The wilder shores of love [Repr. ed.] 9780349103297, 0349103291

Table of contents :
CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Isabel Burton
Jane Digby El Mezrab
Aimée Dubucq De Rivery
Isabelle Eberhardt
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX

Citation preview

(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 A Two-headed Pro.file

7

JANE DIGBY EL MEZRAB. Matrimonial Theme and l/ariations

I3I

AIMEE DUBUCQ DE RIVER Y A Message from a Glzost

197

ISABELLE EBERHARDT Portrait of a Legend

271

BIBLIOGRAPHY

312

INDEX

317

I

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

to acknowledge with gratitude, the generosity of all those people who placed their valuable time and knowledge at my disposal. 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 Peter de Hunt, for the loan of unpublished Burton material.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 Dermenghen, 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, published 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. WISH

'Love and Love always read from the same book, but not always from the same page. '

T

INTRODUCTION

four women who form the subject of this book might be described as northern shadows flitting across a southern landscape. All of them belonged to the West, to the fast-greying climate of nineteenth-century Europe where the twentiethcentury 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 Stanhope, 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. HE

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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 renunciations. 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 !l man. 2

Introduction Lady Ellenborough retained financial ind_ependence and was accordingly 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 AngloSaxon, 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 subconsciously 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 considerably more freedom to be essentially a woman than many women now enmeshed in the complex 'mechanism of our economic ci~ilization. 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

Introd11ction strutting grandiosely, for ever posturing before an alien landscape she persisted in regarding as her backcloth. My subjects arc of softer clay. Take the case of Jane Digby, Lady Ellen borough, who, for all her birth and beauty, sweetness and allure, still came to grief, to what seemed the end, to romantic bankruptcy in her forties. This was the point of disillusion at which she, too, turned Eastward. To love fully, with complete abandon (but ever with great style) she smashed all the taboos of her time; her conduct was at best eccentric; at worst, scandalous. It was a life lived entirely against the rules, reasons and warnings-and it was triumphantly happy. I have chosen Isabel Burton because she is the supreme example of a woman who lived and had her being entirely through love. Her life story is one of the greatest adventure stories, too, because she loved 'Burton of Arabia', one of the greatest adventurers of his age. She was a Victorian woman, an impassioned Catholic, with all the prejudices and conformisms those two states imply; yet she married a heretic, one of the most unorthodox, defiant social outlaws. She was never to accompany him on those desperate ventures which made his life so astonishing. But such is the power of love that she lived them all by proxy. Through loving him so greatly she entered Meccah, explored Africa, penetrated Harar . . . Thus she achieved a greater degree of liberation, knew more of achievement and the East, and came closer to the heart of adventure than perhaps any other woman of her day. Lastly, I chose Isabelle Eberhardt as being the embodiment of a period of transition, from that age when women looked for fulfilment in love, to the moment when they hoped to find it through an equality of work, aims and means. She is a haunting figure, this Russian-born girl who went into the desert dressed as a man, with shaven head, to live among the Arabs as one of them. Her slow disintegration and disillusion stands out prophetically at the tum of the century, as a first manifestation of what was later to grow into this, our age of anxiety. The mistake made by Isabelle Eberhardt, and by so many other women who followed, was to believe she could go, as a man, into a man's world, and thus live more fully. But she remained for ever en travestie. The disguise was only skin deep. Beneath, she remained submissive, gentle, generous, and men exploited her cruelly. She is 4

Introductioll the forerunner of many characters in c9ntemporary fiction; that nihilistic, neurotic and disillusioned flotsam. She is, too, first symbol of the disintegrating West. And this brings me back to my beginning; all these four women found some, if not all, of their fulfilment, as women, along wilder Eastern shores.

5

Isabel Burton A TWO-HEADED PROFILE

1

F

start she J~.cl _)gJ_own what she wanted, and proc~eded single-minded, with th~ -t.~rc~ ~f--;-;tea~ engine, towards her goal. There was never a moment's doubt or regret. She wanted the East; and- fr~m thTi~~rt~h;-;t eyes o-;·Ri~hard Burton, with his dark Arabic face, his 'questing panther eyes', he was, for her, that lodestar East, the embodiment of all her longings. Man and land were identified. He was one of the world's greatest travellers, an Orientalist without equal who wore the green turban of the Hadj as his right: besides[Burckha@J1c was the only European, at that time, to have penetrated Meccah as a pilgrim; to have attained the inner sanctuary as a Moslem, and seen what few other infidels had lived to recount. He spoke twenty-eight languages (one of them pornography, it was unkindly said) and many obscure Oriental dialects, but he always averred that Arabic was his native t~ngue. His travels in the East had created a stir in England, then unaccustomed to the cheap easy voyages inaugurated later by Mr. Cook. His books had been Isabel's constant reading since her youth. She had followed his legendary adventures step by step, and so, when at last they met, he had become the personification of an ideal-a hemisphere. "I~at__to live witH him_ajg_ht anc!_jay h,r_yJI my life" she wrote to her mother, when after ten years of passionate longing and frustration, parental sanction was still withheld. "I wish I were a man," she went on. "Ifl were, I would be Richard Burton ; but, being only a woman, I would be Richard Burton's wife." She had to have him -in..li.fe_ in death. ' - I' ·"' -----... They were a strange pair for any age: in their own, they were particularly odd. But most people recognized their absolute dependence on each other, in spite of off-hand posturings on Burton's part. They were elective affinities, 'o~ __ soul in two bodies\ never l~g apart in life ~r q~a~!i, as Hagar the Gypsy foretold. Burton, who rocked Victorian England by the pre-Freudian tone of his writings on ~ the

9

Isabel Burtoll che Ease, and whose brilliant and cynical mind was a Jumble of hard facts and woolly mysticisms, always maintained chat psychologically speaking he was a broken twiI],_a.nd that_ she w;i,s the shacter~d, or missing fragment. Throughout their lives they seemed to be united by a'" series of curiously predestined, or coincidental happenings. There were waking and sleeping visions, telepathic conversations, presentiments and strange chance encounters that fitted so neatly into che web of predestination and prayer which Isabel delighted to spin. She was an ardent Catholic, but superstitious coo, and given, in her later years, to psychic research, which like her belief in a soul for the animals she loved, caused black looks from her Church, though Moslem tenets were most comforting on that score, since Mohammed's Paradise admitted nine animals. Burton was a loudly self-proclaimed agnostic, but his superstitions and mystical nature kept him alternating between bouts of Sufism (he was a Master Sufi) and a sort of lefthanded Catholicism. His true religion (and perhaps, his love for Isabel) was the only thing about which he had any pudeur. He delighted in mocking all ecclesiastical hypocrisies, high and low; he disliked religious manifestations as much as cant, and appeared to most people as a swaggering iconoclast. Yet he was very emotional, and used to sob, on the rare occasions he attended Mass, Isabel records in her journal. When her brother died, Burton gaye her £5 for a Mass to be said for the dead man. Though this, like so many of Isabel's statements, might be interpreted two ways. Her proselytizing zeal, was such that Burton may well have been buying himself some peace and quiet. Still, this would be the cynic's view, and not mine. The more I study this odd couple, the more I perceive their tragic grandeur. He was a desert eagle in a_ cage, brought low largely by a tactless manner-an insistence in both word and deed of those principles 'Honour, not Honours' which \Vere his device, and which so impressed General Gordon that he never failed to quote them, as a heading, in his correspondence with Burton. In his public life Burton almost invariably did right but did it in the wrong way, a fatal reverse of the more worldly method of doing the wrong things in the right way. As to Isabel, she 'nothing petty did or mean'; though often maddening, no doubt, she emerges from the tangle of contradictory memoirs, letters and journals as a great woman; overwhelming, but loving, loyal, courageous and generous, with a sense of humour IO

A strange relationship: West ZJersus East (not, however, applied to Richard, whom she described as her Earthly God and King). Both were tragic and comic figures. Together they found much happiness: yet together their life had the doomed inevitability of a Greek drama. Loving with her allencompassing greed, she destroyed him; and he, trapped and tamed by her affections, destroyed himsel£ In the development of their strange relationship, we see that the West overcame the East. Indeed, Isabel acted towards Burton very much as England was then acting towards the East. She colonized him. To Burton's East, she became the managing West, civilizing, refining, elevating, protecting, suppressing . . . And her burning of his journal was the ultimate gesture of conquest, the final suppression of any posthumous independence. It was a last assertion of personal domination over her empire. In the margin of Queen Victoria's reign, a more intimate, but no less glorious conquest was consummated. If, in this profile of Isabel Burton, I am thought to give too much place to her husband, it must be remembered that her whole life and being was bound up in his: he was her all. His every action, every thought came to have a bearfug on her "fife and character. At first, it ~a~ a_girlisll._P.?:~~i9...n_;jt-gr.cl;V_UJ..tQ.Jf>_~!:.t..!,.~~~g~_g of C?E:£.J~ekigJ_nto @O(Q~r, until, at last, to wri.te of the Durt