BOOKS

The far west of Barbary

Alastair Forbes

MATISSE IN MOROCCO: NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON

Thames & Hudson, £28, pp.293

TWO YEARS BESIDE THE STRAIT by Paul Bowles Peter Owen, £12.95, pp.80 ENGAGING ECCENTRICS by David Herbert Peter Owen, £14.50, pp.134 My own first step on to Moroccan soil was taken after a slow wartime flight south-westward over the Middle Atlas mountains, chasing a sun that obligingly delayed its disappearance into the Atlantic somewhere beyond Agadir until I landed at Marrakech to find Winston Churchill most comfortably convalescing there from a brush at Carthage with that 'old man's friend', pneumonia. In and around Algiers, whence I had come, I had already had a foretaste of the special charms of the Barbary Coast and had also, thanks to my friendship with de Gaulle's cultivated right-hand man, Gaston Palewski, had the good fortune to come across Albert Mar- quet and his work. Marquet was that close friend of Henri Matisse who had painted his own splendid studies of Tangier in 1911, a year before Matisse himself arrived there with his wife for the first of the two immensely influential and fruitful visits he was to pay to the African continent's most northerly port. There he had had to suffer 15 days and 15 nights of depressingly torrential rain before finally discovering that mysterious mother-of-pearl misty light that filters the sky, especially after cloud and rain, between the hills and the Strait of Gibraltar (Djebel-al-Tair, the hill of the Moorish warrior who began the centuries- long colonisation of Spain).

Matisse in Morocco is a breathtakingly beautiful and fascinatingly informative book, worth twice its price. It constitutes a perfect catalogue raisonne — almost in- deed a satisfactory substitute — for the exhibition that is alas to bypass London and go directly from the US to the USSR, whose Hermitage and Pushkin Museums have lent to it so many of the paintings so discerningly collected in the first place by Matisse's remarkable Russian patrons, Schuekin and Morosov. Fresh to the eye, too, are the pen-and-ink drawings from some of Matisse's only recently discovered Moroccan sketchbooks which seem to me to equal if not to outclass the more familiar ones of Delacroix who had passed through Tangier on his way south 80 years before him, when the scenes about him of every- day Moorish life were even more mediaev- al. Indeed, horse, mule, donkey and Shanks's pony were the only means of transport until well after the 1914-18 war.

The subjects of Matisse's brilliantly re- produced Moroccan portraits, whose col- ours so enchant, were almost inevitably all Rifians, the men of that Berber tribe which enabled Abd-el-Krim (one of whose sons later became a friend of mine in Cairo) to put up years of resistance in the Twenties to the massed armies of France and Spain. His female models, with the exception of one very dark mulatto girl, appear to have been mostly drawn from the jolly, chatter- ing, barefoot 'Gibli' women from the mountain villages eastward of Tangier who nightly bring down to the city's colourful markets their donkey-borne baskets of fresh produce, which may sometimes in- clude some of the best /of obtainable outside Latin America. The famous Zohra, who kneels in the centre of his exquisite triptych, was probably a Chleuh prostitute, like her brothers if they were not dancers as well.

Not for them the chador or the veil, and hardly ever even the shapeless white haik to cover their seldom very delicate bodies. The Rif, of all places, should certainly prove a stout stronghold against that ill- named 'Fundamentalism' now raising its hideous head in neighbouring Algeria and its cities.

For Morocco, besides being, as Lyautey liked to say, 'a cold country with a hot sun', is above all a Berber land that was only in `It's a shipping and funking novel.' the seventh century converted at the points of Levantine swords to Islam, an event rather sadly recalled by Driss Chraibi in his sensitive novel, La Mere du Printemps, (Editions du Seuil, pp.214, FFrs 59). The book is dedicated to 'all the minorities that after all constitute the biggest majority in the world', and flashes back from a morn- ing in 1982 to another in 681 AD at the Atlantic mouth of a South Moroccan river, when the conquering Arab General Okbar arrives with his Syrian horsemen. One remembers Galsworthy's rather Wilfrid Thesiger-like character who was cut in all the clubs after submitting, to say,: his life, to just such a conversion in the desert. Yet who would want to argue with the proposi- tion that there is no god but a god who is merciful and compassionate?

In the Tangier I knew nearly two score years ago my Muslim friends strictly re- spected that chapter in the Koran which goes:

Say; Oh Unbeliever, I do not worship what you worship and you do not worship what I worship. And I shall not worship what you worship and you will not worship what I worship. You have your religion and I have mine.

If atheism was best kept in the closet, the Roumis (Christians) could build their chur- ches and the Jews their synagogues and both their cemeteries as they liked. The Indian commercial community, too, wor- shipped as it pleased. Watching and getting to know the disabled beggar who, beneath my balcony, sat daily against the blue and white walled cemetery (once painted by Delacroix) where the lightly shrouded dead were, according to custom, hurried on friendly shoulders to burial before sundown and who conscientiously kept a tithe of his begging bowl for another beggar too crippled to make his pitch, I grew very affectionately disposed to Islam a la Mauresque. It was not Mohammed, as in Ayatollah lands, who was being wor- shipped in all and everything around us but Allah, who Mohammed had reminded the faithful was merciful and compassionate. To the amazement and disdain of Paul Bowles when I told him, I twice kept Ramadan and will never forget the deli- cious harira soups always served in Moor- ish homes to break the fast at the firing of the crepuscular gun amid the happy laugh- ter of excited children.

I rather approved of the European hero of Jacques Perry's beguiling novel (Les Sables Roses d'Essaouira Calmann-Levy, Paris, pp.205, FFrs 85) about the dazzling port once called Mogador who, when not in the arms of AIssa, his young Berber mistress casually encountered in the rose- red dunes, walked its broad streets laid out long ago by a Roumi prisoner of its Pasha — 'not daring to smoke or drink or eat so as not to disturb the faithful keeping Ramadan', forgetting perhaps that love- making, too, is forbidden in fasting hours, leaving the faithful hungry for more than just harira. Paul Bowles merely comments irritably that his local cannon has been replaced by a siren, not that it affects his own rather spoilt spinsterish routine a whit.

The Bowleses both — dear, crazy, some- times brilliant, always funny but long dead Janey, with her very inadequately requited Lesbian passion for the butch Cherifa, one of the plainest women in the Socco Grande, and the ever handsome Paul, the rather constipated homosexual musician and intermittently inspired story-teller are nowadays worldwide cult figures.

Paul's Paris publisher, Daniel Rondeau, has written an amusing little book of Tangerine apercus, well worth perusal by any Francophone visitor (Tanger, Livre de Poche, Paris, pp.151, FFrs 23). But his client's 1987-9 Tangier journal is of stupefying boredom and, at 20p a page, as oppressive as his poky flat where the camera crews are ever welcome to pry. Indeed journalist interviewers of every nationality are encouraged to remind him that he is still alive and importantly so, even if they go home still not exactly certain why, unless it be that he long ago sold for peanuts the film rights of his masterly story of Algeria, The Sheltering Sky, now being shot in Morocco by Berto- lucci. He does have some sidelong glances at Gavin Young, but I prefer that excellent writer in the solid flesh at the Beefsteak Club. His few musical observations are of marginal interest, if fairly old hat to anyone who saw the television film of Mick Jagger and the Stones meeting the 16 Berber musicians from Jajouka who allowed Jagger a turn on their drums. But in none of these books is there anything about the extraordinary old Andaluz music which the Moors took to Spain and after centuries brought back with them. When I listen to it on tapes I close my eyes and think of the once great civilisation of Cordoba where Muslim, Jew and Christian lived in peace in the shadow of that wonderful red and white mosque and my eyes fill with tears at the thought of the mad cruelties now reigning at the other end of the Mediterranean.

Clever Mr Pickles of Quartet Books will before long be publishing in translation Jour de Silenced Tanger, (Seuil, pp. 122, FFrs 63), another book by his Goncourt Prize-winning author Tahar Ben Jelloun, a compelling and convincing portrait of a dying Tangerine father which makes Bowles's diary a silly irrelevance.

Silly is also the adjective most usually used to qualify that octogenarian Osric, David Herbert, who has persuaded the publisher of his really quite readable and enjoyable Second Son to print some fly- blown left-overs from the larder of the charming little flower-embowered house whither, soon after the war, he fled Eng- land with an equally well-born but much more cultivated American companion, a sort of upmarket Orton and Halliwell pairing which fortunately ended in separa- Matisse's 'Café Morocain', 1912-13, Hermitage, Leningrad tion rather than murder. To his wife Ann in London (vide her correspondence edited by Mark Amory) in 1957, Ian Fleming on a visit to Tangier complained that it con- tained 'nothing but pansies' (he made a generous exception in the same letter for me and the 'very beautiful girl' — Berbero- Arab with a touch of a Tuareg brush and a truly classic Semitic profile — with whom I was then living in happy and fully requited love). 'David [Herbert]', he went on, 'is a sort of Queen Mum. He has been very kind to me but I'm fed up with buggers.' Recently Herbert complained to Queen Elizabeth, who has been tirelessly served since 1937 by his very respectable sister Patricia, Lady Hambleden GCVO, and well-deserved too, about his rather ambivalent Tangerine nickname. 'Oh, I shouldn't at all mind being called the David Herbert of Clarence House!', char- acteristically replied that lady, many of whose male household have long been awarded the regal prefix behind their backs.

In this last book he has rather set out to be the Mrs Betty Kenward of Tangier, only he can't spell even his own family's names right and all but a tiny fraction of his stories are either inaccurate or ascribed to the wrong people or both. He says he is sure he `was a bird in my former life'. A popinjay, perhaps? He could certainly have done with an editor to censor some of his malaprop tautologies e.g. 'eulogies of praise'. It was rather foolhardy of him to make fun of poor old jailbird Maud Nelson once forgetting her wig, for at the Tiara Ball at Wilton a decade or so ago I recall that guests had eyes chiefly for his own unsightly wig which he was forever patting nervously. However, it is brave of him (he has never lacked courage, only discretion) to confess that 'what I am best doing is playing a grotesque woman's part'. He certainly bears a strong resemblance to his maternal grandmother Lady 'Dandy' Paget. Of High Wind in Jamaica Richard Hughes' Tangier friend, Wylie, he writes `Jim was always gay', and bless his silly heart that is the only time that adjective appears in his book at all and in its proper sense too, once one of the most beautiful and useful words in the language for poets and prosodists alike and everybody else too.

David Herbert, though a lover of flowers and birds, has never been much interested in music or painting, but he writes with pride of having been for a quarter of a century a churchwarden of the St Andrew's English Church in Tangier, whose little cemetery nestles cosily, I nearly wrote oecumenically, against a much larger Mus- lim one. He will find that church many times most beautifully depicted by both Matisse and Marquet in the marvellous book which can easily be afforded by the simple expedient of refraining from wast- ing ing the money on his own and Paul Bowles' worthless rubbish.