Freya Stark (8 page)

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 despondently 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.

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.

Then, at the beginning of a wet August week,
came a final visit to Houghton Hall in Norfolk, to stay with the Marchioness of Cholmondeley, a close friend of Cockerell’s whom she had recently met with Duff and Diana Cooper at the British Embassy in Paris. At Houghton, Freya commented, ‘there is not the tremendous sense of history of Hatfield, but a pleasant liveableness of civilisation’. (It was Lady Cholmondeley who suggested to her that she should wear a lace cap, as in the eighteenth century, and she wore one ever after.)

On her second day, Queen Mary came to tea. Freya was always a keen student of clothes and grandeur; her regard for royalty was like that for Empire, somewhat unquestioning. In a letter to Stewart she described the scene; if a little much, a bit too admiring, it has none the less the same precision, the same sure eye, that she had brought to her tales of harem life in Baghdad. ‘Queen Mary came at 4.20 and left at 7.15. She was very erect in grey glacé kid shoes, the kind of 1910 with little waisted heels; and a Liberty silk of pink flowers on pale blue under a pale blue coat with little cape, and pale blue marabou; a high tulle collar of the sort held up with whalebone; a pearl necklace, diamond brooch and earrings of a little diamond and huge pearls; a very pink make-up, and blonde-grey hair nicely waved; and a pale blue toque with a bunch of pink and yellow primulas and a white narcissus among them; and a
grey silk parasol with a Fabergé handle of crystal and diamonds. She came along very anxious not to get her feet wet, with Lady Wyndham (whom I had met years ago at Petworth) very dowdy behind her with untidy hair. Perhaps a Lady-in-Waiting ought to be a little dowdy?’ (In Freya’s eyes there was never much charity towards a royal servant.)

More, certainly, than the pleasure in grandeur of this English tour, was the reaffirmation of friendships. Marriage had been a failure; friends were not. Freya, more keenly than anyone, understood about friends; she knew how well they had to be looked after, how constantly tended. Lord David Cecil, who had met her regularly since their encounter at Petworth in the thirties and had greatly come to value the way her ‘sharp, observant mind tethered romanticism to reality’, now counted her among the dozen or so people who had made the most impression on him. Some of this came from her attention to friendship. ‘Like us,’ he says, ‘she always rated it very high. I don’t know many people to whom it meant as much as to her and to us. We had made friends because she was fascinating and unusual and because she wanted to. That’s an essential condition.’ Many others agree. Friendship with Freya could be demanding; she could be unprincipled, even merciless; but she was possessed of some rare quality that made people
seek her out, and, once taken as a friend, many were willing to become devoted slaves. In return she made their lives seem somehow better. There was something about her unquestioning assumption that to be worthwhile people must be in control, and not ruled by circumstance, that made her approval very important.

On 4 September 1952 Freya boarded SS
Iskenderun
in Piraeus, heading for Smyrna on the west coast of Turkey, where she had a friend in David Balfour, the Consul-General, a former Greek Orthodox priest who took to diplomacy after concluding that ‘man is just one of God’s mistakes’, and Seton Lloyd, who had been Director of the British Institute of Archaeology in Ankara since 1949. She had formed an idea that she would take Herodotus as her guide and visit the places he wrote about, to have a ‘thread to run one’s exploring on’. After a few days of wandering around sites she wrote tentatively to Jock Murray that it might even make a short book,
Talking with Herodotus
. ‘Curiosity led me,’ she was to explain, ‘pure, disinterested curiosity, the human thrust in time.’

Freya was forming a pattern for her travels. Reading played a fundamental part, and before she had been in Turkey a fortnight she set off for Ankara, to spend
some days with Seton and Ulrica Lloyd, reading in the Institute library. They remember her visit well. She was expected to arrive for lunch. One o’clock passed, with no sign of a taxi. The afternoon wore on. Then a message came to say that she was on her way. At nine, they sat down to dinner. At 9.30 a jeep stopped at the door. White with dust, stiff and bruised after fourteen hours of appalling roads, breakdowns, near crashes and unexplained delays, Freya stumbled up the stairs. The Lloyds made to usher her straight to a bath and bed, preparing themselves for a recital of travel disasters. Freya brushed them aside; finding the food still laid, she settled briskly in her place, put her elbows on the table, and began to talk of Alexander. She had come to Ankara to discuss history, and discuss it she would.

It was a good time to be in Turkey. The weather was excellent, travel was cheap and Turkish teachers easy to find. (On her own, Freya practised Turkish using translations of the Bible and Eric Ambler.) In October, David Balfour asked her to go with him to Patmos and Rhodes on his five-ton motor ketch
Elphin
and Freya set off gladly, with all the delight of a fresh departure. For a month they toured the islands, swimming by day, talking history at night. She left the
Elphin
to wander in the lower Meander Valley, then travelled on to Ephesus, Didyma and Miletus.
She was planning a third book of essays, based on landscapes and ruins. On 11 November she wrote to Jock Murray: ‘I begin to feel it is absolutely necessary to travel to Asia Minor. Rome and even Athens are stops on the way, but here is the source of all that has made us, all the ideas, all the patterns. And these Ionians seem to have been unaware that other human beings might want their world … I do like barbarians on the whole.’

Freya again was on her own, walking, hiring jeeps or taxis, and even occasionally a pony. The weather turned very cold; the Meander flooded. Undeterred, she kept going; she regretted only, she told friends, the absence of a little danger, such a stimulating ingredient in Arab travel and sadly lacking in Turkey. The Lloyds, observing her progress, were overwhelmed by her doggedness, her absolute refusal to give in or complain, though frequently uncomfortable, unable to make herself understood and totally alone. A friend who joined up with her briefly during one of the stages in her route remembers her ‘long baggy pants, a long Russian coat tied up with a golden cord and a pink umbrella, trotting through the rain, indestructibly brave’.

At the beginning of December she moved on to Cyprus, to stay with her architect friend Austen Harrison, from where she wrote to tell Lady
Cholmondeley that she had visited fifty-five ancient Greek sites and cities in less than three months and encountered only one other fellow tourist, at Pergamum. To Jock Murray, she reported, ‘Really this autumn has been very happy, spent with men (which I like) in real friendliness and nothing further. How restful and agreeable, and one of the pleasures of age to enjoy friendship undisturbed by oneself or others. One doesn’t need anything very passionate, but just the gentleness of life, the eye that looks pleased when you enter, the feeling that there is no barrier.’

The serenity was real, but she could not always keep it up. Asolo, on her own, she found particularly hard. She was there, alone, on her sixtieth birthday and though at work, in an intensely self-disciplined way, on
Ionia: a Quest
, an account of her autumn travels with Herodotus, she was again worrying about money. As usual, Jock Murray, the most devoted and constant of friends, was the recipient of her reproaches about the inconstancy of people, just as he was, in letters to others, made the villain when she felt in need of consolation. ‘Jock’, she wrote, after one of his visits, to Pamela Hore-Ruthven (now Cooper, having just remarried), ‘was so overworked and strained … a state when all intimacy goes, because one is always being warned off the things that come naturally. How few people seem to realise that friendship really does
mean talking about the things that one is
feeling
and with no guard, so that one can for that little interval banish fear from one’s daily life.’ As a friend, Freya could be exorbitant in her demands; those who knew her well now sensed her acute loneliness in a new and sometimes fretful tone. Postponed visits, letters not answered quickly enough provoked stern rebukes.

There were few periods of unhappiness in her life out of which Freya was not able to travel, and write, her way.
Ionia: a Quest
was completed at great speed and, deeply relieved, saying that she felt like a Victorian mother marrying off a daughter, she sent off the manuscript to Jock Murray, and set her mind resolutely on an eight-month absence in Asia Minor. Alexander, mentioned over the table in Ankara to Seton Lloyd, had taken hold of her. ‘I wanted’, she said later, ‘to discover what Alexander found in men’s minds when he marched down from the Granicus in 334 BC.’

But first she felt she had to learn good Turkish. By February 1954 she was back in Crete, studying several hours each day. Soon after, she reached the Turkish coast, at Issus, imagining the battle as it unfolded, the troops, the cavalry, the ‘wide grey bed where Alexander and his white-plumed helmet pushed in with his guard about him …’ These were soldiers as she admired them most, who ‘thought fighting
natural and liked it’. What she was enjoying doing was conjuring up history in its rightful settings, relating what she read to what she saw, in bold sweeps that took in men, their characters and their campaigns. It was something new for her, and as it made its way into her writing, it rapidly found admirers.

In June came one of her more unsuccessful journeys. Misfortune took, as it often did with Freya, the shape not of the landscape, which rarely failed her, but that of a fellow traveller, whose ways she found uncongenial. The feeling was mutual.

Not long after the war had ended, Bernard Berenson had introduced Freya to a young painter called Derek Hill. He was fascinated by her and found her very charming. They talked about architecture and history. When, some four years later, she was planning her long tour of Turkey, she met him again at I Tatti and they agreed to make part of the journey together, to Marash and Malatya, so that Derek Hill could look at Armenian churches and Freya pursue Alexander. Berenson was sceptical. In the hall of I Tatti, they laid out the divided tent that they intended to share, with much laughter.

Early in June they met in Mersin. Even the start was inauspicious. Derek Hill was late, having had his passport stolen – a piece of inefficiency Freya always found hard to excuse. Over dinner the first night,
Derek Hill told her he thought he would keep a diary, perhaps write something about the journey. ‘A glacial expression descended over her face,’ he remembers. ‘No, Derek,’ she said. ‘I think that would be very rude to me. I am the writer.
You
are the painter.’ To Jock Murray she wrote furiously: ‘This seems extremely cheap to me and brings this journey into the sort of category I loathe … anyway, as I have to do all the talking, I am going to shunt all the business of food on to his shoulders and shall jolly well make him too tired to write.’

The exchange set the tone for the trip. A jeep was hired, with a driver called Ali whom Freya liked and cosseted and Derek Hill thought a scoundrel; they got stuck repeatedly in mud. The tent was rarely used, both travellers preferring even the most primitive of hotels, and when it was, Freya asked Derek Hill at breakfast why he hadn’t shaved, announcing that in her day no gentleman would have appeared before a lady unshaven. (Victorian England seldom left Freya’s side: when one night she found a two-and-a-half-inch insect crawling along her thigh, she put on a dressing gown and a ‘boudoir’ cap, before shouting for help.) Seeking to make peace, Derek Hill asked her questions about the battlefields through which they drove. ‘Derek, I am not your Cook’s Tour.’

At Lake Van they parted, both falling with joy on
Oleg Polunin, who they found collecting flowers on the shore. Freya was to go to Diyarbakir, Derek Hill to look at churches in Ahtamar. ‘I have been thinking about it, quite a lot,’ Freya remarked disingenuously to Jock Murray, ‘and come to the conclusion that the tourist is content to
see
places, the traveller wants
to be
… You must have guessed that I find Derek a tourist at heart and feel like strangling him at frequent intervals … I left, with that wonderful feeling of exhilaration which seems to visit me when I drop a man.’ Derek Hill was no less relieved. Though as admiring as ever of her sense of history and the infectious excitement with which she could conjure up a battle or a campaign, he had no talent for the role of courtier.