Freya Stark (10 page)
Authors: Caroline Moorehead
Michael Russell, a small publisher, was eventually found to take on what in the end turned into eight volumes of letters. All were from Freya, to her mother, and to the friends and acquaintances of over seventy years. As she explained to Paul Scott, who became a new correspondent after an enthusiastic review of the first volume in
Country Life
: ‘I have been so much alone that it has gradually become my easiest way of conversation – one has intervals to think over whatever the subject may have been and presently the pleasantest of patterns shapes itself, a little bit from each side and gradually the shape of its own emerging.’ Though never commercial as a venture, the letters found favour with reviewers. The travel books had presented a rounded picture, distanced by memory; it is the letters that give the feel of travel, with its confusions, pleasures, anxieties; those who read them were taken by the vision, the great sweep that seemed to encompass 2,000 years of civilisation, and were charmed by the traveller and her humour.
Freya, by now also working on a new selection of essays, ‘an
old
version of Perseus, all on age and death but not I think depressing’ (to be called, she suggested, like the chocolates,
After Eighty
), watched over their reception with a satisfaction she had not felt for years. It was matched perhaps only by the delight of being made a Dame in the New Year Honours List of 1972. She found the title, she told friends, austere; in Italy she would stick to ‘Donna’.
In her seventies and eighties Freya lost none of her attention to world events, particularly in the Near East which in letters to
The Times
she was able to suggest were merely consequences of earlier unfortunate policies, nor did she relinquish her fondness for Empire nor her capacity to be absurd about it. To Paul Scott, after enjoying his
Raj Quartet
, she wrote: ‘I wondered whether the clue to our failure (in India) could not be found in the different system on which civil and military seemed to work. I thought the army was still wanted but practically everyone wished the civilians to go (1945), and was it because the army was
paternal
? I wondered whether a
deification
of the Viceroy and his wife could not have served the British rule?’ Nor was her particular form of sharpness muted. People she had not liked earlier in life were unlikely to find her more yielding now. Discovering herself at a dinner in London to be seated near Mountbatten,
with whom she had scored so little success in Delhi, she remarked that he was ‘not inspired, and rather disintegrated like that beautiful profile of his’. She greatly preferred Sir Francis Chichester, seated on her other side, with whom she had a ‘splendid talk of deserts and seas, like tumbling suddenly into the Elizabethan age’. Invited to the Huxleys’ golden wedding, she wrote: ‘Fifty years of looking after Julian! Juliette should appear with a palm branch in her hand like one of those Byzantine martyrs.’ And it was really to Freya that went the last word on Gertrude Caton Thompson. Urged to be charitable when volume three of the letters, dealing with the Hadhramaut, was being prepared, Freya jibbed. It was pointed out that the archaeologist was, after all, still alive. ‘Typical,’ said Freya.
In the late seventies came two more journeys. The BBC had asked Freya whether she would like to make an expedition in the Near East with a film crew. She chose a stretch of the Euphrates she had seen first almost fifty years earlier, when she had admired rafts carrying wood down from Turkey to sell in Iraq, and longed to commandeer her own, pausing to take to a horse when a castle appeared on the horizon. Mark Lennox-Boyd and his wife Arabella were invited to join the party. To the director, Freya sent off notes about how she envisaged the scenes. There would be,
she thought, ‘
conversation
as the landscape went by, pointing at this and that as it caught our eye …’ In order to slip them casually into her talk, Freya now set about boning up on Trajan and the Battle of Carrhae and preparing outfits suitable for raft life. The expedition took place in May 1977. Beset by problems of timing, by a new dam that had completely altered the river and its purpose since Freya first cast eyes on it, by near war between Syria and Iraq and by the raft itself, built more as prop than functioning boat, it was not a total success. Freya loved it – though she worried that she might not appear at her best, since she ‘never wore make-up on a raft’ – and said she would travel to the Middle East whenever she was asked and had the strength.
Soon afterwards, she went to practise riding on a pony on Dartmoor, and returned to trek around Annapurna. Freya was now eighty-six. Dick Waller, son of her friend Dorothy, with whom she had cantered across the Devonshire moors at seventeen talking about socialism, was worried about her strength. Helped up on to her pony the first day in India, Freya trotted briskly off and up a pass and out of sight; two hours later, on foot, panting and deeply anxious, he caught up with her. ‘I just wanted, dear, to show you I could still do it.’ In the days that followed there were evenings when, after seven hours on her
pony, Freya was too stiff to move, and had to be lifted off and carried into her tent. She never referred to it.
In 1973 Freya sold Montoria. Financially it had never been anything but disastrous, with debt piling on debt. The recession, the lira, the exchange rate had all been against her. The garden, and in particular its roses, had given her pleasure, as had the splendour and proportions of her great house. It went to a bicycle-saddle maker from the Veneto. With the money, Freya moved to a flat in Asolo, with a view across the valley to the Dolomites: the books, the pictures, the coins and statues and the old silks from the
tessoria
went with her, as did one ornate marble bath. ‘I am dead tired and feel too old for these gymnastics,’ she complained to Jock Murray. Almost at once, however, she was enjoying the rearranging, and protested strongly when he spoke of envying the young: ‘You say one should try not to – but I can’t imagine doing so. It would be
awful
to go back when one is so much nearer to the goal … I feel about it as about the first ball, or the first meet of hounds, anxious as to whether one will get it right, and timid and inexperienced – all the feelings of youth.’ What was more, she had a new car, always something that delighted her, in the shape of a Dormobile, one she had coveted for years and that came to her as a present from a new friend, Anita Forrer. Perched
on the high seat, her short legs barely reaching the pedals, her travelling companions reduced most often to speechless apprehension, she took it off for jaunts up the winding mountain passes and into the Dolomites. Not until she reached eighty-two was Freya finally persuaded to part with it.
On 26 May 1984 Freya was presented with the keys to Asolo. To the ceremony, attended by friends and the entire village, came the Blues and Royals, the band of the Household Cavalry. All morning, the rain poured down. At two o’clock, as they piped and drummed, wheeling and forming up and down the Piazza to music chosen by her, the sky cleared. To Freya, so charmed by pageantry, so approving of soldiers, it was a splendid sight.
While in Aden in 1940, Freya Stark began a series of long autobiographical letters to Sir Sydney Cockerell. Completed during subsequent breaks in her war work, they covered several hundred typed pages, describing her life up to 1944. In 1948, married and living in Asolo, she used these letters as the basis of one of the most enjoyable of all contemporary autobiographies,
Traveller’s Prelude
; over the next twelve years followed three more volumes;
Beyond Euphrates, The Coast of Incense
and
Dust in the Lion’s Paw
.
Of all the twentieth-century travellers and writers, Freya Stark’s life is possibly one of the best and
most fully documented. She was an excellent and exceptionally conscientious letter writer, both to her family and to a small group of friends – Bernard Berenson, Sir Sydney Cockerell, Field Marshal Wavell and Jock Murray, her lifelong publisher – to whom she wrote, often almost daily. Between 1974 and 1982 appeared eight volumes of these letters (published by Michael Russell Ltd), starting from when she was twenty-one at the outbreak of the First World War and ending in 1980, when she was eighty-seven. They give a remarkable picture of practically the whole of this century, with their huge cast of characters, from travellers to statesmen, diplomats to politicians; they are also a unique, personal chronicle of a traveller’s life that is both funny and intimate.
Before the war, Freya Stark travelled in the Near East; after it, through Asia Minor. Her accounts of these journeys, exceptional in their detail and ability to relate landscape, people and history, interweave past with present, knowledge with observation. There are ten books of travel spaced over thirty-five years; not as easy as the more personal accounts, they are companions with which to journey and observe.
The first of them,
The Valleys of the Assassins
, an account of two early journeys across Persia in search of lost treasure and unmapped castles, was embarked on, as she writes in the preface, ‘single-mindedly for fun’;
much of that enjoyment, the delight in discovery and intense pleasure in solitude, comes across in its pages. Among the post-war books, there is
Ionia, a Quest,
a scholarly ‘guidebook in time’, written after visiting fifty-five ruined sites along the western coast of Asia Minor. The two books, written with twenty years between them, both contain an easy blending of time and place, and the same considered pauses for reflection.
To these two sets of books can be added two more; the collections of photographs and the essays. From her first days as a traveller in the East, Freya Stark took photographs; they are of people and of places and many were taken at a time when no one else had travelled in these regions before. They appear as illustrations in the travel books and on their own, in separate collections. As for the essays, she began her observation of human behaviour, frailties, tastes and qualities in her thirties; they have formed the basis of a number of distinctive and pleasurable volumes of what she once referred to as her ‘own Everywoman philosophy’ and of which the first,
Perseus in the Wind
, remains the most outstanding.
All Freya Stark’s books are in print in Great Britain, published by John Murray. Century have published several of them in paperback including
Traveller’s Prelude
and
Perseus in the Wind
. Her books are published in the USA by Transatlantic.
The first acknowledgement must of course go to Dame Freya Stark, on whose autobiography and many letters, both published and unpublished, I have drawn repeatedly.
Next, to Mr Teddy Hodgkin and Mr Jock Murray, who gave me invaluable help with both research and correction, and to Mr Wilfrid Blunt, for permission to see an unpublished biographical notebook kept by Sir Sydney Cockerell.
I would also like to thank, for their time, patience and memories: Miss Lulie Abul Huda, Viscount and Viscountess Boyd, Lord David Cecil, Sybil, Marchioness of Cholmondeley, Mr and Mrs Nigel
Clive, Mr and Mrs Derek Cooper, Mrs Lavender Goddard-Wilson, Mrs Peggy Hackforth-Jones, Mr John Hemming, Mr William Henderson, Mr Derek Hill, Mrs Doreen Ingrams, Sir Laurence Kirwan, Mrs Barclay Larsson, Mr Mark Lennox-Boyd, Professor and Mrs Lloyd, Mrs Catriona Luckhurst, Viscount Norwich, Mr Stewart Perowne, Signora Caroly Piaser, Mr Michael Russell, Mr Malise Ruthven, Mr Anthony Sheil, Miss Emma Tennant, Mr Colin Thubron, Mr Richard Waller and Mr Gordon Waterfield.
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C
AROLINE
M
OOREHEAD
is the biographer of Bertrand Russell, Freya Stark, Iris Origo and Martha Gellhorn. Well known for her work in human rights, she has published a history of the Red Cross and a book about refugees,
Human Cargo
. She has been shortlisted for the Costa Biography Award in 2009. She lives in London.
Iris Origo was one of the twentieth century’s most intriguing women – a brilliantly perceptive historian and biographer. Iris grew up in Villa Medici in Florence, where she became part of the colourful and privileged Anglo-Florentine set that included Edith Wharton, Harold Acton and the Berensons. When Iris married Antonio Origo, they bought and revived La Foce, a derelict stretch of the beautiful Val d’Orcia valley in Tuscany and created an estate that thrives to this day.
Caroline Moorehead has drawn on many previously unpublished letters, diaries, and papers to write the definitive biography of a very remarkable woman.