We
began our last article with a look at the first great private library of
antiquity - Aristotle’s - and the manner in which it disappeared from
sight when a certain Roman bon viveur called Faustus disposed of
it to clear his debts around the middle of the first century BC. It is
tempting to speculate that a good number of those scrolls passed into
the library of the Villa of the Papyri, which first came to the
attention of latter-day booklovers in 1752. In that year the Swiss
scholar Karl Weber began excavating a sumptuous seashore villa in
Herculaneum which had lain below ninety feet of petrified mud ever since
the famous volcanic eruption of 79 AD. In a small backroom he found some
carbonised logs lying on wooden shelves, which the diggers (including
several convicts) began to throw away. Closer inspection showed them to
be priceless papyrus rolls, of which about eighteen hundred (of a total
of two thousand) survived the preliminary spring-clean - the first and
most remarkable ancient library to have been uncovered in modern times.
A machine was devised which managed to unroll a few of the brittle
objects, but because of their extremely fragile and blackened state, a
proper technical solution has only been emerging in the past fifteen
years. They turned out to be mainly works on Epicureanism by Philodemus
of Gadara, a philosopher who lived in Rome at the time of Cicero. The
villa itself - on which J. Paul Getty based his famous museum in Malibu
- is now thought to have belonged to Philodemus’s patron, Lucius
Calpurnius Piso, father-in-law to Julius Caesar. As Philodemus lived in
Rome between 75 and 40 BC, what connection could there possibly be with
the library of Aristotle (384-322 BC)? The answer comes from our old
friend Faustus - something of an angel in disguise. If a scholarly and
wealthy patron like L. Calpurnius Piso was collecting scrolls in the
middle of the first century BC, he would probably have been highly
interested in the sale of Aristotle’s collection. Two charred but
lavishly-made doors have just been found at a lower level of his villa,
which some believe lead into the main library. If this hypothesis is
correct, then Aristotle’s scrolls might be just a few tantalizing metres
(or even centimetres) from our grasp.
Whoever said books were dull? Payprus, by the way, has the same
etymological root as bible - and bibliomaniac - but we’ll leave that for
another day. Right now it is time to climb onto our magic carpet and fly
straight from Herculaneum and Aristotle to Ibiza and Apollo.
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Whatever ails you, our island cures you -
provided it doesn’t make it worse. The eponymous heroine of Penelope
Grogan’s The Mending of Cathlene (1995, 2nd
edition 2002), certainly needs a little of that special Pityusan
magic: it all starts when husband Rob forces her to have an abortion
and follows it up by announcing he’s in love with another woman;
then a finicky brother-in-law denies access to two adorable nieces;
barely has our protagonist drawn breath from this triple catastrophe
when composer friend Graham commits suicide; for the final straw,
Rob’s trade-in model is spotted pregnant. Therapy of some sort is
clearly needed, but it comes from a rather unexpected quarter -
‘Apollo, wearing a very expensive silk jacket.’ The male muse is
actually Edward O’Brien, Graham’s callous lover or rather ‘adopted
son’. His manly voice comes in handy when dastardly Rob rings up to
finalize the house-sale; his looks are suitably decorative both
indoors and later on the road to Ibiza; his |
gayness precludes romantic
complications; and finally his financial and domestic ineptitude
require round-the-clock vigilance. When Edward’s brother drops
anchor in West London to become part of Cathlene’s work-cure, we
know she’s in safe hands: how can anyone surrounded by total chaos
have time to become depressed? |
There is one piece of the puzzle, however, which remains missing: the
heroine’s longing for a child. Which is where Ibiza comes in:
schoolteacher friend Margaret knows someone with a flat to let in Ibiza
town and before overdosing on pills, Graham paints a rather attractive
picture of that perennial retreat for injured souls:
“Oh, Ibiza, it’s a lovely place, or used to be. I’ve
got a friend there, a painter … He rents a large, old farmhouse on a
hillside that looks out across the Mediterranean. I believe he has a
little girl now. I spent a whole summer with him several years ago. They
lead an extraordinary life, he and his women. They cook up fish heads
with rice and eat figs off the trees. There were all sorts of strange
people living there. I never found out who they were. When I first
arrived at the house, a young woman in a long white cotton night-dress
came out from what had been a pigsty, and wandered off down the hillside
among the almond trees. I don’t think I ever saw her again … I’ll give
you his name, but I can’t give you an address because in Ibiza there’s
no such thing.”
The Mending of Cathlene,
pp. 44-5
The
Ibiza we know and love - or used to. Cathlene and Margaret head off
south as soon as term ends and Edward tags along as the token man. It
turns into a typical long car journey: endless tailbacks, pokey
overnight stops, the occasional cultural snack and finally, at land’s
end, the missed ferry. Although there is no prospect of a crossing until
October at the earliest, Edward is on hand to successfully charm the
ticket clerk - in the face of a ‘huge rugger scrum of violent Germans
fighting for bookings.’ Useful chap that.
The
set-up on the fabled island is far from promising: the flat is airless
and cramped, Margaret’s back is playing up while Edward immediately
waltzes off to join some new friends in Santa Eulalia. Left to her own
devices, it is to the mysterious and little-known interior that Cathlene
turns for a measure of consolation:
Every afternoon, while Margaret was asleep, I
wandered out into the countryside. Of course, it was usually the hottest
time of the day, but I was on the run from myself, so I had to do
something. I walked past whitewashed, flat-roofed houses with beautiful
circular threshing floors beside them. In some places the earth is red,
the colour of blood. On one evening when the sun was setting and I was
returning later than usual, I was passed by a mule cart. It was loaded
with lucerne. The great wheels wobbled and jolted from rut to rut, the
cart lurched and shook, but the small wizened, Ibicencan driver saluted
me with noble charm. I wished we could have been staying in one of these
farmhouses, where everything was beautiful, instead of in our dreadful
flat where everything in sight was ugly. I wished I could talk to the
people I saw, but then I wished a lot of things. I wished I had a child,
I wished I had my husband. I wished I were anybody but myself.
pp. 114-5
With
ten days left to go, Thelma-and-Louise (or Hinge-and-Bracket) decide to
ferret out Graham’s painter friend, Steffan, in the far north. Their
quest takes them to one of Ibiza’s wildest and most untouched corners:
To the right the ground fell steeply away in
abandoned terraces, grown over by scorched weeds and scrub. After
rounding another corner we came to a more cultivated hillside, planted
with almond trees. To the side of the road was a covered stone well.
Beside it grew a tall clump of bamboo, twittering with little birds,
restlessly flittering about among the canes. An ancient olive tree cast
a cool shadow from a terrace above.
p. 119
That
little well, incidentally, is still intact. I was picking enormous
mulberries there last week (and stained my favourite polo-shirt). When
the intrepid duo finally arrive at Steffan’s finca, his
half-starved eight-year-old daughter informs them that “it won’t be any
good to see him today, because they’ve gone on a trip” - a little
psychedelic excursion. Little Clara is a vignette from hippy Ibiza which
merits closer inspection: barefoot (‘toes so spread out they looked like
monkey hands’), skinny and brown all over ‘like a dried nut’, she
wanders across the sun-baked hillsides accompanied by her faithful
podenco, ‘Perro’, both on the lookout for free food. A not untypical
product of the flower revolution. The following evening Steffan and
Clara turn up in Ibiza town and take the English ladies out to a trendy
restaurant below the battlements (Es Quinques?). But the cheeky hippy is
suddenly called off by another, who makes a snide comment they don’t
quite catch - leaving the two ladies with a hefty bill. “What an
extraordinary way to behave,” is all that Margaret manages to snort.
The
last two chapters encompass a sort of resolution of the book’s principal
theme, Cathlene’s longing for a child, but here we will draw a discrete
veil over the manner in which this is achieved. There is also a settling
of accounts with Rob and his new partner. This is a book which, on
balance, has considerable riches to offer those who love a well-turned
phrase. The author’s Anglo-Saxon understatement and her Celtic lyricism
are so expertly handled that for this reviewer at least, they easily
compensate for the heroine’s readiness to be the victim of every monster
who crosses her path. The men, almost without exception, emerge
unfavourably: adulterers, liars, spongers, acid-heads, fall-guys,
manipulators and lawyers - rather an unedifying lot. The women come out
little better: over-knowledgeable and overbearing Margaret, a
nymphomaniac beer-heiress and a clutch of listless freaks who have
shrugged off maternal responsibility like an unwanted garment; Rob’s new
partner, adulteress Ella, is really the best of the bunch - excluding
the long-suffering and saintly Cathlene. But is Cathlene really so
perfect? I am not qualified to talk at length on the sensitive issue
with which the book opens, but one or two female readers might take
exception to the heroine’s decision on this score. Children, on the
other hand, get an excellent press: Coppertop and Curly Wig, the
adorable nieces; little Clara, whom we first saw running wild like a
latter-day Diana; and two innocent little mites (girls, be it noted) who
pass muster quite satisfactorily. If you love Ibiza, books and children
the way they used to be, then I can heartily recommend this one.
The Mending of Cathlene was launched at
Libro Azul on 12th June 2002. They say that London buses come
in threes, but books about Ibiza’s recent past apparently come in sixes
or sevens: the last week of April saw the publication of Dutch
Writers and Painters in the Pityuses, translated by yours truly; a
few weeks later Peter Kinsley’s Bogged Down in County Lyric (see
Weekly Edition 071 Saturday 6th July 2002) with its ten
chapters on Ibiza ca. 1970 hit the shelves; your correspondent then
received a rare copy of The Pistolero (see Weekly Edition 069
Saturday 22nd June 2002), a book set largely in Ibiza Town
around November 1977; Last Tango in Ibiza (2001) is also
clamouring for my attention; Tristan Jones’s Yarns has just arrived,
with ‘The Saga of the Dreadnought’, a delightful tale about the
salvaging of an iron lifeboat in Ibiza harbour in November 1965; and
finally, a lucky break has put the bibliomaniac onto a completely
unknown novel about Ibiza in 1956 by one of the greatest names in modern
English letters. In the next article, our exploration will focus on this
unusual treasure, dredged up from the very bottom of the literary ocean.
I shall leave you with a passage from it which ties in neatly with our
exploration (Weekly Edition 071 Saturday 6th July 2002) of
the emerald muse - suissé in local parlance. Beckett,
incidentally, is a character who seems to have much in common with the
painter Grimes:
Although Beckett had a weak stomach for strong
liquor, this was the one time when he felt justified in ordering an
alemana. Alemana was a local concoction of absinthe, so-called
because it was supposed in Vedra to be a drink for which the Germans had
formed a dangerous national addiction. The supreme virtue of an
alemana was the speed with which it changed the face of the world.
In a matter of minutes colours flowed into drab landscapes; mere noises
rearranged themselves, with the slightest excuse, as music; the past
ceased to admonish, and the future to threaten. But this was euphoria,
too, that could be carried to unmanageable lengths. The alemana
was served, with the usual half of a small, green lemon. Beckett
squeezed the lemon into the clouded liquid and watched with anticipatory
satisfaction, as the droplets sank and spread their oily ectoplasms ...
Intoxicated? Beckett found it hard to believe it could be so. He tried
to compare his present mood and sensations with those of a half hour
before. The mental heaviness seemed to have lifted, that was all.
Perhaps too he was abnormally conscious of what was going on round him.
Possibly the special chemical - the ester or whatever it was - in the
liquor possessed the power of neutralising the poisons of fatigue in the
blood … Profoundly philosophical observations had begun to flow, on the
slightest encouragement, in and out of his mind.
¡Salud! |