Songlines
The Garden of Allah, the novel by Robert Smythe Hichens, is published in 1904. See below.
Dust jacket of Grace and Favour with portrait of the authoress by Cecil Beaton, and two persimmons.
No doubt you've wondered how we are managing out here lately, what with the fires and the protests raging all around us. Understandably, the fires have dominated the local news coverage, and on top of which I have been working a full schedule lately, but when I caught up with E and M and C Saturday evening (at a smart cabaret in Hollywood), I was gratified to learn that the march on City Hall, which they attended along with many other thousands of our friends and acquaintances, had seen a very healthy turnout, the subway trains arriving downtown at Pershing Square positively filled to the brim.
It is a strange thing, I thought, as I was working just blocks away from the action, how people and lives can manage to converge without seeming to; almost invisibly, simultaneously co-habitating as it were, all of us taking the same trains, arriving in the same places, our different experiences overlapping in a particular place and time, close and yet far, near and yet separate. Just the other night, for instance, Heroes was filming right outside my place of employment, and I might not have ever known if one of the security guards hadn't mentioned it as I was leaving. Now at some future point I will see the episode on TV and realize that while the dramatic and dire situation is unfolding for one of the superhero cast on the small screen, my past self sits utterly oblivious in that distant lighted window in the background. Odd.
Meanwhile, reading Grace and Favour [New York, Reynal & Co., 1961] the memoirs of Loelia Duchess of Westminster (1902-1993), I am struck by the less than six degrees separating her world from ours, even though as she herself admits, it is a world that exists no longer. In fact the wonder is it existed at all; children abandoned to the whims of sadistic governesses, wives neglected by sporting (and wandering) husbands, all of them at the mercy of royal caprice and subject to the demands of insufferable ritual and rule, burdened with enormous homes requiring the employment of countless staff. Not to mention the herculean effort involved in traveling. From the Duchess's account it is perfectly clear that being "in Society" was no easy task.
In 1928, while still a shy and as yet unmarried young woman, Loelia accepts an invitation to a Mediterranean cruise on Admiral and Lady Beatty's yacht. Lady B. was the daughter of millionaire Marshall Field of Chicago, and according to Loelia "extremely spoilt" -- they cruise the shores of North Africa and Loelia observes that "Marakesch would have been delightful if Lady Beatty had ever stopped complaining about the flies."
They arrive at Biskra, a small town in the Algerian desert which they all know from the play based on the "hoary Edwardian best-seller" put on at Drury Lane in 1920, "a production chiefly memorable because a realistic dust-storm was conjured up with the aid of electric fans, so that the people in the front stalls were smothered in sand."
The Garden of Allah, which would inspire not just theatre but three film versions (two silent, one with Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer), and lend its name to an infamous apartment complex in West Hollywood ruled over by the femme fatale Nazimova is, acccording to Loelia "an irresistible mixture of sex, religion and the Lure of the East:"
Although the novel had been written as long ago as 1904 we found in Biskra not
only the author Robert Hichens (rather pale and washed-out looking), but also the
wonderful garden. It was just as it is described in the book... More, the fortune-
teller was still there too, squatting on his haunches and gazing out over the desert.
Naturally, the young lady has her fortune told. The incredibly old man reveals that she is going to acquire tremendous wealth, many houses, yachts, pearls, diamonds, emeralds, everything money can buy, but that she will never be happy because of jealousy.
"I thought it boring of him (she writes) to give me the set piece he gave every unmarried girl and not to have invented something a little more probable which I could have the fun of believing."
As the reader discovers, however, in a short time Loelia would indeed meet and marry the immensely rich and violently untrusting Duke of Westminster, thus ending up with a life precisely as described by the old desert soothsayer.
"It seems odd," she writes, "that I should never have had the slightest premonistion as to what was in store for me."
A sentiment with which I believe so many of us can identify. How little we know or can imagine, as we trudge along the road to happy destiny, of the intersection of our fate with other lives, other paths, crossing our own, yachts passing in the night, so to speak. (There is another Robert Hichens by the way, unrelated, who was at the wheel of the Titanic when she struck ice). And I might add, how unexpectedly 1904 shows up, a sign, however obtuse, that faintly resonates as a reminder to me of life's mysteries yet to be revealed, tempting me to imagine that I am somehow on the right track!
And so on Saturday, while my friends marched and made their voices heard in the ongoing struggle for civil rights and justice, I was a few blocks away doing my job. And in that capacity, as a result of assisting a patron -- an older lady of foreign extraction -- I was given by this kind individual two persimmons (illustrated above) which she happened to have in her bag. As I am not stictly speaking a civil servant and therefore prone to bribery, I graciously accepted the gift as a token of her appreciation.
This is the season for persimmons, an exotic fruit in my humble opinion, grown in exotic gardens. I have not the slightest idea what you do with them; recipes to which I have given a cursory glance seem beyond my meagre skills as a chef. I am told persimmons help regulate one's ch'i which I can't help thinking is enormously important if also rather elusive. And I find them beautiful.
I could never have predicted persimmons as I went off to work on Saturday. I have no idea what's in store for you or for me.
I feel certain, however, even without the aid of a fortune teller, that we will meet in the fullness of Time. That our journeys are invisible lines laid down -- Songlines, as Bruce Chatwin once told us, which he learned about from the Aboriginals -- and these lines cross and intersect and cross again. In 1904. In 1928 in a garden in north Africa. This past weekend, in downtown Los Angeles.
Dust jacket of Grace and Favour with portrait of the authoress by Cecil Beaton, and two persimmons.
No doubt you've wondered how we are managing out here lately, what with the fires and the protests raging all around us. Understandably, the fires have dominated the local news coverage, and on top of which I have been working a full schedule lately, but when I caught up with E and M and C Saturday evening (at a smart cabaret in Hollywood), I was gratified to learn that the march on City Hall, which they attended along with many other thousands of our friends and acquaintances, had seen a very healthy turnout, the subway trains arriving downtown at Pershing Square positively filled to the brim.
It is a strange thing, I thought, as I was working just blocks away from the action, how people and lives can manage to converge without seeming to; almost invisibly, simultaneously co-habitating as it were, all of us taking the same trains, arriving in the same places, our different experiences overlapping in a particular place and time, close and yet far, near and yet separate. Just the other night, for instance, Heroes was filming right outside my place of employment, and I might not have ever known if one of the security guards hadn't mentioned it as I was leaving. Now at some future point I will see the episode on TV and realize that while the dramatic and dire situation is unfolding for one of the superhero cast on the small screen, my past self sits utterly oblivious in that distant lighted window in the background. Odd.
Meanwhile, reading Grace and Favour [New York, Reynal & Co., 1961] the memoirs of Loelia Duchess of Westminster (1902-1993), I am struck by the less than six degrees separating her world from ours, even though as she herself admits, it is a world that exists no longer. In fact the wonder is it existed at all; children abandoned to the whims of sadistic governesses, wives neglected by sporting (and wandering) husbands, all of them at the mercy of royal caprice and subject to the demands of insufferable ritual and rule, burdened with enormous homes requiring the employment of countless staff. Not to mention the herculean effort involved in traveling. From the Duchess's account it is perfectly clear that being "in Society" was no easy task.
In 1928, while still a shy and as yet unmarried young woman, Loelia accepts an invitation to a Mediterranean cruise on Admiral and Lady Beatty's yacht. Lady B. was the daughter of millionaire Marshall Field of Chicago, and according to Loelia "extremely spoilt" -- they cruise the shores of North Africa and Loelia observes that "Marakesch would have been delightful if Lady Beatty had ever stopped complaining about the flies."
They arrive at Biskra, a small town in the Algerian desert which they all know from the play based on the "hoary Edwardian best-seller" put on at Drury Lane in 1920, "a production chiefly memorable because a realistic dust-storm was conjured up with the aid of electric fans, so that the people in the front stalls were smothered in sand."
The Garden of Allah, which would inspire not just theatre but three film versions (two silent, one with Marlene Dietrich and Charles Boyer), and lend its name to an infamous apartment complex in West Hollywood ruled over by the femme fatale Nazimova is, acccording to Loelia "an irresistible mixture of sex, religion and the Lure of the East:"
Although the novel had been written as long ago as 1904 we found in Biskra not
only the author Robert Hichens (rather pale and washed-out looking), but also the
wonderful garden. It was just as it is described in the book... More, the fortune-
teller was still there too, squatting on his haunches and gazing out over the desert.
Naturally, the young lady has her fortune told. The incredibly old man reveals that she is going to acquire tremendous wealth, many houses, yachts, pearls, diamonds, emeralds, everything money can buy, but that she will never be happy because of jealousy.
"I thought it boring of him (she writes) to give me the set piece he gave every unmarried girl and not to have invented something a little more probable which I could have the fun of believing."
As the reader discovers, however, in a short time Loelia would indeed meet and marry the immensely rich and violently untrusting Duke of Westminster, thus ending up with a life precisely as described by the old desert soothsayer.
"It seems odd," she writes, "that I should never have had the slightest premonistion as to what was in store for me."
A sentiment with which I believe so many of us can identify. How little we know or can imagine, as we trudge along the road to happy destiny, of the intersection of our fate with other lives, other paths, crossing our own, yachts passing in the night, so to speak. (There is another Robert Hichens by the way, unrelated, who was at the wheel of the Titanic when she struck ice). And I might add, how unexpectedly 1904 shows up, a sign, however obtuse, that faintly resonates as a reminder to me of life's mysteries yet to be revealed, tempting me to imagine that I am somehow on the right track!
And so on Saturday, while my friends marched and made their voices heard in the ongoing struggle for civil rights and justice, I was a few blocks away doing my job. And in that capacity, as a result of assisting a patron -- an older lady of foreign extraction -- I was given by this kind individual two persimmons (illustrated above) which she happened to have in her bag. As I am not stictly speaking a civil servant and therefore prone to bribery, I graciously accepted the gift as a token of her appreciation.
This is the season for persimmons, an exotic fruit in my humble opinion, grown in exotic gardens. I have not the slightest idea what you do with them; recipes to which I have given a cursory glance seem beyond my meagre skills as a chef. I am told persimmons help regulate one's ch'i which I can't help thinking is enormously important if also rather elusive. And I find them beautiful.
I could never have predicted persimmons as I went off to work on Saturday. I have no idea what's in store for you or for me.
I feel certain, however, even without the aid of a fortune teller, that we will meet in the fullness of Time. That our journeys are invisible lines laid down -- Songlines, as Bruce Chatwin once told us, which he learned about from the Aboriginals -- and these lines cross and intersect and cross again. In 1904. In 1928 in a garden in north Africa. This past weekend, in downtown Los Angeles.
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