Vivienne de Watteville
Vivienne Florence Beatrice de Watteville (17 August 1900 – 27 June 1957) was a British travel writer and adventurer, author of two books based on her experiences in East Africa in the 1920s, Out in the Blue (1927) and Speak to the Earth (1935).
Her mother died of cancer when she was nine, and she spent her childhood holidays from her English boarding-school (St. George's School, Ascot) tomboyishly alone with her father, whom she called 'Brovie' ['brother'], in remote parts of Norway and in the Alps.
[3] On 30 September 1924,[5] on the Congolese shore of Lake Edward, shortly after being refused permission by the Belgian authorities to hunt the rare okapi, Bernard shot and wounded a lion, his nineteenth.
Though suffering from spirillum fever and shock, and though before her father's death she had killed nothing bigger than dik-dik and guinea fowl, Vivienne took charge of the safari and completed the mission, shooting both for the pot (she had a team of sixty native trackers, skinners and porters to feed) and for the collection.
She narrowly escaped death in a close encounter with a lion (thinking the visitor one night was a hyaena, she left her tent to chase it off, realising her mistake too late to retreat: she was so close to the lion she could have touched it), and twice with charging rhinos that missed her by inches; she climbed two mountains (Ol Doinyo Orok and Longido); and she killed no animals except, at the request of the local Maasai, a man-eating lioness, shot by her askari.
She then spent an idyllic two months (January–February 1929) based in Urumandi Hut on Mount Kenya (see Mountaineering on Mount Kenya), in the giant heather and parkland zone, some of the time with two porters and some alone, exploring the mountain and valleys, bathing naked in the rock-pools below the Nithi Falls, befriending the birds and small animals, collecting flowers and seeds, sketching the flora, and meditating "first principles".
[19] While up at the peaks she witnessed the third ascent of Mount Kenya, by Eric Shipton, Percy Wyn-Harris and Gustav Sommerfelt (January 1929), who next day took her on a scramble around the south-face glaciers.
Suffering toothache a few days later, rather than cut short her stay and return to Nairobi, Vivienne pulled out the tooth herself in an operation that took three hours and forty minutes, using first fishing-wire and gravity, then pliers from her tool kit.
Its epigraph, "Speak to the earth, and it shall teach thee" [Job 12,8] points to the book's gentle didacticism, touching as it does on existential questions relating to the human spirit, self-knowledge, solitude, risk-taking, Nature and happiness.
Shortly after the book's publication, the unnamed 80m waterfall below Lake Michaelson high up the Gorges Valley on Mount Kenya were named the 'Vivienne Falls' in the author's honour.
She rented a house in the bay of Port Man, ordered alterations and, shopping recklessly in Paris in August (having then come into a legacy), furnished it to perfection.
She observed, detached, the failing relationships of her guests but her idyll turned to nightmare when alone during the wind-tormented winter months, she found to her horror that her only servant, a full-blooded young Italian called Josef, had developed a passion for her.
Josef was driven to frenzies of jealousy by the visits of a cultivated Englishman, Bunt; and in a dramatic climax reminiscent of a D. H. Lawrence plot, though with an un-Lawrentian outcome,[note 2] Vivienne, "like one waking from the dead", was forced to confront her psychological demons: her "freedom-complex" ("it was my own will to be free that had bound me hand and foot" ... "the battle within raged between this devil's pride and the other voice which pleaded for the self's surrender"[23]); the ambivalent ties that bind her to her father's memory; delayed trauma from her father's death; fear of "saddling [herself] with the wrong companion for the rest of [her] life"; extreme perfectionism.
Bunt (Captain George Gerard Goschen, soldier, diplomat), a stranger she had met at an Albert Hall concert and who visits her on the island, shares her love of solitude and beauty, music and games, helps save her from the unhappy Josef, and at the end becomes her fiancé.
Vivienne and George Goschen lived at Wild Acre near Farnham, Surrey, 1932-1934, then King's Farm, Binsted, Hampshire, then Coneybury, near Ardingly, Sussex.
"When told that she had no more than a fortnight to live," J. Alan White wrote,[29] "she received the news with relief, and even a kind of exaltation, that the pain and uncertainty from which she had suffered for a number of years were about to end.
Among writers influenced by de Watteville's two African books was Ernest Hemingway, who originally included a quotation from Speak to the Earth as an epigraph to his 1936 story 'The Snows of Kilimanjaro'.
