The Pillars of Hercules

“The Corsican way of life is a resistance to foreigners,” Dorothy said. “And Catholicism gives a life to the villages, like the Good Friday observance in Sartène, which is a jolly good picnic, and the men take their hats off as the statue of the Virgin goes by. Many of those men are gangsters, who rehabilitate themselves through the church.”

In the churchyard of Chiavari’s lovely church, looking down at the bay of Propriano and beyond to Ajaccio, Dorothy became thoughtful.

She said, “Corsicans helped the French run their empire, they worked in the colonies in Indochina and Africa.” We were walking among gravestones, with foreign place-names chiseled into them, where each deceased Corsican had breathed his last—Algiers, Oran, Tonkin.

“The Corsicans had always gone abroad, from the turn of the century until the 1960s. The nationalist movement started when there were no more colonies to exploit and no more jobs. It’s a Marxist argument, yes, but there it is.”

We went back to Ajaccio and had tea in her apartment. There were some of Francis’s paintings on the wall. I understood what she meant when she said people either loved them or hated them. I did not love them. It was an austere apartment; and yet Dorothy made no apologies. It was a writer’s apartment, a sitting room, a narrow kitchen, a bedroom—books and papers, an old typewriter, notes, drafts, notebooks, and some flowering plants in pots. But it was chilly there. The winters could be cold, she said.

She was frail, and yet she gave classes in poetry appreciation to get some income. She had just finished a book about belief in the supernatural in Corsica, The Dream Hunters of Corsica. “My rationalist friends will hate it.” Her life was full. She was settled here. “This is all I want,” she said, and it was not clear whether she meant the apartment in the first basement or the island of Corsica; but it came to the same thing.

Over tea we were talking about England.

“Margaret Thatcher!” Dorothy said. “Isn’t she awful? Look at her, a very humble upbringing in a grocer’s shop. But listen to her. That’s why she’s so careful in the way she talks, so ‘refained.’ And so careful in the way she dresses. And she is so intolerant.”

She had ceased to be a Marxist, but Lady Rose was still a bohemian.

In heavy rain, I left Ajaccio the day after my lunch with Dorothy, detouring around the village of Petreto-Bicchisano and down a winding road to Filitosa. Seeing the strange, almost monstrous beauty of Filitosa helped me to understand passages in Granite Island where Dorothy had been transformed in something akin to a spiritual experience—though in her brisk practical way Lady Rose probably would not use that word (but Dorothy Carrington might). She was changed: “On that day I entered Corsican life and became part of it,” she wrote.

In slippery mud and pouring rain I made my way through the cold forest to the simple settlement of stones. I saw no other people until I reached the place, and then as if in a bizarre reenactment I saw a wet family sheltering from the rain in the remains of a Filitosa stone hut—beefy Father, red-cheeked Mother, two pale children. Two thousand years fell away, as the cliché goes. They were German tourists, but it was a vivid glimpse of early man in the Mediterranean, in his hideout in the hills. At first the little tableau startled me, and then I walked on, laughing.

The little glade below Filitosa, where there were upright sculptures, was full of wildflowers. Now I knew what an asphodel was, and there were two varieties growing here, with buttercups and broom and pink lavender. A big middle-aged man and woman, wearing yellow raincoats, were embracing and kissing in a stone shelter farther down the hill, and still the rain fell. There was thunder, so loud a horse was spooked from where it stood under a tree, and it bolted into the downpour.

In the late forties and early fifties, this tiny village in the south of the island was just a place of mythical prehistory, a litter of strange stones, a nameless Stonehenge. Dorothy mentions in her book how a Corsican farmer realized that a convenient flat stone he had been using for a bench for years was actually a priceless historical object, an ancient carving of a man with a sword.

Only in the 1960s did the knowledgeable archaeologists arrive in Filitosa; then the megalithic ruins of Corsica become codified and the apparently barbarous carvings were more elaborately described and seen for what they are, wonders of Mediterranean prehistory. Dolmens, menhirs, and statue-menhirs—the most ancient of them probably four thousand years old. The terminology is not especially helpful, but it is almost irrelevant when you see the settlement at Filitosa, the shelters, the high walls, the battlements, the altar and the standing stones, the weird masklike portraiture of the heads on slender stalks of stone—perhaps gods or warriors—of this enigmatic culture.