Byzantine Honeymoon
A Tale of the Bosphorus
1979
AT ETON IN the early 1950s, Philip Glazebrook already appeared to be an onlooker, not a participant. Thanks to his red hair, pale eyes and a certain gravity, I knew who he was but we never exchanged a word. A joker in the Eton pack at that moment was David Winn, who could be seen slipping away with Philip to play golf, the opposite of team sport. Both were writers in the making. In 1963, David drowned in a sailing accident. In one of his letters to me, Philip observes that one has to overcome self-esteem and accept writing something less good than the writing of one’s most brilliant contemporary. “Not to have grown out of that dilemma is the real tragedy. I often wonder if David W. would have progressed beyond that point.” Thanks to other Glazebrooks successful in their fields, a conventional education and some private money, Philip was often dismissed as a dilettante, an oddball who was either too serious or not serious enough. The opening sentence of the obituary that the Times published in 2007 is an impressive example of the sneering he was up against. “Philip Glazebrook was one of the last of a near-extinct breed, the genteel man of letters.”
Four years as an honorary attaché at the British Embassy in Rome provided material for fiction, especially Try Pleasure, Philip’s sophisticated first novel. Here he makes fun of a dislikeable true-to-type member of the Foreign Office, clearly a personal enemy. I believe Philip and I met more or less by chance in Florence when I was staying with my grandmother. “All that may be said for identifying Italy so inextricably with Youth is that I am conscious of no regret for lost youth, but only for lost Italy.… Instead of a pensione in Vallombrosa I clocked in at the Reigate House of Correction for my autumn shot at getting a novel off the ground. Do you know about Mount Pleasant at Reigate, a glum mansion put at the disposal of ‘artists’ by the munificence of a starch millionaire.”
The Eye of the Beholder moves easily from Cheshire and Scotland to Mexico City and Antigua. In a review I wrote, “If it had been free of the structure of a novel this would have been a wonderful travel book.” Philip picked up this recommendation, telling me, “Ever obedient, I did at last write a kind of book of travels (a mixture of my own outing to Kars with my interest in nineteenth-century travellers to those parts).” Revealing the inner self, he also noted, “I was more pleased to have my Travels accepted as publishable than any novel since my first. Perhaps because of my admiration for real travellers, perhaps because of the sensation of peeling off the green spectacles and false nose of novel-writing (where you masquerade your own views as the views of your characters) I have more the feeling of ’being published’ in this case than in others. Also, consequently, more the feeling of being a fraud whose pretensions will be uncovered by merciless pens.”
Journey to Khiva was published in 1992, and I think my comment on it prompted Philip to return the compliment, “accepting as gospel truth the favorable line taken by so elegant and perspicacious a pen as your own … twenty-five years of rather intermittent production has taught me that all but a tiny pinch of reviews are nothing but further irritation. I cannot help looking in the papers in hopes of one of those reviews that (whether favourable or not) comes from an intelligence which has twigged what you are up to and why you wrote the book.”
Philip lived in a handsome Regency house in Dorset, very much a gentleman’s residence. Once when I was staying there, he invited Fred Warner to dinner. A member of the Foreign Office, he had been a friend of the Soviet agents Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean and had accompanied Kim Philby on some motorbike trip in Europe, bringing on himself the nickname of Red Fred as well as numerous interrogations with the security services. He had been posted to Burma, and in an encounter that had entertained a small circle, David Winn had advised Fred to learn Burmese so that he could earn a living translating Burmese poetry when the going became really rough. Reminded of this tease, Fred hit the table so hard that he brought down the delicate candlesticks. Philip followed it up with another invitation to Fred, keeping me in the picture. “I will tweak and probe till candles once more leap from sconces as Diplomat’s Shoe Strikes Table.” Fred was selling his Dorset estate, “so may well regret yet his inadequate grasp of Tamil, or whatever language it was David Winn advised him to master against a destitute old age.” Philip would have wished to be a successor to Layard, Kinglake, Burkhardt, Mungo Park, Richard Burton, Speke, the adventurous men who opened paths all over the world and whose books, preferably first editions, he collected single-mindedly. Surely one of the most surprising novels in English literature is Philip’s Captain Vinegar’s Commission, a pastiche of this Victorian genre with its military and imperial undertones.
For lengthy periods he abandoned home and civilized life, and on returning he was in the habit of isolating himself again in some bleak place where he could write up the latest experiences without distraction. He did not feel justified in “making the house miserable whilst I worked, a place of whispers and tiptoes and dying fires and silent meals.” In his heartfelt words about the self-discipline imposed by blank paper, “I behave like a savage, speak to no one, act furtively, kick the dog, have always taken cottages before (where, like Baudelaire, I can be self-catering and fais bouillir et mange mon cœur).” Some colorful idea, some recapitulation of the past, in the case of Kars and Khiva the romance of distant inaccessible places, had a grip on his imagination. He and I had a joke correspondence using paper and envelopes that bore no relation to where we actually were but spun a misleading story. Letterheads I received from him include the Venice-Simplon Orient Express, M. V. Innisfallen of the City of Cork Steam Packet, the Gellert Hotel in Budapest, the Hotel Bulevard in Bucharest, the British Embassy in Rome (dated long after his service as honorary attaché) and the Turban Amasya Oteli. Also postcards variously postmarked from Tallinn, Urfa, Prague, the Algonquin in New York and Hawthornden Castle where writers are supposed to stay in and write, that is to say another House of Correction.
Always cadaverous, losing most of his red hair as he aged, he was not the weakling that he might have appeared to be. He was resting on the bed in a Moscow hotel when a man came into the room carrying a knife and demanded money. Philip immediately grappled with him, and eventually managed to hold him down on the bed and wrest the knife away. The man then fled. Philip had suffered several cuts. The woman receptionist on that floor of the hotel must have heard the scuffle but refused to respond. The blood on Philip’s arms was not enough for the police in the local station to register the assault.
Here is a letter ostensibly from Celik Palas Oteli in Bursa, written after what he calls a ramble in the Levant. Unusual as others may have judged him to be, Philip evidently had come to terms with himself. “I found I had manufactured for myself a Hero-Narrator … an attitude not wholly in accordance with my real one when confronted with the ups and downs of solitary travel. You leave things out – the dull bits – and after re-writing a time or two, you have clean forgotten them. By dull bits I mean trying to find somewhere to have breakfast in a shabby dusty Turkish town, after sharing your bedroom with two stout Turks, when every eating shop seems to be selling only corba iskembe. Still, there’s nothing like Travel: I had, I suppose, six days out of the month which I will never forget, and what other recreation could claim so high a proportion of bulls-eyes? Only when crossing the Syrian border from Urfa to Aleppo (which took eight hours at the mercy of some very reckless young urban guerrillas) did I think that a 47-year-old father of four with a comfortable home was possibly in the wrong place. Syria is in the hands of the successors of those bashibazuks and Arnauts and Nizam deserters who terrorised the Ottoman Empire. But an hour or two at Baron’s Hotel of course restored me to absolute trust in the flatness of the earth under an Englishman’s feet.”