Lament for lost beauties
Philip Mansel
ISTANBUL: MEMORIES OF A CITY by Orhan Pamuk Faber, £16.99, pp. 288, ISBN 0571218326 ✆ £14.99 (plus £2.25 p&p) 0870 800 4848 This magnificent memoir interweaves the political and the personal: the history of Istanbul with the early years of its most famous living writer. Born in Istanbul in 1952, to a large, quarrelsome family which owned and lived in the Pamuk Apartments, the novelist Orhan Pamuk has never left: ‘I am attached to this city because it has made me who I am.’ Istanbul: Memories of a City is more solemn and more introspective than another great Istanbul autobiography, Istanbul Boy by the comic writer Aziz Nesin. For Orhan Pamuk the Istanbul of his youth in the 1960s and 1970s was dominated by ‘bitter memories of the fallen empire’, ‘the cloud of gloom and loss that the fall of the Ottoman empire had spread over Istanbul’. Here he is projecting his own love of Ottoman culture, which he rightly calls ‘a sumptuous culture that had been influenced by the West without having lost its originality or vitality’. Far from being afflicted by ‘end of empire melancholy’, many Istanbullus were delighted to be rid of their empire. They soon forgot the Ottoman dynasty and felt no regret for the lost provinces whence, as so many songs lamented, few Turkish soldiers ever returned. Istanbul hearts ached less for the beauty of Ottoman architecture, as Orhan Pamuk claims,than for Mustafa Kemal, for communism, fascism, political Islam or simply over the difficulty of earning a living. The Istanbul of the late 1970s was a battlefield of political and social creeds — the shape of a moustache indicated fascist, communist or islamist sympathies — unrelated to the Ottoman past. Much of the melancholy which Pamuk calls ‘this feeling that is unique to Istanbul and that binds its people together’, had personal roots, like inheritance laws and poverty.
Pamuk writes sadly of his visits to crumbling Ottoman mansions, inhabited by relations who preferred cats and dogs to humans. The mansions’ divisions, made with remarks such as ‘you take the harem, I’ll take the annexe’, were an invitation to disputes. Pamuk knew of people who built walls simply in order to block their relations’ view of, or access to, the garden. In his opinion ‘dishonesty and insincerity’, helped by a flair for deception and manipulation, dominated personal relations in his parents’ circle of friends. Writing and painting were for him an escape from this hypocrisy. Other favourite pastimes of his youth included watching wooden mansions burn — often set on fire by owners for the insurance money — and counting the number of car and boat accidents in the Bosphorus. He has a marvellous quotation from a handbook on ‘how to escape from a car that has fallen into the Bosphorus’: ‘slowly open the doors and without panicking get out of the car.’ Pamuk’s perception, attention to detail and many quotations from books and newspapers give readers direct insight into the life of a city which he calls ‘so unmanageably varied, so anarchic, so very much stranger than Western cities’. He grew up in the interlude between the cosmopolitanism of the late Ottoman empire and the cosmopolitanism of global capitalism, when the only place that ‘felt like Europe’ was the lobby of the Hilton hotel. The period’s intoxication with the West was reflected in interior decoration: sitting-rooms ‘were designed to demonstrate that their householders were Westernised’. In those days Islam was regarded by the educated elite as ‘a strange and sometimes amusing set of rules on which the lower classes depended’.
Reflecting the cosmopolitan character of the Ottoman capital, Pamuk shares many educated Turks’ admiration for the Westerners who painted or wrote about their city. The superb 1800 engravings of the city by Antoine Ignace Melling, architect to the Sultan’s sister, with their precision and freedom from sentimentalising Orientalism, were for him a vision of a ‘lost heaven’. Looking at Melling’s views was like driving along the Bosphorus. Pamuk also identified with the accounts of Istanbul by Gérard de Nerval, Flaubert and Gautier. Ottoman writers, who said Istanbul made the angels in heaven gasp with envy, are ignored; Pamuk even claims, with considerable exaggeration, ‘For centuries the only literature our city inspired was penned by Westerners.’ Among the many unknown aspects of Istanbul to which Pamuk introduces foreign readers are ‘four lonely, melancholy writers’ of the 20th century, who lived alone and never married: the poet Yahya Kemal, the memoirist Abdulhak Sinasi Hisar, the novelist Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar (whose novels need translating into English as urgently as Nesin’s Istanbul Boy, already published in the United States, needs a London publisher); and the journalist historian Resat Ekrem Kocu. A mournful lover of beautiful youths and vanishing Istanbul, Kocu lived in an apartment piled high with mountains of manuscripts: the last unbound sections of his Istanbul Encyclopedia found no buyers, even when sold as waste paper.
Pamuk mourns the city’s transformation into a mass of ‘soul-crushing’ and viewblocking apartment blocks. In his youth Istanbul ‘was not an anonymous multitude of walled-in lives — a jungle of apartments where no one knew who was dead or who was celebrating what’ but ‘an archipelago of neghbourhoods in which everyone knew each other’. His laments for Istanbul’s lost beauty are reinforced by the marvellous (if appallingly reproduced) photographs scattered throughout the book, many by the great photographer Ara Guler. Shots of his beautiful mother holding young Orhan are followed by views of abandoned wooden houses, fog-wreathed minarets, ice on the Bosphorus, fires, the debris from race riots. The translation by Maureen Freely, author of one of the funniest Istanbul novels, The Life of the Party, is a delight.
An underlying theme of the book is loss of cosmopolitanism. Pamuk can remember the state-inspired anti-Greek riots of 1955 when mobs pillaged the city with government blessing. As he grew up ‘the city stagnated, emptied itself out and became a monotonous town in black and white’. He speaks of ‘cultural cleansing’ and provincialisation. When French, Greek or Armenian were spoken in the street, the speaker was told, ‘Citizen, please speak Turkish.’ Both Tanpinar and Yahya Kemal became nationalists who emphasised Istanbul’s Turkish identity. Even in 2005 the future of the Greek Orthodox Oecumenical Patriarchate — the oldest institution in Europe after the Vatican — is as uncertain as that of the tiny Greek and dwindling Armenian and Jewish communities. Recently Pamuk has had the courage to be one of the first Turkish writers openly to challenge the official version of the fate of Turkey’s Armenians, who once composed a tenth or more of Istanbul’s population, a topic which still seems, to visiting historians, to hang like a cloud over the city. The battles now engaged over this issue will help decide whether or not Istanbul’s future will include these living links with what Orhan Pamuk calls ‘the grand polyglot multicultural Istanbul of the imperial age’.
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