The Golden Fleece: Essays

by Muriel Spark

  The ancient aqueducts are one of the city’s most impressive landmarks. I found the old tombs and extensive graveyards with their tall, thin, ghostly stones particularly haunting. For a trip back in time to Byzantium a descent to the underground network of cisterns is convincing, and is now enhanced by a son et lumière show; wooden bridges lead in all directions over floors of water which were once the much-beleaguered city’s water supply. Ancient pillars hold up the roof. Light plays on the majestic scene to the strains of Beethoven.

  It is amazing that so much has survived when the city and its monuments, its churches, mosques, palaces, towers and walls have been so repeatedly attacked and destroyed by invaders, crusaders, plunderers, earthquakes, fire and sheer neglect. Timelessness often seems to possess the streets and shops: pavement vendors, old men with spices on a stick over their shoulders, boys pushing handcarts everywhere and the bazaars themselves, give the impression of long, long, ago. The much-celebrated Covered Bazaar of Istanbul stretches for miles of interleading streets; there, the shops are altogether repetitive, and to my mind it is a great bore and a fire hazard.

  History and politics, religion and philosophy are the focal and commanding centre based on which mosque architecture, the main feature of the city, has flourished, while music, the visual arts, literature and theatre, and that greatest of all the arts and sciences, daily life, have not.

  The secularisation of Turkey, Atatürk’s dream, started to work, but stopped. One looks in vain for that Pera Palace atmosphere of pre-war culture and sophisticated fun, but it is nowhere to be found, least of all at the Pera Palace, now merely a one-time grand hotel. Alexandria, Carthage, are the cities that come to mind when one thinks of Istanbul in its decline. But Istanbul’s new opportunities lie in its annual multitudes of tourists. If it can learn to take care of them, which it can’t at present, the city might have a promising future.

  But in the streets and bazaars something smoulders; perhaps it is a dying fire, perhaps an incipient one. I would never be surprised if there was not a spontaneous Turkish rising, a revolution. The official handout is that there are no extremists at large, right or left. They are all in prison, ‘all 23 of them’. Meanwhile, Prime Minister Turgut Özal is said to be working towards a one-party system. His mother had a dream before she died. The venerated Sultan, Suleiman the Magnificent, appeared to her and invited her to be buried within the royal and sacred precincts of his great mosque and splendid mausoleum. The dream was put to parliament who ratified the request for the Prime Minister’s mother to be buried there. And there she is in the royal cemetery, occupying the only modern grave.

  Typical of the city, the dying hillside at Eyüp, where Pierre Loti, the French writer, liked to spend time at a coffee house, is still covered with ancient tombstones, but there are shanty towns and crude factory buildings of more recent growth to amaze the view.

  These reflections, negative and sad, are however the best frame for sightseeing in Istanbul. There is no point in going round with western illusions and aesthetic standards, merely gaping and gasping. The rubble piled up everywhere in the streets, the aimlessness of the millions who march in the streets all day, going nowhere, young men waiting for the time to go home, do have a bearing on the Blue Mosque, the Palace of Topkapi, the brilliant newly restored narrative mosaic of the Chora. The fact that within a few feet of the Blue Mosque and its elegant surroundings, people are living in holes in the rubble, with only a row of pathetic washing for a curtain, is part of the total experience. If this were not so, a visit to the Byzantine department of any of our great western museums would do just as well.

  Up the Bosphorus on the European bank, bask sumptuous private houses and elegant highly priced apartments, but on the opposite banks, on the Asian side, bulldozers have been busy everywhere.

  The best part of a trip up the Bosphorus from Istanbul towards the Black Sea are the distant views, and the hovering warships both Turkish and Soviet. How close geography is to history!

  Generally in Istanbul and its environs, both on the European and Asian flanks, whole mountain-sides, entire street corners have been bulldozed away. Whether this is part of some huge reconstruction plan or an endeavour to forestall earthquake damage, there is nothing to show; only huge piles of rubble are in evidence, and occasionally a solitary workman with a wheelbarrow and spade shovelling at it; sometimes, an idle bulldozer seemed to await orders. The scene reminded me of wartime London but without its defiant energy. I was reminded, too, of Bombay’s seething millions. There is no alley-charm, no back-street vivacity as one might see even in the direst quarters of Naples. The smell of bad drains is a constant factor. A few characteristic wooden houses have been attractively restored but most are falling to pieces. If one asked about these demolition sites the answers were vague and without conviction: ‘a mosque is going up’, or ‘that space is for a new hotel’. No-one seemed to know much; no-one appeared to have the right to know. Modern Turkey raises a vast number of questions; the answers savour of schoolroom propaganda. The present life of Istanbul is entirely in the past.

  [1988]

  Tuscany By Chance

  It was by chance, not choice, that I came to Tuscany to spend several months of the year at the house of a friend in the olive groves between Arezzo and Siena. So that I have never been properly ‘on tour’ in Tuscany. It is a place where I work and live, visit friends or go for day-trips for a special reason – to hear a concert, look at a picture or a building, or a square, or to eat at a newly discovered trattoria, coming upon a small hill-town or an old parish church on the way. Although Florence is not far away it is another world from rural Tuscany. Florence is Florentine. The same with Siena and all its glories; it is Sienese.

  It isn’t necessarily the great and famous beauty spots that we fall in love with. As with people, so with places: love is unforeseen, and we can all find ourselves affectionately attached to the minor and the less obvious.

  I don’t have an art-historian’s response to places. I can discern and admire a late renaissance gate, a medieval street, a Romanesque church or an Etruscan wall, but my first thoughts are for the warmth of the stone, the bright yellow broom covering the hill-sides in early summer, the clouds when they look like a fifteenth-century painting with a chariot or a saint zooming up into them; I notice the light and shade on buildings grouped on a hilltop, the rich skin-colours and the shapes of the people around me. I love to watch people, to sit in a trattoria listening-in to their talk, imagining the rest, and to take country roads lined with woods of pine, ilex, forest-oak, chestnut.

  Nearly every evening I go somewhere in the countryside. Early summer is good, August generally hot in Tuscany, but the autumn up to Christmas is comfortable. For people too busy to cook, as I am, it is easy to eat out all through the year.

  One of my shortest drives is to the castle-hamlet of Gargonza, passing the medieval market town of Monte San Savino. Dante Alighieri stopped at the Castle of Gargonza on the first few days of his exile. It is an intimate fortification, well restored, with an ancient tower and an airy forest view. Once at sunset I saw a wild boar (cinghiale) sauntering down one of the tarmac roads outside the restaurant. It was a beautiful rippling beast. It looked around as it walked like a tourist taking the air.

  I return again and again to lovely Pienza, originally a medieval town which was re-planned by Pius II in the fifteenth century. Its central square is small, enclosed by a church and three palaces, all of appropriate and elegant proportions – an attractive example of urban planning. Walking round the square of Pienza I often have the illusion of being in a roofless temple, as in the Parthenon.

  Near Pienza are several terme or sulphur-bath resorts. Chianciano is one of the best-known in this vicinity. For me, these towns have too much an air of people caring greatly for their own health, and really quite healthy people at that. At Bagno Vignoni a fountain in the piazza takes the form of an ancient bath filled with the hot curative waters.

  When people come
to visit me I usually take them to see the majestic Madonna del Parto of Piero della Francesca. This fresco was to be found entirely on its own in a small cemetery chapel at Monterchi.* The surrounding countryside, with its broad sweep of cultivated, undulating fields, seems to be out of a painting of the fifteenth century. Peasant-like and noble, the picture is planned to represent a stage, the Virgin herself both dramatic protagonist and actual theatre, as she opens her dress to prepare for the historic curtain-rise of the Incarnation. In parallel action two angels on either side hold back the curtains of the canopy where she stands.† Throughout this part of the Tuscan countryside one can still see indigenous faces resembling that of Piero della Francesca’s famous model; there is something, too, in the setting of the head on the sturdy neck which is still typical of the Tuscan to-day.

  From Monterchi it is only five kilometres to Sansepolcro, home of Piero della Francesca. His stupendous Resurrection is in the museum. The streets of the old city are characteristically medieval to renaissance. There are good hotel restaurants in Sansepolcro; and, between Monterchi and Anghiari at Castello di Sorci, there is an old, capacious farmhouse where a good fixed menu is served at a reasonable price including local wine. Here again, as in so many hidden places of Tuscany, there is a feeling of timelessness. In the ground-floor kitchens the cooks can be seen skilfully making the pasta, by hand, in different designs.

  The city of Cortona is too well-known, too crowded, for the comfort of a long-term resident in the area. For some reason, when in Tuscany, I find an abundance of English and American voices around me an irritant; not so in Rome which is cosmopolitan from its foundation. But to be in the midst of an English-speaking fraternity in this wild and natural Italy depresses me greatly. I wonder: What am I doing here? I could just as well have stayed there at home. Did I come all this way to hear phrases like, ‘Why do they close the museums at the lunch hour?’, an innocent question that opens a huge cultural gulf; the long mid-day meal and repose is sacred to the Italians; only catering establishments are absolved from the near-religious duty of going home to eat at il tocco (one o’clock). And I remember an English visitor asking me, ‘Are you stationed out here?’ Recalling this, I look out of the window and see Gino the horse-coper riding by proudly with his beasts; nobody has told him he lives ‘out here’, and as for me, there’s nothing in my life that corresponds to being stationed. Cortona, then, is one of the places I avoid, despite its art treasures and antiquities. Even in winter. Because, when the flocks of visitors have gone home, the wintery streets are all the more deserted, all the more gloomy. Like Edinburgh after the Festival. Better the places that never have this swarming influx. I take Cortona as my convenient example of this phenomenon; there are many many more.

  But to me there is a fascination about Cortona: the road to it that leads south from Arezzo. This indeed is one of the classic Tuscan drives, through the rolling basin of the Valdichiana. From where I live, one comes first to Castiglion Fiorentino, a charming small town mainly composed of one street rising up to the very fine municipal arcade of Vasari, an old market-place, from which there is an impressive view framed by the arches. In the picture gallery, modestly displayed, is a strange, hypnotic painting, Stigmate di S. Francesco, beloved of Kenneth Clark. It is by a little-known mid-fifteenth-century artist, Bartolomeo della Gatta. St Francis and his companion are unusually represented in green habits among an almost cubistic formation of rocks.

  Also on the way to Cortona it is worth stopping to see Montecchio, the recently restored stronghold of Sir John Hawkwood, a fourteenth-century English condottiere.*

  Up the valley of the Casentino a grand mountain view is to be seen on the way to Camaldoli, where there is a hermitage and monastery, with a few souvenir shops and two unexceptional restaurants. The church has been much restored since its foundation in the thirteenth century; it is now predominantly eighteenth-century baroque and contains some minor Tuscan paintings and frescoes. The main attraction for me is the old monastic pharmacy. Here you can purchase such potions as Amaro Tonico, which is described as a neurotonic and digestive and is recommended for ‘nervous exhaustion, for disturbances of the liver and for physical and intellectual stress’. It is prepared from ‘a basis of roots and aromatic herbs’. Try it if you like; I haven’t. The air and stillness of this great forest are enough balm for physical and mental stress; like so many of the vast valley and mountain scenes of Tuscany, the prospect from the heights of Camaldoli makes for a generous heart; it is one where mean thoughts are out of place, where the human spirit responds easily to the expansive benevolence of nature and its silence.

  The long, shady, forest road to Vallombrosa is another place I sally forth to, glorious in the leafy autumn. This is on the Pratomagno, a mountain ridge, and leads up to the seventeenth-century Benedictine Abbey of Vallombrosa, quite modern for these parts; the original foundation was eleventh-century. Here, too, is a scene of wooded hills, canyons, crags and rivers which belongs to no century at all. A short way above Vallombrosa, on the site of a thirteenth-century hermitage, is a modern edifice, now a forestry school; this is Paradisino; the building bears a plaque to commemorate the sojourn of ‘the supreme English poet Giovanni Milton in 1630’. The inscription goes on to say that he was ‘enamoured of this forest and these skies’; and one can well believe it. The view from Paradisino has a feeling of Paradise Lost.

  Arezzo is the nearest big town to the spot where I spend part of my life. The remains of the original walls are Etruscan, it has a number of notable medieval and renaissance churches and palazzi, and much of the town is modern. The overwhelming attractions of the city are the abundant frescoes of Piero della Francesca. In the Cathedral is the famous Magdalen. In the church of San Francesco are the frescoes depicting those biblical subjects which made church-going such a wonderful picture-show for the faithful. I often think, as I look at them, how fortunate it is for us that so few people could read in those days, and were obligingly informed by these wonderful stories in pictures. The same Tuscan face of the Madonna del Parto is here in other roles.

  Even closer to my second home are the two hill-towns I visit most for practical purposes of shopping or eating out, Monte San Savino and Lucignano. I have grown fond of them.

  At Monte San Savino for several years I used to be invited with a friend to lunch every Thursday at the home of an elderly Signora of that place. She was in her eighties and had wonderful and terrible stories to tell as we made our leisurely way through Tuscan rarities, cunningly prepared with the herbs and flavourings she knew were the right ones. Thrilling and terrible were her stories. The Germans had taken her villa during the war; it still stands high on a hill-side, but her house at the time I knew her was in the piazza. The Germans had shot her 19-year-old son; a street bears his name. She herself with her daughter had been put on a truck bound for a train-connection to dreaded Germany; but one of the officers on guard, noted for his rigid toughness, nevertheless put them off in the countryside before they got to Florence, on the basis of a mutual love and knowledge of music. Love stories, escape stories, stories of wars and occupations, of her youth, provincial balls, visits to the opera: those Thursday lunches were unforgettable. After lunch our friend Carolina would play the piano and sing romantic songs from the turn of the century. My favourite was called ‘Tormento’ which she rendered with her whole heart. When she returned the visit, she would bring with her those things befitting a day in the country; these were her embroidery, her sketch book, and a book of poems by Leopardi. Carolina died on her ninetieth birthday. She seemed to sum up my Tuscan experience. A whole people, the product of civilised time past, the product of the dramatic landscape, the Tuscans are also the progenitors of what one finds there. It is this spirit of endurance and rejoicing in the goodness of life which inspired the architecture, the paintings, the churches and those ancient cultures of olive groves and vineyards, which are the essence of Tuscany.

  [1984]

  * The fresco has been moved to a m
odern school-house in the village of Monterchi.

  † The additional painting of a baldacchino (canopy or tent), not the work of Piero della Francesca, has now been removed.

  * Giovanni Acuto in Italian. His portrait by Paolo Uccello may be seen in the Duomo, Florence.

  The Sitter’s Tale

  The Director of the Scottish National Portrait Gallery wrote to me and asked if I’d sit for Sandy Moffat. I asked if I could think about it, but in the meantime they booked it up. At the time there was a very nice curator, Duncan Thomson, whom I liked very much, so I didn’t mind.

  Sandy Moffat’s portrait of me is a striking picture but bears no likeness to myself. Nobody recognises me. I spent one week in Edinburgh about 15 years ago with five sittings. Objectively I think it looks like a good poster. The artist didn’t try to get to know me; in fact, he seemed only to want to fill in sessions with extra sketches.

  He has given me yellow hair with a navy blue parting. It looks like dyed hair, but I’ve never coloured my hair, I’ve never needed to do so. Although I’m 81 I still have my natural light reddish hair and freckles, which is part of my ‘look’. The portrait has somehow altered all that.

  Sandy Moffat didn’t know what I should wear. I had a black suit and a sweater with a thin black-and-grey stripe which he made into broad footballer’s stripes. I put on a red scarf through my own intuition; it cheered the artist up, he was quite gloomy. He said to me, the picture is called The Red Scarf, and that, in fact, is what it is. I was just a model for The Red Scarf by Sandy Moffat. It isn’t me at all; the author of my books is just not there.