Les Goddesses

A young Englishwoman named Mary Wollstonecraft lived by her wits and her pen. At thirty-four, Mary did not expect to marry, but she soon met an American adventurer named Gilbert Imlay and believed she’d found her soul mate. In love, they moved to Paris where they had a daughter, named Fanny.

But Gilbert began to travel more and more, and soon it became apparent he had a wandering eye as well. Heartbroken over this desertion, Mary drank laudanum. She survived, but within a matter of months was despondent again and jumped from a bridge into the Thames.

Miraculously she was rescued and nursed back to health by William Godwin, like Mary a political radical, to whom she quickly developed a strong attachment. Later married and happy, they read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther aloud together the night before she went into labor. Tragically, Mary died a few days after giving birth to a second daughter, also named Mary, who would be raised, along with Fanny, by William Godwin, who would remarry.

His new wife had a young child of her own, Claire, and the three girls grew up as sisters; they became known as Les Goddesses. When Mary was seventeen, a famous poet named Percy Bysshe Shelley came courting: he first paid favors to Fanny but quickly fell for Mary and the two eloped to the Continent, taking Claire with them.

Fanny, crestfallen, stayed behind and, like her mother, drank laudanum. The real story concerning the lives of these extraordinary women is filled with many paradoxes, and without a doubt it is more fantastic than any fiction.

*

Gray to Green

Sitting on the floor in sunlight and reading through eight small notebooks going back to 1998, looking for a phrase about Goethe: The stars above, the plants below. The thought is connected to Goethe’s mother and what she taught him about the natural world; more generally, it is about how people lived in constant relation to nature.

I never found the reference; it was something I had stumbled across on the internet, but it led me to The Flight to Italy, Goethe’s diary (recommended by Kafka, in his diary), in which G. abruptly takes leave of a turgid existence in Weimar and travels incognito to Italy for the first time in his life. He is thirty-seven years old, and the trip is a revelation and a creative renewal of mammoth proportions. He draws plants, collects rock samples, and begins to dress like the locals so as to pass and be better able to observe their customs. G. reports on the weather patterns (sublime clouds and sunsets); he develops a theory of precipitation involving the curious concept of “elasticity.” He looks at architecture and writes of his worshipful love of Palladio; he has a deep appreciation for Italian painting but rails against the squandering of genius and talent on the “senseless … stupid subjects” of Christianity.

JOHN OPIE, MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT, CA. 1797, OIL ON CANVAS, 30 1/4 X 25 1/4″. PUBLIC DOMAIN, VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS.

Because the diary is written quickly, informally, it feels uncannily contemporary. It is hard to believe this is a voice from the late eighteenth century. In addition to studying everything, G. takes a hard look at himself, and toward the end of the book there is a striking revelation: he confesses his “sickness and … foolishness,” his secret shame that he had never before made the trip to Italy to see firsthand its art and architecture, the objects of his lifelong fascination. Two days before arriving in Rome, he no longer takes off his clothes to sleep so as to hasten his arrival, and on October 26, 1786, he writes, “Next Sunday I’ll be sleeping in Rome after 30 years of wishing and hoping.”

The effusive diary abruptly goes silent: “I can say nothing now except I am here … Only now do I begin to live.” To his Weimar friends, he writes: “I’m here and at peace with myself, and, it seems, at peace with the whole of my life,” and to his lover, Charlotte von Stein: “I could spend years here without saying much.”

The Flight to Italy is filled with references to plants and crops; G. even has a theory of a “primal plant” form. The only star he mentions, though, is the sun.

*

The Real

Now it is a conflict between the idea of writing from the unknown versus working from notes and journals. Elsewhere, I have compared these different modes of writing to two genres in photography: the vérité approach of the street, seizing life and movement with little chance of reprise, and, in contrast, the controlled practice of the studio, where the artist is less exposed, the environment more forgiving, and time more malleable. And perhaps another iteration of this distinction between risk and control was intimated in something I heard a critic, quoting Godard, say on the radio when I lived in Paris in 2008: “Filmmakers who make installations instead of films are afraid of the real.”

In his six-hour documentary Phantom India, Louis Malle travels all over the subcontinent filming, and later, in voice-over, he analyzes and reflects on the intrusion and indiscretion of the camera. Malle will never get over this feeling of impropriety, but he will keep on shooting, hour after hour, pushing up against the act of documentary in an attempt to understand something about India and something about himself. Much of Phantom India is straight-up documentary, but there are moments of intense self-scrutiny and questioning, for instance when Malle describes his inability to be “present,” to experience the “real” of what is taking place before the camera.

He lives in his head, sometimes thinking of the past but mostly caught up in a work whose meaning will only be locked in at a future moment. To every new situation, his first instinct is to invoke memory and analysis: a scene on a beach at daybreak reminds him of another, twenty years earlier, when he was making his first film. “A tamer of time, a slave of time” is how Malle understands his predicament. At a certain point, he and his crew stop filming. Only then do they begin to experience the present tense, the slowness of time, and what Malle calls “the real.”

*

The Wet

Another problem for me now is the welling up of the “Wet,” the insistent preoccupation with narrating certain aspects of the discredited past, things I may never be ready to tell.

Previously I have incited myself to write by beginning with the most pressing thing, but the problem now is that I can’t face writing about the Wet. I think about giving it a masquerade, or perhaps the Wet will duly give way to something else.

This document parallels another one written from notes collected in diaries. That one is accompanied by the uneasy feeling of cannibalizing myself. This document, though not a book, is trying to begin according to a principle described by Marguerite Duras: “To be without a subject for a book, without any idea of a book, is to find yourself in front of a book. An immense void. An eventual book. In front of writing, live and naked, something terrible to surmount.” I wanted to try, almost as an experiment, to write both ways, one alongside the other in tandem, but already I’ve begun to fold in notes from that other document …

Was Duras opening her veins? Yes and no. She was also opening the bottle. But she would go at it—writing and drinking—for days and nights. She had stamina, as Susan Sontag would say. And she was not afraid of the Wet.

Rainer Werner Fassbinder: “The more honestly you put yourself into the story, the more that story will concern others as well.”

*

Mary

Mary Wollstonecraft, born in 1759, ten years after Goethe and two hundred years before my sister Claire, was Wet and Dry. She was a brilliant star in her firmament, a passionate, early advocate of women’s, children’s, and human rights and an enlightened defender of truth and justice: a radical. She went to Paris to witness the revolution and lived to tell of the bloody Terror of 1793/94. A woman with enormous intellectual capabilities and savoir faire, she supported herself, and at various times one or more of her largely hapless six siblings, by writing.

But she also suffered from depression, and, brokenhearted over the rejection by Imlay, drank laudanum. In an attempt to revive her, he offered a mission of travel to Scandinavia to investigate a murky business affair of his. Mary accepted because she needed the money and hoped that this continued involvement with Imlay might ensure a positive romantic outcome.

In 1795, she set out on a dangerous ocean voyage with her infant daughter, Fanny, and a French maid. Like Goethe on his travels to Italy, Wollstonecraft wrote letters to Imlay chronicling her observations and emotional responses to the landscape and peoples of Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. Her heartbreak is softly intimated in the letters, but mostly she reflects and reports with a journalist’s eye on the native customs: a featherbed so soft and deep it is like “sinking into the grave”; children swaddled in heavy, insalubrious layers of flannel; airless homes heated with stoves instead of fires—here, like Goethe, Mary invokes the odd concept of “elasticity” to talk about the air. Viewing the mummified remains of some nobles, she responds with characteristic indignation: “When I was shewn these human petrefactions, I shrunk back with disgust and horror. ‘Ashes to ashes!’ thought I—‘Dust to dust!’ ”

After her return home to England, Wollstonecraft composed the letters into an extremely well-received book titled Letters Written during a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark. It was published in 1796, two hundred years before the birth of my son, Barney.

*

Alison

Soon after I arrived in Paris, shaky with jet lag and insomnia, I asked Alison, my oldest friend, if she’d help me brainstorm. Bless her, she is always willing, and she is a font of ideas and strategies. I was struggling and fearful, convinced I’d do nothing of value in this city: I took a pill and drank a glass of wine on a cold terrace on the rue de Rivoli, and told Alison this:

I came to Paris in 1976 just out of high school. I was lonely, depressed, bored, illiterate. I was thin, I was fat, with no control over any of it. I was a Francophile with a deep longing to be part of the culture, but I was clueless, infused with teenage ideas about ‘the Romantic.’ A French friend told me emphatically: ‘The Romantic is the nineteenth century. End of story.’ I met the two Quebecois artists in the Cité Internationale des Arts studios. They were friendly but aloof. Thirty years later, I am back in Paris with a husband, a son, a life. I have one of those studios. I am thin. I have money. I have MS.

Alison’s eyes light up: “That is the perfect story.” But I have no idea how to write a story. About telling certain episodes of your past, Norman Mailer said: “You must be ready.” I may never be ready. Some excised paragraphs, the original motivation for this project, now reside in a separate document labeled “Pathography.”

Why does everyone want to tell their story? Why do all of my students talk about “representing memory”? Why is Amy, in grad school, suddenly conscious of her working-class roots, destabilized, and obsessed with her childhood? Why is my sister Jane tormented by the past and asking Mom to talk to her shrink? Why did I spend so much time in Paris, agoraphobic, brooding, tunneling into realms of childhood where I found pockets of it illuminated with sudden, violent flashes?

Isak Dinesen: “The reward of storytelling is to be able to let go … All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.”

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Siblings

At the end of my copy of Flight to Italy, there are short bios of all the principals in Goethe’s life. His mother, Katharina Elisabeth Goethe, is described as a very supportive woman, and there is a citation from Freud about G. having been his mother’s favorite and about how children singled out in this way retain a lifelong confidence and glow. 

This led me to Freud’s brief essay “A Childhood Recollection,” an analysis of an early memory G. recounts in his autobiography of throwing dishes out the window when he was a small child. The episode remained mysterious to Freud until, as is typical of his method, he began to hear similar stories from his patients and started to piece together a theory, namely that the throwing of objects out the window is typically linked to a child’s fury and jealousy in response to the arrival of a new baby. I strongly suspect I reacted just as violently or even more so to the births of my five younger siblings. A therapist explained this to me once and said I should practice self-forgiveness, but it took Freud’s words to cement the notion that my behavior was not a murderous aberration of childhood. A description of one of these cruel episodes of “acting out” has been excised and relegated to the “Pathography.”

Michael Haneke: “Artists don’t need shrinks because they can work it out in their work.”

But can we do without Freud?

*

Sharon & Gloria

I fell asleep in the afternoon and dreamed I was commiserating with Sharon Hayes about how a work, once finished, is “like a tombstone.” Gloria Naylor said this about her book The Women of Brewster Place: “I had gotten a bound copy of the book—which I really call a tombstone because that’s what it represents, at least for my part of the experience.”

The thing is only alive (and, by extension, I am only alive) while it is in process, and I’ve never quite figured out how to keep it ignited, moving. Some stubborn gene always threatens to flood the engine just at the crucial moment of shifting gears.

*

Mary and Mary

Like Goethe’s Flight, Wollstonecraft’s Letters, a narrative moderated by a journey, has a special, self-generating momentum: a trip, with its displacements in time and space, can be the perfect way to frame a story. Combine this with an epistolary address, and it would appear to be the most easeful of forms. Letters was the only happy outcome of the Scandinavian trip. Five months after her first suicide attempt, on confirmation that Imlay had a lover, Mary jumped from a bridge in rain-soaked clothing to hasten her descent. She was saved by a boatman and briefly consoled by Imlay, who shortly thereafter disappeared for good from the lives of Mary and Fanny. But M. W. was lucky to find a friend in the person of William Godwin, a sage man who, according to M. W. biographer Lyndall Gordon, counseled: “A disappointed woman should try to construct happiness ‘out of a set of materials within her reach.’ ”

A year later, in 1797, in love with Godwin, married, and pregnant, Mary read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther aloud with him.

The following night, she went into labor and gave birth to a child who would grow up to be Mary Shelley, whom she would soon leave motherless. The delivery was botched: the placenta did not descend, and a doctor’s unwashed hands reached into the womb to tear it out. Sepsis set in, the mother’s milk became infected, and puppies were used to draw off lactation. Two hundred years later, in 1997, less than six months after giving birth, I flew across North America with an electric pump to suction the milk from my breasts. 

But I missed my connection and arrived at my destination twelve hours later, my breasts grotesquely engorged. I took a photo in the hotel room and some years later published it in LTTR, a minutely circulating queer-feminist journal. Now that photo is all over the internet, completely out of my control.

Part of the tragic irony of M. W.’s death in childbirth was her own enlightened advocacy of simple hygiene and nonintervention in the care of infants and mothers; suspicious of doctors, she was a believer in wholesomeness and common sense in an age of superstition and quackery.

*

The Sun

Wollstonecraft and Goethe, both northerners from cold, rainy climates, enthuse repeatedly in their correspondences about the presence of sunshine. Goethe marveled to his friends about its perpetual abundance in Italy (“these skies, where all day long you don’t have to give a thought to your body”), and for Wollstonecraft in Scandinavia its effects are central to her evocation of the sublime, which she experiences in her travels along the rocky coast and mountainous landscapes of Sweden and Norway.

The warm reach of the sun was also surely a factor in granting each of them a measure of peace: for Goethe, when he arrives in Rome and no longer feels the need to double his life in writing (“I am here … Only now do I begin to live”), and for Wollstonecraft, during countless moments when nature impresses itself on her as the salve and renewal of an exhausted, disillusioned spirit. Waking on a ship one morning, she greets daybreak with these words: “I opened my bosom to the embraces of nature; and my soul rose to its author.” Two decades later, her daughter Mary Shelley would write from the banks of Lake Geneva: “When the sun bursts forth it is with a splendour and heat unknown in England.”

In 2004, in Needville, Texas, an asteroid was named for Mary Wollstonecraft (Minor Planet Center designation 90481 Wollstonecraft).

*

“Les Goddesses”

Aaron Burr, visiting England from America in 1812, bestowed this epithet on Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughters, Fanny and Mary, and their stepsister, Clara Mary Jane Clairmont, known then as Jane and later as Claire. Two years later, Mary, age seventeen, and Percy Bysshe Shelley eloped to France with Jane in tow; Fanny—with disastrous results—was not invited to join them. Lord Byron eventually formed part of the group, and together they lived an idyll of poetry, song, travel, and love, surviving on whatever money they could squeeze from Shelley’s father. On foot, atop a donkey, and by boat, they journeyed through parts of France, Switzerland, and Germany, keeping a collective diary subsequently published under the title History of a Six Weeks’ Tour. Nearly two hundred years later, I procured a facsimile edition of this book printed in New Delhi, no doubt downloaded from Google Books: the insides are a distant cousin of the original typeset, but the cover is a bright red design adorned with Islamic patterning. It is an utterly charming object, as is the prose it contains.

Eventually the Shelleys settled in Italy, where they wrote; read the classics, Rousseau, and Goethe; and Jane, in particular, studied music and languages. About Rome, Mary proclaimed: “[It] has such an effect on me that my past life before I saw it appears a blank & now I begin to live.” They existed like this for eight years, short of money, outcasts living in defiance of the rigid matrimonial conventions of the early nineteenth century. The ménage was not without its tensions and jealousies: Mary, pregnant and ill for much of the time, quickly began to find Jane (now Claire) an irritant. Claire was vivacious and talented, and though she could sometimes be dispatched, she would remain a resolute fixture of the Shelley circle. Mary began to use a little sun symbol in her diary to indicate Claire’s presence on any given day.

*

Jane

Mary Wollstonecraft’s parents, John Edward and Elizabeth, were married in 1756; their union produced seven children. Two hundred years later, my parents, James and Patricia, met in England and married in 1956. They also had seven children—six girls and one boy—beginning with Jane Elisabeth in 1957.

Prompted by a stay in rehab, my sister decided to write a memoir of her childhood and addiction. In an email, she told me: “I am in the process of teasing out an ending, but I’m now edging up to a very respectable 60,000 words, plenty to qualify for a book. Now, of course that the deed is nearing completion and I have set down once and for all a true record of what has happened (sorta, kinda), I am feeling somewhat uncertain.”

M. W. wrote of “the healing balm of sympathy [as the] medicine of life,” a concept Jane, an uncommonly sensitive and empathic person—always, since childhood—and now an amateur homeopath, would undoubtedly agree with. Jane reminds me of M. W. in some ways. A nurturing mother of three daughters, she is a strong and caring woman who, like M.W. at times, both keeps her distance from doctors and their drugs and is emotionally fragile, prone to depression and occasional rash behavior.

*

Fanny

Fanny, to whom Percy Shelley had first shown affection, was excluded from the Summer of Love. She had inherited her mother’s melancholic streak, and though she tried to combat the depressive feelings she was dogged by what she called: “Spleen. Indolence. Torpor. Ill-humour.” Fannykin, of whom Mary Wollstonecraft wrote in the Scandinavian Letters when her child was a babe, “I dread lest she should be forced to sacrifice her heart to her principles, or her principles to her heart,” succumbed to exactly that predicament of the nineteenth-century woman without means. Fearful of becoming a burden, Fanny drank laudanum as her mother had done, but unlike Mary, she was successful.

Young Mary’s bliss with Shelley was short-lived, as death began to intrude with frightening regularity. Of her four pregnancies, only one child, Percy Florence, survived. Claire’s daughter by Byron, Allegra, whom Byron callously separated from her mother, died at age five, alone in an Italian convent. Just prior, Claire had written heartbreakingly in her journal that recovering Allegra would be like “com[ing] back to the warm ease of life after the coldness and stiffness of the grave.” Shelley’s first wife, Harriet, in an advanced state of pregnancy, drowned herself in 1816, and, eight years into his relationship with Mary, Shelley himself drowned in a boating accident on the Gulf of La Spezia off the coast of Pisa with their close friend Edward Williams. Byron, who’d committed himself to a war of independence in Greece, died two years later in Missolonghi of fever.

*

James and Patricia

In 1975, my father, James, age forty-five, fell from the roof of our house one Saturday morning in August and never regained consciousness. I had just turned seventeen, the same age as Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin when she eloped to France with Percy Bysshe Shelley and Jane Clairmont. My mother, Patricia, retreated to the top of our big box of a house and all hell broke loose below. 

The Davey girls were not writing poetry, studying Greek and Latin, and procreating; we were listening to David Bowie, Roxy Music, and the Clash, and ingesting too many drugs. Interviewed by a journalist friend about our active sex lives at the time, my mother responded ruefully: “I’d mind less if I thought they enjoyed it more.” It was a different time and different kind of rebellion; nonetheless, many thought of us as a female force—goddesses, no, but “Amazonian,” yes, to be reckoned with. And that is what I tried to show in a series of portraits I took in Ottawa and Montreal beginning around 1980. “Les jeunes filles en fleur” was another expression used by the same journalist friend to describe some of us, but that came later, after we’d settled down a bit.

*

Claire and Kate

Claire Davey, small and taut, and the only one among us who did not regularly swell and shrink, never succumbed to intoxicants or liquor. And she never threw herself at men, as did some of her sisters, as did Claire Clairmont with Byron. Temperate, she traveled, she studied; now she teaches philosophy and yoga to high school students in Toronto. Kate, born a year and a half after Claire, in 1961, two hundred years after Mary’s brother Henry Wollstonecraft, was the fearless party girl, drinking and inhaling pills until she passed out. Kate never “recovered” into anything resembling normalcy. Multiple stays in rehab would eventually lead to a lifetime of AA, NA, OA. Intelligent, sensitive, she opted out. She read every novel on my mother’s bookshelves and filled the house with rescued animals. Some of the original five cats and four dogs have passed on, but the smells linger to remind us of nineteen-year-old, blind, incontinent Candy and gentle, gormless, clubfooted Duke, found on a reservation.

*

Claire

Of the Shelley entourage, only Mary, her son Percy, and Claire Clairmont lived beyond their thirties. At the dissolution of their circle, Claire joined her brother in Vienna and began to work as a teacher, but she was hounded out of this employment by the lingering scandal of her youth and forced to migrate as far as Moscow, where she became a governess. Her journal, a penetrating literary document, was published a century later; an old woman, she eventually settled in Florence with her niece Paola and became the model for Henry James’s story “The Aspern Papers.”

*

Mary and Percy

Widowed, Mary Shelley was at the mercy of her tyrannical and conservative father-in-law, a man who had never accepted his son’s poetic gift, nor his marriage to Mary. After editing a posthumous collection of Shelley’s work in 1824, Mary was forbidden by the patriarch from publishing any more of Shelley’s poetry or even writing about him, lest it shame the family, thus forcing her into a conventional lifestyle for the sake of her son and his inheritance, small sums of which were parsed out to them while Shelley senior lived on and on, defying all expectations of his demise.

According to Muriel Spark, Percy Florence inherited none of his parents’ literary or artistic talent and refused to visit art museums with his mother when they traveled in Europe. Although he was a disappointment to Mary, she later grew to appreciate what Spark termed his “phlegmatic qualities.” Percy was “to remain loyally and negatively by [Mary’s] side to sustain her old age.” He married Jane Gibson, a sympathetic woman who became Mary’s friend and caretaker during her final illness at age fifty-three. Percy and Jane did not have children.

*

Barney

Age thirteen, Barney does not like art museums either—he says they instantly make him feel sleepy. He told me, “An ideal way to spend the day would be to drive to an airport and watch the planes take off and land.”

*

Tautology

I learned the meaning of this from Baudelaire via Barthes: “I take H [hashish] in order to be free. But in order to take H I must already be free.” And from Alejandra Pizarnik: “To not eat I must be happy. And I cannot be happy if I am fat.” This comes close to summing up my adolescence.

*

Homeopathy

In November 2010, on the recommendation of my sister Jane, I traveled to Montreal to visit Dr. Saine, a famous homeopath, a man who, like his father before him, had treated thousands of people with MS. I sat with him in his Dickensian study, surrounded by stacks of paper and books, some framing white busts—no doubt Dr. Saine’s predecessors, the discoverers of this strange and mystical science. He interviewed me for three and a half hours about symptoms, cravings, fears, and dreams.

He felt my frozen feet and lit a fire, burning a cube of oak. “How do you feel when you see a poor person? On a scale of one to ten, how much do you fear poverty? Cancer? Death?” “How do you feel when you are with your son and your husband enters the room?” And on and on. “Is there anything you haven’t told me about yourself?” I told as much as I could, including some of the bad and shameful memories from the “Pathography” (because you have to), but the long interview was tiring, and my fragmented story came out rather flat and monotone. He received it all without judgment, indeed, with a high degree of curiosity, almost excitement.

He said my case was unusual—perhaps my parental influences were too strong, too dominant, neither one giving way—and this left him torn between two antidotes. I departed with two tiny glass vials, coincidently each substance related to photography: sepia, which is a dye used to tone photographic prints, and lycopodium, the spores of club mosses that were ground into combustible powder and ignited in the era before flashbulbs.

*

Being

“To do without people is for photography the most impossible of renunciations,” wrote Walter Benjamin. Yet that abandonment is precisely what would begin to take place in my photographs over the next ten years, beginning in 1984, until my subjects constituted little more than the dust on my bookshelves or the view under the bed. The burden of image theft, as Louis Malle put it, had something to do with my retreat, but also a gradual seeping in of a kind of biographical reticence, perhaps connected to my present reservations around telling my story (“Pathography”).

I, too, ingested excessive substances in decades two and three, and one result is that I can barely keep track of the analogies I’ve posited, from Duras’s “immense void” and the unscripted of vérité, between rehearsed writing (from journals) and photographic mise-en-scène. And what is meant by “the real” in the pronouncements of Malle and Godard (“Filmmakers who make installations instead of films are afraid of the real”)? For Godard, the real is about confrontation and risk in time-based media, the old-fashioned way, no props allowed. Malle uses the term to describe a state of “being” to which he accedes when he finally stops filming in India; it is about experiencing a kind of existential peace, a freedom from the need to be making something. But he can only enjoy the feeling because he has worked very hard for it.

*

The Green and the Wet

Over the years, I’ve brushed up against a peculiar sensation of “being,” usually in green places where water infuses the air: in a marshy field in England crisscrossed by canals; on the tiny, narrow peninsula of pine-choked soil that is Provincetown, in fall or winter. Something about the “elasticity” of the air infuses “the elasticity of my spirits” and allows me to enter an unusual state of weightlessness, an intense and rare feeling of well-being.

Displacement in space, and the attendant fatigue of travel, must be contributing factors to this febrile state, not unrelated to Stendhal syndrome, which had its origins in Florence in 1817. Stendhal noted this phenomenon in Italy just one year before Claire Clairmont and the Shelley party found themselves climbing the ruins of the Colosseum on their nightly walks through Rome. Goethe, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Shelleys were all weary travelers—M. W. had recently given birth, and Mary Shelley, her daughter, was more or less pregnant for five years. They both had very young children in tow; they were exhausted. In early 1997, sleep-deprived, I walked through the snow-covered woods of Provincetown with infant Barney strapped to my chest. I needed to move at all costs; I craved something mind-altering.

*

Sepia Days

Mary Shelley died in 1851 and Claire Clairmont in 1879, but no photographs of them seem to exist, at least on the web; there is a photographic oval of Percy Florence Shelley as an older man—he looks a bit like Freud.

In his essay “A Little History of Photography,” Walter Benjamin cites Goethe, apropos of August Sander: “There is a delicate empiricism which so intimately involves itself with the object that it becomes true theory.” Mary Wollstonecraft and Goethe were just pre-photography, Goethe by only seven years. Their travel writings have the vividness and spontaneity of snapshots, and Goethe’s phrases and sketches, in particular, feel startlingly modern. It is not a stretch to imagine that Goethe, with his scientific mind, might have anticipated the nascent technology: it was “in the air,” after all, long before 1839.

The close observation that Goethe championed and was his means to knowledge, to “true theory,” was precisely the promise held out for photography for many, many decades, perhaps a hundred thirty years if we count up through the late 1970s. And that is when I started taking pictures, at the very moment when the truth claims of the photograph were being dismantled by theory. That moment of the “Discourse of Others” has passed or shifted, but it marked me, changed for good the way I work.

When I wrote about “being” four years ago, it was under the tapering effect of steroids. Now I take drugs that make me sleep. But this morning I woke early with precisely the idea of writing these lines and taking a picture of the rising sun reflected off the giant apartment building in the distance. Up at seven for the first time in … ? Photograph gleaming building—my old habit from when I’d wake with the sun.

*

Coda

On the subway downtown to the New York Public Library in search of Mary Shelley’s diaries, I began to notice subway riders absorbed in writing of their own: a woman paying her bills, another marking pages on which the word draft is stamped in large letters. Some are standing, precariously balancing pads and pens on crowded trains; others look off into space, lost in concentration. There is a man folded over his crossword, whom I captured in the same pose on more than one day, and children doing their homework. A woman wearing orange velvet gloves clutches a small yellow pencil.

Just when I’d been writing about the disappearance of the figure from my photographs, I found myself taking street pictures again in the dim green light of the Manhattan subway. I experienced the same unease and doubt I’ve always had in taking pictures on the street, and I kept expecting to be asked what I was doing. But the writers themselves, eyes downcast, were unaware of my camera, and those looking on, over my own shoulder even, seem only mildly surprised by the small point-and-shoot, a note taker itself, recording the underground writers as we ride.

(Source: The Paris Review)

More than just a lesbian love story

“Shameless” and “unpublishable”—this was the reaction of her publishers when the Dutch writer Dola de Jong first submitted her novel The Tree and the Vine (De Thuiswacht) in 1950. Four years later, it made it into print, thanks in large part to the backing of prominent literary figures such as the Dutch poet Leo Vroman and the Belgian writer Marnix Gijsen, both European exiles living in America (as was de Jong by this point in her life). She also had the support of renowned New York editor Maxwell Perkins, the man who’d discovered both F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, and who’d published de Jong’s And the Field is the World (1945), the story of a young Jewish couple who flee the Netherlands for Morocco on the eve of the Second World War.

What made The Tree and the Vine so shocking was its candid depiction of queer desire. It follows two young women in Nazi-occupied Amsterdam in the late thirties: Erica, a rash and impatient fledgling journalist who doesn’t live by anyone else’s rules, and the much more guarded, inhibited Bea, the narrator of the tale. De Jong’s publisher’s concerns were predictable. A bold and groundbreaking work, The Tree and the Vine caused a stir, both in Holland when it was first published, and then later again when it was translated, by Ilona Kinzer, into English and American editions, in 1961 and 1963 respectively. Though it clearly struck a chord with many readers—de Jong, it was said, received piles of fan mail from married women who questioned their life choices after reading it—its nuances were lost on many. As Lillian Faderman explains in her afterword to the Feminist Press’s 1996 reprint, a reviewer writing in The Statesman and Nation (May 12, 1961) was “unable to appreciate the book’s subtleties and larger meanings.” A new translation, by Kristen Gehrman, published this month by Transit Books, hopes to appeal to a broader readership today. As Gehrman argues, it’s a novel that deserves to be appreciated as something more than just a tale of war, or a lesbian romance.

Though the Statesman and Nation’s reviewer describes the novel as a portrait of “exotic vice,” “compulsive sin,” and “sexual pervert[s],” by today’s standards, de Jong’s depiction of lesbian love really couldn’t be any tamer. This is not a book that titillates; its emphasis instead is on the pain and damage caused by repressed desire. Although they have their more theatrical moments, on the whole Erica and Bea are far from histrionic. As Faderman reminds us, though, the reviewer is using “cliché terms […] characteristic of cover copy for the lesbian pulps of the era.”

Which is not to say that de Jong was unaware of that genre. Faderman continues by explaining that although the “quality and seriousness” of The Tree and the Vine far transcends its pulpier cousins, this doesn’t mean it’s immune to the broader influences of the period. Certain elements of the novel capture the flavor of those more sensationalist volumes. De Jong depicts the darker, dangerous side of the world of same-sex desire, and the way it’s a source of torment—physical and psychological—for those who exist within it. 

It is also a potent source of self-hatred, and de Jong pathologizes Erica’s lesbianism with the suggestion that it can be traced back to the problematic relationship she has with her mother. Reading the novel made me think of Yelena Moskovich’s description in her 2018 essay for the Daily, “Hunting for a Lesbian Canon,” of the first lesbian pulp “accidental best seller”: Tereska Torrès’s Women’s Barracks (1950), “a fictionalized autobiographical account of [Torrès’s] wartime service in London for the women’s division of the Free French forces, where we follow a barracks full of young women navigating identity, love, and politics amid their French Resistance duties.” Erica—who in the early days of the Nazi occupation joins the Dutch resistance, as courageous in her politics as she is in her love life—wouldn’t be out of place amongst Torrès’s protagonists.

Bea and Erica meet in 1938, and the events of the novel play out in parallel to the storm clouds of war amassing across Europe. The terrible specificity of the historical context is, however, much more than circumstantial. The menacing backdrop to the psychosexual drama has an important hand in shaping Bea’s character development, transforming her from a rather unlikeable, mousey wallflower into a woman of action, one prepared to do anything she can to try to save the life of the woman she loves, even while she refuses to admit to herself what’s driving her. This is where the true brilliance of the novel lies: in de Jong’s impressive and nimble rendering of Bea’s inner conflicts and complexities.

*

Bea first meets Erica at the home of a mutual acquaintance. She’s instantly attracted to this captivating young woman who looks “like a boy in need of a haircut.” Only a month later, the two women move in together. They rent an apartment on the Prinsengracht, one of Amsterdam’s three main canals. It is not a romantic arrangement; they’re just roommates. They have separate bedrooms, and a mutual understanding that they “each lead their own lives.” All the same, their relationship quickly slips into one of jittery codependence. Bea—who has few friends compared to the much more boisterous and sociable Erica—takes on the role of the other woman’s “benefactor.” Erica, for example, brings no bed with her, claiming she can just as comfortably sleep on a pile of blankets on the floor. Bea is shocked, so she buys her friend a bed for her birthday, an act of generosity that sets a dangerous precedent, not least because Erica is a spendthrift while Bea is much more prudent with her earnings.

We, along with Bea, come to experience Erica’s mood swings: how she fluctuates from one minute to the next between intensity and apathy, outbursts of passion and activity followed by periods of introspection and lethargy. Shades of the wild, destructive Robin Vote from Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936) abound. Although Bea initially struggles to understand the source of her friend’s restlessness, she at least comprehends that it is “something deeper inside” Erica than ordinary, everyday frustrations, “something to do with her actual being.”

When the two take a summer holiday together in Paris, Erica is revealed at her best and her worst. Initially, she’s in her element, carefree and without responsibilities, soaking up every last detail of Parisian life:

During those four days in Paris, she threw ballast overboard and sounded the foghorn for the first time. She cut the anchor and cruised through Paris like a young pirate, the wind in her sails.

The two women’s idyll is shattered, however, when they meet Judy, a loud and uninhibited American with whom Erica becomes instantly “fascinated.” Bea unhappily finds herself relegated to a third wheel, but the speedy intimacy between the other two is tense. Erica and Judy behave “like two little girls—one minute they were hitting and scratching each other and the next they were wrapped in each other’s arms and sharing their deepest secrets, promising to be friends forever.”

Bea claims to not understand what couldn’t be any more glaringly obvious to the reader—as Faderman suggests, Bea’s lack of self-knowledge “forces the reader into the interesting role of analyst,” and with this, our focus shifts from Erica to Bea. The fierce heat of her anger at being frozen out suggests that her jealousy is more than that of just a friend. She’s like Martha Dobie in Lillian Hellman’s The Children’s Hour (1934), willing her feelings toward her friend to be nothing more than platonic in a desperate attempt to fool herself.

The narration is given in retrospect, Bea looking back on her and Erica’s entanglement a decade and a half after the fact (the date given for Bea’s manuscript is 1954), and yet, in relating the events as they played out at the time, Bea presents herself as a gloriously unreliable narrator. She’s not only slow to pick up on Erica’s sexual attraction to women (herself included) but slower still to admit to the taboo desire this unleashes within her. It isn’t hindsight alone that allows her to reassess the past. “For a long time,” she writes at the beginning of the novel, “I saw myself as an innocent bystander, but now I know that I changed my course for Erica. Whether my life would’ve been better or happier without her—who knows. I certainly don’t.” There’s a hefty dose of self-deception thrown in here, too. 

Yet like anyone in denial, she can’t help but give herself away, especially when describing her awkwardness with her then boyfriend, how torn she was between him and Erica. “In my life, men have always been like shadows waiting in the wings. There was never room for them on stage because Erica held the spotlight,” she can only now confess.

When, eventually, the tension between the two women reaches a crescendo, culminating in a desperate explosion from Erica, “of anger, hate, and disappointment,” the supposedly naive Bea protests her ignorance. “She accused me of misleading her, of driving her to confess, of letting her have her way and then humiliating her with my rejection. There was nothing for me to say. 

How innocent, no, how blind and stupid I’d been.” This episode, which occurs about two-thirds through the novel, marks a sharp shift in perspective. With Erica’s true identity out in the open, and with it her feelings for Bea, it becomes apparent that, however unpredictable her behavior has been, it’s actually Bea’s obsession with Erica that’s the more unruly force at work. Erica, at least, acknowledges who she is—“She resigned herself to a nature that couldn’t be changed, accepted the consequences and enjoyed her life”—whereas Bea, tightly trussed up in the societal norms of the era, is too ashamed to do the same. “I didn’t dare disturb the dark craters of my soul,” she confesses retrospectively. “I’d simply bought myself peace of mind by ignoring who I was.”

Reconciled, albeit uneasily so, as Hitler’s troops march ever closer, Bea becomes increasingly afraid for Erica’s safety. Erica’s birth father, whom Erica never knew, is revealed to Erica to have been Jewish, which means that under the Nazi classifications, she’d be labeled “bastard Jew I” and thus “would likely suffer the same fate as the ‘real’ Jews.” In unexpectedly thrusting Jewishness upon Erica—“It’s crazy, Bea! Now I’m suddenly a Jewess,” she exclaims, shaking her head “in disbelief and half-amused despair”—de Jong cleverly draws parallels between sexual and racial identities. Both are revealed to be arbitrary, and yet horrifyingly all-determining. Despite Bea’s best efforts to save her, in tandem with so very many of the country’s Jewish citizens, Erica rushes headlong toward tragedy.

*

The Tree and the Vine is not autobiographical, but de Jong did draw on her own lived experience when it came to the accumulating fear, the “anxiety and doubt” that plagued Amsterdam’s Jewish residents as they learned about “the misery of the Jews under the Nazi regime” elsewhere in Europe. Attuned, as Bea is, to this danger, de Jong fled the Netherlands for the safety of North Africa in 1940, only weeks before the Nazi invasion. Although she tried to convince her father, her stepmother and her brother to accompany her, they refused to leave. They were murdered by the Nazis not long after.

In Tangier, de Jong married the Dutch artist Jan Hoowij, and supported herself teaching children ballet—she’d studied dance in both the Netherlands and England, and had performed for eight years with the Royal Dutch Ballet. The couple emigrated to America in 1941, and became U.S. citizens six years later. After she and Hoowij divorced, she made a second marriage to the American writer Robert H. Joseph.

In America, she wrote and published books in both Dutch and English, earning particular acclaim as a mystery writer—she won the Edgar Allan Poe Award for her 1964 novel The Whirligig of Time. She also worked as a reader of Dutch literature for New York publishers, and was responsible for the English edition of The Diary of Anne Frank, among other well-known Dutch titles in translation.

The prominent readers and writers who admired The Tree and the Vine from the get-go were able to see beyond its then-provocative subject matter to the virtuosity of the novel itself. Gijsen, for example, described it as “an important and remarkable book—and not because it addresses a delicate problem with so much understanding, that’s just the starting point. I’m more in awe of the finesse with which Dola de Jong sketches her two main characters.” 

This was praise echoed by V. S. Naipaul, who astutely recognized that Bea was the beating heart of the novel. “De Jong makes her narrator a real person,” he wrote in his review of the first English translation in The Listener, “the plain woman over thirty, who does not want to recognize her nature and has brief, dutiful, joyless affairs with men. Therefore, she is always lonely; her little affections and pleasures will never change that. She is not aware of the barrenness of her existence. This silence, this refusal to see, is very touching, and is delicately rendered.” As Gehrman argues today, in the translator’s note at the end of the recent reissue, The Tree and the Vine is a story that’s also “reflective of the broader female experience,” a rich and poignant tale that she hopes will move every reader and “push them to think about their own inner worlds and those of the women they love.”

(Source: The Paris Review)

'I left my campervan in Argentina'

Imagine breaking free. You sell your possessions, buy a van, pack it with what you need, and go. For months or years you live a frugal life, going wherever you want. But for thousands who made this dream a reality, coronavirus brought them to a sudden halt, writes Paula Dear, and left them stranded with a van and a vanload of kit on the far side of the world.

For Radka and Ivar the plan began to form when they met in 2016. Both working as personal carers for a disabled man in Trondheim, central Norway, they would cross paths as she finished the night shift and he took over for the day.

"We met for like five minutes, to change the shift. I was very charming in the morning," jokes Radka.

RADKA AND IVAR

"And then you would stay for breakfast sometimes," Ivar adds.

Radka was the more experienced traveller. She had previously hitchhiked from Russia to south-east Asia and was preparing to do the same from Argentina to Alaska. But after falling in love with Ivar, who was in the process of retraining as a nurse, she faced a dilemma.

"There were lots of conversations. I said, 'You have to promise me that once you're done studying you'll go with me.' It was a deal-breaker, and Ivar adopted my dream very quickly!" she says.

In the meantime, Radka took a six-week trip to Patagonia with a friend, and at one point hitched a lift with a woman called Silvia from Ushuaia in Argentina, the world's southernmost city. They stayed in touch, and three years later this would turn out to be a critical stroke of luck.

Radka and Ivar's plan slowly morphed from backpacking to travelling the Americas by van, and they picked up a second-hand Toyota Hiace. With help from Radka's dad, they built a basic bed and kitchen in the back, and storage for their gear - including climbing and freediving equipment, bicycles and an inflatable canoe.

"We needed a van because Ivar has a shedload of sports stuff," says Radka. "But also it's the freedom of it. When we are inside the van, with gas for two months and food for several weeks, we can be totally off grid. We thought it would be great to have comfort and the ability to drive wherever we want."

RADKA AND IVAR

Ivar, who'd previously been a climbing instructor, studied hard for his nursing degree and they worked "every single job that came our way" to save money, says Radka, who would often finish a nightshift and go on to do cleaning jobs before having four hours off ahead of the next nightshift.

She developed terrible sleeping problems, she says: "I burnt out and made myself ill. But I did it because I had a dream, and I wanted to make it come true."

In the flurry of preparations, they were still making last-minute modifications to the van on the day they drove it to the port in Germany for its voyage across the Atlantic and through the Panama Canal to Chile.

Six weeks later, in early January they were in San Antonio to collect it and begin their epic journey. It was the height of summer and their plan was to loop down at a leisurely pace to the southern tip of Argentina - the symbolic start of their one-to-two year trip - and then drive north, all the way to Alaska.

So, stopping frequently, they slowly headed south, enjoying hikes in the Chilean island of Chiloé and Argentinian trekking hub of El Chaltén, and a trip to the 5km-wide Perito Moreno glacier. Camping out in nature soon started to smooth out Radka's erratic sleeping patterns.

El Chaltén was "absolutely amazing", says Radka, who had long fantasised about photographing the famous fiery reds and burnt oranges and yellows of the Patagonian autumn, which by this time was already beginning.

"But the weather forecast was bad, so we said, 'Let's go to Ushuaia and when we come back this way it's going to be even nicer colours,'" Ivar says.

By this stage they were hearing reports of Covid lockdowns in Europe, but were reassured by friends in Argentina and Chile that similar moves seemed unlikely there.

"We were discussing whether we should go to Ushuaia or not, because it's locked in with a Chilean part above it. But there really wasn't any news, and when we asked people they said it was just recommended to wash your hands, no more. So we decided to go. And then it all happened really quickly and we couldn't get back out," says Ivar.

RADKA AND IVAR

Hours after they arrived on 15 March, the borders unexpectedly closed, trapping them on the Argentinian side of Tierra del Fuego island, which can only be exited via a Chilean ferry.

With people being ordered to stay at home or in hotels they decided to drive out of the city and wait out the initial 14-day lockdown in their van. As camping was banned, they had to conceal their plans from the police when they encountered a checkpoint at the edge of Ushuaia. An hour north, at a forest lake called Laguna Margarita, they found a spot to wild-camp.

"We were afraid someone would see us and report us. But we were really deep in the woods, and nobody came," says Ivar.

When the weather allowed, they paddled on the lake or went running. Ivar taught Radka how to rope-climb in the trees. It was tough going at times, too. The wind and rain often forced them inside and there wasn't enough sun to replenish their solar-generated electricity. On day two they ran out of cooking gas, and they were washing in near-freezing water.

But they weren't too worried. Once the two-week confinement was over, they would return to El Chaltén and wait out the crisis - they could happily spend months hiking in the national park's mountains. The lack of gas, however, forced them to drive back towards Ushuaia, and when they picked up a phone signal again it became obvious the crisis was deepening. 

National parks had closed. They read increasingly desperate reports from fellow nomads on Facebook forums.

Moreover, they were "really afraid" they would get into trouble from the police for camping in the car during lockdown. 

"We didn't know how to explain where we'd been for those two weeks, or where we were going," says Radka. She messaged Silvia, the woman who had given her a ride in 2016. Could she vouch for them or provide an address?

En route back to Ushuaia they hit a police checkpoint.

"They were filming us and the car, asking where we had been, where we were going. We tried to tell them we'd been camping but we don't speak good Spanish. I'm not sure they understood," says Ivar.

"We were so stressed we then took off in the wrong direction. When we turned back we were met by two police cars with sirens."

The officers weren't pleased.

"They said they would escort us to our hostel in Ushuaia. They didn't realise we didn't have one."

On the way Radka tried Silvia again, and luckily she responded. Within the half-hour drive she had secured them a friend's rental apartment, and they were escorted right to the door by the police.

RADKA AND IVAR

Two weeks of lockdown in the apartment followed. It was much like those seen elsewhere, with trips to the supermarket or pharmacy allowed, and little else.

"For the first few days we felt OK, binge-watching TV series, enjoying hot showers. But we started to realise this was not going to be a situation for a couple of weeks, and that we really couldn't afford to pay for accommodation for up to six months, because even if they then opened the borders, we'd be out of money. We were quickly getting more and more tired and depressed, and I started having problems sleeping again," says Radka, tearfully.

"When you are at home, I imagine you find things to keep yourself busy - clean or paint or bake, whatever. But being in a foreign flat in a foreign country where you were not planning to stay, it's maybe different," says Radka. "You can't focus on doing something new. You spend your day researching every desperate possibility to get out of there. We were even looking at whether it was possible to sail across the ocean! And when each one is a dead end it feels like such a waste of energy and motivation."

Ivar adds: "It's like waiting in a bus stop, when you don't know exactly when you're going to leave and it's not the place you want to be."

But the decision to leave wasn't straightforward. It slowly crept up on them, says Ivar: "It kind of evolved from possibly going home because it's going to be boring to wait, to realising if we stay three of four more months our well-being might suffer."

When Radka received an SMS from the embassy to say there were repatriation flights from the capital, Buenos Aires, she felt an irresistible pull homewards.

"I felt a bit like a failure when I started to consider going back. We have friends who are staying. It was like we were giving up. But everybody's situation is different."

Radka and Ivar are part of a sizeable community of people who travel and live in vehicles for months or years at a time - sometimes permanently - and are known as "overlanders" or "vanlifers". Some work as they go along, or stop for a while to volunteer, others have already retired. Ask them to #stayathome and, well, it can be a bit complicated. Where?

You might think that as they are equipped to live off-grid, they would be fine during lockdown. In reality, their lifestyle choice depends on the ability to move around, camp, and access services like water, power, gas and toilets. With regional and national borders closed, most campsites shut and wild camping banned, "outsiders" being discouraged in many areas, and bureaucratic headaches over visas and complicated vehicle permits, thousands of travellers around the world are either trapped or having to abandon their homes on wheels and return "home".

In some ways, Covid-19 has been like a game of musical chairs for overlanders, who have found themselves in varying situations depending on where they happened to be when the music stopped.

Around 10,000km north of Ushuaia, in the Colombian city of Medellín, Berliners Anne and Martin are living in their VW Westfalia camper in the driveway of a hostel, where they can use the toilets and showers. That wouldn't be allowed in many places under lockdown but they happened to be staying there while fixing some mechanical issues, when the crisis began. The owners allowed them to stay and they decided to sit it out in their van.

Anne and Martin when the going was good. Anne And Martin

"For us there was never a question of leaving the van behind," says Anne.

"We also didn't really see the point of returning back to Europe as the number of infected people was much higher than here. We don't have a home, as we moved out of our apartment and sold all our belongings. We could stay at our parents' places but, in our mid-30s, it's not really our goal.

"The days are getting really long and repetitive. We are safe and healthy, but we are stuck. We miss being on the road," she says.

Radka and Ivar missed it too, but they couldn't see a light at the end of the tunnel. Luckily, the airport in Ushuaia re-opened and they booked a flight to Buenos Aires. The van and their gear would have to stay behind. But with strict rules in most countries, including Argentina, about how long a foreign-plated car can remain there, they had just one day to work out the logistics and find a place to park it. Again, through Silvia's network they managed to secure written permission from a resident who would allow the van to be parked at his house, and a letter from the customs authorities enabling them to leave it behind until the crisis is over.

"It was a stressful day. We really hope that everything is OK with the papers," says Ivar. "It's incredible how it worked out, although when we parked the van and left it there I was nervous about handing the keys over because we had never met the guy. There's a part of us that's afraid we won't see the van again. Maybe we'll show up and they'll be like, 'What car?!'"

Radka on the journey south, in Los Glaciares national park. RADKA AND IVAR

After they arrived in Buenos Aires, their repatriation flight was refused permission to fly. Just before the next flight, a week later, they were told they hadn't made the list. For nearly three weeks the couple waited in a cheap hostel room in the city, feeling increasingly despondent. They started to question whether they really would get out. Finally, on 7 May, they boarded a Norwegian Air flight to Oslo, costing them €1,300.

Back in Norway, they had to complete 10 days of quarantine, but were lucky to have access to a rural family cabin, where they sat it out in peace.

"We have gone through all the emotions… but right now we're just really happy to be back in Norway," says Ivar.

"On a scale of one to 10, the disappointment is 11," says Radka.

"The longer we stayed and the worse I felt, I said 'OK I admit it, I can't imagine spending another four months like this, so I'm willing to spend some of our savings on going home to Norway where people have a bit more freedom.' I was going crazy."

The self-confessed pessimist of the pair, she worries about whether they can gather the funds to return to Argentina and, if they do, whether tourists will still be welcomed under the "new normal".

"And I feel like we have lost time. If we start the trip again in, say, January, that was a time when we were supposed to be somewhere else [in our life]. I have a hard time letting go."

A few months in Norway will give them some perspective, says Ivar.

"We would have felt worse if it was something that we should have seen coming. I think we did everything we could, and I am at peace with that. I feel like we're pretty lucky compared with many other people. I know we will continue the journey."

'Our car is in Tanzania: we could be fined €1,400'

Many overlanders who have abandoned their vehicles are risking penalties, from fines to confiscation, for failing to drive their van out of the country by the time agreed when they entered. When you drive into a country you usually temporarily import the vehicle for a fixed period, after which penalties begin to be imposed.

ARMIN AND TANJA

Armin and Tanja, from Germany, were driving their 2004 Mitsubishi camper through Tanzania, as part of a planned two-year trip through the Balkans, Africa and South America, when the pandemic struck. Initially hoping to stick it out, they eventually decided to take one of the last repatriation flights out.

"We found a place to store the car safely on private ground. If we hadn't have found that place we definitely would not have left our camper behind," says Armin.

Their carnet de passage - a type of vehicle permit that has a cash deposit related to the value of the car - will expire in June. Attempts to arrange special dispensation with the customs authorities before they left were unsuccessful, and they have so far been unable to get hold of the right people in Tanzania to help them.

ARMIN AND TANJA

"The penalty for an expired carnet in Tanzania would be €1,400 in our case, as it is 20% of the carnet car value. We are lucky that we have quite an old car but still we hope to get out of this without paying. We will ask for a flexible solution," says Armin.

The delay has caused them to cut out the South America leg of their world trip, but they hope to return to Africa by September.

Read Radka and Ivar's blog here.

(Source: BBC)