It’s hard to get the chronology straight, but we know of at least one more shipboard romance of Dorle’s. This one was with Bill Barker, a British Police officer in Palestine during the late thirties who she met on a boat from Trieste to Jaiffa. She was on her way on her way, I assume, to meet her Syrian lover, George Asfar, in Damascus.

Here are two “snaps” of Bill Barker in Palestine that he sent Dorle. He is the one speaking in one picture and the one dressed like a police officer wearing a fez in the other.

The following is from a letter Barker wrote Dorle a year or so after their romance while heading to Palestine on the same boat. The Simpson must Wallis Simpson of Edward the Eighth fame. That scandal that would have been unfolding just at that time.

Fearing nothing, I broke the icy atmosphere and drank two sherries. At dinner, I sat alone. There was a bunch of roses and two candles opposite just in front of an empty chair. The roses represented you. They were reddish in bud and cream in flower. That’s you. Dorle, I hate you. Hate you. Hate you. Why the hell you are not on board instead of putting pep in pep in Noo (sic) York. I don’t know. Seriously, if you were on board tonight I would promote you. You should be above ALL sheep and above all fairly good goats. In fact, I would create a new category – you would be placed above all very good looking and marvelous women, well above Miss Simpson, because you after all are- a good looking woman and moreover, a marvelous woman.

Bill Barker continued to write Dorle letters for years. This one is from Palestine during the violent “Arab Revolts” of the late thirties. Periodically, he leaves his letter to attend to police business.

I met Tallant for a short time in London and we had coffee together. He thinks you are a “damned clever woman.” We spoke of you at length and I told him you had been degraded to the women’s compartment with the goats because you wouldn’t answer my letters, but the fool only grinned. Strangely enough he came to Palestine without warning whilst I was away. I saw his name as an arrival, in the Palestine Post and wondered if it could be the same Tallant and he told me later that he had paid a flying visit. (Interval during which I coped with two Jews in charge of a lorry being stoned and the lorry burnt a bomb being thrown- no casualties, and a Jew shot and serious wounded) I am afraid this letter is dreadfully disjointed….

In 1936, Dorle sailed across the Atlantic for an extended European tour with the Philharmonic and took some side trips of her own.

“Don’t go up by the funnels with anybody by starlight,” John jealously warned her. “Otherwise you can, of course, do as you please—you will, anyway! Have some champagne cocktails for me and don’t die of exhaustion before you step on the boat.”

He was worried by her refusal to promise fidelity on her journey. “It makes me physically sick to be told (of course, I knew all the time) that you might give yourself to another man. What I shall be without you I cannot imagine – even for a few weeks—let alone years –as you are now so much a part of me as my leg or my entrails, and I know that I am part of you. That makes me happy.”

John may have been right to be worried . Here is Dorle with another one of her lovers, George Asfar, in Syria in 1936.

The European crisis is very much on people’s minds here. My own feeling is that, subconsciously, they want a war in Europe. The last one solved a bad depression here very quickly. At any rate, they ignore all the facts, are getting excited over the appearances and will not be happy at all if a war is averted in Central Europe as it will be. I’ve been keeping box score and I’ve found that we, as a people, thoroughly insulted Russia, Italy, Japan and Germany. Some day we’ll have to pay for our irresponsibility. As for your people, they will be treated by England and France as the Armenians were treated – used as cat’s paws and excuses and then abandoned cold bloodedly as soon as the Big Powers get what they want.

On Dec 17,1934, a mournful John tells Dorle that her “periods of elation seem to coincide with my periods of depression and visa versa.”

“At any rate,” he goes on, “I spent the weekend in utter futility and despondency by pondering over the nature of love and the frustration of human visions. At the end I reached no conclusion. The trouble seems to be that what we want of love and what love wants of us are two entirely different things. The second is appallingly simple, the first extreme and unnecessary but very naturally complicated. And time is passing; my hairs — I shall send you some in a day or so — are turning gray and you are growing away from me.”

When he writes again on Dec 20, a few days later, his tone is a bit more chipper. There is no reference to hairs. Instead, he describes an embassy party he recently attended and a discussion that occurred there about the nature of women.

“The Persian Minister is a nice man. He goes around calmly with a sense that we are all mad, particularly our women. And that what is needed in this country is the complete subjugation and domestication of the female sex. He says, ‘Of course, we must always do the what women want but NOT as they want it.’ I agreed with him, much to the annoyance of my female friends and relatives.”

When I put the Persian Minister letter back in its envelope, I noticed for the first time a lock of grayish brown hair, which must have been placed inside 78 years ago.

Dorle and her husband Dario were like parents to my own father, in part, because they had no children of their own. I always wondered how Dorle felt about not having children. John’s letter on Feb 12 of 1935 talks about their aspirations and gives something of a clue as to her thoughts about having kids.

“You and your thirteen children and my secretary of state! Darling, have children. You need them and you will be realer than all the governments in the world. That’s what I really worship in you and our real sin is as always what we didn’t do rather than what we did – no matter why we didn’t do it.”

I don’t know the 1930’s term for what has been known euphemistically since about the eighties as “Seeing other people.” In any case, John reacts to Dorle’s desire to do so in Dec 8 of 1934 as follows: “I suppose it will please you to know that I am restless and unhappy. It would also please you to know that the thought of you cautiously experimenting with love as a cure for love does not disturb me. You can never give anyone what I have, so you cannot destroy anything, only hurt the silly part of me which is savage where you are concerned. And we are agreed to be civilized, so that doesn’t matter now.”

“No, I’m not becoming sentimental, “ he goes on “ but I wish I could become numb. I can’t. Fly high, darling, and I see the top of the clouds—they’re all over—use the moon for a boat and follow any star you like.”

“But at the last you shall know, as I know, “ he concludes “that for us there is only one sun, whose glory fills the heavens.“

On Dec 8, 1934, John asks the Dorle the following,”So you want me to be great man,willy nilly, darling?”

“Is that for your ego,” he wonders, “or just because you are foolish enough to imagine me great?”

“I no longer believe in greatness. There’s just work, money, a little reputation and the grave. The bed is our only defense and that – we — I mean the world — have been cleverly sterilized so that the world is dying. We all lack imagination and courage, not just you and I, and prefer comfort and approval to reality.”

When I discovered the letter that John sent Dorle on Nov 17, 1934, a broken gold coin with the words “Aux Belle” that he had bitterly enclosed nearly eighty years ago was still inside. It’s not really gold, of course, more like a gold-colored tinfoil, but the symbolism was the point, something golden that has broken apart.

Dorle’s accusation — to which his letter is a defiant response — appears to have been that he was casual about their relationship and, worse than that, vulgar.

“Vulgarity,” he writes, “has never had any relation to you and me so if it is touching us you are quite right to surmount it. I was as angry as you meant me to be when I got your letter and the enclosed is my own contribution towards the final curtain in which your heart is set.”

“But I never was casual where you were concerned and never asked of you that pose of “bright understanding” which inflames you. At best, all I tried to do was to avoid hurting us too much or too often…You have set your mark on me too deeply for you to efface it with these tiny gashes which you dealt me in your letter… It was always best just to be with you and not to analyze or struggle. It was never a struggle for supremacy and it bore no relation to my pride or to yours. I know I have been clumsy and stupid from time to time and have hurt you. You, too, have hurt me twice more deeply than anything I could do to you”

“I am not angry any more and neither am I resigned,” he concludes. “I shan’t write you again unless you wish it and I shan’t try to see you again unless I cannot help myself. But don’t call it a comedy even if you have decided that it is finished

In the fall of 1934, John expresses opinions about Japan and Germany, the Axis powers to be.

On one hand in John’s next letter to Dorle on Nov 20th (in which he sounds apologetic about the “cheap” gesture of the broken coin), he worries that the US and Japan will come into conflict because the United States won’t ”have the intelligence to resist the British pressure to push forward as the Bulwark of White Civilization against Japan’s economic competition.” The idea of the defense of white civilization brings to mind the California internment camps of the forties.

We see John’s old Hitlerest predilections, though, when he discusses Germany. He disapproves of Jewish attempts to prevent trade with Germany. “Maybe we learned something from the last war but the ease with which we have been lined up in the anti-German camp again makes me doubt it. It has reached the point where some of the American Jewish groups are trying to prevent our wretched cotton-growers from selling cotton to Germany in addition, of course, to their own boycott of German goods. I see little chance of peace as long as our public opinion is so emotionally receptive to these theories of coercion against people of whom we morally disapprove. My latest reports are that the Germans are the best off of any nation in Europe, with better distribution of wealth and higher morale – and these reports come from anti-Nazi sources.”