A flower blooming in the East: Who is Lesley Blanch?

Lesley Blanch was born in 1904 in Chiswich, which is located in the west of London and resembles a village with its lush nature. Although her parents were not very wealthy, they were well-mannered and cultured people. Blanch completed most of her education at home. Although she was raised as a painter, she was gifted with many talents, from book illustration to graphics, from magazine editorship to writing.

In 1938, she started working as an editor in the British edition of the US-based fashion magazine Vogue. Chief editor Anne Scott-James, with whom she worked at the same magazine, likens her to a 'Baroque Angel'; “She is one of the most talented and attractive women I have ever met,” she said of Blanch.

Lesley Blanch (6 June 1904 – 7 May 2007) was a British writer, historian and traveller. She is best known for The Wilder Shores of Love, about Isabel Burton (who married the Arabist and explorer Richard), Jane Digby el-Mezrab (Lady Ellenborough, the society beauty who ended up living in the Syrian desert with a Bedouin chieftain), Aimée du Buc de Rivéry (a French convent woman captured by pirates and sent to the Sultan's harem in Istanbul), and Isabelle Eberhardt (a Swiss linguist who felt most comfortable in boy's clothes and lived among the Arabs in the Sahara).

She loved writing and expressed herself very well with a pen, but a desk job was not for her. She had been living with a free and crazy-spirited girl since her childhood. She was only six or seven years old when the first spark in her heart for the journey fell. They had a Russian family friend who was a mysterious and possibly Soviet Agent. This person, whom Blanch called the 'traveler', would suddenly come to visit with furs on his back and toys she brought from Russia, and change the atmosphere of the house. Lesley fell in love with this mysterious man, whom she fell in love with when she was just a child, and became a lover in the following years. They were dreaming of getting married when the 'traveler' suddenly disappeared. Even though Blanch lost the man she loved, she never gave up her passion for the East.

After two unsuccessful marriages, she got married for the third time, with Romain Gary, whom she met at a party in 1945. Gary was ten years younger than Blanch. She served as a pilot in the French Air Force in World War II; After the war, she started working for the French Diplomatic Service. This young man, who is also a writer and director; Blanch was very interested. Gary told him; The love of youth reminded me of the 'traveler'.

Gary and Blanch, who were assigned to the USA by the Diplomatic Service, also went to the new continent. She had a wide circle of friends here, especially in the art community. She established close relationships with many famous names such as writer Truman Capote, Aldous Huxley, Nancy Mitford, actress Sophia Loren, and Jean Seberg.

She wrote her first book, 'The Wilder Shores of Love', in 1954. In the biographical novel, in which her interest in the East is clearly visible, she told the adventures of four women (Isabel Burton, Jane Digby, Aimée du Buc de Rivéry, and Isabelle Eberhardt) who left Europe to live in the Middle East. According to her, the fame she achieved did not please her husband at all. Years later, in an interview, she would say that she did not like Gary's book at all and that she was jealous of his success in a way she could not understand.

Gary's novel 'Lady L', inspired by Blanch, was published in 1958. The book was adapted into a movie in 1965, two years after the couple divorced. Gary wanted to divorce Blanch so that she could marry actress Jean Seberg, who was 24 years younger than him. Gary and Seberg's marriage lasted only 7 years. Sadly, Seberg committed suicide in 1979 as a result of problems in her private life. Gary also committed suicide in 1980.

Years later, Blanch wrote a book called 'Romain: Un Regard Particulier about her ex-husband and their marriage. In the book, she underlined that their marriage was the first marriage between British and French writers.

Blanch traveled mostly alone to the East, which she was passionate about. While she was married, Gary did not accompany her because she did not show a similar desire for the East. During her life, she traveled almost all over Russia, including Siberia. She went to Afghanistan by hitchhiking. She lived with gypsies in Bulgaria for two years. She managed to cross the Sahara Desert. She saw Oman and Mongolia. She traveled extensively throughout Egypt, India, Iran, Turkey, the Balkans, Central America and Mexico. Years later, in an interview, she would answer a question about her travels: "As a woman, I might have faced many dangers, but I never experienced any major problems because of my gender."

The book, which also included important details about Russia of the period, strengthened Blanch's reputation in the literary world. In an interview she gave about the book at that time, she stated that her interest in Sheikh Shamil dates back to her childhood and said: “I saw him for the first time in an old notebook where newspaper clippings and pictures were pasted. "He fed my imagination during my childhood with his mahur looks, magnificent mustache, and the sword he waved in his hand."

Blanch, who started writing the book in Los Angeles, visited Turkey and Egypt whenever she had the opportunity to meet the grandchildren of Sheikh Shamil. After the book was published, she became so famous that French General and President Charles de Gaulle wrote a letter to her. Stating that he was very impressed by the 'Swords of Heaven' in his letter, the French statesman said, "It is admirable that a woman understands the war so well and describes it so vividly."

Later, in 1968, she wrote the book "Journey into the Mind's Eye", in which she talked about her first love, the traveler. Explaining how she met him and went to Siberia to find him, Blanch realized the journey she could not make years ago in her mind and put it on the pages.

In the 1970s, she bought a house in Menton-Garavan, in the south of France, close to the Italian border. She decorated the garden of the house with bamboo trees and jasmine flowers. Even though she and Romain Gary divorced, she still continued to use the title 'Madame Gary'. She thought it improved her reputation.

Blanch, like herself, devoted her house to the East. Rugs hung on the walls. There was something Eastern everywhere you turned your eyes. She would greet those who visited her in this place, where she wrote her remaining books and lived until the end of her life, with her robe adorned with precious stones and the turban she wore on her head.

In her 'Little Hill', where she lived a solitary life, she would happily receive interviewees from the French media and introduce herself as a romantic traveler. She would tell them about the 'past' that she could never give up. Perhaps the reason why she fell in love with the East was that time passed a little slower compared to the West. She was not at all happy with the progress the world was experiencing, except for painkillers.

In an interview, she said that she felt she belonged neither to England nor to any other country. She loved the feeling of not belonging anywhere. Blanch, throughout her life, Muslim countries to the West; She also preferred animals to humans.

This approach revealed how she escaped from Western modernization. In fact, one day, while watching the Bosphorus from the window of a hotel in Istanbul, she saw something fluttering in the water; At first, she thought it was a dog and asked for help; Then, when she saw that it was a man, she shouted, "Let him drown."

Although Lesley Blanch has occasionally made sentences in her books that succumb to the Orientalist perspective, she does not look at the East from a 'Western-Centrist' perspective; She was trying to get to know and understand the countries and people she visited. She left historical monuments aside and focused on daily life. Because she thought that monuments were structures that emerged as a result of daily life. She wore the sincerity of the East like armor throughout her life.

Russians, Caucasians, Arabs, Turks, Persians, and Bulgarian Gypsies saw her as one of their own. She also lived her entire life beyond borders; Perhaps when viewed from today's perspective, she wrote a very different story compared to her contemporaries: She had the courage to write from the heart and took all her paths to the East.

When Lesley Blench passed away in 2007 at the age of 104, she left behind an elusive life and style, apart from her books. What she writes about the Muslim world with great sympathy and elegance is as valid and vivid as the day it was first written.