Chapter 68In AlgiersIN ALGIER
📖 This chapter with the German alongside →
In Algiers I needed a while to find my feet and grow at home, but then spent three most interesting months there and on further excursions.
Only I have never grasped how, on all conducted tours, no more than a few days are reckoned for it. And in three months of the most strenuous work I have not by a long way exhausted everything worth seeing and worth knowing. How superficially the greater part of humanity travels. And what gain in life does it get out of these lightning journeys into wholly unknown regions and cultures? A gaudy, kaleidoscopic picture. Gaudy little spangles between international hotels. That is all. But how the travellers plume themselves on it.
From my balcony in Algiers I had a fine view over the sea and could make all manner of studies. First I began to look over modern French Algiers, a little Paris of its own, and then slowly but unstoppably the old pirate city peeled itself out of that for me, full of a onetime, monstrous splendour. That was one of the most delightful studies of all my travels. For it I did admittedly sit whole days in the library, itself a magnificent marble palace all in coloured tiles, and read of the life and doings of the great corsair families of the Barbarossas in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries1. Then I looked at old engravings. And from the black terraces of ancient houses in the black Kasba, the Arab town that climbs the hill vertically, I looked at the harbour. Saw, in my mind, from all these black terraces, beautiful women waving to the pirate ships coming home laden with rich booty. So bit by bit I built up again all the sunken fairy-tale wonders of the past. These took ever more hold and life the further I pushed into splendid Moorish palaces otherwise closed to travellers.
The French have chosen well.2 Ministers, generals, barracks, general commands, but foreigners too, English, Russians, Germans! I have been in perhaps thirty wonderfully restored Moorish castles, some in the middle of the city, some in Mustapha supérieur and further out still. Nothing more beautiful and more fantastic can any artist's imagination devise than the Moorish palaces of Algiers. Each one fundamentally different in size and execution and yet all of a piece in plan, the inner rooms grouped about tree-planted, water-spouting courts of columns. In tiles (whether they are called azulejos here as they are in Spain I do not know) I saw the most wonderful colours and designs. Orgies of beauty for the artist's eye. — Yes, life is too short! — And I do not know which of these palaces are dearest to me. Those newly risen through a deployment of unlimited means, artistic sense and taste, or the decaying, dreaming ones, wrapped in wild roses and glowing lilac sprays of bougainvillea, awaiting demolition. I was like a wild thing where the fairy-tale castles of Algiers were concerned, and downright a public menace. No owner of a palace had any peace from me; I even brought round the world-shy owner of the “Bardo.” And in how many beautiful Moorish houses of the inner city was I, which are shortly to be pulled down for the sanitation of the great city. What remarkable interiors I saw in the course of it, at the “beautiful Fatme's,” for instance, who keeps a dancing school, at the “Spanish naked dancers'” and many, many others. The Moorish baths too struck me as a revival of the Alhambra. If I could have contrived it at all, I would have bought myself an old Moorish palace. A good thing that I could not. — Then I made wonderful excursions with the sisters-in-law of the Spanish painter of Biskra, Mlles. Boccoli, to the “black Madonna,” to the capes, along the shore, where from little bathing places one sees the whole snow chain of the Djujura in the Atlas and the mountains of the Tell. And glorious countless walks in the valleys of the Sahel, the hilly hinterland. And to the fortress, from which one has a wonderful survey of the city. There was in fact no cave and no valley I have not been in!
And how often I wandered into the labyrinth of the Kasba. But that is not without danger, without a guide. So in a dark house entrance, into which my curiosity had driven me, a couple of young rascals jostled me and got my purse away in the doing of it. That cost me a great deal of bother with police and courts. In the courthouse the criminals were led in in chains, and my acquaintances warned me against going through the Kasba alone again, the boys would take their revenge — money and purse had of course vanished. Comically enough, though, I got four meal tickets back from the “restaurant chien qui fume.” Those I could still eat up in peace after all the excitement.
I called on the painter Rochegrosse3, likewise in a beautiful Moorish castle. He was just then at work on the picture “La mort du pourpre.”4 By this “purple” he meant everything great, high and passionate.
The waking of spring in the valleys of the Sahel was intoxicatingly beautiful.
And suddenly I spun myself into my four walls for a few weeks and wrote “The Story of a Soul in the Land of the Mormons,” “In the Shadow of Brigham Young.”5 I wrote at it as in a fever.
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑the Barbarossas in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries — Two centuries out. Aruj and Hayreddin Barbarossa belong to the sixteenth century, not the fourteenth and fifteenth. Aruj was born about 1474 and killed in 1518; his brother Hayreddin took Algiers for the Ottomans, became the Sultan's Kapudan Pasha and died at Constantinople in 1546. The corsair state she is reconstructing from engravings and the library shelves ran from then to the French landing of 1830, and is a phenomenon of the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries throughout. Her error is a common one — the age of the Barbary corsairs feels medieval and is not — and it does not touch what she is doing with it, which is repopulating the terraces she is standing on. (Hayreddin Barbarossa)
- ↑The French have chosen well. — Four words on what the conquest did with the city's houses, and she means them as a compliment to the taste of the occupiers. The list that follows is the whole colonial order in one line — ministers, generals, barracks, staff headquarters, and then the foreign colony, English, Russian, German — and every one of them is living in a palace built by somebody else. Thirty of these houses let her in. She sees the restorations as rescue, notices in the same paragraph that the Moorish houses of the lower town are about to be demolished for the sanitation of the city, and draws no line between the two facts. It is worth reading beside her own Tempio in Berlin, a house furnished as a temple out of what she had brought back from other people's countries: she is not an observer of this taste but a practitioner of it, and the chapter is her happiest. (The Casbah of Algiers)
- ↑the painter Rochegrosse — Georges-Antoine Rochegrosse (1859–1938), the most celebrated French history painter of his generation, who settled at El Biar above Algiers in 1900 and died there. He had made his name in the 1880s with enormous, theatrical historical canvases — Andromache, the Death of Babylon — and after his first visit to Algeria in 1894 turned to orientalism and to flowers. By 1914 he was an institution, and lived in a Moorish house at El Biar in the hills behind the city. She gives no hint that she found him hard to reach, which after the world-shy owner of the Bardo two paragraphs earlier is its own small boast. (Georges Rochegrosse)
- ↑“La mort du pourpre.” — La Mort de la Pourpre, finished in 1914 and now in the Musée d'Arts de Nantes. She is standing in front of it while it is being painted. The canvas is large — 219 by 298 centimetres — is dated 1914, and was given to Nantes by the painter himself in 1926. So the visit is a dated sighting of a named picture on the easel, and it fixes her spring in Algiers to the year the painting carries: a third confirmation of the journey's date from outside the memoir, after the two railways. What she brings back that no catalogue has is the painter's own account of his title, given to a visitor in his studio: by this purple he meant everything great, high and passionate. Her French has du for de la — pourpre is feminine in the sense of the dye — and she writes his name as Rochegroße. (La Mort de la Pourpre, 1914)
- ↑“The Story of a Soul in the Land of the Mormons,” “In the Shadow of Brigham Young.” — A second book written in these months, after Yoshiwara at Biskra — and a book no bibliography known to this project records. She had crossed Utah on the American tour of 1910, and mentioned a Mormon novel once before in this memoir, under the title Im Schatten der Mormonen. Here she gives it two more: Die Geschichte einer Seele im Mormonenland and Im Schatten Brigham Youngs, set down side by side, which reads like a title and a subtitle she had not settled between. No printing under any of the three has been found in this project, and searches of the ordinary catalogues return nothing. So in one winter and spring, in an oasis and then in a rented room in Algiers, she wrote two novels: one published posthumously in 1920 and famous, the other apparently never published at all. The war began four months later. (Where the Mormon book was first mentioned)