culture was in his blood.
He presented me to his six cats, pointed out the delicate workmanship of his cabinets, and offered me water for the uphill climb. He seemed much of the history of Beyoglu, in human form.
"Less than one hundred Levantine families left now," an antiquarian bookseller who specialized in liquidating their libraries told me. A few kept the Brahmin profile high: one Levantine daughter married the heir to one of Turkey's largest fortunes last year, and a son went into administrative work for the royal family of Jordan. Breeding paid—but most Levantines had died off, and their children and grandchildren were long gone. In the antique shops of Beyoglu you could buy up their abandoned furniture and bric-a-brac. "Kids here no longer look to Paris for inspiration," a Frenchwoman at the consulate remarked. "They're transfixed by America, by whatever looks newest." At least in the Grand Bazaar, the shopkeepers—shifting fluently from English to Italian to French to German to Dutch to Polish to Spanish in search of a sale—remember.
Monday, November 20, 1995
The Flashman Papers
Written in 1995 for Forbes FYI magazine
“When all other trusts fail, turn to Flashman.”—Abraham Lincoln
Boys read different books than girls do: this is why there are soldiers, and freebooters, and pirates, and empires. It is why Sherlock Holmes and James Bond and Tarzan have nothing to fear from posterity, for every man has deep within him a shadow self dreaming of impossibly heroic lives he might have led.
All the same, at the end of this weary century what we need is a hero we can believe in, a hero worse than most of us: a cad, a liar, a bounder, a coward, a lecher, a bully, a cheat, a rogue with no illusions about fighting on the side of the angels; a man who survives to fool everyone except himself, whose many faults excuse our own. And naturally, he should always get the girls.
Any scoundrel should be allowed to introduce himself:
“For a well-decorated hero I’ve done a deal of surrendering in my time—which is doubtless why I remain a well-decorated hero . . . if there’s one thing I’ve learned . . . it’s that the foeman is generally as glad to accept your surrender as you are to give it. Mind you, he may turn spiteful later, when he’s got you snug and helpless (I often do), but that’s a risk you must run . . . .”
In 1969 a novel appeared in England to great accolades—P. G. Wodehouse remarked, “If ever there was a time when I felt that watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman.” The novel, by a Scots newspaperman named George MacDonald Fraser, purported to be the first packet from a recently discovered trunk of oilskin-wrapped memoirs of a Victorian military hero, Sir Harry Flashman (1822-1915). British critics recognized Flashman as a brilliant literary conceit, for the character appeared as a boy in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). He’s the drunken bully who’s expelled from Rugby, rendering the rest of the work dull by his absence.
Flashman begins where Hughes left off, but the brute tells the tale himself. In swift order (1839-42) our man Flashy has seduced his father’s mistress, joined the cavalry, been the target of a shotgun marriage, cheated in a duel, learned Hindustani from an Indian slave-girl, ridden alongside the toughest warrior-horsemen in Central Asia, and come through the First Afghan Wars as the hero of the fearful siege of Jallalabad, the only white man left breathing in the rubble—through his own relentless survival instinct (he calls it cowardice).
What made it all intoxicating was not just the humor, or the vivid prose and period slang, but the tone—praising and damning the British Empire while being pelted with its medals. And likewise condemning its finest leaders as incompetent while sparing no foreign barbarians either.
On our own drowsy shores the novel was taken by many at face value; a gleeful New York Times article pointed out how credulous reviewers—a third out of some thirty-odd—read it as authentic autobiography. (“The most important discovery since the Boswell papers,” said one.) Flashman was born, and now, a quarter century later, with the tenth volume in bookstores (Flashman And The Angel Of The Lord, 1858-9, in which Flash winds up quaking beside John Brown at Harper’s Ferry), the saga is far from over.
The novels are theoretically memoirs, written in Flashman’s old age. In fact they are history with the gloves off, as Fraser—an unsentimental ex-soldier with a scholar’s exhaustive sweep, a journalist’s nose for detail, and a superb comic instinct—roams through the confused pageant of the previous century on a blood-and-female-festooned Grand Tour. “Win gloriously—and the clever dicks forget all about the rickety ambulances that never came, and the rations that were rotten, and the boots that didn’t fit, and the generals who’d have been better employed hawking bedpans. . . .” Flashman is never running too fast to analyze what went wrong on a battlefield, to belittle a superior, or to show an amazed regard for the true heroes he meets, who frighten him.
All he truly wants is to be safe in England, spending his wife’s money drinking or wenching. But after Afghanistan, his military superiors and the English public regard him as a valiant hero and send him once more into the breach. Amid an unexpected liaison with Lola Montez he is kidnapped to Germany by Otto von Bismarck, there to impersonate an imprisoned prince (Royal Flash, 1842-3 & 1847-8). With customary misfortune he soon finds himself first chief of staff to the White Raja, Brooke of Sarawak, and then gets sold as slave, “military adviser and chief stud to a black she-devil”—Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar (Flashman’s Lady, 1842-5). In the Punjab he’s caught spying in the First Sikh War (Flashman And The Mountain Of Light, 1845-6) but manages to charm a nymphomaniacal Maharani and pocket the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
He is by turns a reluctant slaver in West Africa—shanghaied by a Latin-quoting, failed classics scholar across the Middle Passage—and a fugitive abolitionist agent in the U.S. (Flash For Freedom, 1848-9). He escorts a bordello by wagon across the Great Plains as a Forty-Niner and years later ends up as the sole “fleeing survivor” alongside Custer at the Little Big Horn (Flashman And The Redskins, 1849-50 & 1875-6).
Sent against his protestations to the Crimea, Flash becomes “unwilling leader of the Light Brigade” (Flashman At The Charge, 1854-5), farting so loudly his frightened horse plunges him in the wrong direction, straight at the guns. In India he’s a hapless hero in the Mutiny (Flashman In The Great Game, 1856-8). In China it’s the 1860 Taiping Rebellion (Flashman And The Dragon, 1860), running guns and opium and servicing difficult Oriental maidens. Poor Flash! His only hope is to reach home unscathed.
Much of his time is spent escaping perilous women. “There’s a test which I apply to all my old flames, when I think back . . . if she’d been mine to sell, how long would I have kept her?” His geographically diverse list includes Lily Langtry, Duchess Irma of Russia, Takes-Away-Clouds-Woman of the Apaches, Ko Dali’s daughter the Silk One, Mrs. Mandeville the Mad Dwarf, and the dancing-girl Narreeman. There’s Yehonala Tzu-hsi, concubine of the Manchoo Emperor; the Indian mutineer Lakshmibai; and Lola Montez, la grande horizontale. (“An empress, a queen, and the greatest courtesan of her time; I dare say I’m just a snob.”)
He does the deed in a remarkable array of locales: in a Chinese oven, during a battle with Borneo pirates, on furs in a sleigh escaping pursuit on the Russian steppe. He never questions his magnetism to women (“I could see she fancied me; black or white, savage or duchess, they’re all alike”), but Fraser’s deftest irony is that Flashman’s feather-brained, golden-haired, beloved wife Elspeth is probably—certainly—happily cheating on him too. No wonder: he’s rarely home.
One of Fraser's cunning strokes is that the more of a poltroon Flashman seems, the more trustworthy and persuasive a narrator he becomes, since only an honest man would present himself so very unflatteringly. “This story will be completely truthful; I am breaking the habit of eighty years . . . I can look at the picture above my desk, of the young officer . . . it is the portrait of a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and, oh yes, a toady . . . But I am concerned with facts, and since many of them are discreditable to me, you can rest assured they are true.” A man with no illusions about himself, no humbug, no apologies, no excuses: it may be Flashman’s only real virtue.
And Flashman does gain wisdom. “There’s nothing so cheering as surviving a peril in which companions have perished . . . There is great pleasure in catastrophe that doesn’t touch you, and anyone who says there isn’t is a liar.” He sees firsthand how “the course of history is as often settled by someone’s having a belly-ache, or not sleeping well, or a sailor getting drunk, or some aristocratic harlot waggling her backside.” He learns how to look brave (“head up, jaw firm, eyes steady, bowels dissolving”). Ever open-minded, he knows “the heathen creeds, for all their nonsensical mumbo-jumbo, were as good as any for keeping the rabble in order, and what else is religion for?” He never forgets his place among “those to whom I could be rude with impunity—servants, tarts, bagmen, shopkeepers, and foreigners”—at least until he’s at their mercy as a cowering prisoner.
The novels are, in a sense, Bulldog Drummond turned topsy-turvy: the bulldog as fraidy-cat. Flash is the antithesis of 007 or Horatio Hornblower, ever stalwart and brave for England. (Ever terrified, Flashy does share one talent of the traditional British champion—a gift for foreign tongues and native disguise.) If he has a literary predecessor, it is probably Falstaff. As Fraser told me, “The Hornblowers, which I admire, were simply a product of the Thirties and Forties, while Flashman’s a product of the Swinging Sixties.”
The natural comparison is with the Patrick O’Brian novels, set like Hornblower around the Napoleonic Wars, and which have of late become a marketing phenomenon. The approach is entirely different, though. With Flashman you learn a lot about events, participating center stage with him in major battles or political intrigues. The battles in O’Brian, however, are peripheral to the history of the time, nor are they the real matter of the books; instead you're learning the state of medical arts, the social mores on land and sea, the flora and fauna, how people talked, the music they liked. They’re written in a more formal way, with no real comedy but rather a parlor wit, and the sexuality is very understated and offstage.
Apart from their obvious quality, part of O’Brian’s mass appeal may be that his books allow people to feel comfortably well-educated. They're delightful but serious-minded—adult Hornblower, less lively perhaps but a definite follow-on to him. (Flashman's a follow-on to no one.) O’Brian is benefitting from our unusually nostalgic era, in which the mores of another time seem more satisfying than our own; his books have echoes of a search for heroes and family values. Fraser’s Flashman simply doesn’t fit comfortably into any of this and, exploding the myths of that nostalgic past on every page, is knottier to deal with.
Here is Flashman on Scud East, a junior classmate he bullied at Rugby whom he later sees murdered in the Indian Mutiny. It is a revealing event: Flash calls Scud one of Rugby’s “sturdy fools, manly little chaps . . . full of virtue, the kind that schoolmasters love. Yes, he was a fool then, and a fool twenty years later, when he died in the dust at Cawnpore with a Sepoy’s bayonet in his back. Honest Scud East; that was all his gallant goodness did for him.” Later Flashman adds, “I’d hated the little bastard, man and boy, for his smug manly piety—but you don’t see a child you’ve known all your life die every day. Maybe that was why I wept . . . I felt it all the more sincerely for knowing that I was still alive myself.” We are a long way from Holmes and Hornblower here: the jingoistic historical fantasy of England is finished.
One strong echo is of Fraser himself. In 1992 he published his own war memoirs, Quartered Safe Out Here, from his guerrilla experiences in Burma in 1945 at age nineteen. Historian John Keegan called it “one of the great personal memoirs of World War II”. The similarity of Fraser’s voice and tone to Flash’s is evident. In it, almost as a statement of purpose, Fraser writes, “You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values, if you are to have any inkling of it.”
After Burma, Fraser trained as an officer in India and earned a commission, serving in North Africa and Palestine until 1947—a time he chronicled in a fine series of comic novels about the unrepentant McAuslan, the dirtiest soldier in the world. “I nearly stayed in,” he says, “but decided I wasn’t a peacetime soldier.” He became a reporter for a small newspaper in northern England, married a reporter on a rival paper, and went to the Glasgow Herald in 1953. After sixteen years as deputy editor, he quit just after the first Flashman debuted, to great success (“written in a few weeks, turned down by every publisher for three years”).
“I was always telling stories,” he says. “I used to tell bedtime stories to my parents rather than the other way around. But it’s like that in the Highlands. Everyone’s telling stories.” He began the second Flashman just before the first appeared. “I didn’t envisage more than three or four. Now they’ve been translated into every language in Western Europe except Greek.” In Who’s Who, as a recreation he lists “talking to my wife.”
Apart from ten Flashmans and the Burma memoir, Fraser has written seven other books, mostly fiction; among them is The Hollywood History Of The World, a survey of the cinema’s accuracy in presenting the past. Fraser has been a genre screenwriter, too—he did one Bond film, (Octopussy), Force 10 From Navarone, and fine versions of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers with Oliver Reed, Michael York, and Faye Dunaway.
As the memoirs’ "editor" (a nice conceit), Fraser finds Flashy remarkably accurate, with rare slips of detail; the “editor’s” copious footnotes and appendices at the end of each meticulously-researched volume add greatly to the illusion. (This naturally makes his hero seem even more reliable.) Fraser, who has lived on the Isle of Man since the first Flashman was published, originally did most of his research at Trinity College in Dublin. "They were very enlightened librarians who just turned me loose and said help yourself. But about twelve years ago I joined the London Library, founded by Thomas Carlyle. They have a remarkable collection, and they'll actually send books to you. I get the facts, consider the course of a campaign, and try to fit Flashman into it. History itself does the work. The difficulty in dealing with a 19th century character is it takes so long to get him from point a to point b. For example, with the most recent book I was faced with the difficulty of getting Flashman from India at the end of the Mutiny to the States in time for Harper’s Ferry.”
One of the books’ pleasures is this opinionated witness bringing his era’s large personalities to life with flesh-and-blood candor. They’re all here: “cocky little” Disraeli “well into greasy middle age.” Congressman Lincoln had “the makings of as big a scoundrel as I am myself, but his appetites were different.” G. B. Shaw advances “the fatuous opinion that mental anguish was worse than physical.” The incomprehensible barbarians also come to life: Goolab Singh, Yakub Beg, Hsien Feng. Flashman even teaches the young Crazy Horse how to wink.
It is hard to say why the books (all ten in print) haven’t quite achieved bestseller-dom here, as they have in Britain—though Fraser’s U.S. audience is extremely avid and loyal. (A disappointing 1975 film, Royal Flash, with a screenplay by Fraser, starring Malcolm McDowell, has yet to appear here on video.) It may be that we have neither the British historical sense nor their self-scrutiny, though we have no shortage of famous scoundrels. Or it may be that 19th-century India, China, and Central Asia simply aren’t our favorite cup of java.
Still, I know one prominent historian who counts Flashman’s misadventures with the Sioux and Apaches as the single finest historical novel of the Wild West. Here’s how Flash puts it, having been scalped: “You see, it’s been the great illusion of our civilization that when the poor heathen saw our steamships and elections and drains and bottled beer, he’d realize what a benighted ass he’d been and come into the fold. But he don’t. Oh, he’ll take what he fancies, and can use (cheap booze and rifles, for example) but not on that account will he think we’re better. He knows different . . . And it doesn’t help when the two sides regard each other respectively as greedy, brutal white thieves and beastly, treacherous red vermin. I’m not saying either was wrong.”
What gives the books more torque than the very finest genre writing they apparently resemble? It’s partly that beneath that inspired voice roving the 19th century, beneath the ribald humor, the books remain remarkably even-handed and difficult to place politically. Fraser is a severe critic of empire as well as an admirer; Flashman has no illusions about so-called civilized Englishmen being any better morally than wild Apaches or Tajiks or mutinous Indian Sepoys. And as novels of war they are unromantic, probably because Fraser’s own hand-to-hand battle experience resembled a 19th-century conflict.
Thus Flashman has no patience with the preachiness that surrounds war. With him there can be no soapbox illusions or sham moralizing. It’s no surprise that Fraser calls the Victorians “mere amateurs in hypocrisy compared to our own brainwashed, sanctimonious, self-censoring and terrified generation.” He adds, “One review from the States pointed out that Flashman is politically incorrect—absolutely true, I’m glad to say. It astonishes me that people there are banning Huckleberry Finn—haven’t they got the sense to see Twain was writing truthfully and critically about his own time? It’s equally bad in this country—this tendency to refuse to recognize the past for what it was. Fortunately Flashman’s had a very intelligent American readership who don’t confuse the present and the past.”
If the books weren’t so well written—Fraser (b. 1925) handles action as well as Stevenson or Graham Greene—the Literary Establishment could dismiss them as mere entertainments. But there is something deeper, a peculiarly autumnal feeling as the old charlatan ranges back in memory across a world long gone. Here is Flashman recalling the destruction of the Summer Palace of the Empress of China (with whom he’s had a love affair) by British soldiers set loose at the end of the Taiping Rebellion:
“I’m a bad man. I've done most wickedness, and I'd do it again, for the pleasure it gave me . . . and I don’t feel regret enough to keep me awake at nights. I guess, if drink and the devil were in me, I could ruin a Summer Palace in my own way . . . breaking windows and heaving vases downstairs for the joy of hearing ’em smash, and stuffing my pockets with whatever I could lay my hands on . . . But I couldn’t do it as it was done that day—methodically . . . It burned for almost a week, with a vast pillar of smoke. . . like some great brooding genie from a bottle . . . Pekin was a city in twilight, its people awestricken to silence . . . with the Summer Palace in flames they couldn’t doubt the truth—the barbarians had won, the Son of Heaven had been humbled to the dust, and there was the funeral pyre to prove it. . . .”
“But didn’t a tear mist my eye, or a lump rise in my throat; didn’t I turn away at last with a manly sob? Well, no . . . it was a shame so many pretty things were spoiled—but I'm no great admirer of objets d’art, myself . . . But even you, Flashman, surely to God, must have been moved at the destruction of so much beauty, in a spot where you had spent so many idyllic hours? Well, again, no. You see, I don’t live there; I’m here, in Berkeley Square, and when I want to visit the Summer Palace, I can close my eyes, and there it is, and so is she.”
And what next? Fraser promises more Flashmans, and at age seventy he seems to be going strong. He has completed a novelette, Flashman And The Tiger, which takes place in South Africa and England and may grow into a book; there should also be a volume recounting Flashman’s role in the Civil War, purportedly fighting for both sides.
Meanwhile, some readers refuse to accept that Flashman wasn’t an actual person—or at least go along with Fraser’s game. “Often people write me to say they’re descendants of his—so I write back and congratulate them. And a few correspondents even claim that Flashman borrowed $50 from their grandfather and would I . . .? Then I reply that I simply can’t assume his debts.”
[George MacDonald Fraser died in 2008.]
“When all other trusts fail, turn to Flashman.”—Abraham Lincoln
Boys read different books than girls do: this is why there are soldiers, and freebooters, and pirates, and empires. It is why Sherlock Holmes and James Bond and Tarzan have nothing to fear from posterity, for every man has deep within him a shadow self dreaming of impossibly heroic lives he might have led.
All the same, at the end of this weary century what we need is a hero we can believe in, a hero worse than most of us: a cad, a liar, a bounder, a coward, a lecher, a bully, a cheat, a rogue with no illusions about fighting on the side of the angels; a man who survives to fool everyone except himself, whose many faults excuse our own. And naturally, he should always get the girls.
Any scoundrel should be allowed to introduce himself:
“For a well-decorated hero I’ve done a deal of surrendering in my time—which is doubtless why I remain a well-decorated hero . . . if there’s one thing I’ve learned . . . it’s that the foeman is generally as glad to accept your surrender as you are to give it. Mind you, he may turn spiteful later, when he’s got you snug and helpless (I often do), but that’s a risk you must run . . . .”
In 1969 a novel appeared in England to great accolades—P. G. Wodehouse remarked, “If ever there was a time when I felt that watcher-of-the-skies-when-a-new-planet stuff, it was when I read the first Flashman.” The novel, by a Scots newspaperman named George MacDonald Fraser, purported to be the first packet from a recently discovered trunk of oilskin-wrapped memoirs of a Victorian military hero, Sir Harry Flashman (1822-1915). British critics recognized Flashman as a brilliant literary conceit, for the character appeared as a boy in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1857). He’s the drunken bully who’s expelled from Rugby, rendering the rest of the work dull by his absence.
Flashman begins where Hughes left off, but the brute tells the tale himself. In swift order (1839-42) our man Flashy has seduced his father’s mistress, joined the cavalry, been the target of a shotgun marriage, cheated in a duel, learned Hindustani from an Indian slave-girl, ridden alongside the toughest warrior-horsemen in Central Asia, and come through the First Afghan Wars as the hero of the fearful siege of Jallalabad, the only white man left breathing in the rubble—through his own relentless survival instinct (he calls it cowardice).
What made it all intoxicating was not just the humor, or the vivid prose and period slang, but the tone—praising and damning the British Empire while being pelted with its medals. And likewise condemning its finest leaders as incompetent while sparing no foreign barbarians either.
On our own drowsy shores the novel was taken by many at face value; a gleeful New York Times article pointed out how credulous reviewers—a third out of some thirty-odd—read it as authentic autobiography. (“The most important discovery since the Boswell papers,” said one.) Flashman was born, and now, a quarter century later, with the tenth volume in bookstores (Flashman And The Angel Of The Lord, 1858-9, in which Flash winds up quaking beside John Brown at Harper’s Ferry), the saga is far from over.
The novels are theoretically memoirs, written in Flashman’s old age. In fact they are history with the gloves off, as Fraser—an unsentimental ex-soldier with a scholar’s exhaustive sweep, a journalist’s nose for detail, and a superb comic instinct—roams through the confused pageant of the previous century on a blood-and-female-festooned Grand Tour. “Win gloriously—and the clever dicks forget all about the rickety ambulances that never came, and the rations that were rotten, and the boots that didn’t fit, and the generals who’d have been better employed hawking bedpans. . . .” Flashman is never running too fast to analyze what went wrong on a battlefield, to belittle a superior, or to show an amazed regard for the true heroes he meets, who frighten him.
All he truly wants is to be safe in England, spending his wife’s money drinking or wenching. But after Afghanistan, his military superiors and the English public regard him as a valiant hero and send him once more into the breach. Amid an unexpected liaison with Lola Montez he is kidnapped to Germany by Otto von Bismarck, there to impersonate an imprisoned prince (Royal Flash, 1842-3 & 1847-8). With customary misfortune he soon finds himself first chief of staff to the White Raja, Brooke of Sarawak, and then gets sold as slave, “military adviser and chief stud to a black she-devil”—Queen Ranavalona of Madagascar (Flashman’s Lady, 1842-5). In the Punjab he’s caught spying in the First Sikh War (Flashman And The Mountain Of Light, 1845-6) but manages to charm a nymphomaniacal Maharani and pocket the Koh-i-Noor diamond.
He is by turns a reluctant slaver in West Africa—shanghaied by a Latin-quoting, failed classics scholar across the Middle Passage—and a fugitive abolitionist agent in the U.S. (Flash For Freedom, 1848-9). He escorts a bordello by wagon across the Great Plains as a Forty-Niner and years later ends up as the sole “fleeing survivor” alongside Custer at the Little Big Horn (Flashman And The Redskins, 1849-50 & 1875-6).
Sent against his protestations to the Crimea, Flash becomes “unwilling leader of the Light Brigade” (Flashman At The Charge, 1854-5), farting so loudly his frightened horse plunges him in the wrong direction, straight at the guns. In India he’s a hapless hero in the Mutiny (Flashman In The Great Game, 1856-8). In China it’s the 1860 Taiping Rebellion (Flashman And The Dragon, 1860), running guns and opium and servicing difficult Oriental maidens. Poor Flash! His only hope is to reach home unscathed.
Much of his time is spent escaping perilous women. “There’s a test which I apply to all my old flames, when I think back . . . if she’d been mine to sell, how long would I have kept her?” His geographically diverse list includes Lily Langtry, Duchess Irma of Russia, Takes-Away-Clouds-Woman of the Apaches, Ko Dali’s daughter the Silk One, Mrs. Mandeville the Mad Dwarf, and the dancing-girl Narreeman. There’s Yehonala Tzu-hsi, concubine of the Manchoo Emperor; the Indian mutineer Lakshmibai; and Lola Montez, la grande horizontale. (“An empress, a queen, and the greatest courtesan of her time; I dare say I’m just a snob.”)
He does the deed in a remarkable array of locales: in a Chinese oven, during a battle with Borneo pirates, on furs in a sleigh escaping pursuit on the Russian steppe. He never questions his magnetism to women (“I could see she fancied me; black or white, savage or duchess, they’re all alike”), but Fraser’s deftest irony is that Flashman’s feather-brained, golden-haired, beloved wife Elspeth is probably—certainly—happily cheating on him too. No wonder: he’s rarely home.
One of Fraser's cunning strokes is that the more of a poltroon Flashman seems, the more trustworthy and persuasive a narrator he becomes, since only an honest man would present himself so very unflatteringly. “This story will be completely truthful; I am breaking the habit of eighty years . . . I can look at the picture above my desk, of the young officer . . . it is the portrait of a scoundrel, a liar, a cheat, a thief, a coward—and, oh yes, a toady . . . But I am concerned with facts, and since many of them are discreditable to me, you can rest assured they are true.” A man with no illusions about himself, no humbug, no apologies, no excuses: it may be Flashman’s only real virtue.
And Flashman does gain wisdom. “There’s nothing so cheering as surviving a peril in which companions have perished . . . There is great pleasure in catastrophe that doesn’t touch you, and anyone who says there isn’t is a liar.” He sees firsthand how “the course of history is as often settled by someone’s having a belly-ache, or not sleeping well, or a sailor getting drunk, or some aristocratic harlot waggling her backside.” He learns how to look brave (“head up, jaw firm, eyes steady, bowels dissolving”). Ever open-minded, he knows “the heathen creeds, for all their nonsensical mumbo-jumbo, were as good as any for keeping the rabble in order, and what else is religion for?” He never forgets his place among “those to whom I could be rude with impunity—servants, tarts, bagmen, shopkeepers, and foreigners”—at least until he’s at their mercy as a cowering prisoner.
The novels are, in a sense, Bulldog Drummond turned topsy-turvy: the bulldog as fraidy-cat. Flash is the antithesis of 007 or Horatio Hornblower, ever stalwart and brave for England. (Ever terrified, Flashy does share one talent of the traditional British champion—a gift for foreign tongues and native disguise.) If he has a literary predecessor, it is probably Falstaff. As Fraser told me, “The Hornblowers, which I admire, were simply a product of the Thirties and Forties, while Flashman’s a product of the Swinging Sixties.”
The natural comparison is with the Patrick O’Brian novels, set like Hornblower around the Napoleonic Wars, and which have of late become a marketing phenomenon. The approach is entirely different, though. With Flashman you learn a lot about events, participating center stage with him in major battles or political intrigues. The battles in O’Brian, however, are peripheral to the history of the time, nor are they the real matter of the books; instead you're learning the state of medical arts, the social mores on land and sea, the flora and fauna, how people talked, the music they liked. They’re written in a more formal way, with no real comedy but rather a parlor wit, and the sexuality is very understated and offstage.
Apart from their obvious quality, part of O’Brian’s mass appeal may be that his books allow people to feel comfortably well-educated. They're delightful but serious-minded—adult Hornblower, less lively perhaps but a definite follow-on to him. (Flashman's a follow-on to no one.) O’Brian is benefitting from our unusually nostalgic era, in which the mores of another time seem more satisfying than our own; his books have echoes of a search for heroes and family values. Fraser’s Flashman simply doesn’t fit comfortably into any of this and, exploding the myths of that nostalgic past on every page, is knottier to deal with.
Here is Flashman on Scud East, a junior classmate he bullied at Rugby whom he later sees murdered in the Indian Mutiny. It is a revealing event: Flash calls Scud one of Rugby’s “sturdy fools, manly little chaps . . . full of virtue, the kind that schoolmasters love. Yes, he was a fool then, and a fool twenty years later, when he died in the dust at Cawnpore with a Sepoy’s bayonet in his back. Honest Scud East; that was all his gallant goodness did for him.” Later Flashman adds, “I’d hated the little bastard, man and boy, for his smug manly piety—but you don’t see a child you’ve known all your life die every day. Maybe that was why I wept . . . I felt it all the more sincerely for knowing that I was still alive myself.” We are a long way from Holmes and Hornblower here: the jingoistic historical fantasy of England is finished.
One strong echo is of Fraser himself. In 1992 he published his own war memoirs, Quartered Safe Out Here, from his guerrilla experiences in Burma in 1945 at age nineteen. Historian John Keegan called it “one of the great personal memoirs of World War II”. The similarity of Fraser’s voice and tone to Flash’s is evident. In it, almost as a statement of purpose, Fraser writes, “You cannot, you must not, judge the past by the present; you must try to see it in its own terms and values, if you are to have any inkling of it.”
After Burma, Fraser trained as an officer in India and earned a commission, serving in North Africa and Palestine until 1947—a time he chronicled in a fine series of comic novels about the unrepentant McAuslan, the dirtiest soldier in the world. “I nearly stayed in,” he says, “but decided I wasn’t a peacetime soldier.” He became a reporter for a small newspaper in northern England, married a reporter on a rival paper, and went to the Glasgow Herald in 1953. After sixteen years as deputy editor, he quit just after the first Flashman debuted, to great success (“written in a few weeks, turned down by every publisher for three years”).
“I was always telling stories,” he says. “I used to tell bedtime stories to my parents rather than the other way around. But it’s like that in the Highlands. Everyone’s telling stories.” He began the second Flashman just before the first appeared. “I didn’t envisage more than three or four. Now they’ve been translated into every language in Western Europe except Greek.” In Who’s Who, as a recreation he lists “talking to my wife.”
Apart from ten Flashmans and the Burma memoir, Fraser has written seven other books, mostly fiction; among them is The Hollywood History Of The World, a survey of the cinema’s accuracy in presenting the past. Fraser has been a genre screenwriter, too—he did one Bond film, (Octopussy), Force 10 From Navarone, and fine versions of The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers with Oliver Reed, Michael York, and Faye Dunaway.
As the memoirs’ "editor" (a nice conceit), Fraser finds Flashy remarkably accurate, with rare slips of detail; the “editor’s” copious footnotes and appendices at the end of each meticulously-researched volume add greatly to the illusion. (This naturally makes his hero seem even more reliable.) Fraser, who has lived on the Isle of Man since the first Flashman was published, originally did most of his research at Trinity College in Dublin. "They were very enlightened librarians who just turned me loose and said help yourself. But about twelve years ago I joined the London Library, founded by Thomas Carlyle. They have a remarkable collection, and they'll actually send books to you. I get the facts, consider the course of a campaign, and try to fit Flashman into it. History itself does the work. The difficulty in dealing with a 19th century character is it takes so long to get him from point a to point b. For example, with the most recent book I was faced with the difficulty of getting Flashman from India at the end of the Mutiny to the States in time for Harper’s Ferry.”
One of the books’ pleasures is this opinionated witness bringing his era’s large personalities to life with flesh-and-blood candor. They’re all here: “cocky little” Disraeli “well into greasy middle age.” Congressman Lincoln had “the makings of as big a scoundrel as I am myself, but his appetites were different.” G. B. Shaw advances “the fatuous opinion that mental anguish was worse than physical.” The incomprehensible barbarians also come to life: Goolab Singh, Yakub Beg, Hsien Feng. Flashman even teaches the young Crazy Horse how to wink.
It is hard to say why the books (all ten in print) haven’t quite achieved bestseller-dom here, as they have in Britain—though Fraser’s U.S. audience is extremely avid and loyal. (A disappointing 1975 film, Royal Flash, with a screenplay by Fraser, starring Malcolm McDowell, has yet to appear here on video.) It may be that we have neither the British historical sense nor their self-scrutiny, though we have no shortage of famous scoundrels. Or it may be that 19th-century India, China, and Central Asia simply aren’t our favorite cup of java.
Still, I know one prominent historian who counts Flashman’s misadventures with the Sioux and Apaches as the single finest historical novel of the Wild West. Here’s how Flash puts it, having been scalped: “You see, it’s been the great illusion of our civilization that when the poor heathen saw our steamships and elections and drains and bottled beer, he’d realize what a benighted ass he’d been and come into the fold. But he don’t. Oh, he’ll take what he fancies, and can use (cheap booze and rifles, for example) but not on that account will he think we’re better. He knows different . . . And it doesn’t help when the two sides regard each other respectively as greedy, brutal white thieves and beastly, treacherous red vermin. I’m not saying either was wrong.”
What gives the books more torque than the very finest genre writing they apparently resemble? It’s partly that beneath that inspired voice roving the 19th century, beneath the ribald humor, the books remain remarkably even-handed and difficult to place politically. Fraser is a severe critic of empire as well as an admirer; Flashman has no illusions about so-called civilized Englishmen being any better morally than wild Apaches or Tajiks or mutinous Indian Sepoys. And as novels of war they are unromantic, probably because Fraser’s own hand-to-hand battle experience resembled a 19th-century conflict.
Thus Flashman has no patience with the preachiness that surrounds war. With him there can be no soapbox illusions or sham moralizing. It’s no surprise that Fraser calls the Victorians “mere amateurs in hypocrisy compared to our own brainwashed, sanctimonious, self-censoring and terrified generation.” He adds, “One review from the States pointed out that Flashman is politically incorrect—absolutely true, I’m glad to say. It astonishes me that people there are banning Huckleberry Finn—haven’t they got the sense to see Twain was writing truthfully and critically about his own time? It’s equally bad in this country—this tendency to refuse to recognize the past for what it was. Fortunately Flashman’s had a very intelligent American readership who don’t confuse the present and the past.”
If the books weren’t so well written—Fraser (b. 1925) handles action as well as Stevenson or Graham Greene—the Literary Establishment could dismiss them as mere entertainments. But there is something deeper, a peculiarly autumnal feeling as the old charlatan ranges back in memory across a world long gone. Here is Flashman recalling the destruction of the Summer Palace of the Empress of China (with whom he’s had a love affair) by British soldiers set loose at the end of the Taiping Rebellion:
“I’m a bad man. I've done most wickedness, and I'd do it again, for the pleasure it gave me . . . and I don’t feel regret enough to keep me awake at nights. I guess, if drink and the devil were in me, I could ruin a Summer Palace in my own way . . . breaking windows and heaving vases downstairs for the joy of hearing ’em smash, and stuffing my pockets with whatever I could lay my hands on . . . But I couldn’t do it as it was done that day—methodically . . . It burned for almost a week, with a vast pillar of smoke. . . like some great brooding genie from a bottle . . . Pekin was a city in twilight, its people awestricken to silence . . . with the Summer Palace in flames they couldn’t doubt the truth—the barbarians had won, the Son of Heaven had been humbled to the dust, and there was the funeral pyre to prove it. . . .”
“But didn’t a tear mist my eye, or a lump rise in my throat; didn’t I turn away at last with a manly sob? Well, no . . . it was a shame so many pretty things were spoiled—but I'm no great admirer of objets d’art, myself . . . But even you, Flashman, surely to God, must have been moved at the destruction of so much beauty, in a spot where you had spent so many idyllic hours? Well, again, no. You see, I don’t live there; I’m here, in Berkeley Square, and when I want to visit the Summer Palace, I can close my eyes, and there it is, and so is she.”
And what next? Fraser promises more Flashmans, and at age seventy he seems to be going strong. He has completed a novelette, Flashman And The Tiger, which takes place in South Africa and England and may grow into a book; there should also be a volume recounting Flashman’s role in the Civil War, purportedly fighting for both sides.
Meanwhile, some readers refuse to accept that Flashman wasn’t an actual person—or at least go along with Fraser’s game. “Often people write me to say they’re descendants of his—so I write back and congratulate them. And a few correspondents even claim that Flashman borrowed $50 from their grandfather and would I . . .? Then I reply that I simply can’t assume his debts.”
[George MacDonald Fraser died in 2008.]
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