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Authors: Sven Lindqvist
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forced to go back as if into a womb. We have been born into an element that is not ours, in which we do not belong, in which we cannot live – except for short moments with the piece of bitumen between our teeth.
60
‘The thought of death has long since been familiar to me,’ wrote Isabelle towards the end of her life.
Who knows? Perhaps I shall soon let myself slip into it, voluptuously and without the slightest worry. With time I have learnt not to look for anything in life but the ecstasy offered by oblivion.
Pierre Loti lived with his death-wish until he was seventy-three. Isabelle Eberhardt only lived to twenty-seven. By then she had no teeth, no breasts, no menstruation, was as thin as a well-diver, and almost always depressed. ‘If this foray of mine into the darkness does not stop, what will be its terrifying outcome?’
Eberhardt seated, cigarette in hand, about six months before her death, 1904.
Her life was an extended suicide. With increasing regu larity she took refuge in drugs, alcohol and a brutal, self-destructive, indiscriminate sexuality. She suffered from innumerable illnesses, among them malaria, and probably syphilis.
At her own urgent request, she was discharged from the hospital in Ain Sefra on October 21 and returned to her house by the
oued
.
The torrent that drowned her came that night.
61
When Isabelle died, her first novel,
Vagabond
, was just being serialized in
l’Akbar
. Her sketches and short stories had often been included in Algerian newspapers. A large number of manuscripts was saved from the flood.
The editor-in-chief of
l’Akbar
, Victor Barrucand, published a selection in 1906. Quite well-meaningly, he had first prettied up her texts.
She wrote: ‘Everyone laughed.’ He added: ‘People laughed at his rusticity; his gesture was that of a shepherd.’
She wrote: ‘Freedom was the only happiness accessible to my nature.’ That sounded too simple. He improved on it: ‘Freedom was the only happiness that was necessary for my eager, impatient and yet proud nature.’
Despite the revisions, the book was a success and Barrucand continued to publish Isabelle’s manuscripts in 1908, 1920 and1922, by then with greater respect for the integrity of her writing. The diaries and other writings she left were published in 1923, 1925 and 1944 by R-L Doyon. Grasset began to publish her collected writings in 1988. Most of these editions also contain short biographies. More extensive biographies have been published in France, Algeria, England and in the USA in 1930, 1934, 1939, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1961, 1968, 1977, 1983, 1985 and 1988.
62
What is it about Isabelle Eberhardt that goes on fascinating generation after generation?
I have plenty of time to think about that as I drive on through the desert.
She did not write nearly so much as her master, Pierre Loti. As a rule, nor did she write so well. And yet she is the one to survive. Why?
‘One must never look for happiness,’ she writes. ‘One meets it by the way – always going in the opposite direction.’
There is a great deal of sparkling use of words in her work. It is not the average that counts. It is the highlights.
It is not the quantity that counts, it is the totality. And that applies not only to her language, but also body language. The gesture of life.
Isabelle dressed in male clothes and dived into the wells of the Saharan Arab world. At the same time, Jack London was putting on working clothes and letting himself sink into
People of the Abyss
(1903).
Eberhardt on horseback. (
Painting in oils by G. Rossegrosse
)
He was conducting a social experiment. He wanted to experience with his own body what wretchedness means for the truly poor.
Isabelle was doing the same. But with no secret gold coin sewn into her waistband. She dived without any safety rope. She went undercover with no return.
The boundaries she crossed were not only social, but racial. A white woman in the American South openly preferring black men
60
‘The thought of death has long since been familiar to me,’ wrote Isabelle towards the end of her life.
Who knows? Perhaps I shall soon let myself slip into it, voluptuously and without the slightest worry. With time I have learnt not to look for anything in life but the ecstasy offered by oblivion.
Pierre Loti lived with his death-wish until he was seventy-three. Isabelle Eberhardt only lived to twenty-seven. By then she had no teeth, no breasts, no menstruation, was as thin as a well-diver, and almost always depressed. ‘If this foray of mine into the darkness does not stop, what will be its terrifying outcome?’
Eberhardt seated, cigarette in hand, about six months before her death, 1904.
Her life was an extended suicide. With increasing regu larity she took refuge in drugs, alcohol and a brutal, self-destructive, indiscriminate sexuality. She suffered from innumerable illnesses, among them malaria, and probably syphilis.
At her own urgent request, she was discharged from the hospital in Ain Sefra on October 21 and returned to her house by the
oued
.
The torrent that drowned her came that night.
61
When Isabelle died, her first novel,
Vagabond
, was just being serialized in
l’Akbar
. Her sketches and short stories had often been included in Algerian newspapers. A large number of manuscripts was saved from the flood.
The editor-in-chief of
l’Akbar
, Victor Barrucand, published a selection in 1906. Quite well-meaningly, he had first prettied up her texts.
She wrote: ‘Everyone laughed.’ He added: ‘People laughed at his rusticity; his gesture was that of a shepherd.’
She wrote: ‘Freedom was the only happiness accessible to my nature.’ That sounded too simple. He improved on it: ‘Freedom was the only happiness that was necessary for my eager, impatient and yet proud nature.’
Despite the revisions, the book was a success and Barrucand continued to publish Isabelle’s manuscripts in 1908, 1920 and1922, by then with greater respect for the integrity of her writing. The diaries and other writings she left were published in 1923, 1925 and 1944 by R-L Doyon. Grasset began to publish her collected writings in 1988. Most of these editions also contain short biographies. More extensive biographies have been published in France, Algeria, England and in the USA in 1930, 1934, 1939, 1951, 1952, 1954, 1961, 1968, 1977, 1983, 1985 and 1988.
62
What is it about Isabelle Eberhardt that goes on fascinating generation after generation?
I have plenty of time to think about that as I drive on through the desert.
She did not write nearly so much as her master, Pierre Loti. As a rule, nor did she write so well. And yet she is the one to survive. Why?
‘One must never look for happiness,’ she writes. ‘One meets it by the way – always going in the opposite direction.’
There is a great deal of sparkling use of words in her work. It is not the average that counts. It is the highlights.
It is not the quantity that counts, it is the totality. And that applies not only to her language, but also body language. The gesture of life.
Isabelle dressed in male clothes and dived into the wells of the Saharan Arab world. At the same time, Jack London was putting on working clothes and letting himself sink into
People of the Abyss
(1903).
Eberhardt on horseback. (
Painting in oils by G. Rossegrosse
)
He was conducting a social experiment. He wanted to experience with his own body what wretchedness means for the truly poor.
Isabelle was doing the same. But with no secret gold coin sewn into her waistband. She dived without any safety rope. She went undercover with no return.
The boundaries she crossed were not only social, but racial. A white woman in the American South openly preferring black men
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