The Cruise of the Vanadis

Rating:
Summary: Enchanted by the brightness
Review: How quietly The Cruise of the Vanadis glides into its place among the spring books. Even the foreword by Louis Auchincloss stops short of calling this first American appearance of an early travel diary of Edith Wharton's a literary event. Yet I can't remember seeing a book to compare with this in many years, a book of worldly pleasure-seeking and benign wonder.

In 1888 Wharton said, "I would give anything in the world to make a cruise in the Mediterranean." She said it to the right person; the result was the steam-yacht Vanadis, 167 feet (more than twice the length of Columbus's Santa Maria), 333 tons, with a crew of sixteen, chartered by her friend for a trip of three months. Wharton was only twenty-six when she, her husband and the friend steamed off to visit the art and architecture of the Mediterranean world.

Seeing her journal of the cruise more than a century later, the photographer Jonas Dovydenas decided to retrace the path of the Vanadis. His images are more than an accompaniment to the journal; they form a second work of art, purer and dreamier than the cool lessons of the novelist-to-be, which are striking as an early but fully -formed manifestation of her style.

The Americans wandered from port to port, waited on wherever they alighted by "the amiable innkeeper and the donkey man," or the mayor, or the "Maltese factotum" who supplied the yacht with coal and water and ferried them to and fro, in addition to changing money, interpreting, hiring carriages and "buying everything from lace to Opera tickets"-an interesting thought for those of us who buy our lace and opera tickets with an ATM card. Yes, Wharton can be queenly, finding the women of Malta "poor substitutes" for the more colorful Tunisians, and the inhabitants of one island "a sullen, ill-favored lot." Despite her youth, as a traveler she looked about her more in a spirit of firm aesthetic judgment than with the awakened sympathies of a Kinglake or a Brenan. But again and again she was "enchanted by the brightness," by the men and women whose dress she described with an almost drunken delight in fabric, by the hermits on their cliffside balconies, and by the wildflowers, each recognized and given its name.

Thanks to her careful study and her stamina, they saw far more than ruins and churches. They rode donkeys, prowled the bazaars of Tunis, climbed to the cave where St. John the Divine saw "a door opened in heaven."

For the legion of Wharton readers, The Cruise of the Vanadis is a lyrical text, salty with opinion and deepened by scholarship. It asks to be read aloud. For lovers of photography, its pictures coax out of the small format an unexpected intensity. They are as glowing as tiny egg tempera paintings, as rich as Persian miniatures. A true find.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant Start
Review: In 1888, when she was 26 and well before her first works were published, the writer Edith Wharton, with her husband and cousin, valet and maid, chartered a steam-yacht, 167 feet long, with a crew of 16, to sail through the Mediterranean for nearly three months visiting its ancient ports and islands. She documented this voyage in a private journal which has recently been "discovered" and now has been published, illustrated by the photographer Jonas Dovydenas, who over several years visited many of sites which Whatorn had described more than 100 years earlier. The book stands by itself as an extremely well written travel document with strongly honest opinons and vivid descriptions by a highly cultured young heiress. For the Wharton admirer, it also shows the young artist on the verge of launching a brilliant writing career. Many of the idioms associated with her work are on view here for the first time. The photographs are beautiful reminders of that storied landscape. Areas covered include Algiers, Malta, Syracuse, Palermo, Corfu, Rhodes, Smyrna, Mount Athos, and Dalmatia.