From: "Gary D Chance"
To: "BBC News Channel"; "Victoria Hislop"
Sent: Sunday, May 02, 2010 4:43 PM
Subject: Talking Books: Victoria Hislop "A Spirit of Place" "The Island": the leper colony on Crete; and "The Return": the Spanish Civil War.
I thoroughly enjoyed your interview with her and found it quite fascinating. I've learned something about her and her books which I'll make a mental note to read.
I immediately began thinking about Lawrence Durrell's "A Spirit of Place" when she used this phrase in the context of understanding a location on her travels.
Durrell was a traveller, poet, commentator and novelist as well as a sometime journalist or press person for the British government on Cypress 1952 to 1955.
I pulled out his "A Spirit of Place" and found this amusing and relevant bit about political inclinations described in 1949 from his vantage point in Belgrade. This came from a letter to Theodore Stephanides in 1949 while he was with the British Embassy there:
"There is little news except that what I have seen here has turned me firmly reactionary and Tory: the blank dead end which labour leads towards seems to be this machine state, with its censored press, its long matching columns of political prisoners guarded by Tommy guns. Philistinism, puritanism and cruelty. Luckily the whole edifice has begun to crumble, and one has the pleasurable job of aiding and abetting this blockheaded people to demolish their own ideological Palace of Pleasures." (Lawrence Durrell, "A Spirit of Place: letters and essays on travel," E P Dutton & Co, New York, 1971, edited by Alan G Thomas, p 101)
Given my experience with this Labour government during the past 12 years, Durrell's perception of it as an end product manifestation seen in Yugoslavia 60 years ago is quite telling about the direction its power would take.
The horrors of the Spanish Civil War are what I would have thought and not at all romantic given the carnage. I find it interesting that you should have mentioned Eric Blair, Ernest Hemingway and Martha Gellhorn in this context for I had begun thinking about them as the discussion developed especially the latter.
I was wondering how such carnage and brutality of the Spanish Civil War could have not been as significant as Martha Gellhorn's visit to Dachau a couple days after its liberation later in 1945. She said that this profoundly changed her life after which it was never the same again. She wrote a novel "Point of No Return" about it and described it in an essay collected among others in "The Face of War."
The incredible inhumanity of person to person beggars belief in war, but the atrocities of the concentration camps were incomprehensible after their exposure. For someone seeing this first hand at liberation could have been unbearable.
Which brings me to the point that the surveillance technology torture and medical experimentation to which I've been subjected 24/7/356 for 11.5+ years while this Labour government has been in power are echoed by both Durrell and Gellhorn in their writings but have been brought to London by technology so sophisticated that even the BBC doesn't want to report it.
Travel is a marvellous stimulus, but often the whole world and then some can be found in our own backyard.
Gary
cc Victoria Hislop c/o David Miller, Rogers, Coleridge & White Ltd
