Читать книгу Good as her Word: Selected Journalism - Lorna Sage, Lorna Sage - Страница 20

LESLEY BLANCH HAD JUST returned to the south of France from a visit to Turkey. ‘I’m at home anywhere and nowhere,’ she’d said, and I saw why when I climbed through the jungly tunnel of foliage in her steep little garden and stepped through the looking-glass into her Persian parlour, all latticed windows, low divans and overlapping rugs. ‘The Orient of my mind,’ she announced jokily, with nonetheless something of the air of a satisfied magician – a small, ageless, quicksilver woman in a striped cotton jellaba, who reclined leaning on an elbow to answer my questions.

These were, first, inevitably, about her style of living. She must be a ruthlessly practical dreamer, I realised, to have stamped her desires so clearly on everything surrounding her. So we started with gardens. The romantic green twilight, she said, is achieved by concentrating not on flowers but on leaves – ‘leaves of every kind, mimosa, cypress, fig, jasmine, thickets of bamboo, oranges and lemons and datura … If you sleep under the datura it’s supposed to send you mad for love, but, she added with an air of gallant regret, ‘there’s no one sleeping under mine.’

She has lived here alone now for 10 years, but it’s not the first house she’s ‘made Turkish’: there was an earlier one up the hill in Roquebrune village which she shared with her husband writer-diplomat Romain Gary 30 years ago. After their divorce she tried Paris but hated its greyness so settled again for the south. ‘I craved the sun. I never feel the need for people, or much else, if it shines on me …’

Her love of sunshine is not the only reason, however, why she has not returned to England. (She became a French citizen on marrying dashing Gary in 1946.) Animal quarantine regulations of ‘pig-headed rigidity’ (I’m to make sure to put this in my piece) also keep her pets and hence herself out. She loves animals – ‘but for my travels there’d be a menagerie’. Indeed, pictures of animals are everywhere: an Indian painting of a tree-bear, a pathetic Victorian spaniel needing a home, stray naïve paintings, taken in, ‘out of charity’.

And it seems to be true that her things are her pets, as it were. The room is furnished with fetish-objects; everything has a story, a sentimental footnote, a personal ‘point’ – ‘I prefer things to people, you don’t have to entertain things, they keep you company and they’re loyal …’

She’s not, of course, a mere armchair traveller herself, but she knows how they tick. That was the secret of her first book and surprise best-seller The Wilder Shores of Love in 1954, with its shamelessly romantic evocation of the lives of French and English women who turned their backs on the grey North (‘comfort maybe, but hysterical comfort’) and chose the passionate East. ‘At the time Romain was First Secretary to the French Embassy at Berne in Switzerland – which I found a place of absolutely hallucinatory boredom – and I took off to North Africa, to the Sahara, and began thinking about other ladies who’d turned East. The East attracted them romantically and adventurously; they willed things into a pattern they liked. It’s rare … You need imagination and will combined for this sort of transformation of your life – not into fiction exactly, but into something which becomes fact in the living of it.’

Her new biography on French writer Pierre Loti – traveller, romantic, egocentric and shameless and passionate poseur, who was admired by the adolescent Proust and even by an ironic Henry James – is again an intimate portrait, a kind of conspiracy with her dubious and nowadays rather discredited hero. ‘A wonderful combination of subject and author,’ says her publisher Philip Ziegler of Collins, with the air of a man who perhaps got more than he bargained for. Not that Lesley Blanch idolises Loti as his contemporary fans did: ‘I would have found him maddening, not at all attractive, despite all the women … imagine, a midget charmer.’

What she recognises in Pierre Loti is the completeness of his dedication to fantasy: the house in provincial Rochefort that concealed a lavish private mosque behind its quiet, bourgeois frontage; the discontented spirit that sent him off again and again on new journeys, new affairs of the heart; the romantic hubris that drove him to reject his own appearance (‘I was not my type,’ is his immortal line) and to try every means from gymnastics to lifts and cosmetics to transform it. She does, of course, find him frequently funny, whereas he seems to have found himself grandly pathetic. Nonetheless, the identification is close.

One thing she certainly shares with Loti is his hatred of the colonising culture he himself (as a French naval officer) was a part of. Like him, she is fierce against the West’s arrogant materialism – what she sums up in shorthand as ‘machine-mindedness, big business’: ‘West’ spells true alienation to her.

Her response to this is a combination of domestic retreat and rebellion. She will rhapsodise about clothes: ‘I’ve a beautiful collection of exotica … gold-embroidered velvet jackets, pantaloons, Turkish court robes, men’s kaftans and burnous …’ She’s a skilled needlewoman, too, and used to create pictures in gros point of places she’d visited. ‘I’d do the picture as I’d go, no tracing in advance, just stick in the needle and start on the Nile or a tea-house in Afghanistan … Like the heroines of Wilder Shores, she finds the habits of submission exciting because they’re strange – a role to play.

Otherwise, she’s all for rebellion: ‘I’ve been a rebel throughout my life. I am disciplined about some things, but I’ve no social disciplines … I haven’t wanted to be as selfish as I probably am; I do have regrets that I haven’t been more understanding of certain people – the few I’ve really cared about.

Again, she finds parallels with Loti – ‘he had nearly everything, but there’s something that makes people miserable’ – and with Romain Gary, who committed suicide two years ago: ‘Adventurous people cut and run’.

As my time with her ran out, and I was about to plunge again into the green pool of her garden, she suddenly sounded hungry for change, as though she might strike camp any minute: ‘I might live in Turkey, I’m very tempted, I long to have a house-slave, someone who’d make me more time to write … North Africa perhaps? They do cherish the old, which is a very glorious thought.’

But then, her great gift to her readers has all along been her romantic restlessness and sheer dissatisfaction. It’s this quality that makes her writing addictive – what she calls in a nice phrase from the new book, ‘the habit of faraway places’.