Leo’s Silences

Robert Irwin

• BuyTrickster Travels: A 16th-Century Muslim between Worlds by Natalie Zemon Davis
  Faber, 448 pp, £20.00, January 2007, ISBN 978 0 571 20256 0

At a seance in Hampstead in June 1914, W.B. Yeats was contacted by a spirit guide, who announced that he was Leo Africanus and professed to be affronted that the poet hadn’t heard of him. Over the next seven years, a curious relationship developed between Yeats and the daimon, who presented himself as Yeats’s opposite. Yeats, who saw himself as cautious and sedentary, discovered that Leo was bold and adventurous. A letter from ‘Leo’ to Yeats begins: ‘In my life I travelled over much of the known earth. I . . . was often in danger, & all but always in solitude, & became hard and keen like a hunting animal.’ Here Leo’s daimon is adapting and echoing the words of John Pory, who in 1600 published an English translation of the historical Leo’s La Descrittione dell’ Africa: ‘How many desolate cold mountains and huge drie, and barren deserts passed he? How often was he in hazard to have been captived, or to have had his throte cut by the prowling Arabians, and wild Mores? And how hardly manie times escaped he the Lyons greedie mouth and the devouring iawes of the Crocodile?’