Journey Into the Mind's Eye Read online

  LESLEY BLANCH (1904–2007) was born in west London. From 1922 to 1924 she studied painting at the Slade School of Art and worked steadily as an illustrator and commercial artist for the next decade, designing book jackets as well as costumes and sets for the theater and the ballet. After writing for several British magazines, Blanch turned to journalism full-time, and in 1937 she was named the features editor of British Vogue. She left the magazine in 1945, the same year she married the French novelist and diplomat Romain Gary. The couple moved to Bulgaria; Blanch would never reside in the United Kingdom again. Over the next two decades, they were posted to the Balkans, Switzerland, and the United States. In 1963, Gary divorced her to marry the actress Jean Seberg. Blanch traveled to Russia, Turkey, Central Asia, Iran, and North Africa, researching what would become twelve books. They include the biographies The Wilder Shores of Love (1954), The Sabres of Paradise (1960), and Pierre Loti: Portrait of an Escapist (1983); and one novel, The Nine-Tiger Man (1965). Her memoirs On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life (2015) were published posthumously, along with a companion volume, Far to Go and Many to Love: People and Places (2017). She died in the south of France at the age of 103.

  GEORGIA DE CHAMBERET is an editor, translator, and journalist. She is one of the founding members of English PEN’s Writers in Translation Committee, a founder of the publishing consultancy BookBlast Ltd., and the editor of online journal The BookBlast Diary. She is the literary executor of the estate of Lesley Blanch.

  JOURNEY INTO THE MIND’S EYE

  Fragments of an Autobiography

  LESLEY BLANCH

  Introduction by

  GEORGIA DE CHAMBERET

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1968 by Lesley Blanch

  Introduction copyright © 2018 by Georgia de Chamberet

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Félix Vallotton, Reclining Nude on Red Carpet, 1909; Musée du Petit Palais, Geneva; photograph: akg-images

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  A catalog record for this book is available from The Library of Congress.

  ISBN 978-1-68137-194-8

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  JOURNEY INTO THE MIND’S EYE

  Part One: The Traveller

  Part Two: Gallantry Bower

  Part Three: The Borrowed Life

  Part Four: Bridge of Clay

  Part Five: The Journey Begun

  Part Six: The Borrowed Love

  Part Seven: The Journey Done

  INTRODUCTION

  With the death of Lesley Blanch, age 103, England and France have lost one of their last links connecting them to White Russian Paris, Free French London, and many other lost worlds. Her friends would leave her Ottoman-style eyrie in Menton invigorated and inspired. The subjects of her conversation were well beyond the conventional boundaries of time, space, nationality and fashion. I often went to see her, attracted by her warm personality and colorful, cosmopolitan past. With a unique turn of phrase, she would talk equally passionately about film stars, racism, Arab culture, or the Mitford sisters.

  So wrote the historian Philip Mansel in Le Figaro Littéraire in May 2007. Lesley Blanch was my godmother, and though she was more than a century old when she died, her mind remained young, alert, and inquiring. Painter, journalist, biographer, traveler, Russophile, blond beauty, and animal lover: Lesley made her way out of West London suburbia and up in life through her talent, romantic restlessness, and passionate curiosity.

  She was the author of twelve books, and perhaps the greatest achievement of her work is the vision it offers of Russia and the Middle East before war and terrorism transformed them. She had a strong dislike of colonialism and the arrogant materialism of the West.

  She is perhaps most famous for her first book, The Wilder Shores of Love, about the lives of four nineteenth-century women whose determination to escape the constraints of conventional European society led them inexorably eastwards. A surprise best seller, the book pioneered a new kind of historical group biography when it was published in 1954. It was translated into twelve languages and has never been out of print in English.

  Some of Lesley’s best writing is in The Sabres of Paradise, her biography of Imam Shamyl, who was known as the Lion of Daghestan and who led the rebel tribes in their fight against the invading Russian armies from 1834 to 1959. With its dramatic descriptions of the Caucasus and the campaigns in which both the young Tolstoy and Lermontov participated, this book encapsulates the essence of her passion for the East and her love of the unknown.

  To understand Lesley’s own adventurous life, and her rejection of social conformity, one must, however, read Journey into the Mind’s Eye, a memoir about her early years. She describes how, bewitched by a friend of her parents, she developed “the habit of faraway places,” Russia above all. He stirred her dreams with his stories of the Trans-Siberian Railway, inspiring her later journeys to the Caucasus, Central Asia, Siberia, and Mongolia.

  •

  Born in 1904, Lesley was an only child. Her idle, cultivated father was a misanthrope who “spent his time in museums and galleries discussing things like Chinese porcelain and early oak furniture.” Her artistic, elegant mother was a devoted wife who longed to travel but never did. A supporter of the suffragettes who fought for women to win the right to vote, she wanted her daughter to fulfill her potential and be independent at a time when few women had careers. She had been quite well off to begin with and kept the family afloat, but her money slowly trickled away. After leaving the Slade School of Fine Art in 1924, Lesley had to earn a living fast.

  The part-Russian, part–Central Asian friend of her parents who made djinn-like visitations to their home—possibly a former lover of her mother’s—had a galvanic impact on Lesley. She only ever referred to him as “the Traveller.” He was a mesmeric character and a superb storyteller, described by Lesley as looking “like Nureyev with slanting eyes.”

  The Traveller told her tales about the little humpbacked horse Koniok Gorbunok and brought her presents: magic-lantern slides of troikas in the snow, a Mongol Khan’s spirit banner with circularly arranged horsetail hairs around the top, a diamond-encrusted blue egg that was whipped away by her mother. She dreamed of life in the Gobi desert and of the buried treasure of Karakorum, and learned to count in Yakut. Lesley imagined St. Petersburg, the Black Sea, Nizhniy Novgorod where Gorky grew up, the Moscow of Ivan the Terrible, the Russian army officers who led the Decembrist uprising of 1825 against Tsar Nicholas I, and monasteries in Ukraine. She learned how to swear in Russian and devoured Jules Verne’s novel Michael Strogoff: The Courier of the Czar. Pushkin won hands down over Dickens. She read the Russian intellectual and diarist Aleksandr Herzen—throughout her life she liked to keep a volume of his memoirs on her bedside table.

  The Traveller seduced Lesley when she was seventeen. She acknowledged his disgraceful behavior—“abusing every canon of honour”—but had no qualms about it whatsoever. She was now his “Pussinka” and “Doucinka,” and became accustomed to his sudden arrivals and disappearances. They visited the Yusupovs in exile in Capri. Her romantic obsession never lessened even once he had gone. “He was the greatest love of my life. I’ve had some passionate affairs but nothing to touch the T
raveller,” she said. “The Traveller has always been a part of my life, my habits, what I read.” His imprint on her was such that he would influence her choice of husband years later.

  •

  When Lesley wrote that “Journey into the Mind’s Eye is not altogether autobiography, nor altogether travel, or history either. You will just have to invent a new category,” the label “narrative nonfiction” did not yet exist. The book was published in 1968. Like Rebecca West and Truman Capote, Lesley Blanch was experimenting with different forms and techniques to tell a damn good “true” story. Essentially all three of them, each in their way, invented a new genre: the nonfiction novel.

  She figures in her book as a kind of Scheherazade, and her fragmented, episodic way of storytelling is not only dramatic but reflects the actual workings of memory. Her narrative takes us from London to Lake Baikal, from Romanov splendors to Soviet austerity. The description of a train journey to Corsica, setting off from the Gare du Nord with the Traveller, his two sons, and his “mad Montenegrin aunt,” Countess Eudoxia, is pure comedy—like a scene out of a sitcom. Lesley has a very particular way of getting under the skin of her characters. Diana Vreeland wrote in the April 1965 issue of American Vogue, “Part of the Blanch effectiveness as a writer lies in her firsthand research, her pleasure in sensuous details, her spread of knowledge, and her understanding of love.”

  When asked about the Traveller’s identity, she brushed it off, saying, “He was very ugly with little slit eyes, and in any case you wouldn’t be able to pronounce his name. I have always had a very secret life. There have been some pretty peculiar adventures I’m not going to go into, many lovers and husbands, but I’ve always had ‘darling self,’ a secret apart, a fortress. Very few people have got under my skin.” Their liaison may have been scandalous, but his anonymity had another point: it made the impact of their love affair and its abrupt ending far stronger—and her subsequent journey to Russia more poignant.

  •

  Lesley was among the very few western Europeans to cross the USSR in the thirties, tracing literature and history, rather than politics—“I went to Moscow and Leningrad because of my interest in Pushkin.” Later, as the features editor of British Vogue from 1937 to 1944, as a cultural columnist and commentator, she wrote about everything but fashion. She covered the arts, ballet, theater, books, life about town, and sketched portraits of famous people ranging from Lord and Lady Louis Mountbatten and Noël Coward, to Vivien Leigh and Billy Wilder. During World War II, she documented the lives of women in the armed forces and collaborated with the photographer Lee Miller.

  Lesley left British Vogue in 1945 and briefly wrote a column for the Daily Mail, but fell out with the commissioning editor, her love for all things Slavic not chiming well with the paper’s conventional readership. Edward Hulton hired her to write profiles about the cinema and its stars for The Leader—a journal of current affairs and the arts which was complementary to his successful photojournalist magazine, Picture Post.

  In 1944, Lesley met Romain Gary, born Romain Kacew. She was forty-one and he thirty-one. A Polish Russian Jewish navigator with General de Gaulle’s Free French Squadrons flying with the RAF, his deep gravelly voice was irresistible. She had “found the Traveller again in him.” They married in April 1945. Life with her diplomat-novelist husband meant she was free to roam in wild places when not unpacking and setting up house at a new posting. In 1956, at the peak of their writing careers, the couple landed in Hollywood. As best-selling authors, they were invited everywhere. Lesley worked beside George Cukor at M-G-M Studios. After eighteen years, however, their marriage ended in divorce.

  •

  I often visited my godmother in her small pink villa on the hill overlooking the Mediterranean bay of Garavan and its tiny Victorian railway station, just before the French-Italian border. Lesley had made a home for her imagination—“the Orient of my mind”—and was happy in her Aladdin’s cave, surrounded by the treasures from her travels.

  From 2001, I worked with her intermittently, transcribing her handwritten anecdotes onto an old laptop. I became fascinated by the many lives she had led and her travels to the Sahara, Iran, Turkey, Syria, Afghanistan, and Central Asia. I finished editing her memoirs after her death. On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life was published posthumously, followed two years later by a companion volume of some of her early journalism and travel writing, Far to Go and Many to Love: People and Places.

  Lesley’s artist’s portfolio, circa 1923–1935, came to light while I was editing her memoirs. “The owner wishes to remain anonymous,” said the fine-art dealer’s voice at the other end of the telephone line. “The portfolio was found after her mother died. The best sketches were framed and hung up, but were stolen by the housekeeper when she was sacked.” I was particularly intrigued by her sketches for productions by the Russian émigré director Theodore Komisarjevsky, which were staged at Le Studio (the smaller sister theater of the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées) and Théâtre Pigalle in Paris; in Stratford-upon-Avon; and for the Ballets Russes de Monte Carlo. They are racy, baroque, and beautiful. Eight were included in the Theatre Art International Exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1934. Lesley had begun to talk to me about Komisarjevsky the last time I saw her before she died. With a closed expression, she said, “Peggy Ashcroft took him off me.”

  Books from her library hold riddles.* Komisarjevsky’s memoirs, Myself and the Theatre (1929), have a puzzling handwritten dedication to her. His father, an operatic tenor, regularly received Stanislavsky, Stravinsky, Turgenev, and Mussorgsky as visitors to his house in St. Petersburg. Komisarjevsky’s sister, Vera, had created the role of Nina in Chekhov’s The Seagull and was considered to be the greatest actress of the time. He left Russia in 1919 and brought the idea of “director’s theater” to England. As Wagner had done with opera and Diaghilev with ballet, Komisarjevsky dreamed of creating a universal “synthetic” theater, “Where all forms of art could be harmoniously united in one single show.” He “introduced music into the plays, rewrote the librettos of the operas to suit the character and the rhythm of the music, and inserted dialogues and speaking parts in the operas. Hence the singers took part in the plays as well as the operas, and similarly, the dramatic actors took part in the operas.”

  From 1923 to 1924 Komisarjevsky worked in Paris, and from 1925 to 1926 at the Barnes Theatre in London, where he put on Chekhov, Andreyev, and Gogol. His productions of The Merchant of Venice (1932) and Macbeth (1933) were controversial. A reading of theater programs in the archives of the Bibliothèque Historique de la Ville de Paris, the Bibliothèque-Musée de l’Opéra Nationale de Paris, and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France, alongside certain designs in Lesley’s portfolio, enabled me to pinpoint and verify pivotal events she describes in Journey into the Mind’s Eye. My findings and conclusions about Komisarjevsky, always referred to as the Traveller by Lesley, are included in detail in the preface to Far to Go and Many to Love. He was a talismanic figure she returned to again and again throughout her long life. They were together not only in London but in Paris and the south of France too. The power of place on the imagination and on the heart is a recurring motif in her writing. Her book Pavilions of the Heart, which combines love and place, is Lesley at her most romantic.

  The last time Lesley Blanch and the Traveller made love was in the cemetery for Russian émigrés near Menton, where she would live and, eighty years later, would die. Her memoir about her search for her lost love, and the Russia he had planted within her, is as haunting and rare as a Fabergé masterpiece.

  —GEORGIA DE CHAMBERET

  *Now at the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, along with the rest of her archive.

  JOURNEY INTO THE MIND’S EYE

  Almost a family portrait: the Tiumenev Princes. Right to left: Serbedjan, Batyr, and Tzeren Norbo (see page 241)

  TO MY RUSSIAN FRIENDS, EVERYWHERE

  Chaque homme porte en lui sa dose d�
��opium naturel.

  Baudelaire

  PART ONE

  THE TRAVELLER

  Who is the lonely Traveller

  Racing the moonlight to my door?

  Racing his troïka over the steppe

  Pacing his steeds with the wind in the forest.

  The North wind that harries

  The South wind that tarries

  Who the lone Traveller come to my door?

  – Lonely no more.

  Siberian song – Trans-Baïal region

  CHAPTER I

  I must have been about four years old when Russia took hold of me with giant hands. That grip has never lessened. For me, the love of my heart, the fulfilment of the senses and the kingdom of the mind all met here. This book is the story of my obsession. In her essays, The Sentimental Traveller, Vernon Lee wrote of her emotion for Italy thus: There are moments in all our lives, most often, alas! during childhood, when we possess the mystic gift of consecration, of steeping things in our soul’s essence, and making them thereby different from all others, for ever sovereign and sacred to us. So Italy became to her–so Russia to me.

  •

  The Traveller had come to rest in the rocking-chair. The clumsy folds of his great fur-lined overcoat stood round him like a box, while a number of scarves tangled under his chin. His tight-skinned Chinese-yellow face seemed to glow, incandescent, in the light of the nursery fire where we made beef-dripping toast together. Even this warming occupation could not persuade him to remove his overcoat.

  ‘You’ll catch your death of cold when you go out,’ my nurse would always say.

  ‘Not after Siberia,’ the Traveller would always reply. It was a ritual.