How to Be Fulfilled

THE WILDER SHORES OF LOVE (332 pp.) --Lesley Blanch--Simon & Schuster ($5).

As a word, "fulfillment" has had quite rise in recent years. It appears in publishing ("circulation fulfillment"), socialism ("plan fulfillment"), psychoanalysis ("wish fulfillment"), but most of all as applied to modern woman, who always wants to be fulfilled. The latest application is made by British Author-Journalist Lesley Blanch, who wonders out loud how modern woman can be fulfilled "as a woman, [without] seeking escape from her own nature."

Author Blanch is no pale sociologist; a onetime staffer on the British Vogue, she has an interest in career-woman feminism and an addiction to headlong prose. The value of The Wilder Shores of Love is not in its arguments and conclusions, but in the case histories it presents of four 19th century women who turned their backs on the progressive West and found salvation in the unemancipated East. All four of them, says Author Blanch, "seemed to sense in ... passivity far larger opportunities of self-expression." The four:

Jane Digby, Lady Ellenborough (1807-81) was a superb horsewoman and "the greatest beauty of her day." Jane thought that she could find salvation in "romantic relationships." Divorced by her husband for adultery with an Austrian prince, Jane moved to Paris, bore her princely lover two children, took up briefly with Novelist Balzac ("I have since noted," said he dryly, "that most women who sit a horse well are lacking in tenderness"). From Paris, Jane rode on to Bavaria, became the mistress of King Ludwig I, married a Bavarian baron and bore two more children. Swept off her feet by a Greek count, Jane was baptized into the Orthodox faith, married again, arrived in Athens where she had another baby, broke with her husband and became the mistress of Greece's King Otho (son of her former lover, King Ludwig). After swapping Otho for an Albanian general, Jane proceeded to Syria, where a "very possessive" young Arab "swept her . . . into the black Bedouin tents of his encampment." Jane was 47, still beautiful, and bursting with ''girlish excitement and rapture" when she settled down for keeps with a sheik. She lived contentedly in the desert for 27 years, "milking the camels, serving her husband . . . washing his feet" and relishing the joys of passive living.

Aimee Dubucq de Rivery (1763-1817), cousin of Napoleon's Empress Josephine, had passivity thrust upon her. Abducted by Corsairs while en route home to Martinique from a convent in Nantes, Aimee was given as a present to Turkish Sultan Abd uel Hamid I, who popped her into his harem. At first, convent-bred Aimee violently resisted a fate worse than death, but at last came to agree with the Arab maxim: "Woman succeeds where man fails, for woman knows when to yield." Aimee became the Sultan's favorite, and lived to a ripe age plotting bloodthirstily against the Sultan's enemies. Thanks to Aimee, her son, Mahmoud II ("The Reformer"), broke the power of the Janissaries and (says a Turkish poet) "opened the gate of the Orient to a new light." "We see [through Aimee]," concludes Author Blanch, "that even in the seraglio, as a slave, she had considerably more freedom to be essentially a woman than many women now enmeshed in the complex mechanism of our economic civilization."

Isabella Eberhardt, who died in 1904 aged only 27, was born in Geneva, the illegitimate daughter of an illegitimate mother. Of Russo-Jewish stock, Isabelle had manly ambitions from childhood. Shortly after the family had settled in North Africa, her mother died. From that time, Isabelle's life was in the desert. She was accepted by the Arabs as a man, earned a reputation as a war correspondent, and became so knowledgeable that the great Marshal Lyautey (who was reputed to be her lover) said: "No one knows Africa as she does." Another eyewitness says of her: "She was an alcoholic [but] deeply religious . . . She was passionate, sensual, but not in a woman's way. And she was completely flat-chested . . . When she saw a man she wanted, she took him. She'd beckon him over, and off they'd go ... And whatever she did, she remained well-bred." Russian to the core, Isabelle was prone to cries and lamentations which she often expressed in admirable prose. She explained: "Why do I prefer nomads to villagers, beggars to rich people? Aie yie yie! for me, unhappiness is a sort of spice ... I love the knout!" To Author Blanch, Isabelle Eberhardt represents the "blessed annihilation of self," the woman "free of all the little deadly fetters of everyday life."

Lady Isabel Burton (1831-96) was not only one of the most formidable women who ever lived, but wife to one of the most formidable men. When she was still a girl, she resolved to marry Explorer Richard (The Thousand Nights and a Night) Burton, dedicated her youth to preparing for the day when she would be united with her "desert lion." Burton was tough, resourceful, sharply witty. (Asked by a doctor "how he had felt when he had killed a man," Burton answered: "Quite jolly, doctor. How do you?") It was years before he surrendered to Isabel's determination, which he compared to "the noble firmness of mules." Burton's view of married bliss was to ride roughshod over Isabel; she relished every hoofmark. Booted out of his job as consul in Damascus (the Foreign Office considered him slightly mad), Burton strode off into the desert, leaving Isabel one of the curtest orders ever issued by any husband to his wife: "Am superseded. Pay, pack, and follow." Isabel followed so relentlessly that in the end she wore her hubby out. "His masterful powers," said Novelist Ouida, "were tied up like great dogs in their kennels." When Burton died, Isabel burned "almost all of his journals, diaries and notes," along with The Scented Garden Men's Heart to Gladden, a hair-raising encyclopedia of Oriental sexual practices. She reckoned thus "to save his soul in Heaven, his reputation ... on earth," but Author Blanch suspects that Isabel was just plain jealous of her husband's Garden. Nonetheless, Isabel Burton, says Author Blanch, "is the supreme example of a woman who lived and had her being entirely through love."

The male reader of The Wilder Shores may well be fascinated by the adventures of these four extraordinary women, but he will find it hard to swallow the idea that they were in search of feminine "passivity." By comparison, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse seem like little old softies.

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