Other People's Houses

by Hilary McPhee

  Lyndall’s life was, and is, extraordinary and, gradually, as we became friends, she told me more about it. At the age of twenty-one, officially engaged to a rich, upper-class Englishman, she fled to Rome on a one-way ticket when her fiancé refused to listen to her plea they delay their marriage. In Rome, she survived by working as a proofreader in a UN agency. Then she re-met a man she had known slightly since the age of fourteen. Lionel (Bobby) Birch had been assistant editor to her father when he was editor of Picture Post. Twice her age, Bobby was then the editor, and holidaying in Rome, having just divorced his fourth wife. She married him but it was a disaster and, in less than a year, Lyndall was back in Rome, which she had been missing horribly. It was 1956, and she found work in the fashion and film worlds—a small part in Fred Zimmerman’s The Nun’s Story and as an extra in La Dolce Vita. Then she wrote film scripts with Wolfgang Reinhardt, Max Reinhardt’s son.

  A decade later, Lyndall met Lorenzo Passerini, a left-leaning Italian count who never used his title, and was in the process of donating, complete with furniture and a valuable library, his vast Renaissance villa, Il Palazzone—about 2 kilometres outside Cortona, near springs that irrigate the olive trees and cypresses—to a prestigious Italian university, the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa. The Palazzone had been commissioned by Silvio Passerini in 1521, a few years after he was made a cardinal by his close friend Giovanni Medici, Pope Leo X. Its tiny chapel was frescoed by Signorelli; its huge salone by one of his pupils. Through the generations, many precious paintings, art treasures and Etruscan urns had been added to the original Renaissance furnishings.

  Lorenzo kept a large apartment, with a 30-metre tower and an unkempt garden, to live in for the rest of his life. In his middle years, he spent much time in Africa, flying out in his own secondhand Cessna aeroplane, until he lost everything, including the plane, when a revolution broke out in Angola, where he had a coffee plantation, forcing him to return to Italy by boat.

  He was twenty years older than Lyndall and, like her, had had a very brief marriage many years before, but unlike her, was not able to be divorced. When divorce became legal after a referendum in Italy in 1972, Lorenzo and Lyndall married. They lived in shabby grandeur, in un-modernised rooms, handsomely frescoed, with uneven floors and all the shutters too rickety to close. Lorenzo had died over thirty years before; Lyndall, as his widow, was still there. Her domain was now the tower, and a frescoed apartment where her friends and family visited her throughout the year. Eventually, that apartment, too, will go to the Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa.

  Lyndall and I had more in common than I could have ever imagined. Politics, of course, but also reading and films. Friends brought her books from London and she had a vast collection of DVDs to get her through the winters. And we spoke sometimes of difficult mothers, her stories putting mine in the shade. As a young woman, Antonia White had gone temporarily out of her mind and been incarcerated for almost a year in Bethlem Royal Hospital (Bedlam) in Southwark, now the Imperial War Museum. Besides Frost in May, the best known of her books, one of her other three novels and some short stories describe her madness.

  Antonia White also left behind a journal of more than a million words, which would be edited to a much reduced form by her eldest daughter, Lyndall’s half-sister, Susan Chitty. The publication of these edited diaries had exacerbated a rift between her daughters—both of whom had written biographies of their mother. Now to My Mother: A Very Personal Memoir of Antonia White by Susan Chitty was followed by Lyndall’s Nothing to Forgive, an attempt to soften and correct her sister’s portrait of their difficult and neurotic mother, who had battled bouts of depression, existing precariously by translating French authors, including Colette and Maupassant. Antonia White died in 1980, having lived on her own for forty years after the last of her three marriages ended in divorce in 1938. And Carmen gave Antonia the huge pleasure of being republished in Virago’s Modern Classics.

  I would make Lyndall’s little apartment in the town almost mine for much of the next four years, moving a desk under a window, so I could see out over the wall and the rooftops to the Valdichiana plain towards Lake Trasimeno. On warm evenings, I would sit outside on that wall, partly concealed in the leaves, a book and glass of wine beside me, legs dangling over the 10-metre drop to the stone churchyard of San Domenico below. And the windowsills in the apartment were high and deep enough for me to sit on when the sun slanted perfectly into the sitting room, cheering me, and ripening my summer tomatoes and autumn pears.

  5

  Hope against hope

  THE FIVE DRAFT chapters I had left behind were 100 pages printed with wide margins for comments, and a tactfully worded request, insisted on by Sitti Sarvath, that Prince Hassan work on the text before I return, and not ‘just keep talking’. I knew what she meant. The taped interviews, when he could fit them in, had been getting better, and some were rather wonderful—full of rich ramblings, philosophical, poetical, theoretical, literary, hilarious—or simply ways of avoiding the task. It was obvious by now that this was a book Prince Hassan was reluctant to do, had probably never wanted to do. But his wife and, presumably other members of his family, persuaded him to ‘write’ it, perhaps in the hope it might cheer him up. Or something. Eight years of mourning, enough already—whatever its Arabic equivalent might be.

  Leaving those 100 pages behind was also a way for me to test the waters. Before I flew out, I had remembered to ask Adiba, the research assistant who’d met me when I first came to Jordan, about Lyndall’s mention of a friend who was writing a biography of King Hussein. Adiba’s face lit up. ‘That’s Avi Shlaim,’ she told me, the esteemed supervisor of her Oxford Ph.D. She had been one of his research assistants on the biography, and proofs of the book were expected in the new year.

  Suddenly, belatedly, the origins of the idea of a Prince Hassan book done by interview became clearer. Avi Shlaim was the author of major works on the Middle East, the most recent being Collusion Across the Jordan: King Abdullah, the Zionist Movement, and the Partition of Palestine. Born in Baghdad, Shlaim grew up in Israel and was Professor of International Relations at Oxford. A hugely respected scholar, Shlaim was able to persuade the United States Institute of Peace to fund three research assistants over five years to work on his biography. Instead, for Prince Hassan’s ‘autobiography’, the PA, and whoever else was party to the idea, found me.

  Why? Because I was Australian and therefore an outsider?

  Would I have fallen for the project’s exoticism had I known that a major biography of Prince Hassan’s older brother, King Hussein, had been underway for five or more years, and, indeed, was almost finished and soon would be published to, no doubt, great acclaim? Surely I would not.

  Why didn’t I think to check? Why wasn’t I told about it? I, too, had lost face, but presumably nobody there but me knew that.

  Would I have stayed home, and faced the music? The question only then occurred to me.

  I was sleeping badly again, according to my diary. Life was pretty threadbare, if I was honest. Incredibly lonely. Lots of new experiences, new people, new ways of thinking. Brain fully stretched. But not a friend in sight. It dawned on me that I was in a kind of oasis on the edge of a war zone, in a state of transition, if I was lucky. I emailed this rather flimsy thought to the friend who was interested in psychoanalysis and psalms. How about this? I emailed hopefully. And as for me thou upholdest me in mine integrity, and settest me before thy face forever. Psalm 41:12.

  Integrity was the point. I had no hope of an afterlife, and not the faintest hope that anyone but me would help get me through this time. But the language of the Psalms sometimes reached out across the abyss and held me.

  I never mentioned what had happened to me. Putting it into words for strangers would only turn it into a shabby cliché, as the same friend who went through the wringer with her soulmate writer husband had put it. Instead I had fallen for an intriguing project I probably should have avoided. So, I read a lot, walked a
lot, and, at night, projected myself into the corrupt manic-depressive world of The Sopranos, laughing and groaning.

  When I next returned to Amman, at the end of January 2007, it was midwinter, dark and raining. On arrival, I was hoping to sleep but the office telephoned to say that a car was on its way, as Prince Hassan wished to see me at 6.30 p.m.

  Fitted in between harried staff planning meetings for a conference in Islamabad and two Indian diplomats on a trade mission, I was ushered into Prince Hassan’s office, where the five chapters were waiting. He had read only two of them closely, hadn’t had time for the rest, but there was a yellow writing pad covered in minute notes in Arabic and English, which he then started taking me through. Clearly he doesn’t want to do a memoir. I don’t blame him. Perhaps later, in my dotage, if then, he might pen one for family and a few close friends.

  Obviously, he hates the first-person pronoun, and any hint of emotional, let alone psychological, underpinnings, I wrote furiously in my diary later that night, which makes writing a memoir or an autobiography by interview rather a tall order. His use of the words fluff and visceral in response to my wanting more about his formidable mother’s determination to protect his ailing father, King Talal, made me cross. He didn’t want to speak at all of his parents; or of his extraordinary Christian humanist nanny, who gave him a copy of the Declaration of the Rights of Man, and taught him to know the natural world. Or of his schooldays at Harrow, where he, the only Muslim in his class, and another boy, a Sephardic Jew, were let off chapel provided they studied together, one the Qur’an, the other the Old Testament. This was the material that, for me, had comprised much of the appeal of the transcripts of the original taped interviews. And, as expected, he wanted no details of the succession change. Nor of his Beloved brother, King Hussein, nor of his Beloved nephew, King Abdullah. The mandatory ‘Beloved’ always with a capital B.

  But when I calmed down, I was rather relieved. I knew what he meant. The international book world was full of lightweight ghosted memoirs ‘penned’ by prominent men promoting themselves. Prince Hassan was far more interested in policy and good governance. His 30-year role as Crown Prince of Jordan, and in the years since, had been one of nation-building, establishing institutions and promoting alliances, and, with his brother, attempting to broker peace deals with Israel. ‘A record of dynasty in service of the people’, as he described it. Certainly, it meant that Jordan punched above its weight. He warranted a better book than a ghosted autobiography.

  Later, Prince Hassan rang me, presumably from the house, to reassure me that it was ‘my call’. And he especially wanted to read me two amusing quotes, about ‘moral clarity’ and ‘core values’, from a gift I’d given him: my distant husband’s most recent book, Dictionary of Weasel Words. The quotes were perfectly apposite and made him laugh loudly. I made myself laugh back.

  The next fortnight, Sidi and Sitti were away, and I quelled my urge to walk away from it all as impossible unless it were properly resourced, with more staff, which seemed unlikely. Instead, I started to come up with a plan for a rather different book, based mainly on new interviews, about the plight of the region and its political struggles. The plan I noted in my journal was to insist on having Adiba help source documents that weren’t as dry as dust, and for me to do further interviews, transcribed by the PA, so that I could present the idea in the best form I could to London publishers. The London literary scene is no pushover—not even for the voice of reason from the Middle East.

  One evening, I was just putting the finishing touches to a new synopsis and a progress report, including a firm I may not be the right person for this. We may well be too far apart in our views of what is needed and what is possible—and I have a professional distaste for books no one reads, when the door to the pavilion slid open and in he came. ‘I saw the light on and came straight over, and wanted to see how you are getting on.’ Charm—and perhaps an awareness that he’d left me in an impossible position, with only two chapters read, and the absurd proposition that all the personal stuff he’d given me should go, and be replaced by a book of record, or something equally dreary.

  He read what was on the computer screen, groaned and said, ‘You are playing into my wife’s hands.’ I described what I thought might work—in his words, from his material, written by me. But I told him this was the hardest kind of book to make work, because I would have to get inside his head, in language that sounded like him and could be readily translated into Arabic. ‘Let’s do it,’ he said. ‘Don’t go. You’re in charge.’ And he’d done it again—left me wanting to make a difficult book happen.

  But this was to be a first-person account by a Hashemite Prince at the centre of public life during a long period of regional and civil wars, when institution building and modernisation were all that would save Jordan from threats from all sides.

  How do you get inside a culture to which you have privileged but very partial access; and restricted, surely stage-managed, access to its inner workings? Until I arrived in Jordan, most of what I knew of present-day Islam was shaped by post 9/11 panic, and by Australian media coverage closely aligned with that from the UK and the US. The passing of the US Patriot Act after 9/11 and its renewal in 2006, which suspended and curtailed so many civil liberties, had been mirrored by Canada, India, Mexico, Britain and Australia. Islamophobia was rising rapidly, with hotspots in Gaza and Iran feeding the panic.

  For the next eighteen months, I steeped myself in Jordanian history and culture as best I could. I ordered books online, and borrowed from Prince Hassan’s library the prolific and wonderful Karen Armstrong’s Islam: A Short History and A History of God. Syrian poet Nizar Qabbani and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, I found in anthologies. I ordered recent Palestinian, Egyptian and Lebanese novels, Elias Khoury’s Gate of the Sun and Alaa Al Aswany’s The Yacoubian Building, Suad Amiry’s Sharon and My Mother-in-Law. Novels in translation about Jordan I could not find—but everyone I met took me to task for Forbidden Love by Norma Khouri, recently published in Australia, and now exposed as fraudulent. I read Edward Said again, plus Christopher Hitchens, Paul McGeough, Robert Fisk, biographies and political histories, travelogues of journeys through Syria and Turkey. I ordered DVDs and one day found at the market the 1996 Chronicle of a Disappearance, made by Elia Suleiman.

  Carmen suggested Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian writer born forty years after Naguib Mahfouz, whose superb historical and political novels In the Eye of the Sun and The Map of Love move between London and Cairo. Both Soueif and Mahfouz took me inside Muslim households, across several generations, as only fiction can. Azar Nafisi’s Reading Lolita in Tehran had just been published and was in large piles in bookshops everywhere. I read, of course, William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain, envious of his scholarly surefootedness, but irritated by his confident, striding male Britishness. One evening in a book exchange at one of the hotels, and abandoned by a traveller, no doubt, I came across a battered copy of Albanian Ismail Kadare’s The Successor, a brilliant political and psychological thriller set in a small country where steadfast loyalty goes unrewarded and powerful clans come to bitter ends.

  Iran, Russia, Albania, Kurdistan, Turkistan, Afghanistan were not far away. Syria, Israel and Saudi Arabia were just over the border. Not only did my mental map of the world start to shift in a way I could not yet nail, but my antennae did also—whatever that might mean. The PA and I went to some performances of what could only be described as rough political satire—Jordan was sometimes the butt of all jokes but so, too, were political figures, the prime minister, the chief of police. The Royal Family, certainly not. In a country where death and life sentences were common, where families were expected to petition for justice or arrange recompense, where surveillance was increasing due to rapid internet access, the monarchy seemed beloved, with its profile polished by numerous glossy magazines, and its protection ensured by endless heavily armed motorcades that brought the traffic to a standstill.

  In my apartment, where
I started to work more often, central heating blasting, I sometimes watched subtitled soapies from Egypt, Lebanon, Jordan, with wicked husbands, pleading wives, scheming sons and runaway daughters. The Sopranos were mild in comparison. I was dependent for nightly news on Al Jazeera, CNN and BBC World News, and on what I could read online about the immediate and deteriorating situation in Iraq. Journalists from the BBC and CNN called on Prince Hassan often. He issued regular statements on Middle East policy and the ramifications of the war, and about the region’s need for a peace plan to come from Arab leaders, not from those who had brought it to its knees.

  The US surge in Iraq ‘to win hearts and minds’ had the opposite effect. The Battle of Najaf killed 300 Sunnis at the end of January 2007. A truck bomb in the Baghdad market killed 135 and injured many hundreds more. Reprisals escalated, with car bombs planted where people congregated. There were images of desperate fathers carrying bloodied children through the streets. Planes went overhead very often and everyone would fall silent.

  Prince Hassan was a visionary who believed democracy should be driven from within. This put him at odds with those who maintained that US foreign policy in the region should be guided by a mission to export freedom, and somehow bring about democratic change in the Arab world without understanding the social dynamic of the silenced majorities there or taking account of the shallowness of civil society. The weight of the last two centuries of Ottoman rule on Arab political life, followed by that of imperial Britain and France, when political parties were artificially established and manipulated, had left a residue of hopelessness. Well before 9/11, security services in the Arab world were often entirely funded by foreign powers. How, then, to progress freedom of speech and analysis after 9/11, when security became the primary consideration?