I wonder what's happening in Cyprus?

A sign at Aphrodite's Birthplace, 2010, that makes reference to the 1974 Turkish invasion's remains. 

(SP Tiley photo)

Just over a year ago, I realized a dream I'd had since my last year of college, to visit Cyprus.

The dream was born when I picked up a copy of Bitter Lemons by Lawrence Durrell at the campus bookstore as summer wound down; I was married, working in the library 30 hours a week, keeping house, and embarking, however haltingly, on what would become my adult life. That is, a life of writing constantly and traveling frequently at times, interspersed with long periods of finding that a trip to the closest beach was as much as I could muster or afford.

The sweet summons of Bitter Lemons
I adored Bitter Lemons. Durrell painted scenes of life in Cyprus in the early 1950s as almost idyllic...except, of course, when he got into the specifics of the tension between the Turks and Greeks that ended up, in 1974, with Turkey invading northern Cyprus, a campaign that ended with the island divided into the Republic of Cyprus in the south, and what the Turks now consider part of Turkey in the north. When one crosses the border--which we did several times to reach Krykkos Monastery, high in the divided mountains--one's cell phone beeps and one gets a message, "Welcome to Turkey." Freaky. Also freaky, of course, are the instructions not to venture down certain roads, and the odd sightings of military watchtowers. Even inside the Republic of Cyprus, for some years now part of the European Union (EU), one finds cogent instructions regarding military ordnance. Even the paths surrounding Aphrodite's Birthplace near Paphos bear warnings that the odd bullet might be found; please leave strictly alone.

I am thinking about Cyprus because we are not going back there, despite several enticements.

The Mediterranean off Polis, where we stayed, was the most incredible water in which I have ever swum.

We met an interesting restaurateur, Andreas, owner of Moustakallis, a very fine taverna, who invited us twice for morning coffee, and regaled us with stories of pre-EU Cyprus, when the meats and sausages could be truly local, not conforming to EU homogenization. I wouldn't have thought a discussion of abattoirs could be interesting...but on Cyprus...well, it is itself, with lemons and tomatoes and halloumi cheese made from milk of goats grazed on thyme, but lamb and poultry are more important, at least to Cypriots. Me?  I loved the lemons, olives and--I admit--the baklava.

We also had an apartment for the week with views of the Mediterranean from our second-floor balcony, where we ate breakfast. There was bougainvillea beside the front door, and bushes of geraniums. Bushes, not spindly little plants.

But we are not going to Cyprus again soon. Not until the Middle East becalms itself a bit once again; the Turkish question is still bothersome, and Cyprus is only a day-trip by ferry from Egypt. It is strange to realize that the island outpost of the EU is really in Asia Minor, and very probably subject to the Byzantine political machinations of the ages.

Bella Italia, I hope
Our next trip will be to Italy; it was booked less than an hour ago. I've never been to Italy, but I was never crazy to go. I grew up on eastern Long Island (less east than the toney Hamptons, more west than Manhattan, and therefore a true nowhere land) surrounded by Sicilians who were noisy and "juicy" unlike my Irish-English family, who were quiet and dessicated by comparison. The Sicilians were less interested in education than we were, and most of my family considered them NOKD--not that we were anything exalted.  But my mother prided herself that we were not a "huggy" family. Sicilians hug a lot. And the Sicilians I knew did eats lots more interesting food, though, than the steaks and chops that are standard fare in middle-class Irish households in New York, at least back then. 

Lake Garda is not Sicily, so there should be no ghosts of the trampy girls who tortured me in high school because I didn't smoke or drink, did do my homework, and utterly refused to get engaged at my senior prom to a local boy, later a local fireman, who wanted me to do just that. No ghosts of the mothers of trampy Sicilian girls who teased me because I was built like Twiggy (not anymore, darn it) and pale. No ghosts of the leather-jacketed Fonzi wannabes who knew they could intimidate me simply by staring at me when I walked past their corner to the store.

But nothing those skanky worst examples of the Sicilian heritage could do has put me off Italy. Italy just hadn't been on my travel A list.

Paris, a dream--once--as cogent as Cyprus, and now tarnished
Paris was, always, on my A list. I was crazy to go to Paris from an early age, although I was over 30 before I got there the first time. For decades after that visit, Paris remained an important destination that I'd jump through any number of hoops to reach. The shine is dulled now, partly by the behavior of Paris itself, and partly by what I might call the "Home Alone" syndrome: too bloody many American tourists, loud and obnoxious parents and too many snotty children clogging everything with their headlong rush to see it all in four days whether the whining kids want to or not and insisting that they pay in "real money" and noisily rejecting food that doesn't bear a striking resemblance to hamburgers and fries.

So, Italy. My husband loved Lake Garda when he was 16, when he went there with his aging parents who turned in early, leaving him to frequent the bars on his own for the first time. He loved the scenery, of course, and that extensive trip included visits to more touristy places, such as Venice. Now, Lake Garda itself is touristy. It now sports a Gardaland. That's frightening. I wonder if my husband will like it as much now as he did then. Perhaps. On his recommendation, his boss took a week there last year and said he liked it. Gardaland must be avoidable.

Two gentle people in Verona
We booked a fly-drive, so we get to fly into Verona, a place that does hold some fascination for me, more so, I think, than Venice. When I think of Venice, I think of sewage. I think of Katharine Hepburn almost losing an eye to infection after she fell into a canal while filming a movie. I think of two friends who went 30 years ago when the spring tides were particularly high; they had to totter across boards spanning the canal water lapping the walls in the lobby of their hotel, holding their noses--they said--against the stench at the same time.

It's odd the way the reactions of others to places we've never seen influence us. That same couple loathed Paris. Had I spoken to them before my first visit, I might have had to change my previous lifetime of hungering for it. But I spoke instead with my first husband's aunt, a brilliant woman who had worked for Time, Inc., in Paris after WWII, and adored it. In the 60s, Time flew croissants into NYC every day, and she was on the recipient list, all of which made staying with her at her Beekman Place apartment even more wondrous than it already was. She was my touchstone for Paris, thank goodness.

I don't believe I will be anyone's touchstone for Cyprus. It seems to me a shadow of its self in antiquity; the Cypriots are not good at preserving their heritage. Aphrodite's Birthplace, a plant-ringed pool, was filthy. The better part of that day was encountering the semi-toothless orange vendor in the car park. We bought some oranges, and they, like the Mediterranean waters, were the very best of their species. But we grew tired of the scant variety in Cypriot cuisine; we were amazed at how little they did with the lemons and tomatoes that were good enough to make foodies cry with joy. Even the halloumi, the thyme-scented halloumi, was enticing, something store-bought halloumi in the States or the UK never is; here, it's more like plastic turning to stone, tasteless and unscented.

The lure of the Med
But I will go back to Cyprus some day. My skin craves the silky Mediterranean water, and my soul still wants another sighting or two of the "wine dark sea." It amazed me that just at the horizon, as described in the Odyssey, the sea is a deep purple-red, at least there in the climes that the Homeric sailors used to roam.

I will probably go to Italy more than once, too, I think. The Sicilian horror show I endured as a timid girl on Long Island is just about faded now, replaced after knowing a generous, kind, and intellectually agile friend, an Italian doctor from Puglia I knew well in Baltimore, dear Enzo. I miss him, and I miss his Italian-American-etc. wife, Judy, an artist who was one of my horse riding/culture vulturing buddies for years. Only with Judy did I drink Pino Grigio; when Enzo was on hand, we all drank the red wine he favored, Ars Poetica, a primitivo from his hometown.

We shall see. The excitement is beginning to build. For future reference....

Salut!

Frank Lloyd Wright and the Upper Crust ethos

Kentuck Knob, a Frank Lloyd Wright house now on the National Register of Historic Places. (Wiki Commons)

One of the things missing in England is Frank Lloyd Wright. There is an installation of a room he designed, an office, at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, but I’ll need a lot more reasons for a London trip than viewing a single room, even if it was by Frank Lloyd Wright. London, contrary to popular belief, is not close to every other place in England. First, there are the miles and miles of two-lane roads with little motorway involvement. Second, Cornwall is about 200 miles from London. Plus one has to pay 12 pounds a day to the government to take one’s car into the city itself…But I digress.

I have always loved Frank Lloyd Wright’s designs because they are so perfect not only architecturally, but in their underlying ethos. Wright’s Usonian house idea always intrigued me; these were marvelous houses meant for the middle class, and not the filthy rich. There are only about sixty of them standing today, but one was in the Baltimore neighborhood where I lived for six years. You can see it here.

There were also, nearby, the Frank Lloyd Wrong houses, modern cubes with oddly attached roofs and stacks of glass bricks here and there on the façade, seemingly with no rhyme or reason. (I use the term façade with my tongue firmly in my cheek; to Baltimoreans, the word is fakade. I swear.) I didn’t name them Frank Lloyd Wrong houses. My late good friend the Rev. Jeffrey Proctor called them that after he moved to Baltimore; he, too, was fond of Frank Lloyd Wright, and had a lovely sense of humor.

However, this is about neither the Frank Lloyd Wright house in my larger  environment all that time, nor the Frank Lloyd Wrong houses I had to drive to get to Starbucks.

It is about elitism, and how bone-deep it seemingly is in the American moneyed class. The Old Money class, that is.

It was probably more than 30 years ago that I first became friends with a couple who lived in a swell house on Manhattan’s East Side. It was filled with museum-quality furniture and paintings. After I moved away from NYC, when I was their weekend guest, I awoke to a Courbet hung above the dresser in the room I was assigned. It certainly was fun, too, to be served the de rigueur East Side watercress soup followed by a chicken wing and a mushroom cap at the elegant dinner parties the couple hosted, parties where one might easily meet Nepalese princes and princesses, among other people born to the ermine. (At West Side parties, one actually got fed real, life-sustaining food, although those soirees lacked the monkey-suited serving guys one would encounter on the East Side.)

Still, I quite enjoyed going on the New York Garden Club tours each spring as a guest of my friend’s mother. I got to see Zubin Mehta’s house and garden one year. On those days, we always had lunch at the Summerhouse, a very preppy spot on the upper East Side.

Once, my friend and I went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to be, as she ALWAYS put it, “culture vultures.”  I was keen to see the new installation of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Francis W. Little House II Living Room.  “I can’t stand that stuff,” my friend intoned. “If you want to see it, I’ll just go and wait for you outside.”

I did want to see it, and I did see it. No accounting for taste, I thought, and thought nothing of it.

But now, on reflection, and coupled with a later incident, I have decided her distaste was not aesthetic, at least not totally, but cultural/class-based as well.

The other incident?  While disagreeing with my political views, my friend’s husband told me I was childish and used the term “you people” to denigrate my opinion. I ended the friendship over that, and not before time, I think.  

I suspect I was the house oddity for the couple, the unaccountably well-raised member of the middle-class, decently educated, slightly traveled, and with a knowledge of which fork to use. But I didn’t fit intrinsically into their world, just as Frank Lloyd Wright, with his ideas of a decent bit of ground and some lovely furnishings for all, didn’t fit. (NOTE: Wright wasn’t a universal egalitarian. His ideas descended only down through the middle-class, but that was better than most architects of his day, who thought only about the wealthy and their needs).

Regarding its Wright room, the Metropolitan Museum of Art notes that the house from which it came “is composed of a group of low pavilions interspersed with gardens and terraces, which, in plan, radiate from a central symbolic hearth.” Wright took into account the architectural/cultural lexicon of a few thousand years, making the ancient concept of the cultural heart/hearth move onward through the Roman vernacular of rooms for specific uses, to the thoroughly modern concept that a home should be an organic whole.

That is not so, of course, in the homes of America’s upper classes. They are not now, and never were, organic wholes. There would have to be separations so that servants would not forget their place, so that mere tradesmen should be forced to use a rear entrance, while invited gentry used the front. (Visiting the house of George Bernard Shaw last weekend, I learned that he refused to use the servant bells in his house; he both believed and lived his socialist ideals, in direct contravention of British upper crust mores, which the American upper crust was aping.)

Upper crust houses have not historically featured flowing spaces, meant to put residents and guests at ease as in a Wright house. Rather, the upper crust manse will feature defined and delimited areas, entry to which denotes one’s position in the hierarchy of the family or in society at large. Admission to the kitchen meant one was a servant; houseguests, of course, could also enter to get a glass of milk before bed and so on, being temporary “family.”

Usonian houses did have separate dining rooms, or at the very least, dining areas. And the kitchen itself conformed to the upper class ideal; it was place where the work of cooking and cleaning up was done, and was not appropriate for guests. Not because kitchen work is inferior and should be reserved only for servants, but because dinner guests are to be pampered and honored in return for the conversation and liveliness the contribute to the occasion. Although he was an egalitarian, Wright drew the line at imposing a host’s tasks on guests--a line I do retain in common with my ex-friend--and kept the kitchen where it belongs, as a separate room.

Unlike my friend, I could easily live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, should I ever be fortunate enough for the gods of civilization to bestow one upon me. And everyone, from the man cleaning the gutters to Prince Charles, would be invited in the front door and given some refreshment on the good china.* Indeed, it has never once occurred to me to treat tradesmen/women any differently than I would treat Prince Charles. As my mother used often to say, they all put their knickers on one leg at a time. (Actually, she said, “What, they pee perfume?”  We got the message.)

Her message was that it doesn’t matter who you are, but what you are matters very much. Who you are is denoted by whether you live in a Frank Lloyd Wright house,  a mansion on Manhattan’s East Side, a Frank Lloyd Wrong house, my house, or a tent. Or your car, these days. One’s estate is not what one is; it merely represents one’s current state of finance, something that changes over time for everyone. Everyone. Even my fine friends had to sell some paintings to afford schools for their kids, darn fine schools, but still….And in the end, when they couldn’t afford the inheritance taxes on that fine East Side pile of bricks, they had to rent it out and move to the hinterlands.

But you know what? They are doubtless still referring to those they perceive to be of lesser estate as “you people.” The great unwashed. Yup. The rest of us.  I’m one of “you people,” and proud of it.

But I still wouldn’t mind if the gods of bricks and mortar dropped a bona fide Frank Lloyd Wright house in my back garden.

* Ludicrous thought, as is “good silver.” If you and your family aren’t good enough for the good china, who is? Reverse snobbery…against yourself. If you don’t regularly use the silver, you’ll have to polish it by the time you get it out of the drawer. Far better to regularly use your “stuff” I think.