JOURNEY INTO THE MIND'S EYE, Fragments Of An Autobiography ~ Lesley Blanch
I must have been about four years old when Russia took hold of me with giant hands. That grip has never lessened. For me, the love of my heart, the fulfilment of the senses and the kingdom of the mind all met here. This book is the story of that obsession.
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The Traveller was from Moscow, 'a Muscovite' he said, but later I was to learn he was of Tartar blood; and unmistakably, the Ta-tze or Mongol hordes had stamped their imprint on his strange countenance. The dark slit eyes, the pointed ears, the Chinese-bald skull, the slight, yet cruel smile which sometimes passed across his usually impassive face — all these spoke of Asia, where he roamed, in spirit, and in fact.
Whenever he came to Europe, he would visit us, and then, reaching my nursery, sit beside the fire, his huge shadow spread-eagled —- a double-headed Russian eagle to me — across the rosy wallpaper. Shrugging and gesticulating with odd, unexpected movements, his long, bent-back fingers cracking, the nail of one little finger sprouted to astonishing length, he would spin a marvellous web of countries, cities, people and things, conjuring for me a world of shimmering images.
Every Easter, I received the lovely painted eggs of Russian tradition; some were in papier mâché, elaborately decorated with the Imperial eagle or some regimental insignia; some were gaily painted with peasant designs. When I was six he had sent a tiny one in dark blue enamel with a ribbon of pin's-head diamonds around it, a lavish Fabergé toy. 'Diamonds for a child! It doesn't seem natural does it?' sniffed Nanny, putting it out of reach, until my mother appropriated it for her dressing-table, where it hung beside the looking-glass, on a blue ribbon.
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Although he was international in his way of life and Tartar in his remote ancestry, The Traveller was in essence, the most supremely Slav being imaginable. I use the word Slav rather than Russian, for how to define or pin down the prototype of this race which is the blend of a hundred different peoples from the Arctic to the Black Sea, from Poland to China? And just as he seemed a conglomerate of all these peoples, belonging wholly to no one of them, so he was impossible to place in any one milieu; too luxurious for a revolutionary — too cynical, also. Too active for an intellectual; too realistic, too openly in revolt, too free of all conventions for an aristocrat; and far too adventurous for a bourgeois. He was impossible to classify. There was something of each in him, besides an inertia recalling, at its worst, Goncharov's Oblomov, who rotted on a sofa; at its best, his immobile moods recalled the withdrawals of a Buddhist priest. Each aspect of his character contradicted or constrained the other.
I loved him unreservedly: for his strangeness and for the climate of danger that I sensed around him — as adventurer, and as the man of whom, even unconsciously, in my earliest childhood I had been desperately aware. So, loving him, I loved his background, everything that had surrounded and formed him, and I sought to penetrate that enigmatic and limbo-land of the Slav, where, I felt, my roots had been planted in some unfathomable past. It seemed I had always known and loved him and in his world I would at last come home.
THE WILDER SHORES OF LOVE ~ Lesley Blanch
The four women who form the subject of this book might be described as northern shadows flitting across the southern landscape ... Aimée Dubucq, the gentle, inexperienced convent girl, in violent contrast to Isabelle Eberhardt, the chaotic Slav, mystic and voluptuary; Jane Digby, the wealthy raffish divorcée, loving so many yet always retaining a curious innocence, a romantic idealism; Isabel Arundell, the impoverished Victorian miss, loving with single-minded fury, biding her time, stifled in conventional living. All of them responded to a similar inward impulse to which the East offered fulfilment.
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An explorer's wife. Isabel Burton's marked preference for everything Arab was considered unsuitable and incomprehensible by the Western society of Damascus. The East had indeed proved a heady draught to Isabel. She began to fancy herself as a re-incarnation of Lady Hester Stanhope, the heroine of her youth. Not only did she adapt Arab dress wherever possible, but while Burton slipped off, disguised, into the life of the Souks, Isabel spent luxurious hours in the Turkish baths, or stayed for days at a time in the harems. Sometimes she was persuaded to entertain the inmates by wearing her most décolletée gown, and describing in detail her coming-out ball at Almack's. The harem thought low necks and waltzing very dashing. Sometimes she was invited to be the guest of honour at wedding or circumcision celebrations; where as a special mark of esteem she would be asked to hold the victim steady for the knife, a proceeding she accepted in the gratified manner of a god-parent holding the baby at the christening. Every day she was drawn further in to the East. She wanted no more of the West.
A naughty Almanach de Gotha. There are two sorts of romantics: those who love and those who love the adventure of loving. The latter are less costive, more mobile, more able to blow where the wind lists. Jane Digby, who was successively Lady Ellenborough, Baroness Venningen, Countess Theotoky and the wife of the Sheik Abdul Medjuel El Mezrab, to name only her legal attachments, was one of the latter kind. Romance alone was not enough, or not for long, at any rate. She craved adventure too —- riding out with the Mezrab tribe on desert raids well into her sixties — and was well equipped by nature to get life on her own terms.
Jane Digby was a great romantic, but she was also an adventurer, in the precise sense of the word — one who has adventures, as opposed to an adventuress, since this word has come to have largely sexual implications, as one who has lovers. Her ardent temperament, her perfect health, sought life —- the adventure of loving, as much as love itself.
With the Mezrab tribe she would go on their raids and desert warfare. She was an Amazon. Her whole life was spent riding at break-neck speed towards the wilder shores of love.
Naksh, The Beautiful One. When Aimée Dubucq de Rivery entered the Seraglio (Harem) its splendours were still unshadowed by restraint; indeed, many of the subsequent reforms probably originated in her thrifty French brain, as we shall see. But in 1784, we read of umbrellas with gold ribs studded in sapphires, patterns for the bath inlaid with pearls, and hand-towels stiff with gold embroidery. No favourite ever appeared before the Sultan in the same dress twice. The first visit was an occasion of unparalleled grandeur, and Aimée must have felt herself very far from the convent, as they robed her in the innumerable gauze chemises, velvet and fur caftans, the vast pantaloons, or chalvari, and the three-trained over-dress tradition demanded. There are no portraits of her thus adorned, but there is one eyewitness description which has been preserved: she was remarked above the other three black-haired Kadines for the beauty of her colouring, her fair skin, and pale golden hair. It seems she was always dressed resplendently, à la Turque. On her head, and tilted to one side, she wore a tiny, flat pill-box cap, blazing with jewels. Her flowing hair fell to her waist, and was powdered with diamonds which trembled among the gold and seemed scattered carelessly, but were, in fact, cunningly attached by fine golden chains. Her hands and feet were hennaed, though she had little need of the paint that was so much part of the other women's toilette, and an essential part of Turkish tradition.
Portrait of a Legend. Everything about her was extraordinary. She was a woman, dressed as a man. A European turned Arab. A Russian who transposed 'nitchevo' into 'mektoub', whose untidy mystical torments, l'âme slave, found peace in Islam's faith - and flesh. She was born on the prim, pale lakeside of Geneva. She died on the burning desert. She was an expatriate wanderer whose nomadic Slav background led her to range the desert insatiably: yet she dreamed of a petit-bourgeois haven, a grocer's shop in some obscure little Algerian town where she and her Arab husband and all his hordes of relatives could conduct a modest business. She adored her insignificant husband, but her sensual adventures were without number. Her behaviour was outrageous: she drank, she smoked hashish, but déclassée, she remained racée. She was the outcast, despised and rejected by French Administration and the colony in general. But she was General Lyautey's trusted friend. She was a writer who was almost unrecognised, and quite penniless till after her death, when, ironically, posthumous editions of her books earned a small fortune —- for others. Her death was strangest of all, for she was drowned in the desert.
In her brief lifetime Isabelle Eberhardt aroused violent interest. She was loathed or loved, rejected or despised. No one was indifferent to her. Her echoes have never died. No one who knew her ever forgot her. Those who had never known her felt the strange, compelling force of her character. She was a legend during her lifetime.
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