Freya Stark

by Caroline Moorehead

  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, s
aying 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.

  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.