Freya Stark muses on the seasons, the effect light has on a landscape at a particular time of day, the smell of the earth after rain, Muslim saints, Indian temples, war, and old age. Each chapter is devoted to a particular theme

 

Freya Stark, Perseus in The Wind: A Life of

Travel, Tauris Parke Paperbacks, 2013

Written just after World War II, Perseus in the Wind (named after the constellation) is perhaps the most personal, and haunting, of all Freya Stark's writings. Putting together memories and reflections, ""harvested from life and accident"", that have carried her through her travels, Stark muses on the seasons, the effect light has on a landscape at a particular time of day, the smell of the earth after rain, Muslim saints, Indian temples, war, and old age. Each chapter is devoted to a particular theme: Happiness (simple pleasures, like her father's passion for the view from his cabin in Canada); Education (to be able to command happiness, recognize beauty, value death, increase enjoyment); Beauty (incongruous, flighty, and elusive - a description of the stars, the burst of flowers in a park); Death (a childhood awareness of the finality of Time, the meaningfulness of the end); Memory (the jeweled quality of literature, pleasure, love, an echo or a scent when aged by the passage of time).

Woven throughout this beautifully-crafted book are references to Stark's many travels, from Asolo to Aden, Iran to India. For those who have loved her travel writing, Perseus in the Wind illuminates the motivations behind her journeys and the woman behind the traveler.

The Journey's Echo Selections from Freya

Stark. Foreword by Law­rence Durrell.

Harcourt, Brace & World, 1963

FROM Jane Austen to Virginia Woolf many distinguished women writers have led singularly secluded lives; and the limitations of their personal experience are often reflected in their literary outlook. Miss Freya Stark provides a fascinating exception. She is a born adventurer, scion of an adventurous family; and since she grew up she has always been a wanderer ‐ a romantic wanderer like Lady Hester Stanhope, but with a femininity and natural gaiety that the gaunt and self ‐ centered Lady Hester lacked. For the last 30 years—her first travel book, “Baghdad Sketches,” appeared in 1933 —she has been perambulating the coasts of the Mediterranean and exploring the countries of the Middle East, frequently returning, however, to her Italian home at Asolo.

London, too, has regularly seen her; and she has been a faithful client of renowned Parisian dress houses. Her sense of literary style is accomppnied by an inveterate love of fashion. Osbert Lancaster once produced a memorable cartoon of Miss Stark, crowned with a rakish new hat and seated crosslegged on the sand, explaining the mysteries of the latest Dior collection to a wondering group of desert sheiks.

In my own opinion, her three finest volumes are “The Valleys of the Assassins,” “The Southern Gates of Arabia” and “Seen in Hadhramaut, ” all published before 1939.

NOT that I have failed to enjoy their successors. But her autobiographical works, though full of interesting detail and vivid family portraits, are rather more loosely planned and written; while such books as “Perseus in the Wind” have a somewhat prophetic, even didactic, tone that tends, here and there, to dim the outline. On the whole, I prefer her visual impressions, which are invariably sharp, to her meditation and reflections, which are apt to be slightly vague and highflown. As a writer, her chief assets are an extraordinarily acute eye and gift of translating the harvest of the eye into lively, lucid English prose. Few modern writers have so acute an appreciation of locality. Not only does she describe a city or a landscape, but she conveys the essential spirit of a place, and the effect that it makes upon the traveler's heart and nerves.

She gazes outward and, at the same time, gazes inward. “A great traveler,” remarks the novelist Lawrence Durrell in his preface to “The Journey's Echo,” a selection of her writings from 1927 to 1958, “is a kind of introspective; as she covers the ground outwardly, so she advances toward fresh interpretations of herself inwardly. And this lends Freya Stark's books the poetic density which is their special cachet” She is constantly preoccupied, for example, with the relationship between herself and her surroundings, and — more generally—with the relationship between man, wherever she observes him, and the rich diversity of the world in which he lives.

“No amount of civilization,” she writes, “is worth the loss of [the] fundamental sense of proportion between the universe and man.” If she has a particular liking for the ancient Middle East—the East that has begun to vanish since Western industrialists dug their oil wells and poured in floods of unearned money — evidently it is because, under the harsh conditions of desert life, against the enormous perspectives of the wilderness, the old ‐ fashioned Arab, she believes, acquired a simplicity and dignity that pervaded his entire existence. She is never weary of depicting the itinerant tribes, marveling “at the aristocracy of them all —the thin Saluki dogs, the horses and goats hungry and free, the shepherd‐girl's triangular face —the wide‐awake eyes of the lads and their easy equal man‐ ners, meeting their life as it comes—” They know that man is small, and that the alien world is terrifyingly large and strange; and for the dignified stoicism with which they accept their lot the English traveler feels a deep imaginative sympathy.

No selection can pretend to give a complete picture of any writer's mental progress. Inevitably, there must be sad omissions; but the passages that fill up the 224 pages of “The Journey's Echo,” some extensive, some brief and aphoristic, have as a rule been very wisely chosen. The lengthier extracts, I think, are usually the best—for example, the description of a ruined Crusader castle, or the brilliant glimpse of a remote Arab city:

“I never got tired of driving leisurely through its scattered ways of houses white and brown. From their slanting walls and upper lattices they look on dusty streets unpaved and silent, and solitary save for a woman here and there trailing her long blue gown by some carved doorway, or beduin camels that brush the roughened mud‐built corners with their loads.”

In his foreword Mr. Durrell calls the author “one of the most remarkable women of our age,” and characterizes her as an accomplished “poet of travel.” “The Journey's Echo” shows again and again that neither assertion is an overstatement.

https://www.nytimes.com/1964/04/05/archives/a-woman-of-the-world-the-journeys-echo-selections-from-freya-stark.html