From the issue dated January 31, 1997
NOTES FROM ACADEME
A Biographer of Napoleon Explores Corsican Culture
By Peter Monaghan
Ajaccio, Corsica -- Corsica has always been a destination for Napoleon hunters. But here in his birthplace, a slow-paced city of about 58,000 people, his reputation is"very mixed," says Frederica, Lady Rose, who is as knowledgeable about the island as anyone.
Still spirited and fascinating at 86, the English expatriate discusses a long career of exploring Corsican history and culture, and writing about it under the name Dorothy Carrington, in her apartment here.
Napoleon, it turns out, has not compelled her as much as the extraordinary folk wisdom and practices of the island. But, of course, Napoleon has always drawn more attention, and in any case she thinks he has a curious relation to Corsican superstitions.
"In Ajaccio, Napoleon is a tourist attraction, and has always been," she says. Her apartment is a short walk through modern, shop-lined streets to the Maison Napoleon, a relatively modest house where the typical Napoleon tour begins.
Lady Rose's keen eyes sparkle under a shock of white hair as she talks."Napoleon's government of Corsica was short -- nothing lasted long in his life -- and it was extremely harsh. He had a military governor who had the right to condemn people to death without trial, and did so. He's said to have made the happiness of the Corsicans by killing a man a day.
"This is Corsican black humor. He wasn't very indulgent."
She knows about the little Emperor. In 1993, her Napoleon and His Parents won the literary prize of the scholarly group known as the Napoleonic Society of America -- a considerable achievement for a non-specialist. The book benefited from her unprecedented access to the personal archives of Prince Louis Napoleon, a descendant of Napoleon living in Switzerland. It explains how Napoleon's life prepared him to dominate European countries that had frequently overrun this small island. Corsica's strategic location in the Mediterranean has attracted a stream of conquerors. Often the Corsicans' only recourse was to withdraw into the dense scrub -- the maquis -- that covers much of the rugged island.
Napoleon had taken another tack. He began to interest Lady Rose only when she realized his relationship to her first passion here, the death-steeped fatalism of Corsican culture.
"Napoleon turned Corsican fatalism into an asset," she says. "The Corsican people had learned by hard conditions to be fatalistic, enduring, and not to undertake a frontal attack on anything because they were always in a minority, a small population scattered over an island. But Napoleon never had any truck with that. He just went out to conquer the conquerors. His was a most extraordinary story."
She says:"You cannot understand this island without understanding its past, which has been violent and tragic, and the effect that's had on its people, together with a very striking environment -- the mountain and the sea."
Corsica's culture is most famous for its tradition of blood vengeance -- the vendetta. That is the odd and chilling practice here of settling wrongs by settling the wrong that settled an earlier wrong -- a murder, or perhaps merely a snub.
Lady Rose has focused on a haunting cousin of blood vengeance: practices, dating from pre-Christian times, that involve anticipation of death and that were common until quite recently. Her books look at the island's collective imaginative life. In Granite Island: A Portrait of Corsica, which won the 1971 Heinemann Award, and The Dream-Hunters of Corsica, published in 1995, she describes the mysterious mazzeri -- the seers, usually women, who dream that they hunt boars, dogs, pigs, or goats by night and recognize, in the faces of their kill, fellow villagers who will soon die. In traditional belief, the dream-hunters practiced bilocation -- they remained in bed yet actually went out hunting -- and someone did die.
A second kind of sorcerer, the signadore, healed by lifting the curse of the Evil Eye.
The voceratrice -- a woman who could be from any walk of life -- sought out funerals at which she would sing the keening, death-drenched voceri, lamentations to placate the dead.
Such little-studied aspects of Corsican culture were still vital when they attracted Lady Rose here in 1948. She considers them akin to poetical imagination."In a highly developed country like England there is art, there is business, there is agriculture. ... It's all in different compartments.
"Art is something a few arty people do," she chuckles."But in Corsica the sense of art is diffused. Almost anybody can sing. A great many people can improvise verse to music, still."
Lady Rose came here with her late husband, Sir Francis Rose, a painter patronized by Gertrude Stein and other noted bohemians. Her life already had been rich. Raised as English gentry, she had discovered the joys of rambling while at a boarding school in Norfolk, which she recalls as"very cold, but enlightened." At Oxford University, she eloped with an Austrian baron, then went to Rhodesia to learn about her father, General Sir Frederick Carrington, who had helped Cecil Rhodes install British rule there.
Her aristocratic roots hardly show in her modest apartment. A manual typewriter, much used, sits on a wooden table in her living room, flanked by cases of books on Corsica and English poetry.
Among the books is her first, The Traveller's Eye. Published in 1947, it was a pioneering survey of English travel writers from Tudor times on.
She began to live the spirit of those narratives as soon as she arrived here. She roamed Corsica's forbidding terrain, alone, on foot, while her husband wandered the globe. Customs and hardships did not restrict her. In inland villages, she presented herself to parish priests, who directed her to local widows."I learned an awful lot in these widows' houses," she says."They poured out their life stories."
She heard men's stories, too."Those days, women didn't go about alone, they didn't go into cafes. But I just went and sat down. It was very rewarding. The men clustered round to ask who I was and what I was doing there. I explained, and they poured out all sorts of things to me. So I noted it all down."
She helped restore several"primitive, almost barbaric" statues at Filitosa, in the highland interior. The 5,000-year- old megaliths, most probably of venerated Corsican ancestors rather than gods, are the earliest examples of portraiture in western Europe.
She also learned about the mazzeri and their ilk.
Did she sense a kinship to these seers?
"No, just the opposite. I was brought up in the Church of England, and I was a rather old-fashioned rationalist."
For her various contributions, Lady Rose, whose title comes from her marriage to Sir Francis, a baronet, has been awarded the French Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and an honorary doctorate from the University of Corsica. In 1995, Queen Elizabeth awarded her the title of Member of the British Empire.
She continues to write. She says she will complete a book based on unpublished documents on Napoleon's youth,"if I have enough health and energy."
Then she will write a book of portraits of"very remarkable individuals I've met in Corsica, all women; there's this heroic streak." They include a Nazi-death-camp survivor who runs an anti-racist association and an aviator, a Corsican Beryl Markham.
The autobiography that cries out to be written will not be, Lady Rose says."I've been offered a good contract, but I can't."
Why not?"I can't let so many cats out of so many bags," she says."You can't have had such a varied life as I've had and not know something about the seamy side of life."
She smiles but volunteers no more. Perhaps, once she has finished her next two books, she will change her mind. Certainly, she has no intention of retiring.
The concept isn't one she likes, is it? She peers over her teacup."Not very keen on it, no."
Copyright © 1997 by The Chronicle of Higher Education
