[Written in 2010]
Découpage—cutting out diverse paper images and gluing them as a collage onto another form, likely glass—is usually seen as an amateur craft, done with paste and scissors on kitchen tables. The results are rarely art, and often kitsch.
Though upmarket découpage may flourish in decor shops, these are mass-produced objects with nothing original about them, designed to look “handmade” only to an undiscerning eye. They bear no resemblance to the high, subtle artistry achieved centuries ago in lacquered découpage from the Far East, nor to the later incarnations by Matisse, Picasso, and Joseph Cornell. Even the finest practitioners today seem musty, sentimental, Victorian.
Jill Barnes-Dacey (b. 1953), an American living in Rome, has brought about a singlehanded revolution in découpage. Though she studied technique with an elderly Danish master, her style and structural approach are utterly her own. Within the apparently limited terrain of glass forms (bowls, vases, dishes, plates, trays, glasses), she moves from surface to surface with an Escher-like flow, allowing the unity of her colors and images, and her inventive spatial sense, to link discordant artistic cuttings—from Baroque to Romantic to Surreal or even avant-garde, then back again—as the object is picked up or a viewer moves around it.
The idea, as she puts it, is to form a plural design that also tells a complete story.
She is, essentially, a collagist who works on glass. Her forms can be large-scale; one of the more lavish cruise ships recently commissioned a set of fourteen enormous (and expensive) vases for niches lining a majestic staircase. Her most recent show, which sold out, was in Gstaad.
Last year the International Herald Tribune Arts Editor, the famously severe Souren Melikian, profiled her, praising a “movement and rhythm that makes the objects swirl. . . [and her] jeweler’s feel for color harmonics. . . If contemporary art and design should ever strike you as a privilege for millionaires, think twice. . . The traditional art vocabulary has no word that aptly characterizes [her] technical and artistic tour de force, a poetic fantasy of cutouts put together. The idea of collage transferred to three-dimensional art is made doubly complex by the fact that each piece has an inside and an outside on which the visual compositions must correlate without being repetitive. Some have a paradoxical visual logic . . . as intriguing as any Salvador Dali. . . [or] an utterly different composition of seething, glittering Baroque motifs. The American artist’s aesthetic innovation is that she applies her artistic ideas to the world of objects that has barely caught the attention of recognized contemporary artists.”
Barnes-Dacey is the daughter of writer Norman Dacey, (whose bestselling How to Avoid Probate aroused the ire of American lawyers forty years ago). While at an English finishing school she fell in love with Rome and graduated from a design school there. After a degree at a London arts academy—followed by marriage and four children—in France she began to do collages. Back in Italy again, she was driven to fuse her own art with the city’s architectural sensibilities.
Her development, then, follows a classic story: the gifted American artist whose talent was first molded by Rome, then renewed by a mature contact with the city’s eternal inspirations. What’s unusual is how her expertise has come relatively late in life (though after decades as a superb and original collagist), and her evident mastery (for there are many skillful découpeurs worldwide) after less than a decade in her chosen field.
Barnes-Dacey begins with a glass object on whose interior and exterior she meticulously glues her intricate collages and designs. Because the surfaces tend to be curved, and the images flat, there is considerable risk of the papers tearing or sliding out of position. Gold leaf may be used to fill in background areas. After twenty-four coats of very delicate varnish, which each take a day to dry, there’s a final polish and three more varnishings. Thus each object, a unique work of art, takes six weeks.
Barnes-Dacey annually gives a couple of small three- and five-day courses at her workshop in the 16th-century Roman palazzo where she lives with her husband, modern art dealer Stefan Lennert. Her creations, $250-$9,000 each, may be seen at www.jillbarnesdacey.com.
Tuesday, December 7, 2010
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
A Day Late
[Written in 2007 for Sky magazine]
One of the pleasures of living overseas for part of every year—in my case, the coast of southern Italy, for four months annually—is to grow accustomed to a radically different sense of time. I do not mean the tired cliché of mañana, which (wherever I’ve encountered it) was neither romantic nor illuminating, and even more of a frustration for working locals than resident foreigners. No, I mean the education that comes with having your temporal assumptions eloquently dismantled.
Take the daily newspaper. Among Italy’s legitimate prides is the array of its journalism, veteran at analyzing complex layers of political, financial, and social scandals. Its great newspapers are easily found at giornali kiosks across the country. But they are challenging for my limited Italian, so invariably I look to the Herald Tribune, which appears six times a week as a succinct version of the New York Times, along with extra international reporting, independent op-eds, and regular pleasures like the art and antiques articles of Souren Melikian.
And yet here, in the seaside resort of San Felice Circeo, my folded copy of the Herald Trib always arrives a day late. Leaving aside the exorbitant price (with the weak dollar, roughly $3), why should reading it be such a valuable part of my day? Is it because I savor it over a cappuccino, while glancing away at a glorious view south to Vesuvius on a clear morning? Is it because I have the inestimable satisfaction of buying it at the same kiosk, just off a 14th-century piazza, from the spectacled grandson of the uncomplaining woman who collected the week’s mail for my father there for decades until we got delivery (electricity, too) on our side of the mountain? Or is it because, addicted to fetching the New York Times off my path in Massachusetts each morning by seven, I need a daily fix of familiar newsprint?
These are lovely, sentimental possibilities, but I’ve come to believe—having lived part of every year abroad for over two decades—that much of the enjoyment lies in the fact that the paper always arrives a day late. My internet connection (an unreliable dial-up, but still) gives me the news almost instantly; and allowing for weather, the BBC and the Voice of America are audible on my short-wave. It is easier than ever to stay in touch and there are handheld options for those more obsessed than I. But it is luxury, sheer lavish splendor, to enjoy receiving your daily newspaper a day late. It proves you have outlived the front page; that (presumably) nothing too catastrophic has rendered the news entirely obsolete; at the same time there is the sneaking pleasure of being a little more knowledgeable than the paper.
Perhaps the best of both worlds was two decades ago, in Istanbul, when the Herald Trib, Le Monde, and the rest of the international press might or might not arrive at the end of a work day—a displacement that seemed peculiarly appropriate to that dream-city equably perched on the edge of Europe and the margins of Asia.
It is liberating to read a daily newspaper one day or several or even a week or two late. The commonsensical conclusion is that few events affect you as urgently as the media want you to believe, and knowing about them sooner rarely changes anything. Such built-in perspective on what you read is a healthy reminder that life goes on, and to see the obituary of a friend a few days late—as I have just done—is a nudge that time moves forward impassively, at its own slipstream rate. Hopefully, to be an expatriate means to free yourself from the societal routines that get taken for granted, and at least in the States, keeping up to the minute is one of them. Try as I might, I cannot do it here without expending more energy than that knowledge is worth.
This awareness alone seems ample reason to live abroad—not just in another country, but in another time. On this coast, I will start to worry when either the Herald Trib begins to arrive on the proper day . . . or when it truly starts to bother me that it does not.
One of the pleasures of living overseas for part of every year—in my case, the coast of southern Italy, for four months annually—is to grow accustomed to a radically different sense of time. I do not mean the tired cliché of mañana, which (wherever I’ve encountered it) was neither romantic nor illuminating, and even more of a frustration for working locals than resident foreigners. No, I mean the education that comes with having your temporal assumptions eloquently dismantled.
Take the daily newspaper. Among Italy’s legitimate prides is the array of its journalism, veteran at analyzing complex layers of political, financial, and social scandals. Its great newspapers are easily found at giornali kiosks across the country. But they are challenging for my limited Italian, so invariably I look to the Herald Tribune, which appears six times a week as a succinct version of the New York Times, along with extra international reporting, independent op-eds, and regular pleasures like the art and antiques articles of Souren Melikian.
And yet here, in the seaside resort of San Felice Circeo, my folded copy of the Herald Trib always arrives a day late. Leaving aside the exorbitant price (with the weak dollar, roughly $3), why should reading it be such a valuable part of my day? Is it because I savor it over a cappuccino, while glancing away at a glorious view south to Vesuvius on a clear morning? Is it because I have the inestimable satisfaction of buying it at the same kiosk, just off a 14th-century piazza, from the spectacled grandson of the uncomplaining woman who collected the week’s mail for my father there for decades until we got delivery (electricity, too) on our side of the mountain? Or is it because, addicted to fetching the New York Times off my path in Massachusetts each morning by seven, I need a daily fix of familiar newsprint?
These are lovely, sentimental possibilities, but I’ve come to believe—having lived part of every year abroad for over two decades—that much of the enjoyment lies in the fact that the paper always arrives a day late. My internet connection (an unreliable dial-up, but still) gives me the news almost instantly; and allowing for weather, the BBC and the Voice of America are audible on my short-wave. It is easier than ever to stay in touch and there are handheld options for those more obsessed than I. But it is luxury, sheer lavish splendor, to enjoy receiving your daily newspaper a day late. It proves you have outlived the front page; that (presumably) nothing too catastrophic has rendered the news entirely obsolete; at the same time there is the sneaking pleasure of being a little more knowledgeable than the paper.
Perhaps the best of both worlds was two decades ago, in Istanbul, when the Herald Trib, Le Monde, and the rest of the international press might or might not arrive at the end of a work day—a displacement that seemed peculiarly appropriate to that dream-city equably perched on the edge of Europe and the margins of Asia.
It is liberating to read a daily newspaper one day or several or even a week or two late. The commonsensical conclusion is that few events affect you as urgently as the media want you to believe, and knowing about them sooner rarely changes anything. Such built-in perspective on what you read is a healthy reminder that life goes on, and to see the obituary of a friend a few days late—as I have just done—is a nudge that time moves forward impassively, at its own slipstream rate. Hopefully, to be an expatriate means to free yourself from the societal routines that get taken for granted, and at least in the States, keeping up to the minute is one of them. Try as I might, I cannot do it here without expending more energy than that knowledge is worth.
This awareness alone seems ample reason to live abroad—not just in another country, but in another time. On this coast, I will start to worry when either the Herald Trib begins to arrive on the proper day . . . or when it truly starts to bother me that it does not.
Monday, December 18, 2006
On "First into Nagasaki"
2006 INTERVIEW WITH ANTHONY WELLER about FIRST INTO NAGASAKI: The Censored Eyewitness Dispatches on Post-Atomic Japan and Its Prisoners of War by George Weller / edited and with an essay by Anthony Weller / foreword by Walter Cronkite
Q: Your father, George Weller (1907-2002), was a legendary war correspondent, winner of a Pulitzer Prize. The odyssey of what he went through for these atomic bomb dispatches sounds absolutely heroic.
A: Yes, it seems almost unbelievable. Once the bombs hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki and concluded World War II, General MacArthur threw a news blackout over both cities. No reporters were even allowed in southern Japan. My father, who’d been bucking censorship for the entire war, felt the world had a right to learn what had happened. So he made his way by boat and train, and sneaked into Nagasaki four weeks after the bomb, ahead of the U.S. Army and Navy. Since correspondents wore military khaki, he told the Japanese general in charge of the pulverized city that he was an American colonel, and expected full cooperation: car, interpreter, lodging. At first the general was skeptical. My father said, “If you don’t believe me, ask MacArthur yourself. But before making that call, you had better consider your position.” The Japanese general bowed to him.
Q: And he wrote this entire book in six weeks? He must never have slept.
A: According to the original manuscripts, he typed all night and wandered around all day looking at the ruins and makeshift hospitals. He wore thick-soled shoes to protect himself against radiation. Each morning, by courier, he sent dispatch after dispatch of what was probably the greatest story of his career—maybe one of the most important of the century—up to Tokyo. He was sure that since the war was over, MacArthur would want to know people were still dying, and send medical assistance. Instead every dispatch was destroyed by MacArthur’s censors, and no doctors arrived for weeks. My father’s articles never reached his editors back at the Chicago Daily News and, until recently, were believed lost.
Q: But he didn’t stay in Nagasaki. He moved on to several nearby POW camps.
A: That’s right. He knew that within a 40-mile radius there were many camps full of American, British, Dutch, and Australian prisoners whom no one had found yet. Most still didn’t know the war was over. They had seen both big mushroom clouds on the horizon but not realized what they were. So he wrote story after story from those camps, taking down each man’s saga, detailing their years of slave labor and unimaginable torture in dangerous coal mines. The POW dispatches were killed by the censors, too. For me the most gratifying part of pulling together this book has been to get letters from brave men in their eighties who still remember my father.
Q: Besides the accounts of how they managed to survive, there were also powerful stories of how some POWs got to the camps.
A: It’s a virtually unknown aspect of World War II, in fact. After speaking to those POWs, he was able to write The Death Cruise, a long narrative about the deadliest Japanese “hellship”, which carried 1,600 prisoners from the Philippines to camps near Nagasaki. After weeks of starvation, dehydration, murder, bombings by our own planes, and even cannibalism in a crammed cargo hold, only 300 survived.
Q: What seems most remarkable is that your father actually lost his carbon of the dispatches—the only copy in existence of a valuable piece of history.
A: For six decades he reported from all over the world—mainly the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Soviet Union, Africa. As with many war correspondents, boxes of paper just trailed him from continent to continent. Even though he retired in 1975 to a villa on the Italian coast, he never got around to organizing the past. Six months after his death I found the moldy typescripts in a wooden crate, thirty feet from where he used to sit bemoaning their loss. It saddened him deeply that they’d been erased from history. The censors had won.
Q: Did he speak to you often about his adventures?
A: Always. What he never mentioned, since he was a writer, not a photographer, was that he had a little camera with him. He took pictures both in Nagasaki and in the POW camps. I found those, too. So the book includes a portfolio of the most dramatic. Like the dispatches, until now they’ve never seen the light of day.
Q: Most of your own books are novels. This book is really your father’s book, yet you’ve written a long historical essay at the end to put it all in perspective.
A: I realized that all of the questions which naturally occurred to me would also occur to every reader. I needed to understand not just the contexts of the atomic bomb and the POWs; I also wanted to explore what it had meant to be a foreign correspondent before there were satellite phones, when the tendrils of government censorship strangled you by different methods than now. I came to realize that the entire story of how and why he was silenced was more complex than I thought. I ended up even more amazed by what he’d done, yet I saw it was a book not just about the end of the war, but the responsibilities of a writer. It proves that in any era, this kind of courageous rogue reporting is essential to learning the truth.
Q: Your father, George Weller (1907-2002), was a legendary war correspondent, winner of a Pulitzer Prize. The odyssey of what he went through for these atomic bomb dispatches sounds absolutely heroic.
A: Yes, it seems almost unbelievable. Once the bombs hit Hiroshima and Nagasaki and concluded World War II, General MacArthur threw a news blackout over both cities. No reporters were even allowed in southern Japan. My father, who’d been bucking censorship for the entire war, felt the world had a right to learn what had happened. So he made his way by boat and train, and sneaked into Nagasaki four weeks after the bomb, ahead of the U.S. Army and Navy. Since correspondents wore military khaki, he told the Japanese general in charge of the pulverized city that he was an American colonel, and expected full cooperation: car, interpreter, lodging. At first the general was skeptical. My father said, “If you don’t believe me, ask MacArthur yourself. But before making that call, you had better consider your position.” The Japanese general bowed to him.
Q: And he wrote this entire book in six weeks? He must never have slept.
A: According to the original manuscripts, he typed all night and wandered around all day looking at the ruins and makeshift hospitals. He wore thick-soled shoes to protect himself against radiation. Each morning, by courier, he sent dispatch after dispatch of what was probably the greatest story of his career—maybe one of the most important of the century—up to Tokyo. He was sure that since the war was over, MacArthur would want to know people were still dying, and send medical assistance. Instead every dispatch was destroyed by MacArthur’s censors, and no doctors arrived for weeks. My father’s articles never reached his editors back at the Chicago Daily News and, until recently, were believed lost.
Q: But he didn’t stay in Nagasaki. He moved on to several nearby POW camps.
A: That’s right. He knew that within a 40-mile radius there were many camps full of American, British, Dutch, and Australian prisoners whom no one had found yet. Most still didn’t know the war was over. They had seen both big mushroom clouds on the horizon but not realized what they were. So he wrote story after story from those camps, taking down each man’s saga, detailing their years of slave labor and unimaginable torture in dangerous coal mines. The POW dispatches were killed by the censors, too. For me the most gratifying part of pulling together this book has been to get letters from brave men in their eighties who still remember my father.
Q: Besides the accounts of how they managed to survive, there were also powerful stories of how some POWs got to the camps.
A: It’s a virtually unknown aspect of World War II, in fact. After speaking to those POWs, he was able to write The Death Cruise, a long narrative about the deadliest Japanese “hellship”, which carried 1,600 prisoners from the Philippines to camps near Nagasaki. After weeks of starvation, dehydration, murder, bombings by our own planes, and even cannibalism in a crammed cargo hold, only 300 survived.
Q: What seems most remarkable is that your father actually lost his carbon of the dispatches—the only copy in existence of a valuable piece of history.
A: For six decades he reported from all over the world—mainly the Middle East, the Mediterranean, the Soviet Union, Africa. As with many war correspondents, boxes of paper just trailed him from continent to continent. Even though he retired in 1975 to a villa on the Italian coast, he never got around to organizing the past. Six months after his death I found the moldy typescripts in a wooden crate, thirty feet from where he used to sit bemoaning their loss. It saddened him deeply that they’d been erased from history. The censors had won.
Q: Did he speak to you often about his adventures?
A: Always. What he never mentioned, since he was a writer, not a photographer, was that he had a little camera with him. He took pictures both in Nagasaki and in the POW camps. I found those, too. So the book includes a portfolio of the most dramatic. Like the dispatches, until now they’ve never seen the light of day.
Q: Most of your own books are novels. This book is really your father’s book, yet you’ve written a long historical essay at the end to put it all in perspective.
A: I realized that all of the questions which naturally occurred to me would also occur to every reader. I needed to understand not just the contexts of the atomic bomb and the POWs; I also wanted to explore what it had meant to be a foreign correspondent before there were satellite phones, when the tendrils of government censorship strangled you by different methods than now. I came to realize that the entire story of how and why he was silenced was more complex than I thought. I ended up even more amazed by what he’d done, yet I saw it was a book not just about the end of the war, but the responsibilities of a writer. It proves that in any era, this kind of courageous rogue reporting is essential to learning the truth.
Thursday, August 24, 2006
Allan Cavinder 1926 - 2006
Written in 2006 for Cyprus Today
Allan Cavinder, a burly Yorkshireman transplanted to North Cyprus, a writer and publican of great wit, inimitable style, and astonishing memory, has died of cancer in Southampton, England on August 19, aged eighty.
On an island legendary for its outsized characters, across four decades Allan was one of the best beloved, as popular with Turkish Cypriots as with expatriates. Known as a superb bridge player, a maven of all knowledge historical, trivial, and linguistical, and as a creator of verbal puzzles, he was delighted to stir up controversy in his writings and at his bars. In a country infamous for its mail delivery, letters addressed to “Cavinder / Mersin 10 / Turkey” still found him. Even at eighty he kept an elegant mustache and beard and a full head of thick brown hair.
Though there was generally someone annoyed at him about some stray remark, Allan was considered the fount of Cyprus wisdom. It was Cavinder you went to for denial of a rumor that the Greeks had attacked this morning, or if you needed political events explained, or wondered whom to hire for reliable plastering, or wanted the truth behind some arcane personal saga. Other Ancient Brits might’ve visited the island earlier, but Allan had lived here since 1973 and was known for a trustworthy memory and a calm, assessing mind, despite a Yorkshire habit of short-lived grudges that might occasionally ban a pub patron.
Allan was born into a strict Methodist family in Kingston upon Hull, East Yorkshire, on January 10, 1926—the son of Leonard, who had served in WWI, and Edith Cavinder. His sister Jean (b. 1920) is still alive. He attended Hull Grammar School and, age nine, won a literary prize for an article. Allan remained proud of this achievement, for he and his mother were given rail tickets all the way to London for him to receive the award.
During WWII Allan was in the RAF Volunteers but had to content himself with being a police messenger. This meant riding his bicycle around Hull at night providing communications between defence agencies such as the fire service. As soon as he was old enough he applied to join the RAF, but by then he was an engineer and that was designated a “reserved occupation” vital to the war effort.
Though his career took him afield, his romantic life sprang from Hull. His first wife, Jean Woodmansey (1928-1999) was born there; they met at the Newland Avenue Methodist Girls and Boys Youth Club (where he also met Joan, his second wife). Jean and Allan married in Hull in 1951 and settled in South London. Their daughter Jane was born in 1953, their son Adrian in 1954. They divorced on Cyprus in 1990 but continued to work together at times and to play bridge as a particularly fearsome team.
Throughout the 1950s Allan worked for several heating and ventilating companies. His last job, as export director, involved much international travel. As daughter Jane recalls, “He and Mum also travelled recreationally and developed a fondness for Cyprus. In 1972 Dad’s company merged with a much larger business and this decided them to try a new life in Cyprus in 1973. Dad started work as a freelance engineer but his plans were disrupted by the troubles of 1974. Mum and Dad were briefly evacuated to the British base at Dhekelia but returned to Girne within a few weeks. They decided to stay on and managed the Harbour Club with the family. He also started to develop his writing; at one point he was Turkish correspondent for a U.K. football magazine, thus combining his passions for journalism and football.”
As Allan himself recalled the decision to leave, “I had spent a lot of time in Beirut and knew I could do good business there. In those days you could fly to Beirut from Nicosia for £20 return.” Contrary to popular belief, only about 200 Brits lived in Kyrenia (Varosha had around 3600). “Jean and I,” Allan recalled, “decided to spend our time with locals, not with expats.”
His English was sumptuous in vocabulary and grammatically exact; his German was good; his Turkish far better than he pretended.
Unable to easily obtain visas to travel to the other side of the island for engineering work, in 1979 he leased Kyrenia’s Harbour Club restaurant from Ramiz Manyera (who’d bought it from Judy Finlay). Allan’s entire family worked with him: artist daughter Jane and her Turkish husband Funda Kutlay (1949-1991), son Adrian and his then-wife Ditza, an Israeli singer; Jean did the cooking. The Harbour Club era lasted until 1983, and is still fondly recalled, musical Saturday nights especially. These might involve virtuoso pianist Arman Ratip, fresh from his two lps for EMI. Allan often thumped a one-string bass made from a tea chest.
1975 saw him helping start GODS (the Girne Operatic and Dramatic Society)—forerunner of KADS. GODS held play- and poetry-readings at the Grapevine; as Allan pointed out, there were 38 chairs and 76 Brits back then. For Christmas 1977 and 1978 he wrote two revues: “Ali in Wonderland” and “Ali Through the Looking-Glass.”
In the early 1980s Allan became the first English-language broadcaster for Radio Bayrak. At his busiest he maintained three weekly programmes: a pop music show entitled “It Must Be A Record”; an hour’s classical music show; and an hour Wednesday magazine that featured interviews with, say, Bill Dreghorn. (A prelude to Bertil Wedin’s “Magazine North”, on which Cavinder and Dreghorn were the most frequent guests.)
After the Harbour Club lease ended, Allan briefly managed Pesabahce and the Moonlight. For the next twenty years his succession of luncheon pubs became the six-days-a-week hub of Girne expatriate life.
Allan presided longest at the Dragon, the Chinese restaurant which was once Sabri’s Orient. Across from the mosque in Upper Kyrenia, its courtyard fountain was full of drowsy fish and obsolete Turkish coins—“from clients who made a wish for better service,” as Allan put it. Besides his canny talents as barman-raconteur, his pubs offered a free library of diverse paperbacks.
For many years Allan’s major-domo was that admirable gentleman from Pakistan, Mohammed, now flourishing at the Courtyard but back then only just coming into his own.
Following the Dragon’s initial stage (1985-1990), Allan moved his loyal customers (“The Melting Pot”) for about eighteen months to the Halk Evi—the former British country club whose terrace, thanks to Allan, hosted several jazz concerts. He then returned to the Dragon (1991-97) and moved for a couple of final years to the Pegasos at Karaoğlanoğlu.
Allan’s definition of an Ancient Brit was precise: an expatriate who’d lived in North Cyprus continuously from pre-1974. After Dreghorn’s death, Allan was the last man standing—he referred to himself as “the last of the Mohicans”—but possibly a few Ancient Brittesses outlive him.
During the late 1970s he wrote a novel set partly on Cyprus, and sometimes spoke of rewriting it. A request to Graham Greene for permission to use a quote earned Allan an encouraging letter of consent and praise from Greene, who had asked to see a couple of chapters.
Likewise, as a columnist and stylist Allan was much admired by the American radio and newspaper essayist Geo Beach and by my father, George Weller (winner of a Pulitzer Prize). It is ardently to be hoped that someone will put out a fat volume of collected Cavinderiana going back to his contributions to the nearly-forgotten Cyprus News (1976?-78?), the Cyprus Weekly Mail (1977-80 perhaps), essays of many types for Arman Ratip’s Pan magazine from 1980-97, and recent work for Cyprus Today, written from here and the U.K. Such a collection should include writings under Cavinder’s mischievous pseudonyms, such as Al Terego or the puzzlesmith Dr. Pangloss.
Stylistically his approach reflected the man: his wide reading (he liked to pepper his columns with amusing and pungent quotations); his sense of economy (years of listening to his pub clientele made him a no-nonsense editor); and his love of music. He had the sensitive ear, in his writing, of a dedicated concert-goer, and a strong grasp of the power in a repeated, jazzy riff. “And so it goes” was the last of these, and ended many a column, but its tone could range from wry acceptance to bitter damnation.
My favorite Allanism expressed dismay for the electronic world: “I’ve got a microchip on my shoulder.” To a customer who said he’d seen a pair of faked snake skin shoes in a local shop, the Yorkshireman remarked: “There are no faked snakes in Cyprus.” Whenever a lovely turn of phrase came, he would allow himself the faint self-praise of “Not a bad one for a Monday.”
No obituary can do justice to the flow of good cheer in his columns. His masterpieces were his roundups of a past year’s events.“There’s so much doom and gloom in the newspapers,” he remarked. “I think there’s room for a little humor.” His workhorse was “a good old steam typewriter I bought in 1951.” He always praised it as “a good speller.”
In recent years Allan had a book in mind on England, a combination of memories and current impressions; a return, as he put it, to Mucky Pig Lane.
As a friend he was unswervingly loyal, attentive, and generous. When the sponsors of the first (1989) Bellapais Music Festival pulled out, Allan paid for jazz guitarist John Etheridge to fly down from the U.K. He acted as best man for Valérie Moniez Iverson in Girne at both her weddings.
His second wife, Joan Tomlin (née Harris), who survives him at their home in Southampton, met him at thirteen; she and Allan corresponded over the decades. They married in Cyprus in May 2000, and thanks to her he was able to get to know England again. Allan left Girne for the U.K. in early August, 2005.
His death marks the end of an era. He loved North Cyprus as it had been, and held out hope for a North Cyprus which is yet to be. In later years it was surprising to see that hale figure walking with a cane, though no less enthusiastically.
Just before he left the island for good, he spoke eloquently of not saying goodbye but merely shifting his headquarters, for he intended to return periodically. As much as Girne had changed over the decades, for him it was still special, still home. He smiled fondly at how locals, greybeards themselves, would approach him and say, “Mister Allan? Remember me? You showed me how to install air-conditioning systems in 1975—” and firmly shake his hand.
For us, what will remain is that steady clear-eyed gaze, the merging memories of mornings and afternoons in the eternal sunlight of his company and, most of all, the expressive baritone of his inexhaustible voice, marvelously talking.
Allan Cavinder, a burly Yorkshireman transplanted to North Cyprus, a writer and publican of great wit, inimitable style, and astonishing memory, has died of cancer in Southampton, England on August 19, aged eighty.
On an island legendary for its outsized characters, across four decades Allan was one of the best beloved, as popular with Turkish Cypriots as with expatriates. Known as a superb bridge player, a maven of all knowledge historical, trivial, and linguistical, and as a creator of verbal puzzles, he was delighted to stir up controversy in his writings and at his bars. In a country infamous for its mail delivery, letters addressed to “Cavinder / Mersin 10 / Turkey” still found him. Even at eighty he kept an elegant mustache and beard and a full head of thick brown hair.
Though there was generally someone annoyed at him about some stray remark, Allan was considered the fount of Cyprus wisdom. It was Cavinder you went to for denial of a rumor that the Greeks had attacked this morning, or if you needed political events explained, or wondered whom to hire for reliable plastering, or wanted the truth behind some arcane personal saga. Other Ancient Brits might’ve visited the island earlier, but Allan had lived here since 1973 and was known for a trustworthy memory and a calm, assessing mind, despite a Yorkshire habit of short-lived grudges that might occasionally ban a pub patron.
Allan was born into a strict Methodist family in Kingston upon Hull, East Yorkshire, on January 10, 1926—the son of Leonard, who had served in WWI, and Edith Cavinder. His sister Jean (b. 1920) is still alive. He attended Hull Grammar School and, age nine, won a literary prize for an article. Allan remained proud of this achievement, for he and his mother were given rail tickets all the way to London for him to receive the award.
During WWII Allan was in the RAF Volunteers but had to content himself with being a police messenger. This meant riding his bicycle around Hull at night providing communications between defence agencies such as the fire service. As soon as he was old enough he applied to join the RAF, but by then he was an engineer and that was designated a “reserved occupation” vital to the war effort.
Though his career took him afield, his romantic life sprang from Hull. His first wife, Jean Woodmansey (1928-1999) was born there; they met at the Newland Avenue Methodist Girls and Boys Youth Club (where he also met Joan, his second wife). Jean and Allan married in Hull in 1951 and settled in South London. Their daughter Jane was born in 1953, their son Adrian in 1954. They divorced on Cyprus in 1990 but continued to work together at times and to play bridge as a particularly fearsome team.
Throughout the 1950s Allan worked for several heating and ventilating companies. His last job, as export director, involved much international travel. As daughter Jane recalls, “He and Mum also travelled recreationally and developed a fondness for Cyprus. In 1972 Dad’s company merged with a much larger business and this decided them to try a new life in Cyprus in 1973. Dad started work as a freelance engineer but his plans were disrupted by the troubles of 1974. Mum and Dad were briefly evacuated to the British base at Dhekelia but returned to Girne within a few weeks. They decided to stay on and managed the Harbour Club with the family. He also started to develop his writing; at one point he was Turkish correspondent for a U.K. football magazine, thus combining his passions for journalism and football.”
As Allan himself recalled the decision to leave, “I had spent a lot of time in Beirut and knew I could do good business there. In those days you could fly to Beirut from Nicosia for £20 return.” Contrary to popular belief, only about 200 Brits lived in Kyrenia (Varosha had around 3600). “Jean and I,” Allan recalled, “decided to spend our time with locals, not with expats.”
His English was sumptuous in vocabulary and grammatically exact; his German was good; his Turkish far better than he pretended.
Unable to easily obtain visas to travel to the other side of the island for engineering work, in 1979 he leased Kyrenia’s Harbour Club restaurant from Ramiz Manyera (who’d bought it from Judy Finlay). Allan’s entire family worked with him: artist daughter Jane and her Turkish husband Funda Kutlay (1949-1991), son Adrian and his then-wife Ditza, an Israeli singer; Jean did the cooking. The Harbour Club era lasted until 1983, and is still fondly recalled, musical Saturday nights especially. These might involve virtuoso pianist Arman Ratip, fresh from his two lps for EMI. Allan often thumped a one-string bass made from a tea chest.
1975 saw him helping start GODS (the Girne Operatic and Dramatic Society)—forerunner of KADS. GODS held play- and poetry-readings at the Grapevine; as Allan pointed out, there were 38 chairs and 76 Brits back then. For Christmas 1977 and 1978 he wrote two revues: “Ali in Wonderland” and “Ali Through the Looking-Glass.”
In the early 1980s Allan became the first English-language broadcaster for Radio Bayrak. At his busiest he maintained three weekly programmes: a pop music show entitled “It Must Be A Record”; an hour’s classical music show; and an hour Wednesday magazine that featured interviews with, say, Bill Dreghorn. (A prelude to Bertil Wedin’s “Magazine North”, on which Cavinder and Dreghorn were the most frequent guests.)
After the Harbour Club lease ended, Allan briefly managed Pesabahce and the Moonlight. For the next twenty years his succession of luncheon pubs became the six-days-a-week hub of Girne expatriate life.
Allan presided longest at the Dragon, the Chinese restaurant which was once Sabri’s Orient. Across from the mosque in Upper Kyrenia, its courtyard fountain was full of drowsy fish and obsolete Turkish coins—“from clients who made a wish for better service,” as Allan put it. Besides his canny talents as barman-raconteur, his pubs offered a free library of diverse paperbacks.
For many years Allan’s major-domo was that admirable gentleman from Pakistan, Mohammed, now flourishing at the Courtyard but back then only just coming into his own.
Following the Dragon’s initial stage (1985-1990), Allan moved his loyal customers (“The Melting Pot”) for about eighteen months to the Halk Evi—the former British country club whose terrace, thanks to Allan, hosted several jazz concerts. He then returned to the Dragon (1991-97) and moved for a couple of final years to the Pegasos at Karaoğlanoğlu.
Allan’s definition of an Ancient Brit was precise: an expatriate who’d lived in North Cyprus continuously from pre-1974. After Dreghorn’s death, Allan was the last man standing—he referred to himself as “the last of the Mohicans”—but possibly a few Ancient Brittesses outlive him.
During the late 1970s he wrote a novel set partly on Cyprus, and sometimes spoke of rewriting it. A request to Graham Greene for permission to use a quote earned Allan an encouraging letter of consent and praise from Greene, who had asked to see a couple of chapters.
Likewise, as a columnist and stylist Allan was much admired by the American radio and newspaper essayist Geo Beach and by my father, George Weller (winner of a Pulitzer Prize). It is ardently to be hoped that someone will put out a fat volume of collected Cavinderiana going back to his contributions to the nearly-forgotten Cyprus News (1976?-78?), the Cyprus Weekly Mail (1977-80 perhaps), essays of many types for Arman Ratip’s Pan magazine from 1980-97, and recent work for Cyprus Today, written from here and the U.K. Such a collection should include writings under Cavinder’s mischievous pseudonyms, such as Al Terego or the puzzlesmith Dr. Pangloss.
Stylistically his approach reflected the man: his wide reading (he liked to pepper his columns with amusing and pungent quotations); his sense of economy (years of listening to his pub clientele made him a no-nonsense editor); and his love of music. He had the sensitive ear, in his writing, of a dedicated concert-goer, and a strong grasp of the power in a repeated, jazzy riff. “And so it goes” was the last of these, and ended many a column, but its tone could range from wry acceptance to bitter damnation.
My favorite Allanism expressed dismay for the electronic world: “I’ve got a microchip on my shoulder.” To a customer who said he’d seen a pair of faked snake skin shoes in a local shop, the Yorkshireman remarked: “There are no faked snakes in Cyprus.” Whenever a lovely turn of phrase came, he would allow himself the faint self-praise of “Not a bad one for a Monday.”
No obituary can do justice to the flow of good cheer in his columns. His masterpieces were his roundups of a past year’s events.“There’s so much doom and gloom in the newspapers,” he remarked. “I think there’s room for a little humor.” His workhorse was “a good old steam typewriter I bought in 1951.” He always praised it as “a good speller.”
In recent years Allan had a book in mind on England, a combination of memories and current impressions; a return, as he put it, to Mucky Pig Lane.
As a friend he was unswervingly loyal, attentive, and generous. When the sponsors of the first (1989) Bellapais Music Festival pulled out, Allan paid for jazz guitarist John Etheridge to fly down from the U.K. He acted as best man for Valérie Moniez Iverson in Girne at both her weddings.
His second wife, Joan Tomlin (née Harris), who survives him at their home in Southampton, met him at thirteen; she and Allan corresponded over the decades. They married in Cyprus in May 2000, and thanks to her he was able to get to know England again. Allan left Girne for the U.K. in early August, 2005.
His death marks the end of an era. He loved North Cyprus as it had been, and held out hope for a North Cyprus which is yet to be. In later years it was surprising to see that hale figure walking with a cane, though no less enthusiastically.
Just before he left the island for good, he spoke eloquently of not saying goodbye but merely shifting his headquarters, for he intended to return periodically. As much as Girne had changed over the decades, for him it was still special, still home. He smiled fondly at how locals, greybeards themselves, would approach him and say, “Mister Allan? Remember me? You showed me how to install air-conditioning systems in 1975—” and firmly shake his hand.
For us, what will remain is that steady clear-eyed gaze, the merging memories of mornings and afternoons in the eternal sunlight of his company and, most of all, the expressive baritone of his inexhaustible voice, marvelously talking.
Monday, December 5, 2005
Know
Every morning I create the world anew:
When I die, the world dies with me.
You who carry the gentle illusion that it is you
Who freshen the world each day, not I,
Know that you too are doomed to obliterate
All you see and love. This is the only task handed on,
And carries no inherited virtue, for man’s life is vanishing thought.
Each generation flatters itself: the present is no runner’s baton
But simply a tide, receding in order to be forgotten,
Successfully wiping the world clean.
[2005]
When I die, the world dies with me.
You who carry the gentle illusion that it is you
Who freshen the world each day, not I,
Know that you too are doomed to obliterate
All you see and love. This is the only task handed on,
And carries no inherited virtue, for man’s life is vanishing thought.
Each generation flatters itself: the present is no runner’s baton
But simply a tide, receding in order to be forgotten,
Successfully wiping the world clean.
[2005]
Monday, April 18, 2005
Robert Dean Frisbie (1896 - 1948)
Written in 2005 for Post Road
Largely forgotten seventy years after his death, his books rarely in print, Robert Dean Frisbie—a tall, humorous, skinny American who, just after the end of World War I, settled in the farthest reaches of the South Seas to write novels—was, in the words of James Michener, “the most graceful, poetic and sensitive writer ever to have reported on the islands.” Frisbie realized a fantasy many men dream about: a tropical vision of island beauty which included local maidens, a large family, solitude to write in, and surviving a hurricane. It meant tragedy, too, for after the death of Frisbie’s beloved Polynesian wife Nga, as a colleague wrote, “Paradise found his weakness and had no mercy.”
Robert Dean Frisbie was born in Cleveland in 1896 and grew up in California, nurtured on the South Pacific books of Robert Louis Stevenson. His health was frail; a wartime training camp left him under permanent threat of tuberculosis. In 1918 he received a medical discharge, a monthly pension of $45, and orders never to spend another winter in America. Frisbie happily obeyed.
Leaving behind his job as a newspaperman in Fresno, in 1920 he made his way out to Tahiti and was immediately befriended and encouraged by that patriarch of expatriate writers in the South Pacific, James Norman Hall, later of Mutiny on the Bounty fame. Within a year Frisbie had bought four acres of land, taken a Tahitian mistress, learned the language, built himself a bamboo-and-palm house, and acquired the name “Ropati” which he would carry for life throughout the islands. He also started his relentless reading of “great books” to make up for a lack of higher education. He began writing short pieces, sending them the long sea-road back to American magazines without success. He spent several years expensively refitting a yawl with a couple of friends. A 3,000-mile sailing voyage, through the Society Islands, the Tuamotus, and the Samoas, ended in Fiji after a heavy gale. Frisbie sold the wounded boat and returned to Tahiti.
Seeking an island more removed and deeply Polynesian, Frisbie in 1924 sailed from Tahiti to Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, with the legendary trading schooner captain Andy Thomson. Through Thomson’s intervention Frisbie got a job as the only copra trader and storekeeper on the remote northern Cook island of Puka-Puka, also known as Danger Island. Copra—dried coconut meat—was many South Pacific islanders’ only income.
Puka-Puka, with three villages and six hundred inhabitants, was over 700 miles from Rarotonga. Really three small islets in a lagoon formed by a barrier reef, it was about as far away from “civilization” as a Westerner could get. Left here by a supply schooner that would come only once or twice a year, Frisbie blossomed as a writer. He at last began publishing short sketches of his island life in the Atlantic Monthly—though the delay, of course, was immense.
To be Puka-Puka’s sole white man and storekeeper for four years was an ideal way to learn about locals’ character, and he became fluent in their language. As on Tahiti, he enjoyed a few mistresses, but soon Frisbie married a petite island girl, Ngatokorua (“Desire” and “Miss Tears” in his books). They had five children, whom the Polynesians called “cowboys” in honor of their American father.
Determined to write the great South Pacific novel, over the years he managed three, of diverse quality: Amaru (1945), Dawn Sails North (1949), and his best, the autobiographical Mr. Moonlight's Island (1939). It has a tremendous local color and feel for the society, but Frisbie lacked the sense of fantasy of a true novelist; his principal characters and stories never quite live up to his background material.
Frisbie’s memoir of his earliest encounter with the region, and the two memoirs of his time in the Cook Islands, are his supreme achievement. As visions of South Pacific life, written from deep within the dream yet harboring no illusions, My Tahiti, The Book of Puka-Puka, and The Island of Desire have never been equaled. To my mind they compare favorably with Thoreau—as the experience of a man living in a close relationship with nature while questioning the tenets of his own civilization, thankfully left far behind. And Frisbie’s writing is always sublime.
My Tahiti (1937)—long unavailable except for the odd bootleg edition—is an unmatched portrait of one of the most written-about islands on the planet. His Tahiti was already obsolete when he wrote the book; it would rapidly become more so with World War II. Here's how he gently describes his first night with a young companion: “I began to think how fantastic it was that the same world should hold cities and armed men, and this strange and beautiful creature. Only a score of miles away was Papeete with its scheming traders, grasping officials, Chinese slum; while farther away was civilization, where the fundamental beauties of life had been lost ages ago.”
In The Book of Puka-Puka (1929) he wrote, “Without a thought for the white man’s code of ethics, I have been happy, enjoying a felicity unknown in right-thinking realms.” He described how natives “sink into trances with perfect ease, bolt upright, eyes open, completely unconscious of the world about them,” and he learned how, too. He had no illusions about Polynesians, seeing them as full of fantasy and short of memory—except for their family trees and poems, some of which he translated. “Puka-Puka is, perhaps, the only example on earth of a successful communistic government,” he wrote, “ . . . due to the fact that no other community equals this one in sheer good-natured indolence.”
What makes his work so vibrant are the islanders: Sea-Foam the Christian and William the Heathen; Bones, the old wrestling champion, with his mouth organ; Ura the drunken chief of police; the beautiful Little Sea and her more tender cousin, Desire; the village debates, the gambling, fishing, gathering coconuts; the sensual dances by moonlight; the life of gossip, habit, and ease.
In 1928 Frisbie and his wife left Puka-Puka for Rarotonga, and began two decades of moving from island to island. They had a happy and productive few years on Tahiti and neighboring Moorea, even though Frisbie published little in that time and was beset by horrific fevers and elephantiasis. The solution to his acute physical torment was rum, and both followed him thereafter. He and Nga ended up back on Puka-Puka, but in 1939 his wife died of tuberculosis, and from then on Frisbie—no matter how much he produced—was a haunted and doomed man. He wrote his old friend James Norman Hall on Tahiti: “If I could only kill this cursed desire to write I could be happy. How can you expect a man who writes in English and thinks in Puka Pukan to be able to know what kind of work he is doing?” Frisbie would die penniless.
The Island of Desire (1944), his final masterpiece, begins with him back on Puka-Puka and describes with great sweetness his renewed life there until Nga’s passing. The book’s second half covers his experience with his children on Suwarrow, an even more remote and uninhabited atoll of twenty-five islets where he took his motherless family in late 1941. This desert island paradise was all but destroyed by a monstrous hurricane, and Frisbie’s account is unforgettable.
Time after time, he caught exactly the sense of island life: “Of a sudden I understood: all this land and sea, dormant by day, had awakened at dusk, refreshed, hungry. . . . ” He described an old woman “singing a little song as silly as it was beautiful” and the “great seas bombarding the reef” in a hurricane, in which he had to strap his children high up in tamanu trees so they were not washed away. Most moving of all, he described, after the death of his wife, a visitation by her ghost.
“I hunted long for this sanctuary,” he wrote. “Now that I have found it, I have no intention, and certainly no desire, ever to leave it again.” But this wasn’t to be. Rescued from Suwarrow, always unhealthy, he took his family back to Rarotonga, then Puka-Puka, then Tongareva, where he contracted tuberculosis. (A Lieutenant Michener was put in charge of bringing the dying American writer back to the hospital in Pago-Pago.) Samoa had use for him as a teacher once he recovered, but his fevers and drink got to him badly and he ended up on Rarotonga. The administering New Zealand government, disgruntled at his alcoholism, tried to kick him off the island, and his last years were frustrated by official bickering. Meanwhile, his books failed to achieve what he hoped, partly because war had brought a newer story to his isles.
In our era of infinite electronic memory, it is still easy for a great writer to slip between the cracks. I happened on Frisbie’s work not because I wrote professionally about the South Pacific many times over the years and did copious research—my sources never heralded him—but because of the accident that he was a family friend. My father, a war correspondent, at Hall’s suggestion met him on Rarotonga in 1943 while en route from Aitutaki to Bora Bora, brought together by Captain Andy Thomson; they stayed in touch, and years later, coincidentally, my father brought the sad information of Frisbie’s passing to Tahiti, and Hall. (He also did his best, via an extensive readership in the Chicago Daily News, to raise money for the now-orphaned “cowboys”.)
Frisbie died of tetanus in 1948 and is buried on Rarotonga, across from the Avarua library, in a simply-marked grave beneath a paw-paw tree in the Catholic cemetery. His eldest daughter’s own writings show us Frisbie as he would wish to be remembered—the inventive father, reading to his remarkably self-reliant children (“Ropati’s Slave-Labor Gang”) from the thousand books brought to a remote isle. No outsider ever lived closer to South Pacific culture, lore, and daily life than he, nor recorded so eloquently what it taught him, before he struck his own reef.
Today Robert Dean Frisbie is known mainly to those travelers through the South Pacific who look past the more familiar names and hunt down copies of his books—which were in their day well-received in England and the States. “A man who destroyed himself through the search for beauty,” is how Michener described him. In some ways Frisbie’s extraordinary journey also seems the “standard” American literary life: so much purity of expression ending in frustration and drink. Yet Frisbie’s poetic touch, his gentleness, his sympathy, are rare, and anyone dipping into his books feels immediately the unique warmth and tone of his voice. I like especially to remember a letter Frisbie sent to his brother—
“The old man looks long across the lagoon and reminisces on his past futile days. Then he wades out until the water comes to his shoulders. He swims with long strokes until he is a mile or more from shore, and quite exhausted, and realizes that now it is absolutely impossible for him to return. He rolls over on his back and stares heavenward, then he looks to land, and suddenly he smells the fragrant mountain wind, sees the moonlight throwing the shadows of articulated ridges across the water. He for the first time in his life realizes that there is beauty.”
[Those interested in the life as well as the work may wish to read The Frisbies of the South Seas (1959), by his eldest daughter, Johnny Frisbie, as well as her earlier book, published when she was only fourteen, Miss Ulysses of Puka-Puka (1947), which Frisbie co-wrote. The Forgotten One (1952), by James Norman Hall, contains an illuminating ninety-page essay on Frisbie, with excerpts from his letters. James A. Michener’s memoir, The World Is My Home (1992), has a brief portrait, too.]
Largely forgotten seventy years after his death, his books rarely in print, Robert Dean Frisbie—a tall, humorous, skinny American who, just after the end of World War I, settled in the farthest reaches of the South Seas to write novels—was, in the words of James Michener, “the most graceful, poetic and sensitive writer ever to have reported on the islands.” Frisbie realized a fantasy many men dream about: a tropical vision of island beauty which included local maidens, a large family, solitude to write in, and surviving a hurricane. It meant tragedy, too, for after the death of Frisbie’s beloved Polynesian wife Nga, as a colleague wrote, “Paradise found his weakness and had no mercy.”
Robert Dean Frisbie was born in Cleveland in 1896 and grew up in California, nurtured on the South Pacific books of Robert Louis Stevenson. His health was frail; a wartime training camp left him under permanent threat of tuberculosis. In 1918 he received a medical discharge, a monthly pension of $45, and orders never to spend another winter in America. Frisbie happily obeyed.
Leaving behind his job as a newspaperman in Fresno, in 1920 he made his way out to Tahiti and was immediately befriended and encouraged by that patriarch of expatriate writers in the South Pacific, James Norman Hall, later of Mutiny on the Bounty fame. Within a year Frisbie had bought four acres of land, taken a Tahitian mistress, learned the language, built himself a bamboo-and-palm house, and acquired the name “Ropati” which he would carry for life throughout the islands. He also started his relentless reading of “great books” to make up for a lack of higher education. He began writing short pieces, sending them the long sea-road back to American magazines without success. He spent several years expensively refitting a yawl with a couple of friends. A 3,000-mile sailing voyage, through the Society Islands, the Tuamotus, and the Samoas, ended in Fiji after a heavy gale. Frisbie sold the wounded boat and returned to Tahiti.
Seeking an island more removed and deeply Polynesian, Frisbie in 1924 sailed from Tahiti to Rarotonga, in the Cook Islands, with the legendary trading schooner captain Andy Thomson. Through Thomson’s intervention Frisbie got a job as the only copra trader and storekeeper on the remote northern Cook island of Puka-Puka, also known as Danger Island. Copra—dried coconut meat—was many South Pacific islanders’ only income.
Puka-Puka, with three villages and six hundred inhabitants, was over 700 miles from Rarotonga. Really three small islets in a lagoon formed by a barrier reef, it was about as far away from “civilization” as a Westerner could get. Left here by a supply schooner that would come only once or twice a year, Frisbie blossomed as a writer. He at last began publishing short sketches of his island life in the Atlantic Monthly—though the delay, of course, was immense.
To be Puka-Puka’s sole white man and storekeeper for four years was an ideal way to learn about locals’ character, and he became fluent in their language. As on Tahiti, he enjoyed a few mistresses, but soon Frisbie married a petite island girl, Ngatokorua (“Desire” and “Miss Tears” in his books). They had five children, whom the Polynesians called “cowboys” in honor of their American father.
Determined to write the great South Pacific novel, over the years he managed three, of diverse quality: Amaru (1945), Dawn Sails North (1949), and his best, the autobiographical Mr. Moonlight's Island (1939). It has a tremendous local color and feel for the society, but Frisbie lacked the sense of fantasy of a true novelist; his principal characters and stories never quite live up to his background material.
Frisbie’s memoir of his earliest encounter with the region, and the two memoirs of his time in the Cook Islands, are his supreme achievement. As visions of South Pacific life, written from deep within the dream yet harboring no illusions, My Tahiti, The Book of Puka-Puka, and The Island of Desire have never been equaled. To my mind they compare favorably with Thoreau—as the experience of a man living in a close relationship with nature while questioning the tenets of his own civilization, thankfully left far behind. And Frisbie’s writing is always sublime.
My Tahiti (1937)—long unavailable except for the odd bootleg edition—is an unmatched portrait of one of the most written-about islands on the planet. His Tahiti was already obsolete when he wrote the book; it would rapidly become more so with World War II. Here's how he gently describes his first night with a young companion: “I began to think how fantastic it was that the same world should hold cities and armed men, and this strange and beautiful creature. Only a score of miles away was Papeete with its scheming traders, grasping officials, Chinese slum; while farther away was civilization, where the fundamental beauties of life had been lost ages ago.”
In The Book of Puka-Puka (1929) he wrote, “Without a thought for the white man’s code of ethics, I have been happy, enjoying a felicity unknown in right-thinking realms.” He described how natives “sink into trances with perfect ease, bolt upright, eyes open, completely unconscious of the world about them,” and he learned how, too. He had no illusions about Polynesians, seeing them as full of fantasy and short of memory—except for their family trees and poems, some of which he translated. “Puka-Puka is, perhaps, the only example on earth of a successful communistic government,” he wrote, “ . . . due to the fact that no other community equals this one in sheer good-natured indolence.”
What makes his work so vibrant are the islanders: Sea-Foam the Christian and William the Heathen; Bones, the old wrestling champion, with his mouth organ; Ura the drunken chief of police; the beautiful Little Sea and her more tender cousin, Desire; the village debates, the gambling, fishing, gathering coconuts; the sensual dances by moonlight; the life of gossip, habit, and ease.
In 1928 Frisbie and his wife left Puka-Puka for Rarotonga, and began two decades of moving from island to island. They had a happy and productive few years on Tahiti and neighboring Moorea, even though Frisbie published little in that time and was beset by horrific fevers and elephantiasis. The solution to his acute physical torment was rum, and both followed him thereafter. He and Nga ended up back on Puka-Puka, but in 1939 his wife died of tuberculosis, and from then on Frisbie—no matter how much he produced—was a haunted and doomed man. He wrote his old friend James Norman Hall on Tahiti: “If I could only kill this cursed desire to write I could be happy. How can you expect a man who writes in English and thinks in Puka Pukan to be able to know what kind of work he is doing?” Frisbie would die penniless.
The Island of Desire (1944), his final masterpiece, begins with him back on Puka-Puka and describes with great sweetness his renewed life there until Nga’s passing. The book’s second half covers his experience with his children on Suwarrow, an even more remote and uninhabited atoll of twenty-five islets where he took his motherless family in late 1941. This desert island paradise was all but destroyed by a monstrous hurricane, and Frisbie’s account is unforgettable.
Time after time, he caught exactly the sense of island life: “Of a sudden I understood: all this land and sea, dormant by day, had awakened at dusk, refreshed, hungry. . . . ” He described an old woman “singing a little song as silly as it was beautiful” and the “great seas bombarding the reef” in a hurricane, in which he had to strap his children high up in tamanu trees so they were not washed away. Most moving of all, he described, after the death of his wife, a visitation by her ghost.
“I hunted long for this sanctuary,” he wrote. “Now that I have found it, I have no intention, and certainly no desire, ever to leave it again.” But this wasn’t to be. Rescued from Suwarrow, always unhealthy, he took his family back to Rarotonga, then Puka-Puka, then Tongareva, where he contracted tuberculosis. (A Lieutenant Michener was put in charge of bringing the dying American writer back to the hospital in Pago-Pago.) Samoa had use for him as a teacher once he recovered, but his fevers and drink got to him badly and he ended up on Rarotonga. The administering New Zealand government, disgruntled at his alcoholism, tried to kick him off the island, and his last years were frustrated by official bickering. Meanwhile, his books failed to achieve what he hoped, partly because war had brought a newer story to his isles.
In our era of infinite electronic memory, it is still easy for a great writer to slip between the cracks. I happened on Frisbie’s work not because I wrote professionally about the South Pacific many times over the years and did copious research—my sources never heralded him—but because of the accident that he was a family friend. My father, a war correspondent, at Hall’s suggestion met him on Rarotonga in 1943 while en route from Aitutaki to Bora Bora, brought together by Captain Andy Thomson; they stayed in touch, and years later, coincidentally, my father brought the sad information of Frisbie’s passing to Tahiti, and Hall. (He also did his best, via an extensive readership in the Chicago Daily News, to raise money for the now-orphaned “cowboys”.)
Frisbie died of tetanus in 1948 and is buried on Rarotonga, across from the Avarua library, in a simply-marked grave beneath a paw-paw tree in the Catholic cemetery. His eldest daughter’s own writings show us Frisbie as he would wish to be remembered—the inventive father, reading to his remarkably self-reliant children (“Ropati’s Slave-Labor Gang”) from the thousand books brought to a remote isle. No outsider ever lived closer to South Pacific culture, lore, and daily life than he, nor recorded so eloquently what it taught him, before he struck his own reef.
Today Robert Dean Frisbie is known mainly to those travelers through the South Pacific who look past the more familiar names and hunt down copies of his books—which were in their day well-received in England and the States. “A man who destroyed himself through the search for beauty,” is how Michener described him. In some ways Frisbie’s extraordinary journey also seems the “standard” American literary life: so much purity of expression ending in frustration and drink. Yet Frisbie’s poetic touch, his gentleness, his sympathy, are rare, and anyone dipping into his books feels immediately the unique warmth and tone of his voice. I like especially to remember a letter Frisbie sent to his brother—
“The old man looks long across the lagoon and reminisces on his past futile days. Then he wades out until the water comes to his shoulders. He swims with long strokes until he is a mile or more from shore, and quite exhausted, and realizes that now it is absolutely impossible for him to return. He rolls over on his back and stares heavenward, then he looks to land, and suddenly he smells the fragrant mountain wind, sees the moonlight throwing the shadows of articulated ridges across the water. He for the first time in his life realizes that there is beauty.”
[Those interested in the life as well as the work may wish to read The Frisbies of the South Seas (1959), by his eldest daughter, Johnny Frisbie, as well as her earlier book, published when she was only fourteen, Miss Ulysses of Puka-Puka (1947), which Frisbie co-wrote. The Forgotten One (1952), by James Norman Hall, contains an illuminating ninety-page essay on Frisbie, with excerpts from his letters. James A. Michener’s memoir, The World Is My Home (1992), has a brief portrait, too.]
Monday, January 24, 2005
Rey de la Torre (1917–1994)
Written in 2005 as the booklet essay for the Bridge disc Works for Guitar
José Rey de la Torre (Dec. 9, 1917-July 21, 1994) was one of the greatest classical guitarists of the 20th century. This is the first CD issue of any of his thirteen LPs which, recorded from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, are treasured by connoisseurs but long out of print. It also includes a previously undiscovered live track.
Born in Gibara, Cuba, like many virtuosi Rey got off to a fast start as a child prodigy (“El Nino”). When the family moved to Havana, he took up the guitar at age ten under the guidance of Severino Lopez ((1907-1978), a “young and shy” former pupil of the Catalan Miguel Llobet (1878-1938), who was the foremost guitarist of the era. Rey made fast progress: his first solo recital in Havana, at age twelve, included Sor’s variations on a theme of Mozart, “Granada” by Albeniz, Tárrega’s “Capricho Arabe” and “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.”
In 1932, at fourteen, his family sent him to Barcelona to study with Llobet. Rey wrote a detailed portrait of the master and a tender account of those two and a half years in Guitar Review (Winter 1985). What he left out was his own success there just before returning to Cuba, when Llobet presented him in concert—his programme included a work still at the outer limits of guitar technique, Alfonso Broqua’s “Ritmos Camperos.”
Rey received raves from the tough Barcelona critics, who compared him not only to Llobet but to Casals; composer Jaime Pahissa declared Rey the most complete guitarist he’d ever heard, with “a sweet but powerful tone and an extraordinary technical perfection that permits him to play the most difficult passages with ease.”
The composer and pianist Joaquin Nin-Culmell (1908-2004) recalled meeting Rey back in Havana just after his return. “As a young performer he was astounding. His playing was aristocratic and exact, quite different from the romantic, improvisational school of Segovia. He had a truly purist mind; this purism went into his concept of technique, which he got from Llobet but which he took much, much further. He was one of the very few guitarists with a respect for the musical text. And I’ve met very few musicians as well read as Rey, a man of extraordinary culture and interests. Even when he was twenty, he had a tremendous literary, cultural, philosophical, and political point of view.”
When Rey began his career, the present worldwide popularity of the classical guitar, so easy to take for granted, was still many years away. The guitar was, as Rey wrote, “practically unknown to musical audiences and. . . largely ignored by the classical performers.” Beginning with his Barcelona debut in 1934 at sixteen, for over four decades Rey concertized across North America, Europe, and parts of Central America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, and did much to bring the instrument the worldwide respect it enjoys today. His New York recitals (mostly Town Hall, but also Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully, and the Metropolitan Museum) became annual milestones. He made countless radio and TV appearances.
For the historical record, Rey gave world premieres of Joaquin Nin-Culmell’s “Six Variations on a Theme by Milán” in (Town Hall, N.Y.C., Nov. 10, 1947); of José Ardevol’s “Sonata” (Woodstock, N.Y., Sept. 3, 1950); of Julián Orbón’s “Preludio y Danza” (originally “Preludio y Toccata,” in 1953); and of Carlos Chavez’s “Three Pieces for Guitar” (Alice Tully, N.Y.C., Nov. 14, 1969; written back in 1923). He also performed in the premiere of Villa-Lobos’ “Introduction to the Chôros” (N.Y.C., August 1962). And I believe but cannot confirm that he was the first guitarist to perform in its totality the seven-movement suite, “Evocaciones Criollas,” of Alfonso Broqua.
Rey made the first recordings of works by Sor, Giuliani, Tárrega, Cervantes, Falla, Grau, Torroba, Rodrigo, Ponce, Lee, as well as the Boccherini, Nin-Culmell, and Orbón pieces included here. He may also have been the first guitarist to record duets by performing both parts himself.
As Michael Lorimer says, “When the guitar world had few great performers, Rey gave a standard of excellence to which to aspire. As the outstanding student of Miguel Llobet, who was the most distinguished performer in the school of Tárrega, Rey directly linked us to that fountainhead of guitaristic tradition. At the same time, Rey’s collaborations with composers provided the literature beautiful new vistas.”
When the two recordings presented herein were made, Rey had built a busy concert career in the USA over the years since his 1938 New York debut. He’d also made five prior LPs which, for various reasons, were unsatisfying to him. However, once he met the two Shulman brothers, his recording luck changed. Though their Philharmonia proved a short-lived label, Rey accounted for two of Philharmonia’s dozen releases, and under several titles the solo LP thrived for many years as a Nonesuch LP and cassette.
It remains one of the essential guitar recordings, with all the glories of Rey’s poetic, precise playing evident a half-century on—his rich and nuanced tone, his exquisite phrasing and sense of line, his bravura technique and profound musicality. (Let those who insist that today’s players have surpassed those of yesteryear consider the fact that this recording was made without any edits.)
The Boccherini Quintet in D—of which this is the first recording—was done just three days before Rey’s 33rd birthday. He had recently received his first of two superb guitars from Hermann Hauser I, arguably the preeminent luthier of the era, and this instrument would prove his beloved “workhorse” for the rest of his career. (Prior to the Hauser, Rey faithfully performed and recorded on a 1931 Simplicio chosen for him in Barcelona by Llobet.)
The Stuyvesant Quartet was one of the finest mid-century chamber groups in the U.S., with a repertoire of remarkable breadth. The quartet’s founders, Alan and Sylvan Shulman, had started Philharmonia, and this disc was the label’s second release. (Side Two was Gian Francesco Malipiero’s “Rispetti e Strambotti,” already reissued on CD.) Apart from its historical importance, the Boccherini performance is notable for a warmth and dynamism that remain unsurpassed. One reviewer pointed out that “the guitarist. . . fits into the quintet group as though he had been a regular member of long standing.”
Here the famous ‘castanets’ passage in the closing Fandango—usually handled by the cellist, tapping the instrument’s body—was played by Rey with his fingernails on the side of his new Hauser, while cellist Alan Shulman took over the pedal figure from the guitar part. (According to Rey, this was Alan’s idea; he was trying to protect the finish on his cello, made by Joseph Dalaglio in Mantua, circa 1800.)
The solo LP, which Rey remembered as “a work of love,” was made over the course of a couple of days in July, 1952. As legendary engineer Norman Pickering recalled, fifty-two years later, “Rey and I had a short but intense relationship. He was a wonderful man, and a wonderfully sensitive musician. I liked him enormously; to this day I’ve never heard another guitarist like him. He was so smart, so easy to work with. He didn’t have any problems, he was totally non-temperamental about recording. He would play things over and over with no objections so I could get the right sound. Complete takes, with no splices—this was how I always worked. Both discs were recorded in the same church. It’s large, of rough stone, with a long reverberation time. I used a single microphone recording him solo, and for the quintet too, placed carefully: a Neumann U-47.”
Rey’s abiding memory of the session was carpets hung in the church to help the sound, and a touch of whiskey being drunk by those listening, not working.
We have included Rey’s original liner notes, which appeared in part on the Philharmonia version of the LP (and an Elektra reissue) and in full on the Nonesuch version. It would be difficult to praise this recording too highly. Though Rey’s later five Epic LPs are superb, revered within the guitar world and awaiting CD reissues of their own, they were made under trying circumstances, far removed from the ease and camaraderie of working with Pickering and the Shulmans. The present two LPs were an Eden in Rey’s recording life, and he looked back on them with pleasure and pride.
It’s worth noting that the pieces in whose development he had a hand have some aspect which is entirely new on the instrument (like the “false harmonics” in the final crescendo of the Orbón). Because of his deep friendships with Nin-Culmell and Orbón, as well as Llobet’s urging, Rey always thought of the guitar in orchestral terms. His attention to dynamics, muting, and registration, his devotion to finding ways to give a score maximum life on the guitar, came from constantly thinking orchestrally.
The Villa-Lobos Etude #11 shows how electrifying a live performer Rey was. Having already recorded the piece for Epic, his interpretation reflects a longstanding friendship with the composer (who praised Rey for playing his work “like a great guitarist and like a true Brazilian.”). This track was only recently unearthed.
As his career flourished, Rey began to have increasing trouble with his right (plucking) hand, a problem unrelated to the later rheumatoid arthritis which would end his concertizing. During the late 1950s and 1960s he found his middle finger weaker and less responsive, with a tendency to under-reach; having never had any problems with technique, he was forced to compensate via complex re-fingerings.
The solution came through Marianne Eppens, a Swiss physical therapist whom he met socially. She realized the problem was due to Rey pampering his right hand to avoid injury or breaking a nail; the delicate mechanism of muscles had become imbalanced from unnatural under-use. She encouraged Rey to put his hand back to active everyday use, and in months he was cured. In 1969 he and Marianne married and left New York for California. Except for two years on Staten Island in the mid-70s, Rey spent the rest of his life in the San Francisco area.
In 1975 Rey was diagnosed with the rheumatoid arthritis which soon twisted his hands and left him crippled. His final concerts, in ’75 and ’76, were played while heavily dosed on anti-inflammatory drugs. The last twenty years of his life were spent in severe pain, and his courage in the face of major setbacks (both knees replaced, a quadruple bypass) was heroic. His marriage to Marianne was profoundly happy and her devotion was, as he put it, “saintly.”
He continued to teach until even that became too arduous. It was inexpressibly poignant to see him during this time—a giant who had once played the most difficult pieces with grace and ease, now unable, as he said, “to play even first-year positions.” Still, even as illness ended his performing at its zenith, it made him a better teacher. Childless, he was loved by students as a surrogate father. Rather than clinging to the faded splendor of what his playing had been, he tried to pass on all he knew, sharing his knowledge (as he wrote of Llobet) as one shares one’s daily bread with a friend. He could explain anything.
It is unfortunate that we have had to wait so long for these discs to see the light of day again. Sometimes it is difficult to grasp how very quickly the vagaries of time can erase a performer’s legacy; the familiar name becomes an unfamiliar ghost. Now, at least, the classical guitar audience will have one of the instrument’s great poets, at his magnificent best, before them again, more than a half-century later. May he never be forgotten.
José Rey de la Torre (Dec. 9, 1917-July 21, 1994) was one of the greatest classical guitarists of the 20th century. This is the first CD issue of any of his thirteen LPs which, recorded from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, are treasured by connoisseurs but long out of print. It also includes a previously undiscovered live track.
Born in Gibara, Cuba, like many virtuosi Rey got off to a fast start as a child prodigy (“El Nino”). When the family moved to Havana, he took up the guitar at age ten under the guidance of Severino Lopez ((1907-1978), a “young and shy” former pupil of the Catalan Miguel Llobet (1878-1938), who was the foremost guitarist of the era. Rey made fast progress: his first solo recital in Havana, at age twelve, included Sor’s variations on a theme of Mozart, “Granada” by Albeniz, Tárrega’s “Capricho Arabe” and “Recuerdos de la Alhambra.”
In 1932, at fourteen, his family sent him to Barcelona to study with Llobet. Rey wrote a detailed portrait of the master and a tender account of those two and a half years in Guitar Review (Winter 1985). What he left out was his own success there just before returning to Cuba, when Llobet presented him in concert—his programme included a work still at the outer limits of guitar technique, Alfonso Broqua’s “Ritmos Camperos.”
Rey received raves from the tough Barcelona critics, who compared him not only to Llobet but to Casals; composer Jaime Pahissa declared Rey the most complete guitarist he’d ever heard, with “a sweet but powerful tone and an extraordinary technical perfection that permits him to play the most difficult passages with ease.”
The composer and pianist Joaquin Nin-Culmell (1908-2004) recalled meeting Rey back in Havana just after his return. “As a young performer he was astounding. His playing was aristocratic and exact, quite different from the romantic, improvisational school of Segovia. He had a truly purist mind; this purism went into his concept of technique, which he got from Llobet but which he took much, much further. He was one of the very few guitarists with a respect for the musical text. And I’ve met very few musicians as well read as Rey, a man of extraordinary culture and interests. Even when he was twenty, he had a tremendous literary, cultural, philosophical, and political point of view.”
When Rey began his career, the present worldwide popularity of the classical guitar, so easy to take for granted, was still many years away. The guitar was, as Rey wrote, “practically unknown to musical audiences and. . . largely ignored by the classical performers.” Beginning with his Barcelona debut in 1934 at sixteen, for over four decades Rey concertized across North America, Europe, and parts of Central America, the Caribbean, and the Middle East, and did much to bring the instrument the worldwide respect it enjoys today. His New York recitals (mostly Town Hall, but also Carnegie Hall, Alice Tully, and the Metropolitan Museum) became annual milestones. He made countless radio and TV appearances.
For the historical record, Rey gave world premieres of Joaquin Nin-Culmell’s “Six Variations on a Theme by Milán” in (Town Hall, N.Y.C., Nov. 10, 1947); of José Ardevol’s “Sonata” (Woodstock, N.Y., Sept. 3, 1950); of Julián Orbón’s “Preludio y Danza” (originally “Preludio y Toccata,” in 1953); and of Carlos Chavez’s “Three Pieces for Guitar” (Alice Tully, N.Y.C., Nov. 14, 1969; written back in 1923). He also performed in the premiere of Villa-Lobos’ “Introduction to the Chôros” (N.Y.C., August 1962). And I believe but cannot confirm that he was the first guitarist to perform in its totality the seven-movement suite, “Evocaciones Criollas,” of Alfonso Broqua.
Rey made the first recordings of works by Sor, Giuliani, Tárrega, Cervantes, Falla, Grau, Torroba, Rodrigo, Ponce, Lee, as well as the Boccherini, Nin-Culmell, and Orbón pieces included here. He may also have been the first guitarist to record duets by performing both parts himself.
As Michael Lorimer says, “When the guitar world had few great performers, Rey gave a standard of excellence to which to aspire. As the outstanding student of Miguel Llobet, who was the most distinguished performer in the school of Tárrega, Rey directly linked us to that fountainhead of guitaristic tradition. At the same time, Rey’s collaborations with composers provided the literature beautiful new vistas.”
When the two recordings presented herein were made, Rey had built a busy concert career in the USA over the years since his 1938 New York debut. He’d also made five prior LPs which, for various reasons, were unsatisfying to him. However, once he met the two Shulman brothers, his recording luck changed. Though their Philharmonia proved a short-lived label, Rey accounted for two of Philharmonia’s dozen releases, and under several titles the solo LP thrived for many years as a Nonesuch LP and cassette.
It remains one of the essential guitar recordings, with all the glories of Rey’s poetic, precise playing evident a half-century on—his rich and nuanced tone, his exquisite phrasing and sense of line, his bravura technique and profound musicality. (Let those who insist that today’s players have surpassed those of yesteryear consider the fact that this recording was made without any edits.)
The Boccherini Quintet in D—of which this is the first recording—was done just three days before Rey’s 33rd birthday. He had recently received his first of two superb guitars from Hermann Hauser I, arguably the preeminent luthier of the era, and this instrument would prove his beloved “workhorse” for the rest of his career. (Prior to the Hauser, Rey faithfully performed and recorded on a 1931 Simplicio chosen for him in Barcelona by Llobet.)
The Stuyvesant Quartet was one of the finest mid-century chamber groups in the U.S., with a repertoire of remarkable breadth. The quartet’s founders, Alan and Sylvan Shulman, had started Philharmonia, and this disc was the label’s second release. (Side Two was Gian Francesco Malipiero’s “Rispetti e Strambotti,” already reissued on CD.) Apart from its historical importance, the Boccherini performance is notable for a warmth and dynamism that remain unsurpassed. One reviewer pointed out that “the guitarist. . . fits into the quintet group as though he had been a regular member of long standing.”
Here the famous ‘castanets’ passage in the closing Fandango—usually handled by the cellist, tapping the instrument’s body—was played by Rey with his fingernails on the side of his new Hauser, while cellist Alan Shulman took over the pedal figure from the guitar part. (According to Rey, this was Alan’s idea; he was trying to protect the finish on his cello, made by Joseph Dalaglio in Mantua, circa 1800.)
The solo LP, which Rey remembered as “a work of love,” was made over the course of a couple of days in July, 1952. As legendary engineer Norman Pickering recalled, fifty-two years later, “Rey and I had a short but intense relationship. He was a wonderful man, and a wonderfully sensitive musician. I liked him enormously; to this day I’ve never heard another guitarist like him. He was so smart, so easy to work with. He didn’t have any problems, he was totally non-temperamental about recording. He would play things over and over with no objections so I could get the right sound. Complete takes, with no splices—this was how I always worked. Both discs were recorded in the same church. It’s large, of rough stone, with a long reverberation time. I used a single microphone recording him solo, and for the quintet too, placed carefully: a Neumann U-47.”
Rey’s abiding memory of the session was carpets hung in the church to help the sound, and a touch of whiskey being drunk by those listening, not working.
We have included Rey’s original liner notes, which appeared in part on the Philharmonia version of the LP (and an Elektra reissue) and in full on the Nonesuch version. It would be difficult to praise this recording too highly. Though Rey’s later five Epic LPs are superb, revered within the guitar world and awaiting CD reissues of their own, they were made under trying circumstances, far removed from the ease and camaraderie of working with Pickering and the Shulmans. The present two LPs were an Eden in Rey’s recording life, and he looked back on them with pleasure and pride.
It’s worth noting that the pieces in whose development he had a hand have some aspect which is entirely new on the instrument (like the “false harmonics” in the final crescendo of the Orbón). Because of his deep friendships with Nin-Culmell and Orbón, as well as Llobet’s urging, Rey always thought of the guitar in orchestral terms. His attention to dynamics, muting, and registration, his devotion to finding ways to give a score maximum life on the guitar, came from constantly thinking orchestrally.
The Villa-Lobos Etude #11 shows how electrifying a live performer Rey was. Having already recorded the piece for Epic, his interpretation reflects a longstanding friendship with the composer (who praised Rey for playing his work “like a great guitarist and like a true Brazilian.”). This track was only recently unearthed.
As his career flourished, Rey began to have increasing trouble with his right (plucking) hand, a problem unrelated to the later rheumatoid arthritis which would end his concertizing. During the late 1950s and 1960s he found his middle finger weaker and less responsive, with a tendency to under-reach; having never had any problems with technique, he was forced to compensate via complex re-fingerings.
The solution came through Marianne Eppens, a Swiss physical therapist whom he met socially. She realized the problem was due to Rey pampering his right hand to avoid injury or breaking a nail; the delicate mechanism of muscles had become imbalanced from unnatural under-use. She encouraged Rey to put his hand back to active everyday use, and in months he was cured. In 1969 he and Marianne married and left New York for California. Except for two years on Staten Island in the mid-70s, Rey spent the rest of his life in the San Francisco area.
In 1975 Rey was diagnosed with the rheumatoid arthritis which soon twisted his hands and left him crippled. His final concerts, in ’75 and ’76, were played while heavily dosed on anti-inflammatory drugs. The last twenty years of his life were spent in severe pain, and his courage in the face of major setbacks (both knees replaced, a quadruple bypass) was heroic. His marriage to Marianne was profoundly happy and her devotion was, as he put it, “saintly.”
He continued to teach until even that became too arduous. It was inexpressibly poignant to see him during this time—a giant who had once played the most difficult pieces with grace and ease, now unable, as he said, “to play even first-year positions.” Still, even as illness ended his performing at its zenith, it made him a better teacher. Childless, he was loved by students as a surrogate father. Rather than clinging to the faded splendor of what his playing had been, he tried to pass on all he knew, sharing his knowledge (as he wrote of Llobet) as one shares one’s daily bread with a friend. He could explain anything.
It is unfortunate that we have had to wait so long for these discs to see the light of day again. Sometimes it is difficult to grasp how very quickly the vagaries of time can erase a performer’s legacy; the familiar name becomes an unfamiliar ghost. Now, at least, the classical guitar audience will have one of the instrument’s great poets, at his magnificent best, before them again, more than a half-century later. May he never be forgotten.
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