Freya Stark (9 page)

By the end of August, Freya was back in Asolo with a new book in mind, something to be easier than
Ionia
, a day-by-day travel book, following her progress along the west and south coasts of Turkey, then up through Alexander’s battlefields. The reader, she told Jock Murray, might thus be led into Alexander with ‘not too researchful wandering’.

Though she found starting a book painful, once into it she could write with extraordinary fluency, in spite of a houseful of guests, frequent breaks for visits to London (a ‘sort of debutante season’ as she
described them aptly, for they included balls, country weekends and occasional meetings with the Queen Mother), having to make plans for future journeys, and her correspondence, important all her life, but never more so than in her later years.

Eight chapters into
The Lycian Shore
, she decided that Alexander needed a volume to himself, and was only slightly daunted to discover that most of her eighty-three research books were in German. As she worked her way into them, some of the characters she met seemed to her admirable; others she despised. Soon they had become as familiar to her as a group of friends encountered during a London visit. ‘Trajan,’ she wrote to Jock Murray, ‘I think is emerging as the central figure: he is not fascinating, like Hadrian, but he has all the
Western
typical virtues so that I think his very mistakes in the East should be of interest. And that tiresome and conscientious Pliny was always asking him questions (must have been such a
bore
for him) which show the huge machine at work.’ It might have been Hatfield House, over a long weekend.

There was something about the western and southern coasts of Turkey, with their remote valleys and treeless plateaux, that touched some chord in Freya. By 1956 she had made two long journeys, by horse and by jeep, feeling each time closer to the
landscape and to the people among whom she was travelling. Her Turkish was improving. Antalya, far to the south, had become her base and she returned there each time with pleasure, to ‘its outline of blue hills, a dark and fierce blue and so steep and tumbled’.

For the last major trip, in what had now become a three-part sequence of books, she accompanied Alexander along his route between Caria and Cilicia, trying as she went to understand why he should have chosen one path in preference to another, why he turned west, ‘when his aim was all towards Gordium in the north’. On her donkey, in terrible weather, pausing on each hillside to stare and ponder, attempting to imagine Alexander and his men, Freya felt at her best. Letters to friends in London reflect her exhilaration. ‘On the pass,’ she wrote to Cockerell of her journey by horse past Mount Solyma, ‘I had one of those good moments, a whole new slice of world opening below me – the wide valley of the Alaghir Chay, filled with small ranges and open places of its own and surrounded in the north by a bodyguard of high, round hills still streaked with snow. What one feels most I think at such moments is the wonderful
variety
of the world!’ The journey ended with a sea expedition to the headland round which Alexander was thought to have waded. Taking the daughter of her hotel-keeper with her, Freya put on her bathing
suit and went round the cliff, swimming when it got too deep to stand.

Alexander’s Path
, her fourteenth book, was published in the autumn of 1958. On receiving the first copy, Freya commented that it looked alluring but that she was distressed to find it badly written, all except for the appendix. What she longed to do was to repunctuate it. Reviewers were rather kinder. In
The Times Literary Supplement
, the anonymous writer praised her for her contribution to history, for her superb prose style, ‘rich yet never rococo’, for her ‘wise and luminous pages’. ‘Miss Stark’, he concluded, ‘stands in an apostolic succession of great travel writers.’

Before the next year was over, Freya had found time to fit in one more quick book,
Riding to the Tigris
, the account of yet another journey, again on her own, through the Hakkiari mountains lying between Lake Van and the Tigris, the ‘most rugged among the regions of Asia’ as Canon Wigram, one of the rare travellers to reach there, had described them. Taking Lucullus as her guide, Freya got there too, by horse, despite dysentery and the police confiscating her photographs, noting with a touch of understandable self-satisfaction that she was probably the first Western woman to do so. She was in Trebizond when she heard that Nuri Pasha al-Said,
Prime Minister of Iraq and her friend from Baghdad days, had been murdered together with King Faisal and the ex-regent in a military coup. ‘It makes seven of my friends or acquaintances murdered,’ she wrote bleakly to Jock Murray, ‘and Nuri I can’t bear to think of … And I feel so deeply that we are to blame – for lack of vision, making it death to be our friend.’ On her return to Europe, she was congratulated on her ‘demure little notes on place names’ that put to shame those responsible for the government maps.

It had been ten years of exceptionally hard work done in her late fifties and early sixties. Seven books, three of them volumes of autobiography, four of travel and history. Not surprising perhaps that Freya’s versatility caused admiration. Was she historian, archaeologist, essayist or travel writer? Historians spoke kindly of her history, but dwelt with greater pleasure on her fine writing and artistic eye; archaeologists insisted that ruins were not her strong point, but that her sense of the characters in history was unmatched; some literary-minded academics praised her style, while others found it too dense, lacking the compelling sweep of strong narrative. In the general public and among her friends, there were those who preferred her essays, and others who, not always sharing her interpretations, found her vision, the way she related landscape and travel and people,
beguiling, and were charmed by the way she treated moral qualities as if they were people. Everywhere, there was approval for her autobiography, and in particular the first volume,
Traveller’s Prelude,
and high regard for her photographs, which caught so perfectly the barrenness and immensity of the landscapes she loved.

One of the few sour notes was cast only many years later, by the American critic Paul Fussell, who, writing of travel books, chose not to include her works on the grounds that in order to ‘write a distinguished travel book you have to be equally interested in (1) the travel and (2) the writing’, and that though Freya was unquestionably a traveller, ‘the dimension of delight in language and disposition, in all the literary contrivances, isn’t there’. If the judgement seemed harsh, and to many incorrect, it said much about the strength with which readers reacted to her work, and the different appeal it had for different people.

Sometime in the middle fifties, Freya discovered an enormous new pleasure: talking to and travelling with the young. It was not altogether new of course; in wartime Delhi, Baghdad and Cairo she had been much feted by young soldiers on leave from the front. But this was something of her own. For about ten years, god-children, by this time reaching the age to
appreciate her, and their friends were to become a central part of each year’s plans. ‘I am feeling old,’ she wrote to Jock Murray as she departed one spring to see Alexander’s northern passes, ‘that is to say that I am just as ready to do things, but would like someone young to take on the unbelievable wear and tear of “getting a move on”.’

Probably the first of Freya’s young companions was Barclay Saunders, granddaughter of Herbert Olivier, Robert Stark’s friend in Paris in the 1890s. Freya had known her as a child at La Mortola, where Olivier had a house. In 1954 she asked whether she would like to accompany her around Sicily to look at ruins. Her intention was to relive the great marine battles of Syracuse, under Thucydides’ direction, and to find a fisherman to row them round the harbour.

February had been chosen, for the blossom. Freya and Barclay Saunders reached Palermo in heavy rain. It was extremely cold. Wrapped up in mackintoshes over their tweeds, they travelled around the island by bus, staying at the cheapest
pensioni
, Freya worrying constantly about money. For lunch, they had picnics of doughnuts and oranges. At Syracuse, the rain was so persistent that they stood by the harbour wall, peering into almost invisible mist at an imaginary naval battle. It was some days before a fisherman could be persuaded to risk his rowing boat round the
bay. Often wet, sometimes hungry, frequently kept awake at night by Freya’s snores, Barclay Saunders remembers the journey with delight, as a moment of educational awakening.

Freya’s travelling was always unpredictable, not least because she knew so many people. In Palermo, they called on the Lampedusas.
The Leopard
was written, but not yet published. At one of several feudal soirées, with Freya in long Arab dress, and flaming torches lighting up the immense Sicilian dining room, they were introduced to a young girl, the daughter of a neighbouring family, on whom
The Leopard
’s heroine Angelica had been modelled. The story of her unhappy love affair was recounted to Freya over dinner. Next morning, she told Barclay Saunders that she must invite the girl to London. (In due course, the girl arrived at Victoria Station, with her chaperone. She stayed just one night, and was so appalled by London that she caught the next boat-train back across the channel, after which she returned to Palermo to marry her lover.)

From this year on, young companions travelled everywhere with Freya. The role, older teacher to respectful pupil, was one she greatly preferred when on the move to the equivocating deliberations with equals. The long summer university holidays were ideal for Greek and Turkish expeditions, by bus,
or one year, in comfort, minibus. At Ephesus, Troy, Didyma or Side, wide-brimmed hat sheltering her face, with stout shoes and lisle stockings, Freya would lean on a broken column and talk, describe events, recall episodes, quote perfectly from a dozen sources. The godsons, often classicists themselves, would listen and learn, and tend to the practical matters of travel; it was, remembers one, like ‘travelling with your tutor’, formidable, somewhat unnerving but always exhilarating. There was much laughter, of a rather high-minded sort. (After Barclay Saunders, of whom Freya was very fond, girls were never a great success. They seemed to Freya to lack the sensitivity and intelligence of the young men.)

In Asolo, in the Easter holidays, there might be reading parties, with everyone at work in a different corner of the house by day, gathering at six to play Scrabble and talk about life over a little vermouth by the library fire. Freya, sitting very upright, shoulders well back, rather small brown eyes very bright, needlework in her hand, would offer a theme: the nobility of military campaigning perhaps, or whether the Sumerians believed in an after-life. The godsons would be expected to take it up, competing a little among themselves. Casa Freia was a perfect setting for such occasions: the smell of wax from highly polished tile floors, the cabinets of coins and Roman pots, the
dimly lit passages, the heavy, striped silk curtains from the
tessoria
next door, all added to an air of serene scholarship, while the slight austerity in food and drink suited the spirit of Academe. It was order, of the right kind, intelligent, immutable, triumphing over the uneasy Bohemia of her childhood.

For Freya, these interludes did much to dispel loneliness. And she was immensely pleased when, as sometimes happened, she found someone who ‘looked through the same window’ and was fired by her own particular enthusiasms: both Malise Ruthven, son of Pamela Cooper, and Mark Lennox-Boyd, grandson of the Iveaghs she had known in Asolo as a girl, her most constant companions on her Turkish travels, chose to take up Arabic.

Towards the end of April 1963, Jock Murray received a letter from Freya. ‘The exciting news’, she wrote, ‘is that I have bought a little hill.’ Driving one day with friends in search of land for them near Asolo she had been offered a steep grassy slope, some ten acres in all, with a view of other foothills all around, and a church and cypresses perched opposite. It was like no other landscape: a series of pointed molehills stretching out in front of the high Dolomites. She was enchanted with her purchase: a little wood at the bottom by a stream, some terraces, a small derelict cottage she hoped to build on to. Asolo itself had become too noisy; the moment had come to look for
silence. Montoria, as the place was called, was to give Freya considerable pleasure; but it was also to torment her. All her life she had been exceptionally brave: over Montoria she almost lost her nerve.

Of the many sides of Freya’s nature, the one that had least found expression in her wandering years had been her skills as a builder. Robert Stark, architect of houses she loved and gardens she remembered all her life, had bequeathed to her a strong feeling for stone and texture. Returning to Asolo in 1945 she had not hesitated about spending most of the war-reparation money on marble baths and basins, baroque fantasies of shells and scrolls. Later she had even designed for herself a revolving desk, twenty drawers and four niches covered in burgundy morocco with columns and brass capitals. But these were details. Montoria was an enormous undertaking. Freya was soon driving, in an unsuitable two-seater sky-blue open car that had captivated her, rather like Mr Toad, with its three hooters and leather seats, to stone quarries near Grappa in search of the perfect slab of marble for the window sills, stairs and swimming-pool border or to Bassano for a modern kitchen. Letters at this time are given over almost entirely to plans: shall the pool have rough stone or smooth? Where will its exit pipes run? Where should the asparagus bed be laid? Casa Freia, beloved for so many years
by several generations of guests, was now on the market; the prospective buyers, Freya commented characteristically, were ‘rather touching, all with money from industry and longing for culture so that I feel like one of those decayed Romans with the young and eager and uncouth barbarians pouring in’. With those who protested about losing the old house, she was firm.

The idea of building on to the existing cottage was quickly abandoned. Freya’s designs, on paper, were grandiose and triumphant; the proportions palatial. Drawing rooms with magnificent vistas and parquet floors; more baroque porphyry bathrooms; room upon room for godchildren, friends, passing scholars: Montoria grew and grew. Above the front door was placed a vast stone lintel: ‘
Noi
siam pellegrini, come voi altri
’ (‘we are travellers, as you are’).

Soon Freya was looking for friends to share it with her, to occupy the ground floor while she took the first, and to inherit it after her death. For a while, it looked as if the Coopers might join her, then another newer friend, Dulcie Deuchar. Costs mounted and Freya, having trouble selling the old house, grew increasingly anxious. The
tessoria
was sold to Caroly Piaser and brought in a little money. Friends made loans; others were asked to take a gamble but no one could be found to take it on. ‘I am so demoralised by
the unreliability of most of my friends,’ she noted, desperately but somewhat unreasonably. A project started with confidence and promise grew sour. Serious financial disaster was halted in the end only when a tenant, a retired QC called David Karmel, offered £1,000 a year in rent for the ground floor.

The year of the house, Freya had turned seventy. She was not in London for her birthday, so Jock Murray promised a celebration the following January. As the day grew closer it was clear there was going to be a problem about numbers. Who, among Freya’s considerable list of distinguished friends, could be excluded? It was solved, quite simply, by eliminating women. Seton Lloyd, Lord David Cecil, the Earl of Euston, Michael Stewart, Harold Caccia, John Sparrow, Patrick Kinross, Gordon Waterfield and a selection of the young, sixteen men and Freya, gathered in a private room in a hotel for dinner. Freya wore white, and circulated. The birthday, she remarked afterwards, could not have been better planned.

It was not that Freya was without women friends. As she had observed in 1938, after her months with Gertrude Caton Thompson in the Hadhramaut, ‘I had begun to think … that I might be one of those women who hate other women and are only easy with men: but I now realised that what I dislike is the arrogance
of the unfeminine women, neither one thing nor the other. The lovely and the brilliant or good of my own sex, Celia Johnson, Biddy Carlisle, Phyllis Balfour, Virginia Woolf, Dora Gordine and many others, I met and admired and easily love – great people all moving like queens in their own atmosphere, and none of them, it suddenly strikes me, fond of working on committees.’ Women were not, however, as cosy as men in Freya’s eyes, nor as intellectual, and for this kind of occasion, most definitely not as much fun. (Wives were never much fun; of those she despised, or found vacillating or tiresome, Freya could be extremely dismissive).

The early sixties continued to be years of exceptional activity. Montoria took a great deal of time; friends, several of whom had also bought plots of land and built around Montoria, and social life almost as much, though many of her wartime friends were now dead, and she reported mournfully that she had just written her tenth letter of condolence in five months. These deaths greatly saddened Freya; they reminded her of what very good times there had been. But they did not depress her, nor was she ever sentimental about death in the way she could be about royalty or soldiers. She seldom went to funerals, even of those very close to her, saying that they made her ‘feel like walking behind a used-up dress however loved’.

Freya was also occupied with what was to be the last of her major books. Alexander, her companion for eight years, had finally receded. She had turned her attention to the Romans, and to their frontier wars along the Euphrates. The idea, she explained, had come to her because ‘I grew up near a frontier, and learnt to trespass across it (and a good many others) in my time: and the impediment which it produces in human intercourse has always seemed to me a historical monstrosity.’ The book was intended to be short, but eight centuries of Roman history demanded much research, and when Freya was not deliberating between Carrara marble and travertine stone, she was deep and not always approvingly at work among people who like all her historical characters were rapidly assuming the personalities of men met at a bad dinner party. ‘I must try’, she wrote to Jock Murray, ‘and find a few nice ones to keep me going; Pliny so boring, Cicero insufferable, Julian, I discover on reading his letters, an appalling prig. Even Catullus jeers at a man
for being poor
! What a relief to turn to Polybius who was a Greek. I would have liked to marry him. What a
decent
person.’ To test her theory that the Roman Empire had disintegrated because its frontier was too long to defend easily, she now fitted in a new round of journeys, travelling at one point down a gorge for ten days on a donkey.

When
Rome of the Euphrates
appeared it was neither short, nor an easy read, assuming considerable background knowledge in its readers. One reviewer remarked that ‘if Herodotus had been a woman and an artist with a camera, this is the sort of book he might have written’. Freya was delighted, for not all were as kind.

Freya’s poor health, so destructive of her plans when young, returned to plague her in later life. Sinus, cataracts, sciatica, a bad hip; one followed the other. She dealt with them as she had dealt with typhoid, dengue fever and dysentery, without complaint, holding court from hospital beds in negligé and lace cap, preferring always Thucydides to questions as to how she felt, and using the enforced idleness rather pleasurably to answer for herself such troubling moral questions as whether or not she believed that moral virtues kept ‘their timeless divinity across the border’. To Lady Cholmondeley, after a hip operation, she reported: ‘I am also trying now to do little
jumps
from one carpet to the next (alas, I was once described as a beautiful
leaping
creature!).’

In her seventies, no more than in her thirties, would she permit physical frailty to stand between her and travel. It was simply a matter of arranging things in such a way that she could manage. Shortly after her seventy-fifth birthday, she told Pam Cooper that she considered her requirements for the next ten
years to be: ‘(1) travel in greater comfort: no more of those happy trips third class in steamers; (2) provide for illness; (3) eventually, in my case, probably pay for someone to travel with me (poor thing); (4) be able to afford short jaunts for fun … (5) most of all, be able to have friends rather than tenants in the bottom flat.’

In the summers, Freya continued to go to the coast of Turkey or Greece to swim, almost always stopping off at some point at Kardamyli, in the Peloponnese, to stay with Patrick Leigh Fermor. In the spring and autumn came the more ambitious journeys, to Peking, to visit the Stewarts at the embassy, to Persia, the Yemen, Tunisia, Austria, the Middle East, wherever there were friends who offered beds and trips into the desert or up into the mountains, occasions which Freya, so knowledgeable and so obviously enjoying herself, made fun. In July 1968 she was in Kabul, preparing to cross Afghanistan from east to west in a Land Rover, travelling from six in the morning until five at night. Less than a year later, it was Persepolis, Isfahan, Nishapur and Pasargadee with Lady Cholmondeley. Both women were in their late seventies. Freya was stern about when they should and should not wear veils. Searching for a caravanserai too close to the Russian border they were arrested and, since they had left their passports in their hotel in Meshed, held by a garrison until a British consular
official could be found to bail them out. Freya, able all her life to fall asleep instantly wherever she was, chose a bench and slept the hours away. On their release, they pressed on to see the ruin they had come to visit, Freya remarking how much finer it was in the late afternoon light, among the shining poppies. The taxi driver had long since given up; it was Lady Cholmondeley who drove them back to Meshed.

On all these journeys, Freya shopped: statues, coins, jewellery, carpets. Friends detailed to meet her at European airports on her return would watch appalled as this small figure clothed in the most brilliant and visible of outfits, a bunch of bright parasols tucked under her arm, would totter across the tarmac, plainly laden down with packages of rare antiquities, her jacket bulging with bales of silk wrapped around her middle, a false-bottomed bag jangling with undeclared objects. Customs officials proved as gullible, or as charmed, as they had in Ventimiglia in the twenties. The trophies took their place in the marble niches and shelves of Montoria.

Freya had never stopped preferring mountains. In the spring of 1969 she heard of an ex-colonel in the Gurkhas who organised expeditions around the skirts of Everest and Annapurna. Six years beyond his age limit, unable as she confessed to walk at all far, she wrote to ask him whether a pony could be arranged.
He replied suggesting Annapurna, and promised a mount. Freya took Mark Lennox-Boyd with her. Camping at 9,000 feet, looking out over three peaks of Annapurna, Freya wrote of the ‘awe and majesty of this approach, the last terrestrial footsteps to infinity’. It was here, she told him, that she would really like to die. Mountains reminded her of faith. ‘I sit in the shadows,’ she would say, ‘but I look at the light.’

Early in 1971, Freya began sorting through her letters. It was a vast and time-consuming process for she had been writing steadily for over sixty years, sometimes as many as ten letters a day. Having issued instructions to friends ever since the twenties to keep the originals she now wrote to them to call them back; bundles containing sometimes several hundred letters, a firm scrawl on thin blue airmail paper, now began reaching Montoria. Other travellers have kept diaries; Freya had chosen to set down the record of her life in letters, using them as touchstone for the volumes of autobiography and the travel books to come. Sir Sydney Cockerell, with Jock Murray the closest of her literary advisers, had been given a selection to read as early as 1938. ‘Magnanimous, vivid, picturesque, closely observant of men and things,’ he wrote in his own diary, ‘and written with an easy mastery that is never forced and that will make them a very precious record in days to come.’

That day seemed to Freya to have arrived. As she read back, she was struck by the sheer amount of historical detail contained in their pages. The span of her life alone, she wrote to Lord David Cecil, made them valuable. ‘What I feel most strongly is that we lived in what was, after all, a heroic age: St Crispin didn’t find us in bed; and that is a deep happiness.’ There was too, of course, an element of self-revelation: ‘The interest or main line is not in the war,’ she noted, ‘but in the almost Tolstoyan development of a human being in extraordinary family relationships … My journeys, and even my writing, are really the consequences and secondary to this grinding of my youth.’

Shrewd as she was about contracts and royalties, Freya was never greatly in tune with the financial realities of the publishing world. Having what she took to be an extraordinary and possibly unique chronicle of contemporary life in her hands she envisaged it quite simply as a ‘Murray classic’ running to at least six volumes, possibly more, the letters published in their near entirety. The exchanges that now followed with Jock Murray showed just how very stubborn she could be. Freya had fought with him over the mink coat; over Gertrude Caton Thompson; over cuts to
Dust in the Lion’s Paw
, when she accused him of thinking that she had ‘a servant-hall taste
for grandeur’. The most bitter battle was over the letters. Six volumes were not financially viable, and Jock Murray was forced to tell her so. Her reaction arrived in the next post. ‘Your little note comes just after my long letter went, and it upset me so much I was
sick
.’ There was, she declared, no question at all of a selection.