Spirit of Place: Letters and Essays on Travel

by Lawrence Durrell

  And the woman of this landscape? At certain times she has been better-loved and understood than at others; though she has always been feared. I think the Greeks got nearest to treating her as such a rare animal deserves to be treated. Pythagoras included her among his pupils as did Apollonius. Epicurus built up a philosophy to share with her which is perhaps the most perfect ever made—a philosophy of poetry which excluded her from nothing. She was granted the importance and the affection which today she finds only in Paris. Indeed, it is not simply a whim to see that France, even today, is as near as modern man has got to Ancient Greece.

  The two worlds, northern and southern, have maintained a curious dialogue in art and culture. They hate much about each other, but they envy more. Perhaps, unconsciously, they feel that each is complementary to the other. But the axis (the spiritual axis) which passes through them crosses the centre of France, from Alsace to Provence, from beer to wine, from Gothic to Romance. It passes, like white light, through the brilliant, discordantly radiant prism of Paris which will always remain the mediatrix between these two aspects of European temperament. What gives the French temperament its balance and form is precisely the uneasy polarity between these two influences. What gives France the enormous range and span and force of its art is, quite literally, that the French artist has the best of both worlds. He can choose, so to speak, the mixture he needs for his work. The spark of French genius leaps between the two poles, northern and southern, Puritan and Pagan. Where else can you span the two worlds so effectively—that of Rabelais and Pascal, that of Stendhal and Chateaubriand, that of Camus and Genet? It was through France that the Mediterranean woman projected her power and influence northward to inflame the imagination of the slow and ox-like northerners. In the time of Shakespeare, the Elizabethan heroine was really a Mediterranean. Stendhal, who discovered Shakespeare in middle age, was delighted to find that his heroines shared many of the qualities of energy and passion that he admired among his beloved Italians. “How he Italianizes!” he writes with delight. In the Elizabethan age, the power of the Italian tradition in feeling was a marked one on the stage—and it alarmed the Puritans who were always attacking this southern infatuation.

  The Englishman Italianate

  Is the Devil incarnate.

  With the political and religious broils which severed the British from Europe and inflicted on them the deep psychic wound which has not healed today, this vein of feeling became exhausted. Nowadays, the British artist is still vainly trying to join the Common Market in arts and letters.

  Here an anecdote comes to mind which will perhaps describe the Mediterranean woman better than a dozen historical generalizations which the reader might find arguable. During the last war an Italian lady of Alexandria who sympathized with the Allies gave a weekly tea-party for the troops stationed in town. To this little party she always invited a dozen or so of the prettiest and most eligible Italian ladies of the town thinking that their beauty and their conversation would be some compensation to the allied soldiers and sailors for the harsh life of danger which was theirs. On one of these occasions a young American was present, very shy, extremely polite, and undoubtedly inhibited by the beauty of the ladies and the magnificence of the house in which he found himself. A young lady approached him and began to converse. In order to show himself anxious to make a good impression, the young man, after racking his brains for a subject, took out his fountain-pen (a very modern one) and demonstrated some of its gadgets to her. They discussed it. The subject once exhausted, he showed her some even more modern gadgets on his expensive wrist-watch and chronometer combined. They discussed it. Finally he passed to his cigarette-lighter which was also a marvel. The young woman put up with this for some time, but finally she leaned forward, touched his wrist gently with her forefinger, and smiling beatifically at the Anglo-Saxon said: “Yes—but what do you feel?” at the same time placing one hand upon her heart. There was no answer to this artless question. Stendhal would have been ravished, but the youth choked on his tea and took himself off as fast as he could.

  It is the sacredness of emotion, the uncritical enjoyment of feeling for its own sake, that is one of the keys to the Mediterranean woman’s character.

  “In Italy,” writes Stendhal, “a country totally devoid of the vanity of France and England, every man laughs at his neighbour and even despises and detests him. His judgement of the arts is founded solely upon his own feelings. The Italians … form a total contrast, it is clear, to the inhabitants of France and England who are better off politically, but who have been deprived of all individual character by their ambition to become, in every sense of the terms, a fashionable and well-bred copy of a certain conventional pattern. Unlike the Englishman and the Frenchman, the Italian listens only to the promptings of his own heart, employing all the energy of his character to give predominance to his own peculiar mode of feeling.” Our author, who divined the Italian character so clearly, remains in my opinion somewhat unfair to his own country. (The symbol of Marianne is still quite recognizably Mediterranean, but not that of Boadicea.) Stendhal, who came of what we might call puritan inheritance, simply longed to free himself from it and espouse the pagan side of the national character. He never quite succeeded. He hated all that was cold, vain, and calculating and loved everything that was energetic, passionate, simple, and generous. The mystery to me is why his sojourn in Marseilles did not teach him that the spirit he so admired was the very lifeblood of the French Midi.

  But if this direct abandonment to her feelings is one of the great strengths of the Mediterranean woman, it is also one of her signal weaknesses. It has given her great powers but it has also enfeebled her political and social position. Men have not been slow to take advantage of this factor; she is extremely male-dominated in the countries of the Mediterranean where cheerful use is made of her as a beast of burden and a money-raiser. In Greece, in Egypt, it is she who does the rough work, carrying and fetching, while the male is content to sit under a tree and fan himself or talk politics. He seems to be quite content with his role—why should he not be? He has the pleasure of begetting the children, she the trouble of bringing them up. Indeed, perhaps her bondage is a willing and self-created one. Who else is responsible for all the truly Mediterranean fetishes which have grown up about the idea of a male child? We confidently assert that Anglo-Saxon males are mother-fixated, but whoever had watched the way Mediterranean mothers bring up their male offspring would hesitate to be so dogmatic. Before her son can walk or talk, the Mediterranean mother has crowned him the king of her life. He can do no wrong, and his sisters soon learn an appropriate female attitude of inferiority before this young god whose word is law. In some ways the bondage of the Mediterranean female may be said to begin in the nursery; she can thereafter only recover her independence by the creation of a male child of her own. Her self-respect as a woman is deeply bound up with the question of whether she can bear sons or not. This mother-son link seems to me every bit as strong as that described by the psychologists in the North, and in some ways even such a great novel of the Oedipus complex as Sons and Lovers could be translated into Mediterranean terms and remain true to its thesis. (I have noticed over and over again that seasick Greeks and Italians and Spaniards are apt to call upon their mothers when in extremis—often in the accents of five-year-old children.)

  But if the Mediterranean woman spoils her male child the balance is often restored by the pattern and rhythm of her family life which is unvarying in its respect for certain basic values. The importance of the family as a tribe is perhaps the most important aspect of the matter. The family holds together as a living unit and provides a frame inside which there is room for every generation. Granny, for example, whether you find her in Naples or Madrid, in Marseilles or Piraeus, is the dominating member of the Latin household. She is not only loved and admired but also deeply respected; more important than this, she keeps on working right to the end. In England today, when a couple marries the old people are rel
egated to the scrap-heap, so to speak; to the furnished hotel on the South Coast. They are no longer useful or productive. In the North, the idea of a family (look at our advertisements) has come to mean only mother, father, and the children. In the Mediterranean it is a whole tribe, shading away on all sides to the most remote corners of cousinship or aunthood. So complicated does this cobweb become that some nations (I am thinking especially of the Greeks) have a full vocabulary to express the fine distinctions of relationship. I once heard a man say to another: “Please go to the hotel in Athens and give this letter to my brother’s second cousin’s aunt Loula—the one by marriage and not the divorced one.” It is possible that this notion of family pattern has been helped and engendered by Catholicism as some people have said; but I think this explanation does not go far enough, for it exists in Orthodox countries as well. It existed among the ancient Greeks.

  The Mediterranean woman, then, while from many points of view she may seem enslaved, is nevertheless the queen bee of the family hive. She is the beloved tyrant of her grandchildren.

  Is she herself religious? Not in the strictest meaning of the word. An anthropologist would say that she was more superstitious than religious. This is because in her passion she is wholly uncritical. She loves her church as she loves her man or her son—with a completely unrationalized self-surrender. She refuses to make a theology out of her passions. Moral questions, questions of principle or judgement, do not sway her. Her life has no critical apparatus so to speak. She has never bothered to worry herself with all the paradoxes of existence. Life for her is as simple as a glass of wine—and she drinks her wine without water. This is what makes me suspect that all the changes of politics and history are, from her point of view, illusory; she has always remained a pagan, devoutly and unconsciously pagan. This is so apparent to anyone who watches her at prayer in a church of Marseilles or Naples! Even if you go further south and watch her Orthodox counterpart praying at the miracle-working shrine of the Virgin on the island of Tinos on the 15th of August every year. See how she attacks the shrine with her prayers, as if she would wrench, by the irresistible force of her prayer, the required miracle from it. No, she does not “pray,” for the very word smacks of self-conscious intercessions with forces which she fears; she besieges her God as she does her lover. She is importuning an earth-force, something elemental which existed long before the Gods were condensed into conceptual forms.

  Fundamentally she enjoys everything, even her own despair, with a vibrating innocence.… If you like, we could consider this a sort of passionate blindness—a limitation. Yet, if it is one, it effectively blinds her to many things which bedevil us northerners, and which we would gladly shed. I recall that in many years of lecturing about literature to boys and girls I never succeeded in making Mediterranean students fully grasp the literary notions which have grown up about two northern concepts: namely “Spleen” and “Ennui.” As for “Angst” I did not even dare to try.

  This portrait, I know, lacks much fine detail: it is too black and white. Nevertheless, it is the best that one can do in words. Luckier men have pictured her in other media more successfully, more truthfully. In the Pomona of Maillol, for example, you see the young earth Goddess that she is, fruitful and heavy-breasted. She is a spirit of place and not simply “a woman.” She defeats words, as all true goddesses must.

  Finally, let us talk a little about her as a lover. I do not use the word “wife” for that to her is a duty she performs perfectly and unselfconsciously. She is destined to be a wife and she knows it and accepts. She is born to be a lover. And when she is in love she shows her Mediterranean character at its highest potential. We know the phrase of Shakespeare about Cleopatra: “Age shall not wither her nor custom stale her infinite variety.” This phrase which echoes in the European subconscious and which may be thought by some to be only a piece of poetic licence is in fact a factual statement, and as true as a stock report. The infinite variety comes out of her innocence. Whether she wears a pistol and chooses her own lovers by force (as Bouboulina of the Greek Independence days) or whether she will have no lovers because she is in love with someone whom she cannot have—the pattern is the same: a totality. She can die for love as easily as a bird leaves a branch. In the North we have not begun to live for it. She can let her sensuality overturn a whole world if it is given free rein, but on the other hand she can become an anchorite because no other men (except the one she loves) seem worth loving. It is this comprehensiveness of her passion which can inspire great poets, can inspire men to become eunuchs for her sake. (That is why she is dangerous to the ordinary run of men.) In fact, she was born to sire poets, and she will continue to try to do so as long as olive-trees and asphodels exist, and as long as the blue waves of the Mediterranean roll upon these deserted beaches. Who would want her otherwise?

  Three Roses of Grenoble

  Published as “The Wordly University of Grenoble”

  in Holiday. Philadelphia. January 1959.

  “IMAY TELL THE reader,” writes Stendhal, “that the Dauphiné has its own way of feeling, lively, stubborn, and analytical, which I have met with in no other country. To the seeing eye music, landscape, and the novel should all change with each shift of three degrees of latitude. For instance at Valence, on the Rhône, the Provençal nature ends.…”

  These observations are not the less exact for being over a hundred years old, and you become conscious of their truth as you take the great motor highway which branches off north-eastward from Valence, describing a long slow ellipse towards Grenoble. Feature by feature Provence flickers out with the hard blue accentuation of its sunlight. The olives are the first to desert you, and next the salty twang of the southern accent; later still the queer-pitched roofs of Provence give place to the high awkward style of building which betrays its concern not so much for wind and heat alone as for snow and rain. The meadows are damp. Everything begins to go up on stilts to keep dry. Only the warm rosy Marseilles tiles cross the border with you to bring a fugitive light to the lichen-encrusted roofs of barns, and to blend softly with the grey of slate or the lacklustre of lead.… And as you move in towards the old university town of Grenoble the Alps begin to rise, tier on tier, with their cold fuming peaks buried in the shifting mists. Hereabouts it is becoming apple country, hazy with mists, where the roads hover in and out of sleeping valleys and dense woodlands. Suddenly the romantic landscapes of Claude, of Poussin, become quite real to the traveller. Those islands half buried in mists, those old fortresses carved upon the green density of glittering foliage, those limitless prospects of woodland and lake—they are all real! Yet one always believed them to be the inventions of romantic fancy. No, in Dauphiné you suddenly realize that the romantic painters were simply copyists of nature after all.

  Yet though the predominant feeling of the landscape is Alpine you notice fields and fields of tobacco—the Régie plantations they must be (government monopoly)—which argue summers hardly less burning and intense than those of Provence. These valleys, then, are sun traps lending themselves to easy exploitation by the industrious Dauphinois. And the red roses which decorate the arms of modern Grenoble are no imaginary emblems either, for the highroad runs between huge nurseries packed with them, gleaming magnificently in the autumn air.

  The leaves had already begun to fall when I reached Grenoble, and the air was spicy with the first sharp hints of the turning year. It was perhaps the best moment to pay it a visit for it was relatively empty, the university not yet in session, and there was an opportunity to visit and assess its faculties and to talk to professors who were then preparing for the approaching academic year, and who would later be too burdened with work perhaps to turn a patient ear to the enquiries of visiting journalists. The town, too, with its spacious leafy squares and avenues showed to its best advantage in the softening light of early autumn. Its site is truly magnificent, pitched in the lee of towering hills and thrown across the confluence point of two swift rivers, the Drac and the Isèr
e. The Alps nudge the sky at the end of every street. Grenoble is dominated by the old fortress in which Laclos wrote perhaps the cruellest book on human love—Les Liaisons Dangereuses. (“It is not cruel!” said Martine puffing at her Gauloise. “But simply exact and unsentimental. Some of the dryness of the professional artilleryman comes through the style. Target-practice.”)

  But here I should explain: apart from the official introductions with which I had armed myself, I had also taken the precaution of bringing a visiting card for a student—in the form of a twelve livre bonbonne of wine. The old sea-captain had lurched down the hill with this wicker-covered trophy saying: “If you are going to Grenoble look up my daughter Martine, and take her this wine.” It was a lucky stroke of fortune, for it was through Martine that I was able to make contact with life at the student level, without which this article would be simply an assembly of cold facts, thrown down one against the other. (“And don’t drive too fast,” the old man had added. “It is bad for the wine. And not on bumpy roads either. It is also bad for the wine. And tell Martine to let it rest and breathe after its journey. And ask her why she insists on staying up there in the summer. We have a right to know. She mustn’t work too hard.”)

  Of Grenoble itself I knew relatively little. I had visited it many years before, but fleetingly, as a tourist. I did know, however, that its most illustrious son had loathed it, and had painted its portrait with a savagery that seemed to me now (walking the streets with Martine in her blue jeans and duffle coat) somewhat unmerited. “Grenoble is to me like the memory of an abominable attack of indigestion; there is nothing dangerous in it but it is utterly disgusting!” So writes Stendhal; but I think that if he could have heard his words quoted with affectionate laughter by the young woman of twenty he might have been tempted to modify them.