Setting Foot in the East
Letters from Syria. By Freya Stark. (John Murray. 95.) WHAT drives Englishmen, and, more rarely, Englishwomen, to the Arab East, can seldom be precisely defined : the source of the motives, for all their irresistible strength, is too vaguely and variously composed to admit of an explanation satisfactory to others. Even Miss Stark, who has since wandered among the known and unknown ways of half Western Asia, could not at first supply an adequate exposition whether to Asiatics or Europeans, when she set foot in the Lebanon in 1927. She went, she says with evident truth, for pleasure ; but since that pleasure involved living in unhygienic conditions, eating too much food, suffering cold (the heat scarcely troubled her), and enduring the company of Syrians who would be Europeans, or of Europeans who saw little good in Syrians except in so far as they approximated to a European ethical, or even religious, standard, she inevitably created wonderment.
But she was resolved to succumb to, and to comprehend, the enchantment of the Arab East, and this exquisite little book recalls the triumphs as well as the trials of her sojourning in the Lebanon and Damascus in 1927-28, and of a formidable journey southwards from Damascus through the Druse country to Trans-Jordan. She applied herself, with a diligence which, justified for its own sake, has since earned rich dividends, to master the difficult Syrian Arabic; but this in no purely scholarly spirit, for she used her achievement to understand the very Arab soul. She went, in short, to learn.
Readers of Miss Stark's half-dozen books will know more or less what to expect in this, actually her first, though her most recently published, work, which consists of letters to her parents and her friends : delectable humour, fragrant descriptions, irreverent indis- cretions, individual judgements, above all, the unintentional revealing of a highly courageous and resourceful personality. It is a record particularly engrossing, for it shows her to us in, so to speak, her formative period, the period in which the romantic was seen, not as the merely picturesque survival of inferior peoples, but as the expression of their inner and historic spirit. No dogmatism is here, but much set down on the basis of knowledge and understanding. Once or twice she has guesses that uncover a delightful frailty. For instance, writing from Brurnana in 1928, she says : "I suppose the frequent blue eyes one meets must have been due to regrettable incidents during the crusades. There are a great many of them." She must since then have met many blue eyes in Western Asia for which she would not hold the Crusaders responsible. But accuracy is no substitute for the stimulus of the truth of things which Miss Stark unfolds in letter after letter: was there ever a more gallant and percipient correspondent from Western Asia?
The author has not been able to see the pages through the Press, but no great harm has been done. Had she been able to do so, perhaps a greater proportion of excellent photographs would have been included, and certainly we should have been spared one horrid misprint—Sheikh Nun Sharlan for the head of the Ruwalla. But Sir Sydney Cockerell, who has supervised this production surely deserves our thanks for letting us see before the end of Le war a record of enchantment that itself steals our hearts away.
KENNETH WILLIAMS.
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