SHARIA IBRAHIM PASHA NAGIB, CAIRO – OLIVIA MANNING (1908–80)
I never met Olivia Manning, but I did briefly meet her husband, the legendary BBC producer R.D. Smith, shortly after her death. It was in the old BBC Club (now restored as London’s Langham Hotel) where in the 1980s hardboard was still nailed to the walls as a wartime precaution. Suddenly out of the darkness of the bar a big man with a very red face loomed up over us. My host greeted him, told me this was ‘the legendary Reggie Smith’, and the big man passed on his slightly blurred, amiable way. It was only afterwards that I realised this was the Reggie Smith, the model for the hyper-gregarious Guy Pringle in six remarkable novels by Olivia Manning.
The Balkan Trilogy and The Levant Trilogy are wonderful books for a view of the Second World War from the perspective of the middle-class European flotsam that finds itself shunted around the Mediterranean as Germany invades everywhere. Olivia Manning wrote very close to her own experiences with Reggie as they fled from the Balkans to Athens and thence to Cairo and Jerusalem. A lot of the Smiths’ friends – and Olivia’s personal enemies – feature, thinly disguised, in the books. The only fictional element she seems to have imported into the trilogies is the wistful personality of Guy’s wife Harriet, who, if all the anecdotes about ‘Olivia Moaning’ are true, is a much, much nicer person than her creator ever was.
Years later my wife and I were on holiday in Cairo when I realised that our hotel in Garden City overlooked the British Embassy, which meant that somewhere nearby must be where R.D. Smith and Olivia Manning lived in the flat of Adam Watson, a diplomat they’d roomed with in Bucharest and who by 1941 was third secretary at the embassy. I wanted to see this place.
During her time in Cairo Olivia worked on Guests at the Marriage, an unpublished novel that covered the ground she would later explore more fully and definitively in The Balkan Trilogy. She also wrote short stories and poetry, some of which she sent to her friend Stevie Smith in Palmers Green in north London in the hope of publication. Not all of it arrived. Given the way the whole world was going up in flames at the time, that’s hardly surprising. For her important essay ‘Poets in Exile’ for Horizon magazine, Olivia managed to smuggle it to London in a diplomatic bag.
So one morning after breakfast I walked round to find Sharia Ibrahim Pasha Nagib, an affluent wide street now known as Ibrahim Naguib. It was no distance at all. The streets of Garden City are calm, relatively spacious and tree-lined. The architecture and atmosphere of the suburb reflect Khedive Ismail’s desire at the end of the nineteenth century to Europeanise his city. Here private investors built spacious homes and apartment blocks on the east bank of the Nile. Back in 1941, however, Garden City was anything but quiet. The British army was based – wholly unofficially – at 10 Sharia Tolombat, which was known to taxi drivers as ‘The Secret Building’ because it was supposed not to exist. Special Operations was based at Sharia Rustum where Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Leigh Fermor were doing their bit to create chaos behind enemy lines, and the SAS and Long Range Desert Group were everywhere and (officially) nowhere.
If you were young enough and male it was all huge fun. David Stirling – ‘the Phantom Major’ who founded the SAS – convinced himself that the only way to get his big enterprise off the ground was to go to the top, so he broke into Army HQ at 10 Sharia Tolombat and managed to come face to face with commander-in-chief Claude Auchinleck (although he almost got himself shot in the process). Peter Stirling, David’s brother, lived above Olivia and Reggie at No. 13 and used to hold noisy parties surrounded by captured enemy explosives.
Poor Olivia Manning, this gung-ho world was not her. Reggie, amiable as ever, made that sense of isolation worse by spending long evenings drinking at the Anglo-Egyptian Union on Gezira Island in the middle of the Nile.
On ‘Ash Wednesday’ (1 July 1941) it looked as if the Afrika Korps would break through and soon be in Cairo, so the British Embassy and Middle East Command started burning all documents, blackening the sky in Garden City. It’s a scene that Harriet witnesses from the embassy garden: ‘The sun was dropping behind Gezira and a mist like smoke hung over the river. Passing into the mist she realised it really was smoke.’
Olivia urged Reggie to take a job in Alexandria, which she ended up disliking even more than Cairo because of the bombing raids, so they moved back to Cairo. In the winter of 1941 Olivia got a job as press attaché at the United States legation, which gave her more of a purpose – and an income – but she continued writing her fiction. It’s tempting to think it kept her sane.
Olivia Manning might not have enjoyed her time in Egypt, but had she been happier she might have partied more and written less. She recorded that she recoiled violently from the squalor and callousness of Cairo, but it was in Egypt that she began to question the behaviour of the British empire. This process resulted in the creation of Harriet Pringle as a voice benignly critical of imperialism when the Balkan and Levant trilogies were finally written back in England between 1960 and 1980.
The Art Deco apartment block at 13 Ibrahim Naguib still curves gracefully round the corner but it’s covered with window-mounted air-conditioners today, like a plague of rectangular warts. It’s mainly offices now, though the metal and glass front doors to let on to some apartments too. No one at the British Embassy could tell me where in this block R.D. Smith and his wife lived and where she developed what would eventually become the double trilogy, collectively known as The Fortunes of War. In 2011 the embassy staff had other things to worry about. So I returned to my hotel walking along the Nile. The image of Ash Wednesday stayed with me, however. Evidently not all the pages burned as they floated through the air, and by the end of the day peanut vendors in Cairo were selling nuts in cones made out of salvaged paper with the words ‘Top Secret’ stamped across them.
It really is a good job the Eighth Army stopped Rommel at Alamein.
CAFÉ HAFA, TANGIER – PAUL BOWLES (1910–99)
Tangier is one of those places that conjures up exotic images in the European and American mind and yet remains accessible. It has a long history with the United States: in 1821 the American legation building in Tangier became the first piece of foreign property ever acquired by the US government.
Conflicting colonial ambitions in Europe led to Tangier being made an international zone in 1923 under the joint administration of France, Spain and Britain. With a population that was half Muslim, a quarter Jewish and a quarter European, Tangier was not mainstream North Africa and its freedoms attracted both artists and exiles.
Maybe more than anyone else, Paul Bowles made Tangier fascinating for several generations of Americans. The young composer – and future author – was following in the footsteps of artists Delacroix, Degas and Matisse when he first visited, but he’d been wary about making the sea crossing from France. Bowles first visited in 1931 at the suggestion of Gertrude Stein with whom he was holidaying in the hamlet of Bilignin, north of Grenoble. When the immaculately dressed and crimped twenty-year-old protested that Tangier might be beyond his budget, she replied: ‘Nonsense. It’s cheap. It’s just the place for you.’
Though Tangier seemed to repel him almost as much as it attracted him, Bowles returned often and eventually took up residence. In 1947 he bought a house for $500 in the Upper Medina where he finished writing his first novel, The Sheltering Sky. Regarded by many as the definitive account of the American (and European) experience in North Africa, it was successfully filmed in Tangier in 1990 and features a cameo from Bowles himself, sitting at Café Colon in Rue de la Kasbah in its final frames.
One long weekend many years ago, I was in Tangier in the company of a gambler who had come here for the casinos. Growing tired of watching him quietly lose money, I visited the American legation to see its Paul Bowles Wing. The author’s battered suitcase was displayed, covered in hotel and shipping labels of the kind that we reproduce on souvenir sheets these days. The accompanying text explained a lot about Bowles’ field studies into traditional Moroccan music when he arrived in 1931.
The Sheltering Sky, despite being rejected by the publisher who had commissioned it, sums up a visitor’s experience of Tangier well: the broken pavements, the importuning children, and the odours. Bowles was acutely attuned to the smells of Tangier: references to the aromas of frying meat, baking bread, petrol, sweat, urine and fear pepper his writing.
I asked at the legation if anyone knew where I could find Bowles’ first house and was surprised that people knew only of Immeuble Itesa, the nondescript modern apartment block on the outskirts of Tangier where he lived from 1960 onwards. I know that he found his house in the Medina hard to heat and he occupied it less and less, even before he moved to Immeuble Itesa, but even so I would have loved to have seen where The Sheltering Sky was completed.
The playwright Jane Auer, Paul’s wife in a long-term, highly unconventional marriage, also had an apartment in the block. In 2009, on the tenth anniversary of Bowles’ death, a fellow resident erected a marble tablet that read, ‘Paul Bowles American Writer and Composer lived here from 1960/1999’. But I found it difficult to imagine Bowles here. It’s simultaneously too mundane and insufficiently immaculate.
So, as there was no way of tracking down the desert hotels where Bowles claimed that he began The Sheltering Sky, I went to Café Hafa instead, on a cliff-top west of the old city, in the slightly run-down Marshan district. Here there are beautiful views across the Straits of Gibraltar from a half-dozen terraces cut into the cliff-side. The café was founded in 1921 and some of its blue-painted chairs facing the sea look original. I watched the waiters trek up and down the steps between the terraces with tiny glasses of hot mint tea and snacks of bread, olives and dips, and I thought of Bowles drinking tea here and smoking God knows what with William Burroughs. Many people came to see him at Café Hafa, even The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. I saw a picture of a white-haired Bowles and a short-haired Mick Jagger sitting close, but not too close together, two unconventional musicians regarding each other with interest, if not affection. In 1990 the American artist Julian Schnabel painted a large canvas with the words ‘I went to Tangiers and had dinner with Paul Bowles’. Bowles and Tangier had become such indissoluble cultural markers by then.
Except for winters spent in Sri Lanka during the early 1950s, Tangier remained Bowles’ home for the rest of his life. Sitting at Hafa he would have mused on The Sheltering Sky, Let It Come Down (his novel of expatriate life in Tangier published in 1952), as well as The Spider’s House (1955) and Up Above the World (1966). At the end of his long life Bowles claimed his thoughts had turned back to music, but his last collection of verse was published in 1997, just two years before his death.
These days a new road, Route de la Plage Mercala, runs at the base of the cliff, keeping the sea some distance away. It’s best to sit somewhere on the terraces where the road isn’t visible and look out to sea and up to the sheltering sky. ‘I have spent a good many hours busily trying to determine the relationship between Tangier and myself,’ Bowles once wrote. ‘If you don’t know why you like a thing, it is usually worth your while to attempt to find out.’
The whole of Tangier was Paul Bowles’ room and he certainly explored it in his fiction.
HOTEL EL MUNIRIA, TANGIER – WILLIAM S. BURROUGHS (1914–97)
I wasn’t looking for William S. Burroughs in Tangier, but I often found myself at the Tangerinn, a temptingly disreputable bar where eventually I set the last scene of the novel I was writing at the time. The bar is still to be found under the terrace of a small white hotel called El Muniria, although when William Burroughs boarded here in the 1950s it was known as Villa Mouneria.
The hotel stands on a steep, scruffy slope in the Ville Nouvelle, with a patch of waste ground opposite it and a front door that is locked night and day – so don’t lose your key. The steepness of Rue Magellan accounts for the hotel terrace and the large vacant space under it, which many years ago had been turned into a bar for dirty drinking and even dirtier dancing.
One evening it was just me at the bar, apart from two crewcut women in biker jackets on the small dance floor, so I spent some time staring at the photos on the wall, recognising images of Jack Kerouac in swimming trunks, and of Allen Ginsberg before he lost his hair and grew a beard. There was also a grinning man lying on the beach, fully clothed with his hat on. The cadaverous face leering at the camera was unmistakable. This was William S. Burroughs, guru of the Beat Generation, a man who had shot his wife dead by accident and now needed somewhere out of the way to hide – somewhere just like Tangier.
I knew that Burroughs began The Naked Lunch in Tangier’s Café Central down in Petit Socco. He and his friends referred to the city’s international zone as the Interzone, a title that was given to a collection of Burroughs’ early stories that were eventually published in 1989. I’d started Interzone many years ago and decided that Burroughs was not my kind of writer. His fiction is paranoid and satiric, verging on downright unpleasant, but there is no doubting his influence. Kerouac and Ginsberg followed him to Tangier and helped him turn Naked Lunch – a series of episodes written while ingesting a local marijuana confection known as majoun – into a highly influential piece of non-linear fiction that was published in 1959.
What I hadn’t realised was that most of Naked Lunch was written up above my new favourite Moroccan divebar, in Room 9 of Hotel El Muniria. The barman showed me another photo, covered with clingfilm, that had fallen below the counter. Here were Ginsberg and Burroughs with Paul Bowles, the literary godfather of Tangier, all of them squinting into the sun. ‘Garden Villa Mouneria July 1961’ read the caption. ‘All assembled outside Bill’s single room post Naked Lunch.’ It was signed ‘Allen Ginsberg’.
I asked if I could see Burroughs’ room upstairs but the barman told me it was ‘privée’ these days. Nevertheless there was no reason not to knock on the hotel door so I paid for my martini and walked uphill to the big locked door. The owner was a gentle and welcoming lady and offered to show me a room. No. 8 had attractive views across the terrace to the Mediterranean. I’m not sure if my poor French misled her, and she thought I wanted to book in, but we exchanged pleasantries and I noticed the door of the room that once was Burroughs’ was now, frustratingly, indeed marked ‘privée’. Was it just too toxic to offer to members of the public?
‘I have a magnificent room overlooking the beach & the bay & the sea & can see Gibraltar,’ Kerouac wrote to his wife from Tangier. ‘A patio to sun on and a room maid, $20 a month – feel great but Burroughs has gone insane – he keeps saying he’s going to erupt into some unspeakable atrocity such as waving his dingdong at an Embassy party & such or slaughtering an Arab boy to see what his beautiful insides look like.’
Taking in the painted blue bedroom furniture of harmless Room 8, I remembered Kerouac describing the words pouring out of his friend in ‘an absolutely brilliant horde’. This new book, according to Jack, was going to be ‘the best thing of its kind in the world’.
And the room next door was where it all happened. I wish my French had been good enough to persuade Madame to let me see inside.
The next day I went to Café Central in Petit Socco, one of those French-African cafés where all the seats are arranged facing outward so you can watch passers-by on the road. The furniture was old and French, the walls painted an unfortunate pink where they weren’t badly tiled. Burroughs drank mint tea here and listened to Ginsberg telling him to keep going. ‘Don’t be depressed. There’s too much to do!’
The tea came in a little metal pot on a tiny metal tray. Burroughs described the café that inspired him as ‘One room 15 by 15, a few tables and chairs, a raised platform covered with mats stretched across one end of the room where the Arabs sit with their shoes off playing cards and smoking kif’. It seemed wholly unchanged – and also wholly typical of Morocco.
What was it about Tangier that got Burroughs’ literary juices going, apart from the freely available drugs? What was it that inspired Paul Bowles to write The Sheltering Sky and live here most of his adult life? The relationship between a writer and place is ultimately unknowable because it is so personal – but as Bowles said, it’s well worth trying to find out.