Jock Murray at his desk
To Jock Murray, she now put what appeared to her an extremely sensible proposal: £4,000 immediately for a mink coat, in return for the copyright to all her books when she died. Already somewhat in disgrace for being less than totally enthusiastic about Perseus, he now fell further by appearing dubious, protesting that it would surely be unsafe to own such a coat. The board at Murray’s were altogether more sceptical. They vetoed the mink and offered £1,500. Freya crossly turned it down, saying she felt like Julius Caesar when the pirates asked too little ransom. ‘I have decided,’ she wrote to a Baghdad friend, Gerald de Gaury, ‘never to save anything ever, and to collect things that are beautiful and precious whenever I can as a protest against this dreary evenness.’
In September, Stewart Perowne sent Freya a telegram asking her to marry him. She replied accepting. Stewart was being sent by the Foreign Office to Antigua and the plan was that as soon as her marble bathrooms in Asolo were in place she would go out to join him. On the 14th, she wrote to Nigel Clive, her p.g. in Baghdad. ‘Such a peculiar thing has happened: I have promised to marry Stewart. I have not written to anyone to tell them yet; but I must say so at once to you, for you are very dear to me, nor do I feel that this or anything else will affect it … It is one of the happy things that Stewart likes the people I like. We have a common world to set out in.’
Not all Freya’s friends were surprised. For all her brave words to Venetia Buddicom in the early thirties – ‘Life is easier for married people: but I think it ought if anything to be richer for us, so long as we take it with full hands and not with the inferiority sense which has often ruined the lives of spinsters’ – Freya had always wanted to marry. Fretted over by her mother, obsessed often by feelings of being plain and unattractive, she had returned again and again in letters to the theme of being alone. True, Freya was now fifty-four, Stewart forty-six. But he was charming, witty, a good Arabist, and could expect, if not an embassy, at least some fairly prestigious Foreign Office posting. What was more, as she pointed out, they shared a common world.
The marriage took place in London, in October, and a crowded reception was held at John Murray’s at 50 Albemarle Street, in the room in which Byron’s letters had been burnt. Jock Murray gave her away. Freya, deep at work on Perseus, had just finished a chapter on love. The couple returned to Asolo, to a house filled with tuberoses. By the 25th Stewart was off to Barbados and Freya began arranging her life so that she could join him. To Cockerell, she expressed some alarm at what she had done: had it been possible, she wrote, ‘I would have done like an unwilling horse at a jump and taken the nearest gap in the nearest hedge.’
To anyone she was fond of, Freya had always written letters. Stewart now became her daily confidant. Evidently he was a poor correspondent, for soon she was complaining that she had no news of him. Uncertain about what to wear in post-war colonial gatherings, she announced that she had packed five big straw hats, four parasols, two fans and some mittens. When a letter came, it expressed concern about money. Freya replied sternly: ‘I never will devote to Ordinary Life’ the extra income from a book. ‘It is the stuff one’s dreams are made of and, however poor I have been, I have always devoted it to dreams.’
By early February 1948, Freya had reached Bridgetown, pleased to be able to report that the half white coral, half dark lava island was pretty and sweet smelling. But Barbados was not Freya’s sort of place, nor was her role, that of wife to a middle-ranking member of the colonial office, likely to satisfy her. After nearly a decade of public admiration and attention, polite conversation with diplomatic wives who had never heard of her was not enjoyable. By the end of the month, she was writing sadly to Jock Murray of a ‘sort of caged feeling’. Stewart, she said, had been turned into the perfect civil servant. ‘I do think there is an element of darkness in the Government Service; it makes people think themselves important, a frightful thing to do.’
Freya did not enjoy Barbados, nor was she happy with Stewart. In April, she decided to go home, hoping to patch things up with Stewart later. Her letters to him from Asolo were subdued; as the months went by they became warmer, less accusatory, as if, separated from him physically, she could again believe in the romance of their late marriage. ‘Do you know,’ she wrote to him in July, ‘that all my life I have lived in a sort of Eden, with no sense of personal insecurity (moral I mean) or danger? Now since marrying you I have suddenly become aware of how precious it all is.’
Perseus in the Wind, twenty essays on such themes as beauty, death, and sorrow, not unlike her earlier essays from Baghdad, but more literary and more assertive in tone, was now out, to a very mixed reception. Wavell wrote to say that it was ‘like a casket not of jewellery … but of pieces of jewellery with jewels in beautiful or quaint or cunning settings and often so pleasantly unexpected’. Others were less admiring: ‘May we not feel,’ asked one reviewer, ‘that if we are going to have almost unadulterated Great Thoughts for 169 pages they ought to be very great indeed?’
Freya had now started work on her autobiography, sorting and bringing together the immensely long personal letters she had written to Cockerell from Cyprus in 1942 when she referred to all she had forgotten as ‘strips of black unfathomable water between ships’. Cockerell, who greatly enjoyed managing people, spurred her on. On her wedding anniversary, 7 October, Freya sent Stewart a telegram: ‘Love to you darling and many thoughts, particularly today.’
In Asolo, Freya settled to a way of life that suited her perfectly. She had friends to stay, people she had not seen since before the war, and her newer Middle Eastern colleagues, coming to Asolo for the first time. There were expeditions to show them the Palladian villas along the Po, evenings at the Fenice in Venice, picnics in the Dolomites. In the evenings, guests played Scrabble, over camomile tea, or grappa, the fiery spirit of Northern Italy, which Freya, no drinker herself, considered as settling as a tisane. Increasingly, she blamed Barbados for the difficulties of their marriage; what she and Stewart needed, she told friends, was a posting to the East ‘big enough for one to keep one’s own scale of values’.
On good terms again, Freya was writing to him almost daily. In October she outlined her perfect day: ‘a fine morning, all alone, walk with Checchi round the garden, post arrives and then three hours spent over the writing of English (the article is done and goes by surface). A little meditation after lunch under the wisteria, looking at the Japanese anemones now like a white and pink halo round the pool, and then a heavenly walk all by myself for one and a half hours in and out of the slopes of the Rocca … It was a day sweet and heavy like honey, a white sky, and all the country sounds, voices and laughter, animals, the crackling noise of carts in the plain below … Rory Cameron came over to find refuge from what he calls “the hard glitter of Italian hospitality” and sat for one and a half hours talking about India and Moguls and Hickey, very agreeably. And then a bath and a little chat to you, and soon dinner.’ There was Caroly Piaser next door in the silk factory, to talk desultory business with; in the house itself Emma, the cook, who had come to Freya as a young maid just before the war, and her husband Checchi, the gardener. It was a pleasing and solid routine, and if Freya was at the same time worrying at doubts it was in her disciplined nature to keep them firmly suppressed. Most revealing, perhaps, are the passages for Traveller’s Prelude that she was writing at about this time concerning her mother, when she came to marry her father in remote Dartmoor in 1880: ‘It is far better to know the limits of one’s resistance at once and put up as it were a little friendly fence around the private ground.’
Freya with Bernard Berenson at Asolo, 1955
One day, she carried the first three chapters of her book over to Bernard Berenson at I Tatti in Fiesole and read them aloud to him after dinner by the fire. Berenson fell deeply asleep. Freya was both cross and amused. He ‘bore this sad lugubrious symptom out by saying that he thinks this sort of book (plain chronological) not very exciting’, she reported d
espondently to Jock Murray. ‘I have an awful feel he may be right.’
Stewart appeared in Asolo for Christmas. The roses and jasmine were out and the weather blue and crisp. There were charades and parties in the local villas, occasions on which Stewart, funny, erudite, speaking several languages, shone. Marina Volpi, the friend who had got Flora out of prison in 1942 and whom Freya had once approvingly described as a ‘fascinating neighbour with dark purple fingernails and tiny Russian boots and high heels’, gave her customary sumptuous Christmas dinner under the Veronese frescoes of Maser, preceded by Mass in the little chapel at the bottom of the drive. Dinner ended at three. Freya had bought a Vespa, to the concern of the Asolani, for she had no notion of how to stop, and went off to dinner parties, in long Arab dress, covered in jewels, confident that a manservant would be at the door to catch the machine and control it before she tumbled off. Freya was outraged when Marina Volpi, as outspoken as Freya with her friends, declared before a large gathering: ‘You are a marvellous writer, but you drive like a dog.’
In the New Year, Freya and Stewart, who shared a sense of adventure as well as many friends, set off for a tour of Tuscany by Vespa, despite heavy snow. Freya regarded it as an excellent substitute for a horse, able to tackle much the same sort of country, and was furious when ice forced them to take to the trains.
Both Stewart and Freya had close and concerned friends in official circles. Efforts to find him another post, better suited to both their lives, had evidently been made, for when they reached Rome there was a telegram informing him that he was to be sent to Benghazi in Cyrenaica, under British rule since the end of the war. It was Arab-speaking, little visited and covered in Roman and Greek remains. Freya went with him, taking furniture and books. The Vespa was to travel out behind.
In 1950, what is now Libya was split into two, Tripolitania, prosperous and lively, and Cyrenaica, a long strip of rather barren coastline. In each was a British resident, and a number of British advisers. Cyrenaica, however, also had Emir Idris, who was to be King of Libya once the two areas were merged and given a constitution; a fragile man in his late fifties with a drooping white moustache and laceless tennis shoes. Benghazi, on the sea, was a town of little distinction apart from a few streets of Italian colonial architecture. It had taken two years to clear the rubble of the war and many of the houses were still in ruins. Nevertheless, Freya was delighted: ‘all the cheerful squalor, the gay dishevelled dirt and beauty mixed of the East, the dazzle of the sea so much more brilliant than any other’. The Perownes had been allocated one of a row of semi-detached houses, near to the head of Chancery. Freya took one look and refused it. Catching sight, across the harbour, of a collection of more isolated houses, she found one to be vacant. It had a garden, and a well, but no staircase, so the interior was gutted to fit one in. Here, late in April, on what had been a hideous fascist sideboard, relic of an Italian predecessor, she started work on the second volume of her autobiography, Beyond Euphrates, stopping occasionally to take the Vespa for a spin into Benghazi. The measured, reflective tone shows how far she was now able to distance life from the discipline of work, though even in the most considered of philosophical statements something of her new anxieties was apparent. ‘It is wise’, she was writing, ‘to discover what our happiness is made of. Of the ingredients of which mine is made I think the presence of goodness comes first, and the affection of a few people I can understand and care about is second. The third is sunshine. After these and close upon them, comes some sort of daily beauty, preferably a spacious view; and after that and side by side – expressions perhaps of the same desire – domestic servants of an old-fashioned friendly sort, and an atmosphere of sequence in time, a regular procession and not a disorderly scramble towards eternity. I like to have as much as possible of the background of this procession in sight, and could never live happily for long in a country where no winding footpaths have been made by the steps of my predecessors … I think that these pleasures – all receptive – are more essential to me than my own work. They mean more than any applause or esteem, for the voice of other people only touches if it carries affection; and I can imagine nothing more barren than to be admired and not loved.’
Cyrenaica was not easy for Stewart. A backwater in career terms, and regarded in the Foreign Office as an agreeable and not over-strenuous post, it had been efficiently administered for some years by a group of advisers all of whom had carefully mapped out their patches and made their contacts. Stewart, as chief adviser to the Minister of the Interior, was, remembers a colleague, ‘a bit of a fifth wheel on a coach’. Soon he was pining nostalgically for Baghdad, where his epigrams were admired and his laughing easy manner had made him many friends. But in more ways it was harder for Freya. She was in her late fifties; her style, her tastes, her interests were all fixed: she enjoyed travel in rough places, and the remote desert and mountain people, and she valued the company of those like herself, travellers, scholars, writers. Benghazi was not a fashionable place. The civil servants posted there were often very nice, but they were rarely very amusing. A strong air of cosy respectability hung over the town. Freya was never good in suburbia. ‘The only way to survive was to muck in,’ says Lavender Goddard-Wilson, who became a friend. Freya did not muck in. It was not exactly that she felt superior; she simply had no talent for it. Sitting near her at gatherings, Lavender Goddard-Wilson would watch her eyes, missing nothing, what Peter Coats in India had called her ability to play ‘oculist to a hawk’.
For their part, the foreign community were somewhat baffled by Freya; most had never heard of her and knew little about the Middle East, having come to Cyrenaica from the Sudan. They looked on her, kindly but with no admiration, as a little odd in shape and appearance.
Whenever they could, the Perownes got away. In under an hour’s drive they could be in marvellous country, on sites described by Herodotus. At weekends they went to Cyrene, 1,000 feet above the plain, the great city where baths, temples and a theatre had been dug by Italians. One day, Freya went fox-hunting on the Barce plain with the 16th Lancers. To friends who had lost husbands or sons in the desert war, she wrote describing the battlefields, the derelict tanks and armoured cars still littering the sand. In May, Wavell died. ‘It leaves a great hole in life,’ she wrote to Cockerell, ‘one of the great men gone and there are not so many.’
It was obvious now that the marriage was not going well. When out on picnics, or dining with friends, it was Stewart who held forth on the antiquities; Freya, uncharacteristically, seemed increasingly withdrawn. Away from him, her letters were reproachful: ‘Hope you are happier on your own! I felt I was just in the way.’ And, on another occasion, ‘I came away sadly yesterday – sad, sad reasons. It is towards the end of life, so perhaps it doesn’t matter.’ Apart for a while, Freya’s letters would grow fond again.
In the summer of 1951 the post of British adviser to the Ministry of the Interior in Benghazi was suddenly eliminated. Stewart was temporarily without a job. Then a short position, advising the British delegates to the United Nations on Arab affairs, came up. With some misgivings, Freya accompanied him to Paris. While Stewart was at the Palais de Chaillot, Freya went to drawing classes, and yearned after a Dessé grey evening ‘gown scarfed with black chiffon and held in a sort of milky way of diamond stars’. She had not lost her sharpness. Deeply scathing of the United Nations, she remarked to Nigel Clive: ‘I don’t want ever anymore to do Public Things. I want to make a good end.’
By that summer the marriage was over. It was a bitter time for Freya. She had hoped, perhaps even convinced herself, that she would be able to mould a satisfactory marriage out of what had certainly been a good friendship with Stewart and that at last she would have one person in the world who would belong to her. But Stewart was not mouldable, nor was he, as he himself remarked, Prince Albert. She felt it most strongly because she saw it as a profound failure, of a kind she could not quite understand or accept; so long a practitioner of will, she was not used to
failure. Once more, as after her mother had died, she now felt in a ‘room far too big for one’.
‘He doesn’t want me, he wants a home and a lot of odds and ends,’ she wrote to Nancy Astor. ‘But marriage is more than that … Friendship is as far as the thermometer will rise, and there it must rest for the present.’ She stated that she would give up the name Perowne; it would be Stark again, Mrs Stark this time.
IN SEARCH OF ALEXANDER
CHAPTER EIGHT
Freya was not given to self-recrimination, nor did she ever permit herself the luxury of prolonged despondency. Travel had always worked well for her; it would work well again, and this time it would be in a new part of the world. The Arab East now receded, and she was rarely to go back there again, except on visits to friends; Asia Minor was about to take over. To the new continent she brought all the enthusiasm and sense of adventure that had filled her as she set sail from Venice, bound for Brummana, almost thirty years earlier.
Before setting off, before even mapping out the routes and goals that characterised every journey, Freya arrived in London for a grand tour. It was to be exhausting, meeting friends and acquaintances without break, but it was possibly the best of all the London seasons, and it set a style and a pattern for the yearly visits to follow.
It began with receiving an honorary doctorate from Glasgow University. Academic receptions, full of cultured and leisurely good conversation, robed ceremonial, the sense of timeless ritual, all this was what Freya liked best in British life, and she paused in Paris on the way for a number of suitable outfits. The three days of festivities over, she looked in on the Scottish islands, then set off south for a round of friends. There was Sissinghurst, where she found Vita Nicolson wandering around in orange trousers, with a wolfhound at her heels; Hatfield House, where she compared breakfast conversation with Lord Salisbury to a ‘thoroughbred horse, always pushing on, anxious to find where you want to go and to go there’; to Cliveden, where an unhappy Nancy Astor told her she wanted to become a saint, so that everyone might feel her influence when she came into a room; and then to Windsor, to the Gowries, Pamela Hore-Ruthven’s father-in-law, Lieutenant-Governor and Deputy Constable of Windsor Castle. In between came a lunch in Henley, with Peter and Celia Fleming. ‘One’s friends are wonderfully good,’ Freya noted.
Freya Stark Page 8