The Pillars of Hercules

“Francis and I started coming to Corsica when we were absolutely penniless,” she said. She began to describe episodes in marriage that greatly resembled the plot of a D. H. Lawrence novel: aristocratic couple, escaping England, find an earthy people and life-affirming landscape, living in peasant huts, hiking the hills, sailing the coast in fishing smacks. It does not cost much. He paints, she writes. Even the sexual ambiguity was Lawrentian. Eating bad food, catching cold, moving slowly up and down the island; most of all, making friends and growing to understand Corsica.

“Francis was an artist, and I was a writer, so we didn’t expect any more. After the war, it was amazing here—mule tracks, nowhere to live, very primitive, still the code of the vendetta.”

Sir Francis and Lady Frederica! Artist and writer! People with class living on the margins! I remarked on that, but she dismissed it. “A title is nothing. I think it is no use at all—it is probably a disadvantage these days.”

And then she let drop the fact that she had been a Communist: Comrade Frederica, Lady Rose, waiting for the socialist millennium in a muleteer’s hut on a Corsican mountainside.

“But I left the party when I realized they were trying to influence my mind. I didn’t want anyone to tell me how to think.”

There were other parties for Sir Francis and his lady. Because of their bohemian habit of just scraping by, living at the edge, they got to know Corsica well; and after Sir Francis decamped to overdo it with his cronies in London, Dorothy stayed on and made Corsica her passion, seeing Corsican culture as something distinct from anything in Europe.

“People talk about the Arab influence, but they overrate it. Here, sentiment as we know it, does not exist. Very violent feelings exist. This mindset still exists among the older people—revenge and superstition.”

“For example?”

“Marrying for love, our idea of love, is quite remote here. I know a woman who had an affair with a young man. She became pregnant. The man went to the mainland to make some money, he said, but when he returned he was still dithering about marrying her. By then she’d had the child. She met him secretly and they talked, and when he made it plain that he was not going to marry her she took out a pistol and shot him.”

“That happens in other countries.”

“Perhaps. But she got a very light sentence,” Dorothy said. “Women occupy a special position in Corsica. In spite of what you see, the absence of women in the streets and in the cafes, they have their little trysts and assignations. I know it. There is a great risk.” And she smiled. “That is part of the attraction.”

She seemed to be speaking from intimate knowledge.

She said that if I saw nothing else in Corsica I should visit Filitosa—it was on the way to Bonifacio, where I would be catching the ferry to Sardinia. I had seen Bastia and Calvi and Corte and the Niolo region. Yes, get out and about, she said. It was how she herself had become acquainted with Corsica. Granite Island, still in print almost twenty-five years after it was first published, is full of excursions, long walking tours and risky and difficult journeys to the interior. It is a book without sarcasm or belittling or any complaints; only gratitude that she had been accepted as an honorary islander. It is no wonder she had lived there happily for almost fifty years.

We went together to Chiavari, one of those little villages high on a mountainside. I was interested in the Italian name, a place name from coastal Liguria. On the way we passed wildflowers—many of the same kind, a meager flower on an attenuated stalk.

“Asphodels,” Dorothy said. “They call it ‘the poor people’s bread,’ because the poor ate the bulb. Until Paoli introduced potatoes to Corsica everyone ate them. The Greeks called it ‘the flower of death,’ but it is edible. It is the flower of life. Lear mentions them.”

“I’ve got his book with me, Journal of a Landscape Painter.”

“Lovely book.”

The village was empty, though the church had been recently renovated, and the war memorial, commemorating the Corsicans who had died resisting the Italians in the Second World War, had fresh flowers on it.

Michael Bozzi, Héros de la Resistance. Fusillé le 30.8.1943.

“Fusillé—shot?”

“Executed,” she said. “They like the word ‘resistance’—better to resist than be for something. Corsicans can be so negative. A greater feeling of Corsican identity has caused more and more bombing incidents—against quite nice people, in some cases. The Williamses are a lovely couple. Lived here for years. They had a water mill. They were bombed.”

I said, “Corsicans have had a history of invasion, maybe that accounts for their resistance.”