Vagabond and exile
He never stopped writing
John Freely, 1926-2017
Prospect, 28 April 2017
Photo Credit: Bogazici.edu.tr
It is a bitter pleasure to read John Freely’s Stamboul Sketches today. The tussling café minstrels, the street markets selling a bric-à-brac of broken dolls and 19th century instruments of dubious purpose, the ramshackle wooden houses, the 1950s Chevrolets rollicking over the cobbled streets, the gas lamps, the dusty antiquarian bookshops, the ducks’ eggs offered when chickens’ were not available, the moon of Ramazan, the street of the dwarf’s fountain – he saw them all, wandering the corners of the crumbling city with his wife, three press-ganged children and Hilary Sumner-Boyd, a fellow teacher at Robert College.
John had total recall of places and people, and an innate empathy for others which made his stories so compelling. With him it was never a matter of Blarney Castle but of the Dingle Peninsula, the western-most rocks of Ireland, home to John’s ancestors and a hidden bastion of a Homeric tradition of bards and their stories, never written but learnt by ear through the generations. Hilary knew about historical research, but John could write, first rolling out their joint Strolling through Istanbul, then distilling the offcuts into his Stamboul Sketches. But the more he brings that İstanbul to life, the more he underlines that it is as lost as the various empires that have risen and fallen in this city. This last half-century has destroyed a whole way of life. And now John too has gone.
John arrived in Istanbul in 1960 at the age of 34. He had fought 96 days in combat in the Second World War in Asia, come home to a G.I. Bill education in physics, and started working at Princeton University on the U.S. nuclear programme. He left that behind to sail to İstanbul and to start teaching physics in Robert College’s campus above the graveyard and castle by Bebek. It was and is a magical corner – and one of the few in İstanbul that has little changed. The parties were good. At one, when the firemen came to save a house in flames, John greeted them singing ‘Smoke gets in your Eyes’. Others took place wherever he and his friends were, maybe a tavern, maybe the elegant multi-windowed library that James Baldwin had rented with his brother, David. But most evenings would start at Nazmi’s, the cafe - long built over - in Bebek where John met many of Istanbul’s great characters.
John with granddaughters Pandora and Helen Longstreth at Dingle Literary Festival, May/June 2016.
He had signed a pact in blood with his wife that they would travel, and they continued so to do. In the late 1960s they left Istanbul for Athens, and John of course was soon on drinking terms with Gust Avrakotos, the CIA agent central to Charlie Wilson’s War and known for telling the Colonels: “My official instructions are to tell you to free Andreas Papandreou. My personal advice is shoot the bastard.” He then moved back to Istanbul, before trying to settle in Boston. That worked for only a few years, before he returned to Istanbul in 1987, left for Venice in 1991, and then settled back at the physics department at Bosphorus University (as Robert College had become) in 1993. He was 67 years old, writing all the time and a fount of life. By the turn of the century, he had published 39 books on travel, historical figures, and the history of science, and he never stopped writing. July 2015 saw the launch in London of The Art of Exile: A Vagabond Life, which fittingly capture the gist of his expatriate soul. This year, only a month before his death, his daughter, Maureen, had taken him to New York for the launch of a new book on his youth and war. He was working with Maureen on a murder novel involving an elderly gent, the hero, and a hooker from the brothel which used to be down the hill from the university. And he was working on two others in his first-floor room at a care home near Bath in Britain when he developed a fever, fell from his bed, fracturing spine and shoulder, and went into sudden decline. His last words were “I am going to find where the words come from”.
Writing in the magazine Cornucopia in early 2015, Maureen describes how the Istanbul of today has changed from that in which she grew up. The house in which John and his wife lived before and after her ultimately fatal stroke was on a shaded, wooded slope next to the university – which has just named a hall after him. It did not matter that he could hardly talk Turkish. He met and befriended most of the painters and writers here. “You are the memory of the city,” the painter, Ömer Uluc, once told him. And for those of us who came to İstanbul in the same period as he did, his word pictures bring back the style and life of those far-gone days, cladding them in the sunlight which we so often give to our memories.
His house was a haven of rare peace in a city of spreading concrete, now having less green spaces than almost any major city in Europe. He continued to travel in his mind, wandering the byways of the past, rather than the throughways of today. Whenever one telephoned, he would pick up instantly on the last conversation that you had had with him, and recall whatever you had been planning to do. His interest in others was integral to his charm, and, when his hearing became less good, that never seemed an impediment. That and reduced mobility may have curbed his trips. They never caused him to narrow his focus.
His links with people and their lives were strong. His interest in culture was unrivalled, but his concern for society, like that of many expatriates, was less marked. The Bosphorus was bridged once, twice and then a third time during his half century in the city. Istanbul quintupled in population from 3 to 15 million. Dual-carriageway roads came between yalıs and the water. The fishing boats and little motor which crisscrossed between Bebek and the Anatolia shore disappeared. So did most of the Greek fishermen, Bulgarian milkshops and Armenian mechanics. The generals came and went, and since 2003 there has been Recep Tayyip Erdoğan.
The Turkey which greeted John had a vibrant press, checks and balances, and aspirations to the professed values of the European enlightenment. It was, as Prime Minister and later President, Süleyman Demirel, said “a talking Turkey”. That has gone. As William Pitt the Younger, referring to a map of Europe, said after the Battle of Austerlitz: "Roll up that map; it will not be wanted these ten years."
We have to live with that now, with the loss of the world of Stamboul Sketches and the ever more pervasive authoritarian ideology of today’s Turkey. But for me at least, John is a symbol of hope and of what the individual can do. Like few - only the ranchera singer Chavela Vargas comes to mind, and she because of an unforgettable recent documentary - he was as productive at 90 as he had ever been. What stops us from following his example?