Last of a romantic breed

BIOGRAPHY: The flamboyant writer Lesley Blanch considered herself the last of the great 19th-century women travellers

Inner Landscapes, Wilder Shores By Anne Boston John Murray, 416pp, £25

Inner Landscapes, Wilder Shores, by Anne Boston, is the unauthorised biography of Lesley Blanch, a remarkable woman and writer whose most famous book was the brilliantly titled The Wilder Shores of Love, a series of monographs on 19th-century European women who lived and loved in Arabia. When she died at the age of 102 years, three years ago, the world lost a legend and a relic and a fabulist who preferred lustre to plain truth. She packed a lot into her big century, lived life at full tilt and even reading about the amount she travelled – usually on a shoe string, or commissioned by a magazine, though sometimes with rich friends – makes one giddy.

When she was over 60, in one year alone she travelled to and fro from the south of France – where she finally settled – to adventures in Afghanistan, London, Istanbul, and Paris. She travelled extensively in the Balkans, Uzbekistan, Mexico, Guatemala, Tunis, all over Russia and spent days on the Moscow-Peking train to Irkutsk; she sojourned in India, Persia, North America, Egypt and Arabia and places between, usually dressed in her own inimitable style, like a creature from a dream harem escaped from a Delacroix painting. And everywhere she went she wrote, or rather overwrote. She did everything to excess. One visitor arrived at her flat in Chelsea to find her ill but dressed in a pair of men’s long johns dyed orange, a short Persian dressing gown covered with blowsy roses and a shocking pink turban shot through with tinsel thread.

Published in 1954, The Wilder Shores of Lovewas – not to make a pun – a runaway success and inspired a generation of women with dreams of being swept away by an untamed sheikh into an exotic tent hard by a palm- fringed, opal oasis amidst the splendour and squalor of North Africa. This, as you can well imagine, was post-Rudolph Valentino but pre-Edward Said territory and it's not what you could call a politically correct text now, but it is a riveting read and was ground breaking in that, before she followed their footsteps the lives and history of the great women travellers of the 19th century had been ignored. Lesley Blanch considered herself "the last of that breed" and was completely fascinated by the Exotic and the Other – especially Russia, Arabia, and men who were Slavs. They were all in a manner of speaking much of a muchness for her insatiable appetite for romance.

She deemed herself a romantic and indeed her reputation is of a creature who lived out her own fantasies. But she was shrewd – tough as an old boot really – and I read with fascination a detail from this closely researched book about her publishers' contract for The Wilder Shores– her first book, after all, when authors are usually both respectful and grateful; and the publisher was the long established John Murray, who knew a thing or two about publishing – they had been Byron's publisher for example. The final clause stipulated that Lesley Blanch kept all translation, film, TV, dramatic American and all serial rights for herself. I swoon with admiration at her chutzpah.

Officially she was married twice – though Anne Boston speculates that it might have been thrice – once to an architect whom she quickly discarded though she stayed on in his lovely house, then secretly and bigamously to the Russian theatre director Feodor Komisarjevsky, and then to writer and diplomat Romain Gary who was at the centre of her life for 15 years. Boston makes a good fist of unravelling their tempestuous relationship and analysing Gary's elusive, complex and maddening character – prodigiously gifted, selfish, sexy, insatiable and unspeakable. When he left her for the young American actress Jean Seberg, Blanch banished him from her life and from her memory and especially from her famous memoirs, Journey into the Mind's Eye. An early case of air brushing.

I first met her in her eyrie in Roquebrune in the south of France where she was still licking her wounds after the defection of her husband but she knew how to keep her end up. At that time, I had the same job that she had had 30 years earlier – features editor of Vogue – and although I thought she was ancient (she was younger than I am now), I was riveted by her life and by her experiences. I still have my notes on that first encounter. She said, “I was blessed at birth by a bad memory” but appeared to have total recall. I found her solipsistic and though Anne Boston makes a lot of her charm “true charm, unfeigned and irresistible”, I found her pretty charmless – she couldn’t be bothered – and I don’t think I ever met a more ruthless woman or one who was so wrapped up in what she called Darling Self. She was to my mind a tiresome woman though fascinating, a self-mythologiser and narcissist, inclined to the whimsical with steel and a certain vicious streak underneath the blonde, fluffy exterior. (She was once described as having “the slightly magical charm of nonsense rhymes”.)

Later, when I was setting off on an adventure to Abu Dhabi – thought to be the first white woman to visit that then unknown state – because Sheikh Said bin Shakbut had fallen in love with me though not I with him, Lesley ecstatically decided that I was the 20th-century counterpart of her earlier desert heroines. She was sadly disappointed in me when I refused to countenance such a role; and I could never accept that she, with her life of bold liberty, amours and fulfilled whims could have expected me to live in a squalid harem, and wear the veil while waiting submissively for an arbitrary summons to sex. I might have been the richest woman in the world but I would rather have been boiled in oil. She was completely unrealistic about how the women of the harem suffered in their curtailed and dark environment and would not listen when I, who had witnessed its reality, told her angrily of it. I was banished forever. Not that I cared. She seemed intellectually dishonest to me and I found the same strain of falseness in much of her writing. But she was feted and surrounded by admirers right till the end of her life.

What I wished I had kept notes on was her house. Now that wasa work of art. Painted, idiosyncratic, lavish, flower-filled (from her garden) – and everywhere needlepoint cushions stitched freehand constituting a kaleidoscope of her life. Each one was a little masterpiece – portraits of mosques, of cats, patterns, of tiles, anything that had taken her fancy. The house was full of treasures collected over the decades of travel and quantities of rare books and first editions signed and dedicated by their devoted authors.

She moved from Roquebrune to a nearby village but brought her treasures with her. One night in 1994 her house totally burned down and she and her cats just escaped with their lives; at 90, she stood in the ruins of her life’s collections. Unvanquished, she started over. “I seem to have lived many different lives in many different countries; for many years I have been . . . scattered between two and three households while fidgeting to be off elsewhere – to some radiant, unreal horizon, even more complicated though from afar it seems desirable.”

She was in the middle of writing her memoirs when she died and I imagine because this was an unauthorised biography that this MSS was not made available to Anne Boston. There are lacunae – certainly she did not have access to Lesley Blanch’s unpublished letters, as she readily acknowledges, and much may remain to be divulged. Some time ago, I was asked to write the authorised biography and so would have had access to these papers. Would it have been a fuller, truer biography? I doubt it. This book is so researched, detailed and loving – almost to a fault – that I don’t want ever to read another word about Lesley Blanch never mind write one.

Polly Devlin is a writer and broadcaster