- 1 The word “travelogue” is used for convenience’s sake, as Passenger to Teheran is not exactly a “tra (...)
- 2 The term will be used here in this general sense rather than in its narrower literary and artistic (...)
1In 1926, Vita Sackville-West (1892-1962) travelled to Persia (as modern-day Iran was called until 1935) to visit her husband, Harold Nicolson, who was then serving as a diplomat in Teheran. Her encounter with a foreign and unfamiliar country was described in a travelogue1 entitled Passenger to Teheran (1926), in which she records her travel experience in the Persia of 1926, presenting it throughout her narrative as a “romantic” and “exotic” place. In the late 1920s and early 1930s, Persia appeared thus to European travellers, as its remoteness and its expanse of mountains and deserts rendered it inaccessible to ordinary travellers. It is useful to define the words “exotic” and “romantic”, since they are used throughout this paper. The word “exotic” was first used in 1599 and meant “alien, introduced from abroad, not indigenous”, before acquiring the connotations of “a stimulating or exciting difference, something with which the domestic could be safely spiced” (Ashcroft, Griffiths and Tiffin 87) in the nineteenth century. Edwardians perceived travel to far-away lands as a safe encounter with the “exciting difference.” Victor Segalen’s “exoticism” or “aesthetics of diversity,” on the other hand, is centred on the instability of contact between different cultures.. In a broad sense, the word “romantic” means “exciting and mysterious and having a strong effect on your emotions” (Cambridge Dictionary)2. In the Victorian era, “romance” still referred to literature of the imagination involving a form of exotic disorientation, as opposed to “novel,” which was the realistic literature of everyday life. In his “Essay on Romance,” Walter Scott describes romance as “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse”:
We would be rather inclined to describe a Romance as “a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents;” being thus opposed to the kindred term Novel, which Johnson has described as “a smooth tale, generally of love;” but which we would rather define as “a fictitious narrative, differing from the Romance, because the events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events, and the modern state of society.” (1)
2For Sackville-West, Persia was an “exotic” and “romantic” destination since it had long been a source of fascination for the Western imagination, eliciting both admiration and fear. For the purpose of our demonstration, the word “romance” and its adjective “romantic” are used as opposed to “reality.”
- 3 Šams-al-Din Moḥammad, Hafez (Ḥāfeẓ) of Shiraz (1325/26-1389/90), was a celebrated Persian lyric poe (...)
- 4 Omar Khayyám, a Persian poet, mathematician and astronomer, is mainly known to English-speaking re (...)
3Sackville-West’s travelogue reveals the breach between the representations of Persia depicted in Victorian literature and the reality. As Taher-Kermani argues, Persia is perceived in different ways in nineteenth-century English poetry: a heavenly garden of eternal beauty as in Henry Kendall’s “Persia” (1890) and Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817); a declining nation in Edward Henry Bickersteth’s “A Lament for Persia” (Poems and Songs, 1848); the enemy of the Greeks in Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s “The Battle of Marathon” (1820); or a tyrannical monarchy in Augustine Hickey’s “On to Freedom” (1865). In Passenger to Teheran, Sackville-West also works through her own difficulty coping with an alien culture, language and civilisation that she explores through her relationship with different places and the people who inhabit them. This paper aims to show that Sackville-West’s Passenger to Teheran is influenced by the Victorian heritage which consists in picturing Persia as a land of “exotic” and “romantic” adventures. As the scholar Reza Taher-Kermani states, “Persia to the Victorians stood not just as the poetry of Hafiz3 or Omar Khayyám […],4 but as a complex and paradoxical embodiment of different notions, created and crafted by a range of oral and written stories, themes, and tropes” (1). Drawing on Edward Said’s theories of Orientalism, this paper will shed some light on Vita Sackville-West’s encounter with alterity through the different shifting lines that disrupt the continuity of her narrative trajectory, which is constructed around the notion of “wandering,” whether on land, in the mind or on paper. This constant wandering implies the existence of multiple shifting lines and fractures in the travelogue that will be studied by focusing on Sackville-West’s recourse to literary texts and fiction, the figures of the Oriental despot and her use of stereotypes.
4Sackville-West’s husband, the diplomat, writer and politician Harold Nicolson (1886-1968), was sent to Persia in October 1925 as Counsellor to the British Legation in Teheran. He had hoped that his wife would accompany him to Teheran, as she thought Persia was “unsmart” , because “there were the compensations of a beautiful country and a proud romantic people” (Nicolson 1973, 209). Yet Sackville-West refused. It should perhaps be mentioned that before her trip to Persia, Sackville-West had started a love affair with Virginia Woolf. In his 1973 biography of Vita Sackville-West, entitled Portrait of a Marriage, her son Nigel Nicolson explains that his mother was too independent to be accommodated in the Legation compound and be made to meet and entertain a wide variety of people (Nicolson 1980, 209). The following year, however, she decided to join her husband in Iran. In January 1926, she ventured upon a journey that took her from Victoria station to the coast of Crete, Egypt, Iraq and then to Persia. She greatly enjoyed her visit, and on April 25, 1926, attended the coronation of Reza Shah Pahlavi (1878-1944), originally known as Reza Savad-Koohi, a charismatic officer who had served in the Persian Cossack Brigade and was appointed monarch.
5Sackville-West uses other Orientalist stereotypes in Passenger to Teheran besides the emblematic figure of the Oriental despot. Offering an account of the coronation of Reza Khan, Sackville-West describes the bodyguards as “centaurs in full panoply; the swart barbarians of Asia” (224), and the Iranians as a “lax limp nation,” “easy to dominate” and “soft” (227). This national character, she argues, leads “to the innumerable abuses and corruptions from which Persia suffers” (227). She continues listing the countless abuses that need to be redressed: “the absence of justice, the sale of offices, the corruption, bribery, peculation, and general dishonesty that appals the beholder, not only from a moral point of view, but also from exasperation with the stupidity and elaboration of such a system” (227).
- 5 It is useful to note that the constitutional revolution of Iran took place between 1905 and 1911 du (...)
6Here Sackville-West is perpetuating negative ethnic stereotypes concerning the Persians. The Persia of 1926 was indeed afflicted with the social ills that she enumerates in her travelogue; what is left unsaid, however, is that from 1900 to 1922, Iran had been heading towards social and territorial disintegration.5 Outbreaks of famine, uncontrollable lawlessness, the lack of a powerful central government and the presence of foreign troops resulted in a series of rebellions by 1918 (Farrokh, Iran at War 250). Her criticism is therefore unjustified, given the exceptional circumstances. As the wife of a diplomat, Lady Sackville-West may well have been aware of this historical reality. In his 1934 biography of the former British Foreign Secretary, the late Lord George N. Curzon, Harold Nicolson wrote: “Persia, during the war, had been exposed to violations and sufferings not endured by any other neutral country” (129). It was during World War I that Iran suffered its greatest humanitarian disaster recorded in history (Majd 10). Despite Persia’s neutrality and its political weakness under the Qajar dynasty, the country was quickly transformed into a battlefield between the Allies and Central Powers. This calamitous episode is one of the most understudied subjects of modern history. Various factors, including confiscation of foodstuff by foreign troops, successive seasonal droughts, hoarding and war profiteering, worsened the situation. In his ground-breaking work about the great famine of 1917-1919, Mohammad Gholi Majd draws attention to the causes of this tragedy and examines its outcome, describing it as “unquestionably the greatest calamity in the history of Iran” as 40-50% of the population lost their lives as a result of “starvation and the associated diseases that accompany malnutrition” (1). Sackville-West’s putting the blame entirely on the Persians and their alleged “national character” is therefore not entirely fair.
7Other Orientalist motifs explored by Sackville-West include that of the East as a world apart, untouched by time or the hands of man:
I saw, as, with the sun, we swept onwards, unlike anything I had ever seen before […] But Persia had been left as it was before man’s advent […]. Here and there he had scraped a bit of the surface, and scattered a little grain; […] but for miles there was no sign of him, nothing but the brown plains and the blue or white mountains, and the sense of space. (102)
- 6 Akbar, known as Akbar the Great, and also as Akbar I, was the third Mughal emperor from 1556 to 160 (...)
8Persia had indeed remained immune to modernity for centuries, and it was only from 1925 onward that the country gradually started to change under Reza Shah’s modernizing authoritarianism. She also uses the Orientalist image of a prosperous Persia, showcasing the riches of the country. During her stay, she had the opportunity to visit the treasury of Imperial Iran, and her description seems to come straight out of the Thousand and One Nights: “The linen bags vomited emeralds and pearls; the green baize vanished, the table became a sea of precious stones” (232). Sackville-West expressed amazement at finding large quantities of precious stones gathered in one place: “Suddenly, and as with a physical start, my eyes and thoughts came together, as gears engaging: I stared, I gasped, the small room vanished; I was Sinbad in the Valley of Gems, Aladdin in the Cave” (232). Myth, fiction and reality coincide in this passage, as the Orientalist imaginary comes alive. As Taher-Kermani writes, this Orientalist perception of Persia as a sumptuously rich country has its origin in “the traditional image of Persia as a land of fabulous wealth and luxury” (23). The riches of the Imperial treasury are such that Sackville-West seems unable to describe the overwhelming number of rare jewels and diamonds that are displayed: “jewelled scimitars,” “daggers encrusted with rubies,” “buckles carved from a single emerald,” “ropes of enormous pearls” are just some of the unique gems that are brought to her. “Then from the inner room came the file of servants again, carrying uniforms sewn with diamonds; a cap with a tall aigrette, secured by a diamond larger than the Kuh-i-Nur; two crowns like great hieratic tiaras, barbaric diadems, composed of pearls of the finest Orient” (232). Sackville-West’s effort to enumerate the never-ending precious gems points to her desire to convey the magical and “romantic” aspect of her Persian experience. Her enthrallment is so great that she forgets about Teheran, its dirty roads and mud houses, and becomes transported to the reign of Akbar, the third Mughal emperor:6 “[…] We plunged our hands up to the wrist in the heaps of uncut emeralds, and let the pearls run through our fingers. We forgot the Persia of to-day; we were swept back to Akbar and all the spoils of India” (232). The Persia of 1926 thus literally and metaphorically gives way to ancient, mythical India. The scene she describes seems to perfectly reflect the Orientalist romance cultivated during the eighteenth century by writers and translators such as Antoine Galland, whose popular French translations of The Tale of Sinbad the Sailor (1701) and The Thousand and One Nights (1704-1717) inspired rival versions and imitations.
9Speaking of the city of Isfahan, she writes that “it is very poignant to say to oneself, ‘I shall never see this place again’” (178). She finds it difficult not to become attached to Persia and its beautiful places and landscapes: “I had thought to gain emancipation by tearing myself up from my roots, and here I was already netted in the love of Persia” (187). Sackville-West clearly expresses her fascination with beautiful and breathtaking Persian landscapes: “I had never seen anything that pleased me so well as these Persian uplands, with their enormous views, clear light, and rocky grandeur. This was, in detail, in actuality, the region labelled ‘Persia’ on the maps” (105). In this passage, Persia as a geographical entity meets the imagined geography of Persia created through her contact with literature and culture.
10Sackville-West also reminds us of the romance associated with the name “Persia” and praises the splendid landscapes she sees on her way to Isfahan: “Indeed, in some places the mountains rose as islands out of the lake, as fantastic as the strange landscapes of Leonardo, and as rocky, and of as deep a blue” (183). As she claims, such magical scenery creates “a world of myth where substance and illusion floated together in romantic marriage; all the more romantic for the knowledge that it would never again be exactly repeated” (170). The “exotic” and disquieting nature of the country is so magnificent that Sackville-West here compares it to pictures painted by Bellini and Leonardo, and her use of poetic simile and metaphor adds to the “romantic” nature of Persia. The description of these overwhelmingly beautiful sceneries marks a shift in the writer’s perception of Persia as she looks for artistic yardsticks to evaluate the beauty of the scenes.
- 7 Sa’adi Abu Moḥammad Mošarref-al-Din Moṣleḥ (ca. 1210-1291/1292), a renowned Persian poet and prose (...)
11As Reza Taher-Kermani points out, in nineteenth-century English poetry the image associated with Persian landscapes is that of “a charming garden of roses and rivers” and this highly Orientalised image of Persia’s landscape is “sumptuous, splendid, and above all, imaginary” (81). In Sackville-West’s travelogue, one chapter is devoted to Persian gardens, and she explains that she was constantly on the lookout for gardens but found none that would fit the descriptions of rose gardens by the great Persian poets Hafiz and Saʿdi.7 For her, the misconception has its origins in “that national characteristic by which the English exact that everything should be the same, even in Central Asia, as it is in England, and grumble when it is not” (126). Sackville-West then explains how inaccurate her perception of the Persian garden is: “‘Garden?’ we say; and think of lawns and herbaceous borders, which is manifestly absurd. There is no turf in this parched country; and as for herbaceous borders, they postulate a lush shapeliness unimaginable to the Persian mind” (126).
12Elsewhere, she explains how a Persian perceives a garden: “All he demands, this denizen of a high, rocky plateau, is coolness at the end of the day’s journey; coolness and greenness; the sound of trickling water after the silent desert, after the miles of shadowless plain. This is his idea of Paradise […]” (“Persian Gardens” 260). In such an earthly paradise, Sackville-West notes that “the sense of property” is absent and everyone can enjoy the garden (Passenger 129), adding that, “Persia is a country made for wandering onward; there is so much room, and no boundaries anywhere, and time is marked only by the sun” (137). One can wander not only in the open country, but also in the bazars which are “vaulted, shadowy” spaces “lit by shafts of sunlight into a Rembrandtesque chiaroscuro” (140). Sackville-West seems to be charmed by bazars of Persia. Wandering in the Grand bazar of Isfahan, she comes across women carpet-makers, who “perched up on their scaffolding […] threaded their spindles, sitting with dangling legs twenty feet above ground before the stretched warp and woof of the carpet. They sat in a row, as swallows on a telegraph wire, ten or twelve of them, weaving with the quick hands of practice” (197). Although Sackville-West does not communicate with these carpet weavers, she seems to penetrate the veiled surface of their thoughts and read their minds: “The women looked up with a grin: here was something that they could do better than the superior foreigner” (198). No words are exchanged: the only voice heard is that of Sackville-West herself, wondering what these Persian ladies might make of her.
- 8 The Qajar dynasty (1789-1925) was founded by Mohammad Khan (1789-1797) of the Qajar tribe.
- 9 James Justinian Morier (1782-1849) was a diplomat who resided in Persia (1808-1809 and 1810-1814). (...)
13Sackville-West herself seems to be aware of her supposed superiority and the barrier of culture and language that separates her from these Persian women. Wandering in the city of Isfahan, she sees “[a]ll the protagonists of Morier's story jostl[ing] in the streets: the scribe, the beggar, the seller of water, the woman in the white veil, the merchant riding on his horse with his apprentice mounted behind him” (173-174). Sackville-West was familiar with James Morier’s The Adventures of Hajji Baba of Ispahan (1824), which she advised readers to carry in their pockets (188). The book depicts Oriental manners and Persia’s perceived backwardness in the early Qajar period.8 As Abbas Amanat explains, to the Western reader, “Morier’s display of the Persian vagaries served as a reassurance of Europe’s cultural and moral superiority and the civilizing mission of the imperial powers” (“Hajji Baba of Ispahan”). Sackville-West’s reference to Morier’s book9 could therefore be read as another sign of her endorsing Western superiority over the Persian other.
14In Passenger to Teheran, she also broaches the question of privacy in the Persian household, noting that the Persian man “has a feeling for his personal privacy; and, of course, for the privacy of his women: he would never willingly expose his private life to the gaze of the passer-by” (267). Sackville-West’s travelogue gives us a glimpse of the lives of Persian women, since, as a foreigner and a woman, she had the opportunity to enter both the masculine and feminine spheres, the latter being the most difficult to gain access to. Iranian women were confined to their private rooms (andarūn) and did not have the freedom to move between different social spaces. Just like the French archaeologist and explorer Jane Dieulafoy, Sackville-West managed to enter Persian andarūnī. Andarūn or andarūnī (inside) refers to “the private quarters of well-to-do houses in contrast to bīrūnī, the public rooms usually reserved for men” (“Andarun”, Djamalzadeh. The andarūn was reserved for the wife or wives, mother, nurses, nannies, other female servants and children of both sexes until the age of puberty. In Isfahan, Sackville-West was hosted by the family of “the black-bearded Seyed” (“Seyed” is a title given to those held to be direct descendants of the Prophet Muhammad), who welcomed them with a special Persian dish. Her description of the house and its patrilineal system of organisation reveals how the Persian household was literally divided into two distinct spheres of andarūnī and bīrūnī, as well as being separated from the outside world by a brown wall: “[…] the house was shut away from the street, not even a window pierced the brown wall; it was all turned inwards, on to the little court, private and self-contained, where the black-bearded Seyed ruled amongst his women” (193). The harem (the Turkish and Arab word for andarūnī) constituted a popular motif in Orientalist pictures and texts. Here Sackville-West conjures up sexual fantasies about Oriental women and shows how the Persian household is shaped and governed by gender and class considerations.
15In 1926, gender segregation was present in every aspect of Persian life. Sackville-West offers an interesting description of the crowd gathered on the streets on the day of Reza Shah’s coronation, which she notes was divided into two distinct categories: “[…] here a wedge of men, and there a wedge of women herded together, so that as you drive along you get first the stillness of the silent males, and then, from the black veiled figures, a sudden, charming twittering, as from a lot of birds or children” (240). She was intrigued by the veiled women through whose “lively naughty eyes” she believed she could discern their character. Although she never got more than a glimpse at these mysterious figures, “that glimpse revealed the whole character in a way that the uncovered face rarely does, whether it was a glimpse of the lively naughty eyes, or of the sagging, pouchy ill-tempered jowl of the old Megaera” (220). The veil here constitutes a visual obstacle that Sackville-West claims to penetrate, her eagerness to force her way beneath the veiled surface of the Oriental other seeming to reflect her desire to unravel the enigmas of this indecipherable country. Despite her efforts to fully discover the “exotic” and mysterious Persia, it remains as enigmatic and elusive as ever, since her representation of Persia forms an obstacle that thwarts her wish to understand the country as it is.
- 10 Darius I the Great was the third Achaemenid king of kings (522-486 B.C.E).
- 11 Nasr-ed-Din Shah Qajar (1831-1896) was the fourth king of the Qajar dynasty.
16Passenger to Teheran contains numerous Orientalist stereotypes of Persia, which are associated with notions such as tyranny, despotism, and barbarism, a reductive vision that dates back to ancient Greece, when historians such as Herodotus depicted the Persians as exhibiting “all non-Greek vices, such as luxury, effeminacy, despotism and lack of self-control” (Vlassopuolos 8). The figure of the Oriental despot is reflected in the numerous references to legendary Persian kings such as Darius10 and other Persian kings such as Nasr-ed-Din Shah11 and Reza Shah Pahlavi As one might imagine, such stereotypical figures are presented as arbitrary and capricious. Sackville-West not only attended Reza Shah Pahlavi’s coronation; she was also asked to give her opinion about the decorative elements of the throne-room. Even though she finds the idea of coronation in general “absurd,” she emphasizes the primitive but fascinating nature of the ceremony. “A coronation argues a veneration for kings,” she notes. It celebrates “that primitive order which carries one back to the historical plays of Shakespeare, with their magnificent and fallacious pageantry […]” (216). Although she dismisses the pageantry as “seductive” and “fallacious” she is enthralled by the gripping atmosphere of the glittering hall, admitting, “there is that in us which revels in ceremonial, and makes us crave to see the enthronement as though we assisted indeed at some moment of august transfiguration” (217). The description of the enthronement itself reveals her fascination with the notion of despotism and suggests a certain bemusement at the idea that this unknown individual was given such grandiose titles:
Only the silence seemed strange; one expected a blare of trumpets, a crashing of chords, and nothing came; only a voice droning an address, and then the voice of the Shah, reading from a paper. With his own hands he removed the cap from his head, with his own hands he raised and assumed the crown […]. Then from outside came a salvo of guns, making the windows rattle, proclaiming to the crowds in the streets that Reza Khan was King of Kings and Centre of the Universe. (217-218)
17Sackville-West highlights Reza Shah’s laconic but authoritative speech, an oath of office which was composed of a hundred words, and she also repeats the phrase “with his own hands”. Having sworn by God and by “all that is sacred to the people of Iran” to serve the interests of the country and to maintain its territorial integrity, Reza Khan—imitating great Persian kings such as Shah Abbas (1587-1629) and Nadir Shah (1688-1747)—put the crown on his own head as if to assert his determination to will himself onto the throne without the help of any other mortal.
18Sackville-West’s interest in Oriental despotism is also expressed through her knowledge of Reza Shah and his habits. It is clear that she was well informed about the newly crowned sovereign, whom she describes as “a mysterious figure” who “never showed himself except at the public salaam [and] never honoured any foreign mission with his presence” (225). As Sackville-West notes, Reza Shah “had not desired the Persian crown, and would have preferred a republic to a kingdom, but […] the priesthood insisted upon his acceptance of the throne” (228). As she relates it, the newly crowned Shah would occasionally “drive through unexpected parts of the city in his Rolls-Royce, after which he would send for the officials concerned, and abuse them for the bad condition of the roads” (225). For Sackville-West, Reza Shah, who ruled Persia with an iron hand from 1925 to 1941, embodies Oriental absolutism. It is interesting to note that in a diary entry dated April 29, 1926, Harold Nicolson describes the coronation scene. His account reveals his fascination with the “superb” King:
Slowly the Shah, dressed in a blue mantle embroidered with pearls, slouched up the aisle and climbed onto the throne. […] He sat on it – rigid, theocratic, rather superb – this Cossack trooper, the Ruler of the World, the King of Kings. When they had ceased intoning, the Minister approached with the regalia. Taking the vast diamond crown in both his red hands he clapped it firmly upon that Cossack pate, becoming instantly rigid again like an idol, the diamond shooting points of fire. (Diaries and Letters 42)
- 12 Jane Dieulafoy (1851-1961) was a French archeologist, explorer and journalist. She and her husband, (...)
19Sackville-West is so enthralled by the figure of the Persian despot that she fantasizes about an imaginary scene between the famous archaeologist Jane Dieulafoy and the Shah of Persia. Towards the end of her travelogue, Sackville-West pays tribute to Jane and Marcel-Auguste Dieulafoy12, who first visited Persia in 1881 and met the king of Persia. She portrays a fictional scene between Nasr-ed-Din Shah and Jane Dieulafoy that confirms her obsession with the figure of the Oriental despot and her tendency to mingle fiction and historical events: “[…] the days when a remarkable couple arrived in Teheran, and were accorded an audience with the Shah. The alley-ways of the palace garden were henceforward haunted for me by the presence of Nasr-ed-Din and the boyish figure of Jane Dieulafoy” (249). Sackville-West’s deepest regret is that Jane Dieulafoy could not paint Nasr-ed-Din Shah on horseback “for her diary would certainly have chronicled their conversations as their acquaintance progressed” (249), and she pictures Jane standing behind her easel, with “the Shah reining in his mount, two people both accustomed to say what they meant, both no doubt giving as good as they got, beneath the plane trees of the garden, in the sun and shadows of a Persian June” (236). Once again, the linearity of the travelogue is undermined by Sackville-West’s digressing from her travel narrative in order to add a fictional touch. Her tendency to mingle fiction and reality is no doubt related to her “romantic” perception of travel.
20Sackville-West prefaces her travel book by writing about the contradictory nature of travel: “Travel is the most private of pleasures. There is no greater bore than the travel bore” (10), she writes. She then compares travel to an “irrational passion” and a “romantic” adventure worth experiencing:
Travel is simply a taste, not to be logically defended; nor standing in any need of defence, since it cannot be argued away, but remains there like a good concrete fact, not to be talked into nothingness, but sticking up as solidly when the mists of arguments have cleared, as it did when their futile miasma began to arise. Nothing is an adventure until it becomes an adventure in the mind; […] And like all irrational passions it is exceedingly romantic. (22)
21In her view, travel is both a mental and a “romantic” experience. Her understanding of travel writing as an “adventure in the mind” leads her to question the factual nature of a good travel account. What is “more odious than the informative book of travel?” (5), she wonders; and she notes that what the reader seeks in any work of literature is “a means of escape into a world of soothing, romantic unreality” (28). “But all this is irrelevant; this book is not fiction,” she concludes, and commences her “romantic” narrative (28).
22Passenger to Teheran (1926) was her first travelogue. Her second book of Persian travels, entitled Twelve Days, was published in 1928 and presents an account of her journey in the Bakhtiari Mountains of South-Western Persia. Sackville-West started writing Passenger to Teheran during her trip to Persia: “The little ship was steaming along on a grey, placid sea. The pink cliffs of Baluchistan stretched along the horizon. I fetched a deck-chair, pen, and paper, and began this book” (77). The pink cliffs of Baluchistan seem to exert a poetic influence on Sackville-West and invite her to record her “romantic” trip to the heart of Persia. In a letter to Virginia Woolf, Sackville-West expresses her anxiety about the quality of her travelogue:
But by the time I come home I shall have written a book, which I hope will purge me of my travel-congestion, even if it serves no other purpose. […] The moment it is released, it will pour from me as the ocean from the bath-tap—but will the blue sparks come with it, or only the blanket-grey of the daytime sea? (Letters 99)
23The above passage reflects the writer’s uncertainties about her travel experience. Her solution to the “travel congestion” she experiences is to write about her perceptions of Persia both in the form of letters and travelogues.
24Sackville-West’s book gives some idea of the image of Persia as it developed in the Western world. Throughout her narrative, Persia is perceived through the lens of an Orientalist and imperialist ideology that was shaped and developed through Orientalist texts and traditions. Indeed, Passenger to Teheran is constructed through texts as much as through landscapes. As Isabelle Gadoin notes, Sackville-West had taken the complete works of Shakespeare and those of Proust on her journey to Persia (6). The supposedly historically linear and fact-based structure of the narrative is therefore constantly checked by various obstacles and references to different texts. In Twelve Days, the preparations for departure consist in reading maps and consulting comparative scholarly sources, which are quoted at length, and the text ends with a bibliography of around ten titles, including some great Victorian explorers and archaeologists of Persia: Sir Henry Rawlinson, Sir Henry Layard, Lord Curzon. In both travelogues, the journey is as much about discovering the country first-hand as it is about rediscovering or reinventing it through existing texts and literature. Sackville-West’s approach to travel literature involves mingling fiction and historical events.
25The Persia of Victorian poetry with which Sackville-West was familiar had little connection with historical reality (Taher-Kermani 7). In order to better understand her perception of Persia, one should mention the two main currents of knowledge that helped forge the image of Persia, as identified by Taher-Kermani: ancient sources (the Bible and classical Greek history, literature and romance) and modern contacts with Persia effected through travel, trade and diplomacy (13). As he argues, despite the emergence of modern knowledge about the country, the image of an ancient or mythical Persia continued to persist during the 19th century and beyond (13) and contributed to the transformation of the word “Persia” into “a cultural imaginary, a mental landscape formed over time and subject to change” (1). Stuart Hall’s theory of “cultural identity” and its link with imagination helps clarify this point. Hall believes that an imaginary identity is constructed from one specific cultural story after another. In the same way, Persia was built into a “cultural imaginary.” The imaginative writing of the Victorian and Edwardian periods shows the diversity of the conception of Persia, which appears as the enemy of the Greeks, a fallen nation, a land of lovely rose gardens, graceful lovers and nightingales, or a tyrannical monarchy. Sackville-West’s image of Persia is essentially mythical and reflects her preconceived ideas about the East. Moreover, her emphasis on romance and adventure ties in with her conception of the East as a mysterious and “romantic” place.
26For Sackville-West, the word “Persia” is more than the name of a territorial entity, and represents an entire mental and imaginary landscape. The first chapter of her travel book clearly depicts her “romantic” fascination with Persia, as she relates how, one January morning, she set out on a journey that she claims took her to “an unexploited country” whose very name, printed on her luggage label “seemed to distil a faint, far aroma in the chill air of Victoria station: PERSIA” (29). The dangling label, as she further explains, was an object of curiosity and other passengers would squint at this “orange flag of ostentation” (30). Aware of their fascination, Sackville-West deliberately let the label dangle: “But I enjoyed seeing my fellow-passengers squint at the address, fellow-passengers whose destination was Mürren or Cannes, and if I put my bag in the rack myself I always managed to let the label dangle, a little flag of ostentation” (30). Later in the book, she once again mentions the orange travel tag, as if to maintain the romance surrounding the word: “For once the orange labels on my luggage had served a useful purpose. There they hung, in the restaurant of the Polish station, crumpled, defaced, but still saying: PERSIA” (281-282).
27Sackville-West’s “romantic” attitude towards Persia is manifest through her interest in Persian places with “romantic names” (48) such as Isfahan. As she maintains, “It is wiser to keep the cities of beautiful name for mental pilgrimage only” (173). She expresses the same feeling concerning her visit to the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. Heading towards the burial grounds of the Pharaohs, she is both excited and scared at the idea of discovering the famous archaeological site for the first time. “There is a keen excitement in not knowing what one is going to see next,” she writes, and she admits that she is loath to part with her ignorance: “I reproached myself with having wasted so many years in not speculating on this royal sepulchre. Never again would that delight be within my reach; for the pleasures of the imagination I was about to exchange the dreary fact of knowledge” (39). Historical reality and the writer’s powerful imagination confront each other in this passage. Once again, she seems to admit that her fascination with the East is related to her lack of first-hand information about the country, and that “the pleasures of imagination” are not comparable to knowledge. In “Reimagining Travel and Imagination,” Garth Lean, Russell Staiff and Emma Waterton argue that imagination is the central aspect of the travel experience. Sackville-West felt the same about the Persian Gulf, stating “There are some places whose names invest them with every kind of suggestion, and this was one of them; its name in French, too, had an odd little twist to it: le Golfe Persique. Why persique? Why not persan?” (74).
28She imagines pearl-fisheries and “the extraordinary Phoenician mounds of Bahrein” (74). Once again, imagination prevails over reality as Sackville-West has to take refuge in the “pearls of Proust”, reading a novel instead of beholding “the pearls of Bahrain” (72). The linearity of the narrative is undermined as the writer refers to a Western literary text, thus shifting her focus from the East to the West. Nowhere, as Isabel Gadoin maintains, is Proust’s ability to construct a coherent, autonomous universe more striking than in a radically different context, seen from the borders of another world (6). In this passage, Sackville-West seems to suggest a certain fictionalisation of her travelogue as she replaces a real-life experience with a fictional one. Her approach to travel writing could be understood as a literal shift, as she inserts other genres or modes, such as fiction, into her travelogue. Although travel writing is intertextual by nature, Sackville West’s use of Western texts tends to move the focus from the East to the West and thus introduce an orientalised version of the East.
- 13 The scene is described earlier in the article.
29Sackville-West’s approach could be read in light of Edward Said’s concept of “imaginative geography”. Said claims that “it is perfectly possible to argue that some distinctive objects are made by the mind, and that these objects, while appearing to exist objectively, have only a fictional reality” (Orientalism 55). As he notes, “space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here” (55). The term Said uses to describe this phenomenon, “imaginative geography”, applies in Passenger to Teheran not only to the preconception of an unfamiliar and distant land but also to the reconstruction of Persia through narrative by Sackville-West. Instead of actually visiting Bahrain and other cities in Persia, she imagines how they might be, by means of fiction as she decides to revisit the “pearls of Proust” instead of visiting Bahrain and its pearls. Another example of such fictionalisation in Passenger to Teheran is the encounter between Nasr-ed-Din Shah and Jane Dieulafoy.13 As Joyce Kelley notes, in Passenger to Teheran, Sackville-West is “intent on exposing the fiction innate in travel writing” (368). Sackville-West expresses the same “romantic” interest in the city of Shiraz, which she has no time to visit, merely looking enviously at the road that leads to it: “[…] as I meditated, looking over the roofs of Isfahan, I knew that there was no help for it: those hills, that Shiraz road, squeezed my heart as in a muscular hand” (178). In the collective imagination of the Edwardians, Shiraz is associated with the poem by Sir William Jones, “A Persian Song of Hafiz” (1771), which envisions the city as an extremely beautiful and “romantic” landscape with clear streams (Taher-Kermani 82). Once again, her travelogue is influenced by the West’s perception of Persia.
30Furthermore, Sackville-West seems to emphasize the importance of her journey by enumerating names of famous people who preceded her. She expresses her excitement at entering Persia by land, via the Iraqi border, just as Alexander the Great did. She seems to be fascinated by the adventures of such great conquerors as Alexander and Darius and, in Ecbatana (the present-day city of Hamadān), she reminds the reader that she is following in their footsteps: “This was Ecbatana, and in the path of Alexander and Darius we pursued the way” (105). In addition, Sackville-West’s insistence on associating her own adventure with that of Alexander, who is better known for his mission to “civilise” Asia, can be seen as reflecting her sympathetic views toward the British Empire. As Christopher A. Hagerman explains, many Britons involved in the imperial project saw themselves as repeating Alexander’s conquests and taking up his mission to civilise Asia (345). It is perhaps significant that Harold Nicolson was involved in the first major confrontation between Reza Shah and the British and that he was, in his own words, “an empire builder” who had a “Kipling inside him” (N. Nicolson, Letters 150). The conflict began over the removal of Indian Savars, mounted guards who were deployed in some British consular offices. On May 13, 1928, Reza Shah unilaterally declared null and void all capitulary rights which granted British citizens of Persia immunity from persecution in Persian courts. The Persian Foreign Ministry had written a note to the British Embassy asking for the removal of these foreign guards. Nicolson immediately went to the Iranian Foreign ministry to object. In fact, he considered the note “so categorical as to be almost offensive” (Nicolson, quoted in Milani 55) and wanted the Iranian officials to retract the note or change it. Eventually, the Foreign Ministry added an appendix to the document that toned down the initial note, but stated that no amendment could be issued, as the note was imposed on the ministry by Reza Shah himself (55). As Abbas Milani notes, the file relating to this affair was closed and classified until 2002, a fact that points to the sensitivity with which such matters were dealt (448).
31Harold Nicolson’s imperialist attitude might account for the somewhat superior tone with which his wife speaks of the Iranians. Indeed, her travelogue is full of comments about their lack of discipline and the widespread corruption that blighted the country in 1926. She also describes Persia as “a ramshackle country” (230) and employs the Orientalist stereotype of its inhabitants as childish, uneducated and ignorant: “Persians are gentle by inclination, fond of children, and easily moved to laughter in a simple way. But they seem to be ignorant of suffering; which is as much as to say, they are childish, they are untaught” (127). All this illustrates how Persia and Persians are seen through the prism of an imperialist ideology. In Exotic Memories (1991), Chris Bongie introduces two distinct modes of “exoticism” (he uses the word “exoticism” to replace Said’s term of reference “Orientalism”): “Imperialist exoticism” and “Exoticizing exoticism”. “Imperialist exoticism,” Bongie claims, “affirms the hegemony of modern civilization over the less developed, savage territories,” whereas “Exoticizing exoticism privileges those very territories and their people, figuring them as a possible refuge from overbearing modernity” (17). “Imperialist exoticism” and “Exoticizing exoticism,” Bongie posits, are both grounded on the common belief that “there exist places on this earth that are Other than those in which modernity has come to hold sway” (17). I believe that Sackville-West’s attitude towards Persia could be described as “Imperialist exoticism”, as she constantly refers to the East’s lack of modern commodities and the inadequacy of Oriental methods. Passenger to Teheran is filled with with Orientalist motifs. Sackville-West describes the Oriental as “naïve” (18) and Oriental methods as “limp” (130). Having ordered three cases of wine from England, she wonders why they have not yet reached Teheran in May and blames Oriental methods, an attitude that stands in sharp contrast with her observation concerning the Oriental methods of farming in Egypt: “There is a downright, primitive simplicity about these Egyptian methods, but it appears to be effective, for enviable crops spring from the black earth” (45). Such contradictory statements point to Sackville-West’s ambivalence about the East and in particular Persia, and highlight her critical and somewhat authoritative tone. Indeed, the distinction she makes between Egypt and Persia might be related to her fantasised image of Persia. As Elizabeth S. Bell notes, Sackville-West’s experience of Persia turned out to be “disappointing” in many regards, since from the very beginning she had “romantic expectations of what should be there” (42).
32In Orientalism (1978), Edward Said uses travel writing as a means of offering a better understanding of colonial discourse. He argues that colonialists used their knowledge of Oriental people to justify their imperial “mission.” Having such knowledge, Said contends elsewhere, “is to dominate the colonized country and it exists, in a sense, as we know it” (Culture and Imperialism 32). In “Colonialist Criticism” (1995), Chinua Achebe underlines the importance of such knowledge and points to its implications for the colonial subject, as the coloniser assumes that the Oriental lacks psychological complexity and that it is easy to understand and control him or her (58). Sackville-West’s comment on Oriental methods therefore reflects her claim to racial superiority and knowledge. Her feelings of superiority can be clearly seen in her description of the crowd that volunteered to guide her to her lodgings in Kum, as she refers to them as “monkeys” perching themselves on the luggage and “crouching on the splashboards” (207).
33Passenger to Teheran presents a mysterious and “romantic” image of Persia that is in line with the Orientalist imaginary of the country. In her travelogue, Sackville-West uses various Orientalist clichés that tend to represent it as the uncivilised counterpart of Europe. While Europe and especially England are described as stable, educated and civilised, Persia is associated with social and political instability, absolutism and ignorance. In his introduction to Orientalism, Said maintains that the Western discourse about the Orient was a damaging one:
without examining Orientalism as a discourse one cannot possibly understand the enormously systematic discipline by which European culture was able to manage—and even produce—the Orient politically, sociologically, militarily, ideologically, scientifically and imaginatively during the post-Enlightenment period. (Orientalism 3)
34As Edward Said explains, “standardization and cultural stereotyping have intensified the hold of the nineteenth-century academic and imaginative demonology of the “mysterious Orient”” (26). This image of a “mysterious” and “romantic” Orient is present throughout Sackville-West’s text, with the concluding section of Passenger to Teheran revealing her enduring “romantic” interest in Persia. The journey is over but the dangling orange labels continue to capture the imagination of passers-by: “Was I standing on the platform at Victoria, I who had stood on so many platforms? The orange labels dangled in the glare of the electric lamps. PERSIA, they said; PERSIA” (289). This concluding sentence shows how the “exotic” image of Persia continued to haunt Sackville-West despite her first-hand experience of the country. The book closes on the ever-exotic word “PERSIA,” thus pointing to her refusal to exchange romance and adventure for her newly acquired knowledge of this country. Despite first-hand knowledge of Persia, Sackville-West continues to cherish a fantastical and mythical Persia, revealing the enduring influence of the Victorian heritage. Her travelogue is subjective and allows the reader to penetrate the feelings of the writer about a country that she considers “romantic.”
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