The wilder shores of love

332 Pages·1987·21.283 MB·English

by  Lesley Blanch

(ABACUS)
The WILDER SHORES of LOVE
, Lesley Blanch
Lesley Blanch
THE WILDER SHORES
- OF LOVE
(ABACUSJ
First published in Great Britain by
John Murray Ltd 1954
Published in Abacus by
Sphere Books Ltd 1984
30-32 Gray's Inn Road, London WCIX 8JL
Reprinted 1984
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of
trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated
without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover
other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition
including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
'Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading
For my husband, Romain Gary
CONTENTS
PAGE
INTRODUCTION I
ISABEL BURTON
7
A Two-headed Pro.file
JANE DIGBY EL MEZRAB.
I3I
Matrimonial Theme and l/ariations
AIMEE DUBUCQ DE RIVER Y 197
A Message from a Glzost
ISABELLE EBERHARDT
271
Portrait of a Legend
BIBLIOGRAPHY 312
INDEX 317
I ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
WISH to acknowledge with gratitude, the generosity of all those
people who placed their valuable time and knowledge at my dis
posal. My thanks are especially due to General Catroux, for
'talking Sahara' on the subject oflsabelle Eberhardt. To Major
Hartley-Clarke, for permission to quote from his collection of Burton
manuscripts and correspondence. To Mr. Peter de Hunt, for the
loan of unpublished Burton material. To Mlle Anne-Marie Bercher,
for her companionship in a journey across Southern Tw1isia. To
Mr.John Hilliard for permission to reproduce one of his photographs
of North Africa. To Mrs. Osyth Leeston, for her patience in dealing
with the manuscript in all its stages. To Monsieur Andre Dermen
ghen, Director of the Bibliotheque du Gouvernement General of
Algiers. To Canon Gibney of St. Mary Magdalene' s Church,
Mortlake. To the Librarian and staff of the Foreign Office Library,
and that of the Public Records Office. To the Director and Trustees
of the Camberwell Public Library, for permission to reproduce
photographs from Lady Burton's estate, now in their possession.•
To the Chief Librarian and the Director of the Kensington Public
Library for permission to study the Burton library and private papers.
To the Curator of Leighton House, for permission to reproduce
drawings from Sir Frederick Leighton's sketch-books. To Mr. Cox,
late of the London Library, for his recollections of Burton. To the
staff of each of those libraries where I worked while writing this
book: The London Library, the Sorbonne, the Bibliotheque National
and the Library of St. Genevieve. To tl1e New Yark Society Library
where I am greatly indebted to Miss Helen Ruskill, and the Public
Library of the City of New Y-ork. I wish to acknowledge my debt
to E. M. Oddies' biography of Lady Ellenborough, published iti 1936,
and also Mr. H. Morton's book on Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, pub
lished in 1923, both of which provided much valuable material.
Lastly, I wish to thank Professor Louis Massignon, for his indulgent
encouragement and interest when this book was only a shadowy
project scrawled on the back of an envelope, and the Cornhill Mag.1zine
for the hospitality of its pages from the start.
'Love and Love always read from the
same book, but not always from the
same page. '
INTRODUCTION
T
HE four women who form the subject of this book might be
described as northern shadows flitting across a southern land
scape. All of them belonged to the West, to the fast-greying
climate of nineteenth-century Europe where the twentieth
century disintegration of women, as such, was already foreshadowed.
Yet although of widely different natures, backgrowids and origins,
all had this in common-each found, in the East, glowing horizons
of emotion and daring which were for them, now vanishing from the
West. And each of them, in her own way, used love as a means of
individual expression, of liberation and fulfilment within that radiant
periphery.
There have been many women, particularly Englishwomen, who
have been enthralled by the Oriental legend; who have followed the
beckoning Eastern star wherever it led. On great voyages or little
trips; as travellers or tourists; as eccentrics such as Lady Hester Stan
hope, or Orientalists such as Gertrude Bell or Freya Stark. But the.
women I have chosen are less intellectual, women whose achievements
remained on a purely emotional plane and who, for all their daring,
each saw the East from an entirely personal or subjective view-point.
Aimee Dubucq, the gentle, inexperienced convent girl, in violent
contrast to Isabelle Eberhardt, the chaotic Slav, mystic and voluptuary;
Jane Digby, the wealthy, raffish divorcee, 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 wpich the East offered fulfilment.
* * *
All these women were realists of romance who broke with their
century's dream, to live it, robustly. At tl1at moment, romantic
living, if embraced at all, was interpreted in terms of sighs and renun
ciations. La Dame aux Camelias coughing out her lungs behind a
, I
Introduction
lace-edged handkerchief. Chopin's music, played by Liszt, its strains
floating out over the misty lakeside gardens of Como to mingle with
the bells of some forgotten convent. Charlotte Stieglitz committing
suicide, hoping thus to provide artistic stimulus for her second-rate
husband. It was a pallid way of life, and between its negations and
the alternative Victorian gentilities and pruderies, which gained, year
by year, life, living-loving-was muffled, and womanhood itself
became a scandalous secret. Between the coughing poets and the
social and sociological taboos, it required great daring to snatch at
the underlying richness which the East still promised.
It was a time when the West was suddenly aware of the romantic
aspects of the East. In the eighteenth century it had been seen as a
fabulous back-drop; a stage setting for Mozart's L' Enlevement dt1
Serail, all toppling turbans and giddy goings-on in key with the elegant
salons of Versailles or the Hofburg where it was first applauded. But
even such tinkling echoes had died away by the time the nineteenth
century dawned and Byron's verses were intoxicating an avid public.
Now another, more sultry East was seen, although treated with an
equal subjectivity. Mock heroics gave place to savage grandeurs.
Travellers such as Prince Piickler Muskau returned with tales of
chivalresque Arabs and the splendours of Oriental hospitality. Far
away, across the steppes, Pushk.in luxuriated in the exoticism of
Crimean legends, and was to be followed by Lermontov writing of
Caucasian bandits. Presently, je\velled scimitars adorned even the
most prosaic country houses and the Mamel11kes Waltz lay open on
every pianoforte. lngres and Delacroix were covering huge canvases
with voluptuous scenes where beneath the expanses of exoticism and
local colour, the most disturbing realities of flesh and blood were
apparent. And some women, such as my four subjects, must have
been aware of this, even subconsciously. Instinctively they must
have sensed the contracting horizons of their age and seen the cold
light of reason dawning like a grey streak across the blue. It was
to spread over the whole sky. But the romantic mirage could be
still translated into reality, could still be lived-elsewhere; they turned
Eastward trustingly.
However, it must be admitted that in the turning they still expected
and retained a degree of freedom unknown to Eastern women.
Purdah, the segregation of the sexes, the veil ... these things they swept
aside. Isabelle Eberhardt avoided the question by dressing as man.
!l
2
Introduction
Lady Ellenborough retained financial ind_ependence and was accord
ingly accepted even more unquestioningly by her husband's tribe.
Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, although for some years compelled to
live entirely on Eastern terms, finally obtained her own. Of all four,
it was perhaps Isabel Arundell, the brisk, the managing, the Anglo
Saxon, who most nearly approximated to the traditional pattern of
Oriental wifely submission. But each one of them seemed to sense
in their passivity, far larger opportunities of self-expression as women
than any left to their Western sisters.
Perhaps, too, this very passiviLy offered something which was
vanishing from the West, something to which they were all subcon
sciously drawn. Repose : the Eastern climate of contemplation, of
Kif, of nothingness, brought to its quintessential state of voluptuous,
animal stillness was a state wholly alien to the West. Even leisure,
an entirely different thing, was vanishing. From afar, a mighty
whirring could be heard approaching: it was the roar and clatter of a
million mechanical devices gaining momentum, forming i.µto an
overwhelming uproar of ingenuity and efficiency: speed and action
for their own sake. This onslaught was to hammer at Western
mankind until there were nerves, but no senses left.
Kif, contemplation, gilded opium pills and the drowsy peace of
senses lulled by satiety ... these things the East still offered, and some,
if not all of my subjects, were, I believe, aware of this. In the East,
there was still 'world enough and time' to be women .
..:,
If we consider the least free of all, Aimee Dubucq de Rivery, a
convent girl captured by corsairs and flung into the harem of the
Grand Turk, we see that even in the Seraglio, as a slave, she had con
siderably more freedom to be essentially a woman than many women
now enmeshed in the complex 'mechanism of our economic ci~iliza
tion.
In writing of romantic women who turned towards the East it
might be asked why I have not included Lady Hester Stanhope, the
archetype, or doyenne of this band. She was not so much seeking
fulfilment as a woman, as seeking escape from her own nature; she
craved power rather than love. To me she !ilways remains a puppet,
3