Speaking of Islands

LOUIS GOLDING

Wherein Especial Reference Is Made to Manhattan and the Drinking of Djerba's Lotus Blossoms

I INSIST to myself frequently that it is illogical to be so spellbound by islands as I am, and to be the more abjectly under their spell the more inaccessible they are. After all, islands partake of the nature of land in general, the same sky is over them, the same rock and earth constitute them. All you have to do is to pretend that the sea is round the next corner or washes the hinder slope of the hill you have just descended. If you pretend firmly enough, you can perhaps enjoy the experience of feeling yourself on an island without the inconvenience of actually getting there. Nor need you diet yourself sparsely on dry toast and tea; nor swallow furtive prophylactics against sickness when your hearty friends are not looking.

But it will not do. You cannot so deceive yourself. An island is an island. It is even more bravely an island if you must pay for landing there with much tribulation. And the scientists and sociologists will tell that an island is not merely a lump of mainland surrounded by water. If you artificially convert Indiana into an island tomorrow, it will develop its private modifications in fauna and flora, non-human and human. Its dialect will acquire its own subtle inflections. Its air and water will strike the nostrils and the palate adventurously.

I CONFESS that to me an island is consummately an island when it is one of the islands visited by Odysseus in his wayfaring. For which reason I am convinced that Odysseus must have preceded Yerrazano—or was it Christopher Columbus?—in the landing upon Manhattan, which is one of the world's two supreme islands.

It was a whale of a wind that blew him so far out of his course from Ithaca. But then, of course, it is just possible that the Authoress of the Odyssey (please consult Samuel Butler) meant Rhode Island when she wrote Ithaca. And has not Manhattan exactly the characteristics of the Odyssean islands, any of them? Do not the sirens sing in Manhattan? If they do not, it is not Mr. Ziegfeld's fault. Does not Circe send her lovers rooting for truffles in the thick loam of Wall Street? Do not Aeolus and Polyphemus . . . no, I hardly think I need labour the point. It is in one respect only that Manhattan does not fill the bill of any of the Odyssean islands. And that is, there are no lotus-eaters here. This is a land where it is never afternoon. And in order to eat lotus (or drink it, to be exact) you must go across the Atlantic and through the Pillars of Hercules into the Mediterranean, and so along the coast of Tunisia, to the Gulf of Gabes; till you come at length to Djerba, the Island of the Lotophagi. But that is the other supreme island. We will get over there shortly.

I said that a man falls the more abjectly under the spell of islands the more inaccessible they are. And Manhattan, of course, is the most inaccessible of them all. There is no doubt that Giovanni da Yerrazano thought so. (It was not Christopher Columbus, was it?) And there is no doubt that you think so, too, if you live in Flatbush Avenue, which is (I understand) in Brooklyn, and you need to get into a Manhattan office, and away from it, every morning and evening. Moreover, they say that in the Bronx . . . but this, after all, is a respectable journal. . . .

Closely bound up with this devotion to islands is the impulse to buy one, to own it all yourself. The idea of buying Manhattan, of course, becomes increasingly chimerical, though I have met a large number of policemen and a small number of police lieutenants whose bearing suggests that if they have not bought Manhattan, they at least own it. But perhaps the island one would like to own would have to be a little lonelier. Not that the concept of solitude is in itself attractive. Nobody ever gets any satisfaction from the thought of being marooned in the middle of a continent. But to be left in supreme isolation on the last island of Polynesia is a destiny for which children would abandon all their dreams of being firemen or Presidents of Corporations, and old men would throw overboard all their giltedged securities. Not long ago a distinguished business-man in England bought up Lundy Island, over against the coast of Somerset. He tried to deceive himself and us that he embarked on it as a purely commercial proposition. But I do not doubt that for years a dasmon has whispered in his ear at the hushed moment of midnight, and the voice will no longer be gainsaid. And now, should he desire to make himself a crown out of seaweed and a necklace out of cockle shells and fashion his royal sceptre out of a spar of driftwood—he is the King of Lundy Island. Who shall say him nay?

THE important thing about the island you buy is that it be very small; so you would certainly deduce from the experience of Compton Mackenzie. He had gone a long way towards possessing himself of the island of Capri—this was in the days when the extraordinary women were still heaping bowls of incense before the vestal fires. Then, realizing that Capri was too large, he bought Herm, which is one of the Channel Islands, and found Herm also by several acres too large. Whereon he bought Jethou. For the circuit of the perfect island is such (he explained) that you must be able to recite The Raven once forward, once backward, then spit three times, and so find yourself at the point you started from.

The ancients deemed that no bliss transcended the blisses of the Hesperidean Islands. We ourselves are as insular in our teleology, for in our contemplation of Heaven, we imagine ourselves seated upon little separate islands of cloud, smaller than Jethou, with wings in place of fins to bridge the distances. But for myself, I should like to anticipate that remote felicity by a real island of rock and grass, with blue waters lapping into its tiny caverns. As a boy, it was an island in Derwentwater, in Westmoreland, that captured my fancy:

On Friar's Crag my body will lie down,

On green grass and earth brown.

But so far as I remember I only wanted to die there, and seeing that the island in question has now passed into the possession of the nation, I shall be denied even that satisfaction. The waters of the English Channel are too green and choppy for my dream, so that I shall set up no rival island to Compton Mackenzie's.

Where then? The South Seas? But I should hate to have to bathe from my own island in a costume of cast iron for fear of sharks. No, there are no seas more Elysian than the Mediterranean.

Capri? The competition is a little violent. Stromboli? The island that stands northward from Sicily, crested with flame and smoke? I can see lots of uses for a nice tame volcano. What an admirable place for week-end parties consisting of people you do not like. "This way to the crater, gentlemen!"... But it might be a little disturbing to get up one morning and find your vegetable garden entombed in twenty feet of hot lava.

NO, not Capri, not Stromboli. It shall be Djerba, Island of the Lotus-Eaters, the other supreme island, Manhattan's antithesis. Perhaps, in point of fact, Odysseus never landed upon the island of Manhattan at all. I must confess there was a sort of heavy playfulness about my suggestion. But there is no doubt about Djerba. Of that sole island can it be stated with certainty, by all the theorists, that it was that place and no other the poet intended, when he deposited his hapless sailors there. Whether Capri was the Island of the Sirens or Ischia was Circe's Island, is by no means sure. But sure it is that the wind of Djerba is rhythmic with the sublime hexameters. Djerba is for me, therefore, more than an island, if the language and my mind can rise to such a conception. It is an altar, a Holy of Holies. It was the last of the Odyssean islands I visited and has that essential characteristic of the best islands—it is as inaccessible as Manhattan itself. I hardly think it is much easier to get there now than it was in the days of Odysseus. Twice or three times a month a snorting little steamboat sets out thence from Tunis. Or you may take the long train journey by Sousse and Sfax and into the arid south, where the palms of the oasis of Gabes rise against the shallow sea. Thence the noisiest public automobile in Africa proceeds into its most mysterious territory—the country of the troglodytes, the cave-dwellers, whom Herodotus encountered here some centuries before Christ, and whose furniture and garments now are no more complex than they were then.

You halt for an hour or two in the incredible town of Medenine, where I will not allow my pen to linger lest I never arrive among the Lotus-Eaters. Hot hours lie before you among the jackal-haunted dunes. Then at the edge of the brown hills where half a dozen surly camels contemplate the cud, a more antique craft awaits you than Odysseus ventured in. Strange noises issue from within. Its mast is engirdled by a pattern of horns. The Arabs take their places with their thick hoods drawn over their brows. At length, after such laborious journeying, you set foot in the island of the Lotus-Eaters. You have achieved the circuit of Odysseus's wanderings. Now, now—or surely, very soon—the great moment awaits you. You, too, shall fill your mouth with the most exquisite of fruits, more subtle than any spice, more opiate than poppies. Even as the warm waters lap the sands of Djerba and your fingers paddle drowsily among sea-weed; even as the slow camels tread their endless rounds upon the circuit of a rain-well, whence they draw water to irrigate the meadows of lotus—even during that time the hexameters of Homer will sway in your head like heavy draperies, singing: "So they set forth and enter the home of the Lotus-Eaters, that quiet people, which lays no deadly snare for them. They present the lotus to them, even its delights. From the moment when my sailors bring to their lips this fruit as sweet as honey, they have no other thought but to pass their days amongst that people. Their only pleasure is to taste the Lotus; they forget even the name of their native land. ..."

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When I landed upon the shore of Djerba, almost my first preoccupation was where the nearest meadow—or orchard should it be?—of lotus grew that I might taste its incomparable felicity. But not my first. What I first set eyes on was two couples of inkblack negroes, each couple bearing between its shoulders a bamboo pole whence a monstrous turtle swung. Who shall have turtle soup tonight, I wondered. What bearded Arab sheikh, what dapper French commissioner? For them their turtle-soup, I said. For me the lotus, even its delights.

I had hardly deposited my rucksack in the vaulted cavern of the hotel when I set forth to gather me lotus. Baedeker is clear enough about it: "From the lotus-tree (Zizyphus Lotus; Arabic nebga, Fr. jujubier), which thrives here, Homer called it the island of the Lotophagi."

Where then to find a jujubier? Familiar trees were here from English orchards—apple and pear and cherry. It was not any of these that had stolen the wits of Odysseus's sailors away. Olives also were here, certain of those gnarled veterans having quite certainly been planted by Roman colonists. The ripening fruit of the date-palm was also springing at the crown of the tree. But, alas, no man. would lead me to the jujube.

Yet I for my part am certain I have eaten of Homer's lotus. Why has no scholar suggested that the lotus may, indeed, have been no more than a grape, nobler than any the vineyards of Champagne ever yielded, brought into amber fullness by the fierce sun of Djerba? There is a wine of Djerba tasted by few strangers. It is made by the Jews, an aboriginal colony which may have dwelled in Djerba what time Odysseus visited the island. The Muslims are a God-fearing and pious sect who, so far from drinking wine, will threaten to knife you if you offer them a cigarette in Ramadan. I drank the white sacred wine of the Jews of Djerba. I, too, have feasted off the lotus. Not in vain have I concluded the circuit of Homer's islands. What? Are you sceptical? You do not believe I grew drowsy on lotus? I leave you to go to the dogs on a box of dates. Or if you think that insufficiently adventurous—go to, suck the jujube. Let the mixture be strained and evaporated until it thickens to the right degree of viscosity; then bring it carefully into contact with the mucuous membrane of the throat. But do not, I bid you, recite the hexameters of Homer. You are not worthy of them. You are no true islander. Djerba is not for such as you, nor yet Manhattan. Get you to White Plains, or to Newark, even. You are a mainlander. We Odysseans will have no truck with you.