Vieuchange’s Forbidden City

Grove Koger

Until I complete a second edition of When the Going Was Good, I plan to post revised and updated entries. Today’s deals with Smara, the Forbidden City by French writer Michel Vieuchange, who was born on August 26, 1904, and died in 1930.

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Smara, the Forbidden City: Being the Journal of Michel Vieuchange While Travelling among the Independent Tribes of Southern Morocco and Rio de Oro (Chez les dissidents du Sud marocain et du Rio de Oro, Smara, carnets de route de Michel Vieuchange; Paris: Plon, 1932)

Influenced by such revolutionary spirits as Arthur Rimbaud and Frederic Nietzsche, young Frenchman Michel Vieuchange came to scorn the literary vocation he had aspired to. Turning instead to a life of action, he conceived the quixotic scheme of visiting Smara, a settlement he had learned about during military service in Morocco. Located in the Saguia el-Hamra region of what was then Spanish Sahara (and is now the Moroccan-occupied territory of Western Sahara), Smara had been founded by Sahrawi resistance leader Cheikh Ma el-Ainin in 1898, only to be abandoned by him a decade later after a military reversal. The French forces that reached it in 1913 found it deserted and laid waste to much of it, including its library.

Vieuchange began his journey from French Morocco one night in mid-September 1930. As Christians traveling in the Sahara were subject to almost certain death, he disguised himself at first as a woman and eventually hid himself in a basket hung from a camel. The physical rigors of the journey told on him immediately, and he came to realize that he was at the mercy of deceitful and abusive guides. He learned to eat locusts and drink “putrid water.” Yet he urged himself ever onward: “My only objective—to keep going.” Vieuchange’s small party reached Smara in early November, but his guides allowed him only three hours to wander the ruins of the “dead city.”

On his return journey, Vieuchange contracted dysentery and died in late November, converting, like Rimbaud before him, to Catholicism on his deathbed. His fragmentary, frequently harrowing journal was published two years later, edited and introduced by his brother Jean. In his eloquent preface, French poet Paul Claudel spoke of Vieuchange’s determination to reach Smara (and by extension death—and God), asserting that “never lover hastened to trysting-place at the bidding of his mistress with a heart so impatient.”

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Editions: The English translation is by Fletcher Allen. Editions in French and English contain an introduction, an epilogue and appendices by Vieuchange’s brother as well as a preface by Paul Claudel.

Apalachicola

Grove Koger

If we were to buy a second house, we’d choose one in Apalachicola, Florida. Maggie read about the little port and the nearby barrier island of St. George when we were planning a trip to New Orleans in 1999, and we thought that if we were going to fly all the way across the country, we should see as much as we could when we got there. We’ve been going back ever since.

The name of the port (and of the river at whose mouth it lies) is derived from the language of the area’s Native Americans, who began living there as early as 2000 BCE. The Spanish arrived in the early sixteenth century, and were followed by the English and, eventually, the Americans. The settlement was known at one time as Cottonton, and then, briefly, West Point. (There’s a town across the water to the east still known as East Point.) Apalachicola gained its modern name in 1831, and while locals know it as Apalach, we don’t presume to call it that ourselves.

The port’s gone through good times and bad, depending on the state of the oyster (or cotton or sponge or lumber) trade, the severity of tropical storms, and the depredations of yellow fever. Today Apalachicola has made a comeback thanks to the tourist trade, which benefits both the port and St. George Island (see my June 3, 2018, post).

Besides the venerable Gibson Inn (above), where we stay for a few days without fail, Apalachicola has several other attractions. One is Boss Oyster, where I eat the only fresh seafood I enjoy, blackened shrimp. Newer establishments include the wonderfully atmospheric Oyster City Brewery, which might well have drifted up one lazy afternoon from Key West, and the Apalachicola Chocolate & Coffee Company, which makes the richest chocolate cream pie I’ve ever tasted.

Uneasy with the spectacle of the port’s growing prosperity, Maggie wrote “Money Comes to Apalachicola Bay,” which the Amsterdam Quarterly published last year. You can read it at http://www.amsterdamquarterly.org/aq_issues/aq21-money/margaret-koger-money-comes-to-apalachicola-bay/.

Some Enigmas

Grove Koger

Occasionally the muse pays me a visit, and occasionally those visits bear fruit, allowing me to enter a place I can’t ordinarily reach with even the most through research and planning. One of the results I’m happiest with is “Enigma,” which Josh Wilson published in The Fabulist on November 5, 2015. You can see it at http://www.the-fabulist.org/author/grovekoger/.

But Josh was uncomfortable with the series of questions I’d posed in the poem, and asked my permission to shorten it. I accepted, on the grounds that the writer has one job and the editor another—a philosophy that I’ve shared with every writer I know and that, as a writer and copy editor, I understand from both points of view.

But I still prefer my original version of “Enigma,” despite the fact that a strict grammarian might have problems with the last few lines. Here it is:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Sometimes those visits from the muse have resulted in vignettes or brief prose poems. One is “The Fields” which was published by 50-Word Stories on November 21, 2016, at https://fiftywordstories.com/2016/11/21/grove-koger-the-fields/.

Another is “That Great City,” which appeared in Gnarled Oak on April 2, 2018, at  http://gnarledoak.org/tag/grove-koger/.

I could reprint the pieces here, but I like to send readers directly to the publications that have been good enough (or perceptive enough—take your pick) to publish me.

Bon voyage!

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The wood engraving at the top of the post depicts the Corsican port and citadel of Calvi, which Maggie and I visited in 2008. It’s by E.T. Compton and is taken from The Picturesque Mediterranean: Its Cities, Shores, and Islands, published by Cassell in New York circa 1890.

Kinglake’s Superficial Traces

Grove Koger

My book When the Going Was Good is now out of print, and until I complete a second edition, I plan to post revised and updated sections here. Today’s entry deals with a classic by Alexander Kinglake, who was born on August 5, 1809. 

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Eothen: or, Traces of Travel Brought Home from the East. John Ollivier, 1844

Scion of a well-placed English family, Kinglake attended Eton and Trinity College, Oxford. Drawn to the army but disqualified because of poor eyesight, he turned to the law, but interrupted his studies for a more exciting enterprise. Kinglake’s friend John Savile had lately returned from Russia and Asia, and now he and Kinglake proposed another trip, this one together.

The two planned to travel through the Ottoman Empire, which stretched in a crescent from southeastern Europe through Asia Minor and the Middle East and westward again into North Africa. Setting out in late 1834 with a handful of attendants and an interpreter named Mysseri, Kinglake and Savile traveled from Belgrade to Constantinople and Smyrna. When Savile was forced to quit the expedition, Kinglake continued on to the island of Cyprus, the eastern shores of the Mediterranean, Egypt, and Syria. Retracing part of his route, Kinglake returned home fifteen months after starting out.        

Eothen (“From the Early Dawn” or “From the East”) is one of the most engaging travel books ever written. Kinglake intended it to be “quite superficial” in character, by which he meant that he had left out the many pages of  “improving” information and passages of description that other authors inserted in their travelogues. He instead recorded only what was perceived by “a headstrong and not very amiable traveller.” (In the book’s comic highpoint, Kinglake and another Englishman meet each other crossing the Egyptian desert by camel in opposite directions, but the two merely raise their hands in greeting and proceed phlegmatically; only their servants’ refusal to stand on ceremony allows them eventually to exchange a few words.) It is this unabashed irreverence that has kept the book fresh, although the same quality put off publishers in Kinglake’s own time, making it necessary for him to subsidize its eventual appearance in 1844.

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There are a number of editions of Eothen available. The one whose cover is illustrated above is from Century (London, 1982) and includes an introduction by well-known travel writer Jonathan Raban. The Oxford University Press edition (Oxford, 1982) includes an introduction by another well-known figure in the field, Jan Morris.

For further information about Kinglake, I recommend Gerald de Gaury, Travelling Gent: The Life of Alexander Kinglake (1809–1891) and Iran Banu Hassani Jewett, Alexander W. Kinglake (Boston: Twayne, 1981).

Aero Espresso Italiana

 

 

 

 

Grove Koger

I collected postage stamps as a child, and although I’ve long since given up the hobby, I’ve never lost my childhood sense that they’re windows to the wider world. I’ve since found other windows (and doors) to that world, but I still buy stamps from time to time. Among them are the first four issued by Aero Espresso Italiana S.A. (AEI). I’d seen reproductions in Scott catalogs (where they’re identified as numbers C1-C4) for decades and admired color images online more recently, and finally the urge to own a set became irresistible.

AEI was an Italian company established in Rome in December 1923 as the Societá Anonima Italiana, a name that was changed shortly afterward to the one more familiar to students of airline history and philately. (The designations “Societá Anonima” and “S.A.” are the equivalents of the American “Incorporated” and “Inc.”) It was the first passenger airline linking Italy, Greece and Turkey, but, more importantly to philatelists, it was responsible for issuing Greece’s first airmail stamps. And those were the stamps I bought a few years ago—little works of art that celebrate the twentieth century’s fascination with speed and flight in the context of Greece’s ancient Mediterranean heritage. I call them “little,” but they were quite large by the standards of the day. And although they’re a bit pale by modern standards, they’re esteemed by collectors as some of the most beautiful and evocative ever produced.

The Greek artist responsible for designing the stamps was one A. Gavallas (or, depending on your source of information, A. Gravalas, M. Gavalla, or M. Gavalas), who used black ink and watercolor. They depict Savoia Marchetti double-hulled flying boats in the four denominations illustrated above—over Phaleron Bay near Athens (2 drachmas), soaring over the Acropolis (3 drachmas), crossing a map of Southeastern Europe (5 drachmas), and as seen through a colonnade (10 drachmas). The stamps were lithographed in Milan by art publisher Bestetti & Tumminelli, but the process wasn’t a quick one, so Greek postal workers resorted initially to whatever surface mail issues happened to be available.

AEI’s first flights took place August 1, 1926, with the planes flying from Brindisi, Italy, to Athens and on to Istanbul, a route of almost 900 miles. The authentic AEI Greek airmail stamps shown above were used for the first time on November 3 on a flight from Athens to Brindisi.

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For information about AEI’s stamps and flights, I’m indebted to Aero Expresso Italiana S.A. by Vincent Prange, whose cover is illustrated below, and “The First Greek Airmails Defied Conventions of Design and Size,” posted on the Linn’s Stamp News site on January 24, 2014.