Subtitles are sometimes oddly revealing; consider our quartet of
early scribblers, for example: Vuillier, a French artist writing just as
impressionism was taking the world by storm, decided on impressions
of travel in the Balearic Isles, Corsica and Sardinia;
Margaret d’Este didn’t bother with one at all as With a Camera in
Majorca was really the subtitle (she simply failed to find anything
better for the title); Mary Stuart Boyd, who stayed longer than any of
the others, opted for life and travel in Majorca, Minorca and
Iviza; and finally, the scholarly J. E. Crawford Flitch, M.A. opted
for footnotes of travel in the islands of Mallorca, Menorca,
Ibiza and Sardinia. This had a decidedly bookish ring, rather like
its author, the first Briton ever to call Iviza ‘Ibiza’.
But who exactly was he? The meagre facts are as follows: his
Christian names were John Ernest and he is known to posterity as the
English translator of the great Basque writer, Miguel de Unamuno. When
Crawford Flitch visited Ibiza his translation of Manet and the French
Impressionists (1910) had just appeared and he was gathering
material for Modern Dancing and Dancers (1912), two interests
which constitute a further point of contact with Vuillier (author of
La Danse (1898)). After Mediterranean Moods (1911), the
Crawford Flitch œuvre continued with The National Gallery
(1912), A Little Journey in Spain: notes of a Goya pilgrimage
(1914) and an essay in C.R.W. Nevinson’s The Great War, Fourth
Year (1918). The twenties was devoted to Unamuno and his literary
career came to an end in 1932 with a translation of The Cherubic
Wanderer (1674), the poems of an obscure Silesian mystic called
Angelus.
Spanish philosophy, dancing, impressionism, Goya, military history
and Silesian mysticism - our subject’s mind roamed far and wide. That he
was a gifted linguist - a useful asset for any travel writer - lies
beyond doubt. But he was also an aesthete, equally at home in painting,
poetry, music and dance. The rest is almost total darkness. Other vague
clues are that he lived in Godstow, a picture-book village on the Thames
just north of Oxford now famous for its pubs; and that he was a member
of the Athenaeum, the distinguished London club known for its serious
scholars and bishops. Further pointers about Crawford Flitch’s character
can be found in the ‘Introductory’ (no mere ‘Introduction’ or
‘Foreword’ for this literary rover):
Every traveller, consciously or unconsciously, is
in search of certain exalted moments. By the traveller I understand one
who is half an exile, kinsman to the Wandering Jew … When he has dulled
the edge of novelty, admired all that is to be admired, worn out his
guide-books; when, in a word, he feels the premonitions of ennui; then,
if he is honest with himself, the traveller will confess that travel is
a wilderness punctuated by oases. These oases are the precious moments
which he seeks. Unluckily there is no certain route which conducts to
them. There is no map on which they are charted. They are not starred in
Baedeker. The tourist agencies know nothing of them. The directions of
friends are invariably misleading … The frequency of these red-letter
moments is the index of the success of the journey. But their times are
as unforeseen as the arrival of the thief in the night. They surprise
you in the last places in the world where you would have expected them.
The foolish traveller plans his travel as if it were a campaign. He
knows the names of the hotels which will receive him. Nothing is left to
hazard. It is difficult even for a piece of his luggage to detach itself
from the rest and follow up an itinerary of its own. Him the capricious
arbiter and disposer of these incalculable moments passes over. Besides,
he is surrounded by an atmosphere that is proof against penetration by
alien moods. The arid entrance hall of his hotel is the citadel from
which he makes incursions into the surrounding country … The wise
traveller comes not to conquer a country, but to be conquered by it. He
takes no thought for the train he shall catch on the morrow. If he
misses it he is not disconcerted, for he never knows whether, if he had
caught it, he might not have missed one of those rare moments of which
he is always expectant. If the engine had not run off the rails on the
branch line to Lanusei in Sardinia, I should never have seen the
skin-clad shepherd fold his sheep by lantern-light in a lap of the
solemn hills. If the falucha had not left Formentera before I got down
to the harbour, should I ever have heard Juanito sing his gentle
love-songs beneath the stars? Indeed, when I come to think of it, it was
only when my plans were frustrated that my desires were fulfilled. It is
chiefly when some mischance upsets the routine of travel that a country
becomes most interesting and most intimate. Therefore the wise traveller
knows the folly of compiling time-tables and itineraries. He lets
himself be directed by any chance word, by the caprice of a hall-porter
or the error of a booking-clerk. For who can tell whether these be not
the agents of fate?
Mediterranean Moods, pp. 11-15
So we are basically dealing with an adventurous philosopher-mystic
with strong humanistic leanings. His book is a vade-mecum to the Med’s
really forgotten corners, witness to the determined search for
adventure which underlies all good travel literature. Let us now take a
closer look at those ‘moods’ in the two chapters devoted to Ibiza and
Formentera. Headers provide a good idea of the thematic range: An
Ibizan Oasis, A Smiling Church, The Uses of Mass, Dancing by the Sea,
The Quarrel, The Unbeaten Track, The Forgotten Isle, Blind
Ballad-Singers, The Ages of Women, Corpus Christi, The Copletista,
Deceitful Beauty, Sic Transit Gloria Mundi, Processional, Formentera,
Becalmed, Juanito’s Love-Song. Further information lies in the
chapter-headings: ‘The Amours of Santa Eulalia’ and ‘The Improvisers’
(set in San Antonio). Folklore in all its various guises, it would seem,
is the book’s leitmotif, an attempt to get to grips with a seriously
exotic culture.
With Ibiza Town taking third billing, our guide spirits us off to the
outlying settlements. In Santa Eulalia he attends a rather
unconventional morning mass, which seems to have more in common with the
mating rituals of Amnesia or Privilege. ‘The church was so crowded that
there was scarcely room for the dogs to lie down comfortably. The right
half of the nave where the women sat was as gay as a garden in June.’ He
goes on to describe costume and hairstyles in loving detail - not just
the women’s but also the men’s. And the coming together of the twain:
Most of the youths wore a rose behind their ear.
They entered the church with a brisk step, dropped for a few moments on
the knee, made the three crosses over their brows, eyes, and mouth,
kissed their thumbs, and then gave up their attention to the faces
behind the fluttering fans on the other side of the nave. Then began a
fusillade of glances, which was returned from the masked batteries of
the fans. The fire was no more feu de joie, but a deadly
encounter; not a smile that were merely flippant or trivial or
coquettish, but regards that were grave, as all ardour is grave. Then I
knew that Mass may have other uses than that of devotion. One breathed
something more intoxicating than the smoke of incense. The air was also
heavy with the smoke of passion. There was an exciting contrast between
the tranquil negotiation at the altar and the secret electrical
intelligence of youthful bodies.
p. 173
No central-European mysticism here. Mediterranean Moods
continues with an attractive description of a town given over to the
pleasurable side of life. ‘To be sure, there are two or three corn mills
along the river-side, but the river is a willing slave, and toils on
feast days and holy days while the miller is away dancing.’ After
describing courting rituals (festeig) and local dancing, the
author steals off to sleepy San Miguel via the San Juan road, not
reached ‘until my nerves and the wheels of the donkey-cart were
shattered to pieces.’ Then on to San Antonio, where he again seeks out
the cultural hotspots, coming across two blind itinerant balladeers,
surely among the last of their kind in Europe. The following evening he
witnesses a famous copletista who had come in from the country,
and needed a little coaxing to display his mastery:
At length, having thoroughly felt the keenness of
their desire, he rested his elbow upon the barrel and the barrel upon
his knee; and pulling out a white handkerchief, which had not yet been
used that day - for it was still folded up into a neat square - he
pressed it over his eyes with his right hand. Taking the stick in the
other hand, he began to tap upon the bottom of the barrel. The tapping
lasted many minutes, being a kind of invocation of the muse. At last he
burst into a long, harsh, monotonous cry. The song was different from
any that I had heard before. It came more closely to the bare monotone
than the music which Spain has borrowed from the Moors. It was less
passionate and less melancholy. It had just a tremor of laughter in it,
a laughter that was not altogether wholesome, something between a sob
and a sneer. But the most remarkable feature of it was a meaningless
refrain at the end of every couplet, the use of which, I suppose, was to
give the singer pause to improvise the next lines. It is possible to
write the syllables yug-yug-yug-yug- and they should be extended
over half a dozen lines or so - but it is impossible to convey any idea
of their strange hiccoughing intonation. Whether this incantation is
also an inheritance from the Moors, or whether from one of the more
ancient eastern peoples who have inhabited Ibiza, I am not learned
enough in folk-music to say. Neither could I understand the burden of
the song, for the words were in Ibicenco. They told me it was a song
about love, but it must have been whetted with satire, for at times it
shook the company with laughter.
pp. 189-19
Raoul Hausmann, Young Ibicenco woman singing, ca. 1934
(from Raoul Hausmann: architecte-architect, Ibiza 1933-1936
published by TEHP and Fondation pour l’architecture, 1990)
The improviser then passes the stick and tambour to a girl who after
blinding her eyes in a similar fashion, answers him in the same
burlesque vein. This is one of the earliest descriptions of the Ibicenco
porfèdi or the home i dona, that dirge-like duel of words,
whose roots reach far back into the island’s past.
And so to Ibiza Town, which strikes our aesthetic traveller as rather
squalid: “Fowls pick about hopefully in the gutters; lambs and goats are
tethered to the doorposts, treading a few wisps of dusty herbage under
their feet.” The overall impression is of vanished splendour:
Once Ibiza lay close to the heart of the world. In
return for its salt, the ore of its mines, its rich purple dye, which
rejoiced the daughters of Tyre, its terra-cotta figures, its earthenware
vessels, with their miraculous property of healing those who suffered
from the bite of serpents, the wealth of the Mediterranean flowed into
it and exposed it to the covetousness of all the lawless rovers of the
sea. Now it lies in a backwater, and its useless fortifications enclose
nothing that any people covets … It has become shabby and neglected,
like a woman who, having suffered a great misfortune, ceases to care for
her beauty.
pp. 192-3
Luckily “neglect can never rob it of the beauty of its site”, and he
waxes lyrical about the splendid effects at sunset, “when the skirts of
sunset are trailing on the hills”. A vivid description of a chaotic
Corpus Christi procession (usually in June) has sulking bandsmen
struggling to read music pinned to their colleagues’ backs, curas
smacking wayward children into line, soldiers failing to goose-step in
the midst of the jostling crowd, canopies grazing overspreading trees
and candles forever blowing out and having to be relit. A day’s outing
to Formentera yields little of interest, but on the return the sailors
improvise some Castilian songs thus creating a spellbinding moment for
the musically-minded author. He should have stayed a little longer on
the smaller Pityusan isle to winkle out a few more secrets. Perhaps he
simply ran out of time, just as we have used up all our space for today.
Rest assured that in a fortnight’s time there’ll be plenty more
surprises from the Bibliomaniac’s shelves. |