Dust on the lioness' paw
Caroline Moorehead
FREYA STARK: A BIOGRAPHY by Molly Izzard Hodder, £25, pp. 342 Freya Stark was always very clear about what she wanted, and one of the things that she was clear about was that a man and not a woman should write her biography. It fitted in with the greater esteem she felt towards men. Casting around, in the 1970s, her eye settled on her friend, David Cecil. He, she felt, would give her life the histori- cal perspective it needed, and place her books and travels in their proper context. But he turned down the gift, and no other suitable man came forward. When Molly Izzard offered her services, they were firm- ly refused. A book on the Brotherhood of Freedom perhaps, the network of pro- Allies 'whisperers' she set up in Cairo in the war? But definitely not a biography; that she forbade. Next week, sees the publi- cation of Molly Izzard's biography, brought out to coincide with the celebration of Freya Stark's 100th birthday on 31 January — though celebration is hardly the word for this bad tempered offering.
Molly Izzard first set eyes on Freya Stark in 1979. It was her 86th birthday, and the plan was to 'take her by storm' by arriving with a car full of mimosa. Molly Izzard was amazed, when she rang the bell, to be con- fronted by a 'well-groomed little worldling'. The quest was on: what did this curious façade conceal? The more Molly Izzard investigated, the more she became con- vinced that the world had been duped by the image of the successful explorer and travel writer that Freya Stark had so ably fashioned and projected to gullible friends and admiring public. Stepping through the `mirror to the other side' was to be the aim of her book. For 13 years, she delved assid- uously. Yet the figure she eventually pulls out of the hat is not one likely to be recog- nised by many who came into contact with Freya Stark. Given that this is the first full- length biography, and that most of the peo- ple who knew her well are dead, the danger is that Molly Izzard's interpretations will be accepted by future scholars.
A reader need look little further than the contents' page to understand the tone of what is to come. The title of Chapter One is 'An Enormous Reputation'. What follows is a relentless search for pecadillos. True, Freya Stark was unscrupulous and manipulated her friends; but she was not tough and for the most part they felt admi- ration and fondness. True, she was wily, but she was not without self-mockery. No one could deny that she was vain, but to say that she had a 'self-deluding, sociopathic element in her personality'? The laboured passages of psychoanalysis fail to bring out the wicked twinkle, the knowing outrageousness. If friends did dine out on Freya Stark's exploits, it was with affection as well as exasperation. She was a wonder- ful topic for gossip; but she was also a good friend. Since only unkind remarks are quot- ed, little of either the humour or the affec- tion comes across. More puzzling, perhaps, is the decision to dwell so obsessively on character defects and failures as an explor- er, and dismiss so passingly the writing 18 volumes of travel and essays, four books of autobiography, millions of words of pub- lished letters — for it is for them that Freya Stark will be remembered. It is a strange omission.
On the subject of Freya Stark's impres- sions of other people, as well as her tastes and abilities, Molly Izzard is at her least reliable. To declare that Freya wasn't interested in ethics or in jour- nalism, she was interested in earning money, and 'getting on' is to ignore her fascination with all things philosophical and to forget the carefully crafted articles. To conclude that by the late 1930s, her intimates tended to be drawn from the social and political rather than the intellectual world is to dismiss one of the most pleasant aspects of her post-war years — the visits of Bernard Berenson, Sir Sydney Cock- erell, Colin Thubron, Paul Scott, Edward Hodgkin, Professor Seton Lloyd, her pub- lisher Jock Murray and many others, and the long talks under the ilex tree in her gar- den. To suggest that 'women tended to associated Freya more with bubble baths and beauty treatments' is to misunderstand not only the comedy and delight of her pas- sion for new and expensive hats, but the terror and respect she inspired in women. While to categorise the break up of her sad marriage to Stewart Perowne with the words
the husband was relinquished with cool determination and without any great fuss,
is to disregard the anguish, bitterness and profound sense of rejection, amply docu- mented in the many letters to friends not included in the published letters as the pro- tagonists were both alive, but available among her papers. (And I am sure that the risottos cooked by her maid do not, as Molly Izzard suggests on page 26 , 'pulsate gently').
The nit-picking, debunking tone of this book — which peculiarly reserves child- hood for pages 217-306, and fails to cover the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, rich and impor- tant years — inevitably raises questions about biography itself. Given that there is no such thing as objectivity, is it not the biographer's task to disinter and present the facts, leaving the reader to form his own opinions? Where the writer does begin with a strongly held theory, is it honest to select only the evidence that fits? And is it right for biographers to so unashamedly disregard the wishes of their subjects? There is something very disagreeable in the endless innuendos of this book, and some- thing deeply baffling about the spleen which seems to have inspired it.
All this is doubly a pity, for Molly Izzard is an entertaining writer, with a sense of history which Freya Stark would have much appreciated, and she has found interesting new material, particularly from the war years. Her final portrait is not so much a journey to the other side of the mirror of Freya Stark's image, at a glance through a distorting prism. The character who emerges is convincing; but she is not Freya Stark. The real biography remains to be written.
Caroline Moorehead has edited Freya Stark's letters and is the author of a short life of Freya Stark in the Penguin Lives of Modem Women series.
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