ANOTHER LEVANT
Charles Glass muses on the Charles Glass muses on the
travel book and journalism interrupted by his kidnap
Levanto, Liguria DESPITE my love for this Ligurian coast, called south of Genoa the Riviera di Levante, its history remains for the most part a mystery to me. In the fishing village Just south of here, Monterosso, there is a 13th-century church of St John the Baptist whose pillars and arches in alternate layers of black and white stone are reminiscent of the Norman Crusader churches of the Levant. In Levanto, there is a 13th-century loggia, which bears a passing resemblance to the courtyard and liwan of a Levantine palace. A partially defaced Latin inscrip- tion on the loggia refers to the `Levantini' who built it. Many of the old buildings along this coast seem to date from the 13th century, which dawned black for Christen- dom in the shadow of the loss of Latin Jerusalem to Islam 12 years earlier. Could this coast — and here a thorough know- ledge of history could only shatter my illusions — have been settled by survivors of the Latin Kingdom of Jerusalem or the Genoese trading colonies on the Lebanese coast when Christendom began its second retreat from the Levant? The remains of St George himself, carried here by Crusaders from the Holy Land, are said to repose on a hill overlooking Portofino, just north of Sestri Levanti. Or might Liguria have been settled by Greeks who fled Constantinople and its provinces in 1204 when Byzantium fell to the barbarous Latins? Civilised Levantines would feel at home here: the olive-and-vine-covered mountains roll down to the sea as they do in the eastern Mediterranean, and the sun here, as there, sets in the sea.
Sir Steven Runciman, who wrote the classic three volume History of the Cru- sades and other excellent mediaeval Mediterranean histories, would un- doubtedly know the answers to the ques- tions vexing me about this Levant coast and the other one from which I've recently fled. It was while reading his Crusades in Liguria and Lebanon in 1983 that I con- ceived the idea of writing a travel book about the Levant. So little had changed in the eastern Mediterranean from the era of the Crusades, and one had only to wander over the terrain to see the similarities.
Lebanon was in 1983 in a more interesting state of confusion than it is now, with nearly everyone — the US, France, Italy and Britain, not to mention Iran, Syria and Israel — sending troops there to contend for control of the Crusader coast. Reading Runciman as the battleship New Jersey threatened the Druze mountains, I knew the American navy would sail away just as the Genoese and Pisan fleets had. The Levant coast had always been dominated from the hinterland, not the sea. Nothing was going to change that.
I went up to Scotland to see Runciman, comfortably and actively retired in a pretty house adjoining the peel tower which houses his library. At lunch, he spoke to my friend David Gilmour and me of the royal families of the Mediterranean — the Bour- bons and Braganzas, the Savoias and Gri- maldis. He knew everything about them, and he jumped from century to century so that I was not always certain whether a marriage or affair had taken place in the last week or some time before the discov- ery of America. He advised me to follow the 'usual invasion route' from north to south in planning the journey upon which I would base my travel book. This would take me from Alexandretta in southern Turkey through the Beilan Pass, called the Gates of Syria, to Antioch and Aleppo, Hama and Horns, down the Syrian coast to Tripoli in Lebanon. From Lebanon, I would go to southern Syria, Israel and Jordan.
The journey would begin in Alexandret- ta, the northernmost Mediterranean Levant port, and end in Aqaba, Jordan's Red Sea harbour. Beginning in Alexan- dretta and ending in Aqaba had both alliterative and historical purposes: Alex- andretta had been ceded by France to Turkey in 1939 and is the last corner of the Arab world ruled by Turks, who had ggverned most of the Arab world for four centuries; Aqaba was the first Ottoman fortress liberated by the Arab army from the Hejaz under T. E. Lawrence in 1917. I was a hostage this July on the anniversary of the fall of Aqaba and the beginning of seven decades of Arab pseudo- independence. Were the Arabs any worse off under the Turks than they are now? The Ottoman theme in my journey and in the book would be strong: hardly any remnant of the empire remains, because the Turks have planted no colonies and left few monuments.
After its imperial army fled north to Anatolia, Turkey never again tried to play a role in its former provinces. You would hardly know the Turks had been there, let alone for four centuries, until you looked more deeply. The Ottoman political struc- ture of rule through religious and ethnic communities persists — most starkly and disastrously in Lebanon, but just as surely in Israel and Syria. It is an impressive, if tragic legacy — made worse by the divi- sions established by Mr Sykes and M. Picot.
The title of my book came from some- thing Tahseen Basheer, a retired Egyptian diplomat and old friend, once said: 'Egypt is the only nation-state in the Middle East. The rest are tribes with flags.' The subtitle of Tribes with Flags was to have been `Memoir of a Journey from Alexandretta to Aqaba'. Due to circumstances beyond my control, the new subtitle, if there is one, may well be, 'Memoir of a Journey Curtailed'. It was not to be a political book, but a literary ramble through a land in which so many good writers from the Arab travellers Ibn Jubayr and Ibn Batuta in the Middle Ages to Alexander Kinglake, Mark Twain, Lamartine and Gerald de Nerval in the 19th century, to Lawrence and James Morris in the 20th, had wan- dered and recorded their impressions. What could be more interesting? Or more fun?
Although I've escaped the Levant, it is a little soon to begin the task of writing the book. So much is intervening. Scores of agents, publishers, film makers, television producers, editors and lecture tour im- pressarios are making me offers which, if not impossible to refuse, are financially if not morally tempting. There appears to be far more commercial interest in the abrupt curtailment of my journey by a kidnapping than there ever was in the book itself. Now, I've had to run away twice — in Beirut, from young boys with guns, and in London, from the telephone.
`We've got 15 film offers, including the TV movies and mini-series,' my New York agent told me just before my wife, Fiona, the children and I left for Italy. 'Four or five of them are worth considering.' I could almost hear him chomping on a cigar, except that, as I recall, he doesn't smoke. When I began my Levantine ramble last March, I gave up what I believed was a well-paid job as an American television correspondent for the risk of freelance book writing. (Luckily, my employers, ABC News, softened the blow by offering me a freelance contract to cover occasional stories for them while I was writing.) The combined advances from my American and British publishers were less than a third of my annual salary. Now the film offers, if genuine, are about five times what I used to make in a good year. We should be able to get you about $20,000 a lecture,' one of the five lecture agents who contacted me promised. 'For a book on the time you spent as a hostage,' another agent told me, 'the sky's the limit.' (I have decided not to write a book on being a hostage, and my longest word on the subject will be a long piece I am slowly and painfully writing for my friends at the Sunday Telegraph.) Before we left London for Liguria, we had not had time to read all the telexes and cables, or answer all the calls, offering to shower us with money my apparent reward for the stupidity of having gone to west Beirut. I said no to an appearance on Wogan (I cannot tell jokes), and I'm hoping no one asks me to endorse razor blades.
I'll miss both Levants. Back in London, I have to help my children back into school and write the Sunday Telegraph piece to get my hostage days out of my system and, more importantly, to make people under- stand what the Lebanese kidnappings mean. Then I'll give a few lectures, some for money and all to launch a new scheme for the benefit of the remaining hostages in Lebanon; write a piece for The Tablet on the meaning of prayer to someone in solitary confinement; again beg my wife and children's forgiveness for my stupidity in getting kidnapped; and write hundreds of thank you notes to everyone who helped my family while I was in captivity. Let me thank here and now the following people: Hani Salam, David Burke, Roone Arledge, Peter Jennings, Paul Friedman, John Cooley, Scott Willis, Ghida Qassem Dergham, Tony Touma, Charles Moore, Omar Alim, Ian and Bunty Ross, Fran Jacobs, Constance Bosworth, David Blundy, Alfred Baker, Sister Mary Veroni- ca, IHM, and, as organisations, both The Spectator, which offered so much help to my wife while I was away, and ABC News, which kindly and without anyone's asking put me back on full salary and established a full-time information and rescue centre for the entire period of my captivity. My publishers, the Atlantic Monthly Press in New York and Heinemann in London, have agreed to be patient until I find time to sit down and write Tribes with Flags. My last pre-writing act of procrastination may be to think about who should play me in the film. As Ronald Reagan must be asking himself in the midst of his foray into the bloody waters of the Gulf, where is John Wayne when we need him?
Sometimes, as I watch the sun set into the Mediterranean and look at my children running around the villa kindly loaned to me by David Ottoway of the Washington Post, I think that at 36 I'm too old to begin my first book. I occasionally see A. N. Wilson, who seems barely old enough to shave, at Spectator lunches and wonder how he has managed to turn out a novel a year since the age of 12 and still find time to learn Russian and prepare the definitive biography of Tolstoy. My unfinished novels sit in the darkness of a never- opened drawer, too awful for me to re- `And do you promise to abide by the rules laid down by the Aids warnings?? read, let alone finish. There is just some- thing wrong with them, like there is about making a lot of money out of being a hostage while friends are still hostage, like there was about the first serious work I ever wrote. That work was a long letter perhaps as many as 15 words — to my mother written about 32 years ago. I remember working hard on this gesture of filial devotion, being careful with what little I knew of grammar, spelling and hand-writing. She was pleased with it when I finally presented it to her. She took a long time, out of respect for my feelings, before mentioning its flaw. 'It's lovely, honey,' she said. 'Next time, though, you should write from top to bottom instead of from bottom to top.' This admonition was far more discouraging to me (I tried to tear the letter up) than a note, which was waiting for me on my return from Beirut to London from Bill Buford at Granta telling me what was wrong with a short story I'd offered him for publication months earlier. Of course, he and my mother were right: I should try it from top to bottom. But it is so hard to get it right.
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