Prospero's Cell: A Guide to the Landscape and Manners of the Island of Corfu (26 page)

 
Pasteli.
An ordinary nougat.

 
Other sweetmeats:
Trigono, Kadaïfi, Baklava, Galactobouri.

Best Village Festivals

  Gastouri; Kastellani; Analypsis; Pantocratoras; Kassopi.

Best Local Wines on the Market

  Provata red and white; Lavranos red; Theotoki white wine.

  Excellent private cellars can be breached at Aphra, Lakones, and Ypso.

Lear’s Corfu

An Anthology Drawn from
the Painter’s Letters

C
ORFU OCCUPIED A
very special place in the affections of Edward Lear—an affection which he celebrated by making it the subject of some of his best work. While he traveled widely and loved the Mediterranean in general it was Greece which most influenced him with her extraordinary landscapes and munificent people; it was in Corfu, too, that he resided for several long spells (during the winters of 1856, ’57, ’58, ’62 and ’63), and where he acquired his devoted Suliot servant Giorgio Kokali who stayed with him until his death in San Remo in 1888.

Lear took Greek seriously and studied “the Romaic tongue” with industry; for years after he left Greece he was still peppering his letters with passages in modern Greek. Sometime in 1941 I penciled in a few passages from his letters of the Corfu period to serve as an appendix to
Prospero’s Cell,
which I had illustrated by some of his drawings of the island. Unhappily this period was not propitious to long books—the paper shortage had afflicted all book production—and in order to lighten the burden I put aside the little Lear anthology and left the appendix to my book as it is. I am delighted, however, that the original idea has come to life again and that my little scraps of Lear should now find an even more appropriate place in a book of his Corfu drawings.
*
I hope they will form a contrast—gay, whimsical and nostalgic—to the grave and serene drawings by this master of nonsense verse.

I am also extremely lucky to be able to confide the editorial side of this little venture to the tender care of Miss Marie Aspioti, M.B.E. She is, I think, the first Greek friend I made, and as a girl in her twenties she wrote and published a book about Corfu in French which was the first study of the island to fall into my hands. It was full of good insights into the past and present of the island, and I learned much from it. Indeed her knowledge is
as comprehensive as her scholarship is scrupulous and unobtrusive. Lear is in the safe hands of an old admirer.

—Lawrence Durrell

The Letters

I shall send you this, though it will not be a long letter, rather than not write at all, for the days are so full of occupation that I vainly try for leisure. Up at 6, Greek master from 6¾ to 7¾. Breakfast etc., to 9, then work till 4, or sketching out of doors, and either dining out of doors, or at home with writing and drawing fill up my hours. First, I wish you a happy new Year, & continually if I didn’t do so before. At all events I wish you a lot of happy Leap-years.

I still think of making Corfu my head-quarters, & of painting a large picture here of the Ascension festa in June, for 1857 Exhibition, & of going over to Yannina and all sorts of Albanian abstractions.

Do you know there has been literally no winter here; they say it is 27 years since there was so little cold, & still some think we shall have a touch of rigour in March—in fact, I have scarcely any Asthma, & no symptom of Bronchitis at all. When I get a house, you must come out and have a run, & I’ll put you up: I’ll feed you with Olives & wild pig, and we’ll start off to Mount Athos.

I trust to paint a magnificent large view of Corfu, straits, and Albanian hills. This I trust to sell for 500£ as it will be my best, and is 9 feet long. If can’t sell it I shall instantly begin a picture 10 feet long: and if that don’t sell, one 12 feet long. Nothing like persisting in virtue. O dear! I wish I was up there, in the village I mean, now, on this beautiful bright day!

It is Mr. Kokali’s opinion & compliment that the painting I am now doing of Corfu will prevent all other Englishmen coming here, for says he
—where’s the good of people paying for coming so far if they can see the very same at home? Giorgio is a valuable servant, capital cook, & endlessly obliging and handy, not quite as clean as I should like always, but improving by kindness. I teach the critter to read & write, & he makes long strides!

The palace folk continue to be very kind to me, & I like them better. Sir John Y. is evidently a kind good man, & I fancy more able than he was thought to be. The truth being that it is no easy matter to act suddenly, where as here, language & people are unbeknown & all power is in the hands of the secretary. Lady Y. lives too much for amusement, but she certainly improves & I believe I should end by liking her
very much if saw more of her. I must close this as the Cyclopses used to say of their one eye. I wish I had written more or better but I can’t. My ‘ed is all gone wool-gathering.

Just figure to yourself the conditions of a place where you never have any breadth or extent of intellectual society, & yet cannot have any peace or quiet—Suppose yourself living in Picadilly, we will say, taking a place with a long surface, from Coventry St. to Knightsbridge say. And suppose that line your constant & only egress & ingress from the country, and that by little & little you come to know all & every of the persons in all the houses, & meet them always & everywhere, & were thought a brute & queer if you didn’t know everybody more or less! Wouldn’t you wish every one of them, except a few, at the bottom of the sea? Then you live in a house, one of the best it is true, where you hear everything from top to bottom—a piano on each side, above and below, maddens you—and you can neither study nor think, nor even swear properly by reason of the proximity of the neighbours. I assure you a more rotten, dead or stupid place than this existeth not.