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Cards on the Table by Agatha Christie (1936)

‘Murder can be an art! A murderer can be an artist.’
(The deliberately provocative – and in the end fatally glib – view of the cosmopolitan exquisite, Mr Shaitana, Chapter 1)

‘He was alive – and now he is dead and, as I told him once, I have a bourgeois attitude to murder. I disapprove of it.’
(Poirot, Chapter 8)

‘Here we are,’ continued Mrs Oliver, ‘three private individuals – all women. Let us see what we can do by putting our heads together.’
(Mrs Oliver the feminist, Chapter 12)

‘Life is a difficult business,’ continued Mrs Lorrimer. ‘You’ll know that when you come to my age. It needs infinite courage and a lot of endurance. And in the end one wonders, “Was it worth while?”‘
(Chapter 18)

Mrs Oliver said, ‘I don’t suppose for a moment you’ll tell us anything you don’t want to.’
Battle shook his head. ‘No,’ he said decidedly. ‘Cards on the table. That’s the motto for this business. I mean to play fair.’
(One meaning of the title, Chapter 19)

‘Cards on the Table’ is the 15th Hercule Poirot book and, since one of them is a collection of short stories and another was the novelisation of a play by someone else, it is the 13th Poirot novel. In the last few novels before this (‘ABC Murders’ and ‘Murder in Mesopotamia’) Christie cannily held Poirot back until we had a good sense of the setting and characters. He only appears half-way through ‘Mesopotamia’. By sharp contrast Poirot is front and centre of this novel from page 1.

Quick plot summary

Mr Shaitani, a louche, camp, upper-class sophisticate of uncertain nationality, hosts fabulous parties at his flat on Park Lane. At one of these he is introduced to Poirot and boasts that he not only has terrific collections of objets d’art and so on, he even has a collection from Poirot’s own field, of crime. In fact (he gushes on) not just cheesy objects like knives and jemmies, but of the best part of a murder, the murderers themselves.

‘I collect only the best!’
‘The best being?’ asked Poirot.
‘My dear fellow – the ones who have got away with it! The successes! The criminals who lead an agreeable life which no breath of suspicion has ever touched. Admit that is an amusing hobby!’ (Chapter 1)

Poirot sagely opines that this sounds like a dangerous kind of collection, but Mr Shaitani sails on oblivious and asks whether he’d like to come to dinner.

So chapter 2 finds Poirot arriving for dinner at Shaitani’s apartment and discovering seven other guests. Poirot realises that four of them are law and order types of one kind or another – himself, Superintendent Battle from CID, the crime fiction writer Mrs Ariadne Oliver, and a pukka traveller chappie, Colonel Race, who everyone says is something to do with the Secret Service.

‘The four murderers and the four sleuths – Scotland Yard. Secret Service. Private. Fiction. A clever idea.’ (Mrs Oliver, Chapter 8)

Which means – if Shaitani is keeping his promise to show off his collection of murderers – that one or more of the other four guests must be murderers. They are: Doctor Geoffrey Roberts, Mrs Lorrimer, Major John Despard and Miss Anne Meredith.

After they’ve all been introduced the eight guests have a nice dinner, then Shaitani suggests they split into two fours to play bridge, each in a different room. Poirot plays with the other officials until someone from the other room makes the dramatic announcement that Shaitani is dead. He doesn’t play bridge and so had been sitting over by the fire and is discovered in his armchair with a stiletto to the heart.

So they call the cops etc, then Superintendent Battle sums up the problem as he discusses it with Poirot. This is that not only did one of the four people in the bridge party murder Shaitani, but, if Shaitani has kept his boast, then some or all of them had previously murdered someone i.e. they’re dealing with not one but four murderers.

So the task is not just to investigate the puzzling murder of Shaitani, but to delve back into the past histories of the four suspects and try and find the mysterious deaths connected with them.

‘And the devil of it is we’ve got to check up on four possible murders in the past, not one.’ (Chapter 8)

So this is what Battle and Poirot proceed to do, each approaching the challenge in completely different ways which are at various points directly compared and contrasted.

Apart from this clever structure, the novel is notable for introducing the colourful character of Ariadne Oliver, an overweight middle-aged woman always fussing about her hair who happens to be a bestselling author of detective novels, as well as being a dogmatic feminist, with an entertainingly down-to-earth if not positively debunking and mocking attitude to her own works. Some commentators call her a self-portrait by Christie but that’s obviously too simplistic. She’s more like a comic caricature of the type of the popular lady novelist, and very enjoyable with it.

Cast

  • Mr Shaitana – host of numerous high society parties, ‘fond of posing as a modern Mephistopheles’, so much so that Miss Meredith tells Superintendent Battle that he won a prize at the hotel in Switzerland where she first met him, in a fancy dress competition dressed as Mephistopheles (Chapter 14)

Guests at the fatal bridge night

  1. Hercule Poirot
  2. Mrs Ariadne Oliver – one of the foremost writers of detective and other sensational stories, creator of a famous fictional detective from Finland, Sven Hjerson.’ She wrote chatty, if not particularly grammatical, articles on ‘The Tendency of the Criminal’, ‘Famous Crimes Passionnels’, ‘Murder for Love v. Murder for Gain’. She was also a vociferous feminist and when any murder of importance was occupying space in the press there was sure to be an interview with Mrs Oliver, and it was mentioned that Mrs Oliver had said, ‘Now if a woman were the head of Scotland Yard!’ She was an earnest believer in woman’s intuition’
  3. Superintendent Battle of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID) – who we’ve met in the non-Poirot novels The Secret of Chimneys and The Seven Dials Murder, so this is by way of him crossing over from those novels into this one – ‘an exceedingly English, big burly gentleman.’ – ‘A big square wooden‐faced man moved forward. Not only did an onlooker feel that Superintendent Battle was carved out of wood ‐ he also managed to convey the impression that the wood in question was the timber out of a battleship’
  4. Colonel Race – ‘A dark, handsome, deeply bronzed man of fifty, he was usually to be found in some outpost of Empire ‐ especially if there were trouble brewing. Secret Service is a melodramatic term, but it described pretty accurately to the lay mind the nature and scope of Colonel Race’s activities’
  5. Doctor Geoffrey Roberts – ‘a cheerful, highly coloured individual of middle age. Small twinkling eyes, a touch of baldness, a tendency of embonpoint and a general air of a well‐scrubbed and disinfected medical practitioner. His manner was cheerful and confident. You felt that his diagnosis would be correct and his treatments agreeable and practical: “a little champagne in convalescence perhaps.” A man of the world!’
  6. Mrs Lorrimer – referred to as an old woman, she is 63 years old – ‘She had lovely cut features, beautifully arranged grey hair, and a clear, incisive voice’ – ‘She’s a widow. Moderately well off. Intelligent, well‐bred woman ‐ first class bridge player’
  7. Major John Despard – ‘a tall, lean, handsome man, his face slightly marred by a scar on the
    temple’
  8. Miss Anne Meredith – treated as hopelessly shy and ineffectual, Anne is 25; ‘She was of medium height and pretty. Brown curls clustered in her neck, her grey eyes were large and wide apart. Her face was powdered but not made up. Her voice was slow and rather shy’
  • Miss Burgess – Dr Roberts’ secretary, been with him 7 years
  • Rhoda Dawes – Miss Meredith’s friend, lives with her in a country cottage (Wendon Cottage) outside Wallingford
  • Mrs Astwell – the cleaner who does for them
  • Sergeant O’Connor – a copper
  • Miss Elsie Batt – late parlour‐maid to old Miss Craddock, who O’Connor takes out in order to question about Miss Meredith’s
  • Mrs Luxmore – ‘a tall, rather handsome woman’, widow of a Professor Luxmore who died in the Amazon on an expedition which included Major Despard
  • Inspector Harper – of the Devonshire police in Combeacre
  • Combeacre doctor
  • Combeacre vicar
  • Mrs Benson of Combeacre – died of drinking mislabelled poison while Anne Meredith worked for her – ‘A self‐righteous grenadier of a woman, working her companions hard and changing her servants often’
  • Doctor Davidson – the divisional surgeon attending Mrs Lorrimer
  • Stephens – ‘a big, awkward‐looking man with red hair entered’, member of the Chelsea Window Cleaners Association and key witness to the murderer
  • Sir Charles Imphrey – the Home Office analyst
  • Mr Gerald Hemmingway – a very promising young actor, hired by Poirot to trick the murderer into confessing

Is Shaitani gay?

The opening pages show him being very camp and bitchy in a way that sounded more like Noel Coward than Christie. A lot later Major Despard is called on to describe his rooms.

‘I don’t know that I’m much of a hand at that sort of thing,’ said Despard slowly. ‘It was a rotten sort of room, to my mind. Not a man’s room at all.’ (Chapter 15)

But it’s doubtful if Christie intended her character to be literally gay; more a ‘type’ of debased, cosmopolitan (he seems to have relatives in Syria) sensualist.

Detective methods

Poirot’s technique is very deliberately contrasted with Battle’s. Battle is all police procedural, gathering facts, sifting documents. Poirot is interested almost entirely in the suspects’ characters, in their psychology.

The importance of psychology

Early on Poirot explains:

Superintendent Battle said, ‘And I’d also like to know what you think of the psychology of these four people. You’re rather hot on that.’
Still smoothing his bridge scores, Poirot said, “You are right, psychology is very important. We know the kind of murder that has been committed, the way it was committed. If we have a person who from the psychological point of view could not have committed that particular type of murder, then we can dismiss that person from our calculations…’ (Chapter 8)

A lot later on the two detectives’ approaches are contrasted: Battle is all legwork and interviewing witnesses and suspects:

‘Well, every man to his taste. I don’t deal much in these fancy approaches. They don’t suit my style.’
‘What is your style, Superintendent?’
The superintendent met the twinkle in Poirot’s eyes with an answering twinkle in his own. ‘A straightforward, honest, zealous officer doing his duty in the most laborious manner ‐ that’s my style. No frills. No fancy work. Just honest perspiration. Stolid and a bit stupid – that’s my ticket.’
Poirot raised his glass. ‘To our respective methods – and may success crown our joint efforts. ‘(Chapter 10)

Whereas Poirot has mostly been thinking about the suspects’ characters:

‘So those are what you call facts, eh?’ said Battle curiously… ‘It’s an odd method of approach,’ said Battle thoughtfully. “Purely psychological.

And this is because of one of his deepest convictions, expressed in novel after novel:

‘No one can do a thing that is not dans son caractère!’ (Chapter 28)

Poirot’s egotism

‘The question is,’ he said, ‘can Hercule Poirot possibly be wrong?’
‘No one can always be right,’ said Mrs Lorrimer coldly.
‘I am,’ said Poirot. ‘Always I am right. It is so invariable that it startles me.’ (Chapter 26)

Age

Mrs Lorrimer is referred to as an ‘old woman’ when she is ‘only’ she is 63 years old.

‘Do you think this man Poirot is clever?’
‘He doesn’t look a Sherlock,’ said Rhoda. ‘I expect he has been quite good in his day. He’s gaga now, of course. He must be at least sixty.’ (Chapter 23)

‘Speech is the deadliest of revealers’

‘Gave himself away, did he? That sounds unlike him.’
Oh, my dear friend, it is impossible not to give oneself away ‐ unless one never opens one’s mouth! Speech is the deadliest of revealers.’
‘Even if people tell lies?’ asked Mrs Oliver.
‘Yes, Madame, because it can be seen at once that you tell a certain kind of lie.’ (Chapter 19)

Bookishness

Like all Christie’s books, this one draws attention to the genre of detective stories and has characters exclaim that it’s all so preposterous it could come from a book! This is  way of pre-empting readerly criticism, and also lulling you into the artificial realm of Murder Mystery World.

Superintendent Battle sighed. ‘This isn’t a detective story, Mrs Oliver,’ he said. Race said, ‘Naturally all information must be handed over to the police.’ (Chapter 8)

‘Not at all,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Least likely person. It seems to work out in real life just the same as in books.’ (Chapter 30)

Every Christie novel has to make an arch reference to Sherlock Holmes, it’s an iron law. Here is Dr Roberts, followed by Poirot himself

‘That seems to remind me of something.’
‘It reminds you of Sherlock Holmes does it not? The curious incident of the dog in the night. The dog did not howl in the night. That is the curious thing! Ah, well, I am not above stealing the tricks of others.’ (Chapter 9)

Mrs Oliver

Given how much she talks about bookishness, it’s surprising that when she introduces actual writers into her stories, they often play a relatively small part. This is an exception. For the first time the fictional author character does play quite a large role. That said her function is mostly comic.

Hair A good deal of comic business is had about her ever-changing hairstyles:

She was an agreeable woman of middle age, handsome in a rather untidy fashion, with fine eyes, substantial shoulders, and a large quantity of rebellious grey hair with which she was continually experimenting. One day her appearance would be highly intellectual – a brow with the hair scraped back from it and coiled in a large bun in the neck; on another, Mrs Oliver would suddenly appear with Madonna loops, or large masses of slightly untidy curls. On this particular evening Mrs Oliver was trying out a fringe. (Chapter 2)

This hair thing then becomes a running gag:

Mrs Oliver gave a sigh and ran her hands freely through her fringe until it stood upright and gave her a wholly drunken appearance. ‘Do you know,’ she said, ‘I rather believe now that she did it! It’s lucky it’s not in a book. They don’t really like the young and beautiful girl to have done it. All the same, I rather think she did.’ (Chapter 6)

Later:

‘My dear, how nice to see you, said Mrs Oliver, holding out a carbon‐stained hand and trying with her other hand to smooth her hair, a quite impossible proceeding. (Chapter 17)

Fiction better than life First there are jokes about how she would manage everything better in a book:

‘I should have kept him to the end,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘In a book I mean,’ she added apologetically.
‘Real life’s a bit different,’ said Battle.
‘I know,’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘Badly constructed.’ (Chapter 4)

And:

Mrs Oliver said bitterly as the door closed behind him, ‘Copy! Copy indeed! People are so unintelligent. I could invent a better murder any day than anything real. I’m never at a loss for a plot. And the people who read my books like untraceable poisons!’ (Chapter 4)

Writing is a job Christie gives several extended descriptions of how writing is a job like any other, and lets the awestruck fan, Rhoda, into some of the crushingly practical considerations involved.

‘I always think I’ve finished and then when I count up I find I’ve only written thirty thousand words instead of sixty thousand and so then I have to throw in another murder and get the heroine kidnapped again. It’s all very boring.’ (Chapter 17)

Compounding it with wonderfully irreverent descriptions of her own work:

‘I mean would it bother you awfully if I sent one of your books to you; would you sign it for me?’
Mrs Oliver laughed.
‘Oh, I can do better than that for you.’
She opened a cupboard at the far end of the room.
‘Which would you like? I rather fancy The Affair of the Second Goldfish myself. It’s not quite such frightful tripe as the rest.’ (Chapter 18)

‘Frightful tripe’, that’s a phrase worth remembering when reading Christie.

Feminist Then there are Christie’s gentle mocking of Mrs Oliver’s feminist over-reach, how she sees it as her job to continually claim that women are much superior to men in every department – claims which often sound more like the more egotistical boasting about her own superiority than the broader cause. Thus when Battle says:

‘It’s odd, but a criminal gives himself away every time by that.’
‘Man is an unoriginal animal,’ said Hercule Poirot.
‘Women,’ said Mrs Oliver, ‘are capable of infinite variation. I should never commit the same type of murder twice running.’ (Chapter 8)

Allied with the usual criticisms of men:

‘And Major Despard?’ asked Anne.
‘Pah!’ said Mrs Oliver. ‘He’s a man! I never worry about men. Men can look after themselves. Do it remarkably well if you ask me.’ (Chapter 12)

At one point, very amusingly:

Mrs Oliver put on her ‘how like a man’ expression. (Chapter 13)

Middle-aged At other moments she is used to describe a middle-aged, fairly weighty woman’s point of view:

Mrs Oliver extricated herself from the driving seat of her little two‐seater with some difficulty. To begin with, the makers of modern motor cars assume that only a pair of sylphlike knees will ever be under the steering wheel. It is also the fashion to sit low. That being so, for a middle‐aged woman of generous proportions it requires a good deal of superhuman wriggling to get out from under the steering wheel. (Chapter 10)

More comically:

Anne led the way to a little group of deck and basket chairs, all rather dilapidated. Mrs Oliver chose the strongest looking with some care, having had various unfortunate experiences with flimsy summer furniture. (Chapter 12)

So mostly she’s a broadly comic character, as in another debunking rhodomontade against her own profession.

‘What really matters is plenty of bodies! If the thing’s getting a little dull, some more blood cheers it up. Somebody is going to tell something ‐ and then they’re killed first! That always goes down well. It comes in all my books ‐ camouflaged different ways of course. And people like untraceable poisons, and idiotic police inspectors and girls tied up in cellars with sewer gas or water pouring in, such a troublesome way of killing anyone really, and a hero who can dispose of anything from three to seven villains single‐handed. I’ve written thirty‐two books by now ‐ and of course they’re all exactly the same really, as Monsieur Poirot seems to have noticed ‐ but nobody else has; and I only regret one thing, making my detective a Finn. I don’t really know anything about Finns and I’m always getting letters from Finland pointing out something impossible that he’s said or done. They seem to read detective stories a good deal in Finland. I suppose it’s the long winters with no daylight. In Bulgaria and Rumania they don’t seem to read at all. I’d have done better to have made him a Bulgarian.’ (Chapter 8)

Black and white

Referring to someone as a ‘white man’ during the heyday of the British Empire in the 1920s and ’30s indicated that they had been to public school and were thus a gentleman, played with a straight bat (cricketing term), played the game (public school term) and were a ‘pukka sahib’, a Hindi expression used in British India which literally means ‘genuine master’. Thus Colonel Race does some background checking on Major Despard and concludes, from all accounts of him serving out East:

‘I’d lay long odds against its being Despard who did the dirty work the other evening. He’s a white man, Battle.’
‘Incapable of murder, you mean?’ (Chapter 17)

And:

‘Shaitana may have heard some garbled rumour of Professor Luxmore’s death, but I don’t believe there’s more to it than that. Despard’s a white man, and I don’t believe he’s ever been a murderer. That’s my opinion. And I know something of men.’

As an outsider, Poirot is allowed to mock this entire attitude:

‘Yes, a woman knows. But I never showed him that I knew. We were Major Despard and Mrs Luxmore to each other right up to the end. We were both determined to play the game.’ She was silent, lost in admiration of that noble attitude.
‘True,’ murmured Poirot. ‘One must play the cricket. As one of your poets so finely says, “I could not love thee, dear, so much, Loved I not cricket more.”‘
‘Honour,’ corrected Mrs Luxmore with a slight frown.
‘Of course ‐ of course ‐ honour. “Loved I not honour more.”‘ (Chapter 20)

And compared to whiteness, are a few comments about Black people which, for these characters at this period, included Arabs. Says Major Despard, who’s travelled to far-flung countries:

‘I never forget a face – even a black face, and that’s a lot more than most people can say.’ (Chapter 15)

While later on, Miss Elsie Batt the parlour-maid, laments that Mrs Craddock died of typhoid in Egypt seeing as she bought a load of lovely dresses specially for the trip but:

She added with a sigh, ‘I wonder what they did with all that lovely lot of clothes? They’re blacks out there, so they couldn’t wear them.’ (Chapter 16)

Tall

  • [Mr Shaitani] was tall and thin; his face was long and melancholy; his eyebrows were heavily accented and jet black…
  • Major Despard was a tall, lean, handsome man, his face slightly marred by a scar on the temple.
  • [Miss Dawes] was tall, dark, and vigorous looking.
  • Sergeant O’Connor… was an extremely handsome man. Tall, erect, broad‐shouldered, it was less the regularity of his features than the roguish and daredevil spark in his eye which made him so irresistible to the fair sex.
  • Mrs Luxmore… ‘a tall, rather handsome woman, was standing by the mantelpiece’
  • Doctor Davidson the divisional surgeon shook hands. He was a tall melancholy man.

Woman hater

I don’t think I’ve come across the expression ‘woman hater’ so many times as I have in Christie’s fiction. Why was she so fond of using it?

‘Your friend is a woman hater? He wants to make us suffer? But you must not allow that…’ (Mrs Luxmore, Chapter 20)

Credit

‘Cards on the Table’ by Agatha Christie was published in 1936 by the Collins Crime Club.

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Posted by Simon on August 11, 2025

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The Green Hat by Michael Arlen (1924)

‘It might be nice for you to take a house in London for the spring season—I know a dove of a house in Talbot Square you could get, furnished. I mean, living with sane, well-balanced English people.’
She would have gone on to tell him all the old propaganda stories of 1914 if he had not laughed and said:
‘I’ve been reading a book by Michael Arlen and if that’s—’
She ruined Michael Arlen with a wave of her salad spoon.
‘He only writes about degenerates. I mean the worthwhile English.’
(Baby Warren and Dick Diver chatting in ‘Tender Is The Night’ by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Book 2, chapter 21)

‘Your generation,’ said Hilary thoughtfully, ‘is a mess.’
(The Green Hat, chapter 3)

She suspected they might be thinking she was going to more than powder her nose. They were, she was, who cared?
(chapter 4)

She drove with assurance, that is to say, she drove as though her mind was not in the same world as the steering-wheel.
(chapter 4)

‘The Marches are never let off anything…’
(The sense of doom clinging round twins Iris and Gerald March, a phrase often repeated)

She [Billee Ponthéveque, a cocotte] never saw her parents, she would say, because of a funny idea they had that it was bad for her health to take cocaine on an empty stomach.
(The blasé attitude to sex and drugs which helped make the book notorious; chapter 7)

‘Why is every one so awful these days!’
(poor Venice Pollen, wailing the eternal wail; chapter 7)

I couldn’t help thinking of her as of someone who had strayed into our world from a strange land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who were calmly awaiting their inheritance of our world when we should have annihilated one another in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality.
(One of hundreds of passages where the narrator adulates the protagonist, Iris Storm; chapter 9)

‘The Green Hat’ by Michael Arlen was the publishing sensation of 1924, making its author famous overnight, quickly becoming a touchpoint for the culture, going on to be referenced in contemporary newspapers, magazines and other fictions for the next decade and more, as epitomising the spirit of the day and the year.

It more or less invented the concept of the heedlessly hedonistic bright young things of London. More specifically, it crystallised and defined the idea of the new woman about town, smartly dressed, comfortably off, defying conventions (wearing short skirts, bobbing her hair, smoking!). The heroine in question is Iris Storm, wearer of the green hat in question, fast driver of a Hispano-Suiza motor car and breaker of men’s hearts.

Michael Arlen

The most striking thing about the author of this quintessentially English comedy is that he wasn’t English at all, but a Bulgarian of Armenian descent. He was born Dikran Sarkis Kouyoumdjian in Bulgaria to an Armenian merchant family. In 1892, his family moved to Plovdiv, Bulgaria, after fleeing Turkish persecutions of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. In Plovdiv, Arlen’s father set up an import-export business and a few years later, he moved his family to England. It was here that young Dikran went to school and was raised speaking posh English, before enrolling at Edinburgh University.

During the Great War Dikran was regarded with suspicion as Bulgaria was allied to Germany and Austria. He gravitated to London and fell in with other conscientious objectors and outsiders. He began writing essays and article for the New Age magazine, and took to signing them Michael Arlen to allay the xenophobia his real name aroused.

During the 1920s Arlen rented rooms opposite ‘The Grapes’ public house in Shepherd Market, then a bohemian Mayfair address. He used Shepherd Market as the setting for the novel. Here’s Shepherd Market on Google Maps. In 1920 he became infatuated with one of the leading socialites of her day, the brilliant and charismatic Nancy Cunard, and she is the inspiration for Iris Storm.

It is, then, as you can see, a strongly autobiographical novel, but with the central character exaggerated for sensational effect.

‘The Green Hat’ made Arlen famous and rich. He enjoyed dressing smartly, driving round London in a yellow Rolls Royce (precursor to John Lennon’s white Rolls Royce forty years later), hobnobbing with other celebrities. He regularly travelled to the United States to work on plays and films. He was understandably nervous about writing a follow-up to his big hit and, indeed, none of his subsequent novels were nearly as successful but he was, until his death in 1956, famous for being famous.

Chapter 1. The Green Hat

Introducing the narrator and Iris Storm

It is the summer of 1922. The story is a first-person narrative told in a breezily facetious style by a well-educated, posh but poor man about town. He lives in a crappy flat above a sordid alleyway in Mayfair’s Shepherd’s market and takes us into his confidence with various arch and self-conscious narrative comments, which hark back to Victorian storytelling.

It is late, after midnight, when the tale begins…

He has just got back to his flat after a party when the front doorbell rings. It is a woman wearing a fashionable small green hat pulled down over her eyes, come to visit her brother, Gerald March, who lives in the flat above the narrator.

As he lets her into the ramshackle house, the narrator is dazzled by her beauty and self possession, by her striking car, a big yellow Hispano-Suiza, by the panache of her green hat, by her small face and dancing auburn hair. He notices she is wearing a large green emerald ring on the third finger of her right hand. He comes to notice that she has tiger-tawny hair and a husky voice. Unfortunately, when they get to the door of Gerald’s flat they see that he is blind drunk.

After the first few pages you realise it is going to overflow with infatuated descriptions of the charismatic Iris. Rhapsodies. A love letter.

She stood carelessly, like the women in Georges Barbier’s almanacks, Falbalas et Fanfreluches, who know how to stand carelessly.

About her, it was perfectly obvious, was the aura of many adventures.

The magic of the sea was in her eyes, whipped with salt and winds.

It seemed to me that across her gentleness flamed a bar of fire. She walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself.

One was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property, either her own or other people’s.

She had a great talent for looking at nothing in particular,

She walked, oh, impersonally, in the fires of herself.

She showed you first one side of her and then another, and each side seemed to have no relation with any other, each side might have belonged to a different woman; indeed, since then I have found that each side did belong to a different woman. I have met a hundred pieces of Iris, quite vividly met them, since last I saw her. And sometimes I have thought of her—foolishly, of course, but shall a man be wise about a woman?—as someone who had by a mistake of the higher authorities strayed into our world from a land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who, the perfection of our imperfections, were awaiting their inheritance of this world of ours.

She wasn’t that ghastly thing called ‘Bohemian’, she wasn’t any of the ghastly things called ‘society’, ‘county’, upper, middle, and lower class. She was, you can see, some invention, ghastly or not, of her own. But she was so quiet about it, she didn’t intrude it on you, she was just herself, and that was a very quiet self. You felt she had outlawed herself from somewhere, but where was that somewhere? You felt she was tremendously indifferent as to whether she was outlawed or not.

One was to find later that she was completely without a sense of property, either her own or other people’s.

She looked at me through the smoke of her cigarette. She was grave, intent. But one never knew what about…

Arlen isn’t afraid to deploy shamelessly poetic prose:

White she was, very white, and her painted mouth was purple in the dim light, and her eyes, which seemed set very wide apart, were cool, impersonal, sensible, and they were blazing blue. Even in that light they were blazing blue, like two spoonfuls of the Mediterranean in the early morning of a brilliant day. The sirens had eyes like that, without a doubt, when they sang of better dreams.

She was like a tower of beauty in the morning of the world.

Anyway, they look into Gerald’s room long enough to realise he has passed out drunk again. The narrator explains that his binges go on for three days. Iris introduces herself, Iris Storm, Mrs Storm, and explains that she and Gerald are twins, born within the same hour 29 years ago. They come from a posh landed family, the Marches, which has fallen on hard times.

I could somehow ‘cope with’ my time and generation, while they were of the breed destined to failure. I was of the race that is surviving the England of Horatio Bottomley, the England of lies, vulgarity, and unclean savagery; while they of the imperious nerves had failed, they had died that slow white death which is reserved for privilege in defeat…

Gerald is ‘absurdly shy’, can’t cope with life hence the alcoholism. She spends most of her time abroad, which she explains why she hasn’t seen her brother for ten years. But he’s drunk and after a bit of chat and explaining these facts, they leave the drunken brother, Iris bitterly commenting that ‘the Marches are never let off anything…’ which becomes a refrain through the book.

On the way back down she suddenly drops into his room asking for a glass of water. The narrator is embarrassed because he is moving out of the place next day and his belongings are scattered all over the floor. She picks up various books, we discover that the narrator is (alas) a writer, and they have some literary chat (she thinks D.H. Lawrence is ‘nice’) which seems terribly dated and irrelevant, for example about the quality of ‘vulgarity’. Then they’re talking about ‘the Jews’ and their love of luxury which leads into a consideration of Chesterton, his Catholicism and blowing on about beer and Britain. Very dated, almost at times incomprehensible.

But the conversation is just filler while he observes and studies the woman he has already become besotted by:

The lady of the green hat said nothing, and that was how I knew that for her everything was inevitable. That is an important thing to know about a woman, for you know then that you will never know where you are.

She kept strange, invisible company, this lady. She walked in measureless wastes, making flames rush up from stones, making molehills out of mountains.

She shook her head, staring at me with a mischievous smile. Her childishness did not jar. She was always herself.

Her hair was thick and tawny, and it waved like music, and the night was tangled in the waves of her hair.

More information is revealed, such as Iris has been married two times, both dead. Second husband, Captain Storm, won a Victoria Cross in the Great War but a year later was murdered by Sinn Feiners in Ireland.

There’s a knock at the door and it’s the local policeman on his beat and worried about an unusual car parked in the alley. The narrator reassures him, but when he returns to his flat, discovers Iris has gone into his bedroom and fallen asleep on the bed. He studies her beauty intently, sitting in a chair smoking till dawn. At which point she awakes, puts on some powder and the famous hat, and departs.

Her eyes were full on mine, naked, expressionless. I felt that they were the heads of the nails under which she had nailed herself.

Wow! He is hooked.

Chapter 2. The Cavalier Of Low Creatures

Profiling Iris’s twin brother, [the alcoholic] Gerald March

The book very heavily uses the old thriller trick of saying ‘But one was to learn later…’, ‘As I found out later…’, ‘That was to come much later…’ and most ominously of all, ‘But now I’ll never know what she was thinking’, ‘that faint dry scent whose name I shall now never know…’ and the like, incredibly obviously signalling that something bad is going to happen, that the astonishingly charismatic Iris Storm is doomed to die!

More generally the narrator spends a lot of time telling us what he’s going to tell us later, constantly promising us stuff later: ‘He will have his place, that dead Boy Fenwick. A deep place.’ He fusses about what he’s going to say when.

At some point the narrator began to remind me of the narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s masterpiece, The Good Soldier‘, John Dowell, who comes over as an amateur storyteller, constantly fussing about when to tell us and how to tell us key elements of the plot, continually explaining how he didn’t understand this or that at the time they occurred. ‘It was only later that I realised…’ ‘But one notices those things only later on…’

In this manner the narrator declares that he’s talked the events which make up the narrative he’s going to tell with friends who knew Iris, Hilary Townshend and Guy de Travest, friends of the late Barty March, had known Gerald and Iris since their earliest childhood. Guy de Travest had been Gerald’s colonel in the Grenadiers for some time during the war (‘I had a sort of eye on him in France, and he seemed as sensitive as a violin string’).

This chapter is about Gerald March, twin brother of Iris Storm, six foot two, lean, one time captain in the Grenadier Guards, who’s gone completely to pot after the war. ‘He was, I mean, so afraid of life that he simply couldn’t exist but by pretending to despise it’, ‘the most lovable man I ever met.’,

That was always Gerald’s trouble, he never was given the credit for being shy, he put himself between you and any sympathy with him, he made it clear that he didn’t want your infernal sympathy

The dark eyes haunted with abstraction, the thin hawk’s nose, the fine, twisted, defiant mouth…

If I haven’t mentioned it before, Arlen’s prose style is odd, quirky, eccentric, mannered.

It was on the fifth morning after the coming and going of the green hat that I was on an instant afflicted with an impulse, and did on the same instant act upon it.

There was by ordinary no grinning froth about Gerald.

I thought I heard Guy mutter something between his teeth.

He has an odd way of saying, not that so and so was an x type of person, but that ‘that was an x type of person’.

That was a most deficient man in every other respect

That was a sad lady, most grave… That was a very quiet lady… That was a gallant lady.

That was a conscientious man, Conrad Masters.

That was a fell lady for whom I bought a green hat that day.

Now that was a loquacious lady.

It seems just not quite standard English usage, although maybe it overlaps with American street slang of the same period or a bit later, Damon Runyon characters saying ‘Now that was some swell broad!’ And he’s addicted to reversing standard word order, often sounding like Yoda from Star Wars.

Thoughtful he was always.

But not I to be provoked!

His eyes pierced the pavement the other side of my shoulder, for tall was Gerald.

Dolorous it was, yet phantasm of gaiety lay twined in it.

Dark it was, the curtains drawn.

A boyish voice, a very boyish voice Venice had.

Weighed down I was by the chill of my journey.

Wise those eyes were now, and steady as stars in a cavern.

Too tall was Guy, in that light.

An amiable man, he looked.

Impatient, Iris’s voice was, I thought.

Soft she was now, soft and white and small.

Or both in one sentence:

The Blues, that man knows.

A man given to muttering, that.

I thought of… Mrs Conrad Masters. A dashing lady, that.

Faintly amused those worried eyes looked to be. That was that man’s way.

Why? Maybe he thought it was modish and modern. Throughout the book his style is often just odd;

We would then, at about eleven o’clock, have by ordinary gone towards bed.

Venice was in high looks that day.

The narrator first met Gerald when he turned up at the magazine where the narrator worked, the New Voice edited by the testy Horton. He gruffly declares he has written a novel. It’s big, titled ‘The Savage Device’, concerns a young idealist named Felix Burton who marries the ghastly Ava Foe. Only later does Iris tell the narrator that Ava is based on her and Burton is based on her first husband, the legendary Boy Fenwick.

Back in the present, when the narrator rings Iris’s London home, the woman she rents the place to, Mrs Oden, tells her Iris left that day for Paris. Some days later he gets a git package from Paris. Iris has sent him a pack of beautiful writing paper with his new address printed on it.

Chapter 3. For Purity!

Portrait of family friend Hilary Townshend

Sometimes his prose is so overwrought and baroque as to be almost incomprehensible.

The cavalier of low creatures dies hard; surviving even our gesture, he loiters dangerously in the tail of our eye, he awaits, with piratical calm, the final stroke; and only will he fade and be forever gone, despised, and distraught, before the face of him who bore the magic device For Purity, whose ghost was to be raised by Mr Townshend over dinner on the twelfth night after the coming of the green hat.

At other times, in fact very frequently, he’s suddenly bright and clever.

Hilary was a man of various ages; when nothing was going well with him, he would look no more than forty; when everything was going well with him, he would look about forty-five; when he was crossing a road, that is to say when he was thinking, he looked about fifty. This last was, I believe, his age.

Grey and thoughtful and kind, he stood there in the doorway of his tall sombre house, looking up at the faint stars on the ceiling of Chesterfield Street: his was just that contained air of loneliness that unmarried schoolmasters wear during their holidays.

‘Oh, Naps, such a wonder!’ cried Venice on the instant, and I saw what one is so apt to see after an intimate talk with a woman, that one has only been talking to a mood. (chapter 7)

‘Growing-pains, Masters. One is always growing up, at other people’s expense…’ (chapter 8)

‘Oh, friends and enemies! One relies on what people are in themselves, no matter what circumstances may make them feel.’ (chapter 10)

And funny:

Hilary, like all middle-aged men who detest night-clubs, at once left me to dance with the first acquaintance he saw. (chapter 4)

The faint, slow lilt of the tango, pleasantest of all dances but one that is so seldom danced in London because nobody in London can dance it… which is a pity. (chapter 9)

She [Iris] drove that menacing bonnet ever more furiously along the road to Maidenhead, so that corners perished like midgets before our head-lights and Hugo and Shirley, who sat behind, murmured against her driving, saying that it would be bad for their reputation as a happily-married couple to be found dead on the road to Maidenhead. ‘A friend of mine,’ yelled Hugo, ‘was asked to resign from Buck’s for being found dead on the Maidenhead road…’ (chapter 9)

‘I do wish,” Hugo said violently, ‘that perfect strangers wouldn’t force themselves on us like this. Any one would think we were at a Royal Garden Party!’ (chapter 10)

And has some dazzling phrases:

Napier stared at her—he was sitting now—and it was as though he had put his hand to his mouth and placed a smile there. (chapter 7)

In the still air of Guy’s great, bare dining room those cameo flames never flickered even so much, they might have been flowers of light cut out of the stifling heat. (chapter 10)

Iris smiled, and those very white teeth bit the moment into two pieces with their smile and dropped the pieces into limbo. (chapter 11)

Well, in the days after Iris Storm’s apparition, the narrator goes for dinner with Hilary and we learn a bit more about all the characters. For example that shy alcoholic Gerald is heir to the earldom of Portairly (would become the 19th Earl of Portairley and Axe). That the second husband, Hector Storm V.C., left Iris everything, which explains why she’s loaded and can jaunt off to the continent all the time.

That her first husband was the legendary Boy Fenwick. That his body was found on the courtyard below their bedroom window on the first night of their honeymoon, Hilary thinks Boy threw himself to his death on a matter of purity. In other words, he discovered the love of his life, Iris March, was not a virgin. Iris could have stuck to the hotel’s suggestion that Boy was drunk on champagne and fell out the window by accident. But she is constitutionally incapable of lying and so said he threw himself out the window while she watched and lit a cigarette. Thus damning her reputation for ever.

The stilted, antagonistic dinner with Hilary is often very funny.

‘Seldom,’ said Hilary thoughtfully, ‘have I known a man pull his weight less than you are doing this evening. Hm. I should try some brandy.’

Chapter 4. Aphrodite

At the Loyalty nightclub

Not wanting to go home to bed the narrator invites Hilary to a new nightclub on Pall Mall, the Loyalty, overseen by its directeur du restaurant, the Chevalier Giulio di Risotto, and packed with social luminaries, an embodification of the roaring twenties.

As she danced she stared thoughtfully at the glass dome of the ceiling. She looked bored with boredom.

He had observed that the whole purpose of a “best-seller” is to justify a reasonable amount of adultery in the eyes of suburban matrons.

The best way to keep old friends is not to see them, for then you can at least keep the illusion that they are friends.

There was a group of tall young men at the entrance, maybe waiting for their women from the Cloak-Room, maybe waiting for sirens to come to them from the night, maybe waiting for taxicabs, maybe only waiting for the next minute, as young men will.

The Loyalty is packed with people they know, and it’s maybe in this scene that Arlen created the sense of ‘Mayfair’ and nightclubs full of cynical bright young things dancing to ‘the Blues’.

There’s a buzz of news, people talking about the evening papers. Then suddenly everyone knows: the news is that Gerald was arrested in Hyde Park for bothering a woman, sitting at the same bench and making indecent proposals to a middle aged women who started screaming and the police appeared.

Iris is at this nightclub and comes up to the narrator and asks him to accompany her to his old house (which we saw him packing to move out of) but where Gerald still lives, because the narrator has a key to get in.

So they drive there and the narrator lets himself in, goes up to Gerald’s flat and it is elliptically done, but we slowly realise he discovered Gerald has blown his brains out. Without pausing he goes back down to Iris who’d waited in the hall and tells Iris he found Gerald in the same posture as the other day, i.e. sprawled drunk and insensible.

She thanks him and jumps into her powerful roadster and drives off. Turning back to his old house he discovers Guy who took a taxi there, who smokes thoughtfully and says: ‘Had an idea he might blow his brains out.’

Chapter 5. The Dark Letter

Paris 10 months later

All the preceding happened in June 1922. The narrative suddenly cuts to the last week of January of the year 1923 (although he later says it’s 10 months after Gerald’s death?) – and to the Place Vendôme in Paris and a description of that floating population of a few thousand dressing-tables, sables and Cachets Faivre which, under the lofty title of l’aristocratie internationale; the shops, the tourists, the Americans buying everything.

The narrator is with his sister. He’s spent four months at Cannes where he bumped into her and they drove across France to Paris. The sense of France, and the south of France, as a playground for tourists, reminds me of ‘Tender is The Night’ and perhaps explains why ‘The Green Hat’ is specifically referenced in it: Arlen described this world exactly a decade before Fitzgerald’s (far more profound and moving) account of it was published.

He has several amusing glances at the habitual rudeness of the French, especially French hotel staff, who refuse to help him or his sister, along with a number of comic generalisations (slurs) on the French character.

The French sections evinces a cosmopolitan knowingness epitomised by the dandyish Mr Cherry-Marvel who knows everybody and knows everything about everybody but drones on in endless confidential monologues. In the middle of this endless droning, the narrator drifts off to the present moment, the moment of writing, and tells us how he had, in the 6 months of Iris’s absence, received some long rambling often indecipherable letters from her, and quotes and comments from them at length, hence the title of this chapter.

But somehow, in the middle of his summary of the letters, the narrator describes Guy paying a visit to Iris lying ill in bed, and their conversation (as reported to him later by Guy). This long conversation included stuff about her marriage to Hector which seems to include references to her having gotten pregnant by Hector but Hector being killed before she came to term. This is all very obscure: did Iris have an abortion? Was that so completely illegal and socially stigmatised that Arlen can’t spell it out, even in fiction?

Eventually the narrator manages to interrupt Cherry-Marvel and extract the address of the house where Iris is staying. So he jumps into a taxi, a ‘clever little Citroën taxi’ which takes him on a delirious midnight drive into dark areas of Paris he has never been before, and Arlen gives a wonderfully purple description of the dream Paris of debauchery.

Montparnasse lay somewhere behind, or to the east, or to the west. We were in unknown Paris, silent, ill-lit, fantastic Paris: silent but for a rending crash here, a jarring cry there. Cold as the devil it was now, as though because the prickly warmth of many lamps and shops was withdrawn. Carefully we traversed a broad avenue as yet scarcely paved, beneath the skeleton shapes of great tenement-houses. Ah, Paris, that we should have come to this, you and I! Paris, that we should have come together down to this! In how many moods you and I have passed the time of day and night together, we have sat in strange places and dared the most devilish shadows, we have wandered from the Rotonde to the crowning grubbiness of the Butte, we have raced in the Bois and up the Mont Valérien, we have laughed at painted boys and been reviled by painted women, we have danced, loved, gambled, drunk, and together we have been bored by the unmentionable and terrified by that which makes the eyes bright and the face white as a soiled handkerchief, while Mio Mi Marianne danced a minuet du cœur with a crimson garter and the moon fell across the French-windows of Berneval’s house to be lost in the soft shadows of giant poppies. Paris, that we should now have come down to this, lost together in these nameless darknesses beyond even the low darkness of the Bal Bullier, that glory of another time than ours…

The taxi pulls up in front of the address Cherry-Marvel gave him, a huge dark imposing building which he hallucinates is like a fortress or an asylum.

Chapter 6. The Red Lights

The nursing home where Iris is recovering

Continues straight on from the previous scene: When the narrator rings the bell the door is opened by a nun (who turns out to be a lay sister) and who explains that it is a convent-nursing-home. (‘Perhaps of all the nations in the world the French alone are capable of fixing the loudest possible bell to a nursing-home.’) When she explains:

‘Nous avons ici,’ she was pleased to add, ‘la clientèle européenne la plus chic’. [‘We have here the smartest European clientele]

It really made me think of ‘Tender Is The Night’ with its theme of high living inextricably linked with mental collapse. Except that Fitzgerald’s great achievement is to make everything seem wonderful and romantic and somehow innocent. Even when describing squalid scenes Fitzgerald somehow manages to keep his aura of romantic innocence. Not so Arlen:

Perhaps that was the worst stroke of that day, so far. Iris among a clientèle européenne la plus chic…. One saw the cosmopolitan divorcées, their secret illnesses and guileful pains, their nasty little coquetries and the way they would blackmail their lovers with their sufferings, and one felt the sticky night-club breath of all the silly, common harlotries of England, France, America.

When I read the following sentence it struck me that Arlen is attempting in prose the wild coloration and stylisation of modernist painting.

How afraid one always is of the callous French doctors with their cynical eyes and purple beards….

Silence. Anxieties walked across it arm-in-arm with that lank man’s doubtful heat.

The nun fetches the doctor in charge who turns out to be someone the narrator knows (of course), Dr Conrad Masters, a compulsive bridge player. Masters is a haunted, nervous man and twitchily leaks out to the narrator that Iris has been there for weeks, something to do with ‘septic poisoning’ leading to some kind of nervous collapse, delirium, occasionally waking into lucidity, but not caring. Then Dr Masters goes home in his flash Renault car.

Cut to the narrator that evening taking his (older) sister to the latest Paris nightclub, La Plume de Ma Tante – leaving reader to ask, why didn’t he simply ask to see Iris or force his way to her room? Because the doctor said she needed rest?

Anyway, this Paris nightclub is significantly more debauched than the London one, and reading Arlen’s description of it you realise why the book crystallised an entire era and came to be so widely referenced. Sorry it’s such a long quote but it’s the accumulation that makes its impact.

La Plume de Ma Tante. Bright green walls splashed with vermilion. A platform at one end, whereon five blackamoors perspired. At the other, a naked woman. She was without hips, according to the fashion for women. Her arms were twined above her head, and raised on the tip of her fingers was a bowl of green malachite from which pink water splashed into a white alabaster basin at her feet. Many English people were present. They would be going to the Riviera, then they would be coming back from the Riviera. Colonel Duck was there, with the quality. Colonel Duck was, no doubt, just returned from some notably swift exploits on the Cresta Run. But he never was so talkative about his outdoor activities. Cherry-Marvel was there, with a great big woman and a nice-looking boy with the hands of a housemaid who was a famous boxer. There was the usual group of Argentines, very well dressed indeed. They talked about le polo. All over the room elderly women were dancing with young men of both sexes. Mio Mi Marianne was there, sitting alone, but I might not speak with her because I was with my sister. A demi-mondaine will feel insulted if you speak with her when you are with your sister. Two years before Mio Mi Marianne had one night tied a silk handkerchief round her wrist, and it became the fashion for women to tie silk handkerchiefs round their wrists. Then Mio Mi Marianne tied a silk handkerchief round her throat, and that became the fashion. She thought of these things while smoking opium. She sat alone, staring into a glass of Vichy Water. A young American polo-player called Blister went up to her table, and maybe he asked her to dance, but she just looked at him and he went away again. Her eyes were intent on an opium-dream, and she was very happy in the arms of the infinite. Mio Mi Marianne will be found one day lying on the Aubusson carpet of her drawing-room. There will be a hole in the carpet where her cigarette has died out.

A blackamoor beat a warning roll on his drum, the dancers left the floor, the lights dwindled and awoke again in swaying shadows of blue and carmine. A heavily built young man with the face of a murderer danced a tango with a lovely young girl with short golden curls. Then he threw her on the floor, and picked her up again. Rudolf and Raymonde. He did it beautifully. An American woman called the Duchess of Malvern threw Rudolph a pink carnation. The Baron de Belus said harshly: ‘That is a white carnation really, but it is blushing at the fuss that women make of Dagoes.’

(I comment below on the occasional use of racial terms or slurs in the text which we obviously find unacceptable now, a century later. On the other hand, modish open-mindedness about gender, about ‘dancing with young men of both sexes’ etc.)

Later that night the narrator returns to the nursing home and is surprised to discover young Napier Harpenden there as well, ‘Napier, favourite of the gods, shy, sensitive, fine’, ‘a strange, secret, saintly youth, a favourite of the gods’. He’s passing through Paris on the way to the Riviera with his wife Venice. When we last saw them both, in the nightclub scene at the Loyalty club, they were three days away from getting married. Now it’s ten months later. In Arlen’s characteristic tortured and oblique style, I think we learn from their extended but elliptical conversation, that Napier and Iris had an affair which started on the fateful night that Gerald killed himself. In fact, the narrator realises, he in a way facilitated it because, if he’d told Iris the truth about Gerald she would have reacted, gone home by herself etc, but instead thought everything was normal and so succumbed to the advances of Napier, who had followed her to Gerald’s digs from the club. Complicated.

Also complicated that his wife, Venice, is waiting outside in the car all this time. And Napier has a letter Iris wrote him. Just imagine if Venice saw it! Devastated! End of marriage!

Dr Master emerges and tells them Iris knows they’re there, and asks for Napier. So he takes Napier in to see her, leaving the narrator outside. Is she going to die without ever seeing the narrator again? Is that the drift of all the doom-laded prolepsis in the opening chapter (‘I was never to find out…’).

Back out front of the building Venice is sleeping in the taxi she and Napier came in. The doctor invites the narrator back to his place to join a bridge party. On the way he explains that Iris’s problem is she doesn’t care whether she lives or dies. She bucked up when she saw Napier. And that’s why he – the narrator – must do all he can to prevent Napier travelling on to the South the next morning.

Chapter 7. For Venice!

Venice’s torment that her husband, Napier, doesn’t love her

Next morning the narrator wakes up in his hotel in the Rue de la Paix. When he’s gotten up he phones Venice Harpenden at her hotel and she in that posh darlings loves kind of way compels him to come meet her and buy her lunch.

This lunch is an agonising affair because Venice reveals she is stricken with jealousy by the way Napier (or ‘Naps’, as she calls him) seems obsessed with this Mrs Storm. They had planned to leave Paris this morning and now Naps has changed all their plans. Why? This puts the narrator in the embarrassing position of having to defend Napier and explain away his dogged visits to Iris’s care home as the loyalty of an old friend.

It’s made ten times worse when young innocent Venice confides in the narrator that she cannot have children, and asks him whether that puts a man off a girl, her being infertile; whether it might be enough to drive the man away and into the arms of an old lover (Mrs Storm)?

They’re in the middle of this sticky conversation when Naps himself walks in. The narrator tries to get away but is forced to sit there as the happy-happy conversation of the couple becomes more and more strained until she becomes angry-upset and he momentarily loves his temper. He says Alright then let’s go, let’s go now, let’s go right away to the South. (There’s a detail that Venice had met the narrator’s sister who kindly agreed to loan them her car and its chauffeur to drive them south.)

Only the narrator knows what a sacrifice this is to Naps, not just because he (apparently) loves Iris, but because Dr Masters had specifically said Iris’s recovery rested on Naps visiting her; that only Naps’s presence was giving her any reason to live. And now because of the nagging of his wife, she’s forced him to break his promise and jeopardise Iris’s life (‘a very cruel decision’). Only the narrator realises what this means, as they all get up, shake hands and part with jolly smiles.

And after they’re gone he is left to ponder the infinite capacity of human beings to screw up their loves lives. When he phones Dr Masters to tell him Napier won’t be coming to the nursing home this afternoon, the doctor swears freely. Will I do? asks the narrator. ‘You!’ The doctor says he’ll come and collect him. (If it was lunch he just ate with Venice then this might only be 2 or 3 in the afternoon.)

Chapter 8. Piqure Du Cœur

French for ‘heart sting’, description of very ill Iris in the nursing home

So Dr Masters drives the narrator to the nursing home, they enter a series of courtyards and quadrangles, all appropriately solemn, the narrator led by a gruff unsympathetic nun until he finally comes to the door on a dark corridor. It is opened by a radiantly beautiful nun, Sister Virginie, whose compassion shine forth. She indicates Iris lying in the bed and leaves.

It is dark. All Iris’s curled hair and style has disappeared. She looks small and frail and asleep but the narrator is reassured by her steady breathing. He is turning to go when he realises her great dark eyes are open and staring at him. He is worried she will mistake him for Napier but then sees in her eyes (as people in novels supernaturally can) that she recognised him. She says just one word, ‘Dying’. He goes to the bed to reassure her, takes a comb from the bedside table and gently combs her damp straight hair until she closes her eyes and breathes slowly. Then carefully gets up and leaves and silently closes the door. He is crying.

Sister Virginie accompanies him back to the doctor’s office. Masters tells him off for letting Napier leave. He was doing her some good. The narrator’s visit, not so much. Later, in a phone call Masters tells him not to visit for a while, say ten days.

In the event it’s longer than that, ‘quite a while more.’ Description of his second visit, on 15 February. She talks a lot more this time, telling him off for still being in Paris, so he has an excuse ready, which is that an idea for a story came to him and he wants to stay in Paris to write it. (The idea is about a man who would not dance with his wife. Not a humdinger, is it?)

She’s been told by the doctors to lie perfectly still and not move hear head, not even a finger. She can’t laugh because it hurts. She says nobody wants her, not even a God and makes a joke about having all the paperwork reading, a temperature of 106, getting to the Pearly Gates but being told she is too full of life and rejected by God himself, who tells the archangel Gabriel to escort her back to the world.

She thanks him for bringing Naps to see her, chats some more but then turns querulous and tearful as the really sick do. More clearly than ever it is hinted that her ailment is something to do with pregnancy:

“As for me,” she whispered, “all this effort wasted … no playmate, no nothing. Masters warned me, too…. Dead as dead, the poor darling was….”

So was it a miscarriage? Or did Iris carry the baby to term and it was stillborn? Dr Masters enters and accuses the narrator of making her cry and Iris stands up for him, but it’s time to go.

She tells him she will never return to England.

Chapter 9. Talking Of Hats

London, July 1923: the narrator and Guy see Iris sweep past in a taxi with Napier

Six months later. July that year was swelteringly hot. After dinner at the Café Royal one boiling hot night, the narrator is walking home along Piccadilly with his older friends, Guy de Travest and Hilary. They’re thinking about popping into White’s, the gentlemen’s club, to fetch Napier when they see the very man come bounding down the steps and jump into a tax which roars past them. Both Guy and the narrator see that sitting on the back seat next to him was Iris Storm! Guy invites the narrator back to his house where, incongruously enough, they play squash before bathing and drinking cold drinks.

Guy idly casually says he was thinking of having a dinner party to which he’d invite Venice and Iris so they could finally meet each other. Does the narrator think that would be a good idea?

In fact Iris calls him the next day and insists that he take her shopping and buy her a new green hat. Which he does, and then lunch. She has fully recovered, she looks radiant, she is splendidly imperious.

I couldn’t help thinking of her as of someone who had strayed into our world from a strange land unknown to us, a land where lived a race of men and women who were calmly awaiting their inheritance of our world when we should have annihilated one another in our endless squabbles about honour, morality, nationality. Strong were the people of that land, stronger than the gold they despised but used, deterred by not qualm nor fear, strong and undefeatable. And just like that was the white mask of this beautiful woman, strong and undefeatable. It knew not truth nor lying, not honour nor dishonour, not loyalty nor treachery, not good nor evil: it was profoundly itself, a mask of the morning of this world when men needed not to confuse their minds with laws with which to confuse their neighbours, a mask of the evening of this world when men shall have at last made passions their servants and can enter into their full inheritance…

Nietzsche wrote about the Superman. Iris Storm is the Superwoman.

Chapter 10. The Fall Of The Emerald

The skinny-dipping party at Maidenhead

Way back in the first chapter, Iris had told the narrator about the oversized green emerald ring she wears on the third finger of her right hand. It was given her by her second husband, Hector Storm, who told her he intended it a symbol of her inconstancy, which has driven him to despair: ‘my life is darkness without you, I love you so, and it’s a perfect hell with you, I love you so!’

Cut back to the present of the story, in which, after that dinner at Guy’s house, they all pile into cars and drive for Maidenhead to go swimming, they being: Guy, the narrator and Iris, Napier and Venice, and another young pair of newlyweds, Hugo and Shirley Cypress.

Iris drives like a demon. The narrator is amazed that everyone seems to be behaving as if nothing is wildly wrong. For he knows that Iris is planning to run away to Rio de Janeiro off Napier in a few days, and he knows Guy invited Iris solely to show her what she is doing is wrong, to show her the happiness of these young couples – Napier and Venice and Hugo and Shirley – to show Iris that she comes from a different world and must not interfere in and wreck their happiness. And yet no-one, not even Guy, acknowledges the elephant in the room. The narrator marvels at their English nonchalance and wonders at what point it becomes hypocrisy.

So when Guy mentions the notion of driving to Maidenhead to go skinny dipping they all jump at the idea, especially Venice and Shirley who think it’s too super! Guy chivalrously says it was the narrator’s idea and they all mockingly refer to him from that point onwards as the ‘he-man’, obviously the latest phrase from America (a phrase mocked by Gertrude Stein in a story told by Scott Fitzgerald).

While Venice and Shirley were gushing, the narrator lit a cigarette for Venice and his hand momentarily touched hers and he discovered it was cold as ice, and in a flash he realised the toll knowing her husband is in love with Iris has taken, how it has undermined that marriage, how desperate she is.

Anyway – the party drive in two cars from West London to Maidenhead, late at night, going at 70mph, taking bends at crazy speeds, Iris driving like a mad thing. They pull into the courtyard of hotel which is closed and bribe the grumpy owner to lend them towels, then stumble in the intense dark down to the river. The narrator finds Iris leaning on him in the darkness and goes purple:

She leaned on my arm, completely. “Foot hurts.” I wished she wouldn’t. I almost said, “don’t.” Her touch confounded, confused. She was tangible, until she touched you. She was finite, until she touched you. She was a woman, until she touched you. Then she became woman, and you water. She became a breath of womanhood clothed in the soft, delicious mystery of the flesh. Touching her, you touched all desire. She was impersonal and infinite, like all desire. She was indifferent to all but her desire, like all desire. She was a breath carved in flesh, like all desire. She was the flower of the plant of all desire. Desire is the name of the plant that Lilith sowed, and every now and then it puts out the flower that in the choir of flowers is the paramour of the mandrake.

She is also, as we have realised by this stage, poison.

They discover boats moored to a jetty and fuss around a motorboat. Several locals, apparently the hotel owner and a local constable, tell them they can’t, but they make all kinds of witty replies and go ahead anyway. Posh privilege.

I think they strip off – as with the situation around Iris’s pregnancy, Arlen’s style or his entire mentality, is so roundabout that it’s hard to be sure – and swim in the water, all except Iris who lounges among the cushions in the motorboat.

Guy warns of dangerous currents and I felt the hot breath of tragedy on my shoulder – would one of them drown like the young couple in Women in Love? No.

But there is a bad moment when the bantering men realise Iris’s dress is in the boat but no Iris! She must have decided to go in after all. Lots of shouting and they realise they can’t see or hear Iris, or Venice. There’s a mad couple of minutes while they splash and yell and swim off in different directions before they find them and bring them back to the jetty.

In fact Venice insists that she’d gotten into a bit of trouble, called out, and that’s why Iris dived in: to save her. She tells everyone crowded round her in the bottom of the motorboat the Iris saved her life! Which triggers tense and varied responses from the menfolk, who are all aware of the tangled web between Napier, his wife Venice, and his lover Iris.

Iris is cold. The menfolk fuss, Guy and Napier worry, after her illness. She gets dressed but is still cold. They make their way back to the cars and Iris snuggles up next to the narrator. He discovers she’s lost the famous emerald ring. Yes, at the bottom of the Thames, she explains. So after all the heavy symbolism attributed to it, associated with infidelity by husband Hector, it was in saving a rival woman’s life that she lost it, an unambiguously moral act.

Then again, as she falls asleep on the narrator’s arm, she whispers that she thinks Venice got into trouble, half consciously, on purpose. Why? To make her (Iris) like her (Venice). Like her enough to back off from stealing her husband. ‘Will it?’ asks the narrator. ‘No,’ replies Iris.

The Last Chapter: St George For England!

Arlen has his narrator introduce us to his Last Chapter with a heavy sense of impending doom, commenting on his own practice with the airy self-consciousness theorising of an eighteenth century novelist, of a Henry Fielding, or maybe Robert Louis Stevenson at his most chatty.

NOW as I come to that last night of all, a night that was as though set on a stage by a cunning but reckless craftsman of the drama, and as I look every way I may at the happenings that were staged on the platform of that night, I do sincerely thank my stars that it is no novel I have set my hand to, but a faithful chronicle of events. For it would seem that the novelist, so he is an honest man and loves his craft, must work always under a great disadvantage in his earnest wish to tell of life truthfully; since, as the old, old saying is, he never can dare to be so improbable as life. He may, to be sure, be as dingy as life, according to the mode of the day, or he may even achieve the impossible and be more dingy than life, also according to the mode of the day, but to be as improbable as life will be as far beyond the honest novelist’s courage as it must be against the temper of his craft; for should his characters have to “break out,” should the novelist be so far gallant as to concede something to the profligate melodrama of life, his people may only “break out” along lines which the art of their creator has laid out and made inevitable for them; whereas you and I know that living men will do queer things which are desperately alien from what we had thought their possibilities—nay, impossibilities—to be, living men will defy the whole art of characterisation in the twinkling of an eye and destroy every canon of art in a throb of a desire: so that we may make no count or chart of the queer, dark sides of our fellows, nor put any limit, of art, psychology, romance or decency, to the impossibilities which are, within the trembling of a leaf, possible to men and women.

It’s a big chunk of text but not particularly clever. Truth is stranger than fiction, so what. It’s this kind of rambling banter which makes the book approachable and easy company, but by the same token also prevents it being literature. It’s not deep or pioneering or particularly thought-provoking. Indeed at some moments it’s almost gibberish, like the long exchange between the narrator and Iris about why she’s inviting him to come for a drive into the country.

‘We are driving into the country, let me tell you, to meet my fear. And when we meet it I shall not mock, nor tremble, nor quail, but I shall be a very Saint George for steadfastness. That is the programme, so far. And you, will you be my esquire?’
‘You speak of darkness, of sun-dials, of fear, of Sir Maurice Harpenden, whom I do not know, of Saint George of Cappadocia, whom, alas, one sees only too little of these days. I think that you, too, must have dined alone. And you have gone mad. Else why must we drive into the country?’
‘But we go to keep high company to-night, that’s why! Are you afraid of that? The captains and the kings of the countryside are our adversaries. Sweet, you and I shall stand arrayed against the warriors of conduct.’
‘Not I, Iris! I am for conduct.’

There’s piles more like this but, despite the deep purple passages – or maybe because of them – it was wildly popular.

So what happened ‘on that night’ of dark repute? Well, Iris invites the narrator to accompany her as she drives west out of London towards a place called Sutton Marle and the house of Sir Maurice Harpenden, father of Napier, being irritatingly vague and obscure to begin with, and then spouting a lot of stuff to justify running off with Napier and ruining poor Venice’s life. She laments that Venice couldn’t have a child; then everything would be different.

Then in the middle of the countryside, she pulls up by a field with the headlights shining on a tree in a field and delivers a massive burst of backstory. She was brought up alongside her twin brother Gerald, Boy Fenwick and Napier, son of Sir Maurice. Her mother died and her father declined. Sometimes an aunt took her and Napier up to London, for tea at Harrods, which they loved as children because they got gleefully lost in it. And so they nicknamed the tree they played around ‘Harrods’.

Napier and she became very close but his father wanted him to marry rich, not the daughter of a bankrupt family and so forced Napier, when he got old enough to go to university, never to see Iris again.

She reveals that when they met for one last time by the tree they played in as children, she told him she loved him and would never love another man. And she kept her vow. She gave herself to Boy and then to Hector in marriage, but they both realised she didn’t love them. Hector volunteered to go off to Ireland where he was killed, because one night he heard Iris whisper Napier’s name in her sleep.

Now she has come back to beard Sir Maurice and tell him that his ban on their love consigned her to twelve years of hell, to the deaths of two husbands, and to the future misery of Venice Pollard.

She starts the car again and sweeps up the drive to Sir Maurice’s house and comes to a halt in front of the grand steps. Out comes the ancient butler, Truble, to greet them. He starts wittering about how he’s known Iris all his life, held her in his arms when she was a baby, and she declares he is her oldest friend, then he is crying and she tries to comfort him.

The narrator and Iris go round the back of the house and spy through the long windows three men inside playing bridge: Guy de Travest, Hilary Townshend and Sir Maurice. Iris forces the narrator to give a quick moral profile of all three. God this is dragging on. What’s going to happen?

They knock and the men get up from their game and greet them. Iris is, as he first saw her, wearing a green hat. Turns out Sir Maurice invited Iris down. The three men have known and loved Iris since she was a girl which is why they want to confront her about her plan to run away with Napier. There’s a lot of talk but it develops into a confrontation between Iris and Maurice who hate and fear each other. He says:

‘This isn’t badness. Damn it, girl, this is evil! There aren’t any words in English to describe what we think of a woman who comes wantonly between a man and his wife, a man and his career.’

It turns into a long, melodramatic, overwritten confrontation, in which Iris, Maurice, Hilary and Guy all have extended speeches considering every aspect of the issue at inordinate length. I wasn’t very interested in all the fol-de-rol about love and the gods and destiny and whatnot, what interested me was the way Arlen makes it at least in part a clash of the generations. The old men realise that their generation screwed it up; with all their fine talk of honour and decency, they’re the generation which gave the world the Great War, which in fact destroyed all those values. Hilary states it clearly:

‘Maurice, years ago, didn’t realise that in our time we are not our children’s masters. Their ideas are not ours, their ambitions are not ours. And there’s no reason why they should be, since ours have sent all Europe to the devil.’

A point echoed by Guy:

‘I fancy Hilary’s right about this father and child business… after all, our cubs can’t make more of a mess of everything than we and our fathers have done.’

When Maurice states, or implies, that Iris is going to ruin Napier’s career in the Foreign Office, Iris makes the kind of set-piece statement that is quoted in history books about the 1920s generation rebelling against their parents’ bankrupt values:

‘You talk to me of your England. I despise your England, I despise the ‘us’ that is ‘us’. We are shams with patrician faces and peasant minds. We are built of lies, Maurice, and we toil for the rewards of worms.

‘You would have Napier toil for a worm’s reward, you are sorry I have broken Napier’s career in the Foreign Office. Maurice, I am glad. To you, it seems a worthy thing for a good man to make a success in the nasty arena of national strifes and international jealousies.

‘To me, a world which thinks of itself in terms of puny, squalid, bickering little nations and not as one glorious field for the crusade of mankind is a world in which to succeed is the highest indignity that can befall a good man, it is a world in which good men are shut up like gods in a lavatory. Maurice, there are better things, nobler things, cleaner things, than can be found in any career that will glorify a man’s name or nationality.

‘You thought to bully me with our traditions. You are right, they are mine as well as yours. May God forgive you the sins committed in their name! And may He forgive me for ever having believed in them…’

This all feels immensely theatrical, like the last act in a play by George Bernard Shaw, what with its strong independent female protagonist and stirring speeches against the dead hand of the older (male) generation.

It obviously represents a clash of moralities, as well: the older generation condemn people like iris for their selfishness, promiscuity or adultery; whereas people like Iris see themselves as being true to Life unlike the small-minded, parochial and stifling lives of the older generation which – unanswerable argument – led up to the greatest cataclysm in human history.

At the height of the confrontation there suddenly comes a voice from the French windows (it’s always the French windows) and it’s Napier himself! He’s come all this way to rescue Iris. And Venice has come with him, standing behind him. Napier steps forward and it is his father he steps towards. He says he wants to clear Iris’s name, Iris begs him not to confront his father, Maurice says they must part, Hilary says the young people must go now, it’s a very fraught busy scene.

Napier now makes his grand speech, accusing his father of sacrificing his life on the altar of stupid outworn values and traditions:

‘You sacrificed Iris for what you call my future, my career. Weigh Iris on one side and on the other my future, my career, now that I am thirty! You sacrificed my happiness to the ghastly vanity of making our name something in this world. You call that ‘working for my future,’ sir. And I call it the cruel sort of humbug which has dragged God knows how many decent people into a beastly, futile unhappiness. Here I am at thirty, a nothing without even the excuse of being a happy nothing, a nothing liked by other nothings and successful among other nothings, a nothing wrapped round by the putrefying little rules of the gentlemanly tradition. And, my God, they are putrefying, and I bless the England that has at last found us out.’

Then becomes clear one of the most striking things in this madly extended and over-the-top finale, which is that Venice has come round to Iris’s point of view. She is ready to give her husband to her because she has come to appreciate how truly and deeply Iris loves him.

Napier’s anger has been intensified because when he happened to walk in Sir Maurice was yet again throwing the fact of Boy Fenwick’s suicide in her face, and this goads Napier beyond endurance. After a lot more ranting and raging he finally spits out why this is so unfair. Iris deliberately let people believe it was something in her that triggered Fenwick’s suicide, allegedly ‘for purity’. Now Napier reveals that Fenwick had syphilis when he married Iris, and killed himself when he realised he had given it to her.

!!!!

Iris is mortified and whispers, very powerfully, that Napier has taken from her the only gracious thing she ever did in her life. And with that they leave, Iris and Napier, through the open French windows.

Venice faints, the older chaps kindly bring her round and are just tending her when… Napier appears back in the French windows and there’s the deafening roar of Iris’s car, starting up, revving up, then roaring off into the night! What!?

Napier walks across the room, looking defeated, and tells Venice that he can’t leave her like that, he is not such a cad. Venice asks what he’s talking about? Napier says Iris tried to conceal it, said she’s promised not to tell, but then tells him that Venice is pregnant, with his child! So that’s why he came back. He’s not a perfect cad. He’ll stand by her.

Except it’s a lie! Venice screams that it’s a lie! She is not pregnant. Iris lied to him to send him back! Chaos, pendemonium, all manner of recriminations and explanations!

But above it all Sir Maurice confronts the narrator about the unnatural loudness of Iris’s car. Suddenly panic grips everyone. Is she going to do something stupid? And so they jump into Sir Maurice’s car and go hurtling off down the drive, then out into the country lanes, chasing Iris’s headlights which they can see in the night.

As the chase reaches its climax, they watch Iris’s car leave the road and race towards the talismanic tree named ‘Harrods’, the place she was happy as a child, race towards it and crash into it with a huge crash and flare of flame.

The others slow their car and park and run towards the wreck. The narrator’s foot touches something soft and he picks up her green hat, the green hat.

Thoughts

Goodness me, what a ridiculously over-extended and over-excited farrago it turned into at the end!

I’ve read so much about ‘The Green Hat’ that it’s a great relief to finally read it. I can see why it was such a hit, crystallising the frenetic partying of the era which everyone, at the same time, felt was so ill-omened and fated. It certainly portrays its little set of high society hedonists with imaginative force and humour, and combines a gossip column view of Paris and London, with tear-jerking scenes in the nursing home, naughty high jinks in Maidenhead, and then a Bernard Shaw moral confrontation followed by a fireball climax. No wonder it was immediately made into a play and soon afterwards into a movie.

At numerous points it has subtlety, acute observations and sharp writing. But a lot of it is obscure, oblique, written in an elliptical style which makes such a fetish of avoiding the point, as to make plenty of passages puzzling and some bits of it almost incomprehensible.

And the final chapter with its torrent of revelations feels as if it has been hammered onto the rest of the narrative with six inch nails. All the revelations of her happy childhood, the tragic blocking of her love for Napier imposed by Sir Maurice, 12 years of hell, all this makes you fall right out of love with the book and then left reeling by the melodramatic ending.

I can see why it is on no-one’s academic reading list and is not even currently in print. Shame. A properly edited edition by, say, the Oxford University Press, would be worth reading for the historical footnotes and explanations alone.

Arlen was soon to be outdone. All around were other gifted writers describing the same sort of thing, but with much more restraint, balance, style and depth. Pure posh dimwit comedy was done better by P.G. Wodehouse; more thoughtful satire was being done by Aldous Huxley; far more stylish bright young comedy was to be done by Evelyn Waugh a few years later; Catholic guilt (if that’s what partly drives Iris) was to be patented by Graham Greene a few years later; while the psychological costs of all this frivolity was brilliantly captured by Noel Coward and, a bit later, by F. Scott Fitzgerald. Even D.H. Lawrence wrote some stories depicting the fast cars and partying of the younger generation (The Virgin and the Gypsy) – to name just a few.

On each of those individual terrains, Arlen compares badly but, at that moment, in 1924, Arlen combined them all to create a smash hit and he lived off its reputation for the rest of his life. Kudos.

Cast

London

Unnamed narrator

Gerald March

Iris March / Fenwick / Storm

Boy Fenwick – apostle of purity, killed himself on his wedding night to Iris when he learned she wasn’t a virgin (?)

Hector Storm – Iris’s second husband, hero in the war, came to realise she was incurably promiscuous, ironically gave her emerald ring, shot dead by nationalists in Ireland

Hilary Townshend – older friend of the narrator and friend of the March family, knew Iris as a girl – amusingly says ‘hm’ every other sentence

Guy de Travest – older friend of the narrator

The London nightclub

  • The Chevalier Giulio di Risotto, directeur du restaurant of the Loyalty Club
  • Mr Trehawke Tush, the popular novelist, who knows all the tricks of success
  • Hugo Cypress
  • Colonel Duck
  • Mrs Angela Ammon
  • Lady Cornelia Pynte

Paris

Venice Pollen, fragrant daughter of Nathaniel Pollen who owns half the newspapers in England, engaged then married to…

Napier Harpenden – ‘Napier, favourite of the gods, shy, sensitive, fine’, ‘a strange, secret, saintly youth, a favourite of the gods who never once relied on the favouritism of gods or men’ – says what at the end of every other sentence

  • Mr Cherry-Marvel – master of gossip
  • Dr Conrad Masters – treats Iris
  • Eugene Martel-Bonnard, the surgeon who owns the nursing home where Iris is treated
    Donna Anna Estella Guelãra who Martel-Bonnard nearly killed with his treatment

Names of background characters in hotels and bars to create a sense of being in the swim of cosmopolitan fast set:

  • Lady Tekkleham
  • The Baron de Belus
  • Fay Avalon

The climax

Sir Maurice Napier – handsome, cunning old soldier, Iris’s sworn enemy for 12 years

Mr Truble – Sir Maurice’s fat old butler and Iris’s ‘only friend’

The roaring 20s

Direct description

By halfway through I realised the novel’s success, almost regardless of the ‘plot’, was at least in part because of its vivid picture of the world of the rich cosmopolitan fast set of London and Paris. This rises to a peak in the two nightclub scenes, the one at the Loyalty Club in London (chapter 4), one in La Plume de Ma Tante (chapter 6). They have the same kind of appeal as celebrity gossip columns do to this day, although with the added value of literary references or artfulness. (Compare the nightclub scenes in chapters 15 and 16 of Aldous Huxley’s 1923 novel Antic Hay.)

The narrator’s worldliness

The image of bright young things is supposedly embodied in Iris Storm but really it resides in the tone of voice and tremendous worldliness evinced by the narrator. He knows everyone but, deeper than that, he has had experiences, many experiences. In every situation he remembers other times when… and lots of dark and troubled experiences are attributed to him. Oooh. Conveyed in almost every sentence, sometimes rising to a Noel Coward level of blasé worldly cynicism:

‘There is a new dance place open. I heard about it from a friend of mine, Mr Cherry-Marvel. You will meet him, he is charming. This new place is called La Plume de Ma Tante. It has only been open three nights, so it will be very modish for another two.’

Casual racism

Part of the breezy cynical dismissal of everything and everyone associated with these posh affluent characters, is a breezy cynical use of what we, a hundred years later, consider racist slurs and stereotypes, in particular of Jews and people of colour.

When the narrator is describing the new Paris nightclub La Plume de Ma Tante to his sister, and mentions it has a caged nightingale to sing, he goes on:

‘There is probably baser music to supplement this nightingale. There are, in fact, five lovely niggers.’

This is the only use of the n word, so it is not a major or even minor theme, just a throwaway remark, although soon afterwards:

La Plume de Ma Tante. Bright green walls splashed with vermilion. A platform at one end, whereon five blackamoors perspired. At the other, a naked woman. She was without hips, according to the fashion for women. Her arms were twined above her head, and raised on the tip of her fingers was a bowl of green malachite from which pink water splashed into a white alabaster basin at her feet…

Any slur on people of colour is clearly just a detail in the general mockery of the whole scene and the entire milieu of international debauchery, but still…

Slightly less throwaway is the unpleasant references to ‘the wrong sort of Jewess’. In the nightclub scene, chapter 4, the narrator is emphasising how the Loyalty club is full of all sorts of colourful people, and:

There was a Jewess of the wrong sort in the wrong sort of green. She looked like a fat asparagus whose head had been dipped in dressing and then put in a warm place to dry. She dried in patches. A caravan of pearls crawled upwards from her bosom to her throat, and she said to Mr Trehawke Tush, the novelist: ‘The only decent cocktails you can get in Paris are at the Ritz Bar…’

He goes on to be just as rude about Mr Trehawke Tush, and then Venice Pollen, and pretty much all the other characters at the nightclub, in fact both remarks come amid a welter of descriptions of other aspects of nightclub life which the narrator clearly finds risible. The point is it is a satire on all these posh pretentious people and frenetic 1920s nightclub culture. But still…

Sex

How much literature is about the incredible difficulties human beings have finding and keeping a mate? Half of all world literature? More?

I sat there in that deep armchair, subdued by the thought of the awful helplessness of men and women to understand one another, and of the terrible thing it would be for some of them if ever they did understand one another, and how many opportunities the devil is always being given of making plunder out of decent people.

Such a simple task. So completely beyond the powers of people in most novels or plays, operas and poems.

P.S.

Mrs Forrest, a fabulously fashionable young woman in Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1927 novel ‘Unnatural Death’, proclaims that she ‘adores Michael Arlen’ and asks Lord Peter Wimsey whether he’s read his latest novel, ‘Young Men in Love’ yet.

Credit

‘The Green Hat’ by Michael Arlen was published in 1924 by William Collins. I read it online.

Related link

Related reviews

  • 1920s reviews

‘Certainly, he once wrote a novel, but who does not once write a novel?’ (the narrator about Gerald March, chapter 2)

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Arms and the Man by George Bernard Shaw (1894)

The comic play ‘Arms and The Man’ by George Bernard Shaw was first staged in 1894. It was published in 1898 as part of Shaw’s ‘Plays Pleasant’ volume which also included ‘Candida’, ‘You Never Can Tell’, and ‘The Man of Destiny’.

I’ve been reading about Shaw’s plays for decades but have never actually managed to read any. This one has a strikingly heroic title, the first words of John Dryden’s translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, so I was surprised to discover that it is a light and rather silly social comedy.

Act 1. A lady’s bedchamber in Bulgaria

The play is set during the Serbo-Bulgarian War, a comically short conflict that lasted from 14 to 28 November 1885.

We are in the bedroom of Raina Petkoff, a young Bulgarian woman, daughter of one of the wealthiest families in the land and a high-minded naive romantic. Her grand and domineering mother, Catherine, tells her that the Bulgarian cavalry have won the Battle of Slivnitza against the Serbs and that Sergius Saranoff, Raina’s fiancé, was at the head of the charge. Raina keeps a picture of Sergius in her bedroom and is girlishly thrilled that he is as heroic in real life as in his picture.

Louka, their attractive and sometimes impudent young servant, comes in to warn the ladies that escaped Serbs fleeing the battlefield might be in the area, seeking refuge in the houses of Bulgarian families, and they are promptly terrified to hear firing and shots in the streets.

Raina refuses to be scared and defiantly keeps her window unlocked but this turns out to be unwise because during the night an unknown man climbs up the drainpipe, onto the balcony and into her room. When terrified Raina calls out to ask who it is, he says he will kill Raina if she makes a noise and gives him away.

Overcoming her initial terror, Raina gets talking to the (unnamed) man who turns out to be very calm and reasonable and not at all a threat. He tells her he is not himself a Serb but a Swiss mercenary fighting for the Serbs.

The point of the scene and of the whole play is that this (still unnamed) soldier mocks soldiers and warfare. He tells her that ‘nine soldiers out of ten are born fools’. Nonetheless, Raina warms to him so that when there’s a knock at the door, Raina helps him hide behind a curtain just as Catherine, Louka, and a Bulgarian officer enter to search the room for any Serbs. Raina convinces them that no one is in her room, and they leave.

Raina gives the man chocolate creams, which she keeps in a box in her room, and is shocked to hear that the man has no ammunition for his pistol, as he normally uses his holster to store chocolate. The man argues that Sergius’s cavalry charge against the Serbs was foolish, and succeeded only by sheer luck. The Serbs had machine guns but were given the wrong ammunition by accident, and therefore could not mow down Sergius and his men.

Raina agrees to help the man escape later that night, though she rebukes him for making fun of her fiancé Sergius. The man goes to sleep and Raina goes to see her mother to ask for her help. When Raina and Catherine return, they allow the man to rest since he has not slept for days. A little later Raina and Catherine sneak the still unnamed enemy soldier out of the house, disguised in one of Raina’s father’s old coats.

Act 2. The garden of Major Petkoff’s house

The second act begins in the garden of the same house, though it is now the spring of 1886. The war is over and the Bulgarians and Serbians have signed a peace treaty. The pretty servant girl Louka is engaged to the house’s head male servant, Nicola. Louka tells Nicola that he will never be more than a servant, and that she has higher aspirations. Louka tells him she knows many secrets about the Petkoff family, and Nicola says that he does, too, but would never blackmail his masters.

Major Petkoff, the head of the family, returns from the war. He reports to Catherine that Sergius will never receive the military promotion he craves because he has no command of military strategy. Sergius enters and is greeted warmly by the family, and especially by Raina, who still considers him a hero. Sergius says he has abandoned his commission in the army out of anger that he will never move up in the ranks.

Sergius and Petkoff tell a story they heard about this Swiss soldier being hidden by two Bulgarian women during the soldier’s retreat. Catherine and Raina realize the story is about them, but do not say anything.

Rain and Catherine go indoors and the second her back is turned Sergius reveals what a creep he is by trying to chat up the pretty Louka. To his surprise, Louka warns Sergius that Raina might not remain faithful to him Sergius before they exit.

Into the civilised peaceful garden of the Petkoff family comes a Serbian soldier named Bluntschli. The serving girl Louka brings him to Catherine. Catherine realizes that he is the man that hid in Raina’s room, the same man that she and Raina helped escape.

Catherine worries that Sergius and Petkoff, who are conferring over military plans in the library, might meet Bluntschli and learn that the story about the two Bulgarian women who helped an enemy soldier refers to them!

On questioning Bluntschli tells her he has come to return Major Petkoff’s coat that Catherine and Raina lent him to escape. Raina walks in and is so happy to see him that she blurts out ‘the chocolate cream soldier!’ only to try and recover herself and blame her outburst, implausibly, on Nicola.

But it turns out that Petkoff and Sergius already know Bluntschli, they met him during the war. Now they ask him to stay for lunch and help them solve a tricky military problem which is how to send the troops home now the war is over.

Act 3. In library of major Petkoff’s house after lunch

In the final act all the different strands unravel, are reconnected and happily tied up.

Left alone with Bluntschli, Raina realizes that he sees through her romantic posturing but that he respects her as a woman in a way her formal fiancé, Sergius, does not. She reveals that she put a photograph of herself in the pocket of the greatcoat they lent him, inscribed ‘To my chocolate-cream soldier’. Bluntschli tells her he never found it and that it must still be in the coat pocket.

Meanwhile Sergius has a second crack at seducing the serving girl, Louka, who maliciously tells him that Raina is not in love with him (Sergius) but with Bluntschli. She reveals that Raina and Catherine are the two women in the story of the Bulgarian women who helped a Serb officer and that Bluntschli is that officer. As a result Sergius challenges Bluntschli to a duel but the non-aggressive Bluntschli manages to talk his way out of it.

It’s at this point that the picture of herself which Raina slipped into her father’s coat for Bluntschli to find is discovered, proving that Raina has not been entirely truthful to Sergius and Raina admits that she has had feelings for Bluntschli since they first met. Sergius and Raina break off their engagement, with some relief on both sides.

Major Petkoff is aghast. When Bluntschli acknowledges that he loves Raina, Sergius and Louka reveal that they, too, have been having a secret affair at Sergius’ instigation, with the result that Nicola graciously releases Louka from their engagement.

During all this Bluntschli had received a telegram informing him of his father’s death and that he has inherited the family business, several luxury hotels in Switzerland. Now, recognising Nicola’s dedication and ability, he offers him a job as hotel manager.

For some reason Bluntschli had been labouring under the misapprehension that Raina was just 17. Now she declares she is in fact 23 there is nothing to stop Bluntschli asking for her hand in marriage. The revelation of Bluntschli’s newfound wealth and good prospects mean that Raina’s parents are glad to marry her off to him.

Hankering after her former simplicity, Raina says that she would prefer her poor ‘chocolate-cream soldier’ to the man who is now revealed to be a wealthy businessman but Bluntschli insists he is still the same person, and the play ends with Raina growing up a bit and proclaiming her love for him.

As to the logistical problem which Sergius and Petkoff were fretting about, Bluntschli, with Swiss precision, solves the problem of the major’s troop movements (‘Send them home by way of Lom Palanka!’) then goes on to inform everyone that he will return to be married to Raina exactly two weeks from that day. The play ends with Sergius exclaiming, of Bluntschli, ‘What a man!’

What a load of twaddle.

Verbosity

Isn’t Shaw verbose? Some playwrights leave the actors and director to deduce the characters from their behaviour and dialogue but not Shaw. He can’t stop himself giving immense long prose descriptions of each of the characters. Here’s just one sentence from his page-long description of Sergius:

By his brooding on the perpetual failure, not only of others, but of himself, to live up to his imaginative ideals, his consequent cynical scorn for humanity, the jejune credulity as to the absolute validity of his ideals and the unworthiness of the world in disregarding them, his wincings and mockeries under the sting of the petty disillusions which every hour spent among men brings to his infallibly quick observation, he has acquired the half tragic, half ironic air, the mysterious moodiness, the suggestion of a strange and terrible history, that has left him nothing but undying remorse, by which Childe Harold fascinated the grandmothers of his English contemporaries.

This more like a novelist than a playwright, or the notes a novelist might make about a character. However you approach it is, above all, very wordy. Coming to Shaw after reading Wilde, Ibsen and Strindberg, the most obviously distinctive thing about Shaw is the fantastic, obsessive detail of his stage and dialogue descriptions. He thinks like a novelist, pointing out exactly how each gesture should be made and each phrase spoken. He has none of a playwright’s tact and restraint, no ability to let go and trust the director and actors. Take this little comic moment:

NICOLA: (after a moment’s bewilderment, picking up the bag as he addresses Bluntschli with the very perfection of servile discretion). I beg your pardon, sir, I am sure.

Note how the stage direction is longer than the dialogue. Another playwright would rely on the dialogue to convey the tone of voice, and/or trust the director and actor to deduce it from the words. Shaw is incapable of doing this. He has to explain exactly how every single utterance should be delivered.

  • BLUNTSCHLI (confidentially)
  • PETKOFF (officiously)
  • BLUNTSCHLI (deeply concerned and half incredulous)
  • RAINA (full of reproach for his levity)

After a while I began to wonder if Shaw was doing this partly to guy directors and actors, aiming not to help but to mock theatre’s unavoidable staginess.

  • BLUNTSCHLI (sceptically)
  • BLUNTSCHLI (dubiously)
  • RAINA (superbly)
  • BLUNTSCHLI (promptly)
  • RAINA (wonderingly)

All these ‘-lys’. I began to suspect Shaw was having a private joke to see just how many adverbs he could attach to the dialogue without repeating himself.

  • RAINA (quickly)
  • SERGIUS (cordially)
  • RAINA (indignantly)
  • SERGIUS (tormentedly)
  • PETKOFF (heartily)
  • SERGIUS (commandingly)
  • BLUNTSCHLI (warmly)
  • SERGIUS (cynically)
  • BLUNTSCHLI (goodhumoredly)
  • RAINA (sarcastically)
  • BLUNTSCHLI (apologetically)

But Shaw not only explains his characters but goes on to give opinions about them. Shaw overflowed with opinions about everything and so do his stage directions. Take the start of Act 3:

In the library after lunch. It is not much of a library, its literary equipment consisting of a single fixed shelf stocked with old paper-covered novels, broken backed, coffee stained, torn and thumbed, and a couple of little hanging shelves with a few gift books on them, the rest of the wall space being occupied by trophies of war and the chase…

The same quality of verbosity which makes his notorious prefaces such a trial to read also informs the long-winded directions.

At the head of [the table] sits Sergius, who is also supposed to be at work, but who is actually gnawing the feather of a pen, and contemplating Bluntschli’s quick, sure, businesslike progress with a mixture of envious irritation at his own incapacity, and awestruck wonder at an ability which seems to him almost miraculous, though its prosaic character forbids him to esteem it.

I suppose Shaw’s plays had ‘subjects’ and dealt with ‘issues’ but a) in such a journalistic, superficial way as to make them, nowadays, appear almost ridiculously superficial; and b) his thoughts and conclusions, at the time of their staging provocative and controversial (war isn’t as glorious as people think it is), now seem so prehistorically dated that they made no impression on me at all.

To put it mildly, as an anti-war play ‘Arms and The Man’ was to be swept away in the deluge of writing which followed the First World War, vastly eclipsed and outclassed. Then again, maybe I’m taking far too seriously a play which was designed to be a light and frivolous comic entertainment, a charming evening out at a London theatre, with only the hint of a ‘serious’ subject underlying it. Yes, maybe that’s the way to think about it, a frivolous and funny comic play with as much serious content as Anthony Hope’s exactly contemporary novel, The Prisoner of Zenda.

Completely ignoring whatever ‘message’ there’s meant to be, I found myself fascinated by the way that Shaw’s plays are so obviously really novels manqués, comic novels cut and spliced into the two-hour traffic of the stage with the severe constriction of the limitations of a fixed location, but overflowing with a novelist’s unstoppable impulse to describe every aspect of their characters.

Credit

‘Arms and The Man’ by George Bernard Shaw was first staged in 1894 and published in 1898 as part of Shaw’s ‘Plays Pleasant’ volume which also included ‘Candida’, ‘You Never Can Tell’, and ‘The Man of Destiny’. I read this in the 1946 Penguin paperback edition, 1964 reprint.

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by Simon on October 23, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on October 23, 2024

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My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl (1979)

‘Is this exactly what happened?’ Sir Charles asked me.
‘Every word of it, sir, is the gospel truth,’ I lied. (p.45)

Apart from his well-known children’s novels, Dahl also wrote movie screenplays, TV scripts, and some fifty-four short stories for adults which appeared in various magazines throughout his career, the first in 1942, the last in 1988. It was these which formed the basis of the Tales of the Unexpected TV series I watched as a teenager in the 1970s.

My Uncle Oswald is his only full-length novel for adults, sort of. The fictional character of Oswald Hendryks Cornelius is described as:

‘the connoisseur, the bon vivant, the collector of spiders, scorpions and walking sticks, the lover of opera, the expert on Chinese porcelain, the seducer of women, and without much doubt, the greatest fornicator of all time.’

He first appeared in two short stories, The Visitor and Bitch, first published in Playboy magazine and published in book form in the 1974 collection Switch Bitch, which I’ve reviewed.

It’s no surprise that Uncle Oswald eventually had a novel devoted to him, indeed it’s a surprise it took so long, he is such a garish, larger-than-life and transgressively monstrous creation.

As ‘the greatest fornicator of all time’, by the age of seventeen he’s already ‘had’ some fifty English lovelies, and goes to stay in Paris, where he swives nubile French daughters (Madamoiselle Nicole), the wife of the British ambassador (Lady Makepiece) and an energetic Turkish gentlelady.

After you adjust to the bantering tone about sexual conquests and the deliberately obscene subject matter, you begin to realise that arguably the real appeal of the book is the deliberately dated and nostalgic setting. The nameless narrator claims to be quoting verbatim from scandalous Uncle Oswald’s multi-volume diaries, specifically Volume XX, written in the 1938 when Oswald was 43 years old and much of the texture of the book is filled with young Oswald’s appreciation for fine wine, gourmet meals, and very early motor cars.

Thus the opening sequence is set as long ago as 1912, during the pre-Great War imperial heyday, when a chap could still travel the world flourishing his big British passport.

1. The Sudanese Blister Beetle aphrodisiac (1912)

The first story tells how Uncle Oswald made his fortune by learning, from a disreputable relation of his, about the most powerful aphrodisiac in the world made from the ground shells of the Sudanese Blister Beetle. Inspired, he sets off himself to the Sudan where he does a deal with the head porter at his hotel to get a few bags full of the precious powder, and brings it back to Paris.

Here he is staying with friends of his posh father (William Cornelius, member of the Diplomatic Service) and sets up a little chemistry lab in the rooms he’s been allotted, and proceeds to produce home-made aphrodisiac pills which, with an eye for marketing, he describes as products of a certain Professor Yousoupoff’s secret formula (foreign names impress the gullible).

Put in summary form like this, you can see that – although the theme is supposedly pornographic, as Oswald couples with women tall and short, foreign and British – in fact the basic ideas and the childish way they’re described (‘the greatest fornicator in the world’, ‘the most powerful aphrodisiac known to man’) are closely related to his children’s books (Danny the Champion of the World, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory), and so is the often funny and deliberately ludicrous way he describes his umpteen couplings:

‘Were you ever a gym teacher?’ I asked her.
‘Shut up and concentrate,’ she said, rolling me around like a lump of puff pastry. (p.34)

Also played for laughs is the conceit that Oswald is subject to vivid hallucinations while he is on the job – thus the second time he swives the nubile 19-year-old daughter of his hosts in Paris, we are treated to an extended and deliberately comic comparison of the whole thing to a medieval tournament, in which he appears as a knight in armour with an unusually long, firm lance and goes about his business to the enthusiastic cheers of the crowd – ‘Thrust away, Sir Oswald! Thrust away!’ (p.27)

There is also a good deal of humour at the expense of national stereotypes, especially in the dinner he gets invited to at the British Ambassador’s residence in Paris, attended by ambassadors from Germany, Russia, Japan, Peru, Bulgaria and so on, each a lively cartoon version of their national stereotype from the short, ultra-polite Japanese to the gruff German with his thick accent. It is to this assembly of bemedalled men that Oswald first explains the nature of the powerful aphrodisiac he has discovered.

The little Mexican clapped his hands together hard and cried out, ‘That is exactly how I wish to go when I die! From too much women!’
‘From too much goats and donkeys iss more likely in Mexico,’ the German ambassador snorted. (p.43)

When we are told (a bit later on) that a sexy young woman student he embroils in his schemes is named Yasmin Howcomely (p.90) we remember that Dahl worked on two movie adaptations of Ian Fleming novels – You Only Live Twice and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang (the female lead of which is named Truly Scrumptious). And these connections made me see the gruff and candid German ambassador in this scene being played by the fabulous Gert Fröbe, who plays Goldfinger in the film of the same name, and the cartoon dictator, Baron Bomburst, in Chitty Chitty

Anyway, Oswald manages to enchant these rich VIPs with visions of the staying power afforded by his aphrodisiac pills and (very cannily) gives them each a free sample presented on a puff of cotton wool in a stylish little jewellery box. Soon they are coming back for more and he sells them for an outrageous amount (1,000 Francs) to the national ambassadors and, by word of mouth, to their fellow countrymen who come flocking.

So that’s how wicked Uncle Oswald made his first fortune.

2. The freezing sperm scam (1919)

The Great War comes, Oswald serves his country and ends the war as a captain with a Military Cross. He goes up to Cambridge and studies Chemistry with a brilliant if rather shabby tutor, A.R. Woresley, whose moustache is coloured yellow by his pipe.

One evening, over a fine bottle of port (Oswald who is, as you might expect, a confident connoisseur of wines and spirits) Woresley tells him a cock and bull story about how he has carried out extensive experiments and perfected a method for freezing sperm, specifically bull sperm.

This is the pretext for a grotesque story about the tutor and his brother stealing the sperm of the prize bull of his brothers neighbouring farm, by taking along an in-heat cow one night, smuggling it into the field with the bull and, as the bull gets and erection and goes to cover the cow, instead manhandling his pizzle into a fake rubber cow vagina, which then captures the bull’s ejaculate, with the tutor then getting onto his pushbike to wobble off along country lanes carrying a bag with a fake cow vagina full of bull semen back to the lab they’ve rigged up at his brother’s farm complete with liquid nitrogen to freeze the semen.

(In case it wasn’t obvious before, this story makes you realise the book is not intended as pornography, even soft pornography, but is instead a Rabelaisian satire on the whole preposterous subject of sex and its indignities and absurdities.)

Student Oswald goes home and lies in bed at night pondering the implications of his tutor’s experiment and realising… there is a fortune to be made selling the frozen semen of Great Men and Geniuses to women who want to be the mothers of the children of Great Men.

He recruits a lively young filly from Girton – the half-Persian Yasmin Howcomely mentioned above – who is sex incarnate.

The plan is for her to seduce the great and the good, writers and discoverers and scientists, with a sideline in the kings of Europe – slipping them each a dose of beetle powder, then clapping a sturdy rubber johnny over their manhoods as they attain rutting speed, in which the precious spermatazoa can be collected, before she makes her excuses and dashes back to Uncle Oswald who’ll be somewhere with the liquid nitrogen ready to pack and store the precious fluid.

What could possibly go wrong with such a hare-brained scheme?

The tutor thinks it can’t possibly work, at which point Oswald – who loves a challenge – makes Woresley his first conquest, sending Yasmin to him, getting him to sign a form for her (supposed) autograph book, and then to eat a chocolate with the fateful beetle powder in it. From his concealed position Oswald watches while stuffy, staid old Woresely is transformed into a virile stud and ravishes young Yasmin, who manages to collect a rubber johnny full of his sperm. Next day Oswald brandishes a container of the sperm and his signature in the tutor’s face. QED. Theory proved.

So they form a team and draw up a hit list of the Great Men of the age (an interesting list in itself). When it comes to the royals, Oswald reveals that he has faked introductory letters from King George V to all the crowned heads of Europe introducing Yasmin as an aristocratic lady in need of a private audience about a sensitive matter.

Imagine a particularly bawdy, not to say crude pantomime, and you have the spirit of the thing. The whole world of the arts and sciences is reviewed not in terms of achievement, but their potential spunk donations. The only snag is that the list of Great Men to be despunked includes some rather elderly ones that they worry might have a heart attack during the process.

‘Now see here, Cornelius,’ A.R. Woresley said. ‘I won’t be a party to the murder of Mr Renoir or Mr Manet. I don’t want blood on my hands.’
‘You’ll have a lot of valuable sperm on your hands and that’s all,’ I said. ‘Leave it to us.’ (p.115)

Woresley will remain Cambridge, doing his day job but also setting up the permanent sperm bank, while Oswald and Howcomely tour Europe collecting the sperm of Great Men!

So they set off on a grand tour of Europe and the first king to be milked is King Alfonso of Spain who, we discover (in this scandalous fiction at any rate), has a clockwork sofa which moves up and down and so does all the hard work for him while he remains more or less motionless ‘as befits a king’. Yasmin bounces out of the palace a few hours later with a johnny full of royal sperm and Oswald motors her back to the hotel where he’s set up a small lab to mix it with preservative, and then freeze it in liquid nitrogen.

And that sets the pattern for the following fifty or so pages. Next up is 76-year-old Renoir who is confined to a wheelchair, but still manages to deliver the goods and who leaves Yasmin in raptures about his greatness.

Followed by: Monet, Stravinsky, Picasso, Matisse, Proust (for whom Yasmin dresses like and pretends to be a boy, the seduction treated like a Whitehall farce), Nijinsky, Joyce, and then Puccini in his Italian villa – in the moonlight by the lake where Oswald prepares Yasmin by teaching her one of the maestro’s favourite arias. Thus when she starts singing it outside his window, Puccini is smitten, and swiftly has his way with her, but is charming and amusing and courteous.

Compare and contrast with Sigmund Freud, who admits this troubled young lady to his consulting rooms who promptly gives him a chocolate (laced with the aphrodisiac), the whole encounter a broad satire on Freud (who Dahl obviously despises).

And so on. It might have seemed a funny idea at the time but this litany of encounters with famous men soon pales, not least because the pattern is the same time – Yasmin introduces herself, offers them a chocolate spiked with beetle dust and precisely 9 minutes later they are stricken with untamable lust, she pops a rubber johnny over their member, then lets herself be ravished, then finds some way to extricate herself (sometimes being forced to use a hatpin to jolt the man off her) before rushing outside to hand the johnny full of Great Man sperm over to Oswald, who motors them both back to his hotel room where he mixes it with a preservative, secretes it into tooth-pick thin straws (a convenient way of dividing up the sperm), then pops these into the cabinet of liquid nitrogen.

In Berlin they harvest Albert Einstein – the only one of the victims to smell a rat – and then worthy-but-dull Thomas Mann, before returning to Cambridge to deposit the straws of frozen semen at the master vat kept by Dr Woresley. And then an English tour taking in Joseph Conrad, H.G. Wells, Kipling, Arthur Conan Doyle and an extended passage satirising pompous, opinionated, dray-as-dust vegetarian George Bernard Shaw.

I suppose a lot of the pleasure of the book is meant to come from a) the outrageousness of the central premise, compounded by b) satirical portraits of various great men, plus c) the comic vulgarity of the actual sexual descriptions, which often sound like a grown-up children’s story. Of the encounter with George Bernard Shaw:

‘There’s only one way when they get violent,’ Yasmin said. ‘I grabbed hold of his snozzberry and hung on to it like grim death and gave it a twist or two to make him hold still.’
‘Ow.’
‘Very effective.’
‘I’ll bet it is.’
‘You can lead them around anywhere you want like that.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘It’s like putting a twitch on a horse.’ (p.182)

In the book’s closing passages Oswald and Yasmin embark on another European tour, milking the kings of Belgium, Italy, Yugoslavia, Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Denmark, Sweden but are finally brought up short with the king of Norway (the country of Dahl’s parents). For here Yasmin makes her first mistake and is merrily badmouthing the King of England and even pointing out the queen’s lovers, all on the basis that the beetle powder will kick in and transform the king when… the beetle powder kicks in on her. She has taken the wrong chocolate! She tries to jump on king Haakon and ravish him but he has his guard throw her out, where she reports all to Oswald and they decide to make a quick getaway to Sweden and so back to Cambridge.

And here the partnership falls apart. Yasmin has had enough, and who can blame her. Oswald wants to press on to America – Henry Ford, Edison, Alexander Graham Bell – but Yasmin insists on a month long break and says she’s going to stay with an uncle in Scotland.

They agree to reconvene in a month’s time and Oswald buys tickets on the Mauretania to sail to the States. Then he goes on a massive bender in London, bedding a different member of the aristocracy every night. Until a terrible day. He is dallying in the bath with a duchess who decides she’s had enough and wants to go home. Oswald is unwisely rude to her and she –having got out the bath, dried and got dressed – contrives to lean over the bath and play with his parts while secretly removing the bath plug. Result: there is a sudden tremendous suction of water and Oswald’s goolies are sucked down the hole. His screams of agony can be heard all across Mayfair! Which leads him to warn us against aristocratic women or, as he puts it in a long-cherished motto:

Ladies with titles
Will go for your vitals

It takes weeks to recover and he is still hobbling with swollen privates when he arrives back in Cambridge at old Woresley’s house to discover a note pinned to the door. They’ve scarpered! Yasmin has married Worsely! And they’ve done a bunk with all the Great Men sperm. All except Proust that is, who Yasmin didn’t take to at all.

Oswald goes mad and trashes Woresley’s house, demolishing every single piece of furniture. Then conceives his final plan. On the last page of the book he tells us how he finally made his fortune. He goes back out to Sudan and buys up the entire area where the rare Blister beetle breeds, sets up plantations with native labour and builds a refining factory in Khartoum. He establishes secret sales operations in the world’s leading cities (New York, London, Paris etc)

There is some last-minute throwaway satire on generals, for Oswald discovers that retired generals are his best sales agents. Why? Because there are retired generals in every country; they are efficient; they are unscrupulous; they are brave; they have little regard for human life; and they are not intelligent enough to cheat him.

If you add this to the page or so satirising aristocratic ladies a few pages earlier, it confirms your sense that, although the theme of the book is sex, its real purpose is to be a scattergun, blunderbuss satire against all respectable values, people and institutions.

Kings, queens, aristocrats, inventors, Oxbridge dons, men and women – all come in for Uncle Oswald’s robust, take-no-prisoners attitude. It is a bracing and hilarious read and like many an older satire, if the narrative structure, if the ‘plot’, feels patched together and made up as he goes along, that, too, is part of the satirical intent.

If the reader was expecting anything remotely serious or dignified or carefully planned, then the joke is on us, too.

Credit

My Uncle Oswald by Roald Dahl was published by Michael Joseph Ltd in 1979. All references are to the 1980 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on May 24, 2024  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on May 24, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/05/24/my-uncle-oswald-roald-dahl/

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières (1994)

This is, to begin with, a wonderful, warm, life-affirming and then, as it develops, a thoroughly harrowing and upsetting, and then, at the end, some kind of redemptive and redeeming, novel. But whatever the changing subject matter and mood it overflows with old-fashioned pleasures of narrative, character and plot. It fully deserved the prizes it won and its widespread popularity. To cite the facts of its success: it was on the Times bestseller list for four years, has sold more than 600,000 copies, has been reprinted in paperback more than thirty times, and has been translated into more than 17 languages. It also won the 1995 Commonwealth Writers Prize for Best Book and I’m surprised it didn’t win more.

Overview

It’s set on the Greek island of Cephallonia during the Second World War and its aftermath. The narrative follows a core handful of characters through:

  • the golden days of peace (1939 and 1940)
  • the advent of war i.e. having promised they wouldn’t Italy declares war on Greece (October 1941)
  • the Greco-Italian war (28 October 1940 to 23 April 1941)
  • the island’s lazy, peaceful, comic opera occupation by the Italian army from May 1941 to September 1943, with a token presence of the German army which mostly kept itself to itself
  • the armistice between Italy and the Allies in September 1943 which placed all Italian forces in an ambiguous and confusing position, and triggered the awful massacre by the Germans of every Italian soldier on the island – a total of 1,315 Italians were killed in the resultant, 5,155 were executed, and 3,000 drowned when the German ships taking the survivors to concentration camps were accidentally bombed by the Allies: the mass murder is considered a war crime second only to the Russian massacre of Polish officers at Katyn
  • the period when the island was occupied solely by the German army, hugely more brutal and rapacious than the Italians (September 1943 to October 1944)
  • the troubled period after ‘liberation’ of the Greek Civil War (1946 to 1949) when, in de Bernières’ view, the Communist forces of ELAS (Ellinikós Laïkós Apeleftherotikós Stratós – the Greek People’s Liberation Army) behaved with even greater brutality to anyone they considered traitors, bourgeois or just wanted to loot and rape, than the Nazis

Having got to about page 370 and supped deep of horrors, massacres and mutilations, you’d have thought de Bernières would draw this sorry sage to a conclusion but there’s more.

Central characters

For the first hundred pages or so we are introduced to the central characters of a small village not far from the town of Argostóli, on Cephallonia, being:

  • Dr Iannis, a widower, small, alert, curious wise old bird, who has a gift for healing despite not actually having a medical degree
  • Iannis’s wife died some time ago (of tuberculosis) so he lives alone with his beautiful, 17-year-old daughter, Pelagia, who has picked up much of her father’s medical knowledge and secretly wishes to become a doctor herself
  • dodging around is the 6-year-old girl Lemoni who’s always getting into pickles ‘in her capricious and erratic manner’ (p.175) from which Pelagia rescues her

The first hundred or more pages consists of a slow, relaxed and deeply pleasurable introduction to the peacetime life of a Greek town, with its annual festivals described in great detail along with its charmingly picturesque characters, including:

  • huge local strongman, Velisarios, whose party trick is to pick up mules
  • Father Arsenios, a fat, roly-poly drunken priest, always sweating like a pig and dogged by his failure to live up to his calling
  • Kokolios the cartoon communist
  • Stamatis the cartoon monarchist

This is all hugely enjoyable because it is how we Brits imagine Greek rural life to be. the narrative is peppered with the many sweet and eccentric little incidents in the village and the characters’ reactions to them. Every morning Dr Iannis goes off to the kapheneion to meet up with Kokolios and Stamatis where – being a republican, a monarchist and a communist – they have the same grumpy old arguments, very much like a Greek version of ‘Last of the Summer Wine’.

And behind the individual characters and chapters what comes over is the wonderfully urbane, amused, wise and droll attitude of the ‘implied author’ i.e. the authorial voice created by the text. To put it more simply, de Bernières’ voice. His treatment of his characters, his focus on the eccentric and charming, his immense good humour, radiate through every sentence and make it an immensely warming, lovely read.

A narrative of sorts gets going when, during the feast of the island’s saint, Saint Gerasimos, Velisarios does his party trick of holding an enormous heavy Venetian gun while the local kids stuff it with all the junk and rubbish they can find, then he gets someone to light the fuse and holds it while it goes off, a deed which requires staggering strength.

Anyway, on this particular occasion he fires it at the empty end of the street just as the handsome young fisherman Mandras comes round the corner. He isn’t badly injured but is taken to the house of Dr Iannis where he comes round to find the beautiful face of Pelagia looking down on him and promptly falls in love.

This Mandras proceeds to hang around the doctor’s house, continually bringing them offerings of fish for Pelagia to cook, until one day he’s fooling around in a tree and falls out, landing on an urn below and getting loads of shards of terracotta stuck in his bum, an absurdity which endears him even more to Pelagia.

On one occasion Pelagia goes down to the sea and not only sees Mandras setting out his nets to catch whitebait naked – i.e. sees what a dazzlingly lithe, fit young body he has – but is then astonished to see him whistle to three tame dolphins and allow himself to be pulled out to sea holding their fins.

Mandras’s mother is Drosoula, a strikingly ugly woman whose bad looks everyone forgets after a few moments in her company because of her warm nature. (On one occasion Drosoula tells Pelagia she only secured a husband because he had ‘unusual desires’ which she was prepared to satisfy – sodomy?).

Anyway that gives you a flavour of the charming and gently amusing first 100 pages or so.

A chapter per character

I haven’t yet mentioned the key ‘formal’ aspect of the novel, which is that each chapter represents the point of view and voice of a different character. The chapters are relatively short (5 or 6 pages) and each time you start a new one, you know it will be a new character and a new point of view.

In fact the chapters come in (at least) two flavours. First of all, there are chapters where the narrative is told by a third-person narrator but with a strong leaning towards a specific character’s point of view. The character in question is usually indicated in the first sentence if not in the very first words, making it pretty easy to understand and orient yourself:

  • Dr Iannis had enjoyed a satisfactory day in which none of his patients had died or got any worse… (first words of the novel)
  • Father Arsenios ruminated bitterly behind the iconostasis… (p.36)
  • Pelagia returned from the well with a jar upon her shoulder… (p.127)

The second kind of chapters are those told from a first person point of view, which I’ll elaborate below.

Politicians

What this technique allows de Bernières to do with tremendous effectiveness is cut between scenes and settings: it allows him to move the story along without having to set scenes each time; he can just cut away to a new character in a new setting in a very effective, filmic kind of way. Thus although the book is quite long, and very packed with text, it feels relatively light because you can just take it one bite-sized scene at a time.

In the early parts, the most striking use of this technique is when he cuts away from the idyllic island altogether to give us entire chapters devoted to the international statesmen responsible for running affairs in the early 1940s.

Thus we get chapters taking us into the mind of the Greek leader, Ioannis Metaxas, a Greek attempt at the kind of strongman leader typified by Hitler and Mussolini. The chapter devoted to him reveals a man who is browbeaten by international events and defeated by his disreputable daughter, Lulu.

But it’s also in these chapters that we get the first use of the other type of narrative, first-person narratives. The most recurring of these first person narratives is, unexpectedly, by a hulking Italian soldier who is in fact a repressed homosexual, and who, indeed, appears in chapters titled (all the chapters have titles) ‘L’Omosessuale’. Like the third-person chapters and to make it pretty simple and clear, the protagonist of these first-person chapters tends to be introduced in the first sentence:

I, Carlo Piero Guercio, write these words with the intention that they should be found after my death… (p.22)

This touchingly sweet, gentle giant and his inexpressible homosexual yearnings turn out to be a major thread running through the whole narrative.

At the furthest extreme of this spectrum is the sole chapter in which we hear the non-stop speech of Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, chapter 2 given as a Joycean monologue. It’s only seven and a half pages long but it is priceless, wonderfully conveying Il Duce’s stream-of-consciousness thinking, his vanity, his posing, combined with his madcap military schemes and would-be clever-clever ruses. He comes over as a dangerous idiot but is brilliantly conveyed and satirised. Just this one chapter could be presented as a hilarious short story or short prose text standing by itself.

Captain Antonio Corelli

So that’s a summary of all the elements of the text, namely ten or so characters on the island of Cephallonia, the Greek Prime Minister, the Italian dictator, an Italian soldier, plus a few other characters, so what happens?

What happens is the novel covers the true historical events leading up to and then during the Greco–Italian War of 28 October 1940 to 23 April 1941; which was followed by the German invasion and conquest of Greece in the summer of 1941, and the occupation of Greek territories by German and Italian forces. We follow our cadre of characters through several years of occupation up till armistice made between the Italian government and the Allies in September 1943, at which point the German army was ordered to regard their erstwhile allies, the Italians, as enemies, with the result that they rounded them up and massacred them.

These are the high-level historical events which provide the backdrop to developments among the characters we’ve slowly got to know on the island of Cephallonia. So who is Captain Corelli?

Well, from a technical point of view it’s interesting that Corelli only turns up on page 157 i.e. a little over a third of the way through the text. Corelli is a handsome, charming, charismatic Italian officer who inspires love and affection in his men and finds himself billeted on Dr Iannis and Pelagia with, as they say, comic and romantic consequences. Oh and he plays the mandolin which he takes everywhere with him (and which he calls ‘Antonia’) because he is a music lover and also to charm the ladies.

Detailed plot summary by chapter

1. Dr Iannis Commences his History and is Frustrated

Introduces us to humane and humorous Dr Iannis as he removes the dry pea lodged in the ear of his friend Stamatis then returns home to carry on composing his ‘New History of Cephallonia’, an ongoing project which allows de Bernières to fill in the backstory of Greek and Cephallonian history. And introduces his humorous, chiding daughter, Pelagia, 17 years old (p.19).

2. The Duce

Rome. The hilarious chapter given as the free-associating, idiotic ranting of Mussolini to secretaries and underlings and introduces his illogical reasons for declaring war on Greece – i.e. it will make Italy look strong, put him up in the same league as Hitler, the war will only last a few weeks etc.

3. The Strongman

Introduces us, first, to Alekos, a goatherd who lives high up on Mount Aenos and who will, from time to time, cast a cold, detached, uninvolved eye on events down n the plains. But the chapter is titled after Megalo Velisarios, the famous strongman. We also meet the cheeky little girl, Lemoni, who’s constantly getting into mischief. And fat waddling Father Arsenios who waddles into the square as Velisarios is entertaining the crowds and who Velisarios picks up and places on a wall to great cheers and Arsenios’s mortification. Velisarios fires the ancient (1739) Turkish culverin and accidentally hits Mandras the fisherman coming round the corner (the wound is caused by an old donkey nail). So Velisarios carries the wounded boy to Dr Iannis’s house where he first meets Pelagia.

4. L’Omosessuale (1)

First person account by the Italian Carlo Piero Guercio, a sensitive man tortured by his homosexuality:

I am exploding with the fire of love and there is no one to accept it or nourish it. (p.23)

He joins the Italian Army to be among men and escape conventional expectations. In a novel full of good things this sensitive portrayal of a vexed homosexual is one of the best.

5. The Man who Said ‘No’

Third person account of authoritarian Greek Prime Minister Ioannis Metaxas (1871 to 1941) in which he surveys the course of political events which brought him to power, his motivation for enforcing an authoritarian form of rule, to befriend Hitler and Mussolini and his dawning realisation that they are about to betray him and invade his country (‘Why had his international brothers betrayed him?’ p.29). Interspersed with rueful regrets about his wayward daughter, Lulu. All building up to his decision to say NO to Mussolini’s bullying ultimatum.

6. L’Omosessuale (2)

Guercio describes being a member of the Italian Julia Division sent to fight in Albania.

No civilian can comprehend the joy of being a soldier. (p.31)

The joy of being among young, beautiful, virile comrades. Unfortunately, he learns from bitter experience that the Italian chain of command is an inept joke, led by the idiot Mussolini, with the result that there isn’t enough support, organisation, arms, equipment or winter uniforms. He falls in love with a young married corporal from Genoa named Francesco (p.34) but becomes disgusted by the squalid lies and deceptions imposed on the Army and the public to justify Italy’s invasion of Albania.

The Italian invasion of Albania was a brief military campaign which was launched by the Kingdom of Italy against the Albanian Kingdom April 7 to 12, 1939. The conflict was a result of the imperialistic policies of the Italian prime minister and dictator Benito Mussolini. Albania was rapidly overrun, its ruler King Zog I went into exile in neighbouring Greece, and the country was made a part of the Italian Empire as a protectorate in personal union with the Italian Crown. (Wikipedia)

7. Extreme Remedies

Father Arsenios is at the back of the church and feeling sorry for himself for being a fat, useless, vice-ridden priests when he realises villagers are coming to leave gifts in the main body of the church, to apologise for the indignity he suffered when the strongman, Velarios, picked him up and place him atop a wall to general laughter. There follows a comic scene where Arsenios, dying for a pee, can’t bring himself to exit through the church and be seen by everybody (there is no toilet in the church) so he employs the desperate remedy of drinking one of the bottles of wine brought for him so as to have a receptacle to pee in. He does this several times with the result that he is completely plasters and lying in a pool of his own piss by the time that Velisarios comes to apologise in person.

Velisarios carries the unconscious priest to the house of Dr Iannis who forces him to drink vast amounts of water. Then Iannis is visited by Stamatis, whose ear he unblocked and now comes comically complaining that for the first time in decades he can hear his wife’s endless nagging and asks if the doctor can put the pea back in his ear.

8. A Funny Kind of Cat

Dr Iannis departs for the kapheneion to meet his friends Stamatis and Kokolios the communist for their daily argument. But the little girl Lemoni begs him to come and see the funny kind of cat she’s found deep in a labyrinth of brambles. Undignifiedly crawling on his hands and knees the doctor discovers it is a pine marten caught on wire and carefully detaches it.

Dr Iannis takes it back to his house to treat where, incidentally, Mandras is still laid up with his ‘wound’ and still flirting like mad with Pelagia, who he has just kissed. Iannis contemplates simply snapping the marten’s neck but then is overcome by humane sympathy and instructs his daughter to being straw and dead mice. He’s going to nurse it back to health.

9. August 15, 1940

Dr Iannis returns to the kapheneion encountering Lemoni on the way who is taunting a dog with a stick. She tells him she has decided to call ‘the strange kind of cat’ Psipsina (apparently this is a common Greek word meaning something like ‘puss’, p.374). Back drinking coffee with his mates a good hearty political argument swiftly ensures, with the communist Kokolios telling everyone they’ll be first up against the wall when the revolution comes etc. In casual conversation Iannis delivers what might be the central message of the entire novel:

‘We should care for each other more than we care for ideas, or else we will end up killing each other.’ (p.52)

As usual, the menfolk gather round an old radio set to listen to the BBC news and learn the latest (Churchill has allied with the free French, there’s been another Albanian revolt against Italian occupation).

Pelagia runs in to inform him that Mandras was fooling about in the olive tree in their yard and fell out of it and landed on his bottom on a terracotta pot. His buttocks are packed with shards and bleeding. Iannis has to rush home and spend hours with Mandras lying with his pants down on the kitchen table, while he carefully extracts every fragment (later commenting that Mandras has: ‘the arse of a classical statue, a very fine arse,’ p.69).

When Iannis returns to the kapheneion for the third time it is to find an extraordinary change in atmosphere. Martial music is playing on the radio, both his friends are weeping and the priest is striding up and down declaiming from the Old Testament. They’ve just heard that the Italians have sunk a Greek battleship, the Elli while it was anchored in the harbour at Tinos, participating in the celebrations of the Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos (sinking of the cruiser Elli). Everyone in the café knows this has brought the possibility of war closer.

10. L’Omosessuale (3)

Guercio and Francesco are chosen for a mission by their officer Colonel Rivolta (p.58). They are to dress in Greek uniform and make an attack on an outpost of what they are told are Greeks masquerading as Italians. When they dress up and sneak up to this border post they realise a) the guns they’ve been given don’t work and b) the Italians really are Italians and c) there are many more of them than they were told and they are expecting them. In other words they’ve been conned into doing one of those ‘border incidents’ which cynical leaders throughout the twentieth century used to justify wars.

In the event they arrive early (at midnight not 2am) discover a big drum of kerosene under the tower and set it alight, causing panic in the tower at which point they open fire with a machine gun massacring the men in the tower. It’s only when one of them falls out of the tower and they recognise him as a fellow Italian that the full depth of the deception dawns on them.

11. Pelagia and Mandras

These two beautiful young people fall in love. The chapter contains a slight formal innovation which is that it contains alternating sections describing first Pelagia and then Mandras’s points of view as they: have a poo in the outhouse and worry about menstruating (Pelagia); load nets onto a boat (Mandras); draw water from a well (Pelagia); sings to his tame dolphins (Mandras). Mandras is given a little speech typifying the motivation of so many men to go to war, to prove themselves a man etc.

I know I will never be a man until I’ve done something important, something great, something I can live with, something to be esteemed. That’s why I hope there’s going to be a war. I don’t want bloodshed and glory, I want something to get to grips with. No man is a man until he’s been a soldier. (p.68)

It’s also tied up with marriage. He envisions going down on one knee and proposing to Pelagia. Pelagia thinks adoringly of the way Mandras now arrives every late afternoon with a gift of fish which she cooks and he sits at the table being polite to her father and rubbing her shin with his foot.

12. All the Saint’s Miracles

An extended and wonderful description of the feast of the local saint, St Gerasimos, with stories of his wonderful miracles. the chapter focuses in on inmates from the local lunatic asylum who have been brought to join the crowds watching the procession of the saint’s mummified body, notably Socrates and Mina. Mandras gets drunk and proposes to Pelagia (p.80) before drinking more and passing out. The day continues on into the evening which is a time of wild partying, music and celebration.

13. Delirium

Mandras doesn’t come for two days and Pelagia is reduced to agonies of worry. Lots of stuff about what traditional marriage meant for a Greek woman back then i.e. consigned to a life of endless labour and childbearing but arguably better than the fates of spinsters and widows.

This is why one had to have sons; it was the only insurance against an indigent and terrifying old age. (p.86)

As in the description of the delusions of the madwoman Mina, so throughout his characterisation of Pelagia, de Bernières displays a supernatural level of insight and understanding. Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is not only deeply pleasurable to read but deeply instructive, too.

On a typically warm and beautiful evening the doctor and his daughter sit outside looking at the stars, thinking about the future. She is fantasising about married life with Mandras until her father gives her a small pistol, warning that war is coming and in war bad things happen to women i.e. rape. She will use this gun only once, and with deep irony, in chapter 63.

The next day is the day when Pelagia goes down to the seashore and stumbles across Mandras, naked, setting his nets then going frolicking with his tame dolphins and is dazzled by the perfection of his young body (p.89).

14. Grazzi

Despite the picture postcard charm of all these village scenes, Captain Corelli’s Mandolin is a historical novel and contains descriptions of, and even soliloquies by, real historical figures. After the chapters devoted to Mussolini and Metaxas we have this one, told in the first-person by Emanuele Grazzi, Italian ambassador to Greece during World War II, who was given the shameful job of delivering Benito Mussolini’s ultimatum to Greek prime minister Ioannis Metaxas on 28 October 1940. Grazzi’s account gives a vivid sense of the incompetence, bad faith and lies of the Italian government which told neither its Army Chief of Staff nor ambassador that they were about to go to war with Greece, operating on Mussolini’s idea of taking everyone by surprise – which just ended up covering everyone in shameful dishonour.

15. L’Omosessuale (4)

Guercio and Francesco keep quiet about the farce they were involved in and are sent to train Albanian guerrillas who they discover to be unreliable lying thieving murderers (p.98). Guercio then goes on to give a vivid description of the chaos and mismanagement of the Italian invasion from Albania into northern Greece, the lack of ammunition, transport, air cover, the right equipment or uniforms for the freezing mountain tops, pages 99 to 104.

Incidentally, in among the memoirs he describes himself as he currently is i.e. sunning himself on the peaceful island of Caphallonia and, on page 100, makes the first reference n the novel to Captain Corelli:

a man who, full of mirth, his mind whirling with mandolins, could not be more different from the vanished and beloved Francesco, but whom I love as much.

16. Letters to Mandras at the Front

Italy and Greece are now at war. These are detailed, worried missives from Pelagia, increasingly begging for some kind of response. What she doesn’t know is that Mandras can’t write (p.130). She describes the inhabitants of their village rallying round to support the war effort and how everyone thinks Metaxas is a hero for standing up to the bully Duce. She describes an outbreak of fortune telling because Mandra isn’t the only son who’s been conscripted and sent to the front – hundreds of families have sent their main earners and supports to the war. She describes the beating up of some unfortunate Italians who live among them:

Why are people such animals? (p.107)

Because dear 17-year-old Pelagia, people are in fact animals, just another species of animals among the 1.2 million species so far identified by scientists. Everything your teachers and priests and leaders told you about humans not being part of the natural world, about our special soul given us by a loving God, was lies which left you completely unprepared for the world as it is and human beings as they are, and so asking such soppy, pointless questions.

Food is becoming short so Christmas Day 1940 wasn’t its usual festive celebration. On Christmas Day the Italians bombed Corfu, the bastards. de Bernières only gives us a selection three (fairly long) letters but the last one states that she has written one hundred letters to Mandras and is becoming frustrated and disillusioned at his lack of reply.

17. L’Omosessuale (5)

Continuation of Guercio’s account of the Greco-Italian War, piling detail on detail of Italy’s mind-boggling incompetence and the bravery, ferocity and effectiveness of the Greek counter-attack which drives the Italians right back to their starting points and then further back.

18. The Continuing Literary Travails of Dr Iannis

Pelagia sinks into a deep depression from which the doctor seeks to rescue her by various ruses like rearranging utensils or stealing stuff from the kitchen, anything to provoke anger and get her out of her mood. War is producing a shortage of medical supplies. He soldiers on with his history of Cephallonia, describing the brutality of the Balkans, crossroads between East and West, and the indolent pederasty of Turkish rulers.

19. L’Omosessuale (6)

Another little formal experiment or piece of playfulness. De Bernières gives a description of Francesco’s miserable death (half his face blown off by a mortar) in the form of an interview Guercio has with his beloved’s mother whereby Guercio tells her heroic patriotic lies, and each of his lies is offset by a long passage in parentheses describing what really happened, in those freezing, lice-infected trenches.

It ends by explaining how the Italians had, to all intents and purposes, lost to the Greeks when the Germans intervened, invading from Bulgaria in the East and opening up a second front which the Greeks couldn’t defend, especially since the Germans sent in 1,100 Panzer tanks against the Greeks 200 light tanks (many taken from the useless Italians).

20. The Wild Man of the Ice

One day Pelagia returns from the well to discover a wreck of man, covered in hair and beard, dressed in animal skins with red eyes and sunburned skin, infested with lice, sitting at her table. She is terrified and it takes several pages of scared enquiry before she eventually realises it’s Mandras back from the front in terrible state, having dodged the Germans and walked hundreds of miles.

21. Pelagia’s First Patient

Shrewdly, Pelagia co-opts Mandras’s mother, Drosoula, herself one of the million Greeks who were ethnically cleansed i.e. deported from their ancestral homes in Turkey after the First Word War. Together they strip and set about healing this broken skinny wreck of a man. Long gone is his god-like arse. De Bernières gives a vivid and extensive catalogue of Mandras’s appalling symptoms (worms, parasites, ticks, fleas, ezcema, gangrene) and shows Pelagia treating them all efficiently. Drosoula is impressed.

‘Koritsimou,’ said the gigantic creature, ‘you are astonishing. You are the first woman I have ever known who knows anything. Give me a hug.’ (p.138)

Dr Iannis had been up in the mountains checking Alekos and his herd of goats (who are always in perfect health). Now, upon his return, he is astonished to discover a huge ugly woman sleeping with Pelagia in his bed, and an emaciated malnourished man sleeping in Pelagia’s. When he listens to the detail of her treatment he is extravagantly proud of his daughter.

22. Mandras behind the Veil

A monologue from Mandras who resents how he is ignored in the Iannis house and realises Pelagia is horrified by him. This is a bitter pill since it was only a hallucinatory determination to get back to Cephallonia and see her again which kept him going after his entire unit was wiped out and he set off on the huge treks through ice and snow and mountains and forests and seas to reach her.

His account includes the magnificently mad episode of him coming across a stone hovel and lying down to sleep, only to be woken by an incredibly ugly old crone with only one eye. She feeds him and he starts to recover a bit but on the third night has a sex dream in which he imagines he’s sleeping with Pelagia but wakes up to discover it is the withered old hag writhing under him.

‘Witch, witch,’ I cried, kicking her and she sat up and shielded herself, her dugs falling to her waist and her body seeping with sores to equal mine. She waved her arms and twittered like a bird in the jaws of a cat, and it was at that point that I recognised the madness in us both and in the very manufacture of the world. I threw back my head and laughed. I had lost my virginity to an antique, loveless, solitary crone, and it was all just one small part of the way in which God had turned His face away and consigned us all to the malice and caprices of the dark. (p.144)

I thought this was inspired in its mocking lunacy, and captured the insanity of the war, and of human existence, in one magnificently grotesque image.

I laid back down next to her and we slept together like that until morning. I had realised that we humans are blameless.

Exactly. If there is a God and he claims to love the human race, he’s got a funny way of showing it. Mandras tells us that the disillusionment of his reception by Pelagia has been absolute. Now he just wants to return to the front to fight.

23. April 30, 1941

On 6 April 1941, the German Army, supported by Hungarian and Bulgarian forces, attacked Yugoslavia and Greece. Hitler launched the assault in order to overthrow the recently established pro-Allied government in Yugoslavia and to support the stalling Italian invasion of Greece. By 30 April the Germans had taken Athens and the Greek king and government had fled to Crete.

There is a hiatus on the island as people wait to see what will happen. They prepare for death or rape. The priest curses God for letting this happen. The doctor starts reading up in his ancient medical textbook, ‘The Complete and Concise Home Doctor’, about wounds.

Mandras is mentally disturbed. Back staying with his mother, he withdraws into himself, except for sudden moments of lucid normality, such as when he joins the celebrations on National Day, 31 March, and Easter on 19 April. Other times he rants and raves. he tells the priest his legs are made of glass. He tries to amputate on with a spoon. He shouts at Pelagia. In one scene he makes her read every one of the 100 plus letters she sent him, humiliating her by pointing out how they got slowly shorter and shorter until in the final ones she asked him to call off the betrothal. Pelagia realises with anguish that she now hates Mandras.

At that moment the Italian invasion starts. Planes fly overhead and landing craft beach and disembark thousands of Italian troops. The islanders are surprised at how diffident and polite they are. At the head of the 33rd Regiment of Artillery of the Acqui Division marches Captain Antonio Corelli, the first time we’ve seen him, so to speak, page 157. He confirms everyone’s stereotypes of Italian men by spotting Pelagia and instructing his men to turn eyes right in order to appreciate the ‘bella bambina’. One soldier does a goose-stepping impersonation of Hitler. Another walks like Charlie Chaplin. Dr Iannis tells Pelagia not to laugh, they are the enemy.

24. A Most Ungracious Surrender

Back to the first person narrative of Carlo Piero Guercio who, for some reason, has stopped being referred to as l’omosesualle. He explains how he was posted to the 33rd regiment in May and how Corelli became a kind of saint to him (p.159). Origin of La Scala club, a group of Italian soldiers who all went to the latrine together and covered up their lavatorial sounds by singing opera (p.160). He receives typically whimsical instructions from the head of La Scala, Corelli, for example rule 4 is that all aficionados of Wagner to be shot out of hand.

He tells the story of the ungracious surrender, namely that the Italian CO and officers marched to the Cephallonia town hall and sent in messages demanding a surrender to which the reply was ‘fuck off’. The Greek authorities said they had defeated the Italian army and refused to surrender except to a German officer so one had to be flown in specially from Corfu.

25. Resistance

The islanders’ response to occupation e.g. graffiti, insubordination and jokes (‘Why do Italians wear moustaches? To be reminded of their mothers.’) A quartermaster arrives to tell Iannis and Pelagia an officer is going to be billeted on them. Iannis gruffly agrees so long as the quartermaster can get him medical supplies. The officer turns out to be Corelli who is driven up by Bombardier Guercio. He is charming and humorous from the start but it is a joy to watch him being steadily put in his place by the doctor and Pelagia who confuse and embarrass him, humiliation doubled when the doctor diagnoses him as having hemorrhoids and then assigns him Pelagia’s bedroom (Pelagia will sleep on the kitchen floor) which destroys Corelli’s sense of himself as a gallant gentleman.

Corelli shyly reveals to them that he plays the mandolin. He joined the army when there was no war and it was a way to get paid for lazing around. That night there’s a scream and he comes running from the bedroom because the pine marten routinely sleeps on Pelagia’s bed and bit him.

26. Sharp Edges

The truck Guercio’s driving to collect Corelli breaks down. Walking, Guercio encounters Velisario, two hulking giants of men who cannot communicate but offer each other cigarettes, nod before going their ways. Velisario comes across the broken down truck, gets a friend, steals the wheels and pours petrol in the radiator.

Corelli is his usual charming self and chats merrily with the little girl Lemoni. When Pelagia breaks them up he asks why and it’s Pelagia’s turn to feel unworthy. These little domestic events and their psychological consequences are so wonderfully done, so real and vivid.

Mandras surprises her by appearing silently. Their every meeting is awkward now. He makes a joke which offends her. She gives him the waistcoat she sewed for him but his first comment is that the pattern is asymmetrical (p.177).

Mandras announces he is leaving now to return to the fight. The army is over but there are partisans in the mountains. Pelagia tells him that every time he is about to do something bad, he is to stop, think of her, and not do it. They hug like brother and sister. Their love is over. Then he walks away.

That evening Corelli finds the hand-made waistcoat on the back of a chair, marvels at its craftsmanship and says he will pay Pelagia anything for it but she insists it’s not for sale.

27. A Discourse on Mandolins and a Concert

Next morning Corelli wakens Pelagia by practicing his mandolin in his/her bedroom. She had been dreaming about the afternoon before when Corelli had arrived on a horse and managed to make it caracole. Corelli explains the structure of a mandolin, how to play it and why he switched to it from the violin which he was useless at. His playing enchants her (p.186). That evening Corelli agrees to perform for the doctor but irritates him by merely tapping the instrument till Iannis loses his temper and makes an outburst. Offended, Corelli explains that he’s playing Hummel’s concerto for mandolin and was tapping out the first 45 bars before the mandolin enters. And now he’s made him lose his place!

28. Liberating the Masses (1)

Describes Mandras’s career as an andarte i.e. partisan. By chance he falls in with the ELAS, the communist group. The resistance is being led by British officers parachuted in to organise and direct assaults, in this case a Brigadier Myers (p.190) who warns his superiors that a lot of their arms are going to communists and storing up trouble for the future (i.e. the post-war civil war).

Anyway, by chance Mandras falls in with a troop of ELAS led by pitiless martinet Hector, wearing his trademark red fez. He is broken in by being led to a village where they drag out a harmless old man, make him kneel then brutally beat his back with a knout before shooting him in the head. His crime? Not reporting a British parachute drop of supplies to ELAS, pilfering a bottle of scotch from it and being found unconscious under the parachute.

Hector makes it quite clear they are going to liberate the people by killing a lot of traitors, royalists, bourgeoisie, lackeys, saboteurs and so on. He is fluent in the death speak of Stalinism. It becomes just as clear that de Bernières loathes and despises the communists.

29. Etiquette

Joke chapter in which Corelli, embarrassed by his inability to communicate with the locals asks for basic phrases from the doctor who waggishly tells him phrases to formally greet all the Greeks he meets which, in reality, mean ‘Go fuck yourself’ and ‘Son of a whore’ (p.196).

30. The Good Nazi (1)

Historical background to the two towns of Argostoli and Lixouri, with explanation that the Italians garrisoned the former and the Germans the latter. Hitler didn’t trust the Italians an inch and sent to Cephallonia 3,000 Germans of the 996th Regiment under Colonel Barge, who were to carry out one of the war’s worst crimes.

One of these is young Leutnant Günter Weber, humourless, obedient, only free when he takes his uniform off at the beach. He is there when the Italians roll up in lorries along with a load of whores shipped there from Libya and much preferring relaxed Greece. They merrily strip off and splash about in the sea to the horror of conservative peasants. Weber is 22, a virgin and has never seen a naked woman before.

Correli introduces himself and when he asks whether Weber is any relation to the German Romantic composer Weber doesn’t know what he’s talking about. He is the son of a pastor in the Tyrol and knows nothing about culture. In the event, they get him drunk, the whores flirt with him, they throw him in the sea, and manage to break down his prim reserves. He becomes an honorary member of the La Scala club.

31. A Problem with Eyes

Two months go by and Pelagia does everything she can to discomfit the captain, almost always spilling food on his uniform when she serves it. She prepares a great speech of outrage at being occupied but somehow never finds the moment to deliver it. He leaves his pistol lying around and then catches her red-handed dunking it in a bowl of water to as to render it inoperative.

Infuriated by his unflappable good humour and manners Pelagia slaps him then throws unripe olives from the tree at him. More months go by and he becomes a fixture. She finds herself looking forward to his morning greeting and then becoming a little concerned if he’s later than usual coming back from the barracks.

He spends his time doing vast amounts of paperwork, or writing music and plucking the mandolin and sometimes watching her crochet. They begin to realise they’re looking at each other and eventually having a childish staring competition which Corelli wins with much laughter. Dr Iannis realises his daughter is falling in love with the enemy occupier.

32. Liberating the Masses (2)

These chapters are about the cruel and heartless communist Hector and his indoctrination of the uneducated lost soul, Mandras. Mandras learns to intimidate the peasants to steal from them, which is fine because Hector dismisses them all as Royalists, petit-bourgeois sympathisers, republicans etc.

33. A Problem with Hands

One dark night the doctor, Pelagia and Corelli are all in the living room, the latter composing music on sheet music paper. Pelagia walks over to look and places her hand on his shoulder as if it’s the most natural thing in the world until she realises what she’s doing and is then crippled by self consciousness. Luckily at that moment Psipsina scratches at the door and Pelagia lets her in from the storm outside and the marten promptly sits on Corelli’s lap make it water-soaked. Pelagia laughs and scoops the marten off his lap then starts to wipe it down, but when Corelli looks into her face she realises the sexual overtones of what she’s doing and straightens up with scorn.

This sets him fantasising, for some reason remembering that Vivaldi taught at a convent full of young women and suddenly Corelli is imagining loads of nubile girls pressing up against him and kissing and caressing him. He now has a prominent erection sticking up through his trousers and when Pelagia calls him to help her with her wind her wool he can’t stand up without revealing it so he makes a big performance of pretending to be a dog and going across to her on all fours which, of course, makes her smile, and they flirt and banter some more. The doctor sighs.

34. Liberating the Masses (3)

Hector is summoned to the headquarters of Lieutenant-Colonel Myers to be given a bollocking. Nobody had warned Myers that he would be spending 90% of his time trying to stop the Greeks being at one another’s throats (p.217). He finds Hector double dealing, dishonest and barbarous, meaning given to torturing and killing any peasants who don’t give him what he wants. Myers gives details of how Hector and his group torture peasants, gouge out their eyes and slit their throats. He knows Hector and his like don’t pay the peasants with the money the British give them a) because they’re greedy b) because they’re storing it up to fund the coming revolution.

Mind you, de Bernières is happy to take the mickey out of the Brits, who are routinely portrayed as upper class twits: ‘Top hole explosion, Absolutely ripping!’ Bertie Wooster meets the Greek communist partisans.

35. A Pamphlet Distributed on the Island Entitled with the Fascist Slogan ‘Believe, Fight and Obey’

A satirical pamphlet which takes eight pages to rip the piss out of the intellectual pygmy, liar, coward and rapist, Mussolini. At the very end of the book we learn that it was written by Carlo and Dr Iannis (p.424).

36. Education

Back with Hector and the partisans, showing that most of his group are thoroughly disillusioned: all they do is loot peasants and avoid any attacks on Germans, leaving everyone else to fight the war. This chapter is another exercise in style because it consists of a brilliant pastiche of a speech by a communist saturated with the self-serving rhetoric and justification for every kind of iniquity characteristic of communist ideology. Compare and contrast the revolting cowardly criminal communists described in Evelyn Waugh’s war novel Unconditional Surrender.

37. An Episode Concerning Pelagia’s belief That Men do not Know the Difference Between Bravery and a Lack of Common Sense

Carlo and the doctor come across Corelli reading the pamphlet quoted in chapter 35, leaping up and hurriedly tearing it in two. But this leads into debate about who wrote it, whether it was an Italian or a Greek and Pelagia, clever woman that she is, begins to speculate out loud that it might have been written by a Greek who was fluent in Italian, had access to BBC broadcasts, and someone who cold distribute it around the island when…she notices her father and Carlo both shuffling in embarrassment and concern. My God – it’s them! And her burbling nearly gave it away to Corelli. She goes inside to prepare dinner.

38. The Origin of Pelagia’s March

It’s the morning after Corelli returned to the house disgustingly drunk, declared his love for her, fell over and was sick. Now he has a crushing hangover and is crushed with embarrassment at his behaviour while Pelagia pours him cold water and berates him. His excuse is his battery’s football team won last night, but she says Weber has been by to explain that the Italians cheated.

While she stands there berating him, into Corelli’s head comes the theme and rhythm for a march which he will compose on the mandolin and write down, hence ‘Pelagia’s March’.

39. Arsenios

The war is the making of Father Arsenios. He quits his parish and takes to walking the length and breadth of the island preaching against the invader and iniquity and the fast-coming arrival of God’s wrath. He is cared for by nuns and monks at monasteries where he stops and by the peasants who feed the itinerant monk and the Italian soldiers enjoy his regular visits and obvious sincerity even though none of them can understand a word. For two years he tramps the length and breadth of the island, burning off his obese bulk, becoming thin and wiry and brown as teak.

40. A Problem with Lips

Short chapter in which Pelagia is passing out of the house as Corelli comes in and she finds herself absent-mindedly kissing him on the cheek. it’s only a few paces later that she realises what she’s done and then tries to furiously back peddle, claiming she though Corelli was her father, a mistake Corelli mocks by saying yes, they are both old and small. Then he throws himself on his knees and makes a comic opera declaration of love, before kissing her on the forehead and running off before she can slap him.

41. Snails

The three adults, Iannis, Pelagia and Corelli, go snail hunting led to a particularly rich briar patch by the ever-inquisitive girl Lemoni. Here Pelagia manages to scratch herself on a bramble then get her hair caught and Corelli can only unravel it by leaning in very close. He takes advantage to kiss her cheek. Suddenly Pelagia bursts into tears. When he asks why she says she can’t take it any more, any of it. He agrees and suddenly they are locked in their first embrace of long passionate kisses.

42. How like a Woman is to a Mandolin

For the first time we go inside the mind of Corelli in a first-person chapter devoted to his thoughts which are, predictably enough, all fantasies about Pelagia, some sexual about her breasts and so on, but mostly lovely scenarios or fantasy scenes or thinking of her actions in terms of musical chords, different moods reflected by different chords, which build together to make Pelagia’s March which he is writing.

43. The Great Big Spiky Rustball

The adults are in the fiddly process of preparing the snails for cooking when the never-mischievous Lemoni comes to the house to announce that she has discovered a big rusty ball on the beach. Carlo and Corelli both realise from her description that it’s a mine, the floating kind used for attacking ships, which has washed ashore.

This longish chapter describes their attempts to clear the villagers out of the way and blow it up safely. In this Corelli is hampered by an officious engineer who tells him all his preparations are inadequate. Corelli gets Stamatis and Kokolios to dig a trench in the sand just 50 metres away and the engineer mocks this. In the event the entire town turns out to watch, shooed away to the safety of the clifftops, while Corelli’s bombardiers have rigged up a small explosive charge underneath the mine and wires leading to a detonator in his little trench.

When he detonates it, sure enough, it goes off with a much vaster explosion than anyone had expected, sending a vast amount of sand mixed with shards of red hot metal flying high into the sky and then raining down on the locals lying flat along the clifftop. This is actually really dangerous and the busy little engineer is decapitated by a red hot piece of shrapnel while other locals are more or less badly burned by the rain of hot metal stinging like hornets (p.260).

Concerned for Corelli, Pelagia leads the charge down to the beach but it’s Carlo who finds Corelli’s trench obliterated and takes a moment before he sees the captain, who was seized in the blast, thrown into the air, dumped back down and covered with sand. He’s mostly alright but is deaf for two days afterwards and suffers periodic tinnitus for the rest of his life. The doctor is infuriated when a small army of people covered in sand with black eyes and cuts all over, presents itself at his house.

Corelli is nearly put on a charge by the Italian Commanding Officer, General Gandin, of whom more below. But he is bedbound at Iannis’s for days and revels in the attention he gets from Pelagia, Carlo and even Lemoni. Even friend Weber brings his wind-up gramophone round and tries to teach him German popular songs.

But he’s even more infuriated to discover that his house is completely infested with snails, these being the hundreds of snails Corelli and Pelagia and Lemoni brought back from their snail hunt which have escaped from their buckets and had all day to ooze themselves into every nook of the house. Charming comedy.

44. Theft

Kokolios discovers two Italian soldiers trying to steal his chickens. This bear of a man grabs them, beats and kicks them and drags them along to Dr Iannis’s house where he wakes up the household and presents them to Captain Corelli for discipline. Corelli goes inside and returns with his pistol and for a horrible moment Pelagia thinks he is going to shoot Kokolios. Instead he points it at the soldiers and, to their amazement, tells them to get down on their hands and knees and lick Kokolios’s boots. Which they do, after he’s threatened and kicked and pistol-whipped them.

At which point Kokolios realises he is stark naked (apart from his boots), suddenly covers his privates, and goes running off. Comedy. Two days later Pelagia’s beloved goat, who she has been feeding and grooming, her consolation in many an emotional drama, has gone missing. She is furious with Corelli, blaming his soldiers and he can only hang his head.

45. A Time of Innocence

Corelli and Pelagia become lovers in the old-fashioned sense, they ‘walk out’ together, kiss and cuddle but have nothing like sex. There is no contraception and Pelagia has seen too many girls her age either shamed by single motherhood or dying after botched abortions.

Weber gifts the captain an old Wehrmacht motorcycle which had broken down, in exchange for Italian rations. Corelli turns up on it and amazes Pelagia. They proceed to have mad adventures biking all round the island, specially when he takes corners too fast and ends up wildly going down side tracks, or when she leans the wrong way on corners.

This allows them to motor to places where Pelagia won’t be seen or recognised (death in such a conservative culture) and then they find a disused shepherd’s hit which becomes a safe place for them to lie and canoodle for hours (p.269).

All their talk is fantasies about what wonderful lives they’ll lead ‘after the war’.

46. Bunnios

Up on Mount Aenos the isolated goatherd Alekos hears a plane booming overhead and then watches a white circle fall from the sky. In his simplicity he thinks it is an angel but it is, of course, a British officer being parachuted in. This officer whacks his head on a rock and required a) untangling from his parachute and then b) days of careful feeding and care.

This is one of the comedy posh Brits who crop up throughout the story. ‘What ho’ is his only remark before passing out. When, after a few days, he tries to talk to Alekos the latter doesn’t understand a word and we are only later told that this is because this typical product of a British public school is speaking ancient Greek (p.275). De Bernières very amusingly conveys the impression this has on his Greek listeners by translating it into Chaucerian English:

‘Sire, of your gentilesse, by the leve of yow wol I speke in pryvetee of certayn thyng.’ (p.2174)

The angel has a mechanical box which he turns on and emits squeaks and squawls though he hears words like ‘Roger’ and ‘Wilco’ and so on. It is a radio.

After some thought, Aleko decides to take the angel to see Dr Iannis. This takes four days of travelling down the mountain by night and hiding from patrols during the day. At Iannis’s the angel reveals his identity as Lieutenant Bunny Warren, seconded to the Special Operations Executive from the Kings Dragoon Guards (p.276).

After discussion, they get him a native outfit and he makes his way off into town where he ends up by sheer chutzpah staying in a local house which already has four Italian officers billeted on it. He confounds them by trying to communicate in Eton Latin. Bunny takes to trekking all over the island, regularly going to the isolated shack where he’s hidden his radio and reporting back to Cairo details of all enemy troop movements.

In his journeys he comes across Father Arsenios and takes to walking with him, passing as another religious lunatic. One more oddity in a book full of eccentrics.

47. Dr Iannis Counsels his Daughter

We find the doctor once again writing a section of his history. He’s gone back to the ancient Romans’ occupation of Cephallonia. More importantly he can’t get his pipe to draw any more because of the vile apology for tobacco which is all you can get in wartime. He reflects that his history is more or a personal lament than an objective factual account. I’m sympathetic to the notion that History writing is actually impossible. We can never fully know the past for the blindingly obvious reason that none of us even understands the present. Like newspaper columnists all we can do is play with stereotypes and clichés, slightly more advanced stereotypes and clichés it’s true, but simplifications nonetheless. Because the true history of any event is beyond our abilities to fully understand. We always shape and interpret everything to suit our own purposes. History is no exception, the reverse: it’s distortion and simplification writ large.

Anyway, next time Pelagia comes in he asks her to sit down and have a heart to heart. He says he realises she and Corelli are in love. She blushes scarlet. He proceeds to calmly make the case against their love: 1) The captain is a foreigner and an enemy. If people discover she’s having an affair with the handsome enemy she will be universally decried as a traitor, spat at, stoned in the street. Her social life will end. 2) If she thinks of leaving for Italy she will leave behind forever everything which matters to her. 3) Infatuated love is transient, 6 months a year. After that it settles down to be hard work and you either discover you are two trees whose roots have entwined (like Dr Iannis and his wife did) or discover that you are separate beings. He is worried this is what Pelagia will discover when the dust settles. 4) She is still officially affianced to Mandras and nobody knows whether he’s alive or dead. 5) Sex deferred becomes more and more obsessed over, but lust can only really function within marriage, otherwise the risks are enormous of pregnancy, complete social death, the man abandoning her, or dying from an abortion. 6) If she did have a child and become a single mum no man would marry her and she would end up like most in that situation, becoming a prostitute. 7) Sexually transmitted infections for which there were, in 1943, no cures.

48. La Scala

Weber brings evidence of crooked Italian scams to Corelli. Carlo is there and the doctor. It turns into a debate about morality and ‘science’, giving Weber the opportunity to expound at length the Nazi idea of the New Morality, Strength Through Joy, the fascist perversion of Darwinian evolution.

Although this then morphs into Weber bringing in his wind-up gramophone and playing Lili Marlene on it, which Corelli plays along to, the sound wafting out into the warm Greek night and enchanting listeners. (Compare with the descriptions of hearing Lili Marlene over the radio in Fitzroy Maclean’s war memoir Eastern Approaches.)

Pelagia expresses such joy at the machine that Weber promises he’ll leave it with her when he finally leaves and she calls him a sweet boy and kisses him on the cheek which makes him blush. She must be 19 or so by now and he, maybe 24. They’re all kids.

49. The Doctor Advises the Captain

Dr Iannis and Corelli are sitting quietly chatting while Corelli restrings his mandolin. Iannis gives Corelli the male equivalent of the talking to he gave to Pelagia a few days earlier. He is nettled when Corelli gives a blithe picture of their future together and says he loves Pelagia, as if that will solve all problems. Iannis tries to explain why he thinks Italians and Greeks are profoundly different, with a view to explaining why Pelagia can never leave the island and go with Corelli back to Italy. She would die of homesickness (p.291).

50. A Time of Hiatus

The Allies invaded Sicily in July 1943. According to the very opinionated narrator this amounted to a betrayal of the Greeks, their most loyal allies and, fatefully, allowed the Greek communists a year to arm and prepare for their takeover i.e. the civil war, although in some places the people rebelled against the 25% tax they imposed everywhere.

The Italians on Cephallonia follow the progress of the Allies up Italy and talk aloud about armistice or surrender. The Germans in their small garrison fume at their perceived betrayal. Father Arsenios passes by with tattered dirty Bunny. Corelli tells Pelagia his boys think they should disarm the German garrison while it’s still small.

51. Paralysis

This chapter opens with another experiment in form for de Bernières has developments in Italy narrated as if in the style of Homer. De Bernières gives a day by day timeline of the collapse of Mussolini’s government in July 1943 and the secret negotiations of his replacement, Marshal Badoglio, with the Allies. The La Scala choir doesn’t meet any more. Corelli doesn’t come to the house any more, too busy training with his unit. On 8 September comes the announcement over the radio that all aggressive actions by Italian forces against the Allies will cease at once. Church bells are rung all over the island and neighbouring islands.

The Italian officers are confused: should they surrender to the Germans? sign an armistice with them? attack them? Corelli is crystal clear that they must disarm the Germans or they’re ‘fucked’. Italian warships in the harbour slip anchor and head back to Brindisi thus preventing the evacuation of the 5,000 or so troops on the island. Hard to credit such cowardly betrayal.

Corelli asks the doctor how he can contact the resistance or andartes but the doctor doesn’t know and all Corelli’s efforts fail.

52. Developments

Consisting of 10 short sections giving the points of view of people caught up in the general confusion.

  1. First person Carlo can’t believe their orders to surrender to the Germans.
  2. Conversation between Italian CO General Gandin who tells his German counterpart, Barge, that the Italians are voluntarily giving up positions to show their good faith.
  3. First person Corelli gives his mandolin to Pelagia for safekeeping, She reveals they’ve also taken Carlo’s manuscript and Corelli is surprised to learn the big man is a writer.
  4. Leutnant Weber cleans his gun.
  5. General Gandin uselessly confers with his chaplains and shows an irrational fear of attack by Stukas, unaware of the fact that’ from a military point of view they were one of the most ineffective weapons of war ever devised’ (p.304)
  6. Someone comes to Corelli’s barracks to tell them Italian officers in another place have been shot by the Germans, prompting Corelli to demand a vote.
  7. General Gandin wastes the next day in indecision.
  8. Quote of the short order sent directly from Hitler ordering the complete liquidation of all Italian forces on Cephallonia. Since Italy hasn’t declared war on Germany, the Italians are to be treated as franc-tireurs rather than as prisoners of war.
  9. General Gandin’s conference with senior officers, at which he highlights contradictory orders from Rome. Indecision.
  10. The British decoded the German order to liquidate the Italians but did nothing because it would reveal the fact that they’d cracked their codes. De Bernières has quite a lot satirical disgust at the British attitude and abandonment of their allies.

53. First Blood

The fighting breaks out piecemeal as Italian officers, abandoned by their commanders and their allies, take courage. Planes fly overhead dropping bombs. Italians take on the Panzer tanks parked at strategic points in the towns. Instead of demanding a surrender, Gandin calls only for a truce, effectively handing the initiative to the Germans.

54. Carlo’s Farewell

Carlo writes a love letter to Corelli saying he has loved him as much as Corelli loves Pelagia.

55. Victory

How the Germans promised the Italians safe passage from Corfu them machine gunned them in the water i.e. German mass murder. Stukas dive bomb the Italian barracks. Gandin makes the mistake of calling all Italians from outposts into the town where they are easier targets. Whatever it was this is now a war novel. From his mountaintop Aleko sees the flashes and hears the bangs and knows the war has come to his island. Bunny Warren tries to get Cairo to send reinforcements for the Italians but de Bernières gives a characteristically scathing characterisation of top hole British perfidy:

‘Dreadfully sorry, old boy, can’t be done. Chin-chin.’ (p.316)

In their house Iannis consoles Pelagia who is terrified Corelli is dead. Stamatis and Kolokios come to ask the doctor’s absolution for they are taking their rifles and going off to kill Germans. Meanwhile, Corelli wanders through the rubble of Argostoli which has been seriously bombed. He comes across a little girl, dead, buried in the rubble of a house. Refugees are streaming in from villages razed by the Germans, clogging the streets and making it difficult to move artillery. Meanwhile two more battalions of Germans land. The Germans flatten villages all over the island in fierce fights with the Italians who run out of ammunition and blame the British for abandoning them.

After days of fighting an exhausted Corelli motorbikes to the Iannis house, kisses Pelagia, tells this is the last time she’ll see him alive. She begs him to stay and hide in the house but he explains he has to be with his boys and motors off.

56. The Good Nazi (2)

Cut to Weber arguing with his superior officer that he doesn’t want to carry out the direct order to murder the Italian prisoners. He and his CO argue about the legality of it, which all depends on the prisoners’ status as either POWs (with rights) or franc-tireurs, who it is legal to shoot.

In the lorry taking them to their deaths Corelli and his pals sing the humming chorus from Madam Butterfly. Weber is appalled that these men arrive singing and jump down from the trucks instead of being forced at bayonet point. Corelli recognises Weber and waves to him. Weber goes up to him, they share a cigarette, Weber hesitates and apologises, Corelli is gracious and shakes his hand but Carlo is rude and unforgiving, Weber walks away.

The order to fire is given but the Italians aren’t lined up against a wall but standing or sitting or lying around crying so the Germans have to shoot them where they are. De Bernières singles out for his loathing a sadistic Croatian sergeant who takes thuggish pleasure in emptying his machine gun into the Italians bodies.

And now occurs the most famous incident in the novel. For as the firing starts, huge strong gay giant Carlo Piero Guercio steps smartly in front of Corelli, seizing his wrists in his hands, and stands in front of him like a human shield, receiving bullet after bullet in his body, seeing if he can count to 30 and nearly getting there before a bullet smashes his jawbone and he falls backwards onto Corelli crushing him. Then Weber walks dazed through the abattoir of bodies delivering the coup de grace with his pistol, bends down and looks directly into Corelli’s face, their eyes meet as Weber’s pistol hesitates, then he pulls it back, stands up and walks away.

57. Fire

And now there is an almighty coincidence when Velisarios – remember him? the village strongman? – comes across the killing field and recognises the corpse of Carlo and lifts him up, with difficulty propping him against a wall, and recognised the bloodied body underneath him as the captain who’s been billeted with the doctor. He has multiple bullet wounds and is covered in blood, so much so that Velisarios wonders if it would be kinder to finish him off there, but Corelli whispers ‘Iatro, Pelagia’ so Velisarios picks him up and carries him to Dr Iannis’s.

Meanwhile up on Mount Aenos the goatherd Aleko who, as I said at the start watches all these vents from an Olympian height and with Olympian detachment, sees fires spring up all over the island. With their usual thoroughness the Germans are now burning the bodies, thousands and thousands of Italian men who they’ve murdered in cold blood.

Father Arsenios comes across then largest fire, it is now dark and the German soldiers are exhausting themselves bringing in truckload after load of corpses and throwing them into the flames, some not yet dead. It is a scene from hell and Arsenios shouts his Biblical anathema on all concerned, then starts beating the Germans with his walking staff until eventually a German officer draws a pistol and shoots him through the nape of his neck and they chuck his body onto the enormous pyre.

Eventually the Germans leave and the Greeks come to rescue the bodies they can, in order to give them a decent Orthodox burial. General Gandin is executed along with all his staff officers. It was a massacre of up to 8,000 Italians and a massive war crime.

58. Surgery and Obsequy

Velisario brings Corelli to Dr Iannis’s. Neither Pelagia nor the doctor recognise him but they set to work to treat him. The procedures are described in great detail. After cleaning the blood off they see six bullet wounds but when Iannis starts operating he discovers that they are shallow wounds i.e. haven’t gone clean through the body. Velisario explains how he found the captain, hidden under Carlo, and they are awed at Carlo’s self sacrifice. They ask Velisario to go and fetch Carlo’s body which he does, at some effort, and Iannis digs a grave in the back garden where they sew up his shattered jaw then give him a decent burial. Iannis reads an eloquent eulogy as dawn breaks and the birds begin to sing.

59. The Historical Cachette

The cachette is the hole under the floorboards which has been used to hide rebels and recusants for centuries. This is where they hide Corelli if the Germans are active locally. When he wakes he is in terrible pain. Iannis had to break some of his ribs in order to extract the bullets and wired them together with mandolin wire. This will have to be extracted in further operations. Iannis gives an unflinching prognosis of what Corelli can expect and when the latter jokingly asks him to lie to him, the doctor replies:

‘The truth will make us free. We overcome by looking it in the eyes.’ (p.341)

Fine words but meaningless because – whose truth?

Corelli develops a fever, requires careful bathing, the fever breaks after four days and then he begins to eat. The doctor makes him stand up and walk on the spot. The pain is very bad but it looks like he’ll live.

60. The Beginning of Her Sorrows

Pelagia is now in very poor shape. Her skin is stretched tight and translucent. She is stick thin. She has grey hairs. Her gums bleed and she’s is worried teeth will start to fall out. She’s lost 50% of her body fat and her breasts have shrivelled. Now they start to starve and are reduced to hunting for lizards and snakes. She and her knackered lover, Corelli, lie on the bed together for hours and fantasise about the future. He hopes there’s a God because he wants to believe all his boys are in heaven. She says she hates all Germans but he makes the point that a lot of the German army isn’t German: they recruited from Poland, Ukraine, Latvia, Czechoslovakia, Lithuania, Croatia, wherever there are thugs and sadists.

(p.345)

They realise that the longer he stays the more likely he’ll be discovered. So with reluctance they ask Stamatis or Kolokios to contact Bunny Warren who, a few days later, comes knocking at the window in the early hours. Provided with gold sovereigns by London, Bunny has for some time been paying local fisherman to smuggle allies out of Cephallonia. Now he arranges for Corelli to be taken by caique to Sicily the next evening.

61. Every Parting is a Foretaste of Death

Corelli and Pelagia’s last day together, full of soppy sentimental fantasies about the future, squabbles about whether Corelli should rejoin the army to carry on fighting Germans, what they will name their children. Almost casually, Dr Iannis tells them he has given Corelli permission to marry his daughter.

That night Bunny comes scratching at the window, gives detailed instructions for how to sneak past the German coast guards, the walk in silence down to the beach, lights flash, a rowing boat comes inshore, Corelli and Pelagia hug, hold and kiss for the last time, then he clambers into the boat and is rowed off into the darkness.

62. Of the German Occupation

After the light-hearted romantic Italians have all gone, shot down in cold blood and incinerated, the Germans prove to be brutal heartless machines, with only one ideology, naked power, and the conviction of their own ineffable superiority. They go into anyone’s house at any hour, beat the inhabitants and steal all their belongings. Both the doctor and Pelagia are beaten and lovely Psipsina is casually beaten to death with the butt of a rifle. Drousoula has cigarettes stubbed out on her breasts for scowling at a German. Four Germans systematically destroy all the medical equipment Dr Iannis has accumulated over four decades. When the Master Race are ordered to withdraw in November 1944, the destroy as many of the houses of Cephallonia as they can.

63. Liberation (the communists)

The Liberation is no liberation because the Nazis are replaced by the brutes of ELAS, the communists, who elect themselves to all positions of power, impose a tax of 25% on everything and start rounding up Fascists and counter-revolutionaries and bourgeois and everyone who poses any kind of threat and sending them to concentration camps. De Bernières really hates them and enumerates their crimes, including stealing food sent to Athens by the Allies for famine relief, destroyed factories, docks and railways the Germans had left intact, created 100,000 refugees, and mutilated anyone who crossed them, castrating and gouging out the eyes of the recalcitrant.

The doctor is dragged away in the middle of the night and sent to a labour camp for the crime of being bourgeois. They beat Pelagia unconscious with a chair. When Kokolios and Stamatis try to protect the doctor all three are arrested and sent to the docks to travel to a camp on the mainland. The communists invite Bunny Warren to a party and shoot him. Chin-chin.

After she’s beaten up Pelagia goes running to Mandras’s mother, Drousoula who takes her to her (shrivelled) bosom and cares for her like a mother. Within a few days she moves into the doctor’s house which becomes a matriarchy.

Return of Mandras

But just when you thought things couldn’t get any worse, they do. Mandras arrives at the doctor’s house and he is now a bloated monster, degraded after years of murdering and raping at will with the communist partisans, gross and disfigured, looking like a toad.

He has come back to claim her as his bride (although he is as disconcerted by the change in his appearance as she is by him). Conversation turns to abuse and he angrily gets out the bundle of letters she wrote him all those years ago and repeats the scene of insisting she read them out loud. This escalates into shouting then he’s accusing her of sleeping with an Italian Fascist, everyone’s told him about it, he starts calling her a whore and when she makes a move to leave, smacks her round the face and when she falls to the floor kicks her in the back, lifts her by the wrists onto the bed and starts to rip off her clothes, as he’s done to so many women over the past three years. (De Bernières gives a horribly convincing psychological insight into the raging joy of rape and then the bitter aftermath, p.366).

Mandras beats her again and again and again till her face is a bloody swollen pulp then hoiks up her skirts but this causes the little derringer pistol her father gave her all those years ago to fall out of the pocket and beside her head. She grabs it and fires, shattering Mandras’s collarbone. He staggers back and at just that moment Drosoula returns, entering the bedroom to encounter this scene.

She rushes over to Pelagia who manages to say through her bloody mouth that Mandras tried to rape her. Outraged, Drosoula produces her own pistol and points it at her son. She formally disowns him, calls him Fascist, Fascist rapist, curses him with traditional curses: may his heart burst in his chest, may he die alone, he is no longer her son, she has no son.

Stumbling outside, Mandras sees the old olive tree, the one he used to fool around in, the one he fell out of onto the pot, the focus of so much love and laughter. Now the whole scene is ashes and emptiness. It’s all been for nothing, all his fighting and suffering and mastering the discourse of revolution, all for nothing. He stumbles along tracks down to the seashore where once he frolicked like a young god, strips off and wades into the sea.

Some time later his body is washed ashore, being nudged and nuzzled by his three tame dolphins. This, the immeasurable degradation of Mandras, more than the killing of Carlo and maiming of Corelli, made me feel really sick and distraught. The charming youth with the arse of a god and a permanent smile had been reduced to a fat, exploiting, bully rapist, symbol of a world degraded to bestial levels.

64. Antonia (the baby)

Someone leaves a newborn baby in a bundle on the step of the house. Drosoula and Pelagia take it in and discover it is a baby girl, to join the matriarchy. Pelagia names it Antonia after Corelli’s name for his mandolin. After so much loss it becomes the focus of their hopes and efforts.

Iannis returns

One of de Bernières’ aims is to flay the communists in the fiercest way possible for their barbaric behaviour. He makes Iannis the vehicle for this, for he has Dr Iannis return, after three long years in communist camps on the mainland, a complete wreck, a broken man. He can’t speak, can barely shuffle, his hands shake, broken by the forced marches without food or water, watching villagers along the way who are slow to feed the people’s army having their eyes gouged out, being castrated or raped, the mouths slit wide. He is haunted by the memory of seeing his two oldest friends, Stamatis and Kolokios, incapable of staggering further, sitting by the road as the column staggered onwards, waiting to be shot as ‘stragglers’. In many ways de Bernières paints the communists as worse than the Nazis.

All the more impressive, then, that he moves back in with the matriarchal household and helps Pelagia who is now the main doctor, healing the sick of the village, despite the deep sense of futility burned into his core (p.371).

She tries to get him interested in his old project, the history of Cephallonia, but the gently whimsical approach to history has been burned out of him. I was recently thinking about Joseph Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’ towards the end of which Marlowe discovers that the deranged envoy of ‘civilisation’, Mr Kurtz, has scrawled words of nihilistic despair across the bottom of a missionary pamphlet, ‘Exterminate all the brutes’. In much the same spirit, Pelagia discovers that her father has scrawled across the bottom of the last page of his manuscript:

‘In the past we had the barbarians. Now we have only ourselves to blame.’ (p.372)

L’omosessuale

Pelagia finally reads the stash of writings by l’omosessuale, Carlo Piero Guercio, and marvels at the secret sensitivity behind the man’s giant strength, marvels at the depths of his love, for Francesco and Corelli. Thus the strength and virtue and endurance of gay love is one of the book’s central themes.

The house becomes a matriarchy, run by Pelagia and Drosoula, who raise little Antonia as a free spirit. The conservative neighbours call them witches, exacerbated by the obvious emasculation of the once-proud doctor, throw stones or hiss at them in the street, tell their children to avoid them. (This reminds me very much of the way the villagers treat the Englishwoman at the centre of John Buchan’s 1926 melodrama, The Dancing Floor.)

In 1950 they can’t scrape together enough to bribe an official who has discovered that neither Iannis nor Pelagia has a medical degree and so bans them from working. It looks as if they’re going to starve until Fate steps in in the shape of a Canadian poet, one of the millions of bourgeois intellectuals who, in the postwar boom, were seeking out the ‘authenticity’ of ‘primitive’ life among workers and sailors. To their astonishment he is prepared to pay an outrageous rent for the old house by the quay which Drosoula had abandoned to move in with Pelagia, and their finances bounce back to health.

In this figure de Bernières gently satirises the existentialist chic of the post-war years, humorously saying that the poet found himself living a happy and contented life and unable to write the angst-ridden and depressing verse which had made him famous and so he eventually packed up and went back to Montreal, via Paris:

where freedom was in the process of being recognised as a major source of Angst. (p.374)

I think he underestimates the extent to which existentialist thought, although well-established before the war, was a) coloured by the wartime years and b) was a kind of traumatic response to the war, and especially to the occupation. But it was also a fashionable fad, as well.

Almost inevitably the household acquires a cat. Women and cats. We learn for the first time that psipsina is, apparently, Greek for ‘puss’. They had started calling Antonia psipsina as a nickname and there is some of the old light-hearted whimsy in the comic confusion created by calling out psipsina and both the cat and the child misinterpreting it.

The revenant

In 1946 occurs the first of strange phenomena. One day, outside, nursing the baby, she looks up and sees a man dressed in black standing hesitating at exactly the spot where Velisarios hit Mandras with the canon. She is convinced it is her beloved Corelli, puts down the baby and runs down the street but when she turns the corner the figure has vanished, despite her anguished calls. Later a single red rose appears on Carlo’s grave. Is it Corelli’s ghost? Next year, at about the same time, she sees the figure again and another red rose appears. As the years of her spinsterhood progress, Pelagia is comforted by the love from beyond the grave.

65. 1953 (earthquake)

Pelagia stops thinking of herself as Greek. The barbarity of the civil war destroyed any belief that Greek culture was special or superior. Increasingly she thinks of herself as Italian and buys a radio cheap because its tuner is broken and it can only reach Italian radio stations. She sings Italian songs and raises Antonia to speak Italian.

Wars

Despite the tourist whimsy of many passages, this is fundamentally a book about war and wars. In one sentence de Bernières positions the events of this chapter after the Greek Civil War (March 1946 to August 1949), after the end of the Korean War (June 1950 to July 1953) and just as the French were drawing near the disastrous climax of the First Indochina War (December 1946 to July 1954). The Second World War may have ended but it was still a world in flames.

Earthquake

This chapter is a fantastically vivid and almost magical realist depiction of the 1953 Ionian earthquake as experienced by our main characters i.e. weird electrical phenomena, followed by a series of shocks, then the Big One, as they desperately try to escape from the collapsing house.

The most destructive [of the shocks] was the August 12 earthquake. The event measured 6.8 on the moment magnitude scale, raised the whole island of Kefalonia by 60 cm (24 in), and caused widespread damage throughout the islands of Kefalonia and Zakynthos … Between 445 and 800 people were killed. (Wikipedia)

The practical upshot is 1) the doctor’s old house is reduced to ruins 2) the doctor is crushed to death, the peg for another of the book’s countless ironies:

[The ruined house] also contained the disillusioned soul and tired body of the doctor, who had planned his dying words for years, and left them all unsaid. (p.383)

66. Rescue

De Bernière’s attitude to his homeland, Britain:

In those days Great Britain was less wealthy than it is now, but it was also less complacent, and considerably less useless. (p.383)

but remember this was published in 1994 and so written during the chaos at the end of the Thatcher regime, marked by the poll tax riots, and then the Conservative Party’s typically squalid and shambolic sacking of the greatest leader it’s ever had, in November 1990 and hurried replacement by the sad and ludicrous figure of John Major, who depressed all progressive-thinking people by winning the 1992 general election by a landslide. So, yes, from the perspective of 1994, Britain was indeed an unhappy, disgruntled, rather ludicrous country.

But there’s more, de Bernière expresses the standard liberal lament over Britain being America’s poodle:

[Britain] had not yet acquired the schoolboy habit of waiting for months for permission from Washington before it clambered out of its post-imperial bed, put on its boots, made a sugary cup of tea, and ventured through the door. (p.384)

You could argue that the crudeness of this is unworthy of the writer who’s delivered so many luminously subtle moments throughout this wonderful book. Then again, satire is, in general, crude. It prompts a second thought: that de Bernières and the world at large had seen nothing yet, and would be amazed ten years later at the behaviour of Tony Blair who rightly earned the nickname ‘Bush’s poodle’ and sent British forces into Afghanistan and Iraq…

Back to the text: it’s the British who send the most aid and stay the longest to help the inhabitants of the Ionian islands to recover but the chapter then goes onto become an overview of all the rescue attempts and aid sent by various countries, as well as the impacts on the locals, some of whom fell into despair, some intractable guilt at having survived, some set up businesses, unlikely leaders emerged such as Velisarios, the strong man, who took charge in Pelagia’s village. The narrative details his heroic acts (single-handedly cleaning out the village well so that nobody went thirsty) deeds which were remembered and venerated for decades afterwards.

In among the general confusion, an Italian fireman borrows an American jeep and drives out to Pelagia’s village, making his way to the ruins of the old house and identifying the ancient olive tree, split in two by the quake, and then sees the grave of the gentle giant Carlo, which has been opened up. He gets a spade from the jeep to recover the big man but as he does so the earth shakes again and the grave closes of its own volition.

Surely this is Corelli, but the text doesn’t say so.

67. Pelagia’s Lament

First-person lament by Pelagia for everything she’s lost, specifically her upbringing by her wonderful father, fount of fantastical stories, which leads up to her memory of Velisarios digging through the rubble to find her father, so small and limp and empty without his soul, and she realised how beaten and broken he had been but how he was the only man who loved her to the end. This lament made me cry.

68. The Resurrection of History

Pelagia sinks into profound guilt that she panicked and ran out of the house and left her father to die. Drosoula and Antonia sympathise to start with, but become more irritated as Pelagia becomes more morbidly obsessed. Eventually they make up the story that her father has appeared to them in dreams and told them to tell her to complete her father’s history of Cephallonia. After initial scepticism, Pelagi discovers that she can do it, enjoys doing it, starts flexing her intellectual muscles, expresses opinions she never knew she had, writes off to experts in Europe and America for more information and is amazed at the enthusiastic replies she receives. Several publishing houses turn it down but it doesn’t matter. Her father’s project has saved her.

It is 1961. Part of her intellectual exercise is enjoying teasing and contradicting the now teenage Antonia. But the girl dismays her and Drosoula by announcing that 1) she is a communist and 2) she is getting married, at the age of 17 (p.397).

69. Bean by Bean the Sack Fills

Life continues. Pelagia starts to receive postcards from cities round the world with short cryptic messages in Greek. They can’t be from Corelli, he couldn’t speak Greek and what was he doing gallivanting round the world. She decides they’re from the ghost of her father continuing the peregrinations of his youth.

Antonia gets a job serving in a café in Argostoli and is chatted up by short, plump, 32-year-old radical lawyer Alexi (p.399). Despite all her mother’s opposition, Antonia gets married at a happy traditional ceremony.

Time passes. Drosoula sets up a ramshackle taverna in the space down by the quay where her house used to be and becomes a tourist attraction, famed for her slow service but eccentric company. Lemona, now the plump mother of three children, helps out as does Pelagia.

Antonia cries when King Paul dies, comes for comfort when Alexi is locked up by the colonels in 1967 and again in 1973, goes to the mainland to take part in feminist demonstrations. She tells her mother it’s all the fault of the older generation and it’s up to the young people to fix the world. As all young people do. But, as a feminist and a radical, she refuses to have a grandchild for Pelagia to the latter’s sorrow.

Drosoula dies quietly in her chair and is buried next to Dr Iannis and Pelagia suddenly realises she is alone. But in the event Antonia does get pregnant and have a little baby boy. Pelagia dandles it and calls it Iannis so often that that becomes its name. Alexi is a rich bourgeois now, builds an apartment block on the hillside where the old village used to be, rebuilds Drosoula’s taverna, hires a competent chef, takes 50% of the profit.

70. Excavation

Iannis grows to be a beautiful 6-year-old who helps out at the taverna and is cooed over by foreign matrons. Alexi becomes a property tycoon, building evermore apartment blocks with swimming pools and tennis courts. Antonia opens a tourist emporium full of tat in Argostali and then in half a dozen other towns. They become rich.

The boy Iannis engages in competitions to pee as high as possible against the wall at the back of the taverna and his dreams are full of plump tourist matrons pressing him their squishy bosoms.

When he’s ten, Pelagia hires Spiridon, a talented bouzouki player from Corfu, whose dexterity reminds her of the one true love of her life. iannis dreams of becoming a kamakia or ‘harpoon’, slang for the handsome young men who hang about the airport on mopeds and make a living having passionate week-long affairs with single women who’ve flown to Greece looking for ‘romance’ (p.407).

Anyway, Iannis conceives the ambition of playing the bouzouki not least because, by the end of every evening, Spiridon has his arms round the prettiest girls in the restaurant and is being showered with roses. Spiridon says his arms are too short to play it, he should start with a mandolin, so he begs his mum and dad for a mandolin but they keep forgetting to get one on their umpteen trips abroad, so instead he pesters granny Pelagia, who says there’s one buried in the ruins of her old house.

Which is why Iannis is dispatched with Spiridon to dig it up and hence the title of this chapter. In digging through the rubble they discover all kinds of relics which mean something to the reader – a wartime photo of Corelli and Weber, a family photo album starting with Dr Iannis’s wedding, a jar with a shrivelled pea in it (the pea which kick starts the whole narrative).

In the middle of this digging a huge old man appears in the ruined doorway. It is old Velisarios, come to see if they are looters. In his hand he holds a red rose and it’s only now that we learn that it is he who has left a rose on Carlo’s grave every year in October and, it is strongly implied, that he too was gay and recognised and respected a kindred spirit.

Anyway, it’s this huge strong Velisarios who opens up the trapdoor to the historic cachette under the old house where, of course, they find all its treasures perfectly preserved – the manuscripts of Carlo’s letters, Iannis’s history, Weber’s wind-up gramophone with records, the clasp knife she gave her father, the blanket she crocheted throughout Corelli’s stay, and, in side a box inside cloth covers, the most beautiful mandolin Spiridon has ever seen.

71. Antonia Sings Again

Reunited with all these evocative objects, Pelagia cries for weeks, and then shows the photo album in particular to Iannis, boring him with stories of all the old people in them.

And Spiro teaches Iannis how to play the mandolin.

72. An Unexpected Lesson (reappearance of Corelli)

Cut to 1993. Iannis is 15. He likes to go up to the old ruined house to practice the mandolin. One day an old grey-haired man approaches him. It is, of course, Antonio Corelli. He politely points out that the boy is fingering the mandolin in slightly the wrong way which is hampering his technique. When he takes the mandolin to show him how, he suddenly realises it is his old one. Everything comes flooding out and he tells the enthralled teenager how he is the man his mother was going to marry, how he was saved by the giant buried in the back garden and how the four strings missing from the mandolin when they first found it… are in his chest, holding his ribs together, he never had them removed.

73. Restitution (Corelli and Pelagia reunited)

This final chapter opens comically, with Pelagia, confronted by Corelli in the middle of her taverna, going mad with rage, overturning tables, throwing plates and pans at him, then prodding him with the broom handle as she furiously accuses him. All these years she thought he was dead and yet he was alive and living the life of Reilly.

So now we have the Big Reveal, the explanation of the last 50 years of their lives (1943 to 1993). It was Corelli who Pelagia saw at the end of the road in chapter 64, in 1946. He had come back to see her. But what he saw was her nursing a baby and put 2 and 2 together and made 53, wildly assuming that she was married with a child. In his confusion he ran and jumped over a wall so that when she ran after him she saw an empty street.

He came back every year around the same time but always saw her with the baby and made the same mistake. Pelagia asks the obvious question, why did he never meet her and ask her? Because he didn’t want to ruin what he thought was her new, happily married life by stirring up old ghosts. So like a gentleman he did the restrained thing and backed off. Although he did return every year, so her impression of seeing the mysterious dark man was real.

In the meantime he took her parting advice, left the army and became a fireman. Plenty of time to practice and compose and eventually he wrote classical pieces which became a success, three concertos, one of them with Pelagia’s March as its central theme.

He became a successful concert performer and was in demand around the world. Hence the postcards. They were from him. Why in Greek? Because when the full truth of the Fascist regime’s evils came out he was ashamed to be an Italian and emigrated to Greece. He’s been a Greek citizen for 25 years.

Much more chat and memories then he shyly gives her a Walkman and a tape of his 1954 concerto and leaves, to meet up later. She fumbles with the Walkman but once she works out how to work it, is amazed at how immediate and total the musical experience is, right in the centre of her head. And then she hears Pelagia’s March which he used to hum, subject to all kinds of developments, played by different instruments and then makes out the rat-a-tat-tat of machineguns, and the rumbling of drums which embodies the earthquake, my God, the whole narrative is captured in musical form.

That evening he brings her a goat. He went to the trouble of taking a taxi to the top of Mount Aenos where he was swindled by Alekos, and had to pay the taxi driver a double fare to bring it all the way down the mountain. It’s restitution for the one she loved which was stolen in chapter 44. She says she’ll name it Apodosis which is Greek for ‘restitution’. She amusingly humiliates Corelli when he tells her she should get good milk out of it, maybe sell yoghurt in the restaurant and she points between its back legs at the big pink scrotum!

That evening he returns with a modern motorbike and suggests they roar off up into the hills to see if they can find the old shed where they used to hide away and kiss and cuddle, which they called their Casa Nostra. Pelagia says it’s a preposterous idea and agrees. As they roar up into the hills Pelagia is pleased and terrified and holds on tight.

And in the final image of the novel, they are overtaken by a scooter carrying not one but three young woman, wearing skimpy dresses showing their shapely breasts, long hair flowing in the wind, one driving, one doing her eye make-up, one nonchalantly reading a paper. An image of carefree youth and optimism. Corelli thinks that when he comes to map out his next concerto all he will have to do is remember this moment to conjure up the spirit of Greece.

THE END.

The unsaid as a central theme

Writing out the sentence describing Dr Iannis’s death in the Ionian earthquake, and how he had for years prepared some noble and profound last words which, in the event, he had no chance to utter before being crushed to death, made me realise that this is a minor but significant thread in the book – the frustration of the unsaid.

On several occasions Corelli has big speeches ready to deliver to Pelagia, only for her temper or mood to sweep the conversation away.

Similarly, Dr Iannis likes to prepare grand speeches with which he will demolish the communist beliefs of Kokolios or the monarchism of Stamatis, and yet life (and Lemoni) keep interrupting him so that they are never delivered.

Mandras has so much to say to Pelagia on his two returns, from the Albanian front and then from life with the communist partisans, and yet both times his hopes of expressing what he feels are dashed and he ends up attacking her in a raging fury.

But the theme has its best embodiment in the entire life of Carlo Guercio, who overflows with love for Francesco and then for Corelli, which he can never ever, in real life, express.

Related, is the scene of Pelagia and Corelli’s last day together before he takes the illicit boat back to Italy, in which they have plenty of time and yet, somehow, mysteriously, don’t get to express a fraction of their feelings.

And maybe also related is Dr Iannis’s eternal frustration with his History of Cephallonia – no matter how much he writes he somehow never gets to express what he wants to say.

It’s as if it’s a buried moral of the story, that no matter how eloquent the writing and the words, the most important part, somehow, still, is left unexpressed. Something which is expressed nearly at the end of the text when Pelagia shows young Iannis all the photos from her life and he is suddenly struck by how little survives of our lives and loves, thinking:

How can a present not be present? How did it come about that all that remained of so much life was little squares of stained paper with pictures on it? (p.416)

Hummel’s concerto for mandolin

Greek words

  • agapeton – sweetheart
  • iatre – ‘Doctor’
  • koritsimou – my girl
  • kyria – respectful title for a female, ‘kyria Pelagia’
  • mangas – men, chaps
  • papakis – diminutive form of address to a father
  • patir – form of address to a priest, same as ‘Father’

Credit

Captain Corelli’s Mandolin by Louis de Bernières was published by Secker and Warburg in 1994. References are to the 1995 Minerva paperback edition.

Modern Greek reviews

Second World War reviews

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Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts (1999) part 2

‘Whatever happens will be for the worse and therefore it is in our interest that as little should happen as possible.’
(Salisbury writing about the Balkan crisis of 1887 in a sentence which sums up his political philosophy)

‘Salisbury: Victorian Titan’ is divided into two equal parts of about 430 pages each:

  1. Tory Tribune, 1830 to 1885 (pages 5 to 422)
  2. Tory Titan, 1885 to 1903 (pages 425 to 852)

By the second half I thought I had a good handle on the book’s strengths and weaknesses. Its obvious strength is the way it examines all the major political events and issues in British and international politics between about 1865 and 1902 in fantastic detail, as seen from the point of view of the hero of this enormous biography, Robert Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury.

Using extensive quotes from Salisbury’s correspondence and speeches, plus citations from the letters or reported remarks of those around him (principally his political colleagues, occasionally his family) we get day-by-day, sometimes hour-by-hour recreations of how it seemed to Salisbury, what his thoughts and strategems were, how he manoeuvred those around him or attacked those on the opposition party, how he managed the relentless, hyper-complex task of managing British domestic, international, and imperial challenges.

So: amazing insights into a figure who really does emerge as a giant of his times, Prime Minister from 1885 to 1902, with only a three year gap. And yet the book’s strength is also, I think, its weakness, which is that the focus is so unrelentingly on Salisbury, what he said and thought and wrote, his speeches around the country and in the House of Lords, his comments over dinner or at parties, what family and confidantes recorded him saying to them – that, although the book covers an amazing number of issues, I began to realise that you fail to get a well-rounded presentation of those issues.

One example stands for many: only as much of the ill-fated expedition of General Gordon to Khartoum is explained and described as is necessary to understand what a political opportunity it presented to Salisbury to attack Gladstone for failing to relieved besieged Gordon in time. But the full background to the Mahdi’s rising, explaining the context of his rise, his appeal, and previous military engagements, and the subsequent history of British involvement in the Sudan are mostly missing. The topic swims into view as it affects Salisbury then, when it ceases to be relevant to him, disappears.

A bigger, more dominant and recurring theme is Ireland and Irish nationalism. Again, it initially feels like you’re getting a lot of information but, after a while, I realised it was a lot of information only about Salisbury’s day-to-day management of the way successive Irish crises impinged on British politics. So Roberts mentions agrarian disturbances, the regular murders and atrocities, and he mentions that this is mostly caused by inequalities to do with land and rents – BUT you don’t get a clear explanation of why. There’s no stopping to give a broader explanation of the context of Irish discontent, the rise of nationalism, the background to rural violence and so on. Roberts mentions a number of organisations, such as the Irish Brotherhood, but without any background on their formation and activities.

The great tragic Irish leader Charles Stewart Parnell appears in the narrative mainly in a very detailed account of his trial which Salisbury helped to organise and provided evidence for. Yet after reading pages and pages about this I was still left feeling unclear what the distinctive thing about Parnell and his party was. And Roberts throws away the event that ruined Parnell, his being mentioned in a divorce case, which led his puritanical supporters to abandon him, in a few phrases. So I didn’t get a full, rounded, thorough explanation of Parnell’s success and rise, just a few episodes as they impinged on Salisbury’s concerns to manage the Irish Problem.

I hope by now you’ve got my drift: this is an awesomely huge, thoroughly researched, insightful, clever and beautifully written biography of Salisbury BUT it is not a good history of Britain during his times. Every page is plastered with quotes and citations from his letters and speeches but these focus entirely on how Salisbury used events to manipulate the politics around him.

It is an extraordinarily detailed view of what politics is actually like i.e. the ceaseless calculating of what is to your own or your party’s advantage, the constant jostling and politicking against the opposition party and just as much with enemies within your own party. Reading about Salisbury’s Machiavellian manipulations is wonderfully insightful and entertaining. But time and again I felt I was being short-changed on the issues themselves. It’s perfectly logical and entirely sensible that we only see events or issues insofar as they impinge on our man Salisbury. But as page 400 turned to page 500, and then on to page 600, I became a little irked at a sense that I was missing out on the actual history of the period.

Contents

Roberts gives sub-titles to his chapters which summarise the issues each one covers, so an effective way of conveying its scope is simply to copy that:

Chapter 26: Reconstruction at home and abroad (January to April 1887)

  • 1887: Salisbury reshuffles his cabinet, coming to rely on George Joachim Goschen, 1st Viscount Goschen, a former Liberal, then Liberal Unionist, who he makes Chancellor of the Exchequer; Sir Michael Hicks Beach as the Chief Secretary for Ireland
  • death of Stafford Henry Northcote, 1st Earl of Iddesleigh, formerly Lord Northcote, Salisbury’s challenger in the Commons to leadership of the Tories
  • 1887: The Mediterranean Agreements, a series of treaties with Italy, Austria-Hungary and Spain
  • Bulgaria: Alexander of Battenberg, prince of Bulgaria, abdicated in 1886 after a pro-Russian coup, triggering a Balkan crisis about who to replace him: the constant worry was that Russia would interfere, prompting Austria to retaliate, triggering a general European war
  • 1888 June: Kaiser Wilhelm II ascends the throne of the German Empire, worrying everyone with his impetuous outbursts and lack of understanding of the intricate skeins of European diplomacy
  • Egypt: ‘I heartily wish we had never gone into Egypt’, Salisbury wrote. British influence was necessary to safeguard the Suez Canal but upset the Ottoman Sultan, the rival Power, France, and the people of Egypt who resented British influence
  • The French were afflicted by a permanent ‘inferiority complex’ and so behaved badly at every opportunity, in a dispute about the Newfoundland fisheries, in the New Hebrides in the Pacific, obstructive in Egypt, planting a flag in the empty wastes of Somalia

Chapter 27: ‘Bloody Balfour’ (March 1887 to July 1891)

  • March 1887 Salisbury appointed his nephew Arthur Balfour the Chief Secretary for Ireland. An aloof, philosophical man, commentators thought he would be a soft touch but he implemented Salisbury’s strategy of cracking down on lawlessness that, in the wake of the Mitchelstown Massacre when Irish police opened fire on protesters killing 3 (9 September 1887) and Balfour gave them his full support, he was nicknamed ‘Bloody Balfour’. Conversely, Balfour’s sternness impressed the future defender of Ulster, Edward Carson.
  • (It speaks volumes about this society and this ruling class, that the Irish Viceroy, the 6th Marquess of Londonderry, had been Balfour’s fag at Eton.)
  • July 1887: Balfour steered the passage of the ‘Perpetual Crimes Act’, a Coercion Act to prevent boycotting, intimidation, unlawful assembly and the organisation of conspiracies against the payment of agreed rents which led to the imprisonment of hundreds of people including over twenty MPs
  • March and April 1887: The Times newspaper published letters they claimed proved Parnell’s association with the Phoenix Park murders and violent crimes. Parnell sued the newspaper whereupon it emerged that the letters were all forged by a notorious crook. Salisbury backed the Times and the prosecution i.e. Tories talk about ‘honour’ and ‘the law’ when it suits them, but break it or ignore it when it suits them

28: ‘The genie of imperialism’ (May 1887 to January 1888)

  • June 1887: Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee; interesting to learn what a struggle the authorities had to know how to mark it appropriately; in the end it was the template or trial run for the much bigger Diamond Jubilee ten years later; of course a cartload of ‘honours’ were doled out, usually as a reward to the Unionist cause (p.461)
  • The Colonial Conference: Salisbury was not a doctrinaire imperialist and was against the idea of forging a closer union or federation with the (mostly white) colonies i.e. Canada, the Cape Colony, Australia and New Zealand; but the Colonial Secretary Sir Henry Holland took advantage of all the premiers being in London for the Jubilee to stage one anyway
  • In the 1880s Britain took control of Bechuanaland, Burma, Nigeria, Somaliland, Zululand, Kenya, Sarawak, Rhodesian and Zanzibar
  • 13 November 1887 ‘Bloody Sunday’: a crowd of marchers protesting about unemployment and the Irish Coercion Acts, and demanding the release of Irish Nationalist MP William O’Brien, clashed with the Metropolitan Police, with 400, 75 badly injured, two policemen were stabbed and one protester was bayonetted
  • Tithes: an example of Salisbury’s defence of the Church of England, his Tithe Rent-Charge Bill was wrangled over for 4 years, from 1887 to 1891; it aimed to get non-payers of tithes to the Church subject to County Court judgements which would make it easier for the clergy to obtain their money
  • Allotments: Salisbury strongly objected to a Bill brought to allow local councils to compulsorily purchase land in order to create allotments for the poor;
  • Fiscal retaliation: this was another phrase for protectionism which Salisbury was also vehemently against; the issue was to grow and grow, reflecting the fact that sometime in the 1880s Britain lost the industrial and economic lead she had enjoyed for most of the century; protectionism was raised at party conferences again and again but Salisbury managed to stave it off; after his retirement the policy of imperial protectionism would tear the party apart and contribute to the Tories’ catastrophic defeat in 1906

Chapter 29: Rumours of Wars (February to July 1888)

  • A reshuffle:
  • ‘Pom’ Macdonnell: Salisbury appointed as his personal private secretary Schomberg ‘Pom’ McDonnell, fifth son of the Earl of Antrim who turned out to be an outstanding administrator and confidante
  • The Vienna Incident: the new young touchy Kaiser thought that his diplomatic overtures had been snubbed and so made it known that he planned to ‘cut’ his uncle, the Prince of Wales, when they were both on visits to Vienna; diplomatic panic; chancelleries and embassies go into overdrive; children
  • General Boulanger’s war scare: Georges Ernest Jean-Marie Boulanger, nicknamed ‘General Revenge’, was a French general and politician, an enormously popular public figure who won multiple elections in the 1880s, vowing revenge for the defeat of 1870, taking on not only Germany but Britain if necessary, causing many sleepless nights in the Foreign Office; at the height of his popularity in 1889 it was widely was feared that he might make himself a dictator; as usual with French bluster, it came to nothing
  • Newfoundland and Bering Sea disputes: diplomatic fracas with France about fishing rights off Newfoundland and then with America about ownership of the sea around the Bering Straits; the point of all these quarrels is the way Salisbury managed them down, without letting them escalating into fighting talk
  • House of Lords reform: surprisingly, Salisbury supported reform of the House of Lords (mainly to kick out crooks) but was predictably against professionalising it; he defended the House of Lords not for its members’ achievements or intelligence but because simply by dint of being wealthier and better educated than most people, they were less likely to be influenced by ‘sordid greed’ (p.493); this of course sits at odds with the reams of evidence throughout the book that those who sought ‘honours’ were precisely the ambitious and greedy
  • February to July 1888: Sir Garnet Wolseley, hero of the (unsuccessful) march to relieve Gordon at Khartoum (1885), was promoted to Adjutant-General to the Forces in the War Office from where he issued a series of alarmist warnings about the threat of a sudden invasion from France and cuts to the army budget, all of which an irritated Salisbury had to manage down

Chapter 30: The Business of Government (August to December 1888)

  • County councils: the most important piece of domestic legislation of 1888 was the creation of County Councils as the primary instruments of local government replacing the previous ad hoc and regionally varying procedures (p.499)
  • The Drinks trade: the nonconformist and Temperance interest among the Liberal Unionists tried to add to the local government bill provisions to limit pub opening hours and cut back on the drinks trade; Salisbury opposed this, believing every Englishman should be free to go to hell his own way
  • Votes for women: in the County Council elections which were held in 1889 women candidates were elected for the first time (p.502); Salisbury wasn’t against women having the vote, and is cited as saying he had no problem with educated women having it; he was against extending the franchise to the lower classes; in the event, like lots of other pressing issues he managed to block and delay it so women’s suffrage became an issue which damaged the Edwardian Liberal governments
  • In 1888 Sir Lionel Sackville-West, British minister at the Washington legation, made a rookie error by replying to a letter, ostensibly from an Englishman in America, asking who he should support in the presidential election; Sackville-West wrote back suggesting Grover Cleveland would be better for Britain; the letter was a ruse, written by an American, Sackville-West’s reply was published in the newspapers and the US government kicked him out for this undiplomatic faux pas i.e. an ambassador expressing about an election in a foreign country; Salisbury was furious; during the fracas Sackville-West succeeded to his father’s title and went back to the huge Knole Park estate with a state pension
  • A ‘black man’: in 1885 a Tory colonel had won the Holborn by-election against an Indian, Dadabhai Naoroji; in 1888 Salisbury made a speech in which he referred to this event and made the remark that ‘I doubt if we have yet got to the point where a British constituency will elect a black man to represent them’; not only the Liberals but many commentators came down on him like a ton of bricks; interestingly, the Queen wrote to criticise him; Dadabhai Naoroji was elected MP for Finsbury Central in 1895, becoming Britain’s second ethnic minority MP; he enjoyed referring to himself as ‘Lord Salisbury’s black man’
  • The Viceroy’s India proposals: before Frederick Temple Hamilton-Temple-Blackwood, 1st Marquess of Dufferin and Ava, was sent off to India to be viceroy (in 1884) he had drawn up proposals to extend the powers of viceregal and local legislative councils, including an element of direct voting; Salisbury quashed these as all other hints at Indian self-rule
  • This leads Roberts into a consideration of Salisbury’s diplomatic style which was highly secretive; he often didn’t inform cabinet colleagues about initiatives; this was partly because he considered the Foreign Office ‘a nest of Whiggery’ and the level of ambassadorial competence generally very low (p.514); Roberts discusses the basis of his diplomatic thinking which was utterly pragmatic – most treaties, he admitted, are based on force or the threat of force (p.512) or, as he put it somewhere else, bluster and bluff; 15 years later, as the world entered the new century, that bluster and bluff would no longer do – big armies, big navies and heavy industry increasingly became key to international affairs
  • Fascinating fact: before 1914 Britain only had 9 ambassadors (compared to 149 in 1997) and just 125 diplomatic posts abroad

Chapter 31: Africa (1885 to 1892)

When Salisbury left the Foreign Office in 1880, nobody talked about Africa. When he returned in 1885, everyone was talking about Africa, and the quarrels it was causing between the Powers (p.518).

Between 1885 and 1900 most of the borders of modern Africa were set by European statesmen who’d never been there. To this day, this is one of the root causes of the chronic instability, political and economic backwardness of Africa. But at the time the various deals the nations of Europe struck, and the straight lines they drew through jungles and deserts, represented a triumph because the primary aim was never fairness or the interests of Africans, it was to prevent European nations going to war.

The lines on the map weren’t drawn in accordance with the logic of geography or tribes, traditional territory, language or commerce. The aim was to stop Europeans going to war.

‘We have been engaged in drawing lines upon maps where no white man’s foot has ever trod. We have been giving away mountains and rivers and lakes to each other, only hindered by the small impediment that we never knew exactly where the mountains and rivers and lakes were.’ (p.529)

(Some) reasons the European colonisation of Africa accelerated in the last decades of the nineteenth century:

  • the discovery of gold and diamonds in South Africa
  • the opening up of East Africa by the Suez Canal
  • the evangelical impulse to eliminate the slave trade and convert the heathen
  • France’s lust for la gloire after her ignominious defeat in the Prussian War
  • private adventurism and entrepreneurship (Rhodes)
  • the quests of each nation’s industry to sources of raw materials and markets
  • the evil greed of Belgian’s King Leopold II
  • Britain’s need for a safe route to India
  • the invention of steamships and advanced weaponry (the Gatling gun)
  • the development of medicines for tropical diseases (p.518)

African issues:

  • Bullying Portugal: ‘a tiresome little Power’ (p.520) I was surprised how much trouble it was to negotiate a treaty with Portugal to stop their incursions into what we called Nyasaland, thus preventing the Portuguese owning a belt right across the middle of Africa, from Angola in the west to Mozambique in the East
  • Zanzibar: managing German attempts to overthrow the Sultan of Zanzibar and to establish Uganda as a German protectorate; Salisbury was appalled at the Germans’ brutality to Africans; acquiring Zanzibar involved a trade-off whereby we accepted France’s acquisition of Madagascar (p.529)
  • March 1890 the Kaiser abruptly sacked Bismarck (p.525); Salisbury negotiated a deal to hand Germany Heligoland in the Baltic in exchange for sole protectorate over Zanzibar
  • Britain acquired the future Uganda and Kenya, Germany kept Tanganyika, Rwanda and Burundi;
  • 1890 The Sahara: Salisbury agreed Conventions with France whereby we backed the Royal Niger Company’s claim to the Niger valley in exchange for agreeing French control of the western Sahara and the Algerian hinterland as far as Lake Chad
  • Italian ambitions: in exchange for British control of the Nile valley Salisbury let the Italians stake the Red Sea coast i.e. Eritrea and Somalia
  • Cecil Rhodes: Salisbury though Rhodes a chancer but backed his request for a royal charter to develop the huge area in south-central Africa which would develop into Rhodesia; in thanks for his support Rhodes named the dusty capital of his new territory Salisbury (which would become the city of Harare, capital of modern Zimbabwe) (p.534)

During a seven year period Salisbury laid down the outlines of colonial Africa which were to last well into the twentieth century.

Chapter 32: Mid-Term Crises (January 1889 to December 1890)

  • The Kaiser pays Victoria a visit, potentially embarrassing because he had been rude to the Prince of Wales the previous year
  • General Boulanger, a bellicose right-winger who had threatened a coup in Paris, in the event fled to Brussels
  • Royal grants: Salisbury became very close to the Queen, they thought alike on many matters, and so he tried to move the question of grants to minor royals out of the Commons, where it had become a regular peg for Liberals and Radicals to make republican remarks
  • The two-power standard: Salisbury secured cabinet support to greatly increase spending on the navy and invented a new rule of thumb, that the Royal Navy should be as big as the next two largest navies (of France and Russia) combined
  • The Paris Exhibition: Salisbury refused to let the British ambassador attend the centenary celebrations of the French Revolution, an event which haunted Salisbury and informed his reactionary Toryism
  • The Shah’s visit: after initial reluctance Salisbury hosted Nasr-el-Din in London and at his Hatfield home
  • The ‘socialist’ current: the London dock strike from August to September 1889 and the huge marches to support it worried gloomy Salisbury that socialism was on its way; he thought it represented an attack on property and law (of contracts, rents etc)
  • The Cleveland Street Scandal: scandal about a male brothel just north of Oxford Street, frequented by members of the royal household and some posh army officers
  • A mid-term crisis: objections to a slew of domestic bills bring his government close to losing a vote and having to quit
  • Prince Eddy in love: Eddy being Prince Edward’s eldest son, second in line to the throne; when he fell in love with a French princess it threatened the delicate balance of European power because Salisbury’s general aim was to keep in with the central powers (Germany and Austria) as protection against France and Russia; having a potential French queen-in-waiting would wreck his whole strategy so he moved heaven and earth to get Victoria to forbid the marriage
  • Trouble at Barings bank which faced bankruptcy until the ruling class rallied round to refund it

Chapter 33: Alliance Politics (January to October 1891)

  • Visitors at Hatfield: the Kaiser visits; Salisbury thinks he is mad and dangerous; and then Crown Prince Victor Emmanuel of Italy
  • Free education: a policy of Chamberlain and the Radical Unionists to which Salisbury acquiesces, creating an Education Bill which passed in August 1891
  • The Prince of Wales in difficulties: Salisbury negotiates peace in a bitter row between the prince and some offended aristocrats
  • The death of W.H. Smith, a steadfast and loyal supporter of Salisbury as Leader of the House of Commons; after careful politicking Salisbury has the post filled y his nephew Arthur Balfour
  • Party organisation: the importance of chief agent of the conservative party, Richard Middleton, and Chief Whip, Aretas Akers-Douglas
  • The Liberal Unionist alliance: the importance of the good working relationship with the super-posh Marquess of Hartington, 8th Duke of Devonshire, leader of the Liberal Unionists

Chapter 34: Leaving Office (November 1891 to August 1892)

  • The general election: friends and colleagues die; the Tory government finds it hard to pass bills; by-elections go against them; much debate whether to call an election for the end of the year (Salisbury’s preference) or June; July 1892 it was and although the Conservatives and Liberal Unionists won 314 seats and the Liberals 272, the balance of power was held by the Irish Nationalist MPs who won 72, and who went into alliance with the Liberals on the understanding that Gladstone would introduce a Home Rule bill
  • Gladstone: Salisbury considered Eton and Christ Church-educated, Anglican Gladstone a traitor to his class in the long bloodless civil war which is how he saw British politics
  • Cabinet style: Salisbury accepted the result and in August tendered his resignation to the Queen, who was very upset; she loathed Gladstone; his cabinet colleagues testify to Salisbury’s calm and cheerful collegiate style; once they got rid of Randolph Churchill, it had been a successful and good tempered cabinet

Chapter 35: Opposition (August 1892 to June 1895)

  • The Second Irish Home Rule bill: Gladstone lost no time in forming an administration, then moving his Home Rule Bill on 13 February 1893; Salisbury’s calculations about the best strategy to block it, his effectiveness because it was defeated by 10 to 1 in the House of Lords
  • Gladstone resigns: Gladstone found himself increasingly at odds with his own cabinet, in particular opposing the ongoing increase of the Royal Navy; he was the oldest person ever to be Prime Minister, aged 84, and on 2 March resigned
  • Lord Rosebery: the Queen couldn’t call for her favourite, Salisbury, because the Liberals still had a majority in the Commons, so Gladstone was replaced by the Liberal Imperialist Archibald Philip Primrose, 5th Earl of Rosebery, who was Prime Minister from March 1894 to June 1895 when he called, and lost, a general election; Rosebery was naive and fell into Parliamentary traps Salisbury laid for him, undermining confidence in his government
  • Evolution: Salisbury was sympathetic to science and Roberts describes a major speech he gave at Oxford about Darwin’s theory of evolution which, however, basing itself on Lord Kelvin’s completely erroneous theory about the age of the earth, claimed there wasn’t enough time for Darwin’s theory to have taken place; all completely wrong, as Kelvin’s theories were utterly wrong: Kelvin thought the sun about 20 million years old, whereas we now know it is about 4.5 billion years old, and that the earliest life on earth probably developed about 3.5 billion years ago
  • Dissolution: The Spectator called Lord Rosebery ‘the butterfly Premier’ and he couldn’t heal the widening divide between his form of Liberal Imperialism, aggressive abroad, radical at home, with the Liberal core; his cabinet split on all its policies, namely the annexation of Uganda, the increased navy budget and appointing Lord Kimberley foreign minister, and Home Rule and the introduction of a graduated death duty at home
  • 21 June 1895 Rosebery lost a minor vote, when his war minister was censured for a supposed lack of cordite for the army, and chose to take the opportunity to resign; the Queen called for Salisbury who agreed to take office and prepare a general election for July
  • Chamberlain: though he disagreed with some of his Radical policies Salisbury came to respect Chamberlain for his forthright character and that, not having gone to public school or university, he didn’t give himself airs

Chapter 36: Problems with Non-Alignment (June to December 1895)

  • A landslide: oddly, to us, Salisbury formed his government before holding the election; it was a landslide, the Tories taking 340 seats, their allies the Liberal Unionists 71, with the Liberals on 177, and 82 Irish Nationalists; the cabinet numbered 19, compared to 1886’s 15 (today it is 22)
  • The Hamidian massacres: series of atrocities carried out by Ottoman forces and Kurdish irregulars against Armenians in the Ottoman Empire between 1894 and 1896, named after the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II, up to 100,000 died; Salisbury wanted to send the fleet to the Dardanelles but was over-ruled by his cabinet and the reluctant Royal Navy, infuriating him, and then he was castigated in the press and by the opposition for being weak

I was particularly interested in the fervid debate about this because lots of well-meaning liberals and churchmen insisted that ‘something must be done’, just as they do nowadays when there are atrocities in the Arab/Muslim world, but Salisbury’s objections remind me of the modern debate I’ve followed in the pages of Michael Ignatieff, Frank Ledwidge and so on, which is, there’s only so much we can do? Exasperated, Salisbury asked one correspondent would he have us invade Turkey and take on the Sultan’s army of 200,000? And then other European powers come in on Turkey’s side thus triggering a European war? No.

  • The signing of a Franco-Russian Entente led to the setting up of a Joint Naval and Military Defence Committee
  • Walmer Castle: his other nominees crying off because of the cost, Salisbury ended up appointing himself Warden of the Cinque Ports
  • Venezuela: the problem – America takes a very tough line about a border dispute between Venezuela and British colony, British Guiana, with President Cleveland seeking re-election, populists and the yellow press calling for war; Salisbury loftily ignores the fuss

Chapter 37: ‘Splendid Isolation’ (December 1895 to January 1896)

  • The Jameson Raid: the foolishness and failure is dealt with in my review of The Boer War by Thomas Packenham
  • The Kruger telegram: the Kaiser congratulated the Boer president, Paul Kruger, for snuffing out the Jameson Raid before it got started; the British press went mad with anti-German hysteria; rumour had it Germany was sending marines to help the Boers; Britain responded by sending battleships; it knocked British trust in German good faith
  • The poet laureate: Tennyson died in 1892. In 1895 Salisbury appointed his sometime all, the small poet and pamphleteer Alfred Austen to the job; Roberts thinks was a joke at the expense of the literary establishment
  • ‘Splendid isolation’: Roberts is at pains to show that Salisbury was never a splendid isolationist, a phrase coined by a Canadian politician and which he rejected; on the contrary he had signed various treaties and deals which allied us with various European powers, but his belief was that the country should act independently of treaties, in response to ever-changing events
  • Venezuela: the solution – the Americans continued very belligerent and Canada made plans to repel an American attack and Salisbury asked the war office to make plans to send Canada help, but after months of bombast an international tribunal resolved the Venezuela question

Chapter 38: Great Power Politics (February 1896 to May 1897)

  • The Jameson aftermath: i.e. the raiders were handed back over to the British authorities who brought them back to Britain for trial, as well as setting up a Royal Commission which, as usual, exonerated the senior political figures (most notably Chamberlain who almost certainly encouraged the raid) while sending to prison some small fry
  • The march on Dongola: on 1 March 1896 the army of the Emperor Menelik II of Ethiopia defeated the Italian army of Eritrea at Adowa. This raised fears that he might incurse into Sudan and so threaten southern Egypt. This was the pretext Salisbury needed to send an army south into Sudan to retake it from the Dervishes also known as the Mahdi Army, who had held it ever since the killing of Gordon at Khartoum in 1885
  • September 1896: The Balmoral Conversations: against the backdrop of another pogrom against Armenians, with Tsar Nicholas II about Turkey in which Salisbury raised his hobby horse that the Powers partition the Ottoman Empire while the Tsar said his country wanted control of the Dardanelles
  • The ‘wrong horse’ speech: Salisbury’s speech to the House of Lords on 19 January 1897 announcing an end to support for Turkey and its bloody Sultan, saying British policy since Lord Palmerston (the 1850s) and the Crimean War (1853 to 1856) had been mistaken; ‘we put all our money the wrong horse’ (p.646); British Near Eastern policy had shifted from Turkey to Egypt (p.703); a major foreign policy rethink; into the vacuum left by Britain’s rescinded support stepped Germany, as described in The Berlin-Baghdad Express: The Ottoman Empire and Germany’s Bid for World Power, 1898 to 1918 by Sean McMeekin
  • Crisis on Crete: Christian Greeks outnumbered Muslim Turks 7 to 1 and wanted to be united with Greece; Salisbury thought it ridiculous that the territory or policy of a modern nation ought to be based on its literary history; he blockaded Crete ports to try and enforce peace but representatives of Greek Prince George landed and acclaimed him leader of liberated Crete at which point both Greece and Turkey started preparing for a major land war. Salisbury cajoled the cabinet into blockading Greece but war broke out in April 1897 with Turkey quickly invading northern Greece who promptly begged the Powers to intervene for peace: ‘The Greeks are a contemptible race’
  • Gerald Balfour: Salisbury appointed another nephew, Gerald Balfour, Chief Secretary for Ireland, and he promptly brought out an Irish Land Bill which Salisbury thought contemptible and worked to defeat in the Lords; then the idea of a permanent royal residence in Ireland, like Sandringham, except none of the royal family approved; then the 1898 Irish Local Government Bill
  • The Transvaal: the economic and political build-up to the Boer War, namely that British experts predicted that the Transvaal’s mineral wealth would soon make it the pre-eminent power in South Africa to which the Cape Colony would defer; Salisbury appointed Lord Milner as Governor of the Cape Colony and High Commissioner for Southern Africa; Salisbury himself wanted to avoid a conflict with the Boers, but in his first official meeting with British officials in SA, Milner made it clear he was determined to engineer one

Chapter 39: Apogee of Empire (June 1897)

  • The Diamond Jubilee: detailed description
  • Jingoism: Salisbury was against extreme patriotism and sabre rattling in speeches and articles; in practice he believed all international affairs derived from physical force but a permanent aggressive imperialist stance hemmed in a foreign policy which he believed had to remain agile and adaptive; scornful of the two Jingo pipe-dreams of 1) a Cape to Cairo railway entirely through British territory, 2) an Imperial Federation behind protective tariffs
  • The three high points of Jingoism were the Diamond Jubilee, Mafeking Night and the Khaki Election (p.835)
  • Honours: Roberts gives a sustained consideration of Salisbury’s attitude to, and record of, giving ‘honours’ (see section below)
  • Bishop-making: as with the honours, an assessment of his policy of bishop making which was pragmatic i.e. he tried to make equal appointments from the Low, Broad and High church traditions in order to keep the Church of England together, something he believed vital for the nation
  • The Munshi: Victoria became irrationally attached to an Indian Muslim named Abdul Karim, aka the Munshi, meaning ‘teacher’, who came to represent all her Indian subjects to her; unfortunately, pretty much the entire Royal household hated him and Salisbury was called in on several occasions to calm arguments

(It’s worth noting Queen Victoria’s striking lack of racism, the reverse, her active wish to promote and encourage subjects of all races from across the empire. Thus she repeatedly demanded that the army in South Africa be supplemented by Sikhs, Gurkhas and Zulus, only to be met by obstructiveness from the War Office, Cabinet and Salisbury himself. Their arguments were 1) distributing arms to coloured subjects set a bad precedent and 2) in a tight spot, English squaddies might refuse to take orders from a person of colour; p.756.)

Chapter 40: Choosing his ground (July 1897 to September 1898)

  • Imperial Federation: pipe-dream Salisbury pooh-poohed; thought Britain stood to lose out economically and, if every citizen in the Federation got a vote, politically, too
  • A French convention:
  • Port Arthur: the Russians seized Port Arthur on the coast of China forcing British ships to vacate the area, signalling a ramping up of the scramble for China; newspapers, politicians and even his own cabinet saw this as a humiliation and claimed Salisbury’s policy of splendid isolation had failed, but Salisbury’s mild response was because he saw trouble brewing with France
  • Anglo-German relations: when Salisbury was off sick his Secretary for the Colonies, Chamberlain, suggested to the German ambassador that Britain and Germany sign a non-aggression pact
  • 4 May 1898 the ‘dying nations’ speech: to a packed audience of the Primrose League at the Royal Albert Hall describing a Darwinian vision of nation states, that weak states become weaker whilst strong states become stronger; “The nations of the earth are divided into the sheep and the wolves – the fat and defenceless against the hungry and strong”; as a comment on the rise and fall of nations it was banal enough; its real purpose was to justify Realpolitik
  • The death of Gladstone: Salisbury was one of the coffin bearers and was genuinely upset which is strange given his deep-seated loathing of Gladstone as a traitor to his class, not least in Ireland (p.693)
  • Curzon as Viceroy: January 1899, Salisbury appointed George Nathaniel Curzon, aged just 40, Viceroy of India; he was to be an inspired choice (p.694)
  • Secret Convention with Germany (‘the Delagoa Bay agreement’, p.719) agreeing no other Power allowed to intervene in Angola or Mozambique the two huge colonies of the weak Power, Portugal, and how the 2 colonies would be divided if Portugal collapsed
  • 2 September 1898 The Battle of Omdurman: part of General Kitchener’s campaign to retake Sudan from the Mahdist Islamic State, revenge for the death of Gordon, a disciplined Anglo-Egyptian force let 50,000 or so Mahdists charge their lines and massacred them with machine guns; around 12,000 Muslim warriors were killed, 13,000 wounded and 5,000 taken prisoner while Kitchener’s force lost 47 men killed and 382 wounded (p.697); journalists present with the British force, and young Winston Churchill in his account of it, were critical of Kitchener for allowing the wounded Sudanese to be murdered; Kitchener was rewarded by being made Baron Kitchener of Khartoum
  • 1898: Winston Churchill published his first book, aged 24

Chapter 41: The Fashoda Crisis (September to November 1898)

  • The Fashoda Crisis was the biggest international crisis since 1878. The intrepid Captain Marchand of the French army marched across the Sahara and planted the French flag at the abandoned mud-brick fort on the banks of the White Nile named Fashoda. A week later General Kitchener, fresh from the victory of Omdurman, arrived with his army and insisted that Fashoda, like all of the Sudan, belonged to Britain. There was a real risk Britain and France would go to war. Salisbury wasn’t fussed about places in mosquito-ridden West Africa (about which we signed Conventions with France) but was insistent that British control of the Nile valley was a sacrosanct principle of British foreign policy
  • France was being disputatious over colonies around the world including Siam (Thailand), Tunis, Madagascar, Niger; ‘They [the French] are so unreasonable and have so much incurable hatred of England’ (p.480)
  • It’s worth remembering how rubbish France was; a century of revolutions, not least the 1871 Commune, had left its society riven by religious and class hatred which had been revived by the bitter Dreyfus Affair – Émile Zola published his famous letter ‘J’Accuse…!’ on 13 January 1898 – and France was on her seventh government since 1893; that’s why its governments and ruling class were so touchy about Britain’s apparently effortless superiority; that’s why populist press and politicians whipped up patriotic feeling against Britain – to try to paper over the large cracks in French society
  • The Marchand expedition: the impressive achievement of Captain Marchand who led 20 French officers and NCOs and 130 French Senegalese over 2,000 miles on a 24-month trek on foot and by boat from Loango at the mouth of the Congo to the Nile
  • When Kitchener met up with Marchand at Fashoda the two men raised their respective flags, denied each other’s right to occupy it, then settled down into a cordial friendship while they let the politicians back in Europe sort things out
  • Parisian politics: the British ambassador worried that war fever was running so high there might be a military coup in Paris led by generals who would use a war with Britain to smother the ongoing Dreyfus scandal; while her populist press ranted for war, ministers were uneasily aware of Germany’s ongoing animosity, and when the Tsar explicitly proclaimed the Franco-Russian entente didn’t apply outside Europe France’s position got steadily weaker; the French government looked like collapsing (again)
  • Triumph: realising they couldn’t win, the French backed down, covering their pusillanimity with vaunting rhetoric; Marchand was ordered to make his way to the Red Sea through Abyssinia (he didn’t have enough provisions to return the way he’d come and returning down the Nile under British supervision would have been humiliated)
  • In February 1899 a Convention was signed with a new French ambassador laying out clear demarcation between the zone of French influence in west Africa and the Maghreb, giving Britain exclusive influence over Egypt and Sudan

Chapter 42: The Outbreak of the Boer War (December 1898 to October 1899)

  • grossly overweight Salisbury had a tricycle with raised handlebars made for him and cycle paths laid out in the grounds of Hatfield House
  • like many grandees back in London, Salisbury had a low opinion of the Boers who he had met on his travels 30 years earlier and thought rough, ignorant slave drivers of the native Africans;

Background: Britain had annexed the Cape Colony, the band of territory right at the bottom of Africa, with the results that the Boer population, descendants of the original Dutch settlers, undertook their ‘Great Trek’ into the interior and set up what developed into two states, the Orange Free State and, to its north, the much larger Transvaal, so called because it was on the other side of the River Vaal. Their descendants called themselves the voortrekkers.

In the 1880s diamonds and gold were discovered which promised to make the Boer government rich. In 1882 the Boers elected as president Paul Kruger, a hard-core, unrepentant Boer nationalist.

The issue was that tens of thousands of migrants had moved into the Transvaal, to work in the ever-growing mines. The Boers referred to them as ‘Uitlanders’ and subjected them to an array of discriminatory laws: they were heavily taxed but in return had worse schools, poor accommodation, were subject to high prices, police brutality, arbitrary arrest, biased legal decisions, censorship of the press and so on. Above all, although they paid taxes, they were forbidden from voting. In Roberts’ opinion the Boers ran little less than ‘a tight, tough, quasi police state’ (p.717). Most of these Uitlanders were ‘freeborn’ Britons so that when the British Uitlanders petitioned the Queen to intervene on their behalf, the war party could claim that lack of help undermined the prestige and authority of Britons throughout her empire.

So British men of the war party, such as Cecil Rhodes, Joe Chamberlain and Lord Milner, kept up a steady barrage of propaganda back to their masters in London, claiming the Boers subjected their black workers to slave-like tyranny, were backward and uneducated, were liable to declare war on friendly black tribes, as well as all the injustices meted out to the Uitlanders.

The fundamental argument was that the ongoing existence of two troublesome, unjust, unpredictable colonies disturbed Britain’s settled rule in South Africa and would only get worse. The war party argued that conflict was inevitable, and so helped to create the expectation, in Parliament and the press, for war. Milner sent Salisbury a note comparing the British workers were treated like ‘helots’ (p.721), Salisbury said they were treated like serfs.

The Boer view was it was their country which they had founded by the sweat of their brows in the face of native reprisals, and that they had their own, highly puritanical ultra-protestant belief and culture, all of which were being swamped by tens of thousands of incomers, and also by the booming immigrant population in the Cape. In other words, they felt their entire identity and heritage was being threatened (p.726).

  • Sir Alfred Milner: High Commissioner of the Cape Colony, was instructed to negotiate better rights for Britons at the so-called Bloemfontein Conference, but found Kruger unmoveable and called him ‘a frock-coated neanderthal’ (p.722)
  • Appeasing Germany: Britain and Germany had been haggling about possession of the islands of Samoa; Salisbury didn’t care tuppence about Samoa so happily gave them all to Germany with a view to mollifying the ever-aggrieved Kaiser
  • Lady Salisbury’s illness: she suffered a stroke and showed signs of dementia, partly distracting Salisbury from his duties; you wonder whether Roberts inserts this as an extenuating factor, softening Salisbury’s responsibility for the war
  • Exasperation with the Transvaal: Kruger offers to give Uitlanders the vote once they had been resident for 7 years, plus guaranteed seats in the small Transvaal parliament; some in the cabinet thought the crisis was over
  • (The Aliens Bill: Roberts points out that at the same time as Salisbury et al were supporting unlimited emigration to the Cape and were compelling it on the Boers, his cabinet passed an Aliens Bill designed to severely restrict immigration into Britain; this was to address the flood of Jewish immigrants who were fleeing antisemitic pogroms in Poland and Russia)
  • Both sides arm: British intelligence reported that both the Transvaal and Orange Free State were buying arms in Europe and importing it via Delagoa Bay, the major port right at the bottom of Mozambique, only 30 or so miles from the border with Transvaal (p.724); for their part the British government moved troops into Natal
  • The Smuts Proposals: Transvaal’s Attorney General Jan Smuts contacts the ambassador to make a series of proposals which represent significant concessions around offering Uitlanders the vote and representation in parliament, but premised on the Transvaal remaining independent and outside British suzerainty
  • The Boer Ultimatum: the British government ramped the pressure up on the Boers, with a series of demands which the Boers, initially, acceded to; so it was a surprise when it was the Boers who issued the set of demands or ultimatum which finally triggered the conflict, setting out a list of demands which must be met by 5pm on Wednesday 11 October

Chapter 43: ‘The Possibilities of Defeat’ (October 1899 to May 1900)

I was wrong about Roberts mentioning Lady Salisbury’s illness in a bid to exonerate his hero because he does the opposite; he heavily blames Salisbury for the Boer War. He cites AJP Taylor who apparently said that Milner dragged Chamberlain who dragged Salisbury into the conflict – but in order to flatly contradict him (Taylor).

No, Salisbury had masterminded British foreign policy for over a decade, was a master of far-seeing strategy; he personally approved every dispatch sent to the Boers, and Roberts cites memos and messages between the key ministers which show Salisbury approving the escalation of Britain’s demands, approving the sending of troops to Natal, and manipulating the presentation of the issues so as to ensure the casus belli (cause of war) was one which would rouse and unite the widest number of the population, or politicians and the press (p.736).

Salisbury should have known better. He should have accepted Kruger’s very fair offers to address the issue of the Uitlanders and worked to extend British suzerainty slowly, by economic means maybe. He should have thought of a clever solution.

Instead he let himself and the British government be painted into a corner where the only two options were fight or have British prestige around the world undermined (p.734). This was an epic failure of statecraft. It was Salisbury’s war and, although he proved remarkably phlegmatic about its initial reverses (so-called ‘Black Week’, Sunday 10 December to Sunday 17 December, when the British Army suffered three devastating defeats) its length, bitterness, cost, the way it divided the nation, the enmity it raised in the other Powers, especially Germany, and the sheer cost of death and misery, all are down to Salisbury.

As Britain’s powerful and long-serving Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary, Salisbury must bear overall responsibility for the situation. (p.732)

Moreover, it was entirely his responsibility that the War Office and the British Army were so poorly prepared to fight such a war (p.756).

  • The death of Lady Salisbury: Salisbury was devastated and never the same again
  • ‘Black week’: Sunday 10 December to Sunday 17 December (p.749): the British army began its war the same way it had begun every one since Waterloo, led by useless generals to a series of disastrous defeats
  • A peace offer: the presidents of the two Boer republics (the Transvaal and the Orange Free State) offered peace, so long as they retained sovereignty, which Salisbury contemptuously refused, claiming they had started the war
  • In the first weeks of the war the Boers surrounded and besieged three major towns, Ladysmith, Kimberley and Mafeking. The military turning point probably came when Ladysmith was relieved on 28 February 1900 but the psychological breakthrough came with the relief of Mafeking on 17 May 1900 after 217 days (p.761) though not before 478 people had died of starvation

Chapter 44: Resolution (May to October 1900)

  • Curzon: Curzon was an outstanding Viceroy in India but was obsessed with the idea that Russia was extending its influence into Persia and that we must fight back; Salisbury put up with Curzon’s criticisms but complained that he spoke as if Salisbury had an army of 500,000 at his back (as the Czar did) when a) there weren’t that many British troops in the whole world and b) the most active forces were tied up in South Africa
  • The Boxer Rebellion: see my review of The Boxer Rebellion and the Great Game in China by David J. Silbey (2012)
  • On 3 September General Frederick Roberts formally annexed the Transvaal
  • Social policy: Liberal Unionist Joe Chamberlain bombarded Salisbury with proposals for social reform bills almost all of which Salisbury managed to reject; they did manage:
    • 1897 Workmen’s Compensation Act
    • 1899 Small Dwellings Acquisition Act
  • The ‘Khaki’ election: held between 26 September and 24 October 1900, when popular opinion believed the Boer War was won, the Boer president Kruger had fled to Holland and all their regular forces had surrendered; result: the Conservative and Liberal Unionist Party 402, Liberal Party 183
  • The Unionist alliance: a short review of the effectiveness of Salisbury’s coalition of Conservatives with Liberal Unionists; Chamberlain said he was treated with more respect as a Liberal Unionist in a Conservative cabinet than he had been as a Radical in Gladstone’s Liberal cabinet

Chapter 45: Reconstruction (October 1900 to January 1901)

The ‘Hotel Cecil’: Salisbury handed out so many official positions to members of his extended family that he prompted widespread accusations of nepotism and croneyism (pages 789 to 790), something he himself acknowledged (p.825). Conservative MP Sir George C. T. Bartley wrote to Salisbury in 1898 complaining that in the Tory Party:

‘all honours, emoluments and places are reserved for the friends and relations of the favoured few’ (p.788)

It says it all that, when he finally resigned as Prime Minister, on 11 July 1902, he was succeeded by his nephew, Arthur Balfour.

The death of Queen Victoria: they had become very close, and even if they disagreed, the Queen was always a fixed point of reference to navigate by, so Salisbury took her sudden death (on 22 January 1901) very hard. Late in her life her eyesight was failing and notes to her had to be written in letters one inch high, often only ten words to a page. In return she sent replies written in a handwriting which had become so indecipherable that special experts were called on to explicate it (p.794).

What this kind of anecdote displays is not so much something about Victoria, but about Roberts and the kind of book he wants to write, namely popular, unacademic, accessible, strewn with humorous anecdotes and so, very readable.

Chapter 46: ‘Methods of Barbarism’ (January to December 1901)

  • King Edward VII: Salisbury had had some professional encounters with the new king, when they sat on committees, but he generally ignored his suggestions and limited what government papers he saw; but to his own surprise they quickly formed an effective working relationship
  • The Boer War, the second phase: the main fighting ended but the Boers upset everyone by mounting a scattered guerrilla war; when you consider that they were fighting for the land they had settled and called their own, for land they and their forefathers had worked for generations, it’s entirely understandable
  • Anglo-German relations: after victory in the Khaki election of 1900, Salisbury reshuffled his cabinet but the biggest change was him giving into cabinet pressure and relinquishing the dual role he had had of Prime Minister and Foreign Secretary; he was replaced by Lord Lansdowne, a Liberal Unionist, who had had a poor reputation at the War Office (but then, everyone did); Lansdowne’s arrival marked a break with what had come to be regarded, rightly or wrongly, as Salisbury’s policy of ‘Splendid Isolation’ i.e. refusing to commit to alliances with any of the major European Powers (France, Germany, Austria, Russia)
  • The concentration camps: Roberts seeks to set the record straight: the concentration camp was not invented by the British but by the Spanish in the war against America 2 years earlier; the camps came about because thousands of Boer women and children, left undefended when their men went off to join commando unit, were at the mercy of the Blacks and/or unable to fend for themselves; plus the deliberate British policy of deliberately burning homesteads anywhere near where a commando attack took place rendered them homeless; but the British were completely unprepared for the scale of the immigration and coralling all underfed people in barbed wire encampments quickly led to the spread of epidemic disease; at their peak the numerous camps held some 118,000 white and 43,000 coloured inmates; the Royal Army Medical Corps had planned to serve 40,000 soldiers – in the event they had to cater to 200,000 soldiers and over 200,000 refugees; some 20,000 women and children died (4,000 adults, 16,000 women); these were obviously not extermination camps like the Nazi ones, but British incompetence led to a holocaust of innocents which is held against us to this day; Roberts lists all the possible extenuating circumstances (a handy list) but is robust regarding his hero: Salisbury ‘must bear the ultimate responsibility for what happened’ (p.806) campaigner Emma Hobhouse blamed it on ‘crass male ignorance’ i.e of the hygiene and accommodation required by women and children

It’s worth pointing out that even in Roberts’s broadly sympathetic account, Salisbury, as I understand it, habituates himself to lying about the causes of the war; its origins were all about redressing the injustices suffered by the Uitlanders; once the fighting started, some Boer units mounted incursions over the border into the Cape Colony; and this allowed Salisbury to completely change his rhetoric and claim that the British were acting in self defence against a dastardly invasion. He took to repeating this in public speeches, in private correspondence and diplomatic replies to the Powers, for example in a note to the new king, advising him how to reply to a personal communication from Tsar Nicholas:

‘The war was begun and elaborately prepared for many previous years by the Boers and was unprovoked by any single act of England’ (p.808)

Obviously, he is presenting the strongest, most unambiguous case possible to one of the great Powers, and during a time of war but it was a line he peddled in a variety of contexts, including private correspondence. Here he is writing to his son:

‘This unhappy war has lasted much longer than we expected…but I have no doubt that it was forced upon us and that we had no choice in regard to it.’ (p.810)

This strikes me as being a very Big Lie. Moreover, if Salisbury and his ilk based their claim to rule the country on the idea that they represented a disinterested values of honour and legality, then bare-faced lies and distortions like this undermined that claim, and showed them up to be just another special interest group protecting their own interests (and grotesque mistakes).

The cost of the Boer War

Salisbury spent a lifetime castigating the Liberals for the costs of their policies and claimed to run a fiscally responsible administration. Roberts shows how the Boer War blew that claim out of the water. It ended up costing some £223 million, led to increases in income and other taxes, and a vast increase in government borrowing. Salisbury left his successor (Balfour) a fiscal disaster.

  • The Taff Vale judgement: on 22 July 1901 the House of Lords handed down a judgement that a trade union could be sued (by employers who suffered from a strike). Superficially a victory for the forces of Reaction, this decision single-handedly galvanised working class movements and activists to realise they needed organised representation in Parliament and led to the setting up of the Labour Party.

Chapter 47: A Weary Victory (January 1902 to August 1903)

  • The Anglo-Japanese alliance: 30 January 1902 Britain departed the splendid isolation she had enjoyed for decades by making a defensive pact with Japan to last 5 years; this was to counter relentless Russian expansion into decaying China and the worry that the Russian and French fleets combined outnumbered the British one and so could, potentially, disrupt Britain’s Pacific trade
  • Coronation honours: Salisbury strongly opposed some of the names the new King Edward put forward for his coronation honours, particularly Thomas Lipton who he thought entirely unworthy of entering the House of Lords
  • The Education Bill: English education policy was stymied because the core of the system was so-called Voluntary schools which were run by the Church of England and taught Anglican religion; many of these schools were poorly funded and so Salisbury wanted to give them government support; however, ratepayers from other religions, some Catholic but many non-conformists, refused to pay rates if they were going to support their children being taught a different religion; the solution was, obviously, to increase the provision of non-denominational state schools but Salisbury blocked this because a) of his deep attachment to defending the Church of England and b) because of his scepticism about teaching the children of the working classes, anyway; Roberts digs up some scandalous comments from his journalism period, in which Salisbury says what’s the point of educating working class kids if they’re just going to return to the plough or the factory; this was not only a scandalously snobbish, privileged point of view, but economically stupid; while Britain wasted a huge amount of political time and money fussing about these issues, the Germans and Americans were instituting practical educational systems appropriate to the needs of a modern industrial economy i.e. technical and engineering apprenticeships and colleges; Salisbury embodied the kind of ‘principled’ and ‘honourable’ Reaction which condemned Britain to slow economic decline
  • Peace at Vereeniging: 31 May, after prolonged negotiations, a peace was signed ending the Boer War; Milner had wanted to fight on until every Boer combatant was killed but head of the army Kitchener thought enough had been done, a difference of opinion reflected in fierce arguments in the cabinet; the treaty terms were surprisingly lenient, amnestying most Boer fighters and letting them return to their farms (the ones that hadn’t been burned down) and families (the ones who hadn’t died in the British camps)
  • Retirement: Salisbury had said he would go when the war ended; with his wife dead and Queen Victoria dead and the war over, he began to feel his age and infirmities, nodding off in cabinet meetings;

‘I thought I had much better resign and get out of the way; especially as, since the death of the last Queen, politics have lost their zest for me.’ (p.829)

  • Salisbury prepared the way for his retirement with his cabinet colleagues; he rejected the plan to have his nephew, Balfour, replace him on the same day as smacking too much nepotism; and went to see the King to hand over the seals of office on 11 July 1902; the King was prepared for the visit and handed him the Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order; within 24 hours his nephew was appointed Prime Minister, to much mocking from the Liberal and Irish Nationalist benches; allegedly, this is the origin of the phrase ‘Bob’s your uncle’, though that is disputed; Balfour found it difficult to fill his uncle’s giant shoes, the coalition began losing by-elections, and was eventually massacred in the landslide Liberal victory at the 1906 election
  • Death: he went steadily downhill after retiring, suffering a series of ailments (ulcers, kidney problems) then a heart attack which led to the final decline and he died on 22 August 1903

The legacy

What an enormous biography this is, overflowing with facts and insights, completely achieving its goal of persuading the reader that Salisbury was one of the titans of the Victorian age. Roberts makes a sustained case for his hero but the more he defends him, the more negative the final impression one has, of a big reactionary buffalo who set his face against all change in any aspect of British society, and solidly, intransigently in defence of his class, the landed aristocracy, its wealth, privileges and power.

The nature of the Conservative Party

‘Hostility to Radicalism, incessant, implacable hostility, is the essential definition of conservatism.’

‘The use of Conservatism is to delay changes till they become harmless.’ (writing to Lady Raleigh after the 1892 election defeat; p.841)

Salisbury engaged in a lifelong struggle against what he saw as the forces of atheism and political progressivism, becoming a master of patient obstructionism. (p.841)

The Conservative Party opposed the extension of the franchise, votes for women, reform of the voting system, home rule let alone independence for Ireland or any of the other colonies, opposed trade unions and workers’ rights, opposed universal education, opposed old age pensions, opposed the welfare state, opposed the National Health System, opposed the abolition of the death penalty, equal rights for women, gay liberation, opposed the expansion of universities and every new artistic movement for the past 200 years. In other words, the Conservative Party opposed every political measure and social achievement which most modern people would describe the hallmarks of a civilised society. They defended the privileges of the aristocracy and the bigoted Church of England, hanging, fox hunting, the brutal administration of Britain’s colonies, and corrupt nepotism. In international affairs they gave us the Boer War, Munich and the Suez Crisis. In every argument, on every issue, they have been the enemy of enlightenment, peace and civilisation.

And what kind of people are attracted to this small-minded, snobbish, xenophobic party of reaction? Admittedly he was writing in a private letter to the Radical Liberal Unionist Joe Chamberlain, but in 1900 Salisbury described the Conservative Party as:

‘a party shackled by tradition; all the cautious people, all the timid, all the unimaginative, belong to it. It stumbles slowly and painfully from precedent to precedent with its eyes fixed on the ground.’ (p.800)

Roberts reports this all quite candidly. It’s for the reader to decide how much this description still applies to the Conservative Party of today.

No policies

To explain, or put the case for the defence, Salisbury’s was a strong disbeliever in theories, manifestos and policies. He distrusted all such claptrap. He despised continental philosophy and was proud of being a philistine in the arts. 1) He thought general theories (such as everything the Liberals espoused) led to unintended consequences, and tended to overthrow the established practices he was so attached to (see the French Revolution, proclaiming brotherhood and ending in tyranny). And 2) he thought a politician needed to be free of pre-commitments in order to react to each issue or crisis as it arose, with the maximum of flexibility, without having his hands tied by promises made to get elected years previously. Epitome of pragmatism.

‘I believe that freedom from the self-imposed trammels of particular theories is necessary if you want to deal with the world as it is.’ (p.475)

He could barely be persuaded to issue any kind of manifesto or platform before the general elections he fought. He thought it sufficed to say the government of the country would be in safe, conservative hands.

Foreign policy

The case is stronger for Salisbury’s foreign policy. Here his dislike of prior commitments was (arguably) a virtue, as it led him to reject every suggestion by his cabinet colleagues to form alliances with this or that of the Powers (France, Germany, Austria or Russia). The central portion of the book makes it clear that this was important as it allowed Salisbury maximum freedom of manoeuvre in handling the many crises which kept coming up, especially in the decaying Ottoman Empire. In fact the major learning from the diplomacy of the 1880s and 90s was how close Europe repeatedly came to a general conflagration, and Roberts shows that Salisbury’s adept diplomacy often prevented that coming about.

Roberts calls the period from Salisbury’s becoming Foreign Secretary to his retirement the Pax Saliburiana. On the face of it the Boer War is a massive, disastrous stain on that claim but from Salisbury’s point of view the single most important thing about it was that none of the major Powers got involved. They complained but the crisis didn’t trigger a general European war.

Same with the Scramble for Africa. In most modern books this is viewed from a woke perspective as a scandal, a historic crime. But seen in context, the thing is not that Africa was arbitrarily carved up with no consultation of the people who lived there, but that none of the potential conflicts between the Powers led to actual war. At the back of his mind was fear of a vast European conflict and he was 100% successful in avoiding this. As Roberts pithily puts it, one of the most remarkable things about the First World War was not that it occurred, but that it didn’t break out earlier.

Everything changed as soon as he retired, and the Entente Cordiale of 1904, far from securing Britain’s security and the peace of Europe, was just the first of the web of alliances which was to plunge Europe into the catastrophic World War ten years later. Would the war have occurred if Britain had stuck to Salisbury’s policy of splendid isolation? Discuss.

Salisbury sayings

‘I was delighted to see you had run Wilfred Blunt in. The great heart of the people always chuckles when a gentleman gets into the clutches of the law.’ (p.448)

The Pope is ‘to be looked upon in the light of a big gun, to be kept in good order and turned the right way.’ (p.449)

‘Always tell the Queen everything.’ (p.515)

Salisbury cynicism

Salisbury was brutally honest about imperialism. He didn’t waste his time with fancy ideas of civilising and morality and whatnot. He really disliked colonial adventurers and chancers. He saw imperialism as an extension of the precarious balance of power between the ‘powers’ or main countries of Europe (Britain, France, Germany, Austria, Russia). Thus he was under no illusion that empire was anything other than the imposition of force to maintain Britain’s interests. Thus Egypt and Sudan had to be held in order to secure the Suez Canal as the conduit to India (p.519), whereas he frankly rubbished the fantasy the fantasy of Cecil Rhodes and the Jingoists of building a railway running from Cairo to the Cape without leaving British territory (p.534).

Thus Britain installed a new pliable ruler of Zanzibar who was installed:

as soon as British warships had bombarded the palace and ousted the pretender. (p.52)

Overthrowing the Ottoman Sultan for a more biddable alternative; overthrowing the king of Burma; overthrowing the Khedive of Egypt; overthrowing the Amir of Afghanistan; overthrowing the heir to the Zanzibar throne, and so it goes on, Britain bringing ‘civilisation’ to the rest of the world and then lecturing everyone about rights and duties and law and honour. No wonder the French despised the British establishment for its deep-dyed hypocrisy.

Imperialism

Poor Lord Curzon saw all his grand schemes for India and beyond (winning influence in Persia, building railways lines across the Middle East) stymied by Salisbury’s basic principle of not alienating Russia and then, when the Boer War drained Britain’s finances, by chronic lack of money. In one of his many letters to Curzon Salisbury gives a (maybe exaggerated) insight into imperial policy earlier in the century:

‘In the last generation we did much what we liked in the East by force or threats, by squadrons and tall talk. But we now have “allies” – French, German, Russian: and the day of free, individual, coercive action is almost passed by. For years to come, Eastern advance must depend largely on payment: and I fear that in this race England will seldom win.’ (p.809)

Salisbury was always gloomy about the present, but this suggests the interesting idea that the empire was created during a unique ‘window’ when force and bluster won huge territories but, by 1900, that era had ended. (Cf taking colonies by force, p.511)

Manipulating the legal system

One of the things that comes across powerfully is the way the ruling class of all flavours (Tory, Liberal, Liberal Unionist) blithely manipulated the legal system, throwing their weight behind prosecutions or releasing individuals early, as it suited them, for example, releasing Irish MP John Dillon early from prison because he was ill, to ensure he didn’t die behind bars and become a martyr (p.451). In the case of the Cleveland Street scandal, Roberts casually mentions that his hero ‘technically’ conspired to pervert the course of justice and committed misprision of a felony, but he did it in a good cause so that’s alright (p.546).

The rotten ‘honours’ system

And the way politicians treated the ‘honours’ system as a simple set of partisan rewards. There was absolutely nothing ‘honourable’ about them, as there isn’t to this day. ‘Honours’ were used to reward loyal service to the government or big financial donors or, frequently, to get rid of unwanted colleagues, ‘kicking them upstairs’ to the House of Lords. Talking of the Liberal Unionists, Robert remarks:

although they refused the rewards of office Salisbury ensured that they were liberally sprayed by the fountain of honours. (p.427)

Home Secretary Henry Matthews was considered to have performed badly during the Jack the Ripper crisis (3 April 1888 to 13 February 1891):

and in 1895 he was awarded a viscountcy as a consolation for not being asked to return to office. (p.507)

The Duke of Beaufort, an important Tory magnate:

corresponded with Salisbury over twenty-five years on the usual aristocratic subjects of cadging arch-deaconries for friends, baronetcies for neighbours and honours for the mayors of towns on his estate. (p.546)

The only reason the Lord Mayor was keen on the visit of Kaiser William was that he thought ‘he might cadge a baronetcy out of it’ (p.555). In 1890 some Tories planned to lure the Liberal Lord Bernard over to their party with the offer of an earldom (p.569). Salisbury himself turned down the Queen’s offer of a dukedom not once but twice, but allowed his son (already Lord Cranbrook) to be raised from a viscount to an earl (p.579).

When forming his 1895 cabinet Salisbury did not appoint Henry Holland, Lord Knutsford, and so gave him a ‘consolation’ viscountcy; Matthews was no reappointed but made Viscount Llandaff; Ellis Ashmead-Bartlett wasn’t given a job, but ‘picked up a consolation knighthood’ (p.602).

Thomas Lipton the tea magnate brown-nosed the queen by donating a huge £25,000 to the Princess of Wales’s project to give London’s poor a banquet at the Diamond Jubilee. Salisbury considered him ‘worthless’ (p.796) but he was a friend of the Prince of Wales and so ‘duly received his knighthood the next year’ (p.661). Basically, you can buy these ‘honours’ if you pay enough and put in enough brown-nosing.

Salisbury despised ‘the rage for distinctions’ but used it as cynically as any other prime minister (pages 668 to 673). In fact in the 6 months of his short caretaker government, he doled out no fewer than 13 peerages, 17 baronetcies, and 23 privy councillors. As Roberts says, not a bad haul for party hacks the party faithful (p.670).

The man more responsible than anybody else for the self-defeating fiasco of the Boer War, Lord Milner, was, of course, given a barony as reward (p.800). Then, as now, colossal failure was rewarded by corrupt politicians.

(Roberts uses the verb ‘cadge’ so many times to describe pushy officials grubbing for honours that I looked it up. ‘Cadge’ is defined, formally, as: ‘to ask for or obtain something to which one is not strictly entitled’, less formally as: ‘to get (food, money, etc) by sponging or begging.’ So you can think of all those Victorians jostling and bothering the Prime Minister for honours as well-heeled beggars and pompous spongers.)

The endless queue of people in the worlds of politics, the church or local government relentlessly pestering him for awards and honours made Salisbury’s view of human nature even more cynical and jaded:

‘Directly a man has satisfied his most elementary material wants, the first aspiration of his amiable heart is for the privilege of being able to look down upon his neighbours.’ (p.668)

And yet he continued to hand them out like smarties, as politicians have continued to do right down to the present day.

Credit

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts was published in hardback by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1999. References are to the 2000 Phoenix paperback edition.

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Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts (1999) part 1

‘Matters are gloomy – I never saw them gloomier.’
(Lord Salisbury in March 1885, but could have been at any time in his long life, quoted on page 318 of ‘Salisbury: Victorian Titan’)

‘The first of duties is to be pachydermatous’ (p.286)

The great thing about Tory writers is they are completely untroubled by theories, ideas or doubts. Living in a dream world of privilege and entitlement, they radiate confidence and suavity. This explains why the writings of so many Conservatives are often so clear and attractive. It explains one of the reasons why Andrew Roberts is so attracted to the hero of this huge biography – for his adamantine certainty:

Unlike so many conservative leaders before and since, Salisbury was a true, dyed-in-the-wool Tory, entirely lacking in either middle-class guilt or ideological doubt. (p.365)

Andrew Roberts is an accomplished biographer and journalist with a very strong Tory bent. He comes from the same kind of privileged, public school background as his subject (though not, admittedly, from the same kind of grand and venerable old family Salisbury came from).

Roberts attended Cranleigh public school then went on to Cambridge, where he chaired the Cambridge University Conservative Association. He has had a distinguished career as a freelance i.e. non-academic, historian, writing 19 books, including four about Winston Churchill, along with countless papers and articles. He writes regularly for the Sunday Telegraph and The Spectator. He lives in Knightsbridge. In 2022 he was created Baron Roberts of Belgravia by that reputable politician Boris Johnson (who has also, coincidentally, authored a book about Winston Churchill; I think everyone should write a biography of Winston Churchill, at least once in their lives) and so took his seat in the House of Lords draped in much the same ermine cloak as Lord Salisbury wore. You get the picture.

This is a blockbuster of a political biography, enormously researched and enormous sized, weighing in at 852 pages. It covers all the political issues its subject was involved in, in extraordinary detail, giving daily, sometimes hour-by-hour descriptions of changing events and opinions. And yet it is written with such tremendous clarity and verve, with such an authoritative presentation of the facts in such a logical order, presented in such beautifully lucid prose and with such amiable good humour, that the pages fly by.

Lord Salisbury

This is a blockbuster biography of Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of Salisbury KG GCVO PC FRS DL (1830 to 1903), British statesman and Conservative politician who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom three times, for a total of over thirteen years. He was also Foreign Secretary before and during most of his tenure, holding these posts at arguably the high peak of the British Empire, 1886 to 1892 and then 1895 to 1902.

Salisbury’s forebears were the Cecils, advisers to Queen Elizabeth I, who built the imposing Hatfield House in Hertfordshire. The 7th Earl of Salisbury, politician and courtier, was raised to the marquessate, becoming the Marquis of Salisbury, by George III in 1789. (There are currently 34 marquises in Great Britain and Ireland.)

The first Marquis of Salisbury was a solid Tory, as was his son, the 2nd marquis, born in 1791, and so was his son, our hero, when he himself became the 3rd marquis on the death of his father in 1868. Cecil’s own father, the second marquis, had been a successful politician in his own right, Lord Privy Seal in 1852 and Lord President of the Council between 1858 and 1859.

Anyway, this is why Roberts refers to our hero by the family name of ‘Cecil’ in the first past of the book, up till the moment when his elder brother died, in 1865, at which point he inherited the title of Viscount Cranborne, from which point Roberts refers to him as ‘Cranborne’. When his father died in 1868 and he inherited the marquisate to become the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury, from that point onwards Roberts refers to him as ‘Salisbury’.

  • 1830 to 1865 – Cecil
  • 1865 to 1868 – Cranborne
  • 1868 to 1902 – Salisbury

In 1821 Cecil’s father had made a strategic marriage into the wealthy Gascoyne family, marrying Frances Mary Gascoyne, daughter of Bamber Gascoyne of Childwall Hall, Lancashire, which explains why the family name became Gascoyne-Cecil.

Lonely, sensitive and sad

Cecil’s siblings were either a lot older or younger than him, his father was away in London a lot, so he had a lonely childhood, wandering the echoing corridors of Hatfield House, his only company the house’s 40 or so servants and its vast library. He became a book addict.

Cecil was sent to Eton where he was so mercilessly bullied that he wrote his father a letter begging to be allowed home, and Roberts includes excerpts from his letters with quite harrowing accounts of being punched, kicked in the shins and spat on by older boys.

Cecil was lonely, hyper-sensitive, often depressed and his boyhood experiences made him an extreme pessimist about human nature, always ready to believe the worst, convinced that just beneath the civilised veneer lurked the savage, a belief he saw confirmed by, for example, the savage fighting of the American Civil War. ‘The optimistic view of politics assumes that there must be some remedy for every political ill,’ he wrote in 1872. But what if there isn’t?

High Tory conservatism

This extreme pessimism formed the basis of Cecil’s arch conservatism: we must hang on to what we’ve got because all change and innovation risks opening the door to democracy, which leads to nationalism, which leads to war, which leads to barbarism.

Cecil didn’t just go up to Oxford but to Oxford’s poshest college, Christ’s Church. It was the time of the Oxford Movement to restore quasi-Catholic decorations to Anglican belief and services. This attracted him because it gave the C of E a more solid foundation in the central tradition of Christianity. At Oxford he crystallised into an arch conservative in religion, domestic politics and foreign affairs. High Anglican, High Tory. He was vehemently against all forms of change or innovation, in any sphere of life; after all, he was doing just fine, so why change anything?

That said, Cecil was too sensitive to complete his degree at Oxford and so was awarded an honourable 4th. But then academic qualifications didn’t matter. Oxford had done its job of putting the finishing touches to another deep-dyed reactionary member of the English aristocracy.

Perhaps surprisingly, given that he was a lifelong bibliophile, Cecil was solidly, thumpingly philistine, in that dim conservative aristocratic way. He didn’t like contemporary fiction, he disliked theatre and ballet and had no time for art. He didn’t even like music very much. He was also notoriously scruffy and badly dressed all through his life, even on state occasions, even when meeting royalty.

All this is what makes Cecil so funny, a very amusing caricature of a huffing, disapproving old buffer. Given his family name of Gascoyne-Cecil, I wondered whether the extended family of doddery old aristocrats of the Ascoyne D’Ascoyne family in the Ealing comedy ‘Kind Hearts and Coronets’ were based on him.

In line with tradition, Cecil was packed off on the Grand Tour of the Mediterranean sights. But then, a little unusually, he continued on to the southern hemisphere and visited Britain’s main colonies there, South Africa, Australia, New Zealand.

Like upper-class Englishmen before and since, Cecil got on well with the ‘natives’, conceiving an admiration for the ‘Kaffirs’ in SA and the Maoris in New Zealand, liking to think that he detected in them a certain aristocratic independence and natural superiority, much like his own. Just as predictably, he complained about the ghastly, awful, vulgar middle class people he was forced to mix with on the long sea voyages between these places. He hated the Boers of South Africa who he thought crude slave-drivers, an antipathy which mattered 40 years later when he was to be Prime Minister during the Boer War.

In Australia and New Zealand he saw how white men behave when far removed from the steadying hand of England with its hierarchy of Queen, Lord lieutenants, justices of the peace etc, which was appallingly. In colonial towns like Melbourne and Sydney he saw drunkenness, prostitution, violence, and unfettered lust for gold and money. It confirmed him in his High Toryism: human nature is essentially barbarous and needs to be restrained, by order, disciple, hierarchy, an established church, monarchy etc.

Married and elected MP

Within ten weeks of returning he was ‘elected’ unopposed i.e. nominated, to the ‘pocket borough’ of Stamford (p.20).

Surprisingly, he married not for money or to make an aristocratic alliance, but for love of a middle-class woman, Georgina Alderson, much against his father’s wishes, in 1857. Cut out of the family inheritance, he turned to journalism to support his wife and growing family (he quickly had seven children) and wrote a prolific amount, mainly reviewing and articles in a wide range of publications, notably The Saturday Review. The period 1857 to 1866 (i.e. from age 27 to 36) were his Journalism Years.

The journalism years, 1857 to 1866

Roberts does a great job of showing the themes and attitudes which informed Cecil’s huge output, demonstrating his fierce satire and sarcastic opinions on everything from women’s fashion to foreign affairs (his policy was to ‘encourage supporters and anger opponents,’ p.261). He was a fierce opponent of nationalisms on the continent and prophetically warned against the rise of German nationalism; scratch the sophisticated veneer of a German professor, he wrote, and you find the same barbarism which transacted the Thirty Years War. The twentieth century was to prove him right.

Cecil was anti-slavery but supported the Confederacy against the Union in the American Civil War because of a deep dislike of Americans as a whole, and of Abraham Lincoln in particular. He thought Lincoln’s actions during the war, such as closing the free press, suspending habeas corpus and interning up to 14,000 political opponents, was exactly what you got if you let democracy run rampant i.e. tyranny.

He also thought that letting the Confederacy win would have the benefit of splitting the US into two countries, both a lot weaker and less of a rival for Britain. He also worried that if the Union won the war, it would attack Canada next.

Roberts’ descriptions of Cecil’s vehement and bigoted views makes for hilarious reading. Cecil had strong views about everything, which he expressed in often very funny satire and sarcasm. For example, he hated the Irish. While happily admitting that England had behaved terribly to the Irish for centuries and possibly even owed the Irish reparations, he still wrote waspish satire such as that Ireland ‘had given us foreign invasions, domestic rebellions, and in quieter times the manly sport of landlord shooting’ (p.53).

Having just read Paul Collier’s book, The Bottom Billion, which highlights the need for capital investment in the poorest African countries, it’s interesting to see that Cecil thought this was precisely the trouble with 19th century Ireland too, that investors didn’t want to invest because of the poor returns and, above all, the lack of security i.e. threat of violence. Interesting to think of 19th century Ireland as experiencing the same problems as 21st century Africa.

So regarding Ireland, in Salisbury’s view, if inward investment was the solution, then it was vital to establish security and the rule of law in order to attract investors; in which case, the continual agrarian unrest in Ireland had to be ruthlessly crushed.

Cecil approved of Ireland’s high migration rate and, indeed, looked forward to a time when every single Irish person had emigrated and the island could be populated with law-abiding Scots and Saxons: ‘the sooner they are gone the better’ (p.53). Mind you, he was just as scathing about the Orangemen and ‘the special fanaticism of Ulster’ which is, of course, still causing trouble one hundred and sixty years later.

Another major issue was electoral reform on which Cecil had a very blunt utilitarian view: if the working classes were given the vote they would elect radicals who would redistribute wealth via fierce taxation on the rich. So in defence of his class, and out of naked self interest, Cecil was against extending the franchise. It wasn’t that the ruling class was morally better than the plebs – he wrote plenty of satirical articles criticising the lifestyle of the Victorian rich – but that the leisure and education they enjoyed made them likely to be better, more disinterested legislators, who would act for the national good, compared to radicals who, if elected, would owe their position to pleasing i.e. bribing, the electorate, probably by levying unjust taxes on the wealthy i.e. Cecil and his class.

(Cf Richard Shannon’s excellent book, The Crisis of Imperialism 1865 to 1915, which also drums home how both conservatives and opponents believed that the 1832 settlement had produced a nice balance between the interests of the landed aristocracy, the new business-based bourgeoisie, and the skilled working class. It wasn’t extending the franchise to the lower middle classes and rest of the working class they objected to, as such (although some did), it was upsetting this delicate balance by giving too much prominence to one particular part of the population, which they thought risked toppling the country into either anarchy or demagoguery.)

Cecil also pointed to the baleful example of America where, once every four years, the entire administration ground to a halt while the political parties competed in offering bribes (tax cuts, favourable government policies) to the electorate.

Timeless issues

The appeal of reading about old politics like this is that as well as the obvious appeal of explaining how political leaders behaved as they did and so helping to explain how and why we got from there to here – it also takes you way out of your comfort zone and presents you with completely different ways of thinking about all sorts of political problems. In my opinion this is useful because closely observing how people in the past were prisoners of their age’s assumptions, their level of technological, economic and social development, sheds light on how we, in our own time, are just as much prisoners of our technological, economic and social conventions. It prompts the thought that our descendants will view us with the same curiosity, puzzlement and disgust as we view the Victorians.

And it’s always disconcerting to learn how few of those issues have really changed: electoral reform; trade reform; worrying about economic rivals; worrying about our poor standard of education; squabbles about the rights of trade unions and strikers; managing clean water and sewerage; difficulties with Ireland; small wars in Africa; instability in the Middle East; how to fend off the growing threat from Russia. Ring any bells? Plus ça change… (a phrase which was coined in 1849 and itself hasn’t changed).

Using the Saturday Review

By the time I got to the end of the book I realised a simple central fact about it which is that Roberts uses Salisbury’s early journalism as a central structuring device. The main structure of the book is straightforwardly chronological, he covers all the events in Salisbury’s career as they occur. But almost every single one of these topics or themes is introduced with a quote from a Saturday Review article which Salisbury wrote about it. Sometimes, 10, 20 or 30 years later, and now in power, his early opinion as evinced in a Review article shows the continuity of his thinking; sometimes, on the contrary, the quote from an article shows how either his thinking or the situation has changed.

But either way, Roberts uses the fact that he has clearly read and carefully annotated all of Salisbury’s early journalism as a kind of running commentary on his later career. Thus almost every incident of Cecil’s long political career is seen from two perspectives: that of the cocksure young journalist writing in humorous, general, cynical terms; and that of the older, experienced statesman, acting on experience. Two voices, two perspectives. Or a running commentary on the mature politician by the cocky young tyro.

Viscount Cranborne

In June 1865 (two months after the end of the American civil war) Cecil’s older brother died, aged just 42, and so Cecil inherited the courtesy title Viscount Cranborne, he and his wife becoming Lord and Lady Cranborne. From now on Roberts refers to him as ‘Cranborne’. From now on Cranborne enjoyed the income associated with the title and so his journalistic activities wound down, as Roberts demonstrates with a graphic statistic: before his brother’s death he wrote 589 articles for the Saturday Review; afterwards, he wrote just 19, mostly to whip up support for policies he was trying to promote.

Four months later Lord Palmerston died and the numerous competing forces in British politics which he had been holding in check were let loose. Lord Derby and Disraeli formed a joint leadership of the Conservative Party, Derby in the Lords, Dizzy in the Commons. Cranborne grew to dislike and distrust ‘Dizzy’. He was the lead figure in the attempt to water down if not cancel Disraeli’s reform bill of 1867.

In 1868 Cranborne’s father died, aged 77, and he inherited Hatfield House and all its incomes, becoming the 3rd Marquis of Salisbury and, of course, being forced out of the House of Commons and into the House of Lords.

Cecil was a surprisingly ramshackle father who let his kids run wild. They all remember a boisterous sociable happy childhood, the exact opposite of his. Lady Salisbury grew into a formidable hostess and manager of the Hatfield Estate, which employed well over 100 staff. Parliamentary colleagues nicknamed him ‘Buffalo’ because he was big (well over 6 foot), solemn and obstinate. In 1870 he built a big ugly red-brick holiday home near Dieppe on the Channel coast of France, naming it Chalet Cecil.

Victorian Prime Ministers

Lord Derby – February 1858 to June 1859 (Tory)
Lord Palmerston – June 1859 to October 1865 (Whig)
Lord John Russell – October 1865 to June 1866 (Whig)
Lord Derby – June 1866 to February 1868 (Tory)
Benjamin Disraeli – February 1868 to December 1868 (Tory)
William Gladstone – December 1868 to February 1874 (Liberal)
Benjamin Disraeli – February 1874 to April 1880 (Tory)
William Gladstone – April 1880 to June 1885 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – June 1885 to January 1886 (Conservative)
William Gladstone – February 1886 to July 1886 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – July 1886 to August 1892 (Conservative)
William Gladstone – August 1892 to March 1894 (Liberal)
Lord Rosebery – March 1894 to June 1895 (Liberal)
Lord Salisbury – June 1895 to July 1902 (Conservative)

Posts Salisbury held

Member of Parliament: 1853 to 1866

He never canvased to be an MP but was simply appointed one by the Earl of Exeter to a pocket borough.

Secretary of State for India: 1866 to 1867

In 1865, his older brother died, he inherited the title of Cranborne, and in 1866 Disraeli appointed him Secretary of State for India.

Salisbury was blamed for mishandling the Orissa famine of 1866, a disaster which affected the east coast of India from Madras northwards. At least a million Indians died, roughly one third of the population of the area. New to his brief, Salisbury believed his officials and experts who said it wasn’t serious, until it was too late, leaving him with a lifelong suspicion of experts. It made him quick off the mark and insistent on spending whatever it took to save lives in later Indian famines. The scale of the disaster made educated Indians realise maybe Britain wasn’t the all-powerful protector she pretended to be. The famine was one among many triggers for Indian nationalism.

Fear, awe and respect

Salisbury thought Britain’s rule over India was achieved by psychological means. There was no way 250,000 (mostly native) troops could hold down 250 million people if they chose to rebel against them. Earlier India officials such as Macauley had recommended that a select number of upper class Indians be educated, in English, up to western standards, in order to become intermediaries between western and Indian culture. Salisbury was sceptical about even this colonial, patronising idea, in fact he thought it was catastrophic since it just produced a class of ‘seditious article writers’. He thought India was vital to Britain’s prestige in the world i.e. vis-a-vis the other powers, and must be kept down by ‘fear, awe and respect for the law’ (p.139).

As Secretary of State for India, where British resources depended to a large degree on prestige rather than actual resources employed, Salisbury…was one of the first people to appreciate quite the extent to which militarily the British Empire was a gigantic bluff. (p.178)

And, criticising the more enlightened policies of Gladstone’s Liberals, Cecil declared in a speech that:

‘They will not learn that these tribes, these vast uncivilised multitudes, are not governed merely by the sword. They are governed by the imagination. They are governed by their fears.’ (p.293)

As Roberts summarises:

He stood out against the Whig ethos propagated by Macauley and others that Britain’s duty was simply to prepare Indians for eventual self-government. In Salisbury’s view, India was a prize that should remain Britain’s until it was forcible wrested from her. (p.216)

The 1867 Reform Act

The big issue was electoral reform in which Disraeli dished i.e. scuppered the Whigs. Salisbury made himself a master of electoral statistics and predicted reform would eliminate support for Tories. Salisbury made a big speech attacking Disraeli for rubbishing the Whig bill in 1866 then introducing one which was even more radical in 1867. Disraeli calculated that the newly enfranchised middle classes would be grateful to the Tories. Salisbury had done the math and said they wouldn’t and they weren’t. In fact he was fanatical about research, and always read everything he could get his hands on about whatever issue was at hand, electoral reform in 1867, and then again in 1885, being classic examples.

In opposition: 1868 to 1874

Gladstone’s Liberals won the 1868 election and were in government for 6 long years which they devoted to reforming all aspects of British law and society

Cranborne’s father died and he inherited the title of Lord Salisbury, the big house at Hatfield and a seat in the House of Lords. Roberts describes the ecclesiastical and political issues around his election as Chancellor of the University of Oxford, the core of high Anglican high Toryism.

Roberts also has a passage describing Salisbury’s unexpected interest in new technology. He was an early adopter of electricity and built a laboratory at Hatfield House where he carried out quite serious experiments about light. Cecil had a surprisingly scientific openness, for example he refused to be drawn into attacking Darwin after the ‘Origin of Species’ was published.

Secretary of State for India: 1874 to 1878

Queen Victorian wished to be awarded the title Empress of India was sharpened when a newly united Germany, after its victory over France, declared itself an empire in 1871, so there as a danger that her daughter, Vicky, who had married the Crown Prince of Prussia, would take precedence over her, a mere queen. Also the Tsar made a state visit to Britain in 1874 after the marriage of his daughter to the Duke of Edinburgh. In other words, everyone else was, or was becoming, an emperor – why not her?

The delicate handling of the issue, for British public opinion, abroad, and, of course, in India itself, are covered by Robert with typical thoroughness. He describes the great hou-ha that was held across India on the declaration on New Year’s Day 1877 (p.215).

The extremely complicated manoeuvring during the crisis triggered by uprisings against Ottoman rule in Bulgaria and Serbia in the summer of 1876. The Turks crushed the Bulgarians with great brutality, sending in mercenaries (the notorious bashi-bazouks) who were allowed to rape, pillage and murder at will. Gladstone publicised all this with his famous pamphlet of September 1876, ‘Bulgarian Horrors and the Question of the East’.

You have to understand that this was all caught up in the long-term consequences of the Crimean War. The Crimean War had been fought to prevent Russia’s extension of its influence into the Balkans i.e. further into Europe, at the expense of the Ottomans. The Treaty of Paris which concluded it pledged the allies i.e. France and Britain, to come to the support of the Ottomans.

The point of a detailed account like Roberts’ is to take you right into the Cabinet of the Prime Minister of the day, Disraeli, and describe in very great detail the different positions of the 12 men who comprised it. And this issue split them up into half a dozen factions as the crisis dragged on and a host of different responses, political, diplomatic and military all emerged.

Basically, some of the Cabinet thought the Ottoman Empire was irrevocably doomed to collapse and so we should never have pledged to prop it up. This led to the view that the Crimean War should have never been fought and was a colossal mistake. But this didn’t mean we supported Russia and its restless aims for expansion. Some supported Russia but opposed any expansion of its territory or power. Some thought we should continue to prop up ‘the sick man of Europe’. Some trod a middle way, trying to find a formula to support the Christians in the Balkans – the Bulgarians and Serbs – without insulting the Turks and without allowing undue Russian influence. Some went to an extreme and thought the European powers should partition the Ottoman Empire and civil servants in European capitals began drawing up suggestions for who would get where.3

Queen Victoria was a confirmed Russophobe. I was startled to learn that she threatened to abdicate no fewer than five times through the course of the crisis, leading Salisbury to speculate privately about her sanity (p.174). Disraeli had made it his policy to suck up to Her Majesty, maybe because it was good politics to have the monarch behind you, maybe because he saw it as his duty as ‘a minister of the Crown’, maybe because he liked sucking up.

Foremost in everyone’s minds was how to keep the route to India, the jewel in the British Crown, open and secure, but there were multiple answers to this problem: the most extreme was letting Russia invade and conquer through Bulgaria and down into Ottoman territory until she, possibly, took Constantinople and restored it as an Eastern orthodox Christian capital, as Russian extremists wanted to. In that case, some Cabinet members were for a) pre-emptively seizing Constantinople ourselves or b) sending an Expeditionary force to seize the Dardanelles i.e. the gateway from the Black Sea. The point of this would be to prevent the Russian fleet from freely passing through it and staking a claim in the Eastern Mediterranean. A simpler route would be to annex Egypt, thus securing the south east Mediterranean and the Suez Canal. The rearguard position was continuing to prop up the sick man – and our power and influence in the region – hoping something would come along.

The enormous pleasure of a book like Roberts’s is that he takes you right into the detail of this complex chess game, in which everyone – not just Russians, Ottomans, and neighbours like Austria – had multiple points of views and proposals, but even within the British cabinet there were multiple beliefs and strategies and that these kept changing and evolving as the situation changed.

Thus Salisbury was chosen to attend the Constantinople Conference (December 1876 to January 1877) to try and sort out the crisis, very usefully meeting the heads of all the important states en route (including huge, coarse, very clever Count von Bismarck), but Roberts shows in great detail how his ostensible aim of securing peace between Turkey and Russia was secretly sabotaged by Disraeli and his ally Lord Derby who, along with the Queen, loathed Russia, but couldn’t be seen to be supporting the perpetrators of the atrocities. Roberts’ suggests that Disraeli’s reputation for two-faced slipperiness was well deserved.

Anyway, the peace conference failed and so Salisbury’s mission failed, but many commentators in the press realised that he had been set up to fail by his boss. It was a hugely useful experience of the realities of power and diplomacy for a man who was to become Foreign Secretary then Prime Minister.

And so war between Russia and Turkey broke out, lasting from April 1877 to Match 1878, with Russia recruiting Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro to her side. Russia won. Her army fought all the way to the gates of Constantinople at which point the western powers intervened again.

In victory Russia reclaimed provinces in the Caucasus but more importantly, the principalities of Romania, Serbia, and Montenegro formally proclaimed their independence from the Ottoman Empire and, after almost five centuries of Ottoman domination, the Principality of Bulgaria emerged as a free nation.

So there’s one layer of pleasure to this narrative, which is watching the drama of high politics play out like an episode of House of Cards. But there’s a huge additional pleasure deriving from Salisbury’s Eeyorish character, always pessimistically convinced of the worse – ‘Things that have been secure for centuries are secure no longer,’ (p.274) – a doom-laden attitude which very often converts into hilariously satirical attitudes and observations. Roberts cites from Salisbury’s letters and dispatches countless examples of ironic reversals and witty sarcasms, a permanent attitude of ‘amused cynicism’ (p.215).

His unexpected juxtapositions aren’t on the level of Oscar Wilde’s deliberate paradoxes, but indicate the taste for aristocratic humour which characterised the age:

‘General Ignatiev is an amusing man without much regard for truth and an inordinate vanity which our Embassy takes every opportunity of wounding.’ (p.159)

Salisbury was an inveterate phrase-maker’ (p.247). Epigrams came naturally to him:

‘No one is fit to be trusted with a secret who is not prepared, if necessary, to tell an untruth to defend it.’ (p.194

Good government avoids one of the causes of hate; but it does not inspire love.’ (p.214)

And ran in the family. Salisbury’s daughter, Maud, accompanied him on his journey across Europe to Turkey, and kept a diary. Roberts cites her being told by beaming Ottoman officials that they were travelling on had been built by the Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, to which she politely enquired whether anyone had mended it since.

Beaconsfieldism

In 1876 Queen Victorian rewarded Disraeli for his toadying services to the nation, by making him Earl of Beaconsfield. From this point onwards contemporaries, and Roberts, refer to him as ‘Beaconsfield’.

From 1878 to 1880 the leading opponent of the Tories, William Gladstone, gave a series of speeches as he campaigned to win the parliamentary seat of Midlothian in Scotland. There were 6 very long speeches and over twenty shorter ones, addressed to halls full of thousands of voters, which harped on four main themes. He charged Disraeli’s administration with: financial incompetence, neglect of domestic legislation, and mismanagement of foreign affairs. In particular he charged Disraeli with a strategy of distracting public opinion from the economic and financial problems of Britain by means of foreign adventures. Gladstone gave the name Beaconsfieldism to ‘the immoral, bullying acquisition of territory almost for its own sake’ (p.212). One Tory critic defined it as: ‘occupy, fortify, grab and brag’ (p.227).

Foreign Secretary: 1878 to 1880

As mentioned above the recurring concerns of Britain in foreign affairs were: continual wars, unrest and Russian threat in the Balkans; management of Egypt and her southern extension, Sudan; management of South Africa and fractious relations with the Boers and the irritating little states like the Transvaal which kept being claimed or created with resulting tribal wars where we had to decide where we stood. And above all else, the running sore of Ireland.

  • Russo-Turkish War (April 1877 to March 1878)
  • Second Afghan War (November 1878 to September 1880)
  • First Zulu War (January to July 1879)
  • Egypt

Congress of Berlin

Roberts gives an intricate account of the multi-layered diplomacy which brought an end to the at the Congress of Berlin, June to July 1878, for which he was rewarded by the Queen with the Order of the Garter (as was with Disraeli).

Afghanistan

Many in the Foreign Office panicked about Russian intentions in Afghanistan i.e. it was placing diplomats there with a view to infiltrating/overthrowing the Amir, with a view to eventually invading India. Salisbury was sceptical about this talk of Russia attacking. He believed that the expansion of the Russian empire, or ‘the Russian avalanche’ as he called it, was unstoppable but was moving east across central Asia.

‘If it keeps north of the Hindu Kush it may submerge one caste of Muslim robbers after another without disturbing our repose.’ (p.145)

The Afghan war was the fault of Lord Lytton, the viceroy of India. Lytton’s despatches had become steadily more hysterical and Salisbury predicted to a cabinet colleague that he expected him [Lytton] would no conduct operations ‘so as to achieve the most brilliant results – lose the greatest number of men – and spend the largest amount of money’ (p.221).

Sure enough Lytton disobeyed instructions to disengage and sent a British force to force the Amir to accept a British representative at his court, which was defeated at the Khyber Pass. This forced Salisbury’s hand because he believed Britain must be seen to be strong.

The Battle of Maiwand

The war included the Battle of Maiwand on 27 July 1880 when Afghan forces under Ayub Khan defeated an admittedly smaller British force consisting of two brigades of British and Indian troops under Brigadier-General George Burrows, some 969 of whom were killed.

The point of mentioning this is that when British forces were dispatched to south Afghanistan in 2006 their bases in Helmand Province turned out not to be very far from the site of the battle and they discovered that local Afghan leaders and fighters still remembered it as a great patriotic victory over the infidel invader. The moral being that we, the British, have forgotten or never even knew most of our imperial history whereas, for scores of nations which we fought and conquered, our violent interventions are very much part of their national story.

The Anglo-Zulu War

From Wikipedia:

Following the passing of the British North America Act of 1867 forming a federation in Canada [Salisbury’s friend and ally in Disraeli’s cabinet] Lord Carnarvon thought that a similar political effort, coupled with military campaigns, might succeed with the African Kingdoms, tribal areas and Boer republics in South Africa. In 1874, Sir Bartle Frere was sent to South Africa as British High Commissioner to effect such plans. Among the obstacles were the armed independent states of the South African Republic and the Kingdom of Zululand. Frere, on his own initiative, sent a provocative ultimatum on 11 December 1878 to the Zulu king Cetshwayo and upon its rejection sent Lord Chelmsford to invade Zululand. The war is notable for several particularly bloody battles, including an opening victory of the Zulu at the Battle of Isandlwana, followed by the defence of Rorke’s Drift by a small British force from attack by a large Zulu force. The British eventually won the war, ending Zulu dominance of the region.

Salisbury in several places rages against the way the men on the spot, politicians or viceroys or diplomats or sometimes buccaneering businessmen like Cecil Rhodes, were forever stirring up trouble and starting conflicts which the government back in London then had no option to follow through. It was true of both the Afghan and Zulu wars where the same ends might have been achieved through diplomacy, trade and deals.

Roberts tells how Salisbury couldn’t understand why the Queen was so keen to allow the son of the exiled French Emperor Napoleon III (who had sought refuge in Chislehurst in Kent) Prince Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, to accompany British forces, but she insisted. He was promptly killed on 1 June 1879 by Zulus who stripped his corpse, all except for one blue sock bearing the initial N from which he was identified.

Egypt

Salisbury wanted to exercise ‘informal empire’ over Egypt not officially annex it. In theory Egypt was run by a Khedive appointed by the Ottoman Sultan. In practice, in return for propping up the Sultan and broadly supporting him against the Russians, Britain was allowed to interfere in Egypt. Apart from anything else Britain had huge sums invested in the Suez Canal and associated businesses. When the stroppy Khedive Ismail Pasha threw out British representatives, Salisbury had the British ambassador to Istanbul ask the Sultan to oust him in favour of his son, Tewfik Pasha, who would be more pliable. A few weeks later Salisbury wrote with typical dour cynicism to a colleague:

‘The only form of control we have is that which is called moral influence, which in practice is a combination of nonsense, objuration and worry.’ (p.229)

I had to look up ‘objuration’. It means ‘a firm binding by oath’. Salisbury’s cynicism is deliberately witty but it’s also bullshit, isn’t it? We also had a massive army (in India a truly huge army), the Royal Navy (which bombarded Alexandria and docked at Istanbul to threaten the Sultan with their guns), and various instruments of financial control through the City of London. A lot more tangible than ‘nonsense, objuration and worry.’

British troops used Egypt as a base to head south to defeat the forces of the Mahdi in what is now the Sudan. Despite all Salisbury and other British politicians’ insistence that the occupation of Egypt was purely temporary, it was, of course, strategic and long term, designed to secure the Suez Canal and the route to India (p.343). British troops didn’t leave Egypt until 1956, leaving a deep legacy of suspicion and resentment.

Tory defeat in 1880

The Tories were surprised at the scale of the landslide which turned them out in the 1880 election: Liberals 352, Tories 237, Irish Home Rule MPs 60 (p.238). Beaconsfield was ill, he had looked tired at the Conference of Berlin, had fluffed his lines and missed sessions due to chronic asthma (p.203).

Leader of the Opposition: 1881 to 1885

Salisbury took up some of his old hobbies including experimenting with electricity and collecting seaweed. Beaconsfield continued as Tory leader until his death in April 1881.

The Liberal Party had only been founded in 1859 as a coalition of anti-Tory forces. As the number of Radical Liberal MPs increased, it alienated the other wing of the party, the landed aristocratic Whig faction (p.244). In opposition, one of Salisbury’s cunning plans was to subtly egg on Gladstone’s radicalism, specially regarding Irish Home Rule and electoral reform, in order to inflame the Radicals’ expectations and rhetoric and so scare the landowning Whigs that they would come over to the Tories. There’s huge amounts of that kind of Machiavellian scheming in this book.

Electoral reform

The big issue at the end of Gladstone’s ministry was electoral reform. Eventually he passed two acts, the Representation of the People Act 1884 (known informally as the Third Reform Act) and the Redistribution of Seats Act 1885. Both were passed by the Liberal House of Commons but strongly resisted in the House of Lords led by Salisbury. This was for the simple reason that both acts tended to favour the Liberal, Whig and Radical interest at the expense of the aristocracy.

For the first time Britain was divided into 670 constituencies of roughly equal size, each returning just one Member of Parliament (previously many constituencies had returned two MPs, who tended to be one Liberal and one Tory, who didn’t even bother campaigning against each other. In other two-member constituencies the fractured Liberal Party had handed one to a Whig and one to a Radical. Salisbury cannily calculated that forcing them to choose one or the other would drive wedges between the two factions.

A lot more constituencies were created in cities, but Roberts shows that Salisbury, with characteristic thoroughness, had done intensive research into British psephology and correctly guessed that although some of these cities might turn Liberal or Radical, a lot of Britain’s big cities now had extensive suburbs and the inhabitants of these were just as scared of working class radicalism as the aristocracy (p.306). This was referred to ‘villa Toryism’ and came to be seen as a legacy of Disraeli.

A small symbol of this was the establishment in October 1882 of the periodical the National Review, designed to produce intelligent journalism for these middle-class Tories.

‘Caretaker’ prime minister: 1885 to 1886

Roberts chronicles the extraordinary manoeuvrings which surrounded Salisbury’s first spell as Prime Minister. In February the Liberals were defeated in an amendment to a bill and Gladstone immediately resigned. But the organisation required by the new Reform Act had not yet been put in place and wouldn’t be until the end of the year so, if he accepted power, Salisbury was faced with the unappetising prospect of being Prime Minister of a minority government for 6 months which was just long enough to make numerous mistakes and, at the next election, be unceremoniously chucked out. It’s fascinating to read the long maze of negotiations this led to, centrally getting Gladstone to agree to pass various nuts and bolts laws and acts which needed to go through. Gladstone had done the same thing to Disraeli in 1874; Salisbury had watched and learned.

There were two other problems. Salisbury wasn’t a shoe-in for Prime Minister. He sat in the House of Lords whereas the leader in the Commons throughout the period in opposition had been Sir Stafford Northcote, 1st Baronet [Eton]. Northcote expected the job but was widely seen to be too weak and lacking drive whereas Salisbury (as we’ve seen) enjoyed nothing more than making swingeing attacks on his enemies.

The second problem was Winston Churchill’s father, the radical and unreliable Lord Randolph Henry Spencer-Churchill (Eton). Randolph had set himself up with a cohort of followers on the Radical wing of the Conservative Party the leaders of which came to be referred to as ‘the Fourth Party’ (Churchill, Henry Drummond Wolff, John Gorst and Arthur Balfour). He promoted something called ‘Tory democracy’, that the Tories should accept the 1885 Reform Act, and the rise of the working class which lay behind it, but ensure the boundaries and details were drawn up to their advantage. A flashy update of Disraeli’s ‘One Nation Conservatism’. He created the National Union of the Conservative Party, created to ‘organise propaganda to attract working men’s votes, registration, choose candidates and conduct elections’, had many followers but refused to serve in Salisbury’s cabinet unless various demands were met.

Salisbury’s juggling of all these issues, trying to square various circles, makes for fascinating reading, insight into the real, smoke-filled rooms nature of actual party politics, more like a soap opera or school playground, with gangs and threats and changing alliances, than anything to do with principles, let alone serving the country.

Salisbury only finally accepted the job when Queen Victoria shed tears and pleaded with him. It was called a ‘caretaker’ government. He was 55. Lord Northcote was gutted but rewarded by being made Earl of Iddlesleigh and packed off to the Lords. Apparently, this is the origin of the expression, being ‘kicked upstairs’.

It is impossible to take the honours system seriously when you see titles like this being used with the utmost cynicism as rewards for mediocrity or being a big donor to party funds or simply to shut people up and get them out of the way. The people these made-up ‘titles’ get handed out to are generally lapdogs, the superannuated or inconvenient mediocrities who need to be shut up. That the givers or takers of these ‘honours’ then get on their hind legs and spout about ‘honour’ and ‘tradition’ and all the rest of it is risible, pathetic: see the way Boris Johnson simply rewarded key allies with peerages, damehoods and knighthoods. Dame Priti Patel. Or Liz Truss’s ‘honours’ list which even the Daily Telegraph described as ‘shameless’.

IRELAND

Salisbury was as solid as a rock against any form of home rule or national assembly for Ireland, because:

  • the 1800 Act of Union was a bulwark of property rights, law and order
  • it would be a slippery slope, the first step on an irresistible drive towards independence
  • as the first and nearest colony of Great Britain, giving Ireland any measure of home rule would immediately trigger calls for the same from every other colony in the empire, especially India (cf pages 574, 587)
  • it would mean abandoning the minority of the population of Ireland who were active supporters of the Union i.e. mostly in Ulster
  • on a moral level, it would be an ignoble surrender to the forces of violence (what was later called terrorism) i.e. the continual low-level agrarian protests and occasional murders all across Ireland
  • losing our prime colony would undermine Britain’s prestige in the world, make us look less powerful, and also
  • an independent Ireland led by people who hate us would become a serious security threat, even a starting point for invasion by enemy powers (as it had been for the French during the Revolutionary Wars)
  • a neutral or hostile Ireland would threaten Britain’s ability to import food in time of war (p.587)

Ireland quotes:

‘Are we to cut our country in two and, in the smaller portion, are we to abandon a minority of our own blood and religion to the power of their ancient enemies, in spite of their bitter protests against the debasing and ruinous servitude to which we propose to leave them?’ (p.586)

There was also rabid anti-Catholicism. Salisbury wasn’t just an Anglican, he was a fierce insister on the rights and perquisites of the Church of England in all its aspects. There was, therefore, a strong element of religious bigotry in his opposition to Home Rule for Ireland. It’s not just in the last few years that politicians have come up with superficial trivialising jingles: it was about this time that ‘Home Rule means Rome Rule’ began to be repeated by the lighter minded Conservatives and chanted at meetings and conferences (p.380).

But Roberts gives the game away, on the same page, about Ireland and the whole imperial ethos, by telling us that the very First Earl of Salisbury had been instrumental in the wholesale CONFISCATION of land in Armagh, Cavan, Derry, Donegal, Fermanagh and Tyrone between 1607 and 1609 and selling it in lots roughly the size of parishes to Scottish and City businessmen for settlement. He makes it crystal clear that the Protestant English stole the land from its rightful owners, then distributed it according to English law and from that point onwards, for the next 400 years, insisted it was a bulwark of English law when it was plain for any bystander to see that English law was, in that case, just a form of organised thieving, looting, imperial confiscation.

To then turn around and claim that this act of grand larceny, the organised theft of an entire nation’s patrimony, represented the epitome of ‘law and order’ and defending the theft amounted to ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’ (p.276):

Hartington looked upon the Irish Question primarily as one of defending property and landowning rights. (p.367)

is either to lie to yourself or be guilty of ridiculous hypocrisy. Ask any Irish historian what they think of English ‘honour’ and ‘legality’.

Roberts’ long account of the lengthy manoeuvrings about Home Rule is interrupted for a brief mention of how the British ‘formally annexed’ Upper Burma. The king of Burma, King Theebaw, was negotiating a convention with France but Salisbury was having none of that – Burma had little or no value in itself but might be a useful conduit to western China, and the French certainly weren’t going to have it! — so he sent a force of 9,000 troops who smashed the Burmese army, overthrew the king and put him in prison, installing a friendly Buddhist in power.

Invading foreign countries, overthrowing their traditional rulers, making them subservient to British rule. Only a special kind of mental perversion could talk about this in the same breath as ‘preserving law and order’ and ‘the inviolable rights of property’ and ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’, let alone think that ‘Britain’s greatest contribution to civilisation and mankind [was her] empire’ (p.370).

The violent overthrows, the coups, the imposition of rule by military force, the suppression of opposition voices, were all carried out to defend British strategic and business interests. The fact that they were dressed up in fancy rhetoric was what prompted continental observers like the French or Germans to routinely accuse the British of stunning hypocrisy.

Anti-democracy

It’s worth exploring the thinking behind Salisbury’s opposition to expanding the franchise. Basically he thought liberty was based on a) property and b) tradition and c) the law which upheld them. Only people with property have an interested in the existing system. Give the vote to people who have no property and their opinions will be wild and unpredictable, harmful to tradition, security, property etc. It would be mob rule, unjust, arbitrary and destructive. This is why he often referred to ‘the tyranny of numbers’. Just because a majority of the voters vote for something doesn’t make it right.

If you start from the position that property is the bedrock of liberty, then it follows that all attacks on property are, to the same extent, attacks on liberty. Thus Salisbury put a wide variety of reforms, such as extending the franchise or a graduated death duties, under the heading Attacks on Property which, in Salisbury’s mind, was synonymous with Attacks on Liberty.

It’s a coherent and logical position, but one which doesn’t take account of poverty. Its twinning of liberty with property, the more the better, gives no representation, voice or opinion to the large number of people who have little or no property: should they have no say in the running of the country? No, according to Tories of Salisbury’s stripe.

This was because he had nightmares that enfranchising the working classes and the poor would encourage in them, or demagogues, a wish to overthrow the aristocracy and take the money and property of everyone better off than themselves. He had a lifelong fascination with, and horror of, the French Revolution, not only read books on the subject but amassed a collection of pamphlets and ephemera, often some up from Paris bookshops and second-hand stalls (p.541). The conclusion he drew from it was that it was the fault of weak-willed liberals who set off with the best of intentions but broke down the constitutional checks and restraints and so opened the door to Terror and tyranny. That’s how he viewed the Liberals of his day: as well-intentioned but weak-willed types who, by attacking ‘privilege’ and ‘property’, threatened to sweep away restraint and open the door to anarchy.

Ironically, however, the actual result of electoral reform was virtually the opposite: as a result of the 1884 Reform Act, during the 1890s Salisbury began to worry that the effect of widening the franchise would not be revolution but the opposite, the triumph of super-patriotic Jingoism which, with his incurable pessimism, he regarded as almost as bad.

Salisbury sayings

‘The commonest error in politics is sticking to the carcasses of dead policies.’ (p.173)

When a member of his own party objected to the way bits of other countries were traded like counters at the Berlin Conference, Salisbury robustly replied:

that if our ancestors had cared for the rights of other people, the British Empire would not have been made.’ (p.185)

Comedy

At the Conference of Berlin in the summer of 1878 it was very hot. At the Kaiser’s residence in Potsdam there were mosquitoes, but at Berlin there were ‘minor powers. I don’t know which is worse.’ (p.201).

Of the army hero and adventurer Colonel Frederick Burnaby, who had undertaken a 1,000 mile midwinter expedition across Central Asia, he wrote: ‘I cannot see any reason for interfering with the natural right of a Briton to get his throat cut when and where he likes,’ (p.218). (Burnaby was subsequently killed in hand-to-hand fighting against followers of the Mahdi at the Battle of Abu Klea, 16 January 1885.)

When, at the time of the Congress of Berlin, an Admiral Hornby demanded that preparations for war with Russia be stepped up, Salisbury wrote to a cabinet colleague that:

‘If Hornby is a cool-headed, fearless, sagacious man, he ought to bring an action for libel against his epistolary style.’ (p.192)

At a tricky point of negotiations with Sultan Abdul Hamid II, Salisbury wrote to the British Ambassador at the Sublime Porte, Sir Austen Henry Layard, that they might get their way in small matters with the Sultan but at the risk of inflaming his Muslim people and risking revolution, which was ‘rather like burning down a house to procure roast pork.’ (p.237).

‘To those who have found breakfast with difficulty and do not know where to find dinner, intricate questions of politics are a matter of comparatively secondary interest.’ (p.250)

In 1889 the Shah of Persia, Nasr-el-Din, visited England for a month. When he was taken to see a model modern prison, he asked to see a gallows in action. On being told that no-one was due to be hanged that day he offered one of his own entourage (p.543).

Of the Daily Mail Salisbury quipped that Alfred Harmsworth had:

‘invented a paper for those who could read but not think’ (p.668)

He liked to say that bishops came in two mutually exclusive categories: those who were fit to be made bishops but unwilling, and those who were willing but unfit. A lot of bishops died and needed to be replaced during his premiership, he appointed 38 new bishops, more than any other Prime Minister before or since. He joked: ‘They die to spite me’ (p.676).

Sir Michael Hicks Beach, Chancellor of the Exchequer from 1895 to 1902 was so appalled by the rapidly escalating cost of the (second) Boer War that he repeatedly threatened to resign from the cabinet. So many times in fact, that Salisbury joked that he had a special drawer in his desk just for Hicks Beach’s resignation letters (p.744).

Balfour said of his uncle that he certainly believed that all men are equal, ‘by which he means, equally incompetent’ (p.746).

When the Liberal politician John Wodehouse, 1st Earl of Kimberley, attacked the dire management of the Boer War, Salisbury replied that:

‘A more gloomy collection of lugubrious vaticinations I never heard.’ (p.755)

In 1896 Victoria asked Salisbury to promote Lord Waldegrave from being a Lord in Waiting to the Yeoman of the Guard, because as a Lord he was constantly in her presence and she found him simply too ugly to look at (p.794).

Roberts says that Salisbury’s wit was the equal of Disraeli’s but different in kind, relying on ‘high irony rather than mere paradox’ (p.849). Discuss.

Roberts the fanboy

Roberts loves his hero:

Protecting the Royal Family from embarrassment, whether it be political in Berlin, financial over the Royal Grants, sexual over disappointed mistresses, or even highly tangential, as over the Cleveland Street Scandal, Salisbury simply saw as part of the duties of the premiership, and he carried them out impeccably. (p.561)

This is not the tone of an objective historian but of an impassioned fan. Robert devotes pages 336 to 338 to citing witnesses to Salisbury’s sense of fun, his dry humour and cynical wit:

Just as he could not write a boring sentence, so Salisbury was also incapable of uttering a commonplace or canting remark. Lord Rosebery [Eton] once wrote that reading old political speeches was as dull as drinking decanted champagne. Salisbury’s extra brut speeches are the exception, and of a vintage that is still effervescent. (p.208)

Roberts himself often mimics or echoes Salisbury’s drollness:

Sultans of Turkey lived on the grand scale, some compensation for their occasional short life expectancy. (p.161) [E.g. Midhat Pasha was dismissed as Grand Vizier during the Russo-Turkish War, banished to Baghdad and eventually strangled.]

They both have that lofty Tory irony, that droll detachment and amused good humour, which makes the book so readable.

Conclusion to part one

This is a magnificent biography, huge, compendious but written with a tremendous lightness of touch and good humour throughout, echoing the ethos of its subject who portrayed himself as a gruff old Tory but, as his letters and speeches reveal, was a lifelong humorist. It is an absolute goldmine of insights into every aspect of British domestic and foreign policy for the 35 years when Britain reached the peak of its economic and imperial might, 1867 to 1902. It is massively enjoyable on every level.

But none of this should blind us to the fact that Salisbury was the enemy. He was the rooted opposition to everything progressive that was attempted through the period. He stood for a level of privilege and entitlement that almost no one nowadays can conceive, an almost incomprehensibly dedication to the life-or-death importance of hierarchy, the aristocracy, the Church of England. Like all conservatives and authoritarians he thought that if any of this was tampered with it would open the floodgates to anarchy. Thus he resisted every move to give Ireland more home rule because he saw it as threatening a wider collapse:

He saw the [Home Rule] campaign in Ireland as merely the precursor for a general class struggle over the rights of property. (p.258)

Of course it didn’t. Trying to hang onto this world of privilege in the face of changing technologies, social norms and culture, in the increasingly embittered clinging onto India, in the embittered clinging on to Ulster, in the embittered fight against electoral reform (all leading to the climactic struggle between Tories and Liberals in 1911), it was these rearguard positions which nearly led to anarchy.

Above all, he held positions of power during the height of empire and openly admitted it was based on threat and intimidation. In Roberts’s view: ‘Salisbury believed implicitly in the politics of prestige and revenge’ (p.247).

The single biggest conundrum is how he managed to reconcile the windy rhetoric of his speeches about ‘the highest interests of Empire’ and ‘the most sacred obligations of honour’ (p.276) (cf Ireland p.351) with the acid cynicism of his private papers and correspondence, which bluntly state that we had to hang onto India and Ireland by whatever means possible because they’re what made Britain ‘great’.

You know the cliché ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’? Well, every time you read a Victorian politician talking about ‘honour’ you can be sure it’s high-sounding cover for either he and his class clinging onto their wealth and privileges or, in an international context, for the British clinging on to countries they acquired by force, with no right or law or ‘honour’ involved in either.

Roberts’ central argument is that Salisbury kept the peace between jostling European Powers for a generation by his foresight and intelligence and diplomacy. This is all true and yet we know that the sweeping changes across all aspects of society which he held back for so long were inevitably going to come about, and it could be argued that, by delaying them for so long, Salisbury made the process of managing them when they became unavoidable (votes for women, rights for workers, Irish independence) much more violent and painful than they need have been if they had been addressed more sympathetically and much earlier.

Credit

Salisbury: Victorian Titan by Andrew Roberts was published in hardback by Weidenfeld and Nicholson in 1999. References are to the 2000 Phoenix paperback edition.

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Byzantine emperors 1068 to 1453

This chronology is taken from John Julius Norwich’s 1995 book, Byzantium: The Decline and Fall, with additional details from some of the relevant Wikipedia articles.

Romanus IV Diogenes (1068 to 1071)

A highly successful general, Romanus is, however, mostly remembered for leading the Byzantine forces to catastrophic defeat against the Seljuk Turks at the Battle of Manzikert on 26 August 1071, defeat which left Anatolia – for 700 years the source of Byzantium’s grain and manpower – vulnerable to the Seljuk Turks’ slow but steady annexation.

Quite quickly central Anatolia became known as the Sultanate of Rum, a corruption of ‘Rome’, the name the Turks gave all the Greeks. This map from Wikipedia shows how the Sultanate slowly but steadily annexed Anatolia.

Expansion of the Sultanate 1100 to 1240 (source: Wikipedia)

Romanus and the Seljuk victor, Alp Arslan, got on well and Alp released Romanus to return to Constantinople. Had Romanus survived, something might have been salvaged from the defeat but he was promptly overthrown and blinded in a coup.

Michael VII Ducas (1067 to 1078)

Michael had been a boy when the usurper Romanus Diogenes made himself senior emperor. Soon after Romanus returned to Constantinople after the shameful defeat of Manzikert, he was blinded by partisans of the powerful Ducas family and power returned, at least in theory, to Michael. Michael was, however, weak and ineffectual, and his policies prompted several coup attempts, the successful one being led by…

Nicephorus III Botaneiates (1078 to 1081)

Nicephorus had risen to become military ruler of Anatolia. He rebelled against the bad rule and high taxes of Michael VII, leading his army into the capital where he was welcomed by the population (Michael wisely abdicated and went off to a monastery).

But Nicephorus, born around 1001, was now 77 years old and, having secured power, didn’t know what to do with it. While military threats mounted in the east and west, the young general Alexius Comnenos emerged as a rising star in the army, a general who never lost a battle. Learning that Nicephorus was about to have him arrested, Alexius rallied his troops and many supporters among the aristocracy and staged a coup. Alexius graciously allowed Nicephorus to retire to a monastery.

Comnenid dynasty (1081 to 1185)—

Alexius I Comnenos (1081 to 1118)

Alexius is one of the heroes of the book, a distinguished general who set about restoring military and political stability to the empire. His successes in Anatolia against the Turks had made Botaneiates jealous which is why Alexius staged a military coup before he himself was arrested. Pious and hard-working, Alexius had to fight wars against the Normans – who, led by their buccaneering leader Robert Guiscard, invaded from their base in south Italy in 1081 – and against the Seljuk Turks who continued their expansion into Anatolia.

Norwich’s account of the canny way Alexius handled the incursion of the various crusader armies into his territory is fascinating. After fifty years which had seen a dozen or so emperors come and go, Alexius was successful in establishing an enduring and (relatively) stable dynasty.

John II Comnenos (1118 to 1143)

Eldest son of Alexius I, John inherited the throne in a smooth transition, on his father’s death. His reign was dominated by wars – defending attacks by the Sicilian Normans, fending off a Venetian invasion fleet, dealing with the Hungarians to the North, and then campaigning against the Seljuk Turks and Armenians of Cilicia to the east, with the sometimes reluctant co-operation of the crusader states of Edessa and Antioch.

Manuel I Comnenos ‘the Great’ (1143 to 1180)

Manuel I Comnenos ‘the Great’ was the fourth and youngest son of John II. His two eldest brothers died before their father, who then chose Manuel over the surviving elder brother, Isaac. Manuel was an energetic ruler who launched campaigns against the Turks, humbled Hungary, achieved supremacy over the crusader states, and tried unsuccessfully to recover Italy. His extravagance and constant campaigning, however, depleted the Empire’s resources.

Alexius II Comnenos (1180 to 1183)

Alexius II Comnenos was born on 14 September 1169, the only son of Manuel I. In the years 1180 to 1182 i.e. aged 11 and 12, Alexius came under the regency of his mother, Maria of Antioch but, she was unpopular because a Latin, and was overthrown by Andronicus I Comnenos, who became co-emperor and finally had Alexius II deposed and killed.

Andronicus I Comnenos (1183 to 1185)

Born around 1118, Andronicus I Comnenos was a nephew of John II by his brother Isaac. A general in the army, Andronicus was imprisoned for conspiring against John II, but escaped and spent 15 years in exile in various courts in eastern Europe and the Middle East, where he acquired a reputation for his promiscuousness.

In 1182 Andronicus marched on Constantinople, capitalising on the unpopularity of Maria of Antioch. His arrival coincided with a city-wide uprising against the hated Venetians, who had been benefiting from trade and legal advantages. Having quelled the riots and established his authority, Andronicus had Maria strangled in prison and then overthrew his nephew Alexius II, who he had murdered, in 1183.

Andronicus’s campaign against the vast landowning aristocracy was justifiable from an economic point of view, but was accompanied by growing paranoia and tyranny, not a day going by without public tortures and executions. The Normans from Sicily took the opportunity of disorder in the Byzantine court to invade Illyria, and Andronicus’s abject failure to repel them clinched opposition to him at all levels of society, and he was overthrown and lynched in a popular uprising.

The Angelid dynasty (1185 to 1204)—

Of all the families who at one time or another wore the imperial crown of Byzantium, the Angeli were the worst… The three Angelus emperors – Isaac II, Alexius III and Alexius IV – reigned from first to last, a mere nineteen years. But each was in his own way disastrous, and together they were responsible for the greatest catastrophe that Constantinople was ever to suffer until its final fall.
(Byzantium: The Decline and Fall by John Julius Norwich, 1995, page 156)

Isaac II Angelus (1185 to 1195)

Born in September 1156, Isaac came to the throne at the head of a popular revolt against Andronicus I. His reign was marked by revolts and wars in the Balkans, especially against a resurgent Bulgaria. After ruling for ten years, he was deposed, blinded and imprisoned by his elder brother, Alexius III.

Alexius III Angelus (1195 to 1203)

Born in 1153, Alexius was the elder brother of Isaac II, who he deposed and blinded. His reign was marked by misgovernment and the increasing autonomy of provincial magnates. He was deposed by the Fourth Crusade and fled Constantinople, roaming Greece and Asia Minor, searching for support to regain his throne. He died in captivity in Nicaea in 1211.

Isaac II Angelus (18 July 1203 to 28 January 1204)

The armies of the Fourth Crusade arrived at the walls of Constantinople in 1203 and began besieging the city. Alexius III fled with his wife. The city council restored Isaac II (see two above) who, although blinded by his brother, was still the most legitimate ruler. Actual governing fell to his son, Alexius IV, but both of them failed to deal adequately with the crusader demands and Isaac was deposed by Alexius V Dukas in January 1204 and died on 28 January 1204, perhaps of poison.

Alexius IV Angelus (1 August 1203 to 28 January 1204)

The son of Isaac II, Alexius enlisted the Fourth Crusade to return his father to the throne, and reigned alongside his restored father. Due to their failure to deal with the crusaders’ demands, he was deposed by Alexius V Ducas in January 1204, and was strangled on 8 February.

Alexius V Ducas ‘Mourtzouphlos’ (5 February 1204 to 13 April 1204)

In Norwich’s view, Alexius V Ducas was the only Byzantine ruler of the time who was up to the crisis the empire now faced. Alexius was born in 1140, the son-in-law of Alexius III and a prominent aristocrat. In 1204 he deposed Isaac II and Alexius IV in a palace coup. He tried to repel the crusaders when they besieged the city, but they captured Constantinople, forcing Mourtzouphlos to flee. He joined the exiled Alexius III, but was later blinded by the latter. Captured by the crusaders, he was executed in December 1205.

Theodore I Lascaris (1205 to 1222)

Son-in-law of Alexius III, Theodore was elected emperor by the citizens of Constantinople on the day before the city fell to the crusaders. He fled to Nicaea, where he organized the Greek resistance to the Latins and was crowned emperor in 1208. Theodore managed to stop the Latin advance in Asia and to repel Seljuk attacks, establishing the Empire of Nicaea as the strongest of the Greek successor states.

John III Ducas Vatatzes (1221 to 1254)

Born around 1192, John became the son-in-law and successor of Theodore I in 1212. A capable ruler and soldier, he expanded his state in Bithynia, Thrace and Macedonia at the expense of the Latin Empire, Bulgaria and the rival Greek state of Epirus.

John Vatatzes had been a great ruler… one of the greatest, perhaps, in the whole of this history. (Norwich, p.203)

Theodore II Lascaris (1254 to 1258)

Born in 1222 the only son of John III, Theodore II Lascaris succeeded on his father’s death in 1254. His reign was marked by his hostility towards the major houses of the aristocracy, and by his victory against Bulgaria and the subsequent expansion of imperial power into Albania.

John IV Lascaris (1258 to 1261)

Born on 25 December 1250 as the only son of Theodore II, John succeeded on his father’s death aged just 8. Due to his minority, the regency was exercised at first by George Mouzalon until his assassination, and then by the successful young general, Michael Palaiologos who, within months, was crowned senior emperor.

After the recovery of Constantinople from its Latin crusader rulers in August 1261, Michael Palaiologos sidelined John IV completely, and had the 11-year-old boy imprisoned and blinded. John IV lived on in prison until around 1305.

Michael VIII Palaeologus (1259 to 1282)

One of the hero emperors, this confident young general campaigned against the Latins and Greek rivals. It was forces under his command who, in August 1261, discovered that Constantinople was virtually unguarded, the Latin garrison being away on a campaign against some island, and so sneaked in and took the city by surprise. Michael had to be woken up at his camp two hundred miles away to be told the city had been recovered for the Greeks. He quickly marched on the capital and was greeted with acclaim by the long-suffering Greek population.

Andronicus II Palaeologus (1282 to 1328)

Son of Michael VIII, Andronicus II Palaeologus was born on 25 March 1259, named co-emperor in 1261, crowned in 1272, and succeeded as sole emperor on Michael’s death in 1282.

Favouring monks and intellectuals, Andronicus neglected the army and his reign saw the collapse of the Byzantine position in Asia Minor. He named his son Michael IX co-emperor. In a protracted civil war, he was first forced to recognize his grandson Andronicus III as co-emperor, and was then deposed outright.

Andronicus III Palaeologus (1328 to 1341)

Son of Michael IX, Andronicus deposed his grandfather Andronicus II in 1328 and ruled as sole emperor until his death. He was ably supported by John Cantacuzenos. Andronicus’s reign saw defeats against the Ottoman emirate but successes in Europe, where Epirus and Thessaly were recovered.

John V Palaeologus (1341 to 1376) part one

John V Palaeologus was the only son of Andronicus III who neglected to crown him co-emperor or formally declare him his heir so that, at his father’s death, a destructive civil war broke out between his regents and his father’s closest aide, John VI Cantacuzenos, who ended up seizing power and being crowned co-emperor.

The conflict ended in 1347 with Cantacuzenos recognized as senior emperor, but he was then deposed by John V in 1354 during another civil war. Matthew Cantacuzenos, raised by John VI to the rank of co-emperor, was also deposed in 1357. John V appealed to the West for aid against the Ottomans, but in 1371 he was forced to recognize Ottoman suzerainty i.e. that Byzantium was now a tributary state of the Turks. He was deposed in 1376 by his son Andronicus IV.

John VI Cantakcuzenos (1347 to 1354)

A maternal relative of the Palaeologoi, John was declared co-emperor on 26 October 1341, and was recognized as senior emperor for ten years after the end of the civil war on 8 February 1347. Deposed by John V in 1354, he became a monk, dying on 15 June 1383.

Andronicus IV Palaeologus (1376 to 1379)

Son of John V and grandson of John VI, he was born on 2 April 1348 and raised to co-emperor in around 1352. He deposed his father on 12 August 1376 and ruled until overthrown, in his turn, in 1379. He was again recognized as co-emperor in 1381 and given Selymbria as an appanage, dying there on 28 June 1385. (An appanage is ‘provision made for the maintenance of the younger children of kings and emperors, consisting of a gift of land, an official position, or money.’)

John V Palaeologus (1379 to 1390) part two

Restored as senior emperor, John was reconciled with Andronicus IV in 1381, re-appointing him co-emperor. He was overthrown again in 1390 by his grandson, John VII.

John VII Palaeologus (April 1390 to September 1390)

Son of Andronicus IV, John was born in 1370, and named co-emperor under his father from 1377 to 1379. He usurped the throne from his grandfather John V for five months in 1390 but, with Ottoman mediation, he was reconciled with John V and his uncle, Manuel II. John held Constantinople against the Ottomans in 1399 to 1402, and was then given Thessalonica as an appanage, which he governed until his death on 22 September 1408.

John V Palaeologus (September 1390 to February 1391) part three

Restored to senior emperor, John ruled until his death in February 1391. If you count the time from his first ascension to the throne and exclude the interludes when someone else ruled, John V reigned longer than any other Byzantine emperor.

At one of the most desperate moments of its history, the Empire was governed by a ruler who was neither intelligent nor far-sighted, and who possessed virtually none of the qualities necessary to a successful statesman. (Norwich, p.347)

Manuel II Palaeologus (1391 to 1425)

Second son of John V, Manuel II Palaeologus was born on 27 June 1350. Raised to co-emperor in 1373, Manuel became senior emperor on John V’s death and ruled until his death. He travelled to the West European courts seeking aid against the Turks, and was able to use the Ottoman defeat in the Battle of Ankara to regain some territories and throw off his vassalage to them.

John VIII Palaeologus (1425 to 1448)

The Empire of which, on 21 July 1425, the thirty-two-year-old John Palaeologus became sole basileus, was effectively bounded by the walls of Constantinople; and Constantinople now presented a dismal picture indeed. (Norwich, p.388)

Eldest surviving son of Manuel II, John was born on 18 December 1392. Raised to co-emperor about 1416, he succeeded his father on the latter’s death. Seeking aid against the resurgent Ottomans, John ratified the Union of the Churches in 1439 i.e. in a desperate bid to secure help from the Pope and the Western powers, he promised to subjugate the Eastern Orthodox Church to Rome.

Constantine XI Dragases Palaeologus (1449 to 1453)

The fourth son of Manuel II and Serbian princess Helena Dragaš, Constantine was born on 8 February 1405. As Despot of the Morea from 1428, Constantine distinguished himself in campaigns that annexed the Principality of Achaea and brought the Duchy of Athens under temporary Byzantine suzerainty, but he was unable to repel Turkish attacks under Turahan Bey.

As the eldest surviving so of Manuel II, Constantine succeeded John VIII after the latter’s death. Confronted by the aggression of the new Ottoman sultan, Mehmet II, Constantine acknowledged the Union of the Churches and made repeated appeals for help to the West, but in vain. Refusing to surrender Constantinople, Constantine was killed during the final Ottoman attack on 29 May 1453.

So the city was both founded and lost under a ruler named Constantine (the emperor Constantine, who founded it in 330, and this Constantine Palaeologus, who was ruler when the city was overthrown in 1453). An epic 1,153-year-long history.

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Luxury and power: Persia to Greece @ the British Museum

This is an exhibition with a thesis. The layout and design, the structure, the choice of topics addressed and even the selection of individual artefacts, have all been made to support the central argument. What is this thesis? It’s another one of those ‘undermining received opinion’ exhibitions, so common nowadays.

In this case the received opinion goes like this: in the fifth century BC, from roughly 500 to 450 BC, the federation of Greek city states, led by Athens, fought off repeated attempts to invade and conquer them mounted by the huge Persian (proper scholarly name, Achaemenid) Empire, under its kings, Darius the Great (ruled 522 to 486 BC) and Xerxes the Great (ruled 486 to 465 BC).

You can see from this map how the Achaemenid Empire, at its height around 500 BC, covered a large swathe of south-central Asia and how vexing it was for its rulers that it swept through the Middle East, all of Turkey and up into the Balkans only to be blocked by the obstinate city states of Greece (at the far left of the map).

The Achaemenid Empire at its Greatest Extent, about 500 BC. Created by Mossmaps, accessed from Wikipedia

Contemporary Greeks, notably the historian Herodotus, but many other politicians and playwrights whose works have survived, portrayed the conflict as a desperate struggle against the odds of free, democratic states battling oriental tyranny.

In particular – and the focus of this exhibition – is the way that Greek leaders, politicians, writers and historians, but also artists, sculptors and craftsmen, routinely associated the Persians with luxury, with excessive wealth, which they went on to associate with moral failings such as decadence, greed, corruption, effeminacy, and so on.

The legendary King Midas (originally an actual ruler of Phrygia in central Anatolia) and how he was curse to turn everything he touched into gold, became associated with the Persians, a symbol of the punishment incurred by unlimited greed.

Recreation of an Achaemenid court robe, made with expensive dyes, rich embroidery and gold applique, designed to be draped and belted across the middle. Designed by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Professor of Ancient History at Cardiff University (2022)

According to Greek writers all this Oriental extravagance and decadence starkly contrasted with their own pure, restrained and high-minded art and culture, which was summed up in the inscription above the famous oracle at Delphi: ‘Nothing in excess‘.

East versus West

This stark dichotomy or binary view of civilisations, of a fundamental opposition the West and the Eastern Mediterranean, was to have a strong influence on the Roman Empire, whose leaders and writers also associated themselves with lofty principle and morality, and their opponents in the East – the successors to the Persians, the Parthian Empire – in identical terms. We are brave, they are warlike. We are high-minded and principled, they are lawless and treacherous. We live lives of dignity and restraint, they wallow on luxury and sensuality. All tropes which would again be revived when, in the late Middle Ages, the Ottoman Turks conquered Anatolia (modern Turkey) and then pushed on into Thrace, eventually conquering Greece itself in the 1700s.

These tropes lived on into 18th and 19h century scholarly works, of history, art and anthropology, as what the American critic Edward Said called ‘Orientalism’ i.e. associating the empires, states and peoples of the East with luxury, corruption, decadence, sexual profligacy and so on.

Arguably, this great founding binary between noble democratic West and tyrannical barbarous East underwent another enormous revival in light of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on New York, in aftermath of which loads of American leaders and opinion-makers revived all these old tropes, painting the Middle East as a land of wild-eyed religious fanatics, with the American political scientist Samuel P. Huntington going as far as claiming the terrorist attacks had revived an age-old, unchangeable and inevitable ‘clash of civilisations’.

The only thing problem with this long and hallowed tradition is that, right back where it started, with the polar opposition between Greeks and the Persians… it’s wrong. And this exhibition at the British Museum sets out to show why.

Undoing the stereotype

It does so by presenting two counter-claims:

  1. Persian luxury wasn’t what the Greeks claimed it to be
  2. the Greeks were far from being as spartan and luxury-free as they claimed, but themselves valued luxury goods and incorporated many aspects of Persian craftsmanship and style into their own artefacts

To put it another way, for over two thousand years scholars and writers in the West have tended to take the Greeks’ at their own valuation of themselves, not least because our own power structures (of Christendom versus the Turks, of the European powers when they created their empires, of the modern 21st century American empire) found the Greeks’ binary tropes useful to confirm the superiority of the moral West. But the actual objects from these two supposedly distinct cultures tell a different story. They reveal a far more complex and messy picture of cultural interaction, interpenetration, influence and involvement than the official documents.

Thus, with disarming simplicity, the exhibition reflect this binary worldview, starting with two rooms: the first one displays a range of objects from different parts of the Achaemenid (Persian) Empire, some to explain the history and structure of the empire, some to demonstrate how luxury objects were used to express and support political and cultural power.

Room two focuses on the other half of the dyad, classical Athens of the 5th century BC, again with some objects used to explain the history and cultural highpoints of the period (of which the construction of the Parthenon between 447 and 438 BC is the most notable item), before going on to display cases which indicate how the Athenians incorporated, remodelled and adapted influences from the East through a variety of handicrafts and objects.

Hellenistic

And then, to prove its point that there was always more complex interplay between cultures right across the region, the third and final room looks in detail at the culture which arose after the conquest of Alexander the Great.

Alexander turned the tables on the Persians for, after conquering all of Greece, he swiftly took Anatolia, conquered Egypt and then pushed on into modern Iraq and Iran and into Afghanistan. It was here that his dazzling ten-year career of ceaseless conquests came to an end with his untimely death in Babylon in 323 BC.

On his death Alexander’s short-lived empire quickly collapsed into individual kingdoms ruled by his various generals and there’s a display of coins with heads of those who managed to emerge as new rulers including the Antigonids (who emerged to rule Macedonia), the Ptolemies in Egypt, the Seleucids in Persia. Nonetheless the Greek culture, literacy, models of poetry and writing, models of sculpture and architecture, lived on after him across the whole region.

Because some Greeks called their homeland Hellas and its inhabitants Hellenes, scholars have for hundreds of years referred to the period from 323 until the Romans conquered Egypt in 31 BC, as the Hellenistic period, and art historians refer to the style which developed across it as the Hellenistic style.

The curators include a room on post-Alexander Hellenistic culture in this exhibition because they want us to arrive at it with fresh eyes: instead of the Hellenistic style representing a new synthesis of opposing traditions – which art historians have traditionally seen it as – this exhibition argues that Hellenism was more like the logical continuation of complex cross-cultural contacts and currents which had been swirling across the region for centuries before, despite the insistence to the contrary of Greek propagandists, who scholars for too long have taken too literally.

Room 1. The Achaemenid Empire

So room one attempts to show that the so-called ‘luxury’ of the Persians wasn’t indicative of moral failings, as Greek propagandists liked to claim, but was an intrinsic aspect of their statecraft. In other words, artefacts and objects, ceremonies and rituals which involved or highlighted wealth were important tools in keeping together such a huge and heterogeneous empire. When the Achaemenids conquered a territory, they went out of their way to appease populations. They often left native rulers in place (such as King Arbinas of Lycia for whom the Nereid Monument was built which is viewable elsewhere in the museum) or replaced them with regional administrators called satraps.

The new Persian rulers let their subject peoples continue to practice their religions – but they insisted on the pomp and pageantry which established them firmly as the ultimate rulers, distributing largesse and gifts to confirm the hierarchy of client king or satrap, and emperor. Satraps in turn collected taxes and tributes, and then granted largesse on a local level.

Thus the Persian administrative system court used objects of exquisite luxury not only as markers of authority but as intrinsic means to the administration of the empire. In doing so, a distinctive Persian style developed that was copied by different social classes throughout the empire and spread far beyond, into Greece itself and up into the Balkans. To quote one curator, the ‘Persians wielded “luxury” as a political tool across a vast and complex empire.

The Greek interpretation of Persian ‘luxury’ was a misreading: the Greeks interpreted it through a moralising prism and failed to understand that ostentatious displays of luxury were central to the Persian Empire’s administrative methodology.

Power was demonstrated not just by luxury objects but ceremonies and activities such as holding public audiences, banquets for subject kings and courtiers, and hunting expeditions. The court moved seasonally between the capital Persepolis, Babylon, Susa and Ecbatana, to hold court, administer justice, and confirm his power around his huge multicultural empire. The king travelled with a vast camp including a royal tent equivalent to a palace throne.

According to the Greek writer Xenophon, the Persian emperor would reward client kings and courtiers with gits such as a horse with a gold bit, a necklace of gold, a gold bracelet, a gold scimitar, a Persian coat, and so on.

Persian armlet © The Trustees of the British Museum

The room starts with historical background to the Greco-Persian wars: with Cyrus the Great (died in 530 BC), founder of the Achaemenid Empire, and then Darius I (550 to 486 BC) who launched the first invasion of Greece (492 to 492). This failed, he began preparation for another one, but died before it could start and handed on preparations to his son, Xerxes.

Xerxes (486 to 465 BC) led the second attempted invasion of Greece, invading via a bridge he had constructed across the Hellespont (480 BC), and mounting a military campaign marked by the battles of Thermopylae, Salamis, and Plataea. Although he at one point captured Athens and burned the buildings on the Acropolis (480), Xerxes was defeated at Plataea and, facing revolts in various provinces back in the empire, was forced to retreat from Greece. The defeat of his huge campaign spelled the beginning of the decline of the Achaemenian Empire.

Room 1 displays

Having given a brisk overview of the historical background, the exhibition moves on to cases devoted to various aspects of the central topic, ‘luxury’.

One of the most numerous types of object are so-called rhytons. These are drinking vessels but, the exhibition tells us, were part of a surprisingly ornate ritual. You’re a very senior Persian official and, at a banquet, you hold the rhyton in one hand while a slave fills it with wine. When it reaches a certain level you tip it with one hand and a stream of wine gushes forth from a small hole at the bottom, often concealed amid an elaborate design, and the thing is, you had to direct this stream of wine towards a shallow bowl you’re holding in your other hand. You don’t drink from the rhyton, you drink from the bowl. The rhyton is a luxury object designed to showcase your power and prestige, as is the entire ritual.

Gilt silver rhyton shaped as a griffin © The Trustees of the British Museum

Sound unlikely? Well, there’s a carved stone relief showing precisely this action being carried out at a banquet and there’s several cases full of beautifully worked examples of these wine pourers, crafted into all kinds of animal motifs.

Detail of the Nereid Monument showing Arbinas, king of Lycia, at a banquet using a rhyton and drinking bowl. In multicultural fashion, he sports a Persian beard but is wearing a Greek gown © The Trustees of the British Museum

Other aspects of Persian ‘luxury’ include bottles created to contain rare and precious spices and oils and objects such as the exquisite gold armlet (above), details of peacocks and parasols, jewellery and make-up. The king wore fur-lined coats, a golden torc around his throat, all markers of supreme power.

Persian rulers used chariots for hunting but also as symbols of power and dominance. The most common animals in Persian imagery are the mightiest animal then known, the lion, and the mythical creature, the griffin, both of which are depicted across all media from the Persian Empire.

Gateway 1. The Persian wars

You pass from room 1 to room 2 through a kind of gateway, angular upright and lintel painted jet black to distinguish it from the dazzling white of the rest of the show. In each of these there is an animated map and a couple of artefacts reflecting war. The first one is a 30-second animation showing the path of the two Persian invasions into mainland Greece: the first one from 492 to 490, ending in defeat at the Battle of Marathon; the second one, from 480 to 479, which featured the battle of Thermopylae, the naval battle of Salamis (480) and the Persians’ definitive defeat at Plataea. To set the tone the animation is accompanied by a classic Greek helmet and a figurine of a warrior.

Room 2. Ancient Athens

Again, the room starts with the basic history, describing the development of the Greek city states, especially Athens, which rose to have an empire of its own, complete with an enormous population of slaves and a flock of smaller cities who paid her handsome tributes, as well as wealth from the silver mines discovered in 483.

Bust of Pericles (about 430 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a bust of Pericles the great statesman (495 to 429 BC), whose noble speeches are recorded by the historian Thucydides, and who oversaw the development of Athenian democracy and the building of a new, astonishingly beautiful and mathematically precise temple to Athena Parthenos atop the Acropolis. This temple, the Parthenon, was not only a temple but a treasury, a storehouse, packed with treasures of all kinds.

The exhibition backs this up with an illustration of the original Parthenon, brightly painted and decorated, and photos of the modern reconstruction of the enormous statue of Athena Parthenos (‘the virgin’) which was the focal point of the Parthenon and which was a gaudy, brightly painted figure, 12 metres tall, made of ivory, wood and gold.

Reconstruction of the statue of Athena Parthenos at the reconstruction of the entire Parthenon in Nashville, Tennessee. Luxury permitted when it enhanced the prestige of the city.

There’s an inventory of some of the treasure the temple once contained, carved in stone (including the throne of King Xerxes, captured at the Battle of Salamis); and part of a relief from the Elgin Marbles showing women processing towards the temple carrying luxury plates and objects, possibly captured from the Persian army, to devote to the goddess.

This section explains how the Athenians struggled to reconcile their self image as noble, egalitarian democrats with their growing wealth. One solution was to decide ‘luxury’ was permissible so long as it wasn’t attached to individuals but was used to honour that state.

It also explains the socio-political reasons for this aversion to luxury. Democracy was a response to civil conflict. Competitive displays of wealth among Athens’s richest families had led to tensions and violence at the end of the 6th century. When the statesman Kleisthenes introduced his reforms in 508 they were designed to defuse these tensions by enforcing greater equality between citizens. The laws he introduced distributed political responsibility among all adult male citizens in a system they came to call the rule of the people, demos-kratos.

Thus the animadversions of so many writers against personal displays of ‘luxury’ wasn’t based on morality alone, but on a very real fear that they would revive the social conflicts of the late 6th century which had threatened to plunge the city into civil war. Banning private displays of wealth was a political necessity.

Room 2 displays

Take peacocks. Peacocks were a very Persian marker of luxury and caste. They arrived in Athens sometime during the 5th century BC. Expensive to keep and with no practical purpose, they were classic markers of wealth and luxury, which meant their owners had to be careful not to raise democratic hackles. One aristocrat publicly displayed his peacocks once a month: luxury was acceptable so long as it was presented as benefiting the community.

As to Athenian views of the Persians, there’s a hilarious display case showing how the Greeks portrayed them on the many, many vases they made, decorated with line drawings of characters and animals. On earlier pots Persian characters are depicted as wearing trousers and jackets, very barbaric from a Greek perspective, but dignified and noble warriors.

After the triumphs of the Persian war, the depiction of Persians became more mocking and derisive, notably in the image of a defeated Persian sitting side-saddle (effeminate) on a donkey (not a warlike horse) facing backwards.

Green pot showing a Persian warrior seated side-saddle, facing backwards on a donkey (about 470 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

Or take the Persian habit of having slaves carry a parasol to protect you from the fierce Middle Eastern sun. In Greek depictions, this was turned into parasols for delicate ladies, associating the Persians with effeminacy. In part this was because women played no part in Athenian politics and so were, in a sense, free to toy with decadent habits. Another one the exhibition points out, is the use of make-up and eyeliner, something Persian men wore but would be unthinkable in a fine, upstanding male Greek citizen.

Fish were another pressure point. Rich Athenians imported from the Persians a taste for rare and exotic fish, something which was publicly disapproved of, as shown here by a vase illustration and a disapproving quote from the playwright Aristophanes. (Compare and contrast with Roman moralists from Cicero onwards singling out ownership of rare fish ponds as one of the first markers of the Roman Republic’s slide into decadence and decay.)

Remember the rhytons which figured largely in the first room? This room has half a dozen examples showing how the Greeks adapted and undermined their grandiloquent originals. For a start they’re generally made from the Greeks’ favourite material, good democratic clay not ostentatious silver. And , as in this example, the bombastic use of an animal’s head (a lion’s) is undermined by the realistic and very Greek narrative depicted on the main body of the vase, above it.

Lion head drinking cup © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a case explaining that the Persians used images of bulls, lions and griffins in their power objects, but that these characteristically Persian motifs were also incorporated by Athenian designers. The exhibition features examples including beautifully crafted jewellery such as pendants and bracelets, and even a wonderful pair of earrings with tiny deer-heads in the shape of rhytons. What had been exemplary markers of Achaemenid royal court have been transformed into high-end fashion accessories for wealthy Athenians.

Interestingly, Persian motifs and depictions of characters wearing classic Persian dress became slowly more stylised and generalised, over time. A century after peace had been made with Persia (i.e. by 350) Persian motifs had been generalised into images and symbols of the vague East, including griffins, Amazons and other legendary animals and peoples.

Gateway 2. Alexander’s conquests

As with the passage from room 1 to room 2, so the passage from room 2 to room 3 is through a narrow, relatively low archway painted jet black in which is embedded a screen showing an animation, in this case showing the path of Alexander’s astonishing victories across Anatolia, into Egypt and then across Mesopotamia, Persia and Afghanistan.

Map showing extent of Alexander’s conquests in 323 BC. As you can see, it almost completely replicates the extent of the Achaemenid Empire at its height (source: Encyclopedia Britannica)

Room 3. Hellenistic culture

Born in 356 BC Alexander inherited the throne of Macedonia on the death of his father, Philip II, in 336, at the age of 20, and almost immediately set about fighting his rivals in northern and central Greece, wars in which he enjoyed unparalleled success, uniting all of Greece under his rue before pursuing campaigns in Asia Minor, into Egypt and then east into Mesopotamia.

The period from Alexander’s death in 323 down until the overthrow (suicide) of Queen Cleopatra VII of Egypt in 31 BC, is generally referred to as the Hellenistic period.

Alexander not only swept aside the Persian empire but the range and cosmopolitan nature of his empire ushered in a new age in which eastern and western styles of luxury were fused, hence the need for a distinct adjective, ‘Hellenistic’ style, a style which originated in Greece but freely incorporated eastern and oriental subject matter and styles.

Alexander has, of course, been traditionally viewed as a great Greek hero. The curators ask the teasing question, was he? Or could he more accurately be described as the last Achaemenid king? Because when he conquered the Persian Empire he inherited a highly organised, centralised administration. He maintained the existing system of provinces and retained some Persian governors. And then he remodelled images of his rule on the Persian style. He held court in the tent of his foe, Darius III and ordered suppliants to kneel before him, in a most ungreek manner.

In the era after Alexander’s conquests, cities across Asia developed as trading hubs for precious materials such as gold, silvery and ivory, housing specialist craftsmen. True to the spirit of Hellenism, they mixed motifs from Greece, Persia and Egypt.

Room 3 displays

Again there are a couple of panels summarising the history before we move on to look in detail at a range of objects. One of the most stunning is a gold wreath from Turkey, similar to those found in elite tombs in the kingdom of Macedonia. The gold oak wreath consists of two branches, bound together at the front by a model of a bee and with two gold cicadas concealed among the leaves. From the tomb of a local aristocrat in western Turkey, it epitomises the spread of ‘luxury’ across the region and the evolution of cosmopolitan styles in the wake of Alexander’s conquests.

Gold wreath: can you spot the two cicadas hidden among the leaves? One is just above the bottom-left leaf; the ‘bee’ is at the top of the thin circle of gold, with 3 triangular wedges at the bottom, looking more like a tiny owl © The Trustees of the British Museum

There’s a display case about ivory, explaining the culture’s attitude to elephants, the trade in tusks and the ‘luxury’ good made from them. There’s a set of clothes, trousers and a jacket, representing Hellenistic cultural synthesis. It’s actually a recreation of a Persian riding costume. Persians wore a costume which included cap, coat, tunic and trousers. Alexander liked to mix Persian and Macedonian costume. He adopted the tunic, cap and sash but not the trousers which, as a good Greek, he considered barbaric.

Persian riding costume as recreated by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones (2022)

The Panagyurishte Treasure

But pride of place in the third room goes to extraordinary Panagyurishte Treasure from Bulgaria (roughly equivalent to ancient Thrace). Accidentally discovered by three brothers in 1949, these treasures are outstanding examples of ancient metalworking and demonstrate the influence of Persian and Greek luxury across the Balkans.

Remember the Persian rhytons from room one, and how we saw them being echoed and rework by the Athenians in room two? Well, of the nine pieces in the Panagyurishte Treasure, no fewer than eight are rhytons, beautifully crafted gleaming gold. The ninth object, the big circular plate, is one of the shallow bowls which you poured wine into from a rhyton and actually drank from. Still can’t really imagine how you’d do this without spilling loads of wine down your front, unless you were exceptionally dexterous.

Panagyurishte Treasure © National Museum of History, Bulgaria

The Panagyurishte treasures rarely leave Bulgaria, and were last seen in the UK in 1976, so this is a once-in-a-generation opportunity to see them.

Information cabinets: raw materials and techniques

The exhibition is punctuated by information ‘boxes’, white cubes with text printed on them and a little glass pane showing samples of the material being explained. So there’s a box devoted to frankincense which contains samples of the aromatic gum from frankincense trees which was used in antiquity as medicine and incense. Apparently rulers of Arabia sent to the Achaemenid emperor every year about 26,000 tonnes of frankincense as tribute, which was then distributed to rulers across the empire as a symbol of the emperor’s largesse.

There’s a box about silver and its role in Persian artistry, which contains some actual silver ore, ingots and silver coins.

There’s one about the marble the ancient Greeks used to build the Parthenon and other temples, explaining that the particular type they used (‘Pentelic’ marble from Mount Pentelikon, 10k from Athens) contained traces of oxidised iron which gives the buildings that warm glow around sunset time, with some examples of marble fragments.

There were other similar explanations and samples of alabaster (‘a soft, luminous stone prized for its coloration and distinctive veining’) and ivory (the role of elephants in Persian and Greek culture, and the use of ivory, having a display case to themselves, including a cute ivory carving of a satyr’s head, which once decorated the head-rest of a couch).

Some of these info boxes are complemented by videos, each only about 60 seconds long, which give you insight into methods and techniques. There’s an interesting one about techniques used to manufacture a stunning Persian robe (displayed next to it), another one about how to create black glaze pottery ancient Greek style, one showing how the Greeks used glazes to give ceramic pottery a finish which mimicked Persian metalware. Persian metalware = decadent luxury; Greek pottery = democracy and morality.

But the standout one for me, one of the highlights of the exhibition, was a 60-second video showing how the Tyrian purple dye, famous across the Mediterranean for over for millennia, is actually made. I’ve read about it hundreds of times but never before seen a craftsman take one of the murex sea snails, crack it open with a hammer, dexterously extract its hypobranchial gland from the gloopy body and add this to a load of others kept in a jar, where sunlight and decay make them turn a rich purple colour. Once the coloration process is complete, the jar of glands is laid out in the sun to dry, then ground to a fine powder to create the basis of the purple dye, for over a thousand years associated with royalty and power. Because of its labour-intensive production, pure Tyrian dye was more expensive, pound for pound, than gold.

Conclusions

Does the exhibition succeed in its aim of persuading me that there was less of a binary opposition between Greek abstemiousness and Persian ‘luxury’ than previously thought? To be honest, it’s difficult to say. I imagine that most visitors, like me, are just not qualified enough to judge and are entirely in the hands of the curators. If they say so, I guess it must be so.

What does come over, for me at any rate, was a related but different conclusion, which is to do with the profound disconnect between official discourse (Greek texts) and the evidence of the objects on the ground, of the life of people in the broader culture which, the curators claim, strongly contradicts official Greek propaganda.

It made me wonder if it’s always true, if it’s a rule of human societies, that governments, almost by their nature, have views and official versions which fetishise a nation’s culture and heritage and so on – but that these will always clash with the far more messy and complex realities of life on the ground, of how people actually live, with the language and artefacts and habits and customs of actual populations, which often don’t fit into anybody’s neat categories.

To put it another way: that, throughout history, societies are always more multicultural than their leaders want or imagine them to be.*

Other rooms

The Greeks and Persians are favourite attractions at the museum, and at the end of the exhibition there’s a list of rooms where you can see objects related to the exhibition, being:

  • Nereid monument (room 17)
  • Parthenon (room 18)
  • ancient Athens (room 19)
  • The world of Alexander (room 22)
  • ancient Iran (room 52)
  • Mesopotamia 1500 to 539 BC (room 55)

* This thought has behind it the evidence and analysis presented in Michael Ignatieff’s trilogy of books about nations and nationalism.

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Posted by Simon on May 5, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/05/05/luxury-and-power-persia-to-greece-british-museum/

To Hell and Back: Europe 1914 to 1949 by Ian Kershaw (2015)

This is volume seven in the eight-volume Penguin History of Europe and it is very good. It has to cover a lot of ground and Kershaw does it clearly and authoritatively. He does this more by focusing on broad themes and issues, than getting snarled up in details. It is a high-level overview.

Contents

The period

In Kershaw’s opinion the 20th century is characterised by wars, immense wars, and falls naturally into two halves – the period of the two world wars 1914 to 1945, and then the Cold War, 1945 to 1990.

The Cold War will be dealt with in the ninth and final volume of the series. This volume covers the earlier period but Kershaw makes the point that, as the violence and chaos of the Second War continued after its official end, and that it took a few years for its repercussions – and the shape of the post-war world – to fully emerge, so his account ends not on VE or VJ Day 1945, but goes on till 1949, the year the Berlin Airlift ended (12 May) and the Federal Republic of Germany was created (20 September).

The themes

In Kershaw’s view the 20th century to 1949 was characterised by four large themes or issues:

1. An explosion of ethno-racist nationalism

The collapse of the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and Russian Empires both ‘liberated’ a lot of peoples who now set up independent nations (Hungary, Czechoslovakia, Poland, Ukraine, Yugoslavia, Turkey) – but also confirmed the trend whereby these new nations defined themselves ethnically.

In the big rambling empires all sorts of religious and ethnic groups may have resented each other but managed to live alongside each other, in part because they were all subjects of the emperor or sultan. Ethnic nationalism destroyed this tolerance. At a stroke, if you didn’t speak the national language of the national people who the new nation was set up for, you were an outsider and, by implication and sometimes even by law, a second-class citizen. The Jews were outcast everywhere.

2. Bitter and irreconcilable demands for territorial revisionism

Before he brought America into the war, Woodrow Wilson had declared certain principles, namely that America would be fighting for 1. a peace without conquest (i.e. in the final peace deals, conquerors wouldn’t get to keep the land they’d acquired) and that 2. oppressed peoples would be liberated and given their independence / own nations.

In practice this second one proved tricky because centuries of living under rambling empires had resulted in a tremendous mixing-up of populations. To give an example, a large area in the east of Anatolia was known as Armenia and was the traditional homeland of the Armenian people – but there were large Armenian populations scattered all over the rest of the Ottoman Empire, not least in the area known as Cilicia, at the other end of Anatolia from Armenia proper: so what happens to them?

The victors in the war laboured long and hard over complicated treaties (Versailles, Trianon, Saint Germain), drawing lines on maps and creating new nations states. But it proved impossible not to include in almost all of them large ethnic minorities a) who resented not living in their nation b) who were resented by the majority population for not speaking the national language, having the correct type of name or religion.

And it proved impossible to do this without creating a burning sense of grievance on the part of the nations who lost territory: Germany lost 13% of its pre-war territory and 10% of its population (p.119); Russia lost control of the Baltic states and Finland; Bulgaria also lost some territory, but Hungary lost a whopping 75% of its former pre-WW1 territories so that some three and a half Hungarians found themselves living outside Hungary, many of them in the new enlarged Romania which became nearly twice the size of its 1914 embodiment.

Kershaw gives the chapter where he describes all this the title ‘The Carve-Up’.

3. A prolonged crisis of capitalism, which many thought was terminal, and needed to be replaced by new social structures

The First World War left economic wreckage at every level, from devastated agricultural land through ruined industrial sectors. This was a lot more true in the East where entire regions such as Ukraine, Belarus and Galicia were devastated, than in the relatively static West, where only a relatively small zone about 50 kilometers wide had been devastated by the trench warfare.

At a higher level, all the combatants had had to borrow vast sums to fund their war efforts, and this left many on the brink of bankruptcy. The Western nations had borrowed heavily from the USA. To repay its debt France insisted on huge reparations from Germany. When Germany defaulted on the payments in 1923, France occupied the industrial Ruhr area of Germany, the German government told the workers to go on strike in protest, and the fragile German economy collapsed leading to the famous hyperinflation where you needed a wheelbarrow full of cash to buy a cigarette.

This situation was sorted out at an international conference which enacted the Dawes Plan, a simple triangle whereby America lent money to Germany to rebuild her economy, the German government used the tax revenue generated from its growing economy to pay reparations to France, and France used the German reparations to pay back its immense war loans to America and pledged to buy American products.

This elegant plan underpinned the brittle prosperity of the years 1924 to 1929, the Jazz Era, the Roaring Twenties, the Weimar Years. But, as we all know, it collapsed with the 1929 Wall Street Crash which not only led to prolonged Depression in the States, but demolished the Dawes Plan and plunged Europe into depression, triggering the mounting unemployment and renewed inflation which set the scene for the rise of the Nazis.

Throughout this period, many thinkers and commentators thought the capitalist system was doomed. It seemed to be failing efore their eyes, in America, Britain, France and Germany. Many thought Western civilisation could only survive by mutating into new forms, by evolving new social structures.

4. Acute class conflict, given new impetus by the advent of Bolshevik Russia

There had been class-based uprisings and revolutions throughout the 19th century (maybe the brutal Paris Commune is the most extreme and clearly class-based example) and a wealth of thinkers, not only Marx, had interpreted the grotesque inequality between the new factory and business owners and the deeply impoverished industrial proletariat as a clash of classes.

But the Bolshevik seizure of power in Russia transformed the situation. The Bolshevik regime became a symbol and lightning rod for class antagonisms all round the world. It appeared to offer a working example of a genuinely alternative social system, one in which the government sequestered all the means of production and distribution and ran them for the good of the entire people, not just a wealthy few.

But it had two baleful consequences:

1. The Russian Revolution split the Left

From the establishment of the Communist International (or Comintern) in 1919 until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the forces of the Left in every country in the world would be divided between communist parties taking direct orders from Moscow, and all the other forces of the Left who, quite often, the communists undermined and sabotaged (see the Spanish Civil War). This was a fatal division of the forces opposing the Right and Fascism, which Kershaw describes as occurring in country after country throughout the period.

2. The Russian Revolution was a galvanising force in the rise of the Right

Right-wing parties everywhere reached out to the newly-enfranchised masses (all European nations expanded their voting base after the war, for the first time creating really mass democracies), especially the large numbers of middle and lower-middle-class voters, and terrified them with visions of blood-thirsty revolutionaries taking over their town or country, lining all ‘class enemies’ (i.e. them) up against the wall, confiscating their businesses and hard-won savings.

One way of looking at it was that, without the very real existence of the Bolshevik regime and the threat from growing communist parties in every country in Europe, there would have been no Fascism.

And the closer you were to Bolshevik Russia, the more pressing the conflict seemed – from Poland which was actually invaded by the Red Army in 1920, to countries like Romania, Bulgaria and Hungary where initial dalliances with left-wing governments quickly gave way to right-wing authoritarian regimes (the Iron Guard in Romania, the royal authoritarian dictatorship of Tsar Boris III in Bulgaria, the right-wing administration of admiral Miklós Horthy in Hungary).

All these trends were exemplified by the central and most important European state, Germany, whose Weimar regime tried to follow Western norms of governance, but was undermined 1) by the extreme social divisions sparked by recurrent economic crises, 2) by the immense and widespread resentment created by the punitive Versailles Treaty, and 3) by a culture of subversion and street violence which the Right, eventually, was to win.

Conclusion

All four elements (nationalism, economic crises, left-wing politics, squabbling over territory) had of course pre-existed all across Europe. But they were driven to new heights of intensity by the First World War and the widespread chaos which followed. And then combined like toxic chemicals, catalysed by the series of political and economic crises, to create unprecedented levels of bitterness, hatred, anger and social division all across Europe between the wars.

The origins of the First World War

There are as many opinions about the origins of the First World War as there are grains of sand on a beach. Kershaw emphasises the folly of the German government sending Austro-Hungary, as it pondered how to punish Serbia for the assassination of Austrian Archduke Ferdinand, a ‘blank check’, promising to support them come-what-may. This encouraged the Dual Monarchy to outface the Russians, which of course prompted the Russkies to mobilise etc etc.

But reading Kershaw’s account what came over to me as the really decisive source of the crisis was the Austro-Hungarian slowness to act. Other heads of state had been assassinated in the decade leading up to 1914 without sparking a general crisis. The other powers expected Austria to attack Serbia and deliver a short sharp reprimand, maybe occupy Belgrade, demand some reparations before withdrawing etc.

But, as Kershaw puts it, the Austro-Hungarian Empire only had two speeds, very slow or stop, and it took them nearly four weeks to write and send their ultimatum to the Serbian government.

This appalling delay gave all the other European governments time to consider how they could use the crisis for their own ends, not least Germany, whose military leaders told the Kaiser this was a golden opportunity to thrash the Russians before the Russians completed their well-publicised plan to modernise and expand their army, which was due to be completed by 1917. The German High Command persuaded the Kaiser that it was now or never.

If Austro-Hungary had gone in hard and fast with a surprise attack into Serbia within days of the assassination, a conference would have been called among the powers – much as happened after the first and second Moroccan crises (1905 and 1911) or the two Balkan wars (1912 and 1913) – to sort the problem out, probably force Serbia to pay reparations, and defuse tensions among the powers.

So you could argue that it was the byzantine and elephantine bureaucracy of the unwieldy Austro-Hungarian state which caused the cataclysmic conflict which defined the entire 20th century.

This view gives edge to the reading of a novel like Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities with its sustained satire on the pompous ineffectiveness of the Austrian administration. Maybe not so funny after all…

Civilised Western and backward Eastern Europe

There’s a whole genre of books devoted to explaining ‘the Rise of the West’ i.e. how Western empires ended up by the early twentieth century ruling a lot of the rest of the world. Harder to find are books which investigate the simpler question: Why was Western Europe relatively ‘civilised’ whereas regimes got steadily more repressive, undemocratic and authoritarian the further East across Europe you travelled. Kershaw’s book suggests some answers.

1. Western Europe was more ethnically homogeneous than central or Eastern Europe. England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden – these were populated by homogeneous populations of people identifying with the nation, with only tiny, insignificant minorities (Belgium is the exception which proves this rule, with low-lying conflict between the Flemings and the Walloons). Therefore, one of the key triggers of post-war social tension – ethnically jumbled populations with conflicting claims – simply didn’t exist in Western Europe..

A notable exception was Spain where two large ethnically distinct groups, the Catalans and the Basques, combined with a backward, poverty-stricken population to make ruling the country problematic, as its slide towards civil war was to highlight.

2. Nation states in the West were long established. The French could trace their nation back to Charlemagne and the British to Alfred the Great, certainly to Magna Carta in 1216. Both nations had parliaments by the 1200s. That gave them 700 years experience of evolving laws and customs and strategies to manage social conflict. Compare and contrast with Germany, which was only unified in 1871 and whose experiments with self-governance over the next 70 years were not, shall we say, particularly successful. It was only after the British and Americans taught the Germans how to run a modern democracy in the post-war occupation that they finally got it right. Or compare with any of the ‘successor’ states to the collapsed empires – Hungary, Yugoslavia, Poland, which had barely any experience managing themselves. Spain, though it had existed as a political entity since the Unification of the 1490s, had only just ceased to be a monarchy. Only in 1931 did they expel their king and declare themselves a republic.

So all these nations or administrations had very shallow roots and little experience of self-government.

To put the same thing another way, Kershaw explains that in Western European countries (and the USA) the state had, over time shaped the nation – the institutions of the state had created a national consciousness which identified with these institutions. The institutions of state had become part of the populations sense of nationhood, for example, in Britain, the Queen, the Houses of Parliament, Black Rod, the Leader of the Opposition and so on.

It was the opposite in the new nations of central and eastern Europe. Here ethnically purist nationalisms predated any idea of what a nation was, and the new states were created in the name of ethnically limited nations: Poland for the Poles, Hungary for the Hungarians and so on. The precise political form the new states took was secondary; the aim was to promote the nation.

Thus the institutions of the new democratic states were mostly new and, as they proved themselves incapable of managing the political and economic crises of the 1930s, broad sections of the population had no qualms about overthrowing these institutions and replacing them with different ones. They didn’t have the national identification with Queen and Parliament or President and Congress that the British and Americans have. So they got rid of them and tried something new, which turned out almost always to be rule by the army or authoritarian figures.

Thus in the USA or Britain, most people thought of politics as a simple choice between Labour or Tory, or Republican or Democrat. Most people accepted ‘democracy’ and few people thought about overthrowing it. But the democratic state was such a new invention in the ten new countries of post-war Europe that plenty of politicians, intellectuals and activists could easily imagine overthrowing and replacing it with a different model more appropriate to the times, and almost always more authoritarian.

3. The further East you went, the less industrialised, the less ‘developed’ i.e. the more ‘backward’ countries became. It appears to have been a simple gradient, a line you could draw on a graph. In Britain at the end of the First World War only 10% of the working population worked on the land whereas 72% of the Romanians worked on the land. Rural workers tended to be illiterate and easy to sway towards simplistic, nationalistic regimes in a way the highly educated population of, say, Britain, would have found laughable. Thus Oswald Mosley’s high-profile British Union of Fascists caused well-publicised public disorders, but never had more than 50,000 members, far fewer than the National Trust or the Women’s Institute.

Of course the most easterly European nation was Russia, which – following the West-East rule:

  • had the highest proportion – 80% – of illiterate peasants
  • no tradition of elective democracy – the Tsar only set up a sort of parliament, the Duma, in 1905, but he and the ruling classes made sure it had no power
  • few if any of the institutions of civic society
  • and a ‘culture of violence, brutality and scant regard for human life’ (p.113) as my reviews of some of its classic fiction tend to confirm (Dr Zhivago, Tales From the Don, Red Cavalry, One Day In the Life of Ivan Denisovich)

The weakness of inter-war democracy

Kershaw has a fascinating passage examining the post-war political systems of every country in Europe (pages 123 to 133) which shows exactly why ‘democracy’ had such thin roots. Later on, a similar survey explains why these weak democracies almost all collapsed into authoritarian regimes by the time of, or during the second war (pages 183 to 192). European democratic systems during this period:

1. Used electoral voting systems which encouraged weak government. Many used variations of proportional representation, which may, on the one hand, have led to general assemblies which were accurate reflections of national views, but also led to weak governments which followed each other with bewildering speed:

  • Spain had 34 governments between 1902 and 1923
  • Portugal 45 administrations between 1910 and 1926
  • Yugoslavia had 45 political parties
  • Italy had 6 changes of government between 1919 and 1922
  • France had six different governments in just over a year, April 1925 to July 1926

2. All this disillusioned much of the population with their mixture of incompetence, endless squabbling, corruption, all too often giving the sense that politicians put party interest above national interest. This allowed right-wing extremists to tar all democratic politicians with neglecting The Nation, even accusations of treason.

3. This created what Kershaw calls a ‘political space’ in the newly-created countries – or countries with new political systems – into which broad sections of the populations were all-too-ready to let a Strong Man step and run the country properly:

  • Admiral Miklos Horthy in Hungary in 1920
  • Mussolini in Italy in 1922
  • General Primo de Rivera in Spain 1923
  • in Albania Ahmed Zogu seized power in 1924 and declared himself King Zog
  • General Pilsudski took control in Poland 1926
  • General Gomes de Costa took power in Portugal in 1926

On the eve of the Second World War only about eleven countries in Europe were functioning democracies and they were all located in the north and the west – Britain, Ireland, France, Switzerland, Belgium, the Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and tiny Iceland; whereas about 60% of Europe lived in 16 countries under repressive, authoritarian rule with curtailed civil rights and minorities facing discrimination and persecution: in the South, Spain, Portugal, Italy and Greece; in the East, Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, Bulgaria, Albania, Yugoslavia, Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia; and slap-bang in the middle, the largest country in Europe, the nation that set the tone, Germany.

What is fascism and how does it take hold?

Kershaw is best known as a historian of Hitler and the Nazis. You can feel the depth of his knowledge when he comes to describe the situation in Germany after the First World War, during the boom years of the mid-1920s, during the Depression (1929 to 1933), and as he explains the reason for the Nazis’ appeal and rise in each of these periods.

All too often histories of the Nazis focus so exclusively on the uniqueness of the German context that the reader is hard-pressed to draw broader conclusions. An excellent thing about this book is that it is a conscious attempt to cover the history of all of Europe, so that in each of the micro-periods it’s divided into, Kershaw goes out of his way to explain the situation in most if not all of Europe’s 30 or so countries; how, for example, the onset of the Depression affected not only Britain, France and Germany (which you always get in the standard histories) but countries right across Europe, from Spain to Greece, Norway to Portugal.

This proves extremely useful when he gets to the rise of the Nazis and their successful seizure of power (Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in January 1933 and within 6 months had crushed all other rival sources of power, all other political parties, the parliament, trades unions, universities, professions, every aspect of a modern state had either been Nazified or abolished).

It’s useful because after explaining all this, he goes on to draw general conclusions, to define what Fascism is, to ask Why Fascism succeeded in Italy and Germany and Why Fascism failed everywhere else. This has all kinds of benefits; one is it allows him to draw a distinction between regimes which were right-wing and authoritarian but not actually Fascist, explanations which we can apply to our contemporary situation in 2024.

1. What is Fascism?

Kershaw says that trying to define Fascism is like trying to nail jelly to a wall because its core attribute is hyper-nationalism i.e. glorification of the nation with its special language and history and traditions – and the precise details of each nation’s history and culture will vary according to circumstances.

Thus an attempt to hold a pan-Fascist Congress in Geneva in 1934 failed because a) Germany didn’t bother to turn up and b) the other delegates couldn’t agree joint plans of action.

These caveats notwithstanding, Kershaw says Fascism includes:

  • hyper-nationalist emphasis on the unity of an integral nation which gains its identity from the cleansing of all who don’t belong – foreigners, ethnic minorities, undesirables
  • racial exclusiveness (though not necessarily biological racism of the Nazi type) with an insistence on the special, unique and superior quality of the nation
  • radical, violent commitment to the complete destruction of political enemies – communists, liberals, democrats, sometimes even conservatives
  • emphasis on militarism and manliness, usually involving paramilitary organisations, linked to worship of war as cleansing, purifying the nation etc
  • belief in authoritarian leadership

Some also had irredentist goals i.e. reclaiming lost territory. Some were anti-capitalist, reorganising economies along corporatist lines, abolishing trade unions and directing the economy through corporations of industries.

All these elements are not unique to fascist rule. They can be present in authoritarian, right-wing governments which want to overthrow or dismantle the existing state and replace it with nationalist, authoritarian rule. What distinguishes Fascism is its insistence on total commitment to bend the collective will of the entire population to the creation of an entirely new nation, expressed in ideas like the New Man, New Society.

Most right-wing authoritarian regimes (like all the South American dictatorships of the 1970s) essentially want to conserve the existing social order, and simply eliminate the left-communist, union elements which threaten it. Fascism goes much further. Fascism is a revolutionary movement because it seeks to sweep awaythe existing order and replace it with a new, totally unified society which will produce New Human Beings, a higher form of people who express the quintessence of the Nation and its epic national qualities.

2. Why does Fascism succeed?

1. Elites lose faith in, and control of, democracy The most important factor in the rise of Fascism – of the extreme, radical Right – is whether the forces of conservatism – business, military, financial and social elites – believe they can get their way through the existing political and social order, or not. If these powers in society retain the belief they can work through the existing system they will support it. Only when they have completely lost faith in the existing system, or believe they have lost the ability to control it, will the elites help to, or acquiesce in, overthrowing it.

In this interpretation, the key to avoiding Fascism is ensuring that all or most elements of these powerful elites believe the existing (parliamentary, democratic) system is the best mechanism for getting their way, or some of it. Only when the existing system has been completely discredited, and the elites feel they are losing control of it and look around for alternatives, does the space open up for radical political change.

Rule 1: Keep the ruling elites invested in the parliamentary system.

2. Fascists play up the threat of communism (and atheism) The second factor is the threat of communism as it affects two sectors of society, the elites and the middle classes.

The realistic prospect of a communist regime coming to power and implementing real communist policies (nationalising all industries, confiscating private property) obviously threatens the interests of the business, economic, class elites. If these interests feel that the existing parliamentary system really is going to allow hard-core Socialist or communist governments to administer Socialist policies, then they will intervene to prevent it.

But communism doesn’t just threaten the elite. It also directly threatens the jobs and livelihoods and cultural capital of a large part of the population, the so-called middle classes, which covers a wide range from the professions (doctors, lawyers) at the top through small businessmen, shopkeepers, small craftsmen and artisans and so on.

Historically, the majority of Fascist supporters have not been from the aristocracy or elites (who often look down on fascist vulgarity) but from the threatened and pressurised middle and lower-middle classes. The elites will have a large number of the population on their side if these people, too, feel threatened by radical socialist policies, not only by their economic policies but by their attacks on traditional culture and values, as progressive in our time have mounted a sustained attack on traditional beliefs (around family, gender, racial guilt etc).

Spain 1936 is an example where the newly elected, aggressively socialist government threatened not only the property and livelihoods of the big landowners and big business but a wide tranche of the middle classes, petit-bourgeoisie and so on. They also directly threatened the Catholic church and all its values, patriarchy, the traditional family, the sanctity of marriage and so on, not having calculated how many traditionalists and believers this would antagonise. They created, in other words, an impressively powerful coalition of enemies.

Kershaw has a section specifically addressing the role of the Protestant churches and the Catholic church during the crisis years of the 1930s and the war. What comes over loud and clear is that the Pope and the Catholic Church, although horrified by the Nazis, thought the communists would be even worse.

Same in Spain. It’s well known that Hitler and Mussolini gave material aid to General Franco, flying his troops in from their garrisons in Africa and bombing Republican strongholds. Less well-known that Britain and France, after some hesitation, decided to adopt a policy of strict neutrality.

Rule 2: Avoid the threat of genuinely socialist, let alone communist, policies. This won’t lead to socialist policies, it will trigger the fervent opposition of the majority of the population.

3. Widespread grievances, specially about lost wars or lost land Political parties don’t exist in a vacuum, they need supporters. Voters, populations, peoples don’t migrate to extreme parties without reason. Almost always it is because they feel threatened by loss or are aggrieved because they already have lost important aspects of their lives (jobs, money, status).

A very large number of people in Weimar Germany felt they stood to lose, or already had lost, jobs or status. Classic Nazi members were white-collar workers, small businessmen, former army officers or NCOs, shopkeepers, small craftsmen, farmers, a huge raft of people who had suffered monetary loss under the economic crisis, or loss of status (ex-army officers, unemployed white-collar workers).

The entire German nation was united by a sense of grievance at the unfair provisions of the Treaty of Versailles, the loss of large parts of territory and the punitive reparations.

The Nazis played on the widespread grievances of disparate sectors of the population and claimed to speak for them against a corrupt system which they promised they would sweep away, restoring everyone’s losses (of jobs and status), and restoring the losses of the entire nation.

Rule 3: Don’t give people and peoples long-running grievances.

4. National pride and national enemies The easiest way to address people’s grievances is to bundle them up into all-encompassing calls for a revival of the nation. Pretty much all Germans felt humiliated by the terms of the Treaty of Versailles, so it wasn’t rocket science for the Nazis to make one of the main planks a call for National Revival and throwing off national humiliation.

And the easiest way to rally national pride, national revival, national rebirth, is to identify some kind of internal enemy who stands in the way. For the Nazis it was their mad irrational hatred of Jews (who, it is always shocking to recall, made up just 0.76% of the German population). Around the same time Stalin was uniting the mass population behind him by attacking ‘kulaks’, ‘saboteurs’ etc. All authoritarian regimes are quick to identify enemies and rally the majority of the population against them.

It’s tricky because calls for national revival are an extremely common tactic of all politicians, and many people are patriotic in a relatively harmless way. It obviously becomes toxic when it becomes mixed with calls to defeat ‘enemies’, either internal or external. ‘Make America Great Again’ is fine in itself, until you start blaming the Mexicans or the Chinese for the fact that it isn’t, currently, great. Or the Jews. Or the Liberals or the Socialists etc.

Rule 4: Be wary of calls to national pride, nationalism and national revival which rely on demonising an ‘enemy’.

5. Economic crisis Implicit in the above is the context of the economic or social situation becoming so extreme and dire that a) the large percentage of the population cease to have faith in the system b) parties of the extreme Left or extreme Right can come into existence, get a purchase on the population, and get into the political system.

Rule 5: Avoid extreme economic or social failure.

6. Unstable political systems Political systems like proportional representation, which cater to every political element in a society, allow the proliferation of small, often extreme parties. Once established, extreme parties have the potential to grow quickly and challenge the status quo. This is what the Nazis did in Germany.

This is less likely in ‘mature’ democracies with winner-takes-all systems like Britain and the USA. Our systems are dominated by two main parties, which are themselves flexible and changing coalitions of interests, which ensure that most views have a political ‘home’ and give a broad spectrum of beliefs at least the possibility of seeing their views and policies implemented.

Even in a stable democracy like Britain’s, it is still possible for new parties to erupt and threaten the status quo if the social movement/mood they reflect is powerful enough. This is what UKIP did to the British political system in the lead-up to the Brexit Referendum. What Boris Johnson then did was in line with the long tradition of mature Western democracies, he incorporated most of UKIP’s policies (‘Get Brexit Done’) into one of the two mainstream parties (the Conservatives) thus drawing its teeth, neutralising it, and maintaining the stability of the two-party system. If it resulted in the Conservatives moving to the right that in fact reflects the wishes of a large part of the UK population who voted for Brexit and voted for Boris.

Mature democracies incorporate and neutralise radical elements. Immature democracies allow radical elements to establish themselves and attract support.

Rule 6: Incorporate potentially disruptive movements into the existing system – don’t keep them outside to become a focal point for destabilisation.

Kershaw summarises:

Fascism’s triumph depended upon the complete discrediting of state authority, weak political elites who could no longer ensure that a system would operate in their interests, the fragmentation of party politics, and the freedom to build a movement that promised a radical alternative. (p.232)

3. The difference between fascism and authoritarianism

Authoritarianism – authoritarian dictatorships – generally want to keep things as they are or turn the clock back. They all share a loathing and fear of socialism or communism not only because it’s a direct threat to their wealth and power but because it threatens change, threatens to sweep away old values and traditions. Authoritarians want to save the nation by preserving its (conservative) traditions from change.

Fascism, on the contrary, is a revolutionary and dynamic ideology which seeks to sweep away time-honoured and conservative institutions. It seeks a comprehensive rebirth of the nation, freed from the shackles of the past, liberated to fulfil its historic destiny (power, land, international respect), but also to create New People in a New Society.

Thus Kershaw is at pains to point out that, although most European nations became dictatorships on the brink of or during the Second World War – most of these were not fascist. They were military dictatorships first and foremost, which may have used this or that aspect of ‘fascist’ ideology or trappings as suited them, but without the fundamental fascist attribute of wanting to transform society.

  • When General Ioannis Metaxis established his dictatorship in Greece in 1936, his avowed intention was to save the nation from communism, and he tried to set up ‘fascist’ organisations but failed to secure anything like the total social control of a Hitler or Mussolini.
  • When General Edward Smigly-Ridz took control of Poland in 1937 as ‘Leader of the Nation’, the country became more nationalistic and more antisemitic but ‘there was nothing dynamic about this form of authoritarianism. No major attempt was made to mobilise the population. The regime was content to control the society. It had no ambitions to change it’ (p.262).
  • Even General Franco, after his military coup of July 1936, took a year to sort out the political aspects of what was essentially a military project. He co-opted the ideology of the banned Falange Party and coerced all the other right-wing organisations into joining it (p.240), but the party was only ever a political aspect of what remained a military rule. This was the polar opposite Germany, where a fanatically organised, civilian political party controlled the military as just one of the many levers of its total control over society.

Another fairly obvious difference is that some of these authoritarian regimes locked up fascists as well as communists, socialist, liberals, journalists etc. For example, the Polish and Portuguese dictatorships (pages 262 and 264) or Admiral Horthy’s authoritarian regime in Hungary, which banned the genuinely fascist Hungarian National Socialist Party and imprisoned its leader, Ferenc Szálasi (p.263).

In other words, for many authoritarian dictatorships, real hard-core fascism was just one more subversive or disruptive element which needed to be controlled.

One way of thinking about this is the contrast between merely authoritarian regimes and totalitarian regimes. Totalitarian regimes want your soul as well as your body, your mind as well as your vote. They insist on total control of every aspect of their citizens lives in order to create a new type of human being.

Everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state. (Mussolini)

Another way of thinking about the difference between authoritarian dictatorships and genuinely fascist regimes is that none of the dictatorships threatened the peace of Europe – the Western democracies didn’t lose any sleep about the foreign policy of Hungary, Bulgaria, Poland, Portugal. Even Spain, whose drawn-out civil war was violent and traumatic, never threatened to spill beyond its borders, never threatened the peace of Europe.

Unlike the irredentist and imperialist ambitions of the true fascist regimes, Italy and, most of all, Germany.

The rise of the Right and collapse of the Left in the 1930s

Putting the usual culprits Italy and Germany in the context of the wider, in fact of the complete European scene, brings out a fact I had never fully grasped before.

I suppose I knew that the 1930s were the era of The Dictator – although Kershaw’s review of every dictatorship in Europe really rams this fact home. The deeper point is that the catastrophic economic collapse of the early 1930s, which devastated nations, threw millions out of work, and led many to think capitalism was failing – did not produce a shift to the Left, in favour of thinkers and politicians who’d spent a lifetime criticising capitalism and supporting workers movements – it resulted, all across Europe, in a seismic shift to the Right.

The 1930s was the decade of the failure of the Left.

Why? Because despite its appeal to the kind of intellectuals whose works survive and are studied to this day, for the majority of the population the Left, in either its socialist or communist form, threatened the interests of:

  • most of the ruling class
  • most of the middle class
  • most if not all of the peasants – some may have heard rumours about Stalin’s forced collectivisation in Soviet Russia, all knew that the Left wanted to destroy the Church and traditional religion
  • even a portion of the skilled working class who stood to lose their perks and privileges
  • not to mention the large number of criminals and dossers who are generally left out of sociological calculations, the kind of people who fill the pages of novels like Alfred Döblin’s Berlin Alexanderplatz

In other words, the hard, radical Left always represents a minority of a society, and is always opposed by a majority in that society.

Which makes it all the more striking that such a disproportionate majority of the intellectuals of many of these societies moved to the Left. Kershaw has a chapter giving a tourist’s-eye view of the ‘intellectual life’ of Europe in the 1930s and 40s (which jumps around superficially, as historians’ quick compliance with the need to mention something about ‘culture’ so often do) – but the general drift is that from Gramsci through Orwell, Sartre to the Frankfurt School, the majority of Europe’s significant intellectuals took a left-wing, often out-and-out communist, view of the continent’s problems.

In other words, a high proportion of the intellectual class of Europe was profoundly out of step with the majority of their populations.

That’s one rather crude interpretation, anyway. The deeper reasons for the shift to the Right bear investigating and pondering. A deep analysis would give insights into why, in our time, years of austerity, uncertainty and economic stagnation since the 2008 Crash have resulted not in a mass outpouring of socialist idealism but, once again, led to the rise of right-wing leaders around the world. At the same time the intellectual and academic classes remain securely embedded in their progressive and left-wing ghettos (universities), out of touch with the populations they claim to interpret, and blankly incredulous of the leaders who keep getting elected (Trump, Johnson).

To return to the period under consideration, Germany’s dynamic Nazi ideology is in fact the exception that proves the rule to most of Europe during the period. So much ink has been spilt about Hitler and the Nazis but they were the product of a very distinctive set of circumstances – to take two of them, the fact that they were in Europe’s largest and most powerful nation, and that the entire nation felt huge grievance over the Versailles Treaty.

Focusing so much on bloody Hitler and his Nazi Party, whose historical situation was unique and so whose precise brand of turbo-charged Fascism is never going to recur, has distracted historians from the much more practical task of analysing the reasons for the rise of right-wing authoritarian regimes in general – which do recur with worrying regularity, which were widespread during the 1930s and 40s, which dominated Latin America and southern Europe in my boyhood (Portugal, Spain, Greece and Turkey all had military dictatorships in the 1970s), and which people worry are now reappearing in the guise of various ‘populist’ leaders.

Historians’ focus on one unique event (the Nazis) is, in my opinion, a distraction from analysing and thinking about how to prevent the far more common (almost mundane) phenomenon of military coups and authoritarian dictatorships.

The accidental rise of Adolf Hitler

As anybody who’s read about the period knows, Hitler didn’t storm to power, he was appointed by political elites who thought they could manipulate and control him to get their way. They did so because in late 1932 the Nazis had secured the largest share of the election vote and so had to be included in whatever government was set up – but, when they finally decided to appoint the vulgar little corporal Chancellor, the behind-the-scenes wheeler-dealers made sure to pack Hitler’s ‘cabinet’ with members of other parties. They thought that would moderate his policies. None of them had any idea how utterly ruthless Hitler would turn out to be in eliminating all these restraints on his power.

So possibly the key fact about Hitler’s rise to power is that it was the result of a mistake in political calculation by Germany’s political elite which had, by late 1932, lost all confidence in the ability of Weimar parliamentary democracy to deal with the country’s severe economic crisis.

Conclusions

Avoiding Fascism

What this analysis suggests is that avoiding Fascism is nothing to do with the Left-wing obsession with promoting workers rights, women’s rights, minority rights and so on. It involves ensuring that the powerful economic, social and military elites of a country continue to have faith in some form of parliamentary democracy as the best mechanism of protecting their interests.

Any political moves which threaten or jeopardise their interests, in effect, open the door to right-wing coups and worse.

Of course you probably require a number of other factors and preconditions, at the very least a) a political culture which accepts or has a tradition of coups, such as Spain’s with its long tradition of pronunciamentos, and b) a really severe economic or social crisis which the parliamentary system manifestly fails to manage.

Avoiding Europe

If you were American or Chinese or anyone looking at Europe from the outside it would be hard to avoid the conclusions that a) Europe is incapable of governing itself, and b) Europe is the most savage, bestial continent on earth.

For all their instability, nothing on the scale of either the First or Second World Wars took place in Latin America, Africa or the Indian sub-continent.

One way of looking at the Cold War is that, at the same time as the Soviet Union acquired a deep buffer zone to protect its western border (i.e. the Eastern Bloc countries) it was also taking control of the very region which contained the most ethnically mixed populations, had shown the most political instability, had been the location of terrible ethnic cleansing and enormous deaths.

In a sense the Soviet occupation of Eastern Europe liberated Western Europe from the burden dragging at its heel and, along with massive American financial and military aid, freed it (Western Europe) for the 30 years of economic growth and prosperity which followed.

It was Cecil Rhodes who made a speech in which he told his audience to remember that they were English and so had won first prize in the lottery of life. Obviously, at the time he was referring to our membership of the biggest empire the world had ever seen – but reading accounts of the twentieth century like this give the idea a whole new meaning.

Put simply, being born in England in the twentieth century meant you weren’t born on the continent of Europe which, as Kershaw vividly emphasises, between 1939 and 1945 descended into hell, real hell, the utter collapse of civilisation, mass slaughter, death camps, mass imprisonment and torture, gas chambers, the endless rape and murder of civilians, displacement and starvation.

In the entire catalogue of destruction, devastation and misery that made up the Second World War, the murder of Europe’s Jews was the lowest point of mankind’s descent into the abyss of inhumanity. The fires of the death-camp crematoria were almost literally the physical manifestation of hell on earth. (p.369)

Both my parents lived through the war as children, experiencing the Blitz and then the V-bombs, which wasn’t pleasant. But nonetheless they both had the immeasurable good fortune not to have been born on the Continent of Atrocity, and in the terrible middle years of the 20th century, that really was like winning a prize in the lottery of life.

Understanding Europe

Which leads to a final thought, which I’ll keep brief: maybe it is impossible for an English person to understand Europe. We were never invaded, devastated, forced to collaborate with the conqueror, to round up and deport English Jews, to execute our own socialists and liberals, and then reduced to starvation and chaos amid the smoking ruins of our cities.

The extremity of the experiences of every other nation in continental Europe during the war years (and described by Kershaw in gruelling detail) are beyond our experience or imagining. And so we never experienced anything like the same cultural or political extremity which wartime conditions produced. In the first post-war election in France, the Communist Party won 26% of the vote, in Britain 0.4%, reflecting the two nations very different recent experiences (p.488).

The great thoughts of Gramsci, Benjamin, Horkheimer, Adorno, Sartre and so on have dazzled generations of British students but bear no relationship at all to the history, culture and politics of the UK and its population. Which is why all those humanities students, drilled in their Benjamin and Lukacs, who voted for Jeremy Corbyn, helped him lead Labour to its most crushing electoral defeat in 50 years.

Brexit

It also explains something about Brexit. The ideal of a European Union has a real meaning for hundreds of millions of Europeans, raised for generations to believe it is better to be politically and economically united than to fight each other to the death as their grand-parents and great-grand-parents did.

But Britain really was an exception to the history of this terrible period, and that ‘exceptionialism’, for better or worse, was, during the period Kershaw describes, and obviously still is, a strong thread in British culture and population.

(I’m not shoehorning Brexit and ‘Europe’ into this review: the last 20 pages of Kershaw’s book explicitly discusses these issues. He describes the descent of the Iron Curtain across Europe, the continent’s division into two blocs being crystallised by the Marshall Plan, announced in June 1947. He quotes several Americans involved in co-ordinating Western Europe’s recovery from the war, not least George Marshall himself complaining that the British wanted to keep aloof from Europe, that the British wanted to benefit from a scheme designed to create an economically unified Europe ‘while at the same time maintaining the position of being not quite a European country’ – quoted page 516.)

I’m not approving or disapproving of Brexit, just pointing out that a book like this, which doesn’t hold back when it comes to describing the terror, murder, torture, holocausts, purges, massacres, reprisals, ethnic cleansing, mass deportations, executions and rapes which took place all across continental Europe during these years, can’t help but make you reflect how lucky we were to escape almost all of it, and how the cultural and political consequences of that very real ‘exceptional’ destiny have shaped our politics right down to the present.

Random facts

The books is full of hundreds of facts, figures and anecdotes. A few grabbed my attention:

In Britain just short of 70,000 civilians were killed by all German bombing in the entire 6-year war. In one night the firebombing of Hamburg killed some 34,000 civilians. The Hiroshima atom bomb is estimated to have killed about 66,000 people on the day, from the blast and fires, although many more died in the weeks and months that followed.

At their core, both world wars were wars between Germany and Russia. I knew the German High Command in 1914 knew they had a window of opportunity to attack Russia before its army came up to full strength, therefore they had an incentive to attack Russia while they still could. I didn’t realise the Germany High Command felt exactly the same in the late 1930s. Thus in both world wars, a – if not the – fundamental factor was the German gamble to take on Russia, and do it in a hurry.

The Irish taoiseach, Éamon de Valera, was one of a very few politicians who sent the Germans a formal note of condolence on the death of Adolf Hitler, 30 April 1945 (p.387).

Hitler loved Disney movies. He was delighted when Goebbels gave him 18 Mickey Mouse cartoons for Christmas 1937 (p.465).

The Venice Film Festival was founded in 1932 in Mussolini’s Italy. Winners of Best Italian Film and Best Foreign Film were awarded ‘Mussolini Cups’ (p.466). I think they should revive that tradition.

Credit

To Hell and Back: Europe 1914 to 1939 by Ian Kershaw was published by Allen Lane in 2015. All references are to the Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

First World War

Russian Revolution

Between the wars

The Weimar Republic

German literature

Czech literature

French literature

Albert Camus

Jean-Paul Sartre

English literature

Graham Greene

George Orwell

The Middle East

The Spanish Civil War

The Second World War

The Holocaust

After the Second World War

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Posted by Simon on May 26, 2020

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