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Ten
years ago Nicolas Bouvier, a Swiss writer and traveller, edited a photographic
album of another Swiss national, Ella Maillart, a legendary name of
20th-cent. travel literature.
In
the book, “La vie immédiate” (Payot-24 Heures publishers), Ella’s images
were selected and commented by Nicolas, almost a sort of passage of
responsibilities: between them both lay a quarter of a century (Bouvier
was born in ’29, Maillart in 1903), and during the Fifties, the former
had travelled again over part of the road undertaken by the latter in
Afghanistan in 1939.
Some
photos of this trip are to be found in “La vie immediate” where the
bony and lean figure prevails of Annemarie Schwarzenbach, Maillart’s
travelling companion on that occasion in a Ford convertible driven by
herself. Now a beautiful exhibition at the Swiss cultural Centre in
Milan “Viaggio in Afganistan”, has put the work of these three protagonists
together for the first time, accompanying the images to relevant written
texts.
This
is a way of making history and honouring memories: Bouvier died in fact
two years ago, at 89, just a year after Maillart, who had lived to be
a splendid ninety-four. The more fragile and unhappy Annemarie died
over half a century ago, in 1942, when she was little over thirty. Of
the two, Bouvier is the least known in Italy: his major books are “Chronique
japonaise, Journal d’Aran et d’autres lieux”, “Le Poisson-Scorpion”.
In 1954, he left Geneva for Iran: on reaching the frontier, as he was
about to sign a cloth register as big as a suitcase, he noticed that
the previous signature was that of the English archaeologist Aurel Stein,
a specialist in central Asia, who had passed that way in...1926.
The
trip, in a small family car, took one year. The fame of the other two
is however greater in Italy but, especially in the case of Schwarzenbach,
the reasons for this can be put down more to the person herself rather
than the value of her work. Very different, if not poles apart, their
biographies enable us to rebuild the ideological, cultural and lifestyle
minefield that existed between the two wars. A human being is also made
up of friendships, the people it mixes with and those it likes. Behind
Maillart lies an anarchic and individualist flame; someone looking for
a way out from the decadence of a continent and a model of growth.
A
reader of Spengler, a friend of Drieu La Rochelle and Alain Gerbault,
Ella seeks elsewhere that sanity which Europe is no longer able to provide.
Annemarie is weaker and more fragile, always in search of someone or
something to help her or in whom or which to recognise herself. Crushed
by the personality of her mother, unsure and ambiguous in her feelings,
unruly rather than anarchic, her rebellious character never results
in total retreat, it never means tabula rasa with what is behind her,
family, status, privileges. In her association with Klaus and Erika
Mann, Thomas’s children, she represents the weak link of a perverse
chain: exploited for the money she can obtain, morally subjugated as
regards vices and attitudes, rejected when she becomes too unstable
and dangerous for herself and others.
Just
as Maillart knows what she wants, so Schwarzenbach does not. Just as
the former has no models, so the latter seeks them. Thus, for them both,
writing takes on a different meaning. Ella considers it a means, not
an end: “After all, the earth is there, the earth belongs to me, I want
to see it, I want to travel over deserts and mountains. I have been
lucky to be given eyes that want to see”. Her writings are the result
of need, paid reports that enable her to go where she wants; she travels
to acquire knowledge, to know herself better and not to make herself
known.
For
Schwarzenbach, on the contrary, writing is a last hope, something to
cling to, an identity in which to find herself. It is also a way of
repenting for the sense of guilt she has for being what she is: rich,
spoilt, in the wrong. She writes because her friends write, because
being an intellectual is better than being middle class, because that
way she can pretend to be different, revolutionary, even working class.
The fact is though that, in the case of Ella, lack of interest in writing
produces a direct, simple and visual style that makes reading immediately
enjoyable, without any stylistic glitter, while in the case of Annemarie,
the fear of not being up to the task, of failing with respect to the
people whose approval she seeks and wants, produces a mental short circuit,
transforms writing into torture and the pleasure of self pity.
While
the travel books and memories of Maillart remain fresh and complete,
Schwarzenbach’s drafts of novels never get off the ground and her “political”
reports are not backed by enough culture to represent interpretations
of facts. The exhibition photographs show and highlight what has been
said so far. Maillart possesses the enchanted eye of the born traveller
and the machine is the mechanical extension of an aesthetic and moral
sensitivity that is part of her being. Schwarzenbach on the other hand
rarely manages to go beyond the idyllic draft or the pure and simple
representation. Their very features accentuate this state of things.
Ella
is physical, Annemarie is diaphanous, Ella is healthy, Annemarie is
sick, Ella is calm, Annemarie is troubled, Ella is primordial, Annemarie
is artificial. Both are decadent, meaning they are aware of the crisis
of a continent, of a civilisation, of a “race”. It is the way they contend
with decadence that is different. Schwarzenbach delights in it, savours
it to the full, lives it like a perversion from which there is no escape,
to be denounced yet to lose oneself in. Maillart wants out, does not
wish to remain mixed up in it. She knows the only way not to succumb
is to go elsewhere, to be elsewhere. Exemplary destinies and figures,
in their lives are reflected the cultural storms that set Europe alight
between the two wars.
It
was no chance occurrence that Maillart spent the years of the Second
World War outside the Old continent, in India, determined not to become
involved in a struggle that was not hers; and that Schwarzenbach drifted
between a sanatorium and a mental asylum, the United States, Africa
and Europe, trying to give a meaning to what was happening around her
in order to give a meaning to what had happened inside her. A banal,
mortal accident interrupted a life that was already finished.
And
her friend was left with the bitter awareness that to surrender to the
weakness of others is a mistake, but being strong is not enough. (traduzione
Interpres sas-Giussano)
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