The Pillars of Hercules

Lear, who was famous for writing light verse with his left hand and painting Mediterranean landscapes with his right, came to Corsica just a few months after writing “The Owl and the Pussycat.” He traveled all over the island in a mule-cart. In his time Lear was better known as a brilliant watercolorist, as well as a painter in oils, rather than a writer of nonsense poetry. He had the idea of illustrating large-format bird books, much as Audubon had done, and Lear’s book of parrots is a masterpiece. But the book made no money. He abandoned ornithology. Looking for new subjects, and restless by nature, Lear became a great traveler in the Mediterranean—France, Italy, Greece, Egypt—and also in India; he wrote and illustrated books on Albania and Corsica. His book about Corsica, Journal of a Landscape Painter in Corsica (1869), introduced Corsica as a wild paradise to British readers, and created Corsica’s first tourist boom. Lear was the twentieth of twenty-one children. He was a kindly, whimsical man, but given to periods of great sadness and loneliness. So ashamed was he of being an epileptic that he hid his affliction—never spoke the word—and so he remained a lonesome traveler.

He was one of the first foreigners to penetrate the Corsican interior, though in the 1860s the French had already begun to exploit Corsica for its fine trees. By the time Edward Lear ventured into the forest he saw “the ravages of M. Chauton’s hatchets; here and there on the hillside are pale patches of cleared ground, with piles of cut and barked pines … giant trees lie prostrate …”

I was told that the French had recently made this forest a national park but, being colonists in Corsica—the activists’ slogans were justifiably indignant—French lumber companies were still intensively cutting trees. The signs of logging were everywhere—marked trees, cut timber, clear-cut slopes, every sort of abuse that goes under the weasel term “forest management.”

The narrow road traversed the valleys, westward, through the trees. The best way of seeing this forest was on a bike, in the open air, for the fragrant scent of the tall pines. The valleys were dappled with shadow and spread thickly with a litter of pinecones and needles, warmed and made fragrant by the sunlight.

Lear had rhapsodized about it. He wrote in a letter (to Emily Tennyson): “I have seen the southern part of the Island pretty thoroughly. Its inner scenery is magnificent—a sort of Alpine character with more southern vegetation impresses you, & the vast pine forests unlike those gloomy dark monotonous firs of the north, are green and varied Pinus Maritima. Every corner of the place not filled up by great Ilex trees and pines and granite rocks is stuffed with cistus and arbutus, Laurentinus, lent & heath: and the remaining space if any is all cyclamen & violets, anemones & asphodels—let alone nightingales and blackbirds.”

It is much the same today. The trip through this region is a combination of forest, of meadow and mountain, all this leading from one side of Corsica to the other; and after Evisa with its tall narrow houses and graceful church steeple, the road descends through the sheer rocky gorges of Spelunca to Porto, haunt of tourists.

At Evisa I met the Dunnits, from England. I was admiring the steep striated gorges and the sloping ledges of pinkish stone, the pinnacles and scalloped ridges, and a car drew up. The driver asked me how far to Corte.

“An hour or so, through the forest,” I said.

“You just come by push-bike?”

“Right.”

“Stopping in Corte?”

“I have to go back there to return my bike. I’m on my way to Ajaccio.”

“We were there—we done that.”

“Calacuccia’s very pretty.”

“We done it, as well.”

I decided to tease them.

“Bonifacio—have you done it?”

“Done it.”

And then the Dunnits began to reminisce about the Hebrides, how they had done it, and how the people were just like the Corsicans, insisting on speaking Celtic (“Or Gaelic,” said Mrs. Dunnit). Eventually the Dunnits drove off.

This was just a day off for me—a picnic. Instead of bicycling all the way downhill to the seaside village of Porto, I pedaled back to Corte and caught the train to Ajaccio.

• • •

It was the last train to Ajaccio. I arrived in darkness, passing through the back of the city, and hardly entering it on the train, because the station is some distance from the center. It was only eight in the evening, but the streets were empty. I was later to discover that Ajaccio is a city of convulsions—busy from seven until noon, the market, the banks, the fruit stalls, the fish shops, the bus station, the stores, all bustling; then dead from noon until three or so; and then convulsed until six-thirty, when it expired until the following morning. And the streets, like the streets in many Mediterranean towns, were a men’s club.