Edith Wharton: The Cruise of the Vanadis. With photographs by Jonas Dovydenas. London: Bloomsbury, 2004.
It helps to have a yacht.
Married for three years and still in their twenties, the Whartons didn’t own a yacht, but they could afford to charter one, sharing expenses and adventures with its owner, Teddy’s cousin, James Van Alen. From Marseilles they went across to Algiers, where the steam-powered Vanadis was anchored. In the company of a crew of sixteen, eighty-two days later they disembarked in Dalmatia, at Ancona, having visited Malta, Syracuse, and many port cities and towns on the Greek islands and mainland. Vanadis was a Norse goddess who engaged in sorcery, bringing it to earth—a female Hermes, although in some respects less helpful, lacking any other arts. Mrs. Wharton came from the north, too, but with no mumbo-jumbo in hand.
Touring poses a problem for one so intelligent as Edith Wharton. Here today, gone tomorrow, what’s really the point of ‘seeing the sights’? You won’t stay long enough to know anyone, to learn the language and the way people think. You can’t ‘do science,’ either. About all you can collect are impressions and anecdotes.
This tells, early in the book, where adjectives expressing generalities pop up too much. Of the fifteen or so occasions she deploys “picturesque,” a dozen occur in the first half. (“Surrounded by the first Arabs we had ever seen,” she can only stammer that they were “startlingly picturesque,” for example.) Same for “beautiful,” “pretty,” and “brilliant.” She’s a bit at a loss for words, a condition more remarkable in Edith Wharton than it is in you or I. For a time, she’s at sea in more ways than one.
She overcomes the difficulties as she goes along. She does it with an exact knowledge of botany and of history, along with the powers of perception and of ironic observation the readers of her then-future novels have come to expect. She seldom writes “flowers”; she writes asphodels, anemones, sweet alyssum, wild geranium, snapdragon, scarlet and yellow vetches. It helps to have convenient means of transportation; it also helps to know what you’re looking at, when you get there.
She invariably exercises her own judgment. Looking at the interior of the Cathedral of Monreale, in Palermo, she finds it lacking in “depth and variety of color: it seems to me that for this bright climate it is too much lighted.” She adds: “Of course I know that in saying this I am running counter to the opinion of the highest authorities; but this Journal is written not to record other people’s opinions, but to note as exactly as possible the impression which I myself received.”
As early as Algiers, she remarks the very recent “reality of Christian slavery in Africa”; “even in 1816 three thousand still remained to be released by Lord Exmouth when he destroyed the fleet of the Algerine pirates,” who had attracted the unfavorable attentions of the Jefferson and Madison administrations, only a few years before that. She notices that French imperial rule over Tunis has had much effect on the Tunisians; despite the mission civilisatrice, “nothing can be conceived more purely Oriental than the Bazaars” there. And even where the mission has left its mark, it hasn’t been altogether civilizing: “a suite of state apartments, furnished in the worst European taste of forty years ago,” was “adorned with the usual number of clocks with which Eastern potentates love to surround themselves.”
Malta, too, disappointed. The Knights of St. John landed there, after heroic deeds elsewhere, and much of what they had built was gone. “The Cathedral of St. Paul, which was not built until the close of the 17th century, is as tawdry and ugly as only a church of that epoch can be, and contains, as far as I know, no traces of the earlier cathedral built by the Norman masters of Malta in the 12th century. The fact is that, although the Hospitallers are so intimately associated with Malta, that their very name has been replaced by that of the island, they did not come there until the day of decadence, their own, as well as that of art and architecture. The romance of their history must be sought in the old heroic days of Jerusalem and Acre, while at Rhodes the order reached its highest pitch of dignity and honour. When the silver trumpet sounded the retreat of Christianity and civilization from the coasts of Asia Minor, the true power of the order began to wane,” and by the time they had arrived at Malta they’d “already begun to lose sight of the object for which they were fighting, and were gradually changing from the protectors of pilgrims into something little better than the pirates with whom they contended.”
She knows that tyrants ruled ancient Syracuse. The “Ear of Dionysius” was a cavern carved in the quarry where prisoners worked; the ruler could listen to any confidences exchanged by his enemies, and had a room at the other end of the “Ear” to enable him to monitor them in comfort. As an arbiter in her own right, Mrs. Wharton judges the ancient architecture superior to the modern; it was “sad to note how brutally the Christian adapter handled his materials.” If the decadence of the Knights of Malta instanced what her older contemporary, Matthew Arnold, called Christendom’s melancholy, long, withdrawing roar, its advance in early modern times was no unmixed blessing, at least when it came to taste in design. And even before that, she laments, Syracuse saw the defeat of the Athenian army. Gliding over the Mediterranean, she sides with ancient Athens, more often than not.
And while she has a place in her heart for the romance of knighthood, she is no Romantic. She dislikes ruins. At the Temple of Concord in Girgenti, built in the Doric style, she finds that “its glory has departed.” “How the architect would have shuddered to think that his raw masses of sandstone would remain exposed to the eyes of future critics?”—the marble facing having cracked and fallen off. On to Greece, the centerpiece of her journey.
She oversleeps while the yacht passes the southern cliffs of Santa Maura, “from which Sappho is supposed to have thrown herself into the sea.” Mrs. Wharton prefers the sea for travel, leaving its use for self-destruction to less well-governed souls. Nor are modern Greeks at times any better at self-government. In Zante, not only are men often miserly, they are so “much absorbed in local politics” that “any person who is dying is afraid to receive the Sacrament from a priest of the opposing party, lest poison be administered.” Foreign politicians prove less worrisome but no more helpful; at the next port, she finds that the men at the English Consul’s office “had very little information to give us, either about Milo, or the rest of the Aegean.” She falls back on learning firsthand, enjoying the holiday costumes of the local women, the “Eastern hospitality” of one of “the chief magnates” of the village (complete with glasses of wine that “reminded us of the ‘sweet wine’ so popular with the heroes of the Odyssey“), and the stern necessity of never violating a point d’honneur by offering material recompense to one’s host. And while the occasional literary allusion occurs to her, “in fact the lack of books about this part of the world, though at times an annoyance, lends an undeniable zest to travelling and makes the approach to each island as thrilling as a discovery.”
In 1888, in Greece, Americans found themselves as much tourist attractions themselves, among local folk, as the sights were for Americans. As she dines with magnates, “the rest of the population looked in at the open door,” and when departing Trypiti on a donkey, at “every window, door, balcony and house-roof” “eager gazers” watched as she “rode triumphantly down the village street.” Yet the Greeks are hardly bumpkins, at least uniformly, when left to themselves. “While other islands, an afternoon’s sail away, still doze in medieval calm, Syra, placed by accident in the route of the steamer lines, palpitates with the responsibilities of modern life”—”a great source of pride to the modern Greeks, but very uninteresting to the traveler who has hoped in sailing eastward to leave the practical realities of life behind. Syra is a hard, ugly place, like all ambitious centres of traffic.” On occasion, even the less ‘evolved’ Greek places repel. “The people of Amorgo have a very bad reputation throughout the Aegean and are accused of making piratical excursions to the neighboring islands, for the purpose of carrying off sheep and goats; but they are very mild and civilized-looking compared with the Astypalians, whose “savage-looking faces,” “narrow and dirty streets,” and generally “unsavory” population leave Mrs. Wharton “uncomfortably reminded of the old days when the Greek islands were not as safe as they are now.”
Rhodes reminds her again of the Hospitallers, who “for centuries defended Christendom against the Ottoman” and sheltered pilgrims heading for Jerusalem. “But Europe failed them in their need, and having in turn been driven by the Turks from Jerusalem and Acre, they were obliged to take refuge in Cyprus in the thirteenth century.” From there they were transferred to Cyprus, where “their rule was an enlightened one for that age, and the Rhodians were happy under their protection” until 1522, when the Ottomans expelled them. “The Street of the Knights is long and narrow, and the fine facades of the houses are broken and defaced by the wooden lattices built out by the Turks.” Indeed, “everything has been done which barbarians could devise to destroy these once beautiful houses,” which Mrs. Wharton nonetheless finds “far finer and more suggestive of the Knights in their crowning day of strength than the debased late Renaissance Auberges of Malta.” Nature does better, as Rhodes has “the most beautiful climate in the Mediterranean.”
Nature also blessed Patmos, “deeply indented with bays and fjords.” Although home to the Monastery of St. John the Divine and to “the small church built over the cave where he is supposed to have seen ‘a door opened in Heaven,’ the Hegumenos interfered with the spiritual impression of the site when he offered to show the Whartons the body of St. John in exchange for a substantial fee. “We found some excuse for declining.” Eastern hospitality extended by the Greek Consul assuaged the rub, with no compensation expected.
“The most beautiful island in the Aegean,” Mytilene proves “from end to end… a blossoming garden.” Embroideries shown off by the elderly aunt of their guide feature Turkish “coloring and design”; Mrs. Wharton remains alert to the blending of Greece and Turkey, ancient, Christian, and modern. They obtain a letter of introduction from the Mytilene archbishop to the First Man of Mount Athos, where the existing monastery dates back to the tenth century, built on ruins from Constantine’s time. The First Man supervises two classes of monks: the Coenobites, who sharing “all things in common,” and the Idiorrhythmics, who “preserve a great measure of independence, take their meals apart, and even maintain their private servants if they choose.” The latter way of life “is much less strict, and more popular among the richer monks,” whereas the Coenobites “are a rough and illiterate set.” “In some of the monasteries all the monks are Greek, in others Slavonic and Russian; and Russico, the Russian monastery, is said to be in the present day a hot-bed of Russian political spies.” Plus ça change…. Annoyed by the rule that no women may set foot on Mount Athos, “I ordered steam up in the launch, and started out on a voyage of discovery, determined to go as near the forbidden shores as I could.” She did discover one thing: the shore was guarded by alert and energetic monks, who “clambered hurriedly down the hill to prevent my landing, and with their shocks of black hair and long woolen robes flying behind them… were a wild enough looking set to frighten any intruder away.” The men in her party were quite welcome, however, and viewed “all the marvelous eikons set with uncut rubies, sapphires and emeralds,” the frescoes, and the illuminated manuscripts housed in the shrine, including a “book of rules which was written for the artists of the Greek Church in the very beginning of Byzantine art by Dionysius of Agrapha.”
Modern Athens, “a white, glaring town,” has “the neat, proper air of a German Residenz, incongruously overshadowed by the Acropolis.” If “the King’s Palace is not a thing of beauty,” the Academy of Sciences building, a modern imitation of Ionic architecture, “shows how perfectly suited Greek architecture was to the Greek climate and landscape, and how grotesque are the classic reproduction in northern countries, with their smoke-blackened columns and weather-beaten sculptures.” One suspects that Mrs. Wharton would not have been altogether surprised, although repelled, by the depredations of the Germans in the next century. Be this as it may have proved, “whatever else of interest Athens contains is so subordinated to the Acropolis, that it is after all but a perfunctory glance one casts at the sculpture of the theatre of Dionysius, the exquisite columns of the Choragic Monument of Lysicrates, or even the treasures of the Museums.” “Perhaps on a second visit to Athens one might recover one’s sense of proportion. I hope some day to find out.” Athens is the only place about which she suggests such an intention.
The Whartons then left Greece, stopping at Montenegro (its independence still threatened by the Turks), where the men “all looked bored and discontented, and no wonder, for unless they are fighting they have nothing to do.” “How they manage to live there without being driven to suicide is a mystery,” although they seem too unpoetic to indulge any such Sapphic impulses. At Dalmatia, the Whartons bade farewell to the crew, which greeted the bonus they were offered as no affront to Eastern hospitality.
“The cruise, first to last, was a success.” And so is the journal, showing, as it does, how to tour with grace and wit.
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