Since I don't eat breakfast cereal, it's only appropriate that I make up for my "cereal" deficiency by being a serial lover of authors and plants. I stop way short of being a serial killer, however (although I've gotten pretty good at chain-sawing this past year: COVID-19 provided leisure time to hack down all those damn Siberian elms and hackberries that instantaneously grew into hefty trees after a few years neglect...)
I never get over my serial plant obsessions: I started collecting saxifrages and primulas as a kid and still keep at it...but over the decades new generic loves took over: penstemons, eriogonums, salvias, mesembs, cacti of all kinds, ferns...we latch onto a group and seek every variation we can find. I know we think of gardens are works of art--but for many of us they're sublimated stamp collections--only of living creatures. We want every one of a set!
Alas, my collecting tendencies extend to other realms (I have a ludicrous assemblage of brass platters from India, various Arabic countries and China for instance). But for me reading seems to fall into the same pattern: I encounter a new author via any one of a hundred avenues (a friend casually drops the name, or another author you admire mentions them). In the case of John Freely, I purchased the first of his books I read (Stamboul Ghosts) when I subscribed to Cornucopia a few months ago: that amazing magazine was offering a vast store of Turkey-related books at ridiculously inexpensive prices, and I added Freely's book to the list--the price was right and the title was intriguing (I've been haunted by Constantinople all my life after all)...
When the hefty box of books arrived, I dipped (as I always do) into this volume and that...and I started to read Freely's slim volume and couldn't stop. He has a seductive style of writing and the subject matter (20th Century Istanbul's writers and artists--as well as expatriates like James Baldwin) was of great interest to me.
I realize I already had a few Freely volumes on my shelf (travel books I've glanced through), but Ghosts was so readable, why not try another of his biographic books as well? I ordered both of his other autobiographical tomes--Art of Exile and the House of Memory (which I have yet to read--it's next).
There are usually a stack of five or six books by my arm chair, and at least that many on my bedstand: one always wins out--and I tore through Art of Exile over Thanksgiving....perhaps since I (like so many) have been practically housebound by the COVID plague) the thought of traveling is so alluring...
And here's a book chockablock FULL of travel: Freely shuttlecocked across the Atlantic ocean as an impoverished child (his mother would lug her children back to Ireland whenever her husband took excessively to the bottle)...and his account of his strangely happy (and difficult) youth is fascinating and luminous.
What really grabbed me was the way that John (Freely) and Toots (his wife Dolores--a fatidic name for a Nabokovian) adopted every place they lived with an expansive passion: Istanbul became very much their home for decades (resulting in a dozen or more books on Turkey in all her facets), but they adopted Greece with every bit as much love (living for many summers on Naxos, and years in Athens and even a summer in my ancestral home of Hania in Crete), likewise commemorating their stays there in a bevy of books on the Cyclades, the Ionian islands, Crete and a guide book to Athens. They returned and lived for several years in America between their various foreign stints (no books about us, however--I don't think they felt as at home here)...but their love of England where they did live comes through in his autobiographies...and Venice where they stayed several years and wrote yet another guide book. His passages about revisiting Ireland over the decades simply glow like Synge's prose.
I have yearned to live in another country, rather than passing through for a few weeks (or months--I have spent summers in Greece after all). Reading Freely's lucid prose fulfills that fantasy. To a point.
The lives of College professors, or travel writers wouldn't seem to be the stuff that would inspire not one but three autobiographies...but Freely pulls it off. Of course, despite being born in Brooklyn, he was a red haired Irishman after all, and the Celts are nothing if not great story tellers and bon vivants.
I revisited his travel books: damn, if they don't read like novels! Needless to say I have shelf full of Freely books (I confess, I am an Abebooks addict) to plow through over the next few months: altogether they barely cost me three figures, and they shall keep me entertained in the dark months: biographies of Sinan, the great architect--books about the history of science, guide books to Western Turkey and a Jewish Messiah! I confess: I've made a new friend, who alas passed away only a few years ago...but lives on valiantly in his printed words. The best form of immortality I think.
I of course have lots of living friends I treasure--but reading for me I've come to understand is also an act of friendship. I have a library full of friends whose words I have accumulated and which I continue to dip into over the course of my longish life: some I befriended in my childhood (Flaubert, Balzac, Mark Twain, Henry James and the great 19th Century Russians--especially Tolstoy and Chekhov). Vladimir Nabokov has been with me since then and we continue to converse. There are plenty of women too: Jane Austen and Mary Renault pop to mind. John Updike, Bruce Chatwin, Philip Roth... Plenty of garden writing friends like Christo Lloyd (who I not only met but hosted for dinner seventeen years ago a few years before he passed away), Frank Kingdon Ward, Beth Chatto, Allen Lacy, Vita Sackville-West and especially Reginald Farrer...not to mention living friends who write like Rob Proctor and Lauren Springer (who even dedicated a book to me: The Passionate Gardener. Who needs a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize after an honor like that?)
Sometimes I feel as though my library (scattered through six rooms and my office at work too) is like a noisy cocktail party...I'm glad to be able to take my new friend, John Freely, into a quiet room where we can just sit and talk. For the next few months. And years.
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