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Robert Harris reviews

Robert Harris CBE (born 1957) has had a spectacularly successful career. He went from a humble background in Nottingham, to Cambridge University, and then to the BBC where he worked on flagship news programmes Panorama and Newsnight before becoming political editor of The Observer at the age of just 30.

In the later 1980s he wrote half a dozen factual journalistic books, and then in 1992 published the first of his fiction books, ‘Fatherland’, which became a popular bestseller. Since then he has kept up an impressive workrate, producing a new novel in the popular thriller genre, every three or so years.

The first few were set against the Second World War which has been a recurring setting (‘Fatherland’, ‘Enigma’, ‘Munich’, ‘V2’) but he soon branched out, writing page-turners set in the contemporary world, (‘The Ghost’, ‘The Fear Index’), late nineteenth century France (‘An Officer and a Spy’), the ancient world (‘Pompeii’), the future (‘The Second Sleep’). In 2006 he embarked upon a brilliant trilogy based on the life of Cicero, the leading writer and political player at the time of Caesar, Mark Anthony and Octavian.

Several of Harris’s novels have been adapted into films – for example, The Ghost Writer (2010), An Officer and a Spy (2019) – but he recently hit gold when ‘Conclave’ was made into a movie directed by Edward Berger with award-nominated performances by Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci.

Harris’s novels

1992 Fatherland A brilliantly gripping alternative history in which the Nazis won the Second World War. The story’s protagonist, Xavier March, is an officer of the Kripo, the criminal police, who is investigating the murder of a Nazi government official who participated at the Wannsee Conference. Slowly he realises he has stumbled on a vast conspiracy at the heart of Nazi rule, the Holocaust which, in this world, has been hushed up. The documents March eventually uncovers contain some of the most searing descriptions of going into the gas chambers of a concentration camp I’ve read in any genre.

1995 Enigma Enigma as in the famous code-cracking operation at Bletchley Park. The story focuses on gifted cryptanalyst Tom Jericho, recuperating in Cambridge from a nervous breakdown brought on by the pressures of work and the breakup of his relationship with Claire Romilly, a cipher clerk, but when he gets back to Cambridge, Claire has gone missing. Who? Why? Where? Another gripping mystery.

1998 Archangel Set in the present: Christopher ‘Fluke’ Kelso is a historian attending a conference in Moscow. He meets an old communist who tells him about a secret notebook which contains a secret concerning Stalin which threatens to turn history upside down.

2007 The Ghost The unnamed ghost writer who narrates the story, has been hired and flown to Martha’s Vineyard, Massachusetts, to help write the memoirs of former British Prime Minister Adam Lang, transparently based in Tony Blair, who Harris was close to. The unexplained disappearance of the writer whose place he’s taken prompts the narrator to undertake investigations which (like the previous two thrillers) lead to a momentous revelation.

2011 The Fear Index Also set in the modern world, this concerns the way an artificial intelligence created to dabble in the stock market, runs out of control.

2013 An Officer and a Spy Leaping back a century, this one follows French military intelligence officer Georges Picquart who begins to discover that the evidence used to convict Alfred Dreyfus of espionage was likely invented, in which case a German agent is still at large in the French military.

2016 Conclave Set in the present, this bestseller describes in typically thorough fashion what happens when Pope dies and a conclave is called to elect a new one: taking us into the heart of the process during which various leading contenders turn out to be ineligible for all manner of Machiavellian reasons. Clever, gripping.

2017 Munich Set over four days in September 1938 during the Munich Agreement, the novel describes the activities of two characters, aides to the British and Nazi delegations. This has the structure and mannerisms of the previous thrillers but, for the first time, didn’t have the same ‘grip’. All the historical detail is there, and the panic-stricken meetings and the twists and turns. Except we know this changed nothing. The Second World War still came. So who cares?

2019 Second Sleep Set in the future after some disaster has set England back to medieval technology and culture. In this world a young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives at a remote village in the wilds of Exmoor to bury a priest who has died ‘in mysterious circumstances’. Slowly he realises the locals are concealing a secret i.e. the book builds to the same kind of Revelation that characterised Harris’s first half dozen novels. Except the final revelation is deeply underwhelming: we find out that the Old World (i.e. our world) experienced some catastrophic breakdown of its digital infrastructure. This is deeply disappointing because a) we knew right from the start that this was a future after some catastrophe; b) so it is just like many, many other science fiction novels set in the future after some catastrophe wiped out ‘our’ culture, all the ones I’m familiar with (The Chrysalids, A Canticle for Leibowitz) being much, much better; and c) the final revelation, that the satellites which keep global digital tech working all crashed, is not really a believable cause for a worldwide apocalypse. OK there’d be disasters but surely we’d just revert to life in the 1970s before digital tech: cars would still drive, food would still grow, not as much but still quite a lot; livestock would be farmed etc etc. The idea that the end of digital tech would devastate the world beyond recognition is not plausible or thrilling. This is the first Harris novel I read but couldn’t be bothered to review because it’s the first one that’s actively bad.

The Cicero trilogy

A brilliant trilogy of novels describing the fraught political career of ancient Roman statesman, lawyer, scholar, philosopher, orator and writer, Marcus Tullius Cicero (106 to 43 BC). They manage to stick very closely to the historical record while at the same time conveying the genuine excitement and danger of 1st century BC Rome.

2006 Imperium All three are narrated by Cicero’s secretary, Tiro. This first volume covers 15 years and is divided into two parts: Part one, ‘Senator’ (79 to 70 BC) leading up to Cicero’s career-making prosecution of a corrupt Roman governor, Gaius Verres; Part two, ‘Praetorian (68 to 64 BC)’ covers his campaign to be elected consul, which becomes entangled with a major plot by Julius Caesar and Marcus Licinius Crassus to stitch up control of the Roman state.

2009 Lustrum Continues Cicero’s career in fraught first century BC Rome, as related by his secretary Tiro. It covers the next five years in Cicero’s life and career (the Latin word lustrum referring to the religious sacrifice offered every five years by state officials)and is again divided into two parts: Part one ‘Consul’, covers the dramatic year of 63 BC giving a thrilling description of the slow escalation of the crisis which developed into Lucius Sergius Catalina’s conspiracy to overthrow the Roman state. Part two, ‘Pater Patriae’, covers the next four years, 62 to 58 BC: beneath a blizzard of more overt incidents and challenges, the two underlying themes are the unstoppable rise of Caesar and his creation of the First Triumvirate (in 60 BC).

2015 Dictator The final book in the trilogy covers the last 15 years of Cicero’s life, from 58 BC to his murder at the hands of agents of Mark Antony in 44 BC. It’s divided into Part one, ‘Exile’ (58 to 47 BC), and Part two ‘Redux (47 to 43 BC), leading up to Cicero’s flight form Rome and eventual murder by agents of Mark Anthony’s. Outstanding.

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by Simon on March 27, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Thriller

Tagged Adam Lang, Alfred dreyfus, An Officer and a Spy, ancient Rome, Archangel, BBC, Bletchley Park, Cambridge, Cambridge University, Catalina, Christopher Fairfax, Christopher Kelso, Cicero trilogy, Claire Romilly, code-cracking, Communism, Conclave, cryptanalysis, dictator, Dreyfus Affair, Edward Berger, Enigma, Exmoor, Fatherland, fiction, First Triumvirate, Gaius Verres, gas chambers, Georges Picquart, Imperium, journalism, Julius Caesar, Kripo, Lucius Sergius Catalina, lustrum, Marcus Licinius Crassus, Marcus Tullius Cicero, Mark Antony, Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts, Moscow, Munich, Munich Agreement, Munich Crisis, Nazi, Newsnight, Nottingham, novels, Panorama, Pope, Ralph Fiennes, Robert Harris, Roman Catholicism, Rome, Second Sleep, Second World War, Stalin, Stanley Tucci, The Fear Index, The Ghost, The Holocaust, The Observer, thriller, Tiro, Tom Jericho, Tony Blair, USSR, Vatican, Wannsee Conference, Xavier March

Posted by Simon on March 27, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/03/27/robert-harris-reviews/

The Critic as Artist, with some remarks upon The Importance of Doing Nothing by Oscar Wilde (1891)

‘The Critic as Artist’ is Oscar Wilde’s longest essay and most extensive statement of his aesthetic philosophy. It is a dialogue in two parts and was one of the four long essays included in the collection titled ‘Intentions’, published on 1 May 1891. It is a revised version of two articles that first appeared in the July and September 1890 issues of ‘The Nineteenth Century’ magazine, which were originally entitled ‘The True Function and Value of Criticism’ which is, arguably, a more accurate and useful title.

When I say ‘essay’ in fact this, like the other works in ‘Intentions’, is consciously experimental in format. It is not an essay in the conventional sense but a dialogue conducted by two well-developed characters, namely Gilbert – who delivers long dogmatic statements about the nature of The Critic and Criticism – to Ernest who asks follow-up questions and generally keeps the narrative moving.

In fact the slow and leisurely opening, with chat about Dvorak and gossip and sharing cigarettes, is more like a novel than a critical essay and it has a setting described as in the stage directions for a play:

Persons: Gilbert and Ernest.
Scene: the library of a house in Piccadilly, overlooking the Green Park.

This long essay moves through a succession of assertions about the central role played by criticism and the critical spirit in society, in culture, in art and life. It could probably be made into a set of bullet points, which it briefly crossed my mind to attempt. Instead in what follows I’m going to try and indicate the flow of the argument via brief summaries, sometimes just a sentence long, of the key points, accompanied by quotations. Wilde states his ideas infinitely better than I could.

Unless otherwise stated, the speaker of each of the quotes is Gilbert, who does the lion’s share of the talking.

Part 1

Victorian artists and critics such as James Abbott McNeill Whistler and Matthew Arnold made a firm distinction between fine art and criticism in which criticism played a subservient and secondary role. Arnold was maybe the first English writer to lay out a comprehensive theory of literature and criticism in the late 1860s and 70s, most notable in his book ‘Culture and Anarchy’ published in 1869.

Wilde sets out not only to question this key distinction but to turn it on its head, proposing that: 1) criticism is itself an art form every bit as valid as the others, and that 2) art in any medium cannot be created without critical intelligence.

Only the critical faculty enables any artistic creation at all.

To put it more fully:

The antithesis between them is entirely arbitrary. Without the critical faculty, there is no artistic creation at all, worthy of the name. You spoke a little while ago of that fine spirit of choice and delicate instinct of selection by which the artist realises life for us, and gives to it a momentary perfection. Well, that spirit of choice, that subtle tact of omission, is really the critical faculty in one of its most characteristic moods, and no one who does not possess this critical faculty can create anything at all in art…

Every century that produces poetry is, so far, an artificial century, and the work that seems to us to be the most natural and simple product of its time is always the result of the most self-conscious effort. Believe me, Ernest, there is no fine art without self-consciousness, and self-consciousness and the critical spirit are one…

And:

An age that has no criticism is either an age in which art is immobile, hieratic, and confined to the reproduction of formal types, or an age that possesses no art at all.

Innovation It is the critical spirit which drives change and innovation in the arts:

There has never been a creative age that has not been critical also. For it is the critical faculty that invents fresh forms. The tendency of creation is to repeat itself. It is to the critical instinct that we owe each new school that springs up, each new mould that art finds ready to its hand.

The artists reproduce either themselves or each other, with wearisome iteration. But criticism is always moving on, and the critic is always developing.

The Greeks had no art critics Ernest (the pedestrian one) is made to deliver the tired old cliché that back in the good old days of the Greeks there were no literary journals and Sunday supplements full of hacks scribbling criticism and this was because the ancients created ab ovo, fresh and new, in the dawn of the world, as the inspiration took them. ‘In the best days of art there were no art-critics” and ‘Why should the artist be troubled by the shrill clamour of criticism?’

The Greeks overflowed with art critics Gilbert replies that this is ignorant rubbish. It was the Greeks who invented the critical spirit. Their entire legacy is one of the critical mind, critically enquiring into philosophy, science, ethics and so on. He gives, as a shining example, the ‘Poetics’ of Aristotle, a masterpiece of critical enquiry. And he associates it especially with the later centuries in Alexandria which was overflowing with critics of all the arts, which:

devoted itself so largely to art-criticism, and [where] we find the artistic temperaments of the day investigating every question of style and manner, discussing the great Academic schools of painting, for instance, such as the school of Sicyon, that sought to preserve the dignified traditions of the antique mode, or the realistic and impressionist schools, that aimed at reproducing actual life, or the elements of ideality in portraiture, or the artistic value of the epic form in an age so modern as theirs, or the proper subject-matter for the artist.

The Greeks invented every form In literature we owe the Greeks everything:

The forms of art have been due to the Greek critical spirit. To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire drama in every one of its developments, including burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture (for which perhaps we should not forgive them) and the epigram, in all the wide meaning of that word.

And:

It is the Greeks who have given us the whole system of art-criticism. Whatever, in fact, is modern in our life we owe to the Greeks. Whatever is an anachronism is due to mediævalism.

Literature is the highest art As that list of genres suggests, Wilde unambiguously considers literature the highest art:

It is the Greeks who have given us the whole system of art-criticism, and how fine their critical instinct was, may be seen from the fact that the material they criticised with most care was, as I have already said, language. For the material that painter or sculptor uses is meagre in comparison with that of words. Words have not merely music as sweet as that of viol and lute, colour as rich and vivid as any that makes lovely for us the canvas of the Venetian or the Spaniard, and plastic form no less sure and certain than that which reveals itself in marble or in bronze, but thought and passion and spirituality are theirs also, are theirs indeed alone. If the Greeks had criticised nothing but language, they would still have been the great art-critics of the world. To know the principles of the highest art is to know the principles of all the arts.

He asserts the superiority of literature over all the arts in a couple of pages which are, indeed, very persuasive. Painting and sculpture can only capture a moment whereas literature captures an entire action and the world of thoughts which accompany it. Which is why all the great characters are primarily literary (he gives an extended summary of the action of The Iliad and then a two-page summary of the entire plot of The Divine Comedy) and painting, sculpture and all the other arts in essence merely illustrate the depth of character which literature alone can capture.

Movement, that problem of the visible arts, can be truly realised by Literature alone. It is Literature that shows us the body in its swiftness and the soul in its unrest.

The artist as individual Echoes of his essay ‘The Soul of Man under Socialism’ which is, in fact, a very extended hymn of praise to the importance of Individualism.

There is no art where there is no style, and no style where there is no unity, and unity is of the individual. No doubt Homer had old ballads and stories to deal with, as Shakespeare had chronicles and plays and novels from which to work, but they were merely his rough material. He took them, and shaped them into song. They become his, because he made them lovely.

The longer one studies life and literature, the more strongly one feels that behind everything that is wonderful stands the individual, and that it is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age.

Criticism demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does.

As a rule, the critics — I speak, of course, of the higher class, of those in fact who write for the sixpenny papers — are far more cultured than the people whose work they are called upon to review. This is, indeed, only what one would expect, for criticism demands infinitely more cultivation than creation does.

In order to really appreciate something you need to understand the entire history and range of the genre, plus all recent developments. True criticism is extremely demanding.

The second rate are correct to decry criticism because their work, being mediocre, doesn’t merit it.

I am aware that there are many honest workers in painting as well as in literature who object to criticism entirely. They are quite right. Their work stands in no intellectual relation to their age. It brings us no new element of pleasure. It suggests no fresh departure of thought, or passion, or beauty. It should not be spoken of. It should be left to the oblivion that it deserves.

Harder to talk than to do Ernest voices the received accusation against criticism, that it is harder to do – to create art – than it is to talk about art. But in a typically Wildean reversal of received opinion, Gilbert insists the opposite is the case:

More difficult to do a thing than to talk about it? Not at all. That is a gross popular error. It is very much more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it. In the sphere of actual life that is of course obvious. Anybody can make history. Only a great man can write it.

Action is instinctive and stupid Flying in the face of the philistine promotion of instinctive action in, for example, the imperial discourse of the time, Wilde says any fool can act, animals are acting all the time, it is instinctive and requires no intelligence.

There is no mode of action, no form of emotion, that we do not share with the lower animals. It is only by language that we rise above them, or above each other — by language, which is the parent, and not the child, of thought. Action, indeed, is always easy, and when presented to us in its most aggravated, because most continuous form, which I take to be that of real industry, becomes simply the refuge of people who have nothing whatsoever to do. No, Ernest, don’t talk about action. It is a blind thing dependent on external influences, and moved by an impulse of whose nature it is unconscious. It is a thing incomplete in its essence, because limited by accident, and ignorant of its direction, being always at variance with its aim. Its basis is the lack of imagination. It is the last resource of those who know not how to dream.

Against the claims of ‘action’ he sets the aesthetic values of passivity and dream.

Action! What is action? It dies at the moment of its energy. It is a base concession to fact. The world is made by the singer for the dreamer.

To summarise:

When man acts he is a puppet. When he describes he is a poet.

A defence of ‘sin’

What is termed Sin is an essential element of progress. Without it the world would stagnate, or grow old, or become colourless. By its curiosity Sin increases the experience of the race. Through its intensified assertion of individualism, it saves us from monotony of type. In its rejection of the current notions about morality, it is one with the higher ethics.

Attack on the ‘virtues’

Charity, as even those of whose religion it makes a formal part have been compelled to acknowledge, creates a multitude of evils. The mere existence of conscience, that faculty of which people prate so much nowadays, and are so ignorantly proud, is a sign of our imperfect development. It must be merged in instinct before we become fine.

Self-denial is simply a method by which man arrests his progress, and self-sacrifice a survival of the mutilation of the savage, part of that old worship of pain which is so terrible a factor in the history of the world, and which even now makes its victims day by day, and has its altars in the land.

He says the none of us know the full results of our actions and it may be that the saint’s actions lead, ultimately to catastrophe while the acts of the criminal, unexpectedly lead to good. In which case life is a kind of moral chaos.

You can imagine the reaction of the average Victorian bourgeois to seeing his system of values and morality being so comprehensively rubbished.

Criticism is an art

Criticism is itself an art. And just as artistic creation implies the working of the critical faculty, and, indeed, without it cannot be said to exist at all, so Criticism is really creative in the highest sense of the word.

Criticism is independent. It is independent because critical intelligence can be applied to any topic. The critic takes the work he’s criticising and makes something new of it in his criticism.

Criticism is no more to be judged by any low standard of imitation or resemblance than is the work of poet or sculptor. The critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought. He does not even require for the perfection of his art the finest materials. Anything will serve his purpose.

In this respect, its complete freedom from being tied to subject matter as art and literature are, you could argue that criticism is the highest art:

I would say that the highest Criticism, being the purest form of personal impression, is in its way more creative than creation, as it has least reference to any standard external to itself, and is, in fact, its own reason for existing, and, as the Greeks would put it, in itself, and to itself, an end.

Criticism is the quintessence of personality

That is what the highest criticism really is, the record of one’s own soul. It is more fascinating than history, as it is concerned simply with oneself. It is more delightful than philosophy, as its subject is concrete and not abstract, real and not vague. It is the only civilised form of autobiography, as it deals not with the events, but with the thoughts of one’s life; not with life’s physical accidents of deed or circumstance, but with the spiritual moods and imaginative passions of the mind.

[The critic’s] sole aim is to chronicle his own impressions. It is for him that pictures are painted, books written, and marble hewn into form.

Contra Arnold Wilde takes Matthew Arnold to task. Among Arnold’s numerous critical nostrums is the famous line that ‘the proper aim of Criticism is to see the object as in itself it really is’. For Wilde this is 180 degrees wrong.

But this is a very serious error, and takes no cognisance of Criticism’s most perfect form, which is in its essence purely subjective, and seeks to reveal its own secret and not the secret of another.

On the other hand, Arnold wrote that art is ‘a criticism of life’:

Arnold’s definition of literature as a criticism of life was not very felicitous in form, but it showed how keenly he recognised the importance of the critical element in all creative work.

The critic is creative In this scenario, the role of the artist or writer is merely to provide subject matter or fodder for the critic, thus giving the critic ‘a suggestion for some new mood of thought and feeling which he can realise with equal, or perhaps greater, distinction of form’ than the original.

Ruskin and Pater Wilde gives two examples: 1) Ruskin’s sonorous critical writings about Turner which, he says, are at least as much works of art as Turner’s actual paintings. And 2) Walter Pater’s well-known paragraph describing the Mona Lisa which he calls a piece of literature more timeless and full of meaning than the painting itself.

It is for this very reason that the criticism which I have quoted is criticism of the highest kind. It treats the work of art simply as a starting-point for a new creation.

The work is just a trigger for the critic

The meaning of any beautiful created thing is, at least, as much in the soul of him who looks at it, as it was in his soul who wrought it. Nay, it is rather the beholder who lends to the beautiful thing its myriad meanings, and makes it marvellous for us, and sets it in some new relation to the age, so that it becomes a vital portion of our lives…

In fact it’s almost the definition of a work of art, a thing of beauty, that it provides this kind of pretext for the critic to exercise his imagination:

The one characteristic of a beautiful form is that one can put into it whatever one wishes, and see in it whatever one chooses to see; and the Beauty, that gives to creation its universal and æsthetic element, makes the critic a creator in his turn, and whispers of a thousand different things which were not present in the mind of him who carved the statue or painted the panel or graved the gem.

To recap:

ERNEST: But is such work as you have talked about really criticism?
GILBERT: It is the highest Criticism, for it criticises not merely the individual work of art, but Beauty itself, and fills with wonder a form which the artist may have left void, or not understood, or understood incompletely.
ERNEST: The highest Criticism, then, is more creative than creation, and the primary aim of the critic is to see the object as in itself it really is not; that is your theory, I believe?
GILBERT: Yes, that is my theory. To the critic the work of art is simply a suggestion for a new work of his own that need not necessarily bear any obvious resemblance to the thing it criticises.

Coda: criticism of Victorian painting Wilde devotes the final page of part 2 to criticising contemporary Victorian painting for its feeble attempts to match literature in telling a story. Too many Victorian paintings are merely anecdotal and so barely rises above the level of illustrations.

Pictures of this kind are far too intelligible. As a class, they rank with illustrations, and, even considered from this point of view are failures, as they do not stir the imagination, but set definite bounds to it.

He uses it as another opportunity to elevate literature above all the other arts for its ability to capture psychology and development.

The domain of the painter is, as I suggested before, widely different from that of the poet. To the latter belongs life in its full and absolute entirety; not merely the beauty that men look at, but the beauty that men listen to also; not merely the momentary grace of form or the transient gladness of colour, but the whole sphere of feeling, the perfect cycle of thought.

The painter is so far limited that it is only through the mask of the body that he can show us the mystery of the soul; only through conventional images that he can handle ideas; only through its physical equivalents that he can deal with psychology.

And:

Most of our elderly English painters spend their wicked and wasted lives in poaching upon the domain of the poets, marring their motives by clumsy treatment, and striving to render, by visible form or colour, the marvel of what is invisible, the splendour of what is not seen. Their pictures are, as a natural consequence, insufferably tedious. They have degraded the invisible arts into the obvious arts, and the one thing not worth looking at is the obvious.

Wilde doesn’t say it but you can see this as part of the reason so much Victorian art is sentimental. It’s because it provides a quick hit. A sad little girl crying, or a pair of sad lovers moping, this is easy to read and respond to. They are appallingly obvious and therefore, in Wilde’s words, ‘ insufferably tedious’.

Against anecdotal Victorian painting the Critic will:

turn from them to such works as make him brood and dream and fancy, to works that possess the subtle quality of suggestion, and seem to tell one that even from them there is an escape into a wider world.

Instead:

The æsthetic critic rejects these obvious modes of art that have but one message to deliver, and having delivered it become dumb and sterile, and seeks rather for such modes as suggest reverie and mood, and by their imaginative beauty make all interpretations true, and no interpretation final.

So that:

The critic reproduces the work that he criticises in a mode that is never imitative, and part of whose charm may really consist in the rejection of resemblance, and shows us in this way not merely the meaning but also the mystery of Beauty, and, by transforming each art into literature, solves once for all the problem of Art’s unity.

At which point the pair break off for dinner (I told you it opens and closes with the circumstantial details you’d expect of a novella or short story).

Part 2

After dinner Gilbert resumes his long exposition of the role of the Critic. The critic’s role is not to passively ‘explain’ the work, it is to emphasise their own interpretation of the work in order to make the work live, which he explains in unusually florid, gaseous terms.

Yet his object will not always be to explain the work of art. He may seek rather to deepen its mystery, to raise round it, and round its maker, that mist of wonder which is dear to both gods and worshippers alike…He will look upon Art as a goddess whose mystery it is his province to intensify, and whose majesty his privilege to make more marvellous in the eyes of men.

The role of the interpreter He gives the example of a great pianist. Their performance is, of course, of a work by Beethoven or Bach but what everyone freely admits to enjoying is their interpretation of the work, and this leads on to a paradox.

When Rubinstein plays to us the Sonata Appassionata of Beethoven, he gives us not merely Beethoven, but also himself, and so gives us Beethoven absolutely — Beethoven re-interpreted through a rich artistic nature, and made vivid and wonderful to us by a new and intense personality.

Same with actors. If a play is a real work of art there is scope for countless interpretations, all revealing something new and ‘true’ about it.

When a great actor plays Shakespeare we have the same experience. His own individuality becomes a vital part of the interpretation. People sometimes say that actors give us their own Hamlets, and not Shakespeare’s but this is a fallacy… In point of fact, there is no such thing as Shakespeare’s Hamlet. If Hamlet has something of the definiteness of a work of art, he has also all the obscurity that belongs to life. There are as many Hamlets as there are melancholies.

Just like the pianist and actor, in order to bring out the truth of the work, the critic must express themselves.

It is only by intensifying his own personality that the critic can interpret the personality and work of others, and the more strongly this personality enters into the interpretation the more real the interpretation becomes, the more satisfying, the more convincing, and the more true.

The more individual the interpretation, the more ‘true’ To better understand and ‘explain’ others, you must work on yourself.

If you wish to understand others you must intensify your own individualism.

So the stronger and more individual the criticism, the more it brings out the truths, sometimes new truths, about the work.

The necessity of scholarship But don’t think this is easy. It requires deep scholarship, for example:

He who desires to understand Shakespeare truly must understand the relations in which Shakespeare stood to the Renaissance and the Reformation, to the age of Elizabeth and the age of James; he must be familiar with the history of the struggle for supremacy between the old classical forms and the new spirit of romance, between the school of Sidney, and Daniel, and Johnson, and the school of Marlowe and Marlowe’s greater son; he must know the materials that were at Shakespeare’s disposal, and the method in which he used them, and the conditions of theatric presentation in the sixteenth and seventeenth century, their limitations and their opportunities for freedom, and the literary criticism of Shakespeare’s day, its aims and modes and canons; he must study the English language in its progress, and blank or rhymed verse in its various developments; he must study the Greek drama, and the connection between the art of the creator of the Agamemnon and the art of the creator of Macbeth; in a word, he must be able to bind Elizabethan London to the Athens of Pericles, and to learn Shakespeare’s true position in the history of European drama and the drama of the world.

The shortcomings of life Philistines go on about the importance of life, true to life, criticism of life, derived from life, a true life story etc etc. But life is appallingly inartistic.

Life is terribly deficient in form. Its catastrophes happen in the wrong way and to the wrong people. There is a grotesque horror about its comedies, and its tragedies seem to culminate in farce. One is always wounded when one approaches it. Things last either too long, or not long enough.

When one looks back upon the life that was so vivid in its emotional intensity, and filled with such fervent moments of ecstasy or of joy, it all seems to be a dream and an illusion. What are the unreal things, but the passions that once burned one like fire? What are the incredible things, but the things that one has faithfully believed? What are the improbable things? The things that one has done oneself. No, Ernest; life cheats us with shadows, like a puppet-master.

Whereas ‘There is no mood or passion that Art cannot give us’ and ‘are there not books that can make us live more in one single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?’

Dante And to prove it, he gives a page-long summary of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Art evokes sterile emotions He makes the striking claim that the reason Art is such a refuge for so many people is that it evokes sterile emotions. They aren’t like the destructive emotions of real life. They don’t cripple us. On the contrary we return to ‘King Lear’ of the ‘Divine Comedy’ over and over again for pleasure. Art may evoke emotions in us but they are, in the end, very tame.

Art does not hurt us. The tears that we shed at a play are a type of the exquisite sterile emotions that it is the function of Art to awaken. We weep, but we are not wounded. We grieve, but our grief is not bitter… The sorrow with which Art fills us both purifies and initiates…

All art is immoral He then goes on to make a characteristically provocative claim:

All art is immoral.

Elaborated by mention of the aesthete in his ivory tower:

Is such a mode of life immoral? Yes: all the arts are immoral.

How so? Because society and its needs are the basis of ‘morality’ and society’s most elementary need is for all its members to be productive and homogeneous – whereas art requires 1) a great deal of idle time and 2) to fully understand it, you must cultivate your individuality, your difference, your separateness. Both of which society deprecates.

Society often forgives the criminal; it never forgives the dreamer. The beautiful sterile emotions that art excites in us are hateful in its eyes, and people are completely dominated by the tyranny of this dreadful social ideal…

So he doesn’t mean that art encourages people to murder and adultery: he simply means it is against the cult of business and hard work so (officially) beloved of the Victorians.

In the opinion of society, Contemplation is the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty, in the opinion of the highest culture it is the proper occupation of man.

The collective life of the race Rather surprisingly, Wilde has Gilbert assert that the ‘soul’ is the accumulated experiences of the race, the ‘transmission of racial experiences’. Which is why, in the imagination, we can travel so freely to other times and places, as captured in their literature. Because our ‘souls’ contain the library of our ‘racial experiences’ and, the right encouragement i.e. art work, can reveal them to us. Which is why a piece of music, a poem opens doors in our minds to memories and feelings we didn’t even know we had.

Wilde’s definition of the soul Highly influenced by the scientific view of heredity, Wilde’s idea of the soul is wildly at odds with the conventional Victorian Christian ideal:

It is not our own life that we live, but the lives of the dead, and the soul that dwells within us is no single spiritual entity, making us personal and individual, created for our service, and entering into us for our joy. It is something that has dwelt in fearful places, and in ancient sepulchres has made its abode. It is sick with many maladies, and has memories of curious sins. It is wiser than we are, and its wisdom is bitter. It fills us with impossible desires, and makes us follow what we know we cannot gain. One thing, however, Ernest, it can do for us. It can lead us away from surroundings whose beauty is dimmed to us by the mist of familiarity, or whose ignoble ugliness and sordid claims are marring the perfection of our development. It can help us to leave the age in which we were born, and to pass into other ages, and find ourselves not exiled from their air. It can teach us how to escape from our experience, and to realise the experiences of those who are greater than we are.

Which is why we can enter into the experiences described by writers such as Leopardi, Theocritus, Pierre Vidal, of Villon and Shakespeare, Shelley and Keats.

Do you think that it is the imagination that enables us to live these countless lives? Yes: it is the imagination; and the imagination is the result of heredity. It is simply concentrated race-experience.

The race experience contained in the critic

The culture that this transmission of racial experiences makes possible can be made perfect by the critical spirit alone, and indeed may be said to be one with it. For who is the true critic but he who bears within himself the dreams, and ideas, and feelings of myriad generations, and to whom no form of thought is alien, no emotional impulse obscure?

Contemplation

ERNEST: the contemplative life, the life that has for its aim not doing but being, and not being merely, but becoming — that is what the critical spirit can give us. The gods live thus: either brooding over their own perfection, as Aristotle tells us, or, as Epicurus fancied, watching with the calm eyes of the spectator the tragicomedy of the world that they have made. We, too, might live like them, and set ourselves to witness with appropriate emotions the varied scenes that man and nature afford.

What the age calls ‘immoral’

Is such a mode of life immoral? Yes: all the arts are immoral, except those baser forms of sensual or didactic art that seek to excite to action of evil or of good. For action of every kind belongs to the sphere of ethics. The aim of art is simply to create a mood.

England is drowning in men of action and business. It needs more ‘immoral’ dreamers who can see beyond the immediate present and its problems, ‘For the development of the race depends on the development of the individual.’ Thus, the so-called ‘immoral’ artist is the most important man in a society, in terms of moving it forwards.

How philistinism derives from conservative society

The security of society lies in custom and unconscious instinct, and the basis of the stability of society, as a healthy organism, is the complete absence of any intelligence amongst its members. The great majority of people being fully aware of this, rank themselves naturally on the side of that splendid system that elevates them to the dignity of machines, and rage wildly against the intrusion of the intellectual faculty into any question that concerns life…

Subjective and objective He articulates another basic Wilde premise which is that we are most subjective when striving to be at our most objective and vice versa.

Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.

Which, of course, links to the long essay about masks in the same volume. He goes on to deliver a devastating abolition of the possibility of objective knowledge, subsuming even science and religion into his cult of the subjective:

To arrive at what one really believes, one must speak through lips different from one’s own. To know the truth one must imagine myriads of falsehoods. For what is Truth? In matters of religion, it is simply the opinion that has survived. In matters of science, it is the ultimate sensation. In matters of art, it is one’s last mood.

Dialogue as a medium for the critic Gilbert gives an extended defence of dialogue as a format or genre, the very format this essay is cast in:

Dialogue, certainly, that wonderful literary form which, from Plato to Lucian, and from Lucian to Giordano Bruno, and from Bruno to that grand old Pagan in whom Carlyle took such delight, the creative critics of the world have always employed, can never lose for the thinker its attraction as a mode of expression.

By its means he can both reveal and conceal himself, and give form to every fancy, and reality to every mood. By its means he can exhibit the object from each point of view, and show it to us in the round, as a sculptor shows us things, gaining in this manner all the richness and reality of effect that comes from those side issues that are suddenly suggested by the central idea in its progress, and really illumine the idea more completely, or from those felicitous after-thoughts that give a fuller completeness to the central scheme, and yet convey something of the delicate charm of chance.

He repeats the notion that Literature, if this wasn’t clear already, is the greatest of the arts:

The ultimate art is literature, and the finest and fullest medium that of words.

Surrendering to the work And reiterates the importance of surrendering to an art work, which had been an important theme in The Soul of Man Under Socialism:

Each form of Art with which we come in contact dominates us for the moment to the exclusion of every other form. We must surrender ourselves absolutely to the work in question, whatever it may be, if we wish to gain its secret. For the time, we must think of nothing else, can think of nothing else, indeed.

The ideal critic What qualities does the true critic require? Ernest suggests some characteristics of the ideal critic which Gilbert enjoys demolishing.

1. Fair? No, the ideal critic is a passionate advocate of whichever work and school he is submitting his mind to at the moment.

2. Sincere? No, ‘Art is a passion, and, in matters of art, Thought is inevitably coloured by emotion, and so is fluid rather than fixed’ and so is continually ‘insincere’.

The true critic will, indeed, always be sincere in his devotion to the principle of beauty, but he will seek for beauty in every age and in each school, and will never suffer himself to be limited to any settled custom of thought or stereotyped mode of looking at things. He will realise himself in many forms, and by a thousand different ways, and will ever be curious of new sensations and fresh points of view. Through constant change, and through constant change alone, he will find his true unity. He will not consent to be the slave of his own opinions.

3. Rational? No, art is, as Plato perceived 2,500 years ago, a form of madness and mania.

A dig at journalism In The Soul of Man Under Socialism Wilde made extensive attacks on contemporary journalism and here repeats his criticism.

I regret it because there is much to be said in favour of modern journalism. 1) By giving us the opinions of the uneducated, it keeps us in touch with the ignorance of the community. 2) By carefully chronicling the current events of contemporary life, it shows us of what very little importance such events really are. 3) By invariably discussing the unnecessary it makes us understand what things are requisite for culture, and what are not.

The artistic qualifications necessary for the true critic ‘A temperament exquisitely susceptible to beauty, and to the various impressions that beauty gives us.’ He cites the passage in Plato which describes the ideal education of Greek youth and summarises that:

The true aim of education was the love of beauty, and that the methods by which education should work were the development of temperament, the cultivation of taste, and the creation of the critical spirit.

Current art Wilde approves of Finally the essay turns to positives and Wilde describes various actual beautiful things. The buildings of Oxford and Cambridge. In art, the Impressionists and a newer school he calls the Archaicistes.

The importance of form rather than ‘inspiration’

He gains his inspiration from form, and from form purely, as an artist should. A real passion would ruin him. Whatever actually occurs is spoiled for art. All bad poetry springs from genuine feeling. To be natural is to be obvious, and to be obvious is to be inartistic.

Yes: Form is everything. It is the secret of life…Start with the worship of form, and there is no secret in art that will not be revealed to you.

Will any artist be influenced by Gilbert’s idea of criticism? Doesn’t matter.

1) The influence of the critic will be the mere fact of his own existence. He will represent the flawless type. In him the culture of the century will see itself realised. You must not ask of him to have any aim other than the perfecting of himself. The demand of the intellect, as has been well said, is simply to feel itself alive.

2) The critic may, indeed, desire to exercise influence; but, if so, he will concern himself not with the individual, but with the age, which he will seek to wake into consciousness, and to make responsive, creating in it new desires and appetites, and lending it his larger vision and his nobler moods.

Surely an artist is the best judge of other artists? No, the reverse.

Indeed, so far from its being true that the artist is the best judge of art, a really great artist can never judge of other people’s work at all, and can hardly, in fact, judge of his own. That very concentration of vision that makes a man an artist, limits by its sheer intensity his faculty of fine appreciation. The energy of creation hurries him blindly on to his own goal.

Characteristically, he uses examples from literature to make the point, the way that Wordsworth, Shelley and Byron all disliked each other’s work and they all disliked Keats.

A truly great artist cannot conceive of life being shown, or beauty fashioned, under any conditions other than those that he has selected.

So, no, artists or writers are not the best judges of other artists or writers. By contrast, only the man who can’t do these things, can appreciate them.

Technique is really personality. That is the reason why the artist cannot teach it, why the pupil cannot learn it, and why the æsthetic critic can understand it. To the great poet, there is only one method of music — his own. To the great painter, there is only one manner of painting — that which he himself employs. The æsthetic critic, and the æsthetic critic alone, can appreciate all forms and modes. It is to him that Art makes her appeal.

The future of criticism In Gilbert’s rather messianic view, the future belongs to criticism. He feels original creative channels are nearly exhausted (a surprisingly suburban bourgeois cliché).

I myself am inclined to think that creation is doomed. It springs from too primitive, too natural an impulse. However this may be, it is certain that the subject-matter at the disposal of creation is always diminishing, while the subject-matter of criticism increases daily.

Surprisingly, he singles out Rudyard Kipling who was, in 1891, the new kid on the block:

As one turns over the pages of his Plain Tales from the Hills [published 1888], one feels as if one were seated under a palm-tree reading life by superb flashes of vulgarity. The bright colours of the bazaars dazzle one’s eyes. The jaded, second-rate Anglo-Indians are in exquisite incongruity with their surroundings. The mere lack of style in the story-teller gives an odd journalistic realism to what he tells us. From the point of view of literature Mr. Kipling is a genius who drops his aspirates. From the point of view of life, he is a reporter who knows vulgarity better than any one has ever known it.

Criticism guides us through the monstrous overload of published books.

Criticism can recreate fragments an entire lost culture from the past.

Only criticism can make us cosmopolitan. All kinds of schemes to achieve peace through sympathy and sentiment have failed.

Criticism will annihilate race-prejudices by insisting upon the unity of the human mind in the variety of its forms. If we are tempted to make war upon another nation, we shall remember that we are seeking to destroy an element of our own culture, and possibly its most important element. As long as war is regarded as wicked, it will always have its fascination. When it is looked upon as vulgar, it will cease to be popular…Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than those that can be forged by shopman or sentimentalist. It will give us the peace that springs from understanding.

Darwin Wilde mentions Darwin several times. In The Soul of Man under Socialism Darwin is selected as one of the only three or four people in the entire nineteenth century who have ‘realised the perfection of what was in him’. Here he is singled out as one of the few intellectuals who raised themselves above the squabbling of the age:

The intellect of the race is wasted in the sordid and stupid quarrels of second-rate politicians or third-rate theologians. It was reserved for a man of science to show us the supreme example of that ‘sweet reasonableness’ of which Arnold spoke so wisely, and, alas! to so little effect. The author of The Origin of Species had, at any rate, the philosophic temper.

Sin versus stupidity In a move similar to his reversal of the usual meaning of immorality, Wilde insists:

People cry out against the sinner, yet it is not the sinful, but the stupid, who are our shame. There is no sin except stupidity.

Echoing the famous line from the preface to Dorian Gray that:

There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written, or badly written.

Aesthetics higher than ethics He was playing with fire, bating such a dogmatically philistine ferociously Christian establishment. But he goes on, giving his enemies more ammunition:

To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability. Æsthetics are higher than ethics. They belong to a more spiritual sphere. To discern the beauty of a thing is the finest point to which we can arrive. Even a colour-sense is more important, in the development of the individual, than a sense of right and wrong. Æsthetics, in fact, are to Ethics in the sphere of conscious civilisation, what, in the sphere of the external world, sexual is to natural selection. Ethics, like natural selection, make existence possible. Æsthetics, like sexual selection, make life lovely and wonderful, fill it with new forms, and give it progress, and variety and change.

To the perfect critic sin is impossible He reaches the threshold of blasphemy and charges through it.

And when we reach the true culture that is our aim, we attain to that perfection of which the saints have dreamed, the perfection of those to whom sin is impossible, not because they make the renunciations of the ascetic, but because they can do everything they wish without hurt to the soul, and can wish for nothing that can do the soul harm, the soul being an entity so divine that it is able to transform into elements of a richer experience, or a finer susceptibility, or a newer mode of thought, acts or passions that with the common would be commonplace, or with the uneducated ignoble, or with the shameful vile.

And then he rises to a kind of Hegelian climax, invoking the ‘World Spirit’.

You have spoken against Criticism as being a sterile thing. The nineteenth century is a turning point in history, simply on account of the work of two men, Darwin and Renan, the one the critic of the Book of Nature, the other the critic of the books of God. Not to recognise this is to miss the meaning of one of the most important eras in the progress of the world. Creation is always behind the age. It is Criticism that leads us. The Critical Spirit and the World-Spirit are one.

Wilde’s own summary

On the last page Wilde has Ernest, Gilbert’s exhausted interlocutor, give his own summary of the long night’s lecture:

ERNEST: You have told me many strange things to-night, Gilbert. You have told me that: 1) it is more difficult to talk about a thing than to do it and that 2) to do nothing at all is the most difficult thing in the world; you have told me that 3) all Art is immoral, and 4) all thought dangerous; that 5) criticism is more creative than creation, and that 6) the highest criticism is that which reveals in the work of Art what the artist had not put there; that it is 7) exactly because a man cannot do a thing that he is the proper judge of it; and 8) that the true critic is unfair, insincere, and not rational. My friend, you are a dreamer.

Completely exhausted, the pair open the curtains of Gilbert’s flat to see that dawn is coming up and the dialogue ends with another moment of fictional colour:

Gilbert: Piccadilly lies at our feet like a long riband of silver. A faint purple mist hangs over the Park, and the shadows of the white houses are purple…

Thoughts

Since at least the expansion of universities and the huge growth in courses teaching literature in the 1950s and 60s, the profession of academic criticism has also exploded. There are nowadays scores of schools of criticism, not least the newcomers feminist theory, post-colonial theory and queer theory, and hundreds of thousands of applications of each critical theory to every available work of literature (and film and TV and everything else) often using the difficult or impenetrable jargon of the trade.

Way back before the great tsunami of critical theory darkened the horizon, Wilde’s essay strikes me as an extremely impressive attempt to convey an entire critical worldview. What impresses is its coherence. It sets out to overturn received opinion on just about everything and so doesn’t make a few hits in a few places, but mounts an impressive attempt to create a total worldview.

Quotable quotes

The English public always feels perfectly at its ease when a mediocrity is talking to it.

Every great man nowadays has his disciples, and it is always Judas who writes the biography.

Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning. He used poetry as a medium for writing in prose.

Even the work of Mr Pater, who is, on the whole, the most perfect master of English prose now creating amongst us, is often far more like a piece of mosaic than a passage in music, and seems, here and there, to lack the true rhythmical life of words and the fine freedom and richness of effect that such rhythmical life produces.

ERNEST: But what is the difference between literature and journalism?
GILBERT: Oh! journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read.

We are born in an age when only the dull are treated seriously, and I live in terror of not being misunderstood.

Education is an admirable thing, but it is well to remember from time to time that nothing that is worth knowing can be taught.

And:

Calm, and self-centred, and complete, the æsthetic critic contemplates life, and no arrow drawn at a venture can pierce between the joints of his harness. He at least is safe. He has discovered how to live.

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by Simon on July 21, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Essays, Literary criticism

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The Soul of Man under Socialism by Oscar Wilde: quotes and commentary

The key thing to grasp about this essay is that, although it’s routinely touted as Wilde’s one engagement with politics, it is not really about politics at all but centred on the more familiar Wildean subject of the cultivation of individualism.

His entire worldview boils down to the need for everyone to throw off the various shackles of society and cultivate their true selves. So Wilde isn’t interested in socialism as it is usually defined – ‘a political and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.’ His form of socialism means ‘a political and economic theory of social organization which enables the greatest possible development of each citizen, the fullest possible blossoming of their selves.’

Socialism = liberation from others Thus he opens the essay by saying that the chief benefit of socialism would be liberating us from ‘the sordid necessity of living for others’. Throughout history only a handful of men have been able ‘to realise the perfection of what was in him’ (in his century, Darwin, Keats, Renan) but most people are prevented from becoming their true selves by the necessity of living for others. In the nineteenth century this is because of the spectacle of ‘hideous poverty, by hideous ugliness, by hideous starvation’ which surrounds them.

Charity is harmful to giver and receiver alike Thus they embark on charity to alleviate the sufferings of the poor but this is wrong. Charity is wrong. In fact the people who set out to do the most good end up doing the most harm. They are like the ‘good’ slave owners who were kind to their slaves and so prevented the true horror of the system from being more evident and the whole thing being ended earlier.

The state of the poor He gives a paragraph on the state of England’s urban poor, ‘living in fetid dens and fetid rags, and bringing up unhealthy, hunger-pinched children in the midst of impossible and absolutely repulsive surroundings’ and pitifully dependent on the weather i.e. whenever there’s a frost the streets are full of whining beggars and crowds queueing for entry to ‘loathsome’ shelters.

Under Socialism…each member of the society will share in the general prosperity and happiness of the society…

Socialism, Communism, or whatever one chooses to call it, by converting private property into public wealth, and substituting co-operation for competition, will restore society to its proper condition of a thoroughly healthy organism, and insure the material well-being of each member of the community. It will, in fact, give Life its proper basis and its proper environment. But for the full development of Life to its highest mode of perfection, something more is needed. What is needed is Individualism.

Individualism The ideal world will be ideal because it will allow everyone to flourish and develop their own individual uniqueness. Under present conditions quite a few people are well off enough to develop a limited form of individualism.

These are the poets, the philosophers, the men of science, the men of culture – in a word, the real men, the men who have realised themselves, and in whom all Humanity gains a partial realisation.

But, of course, the majority are forced to do the work of beasts of burden, live on the brink of starvation, under the tyranny of want. All this will be abolished by socialism.

Private property At the root of inequality is the concept of private property which is why Socialism is committed to abolishing it. However, Wilde, with typical paradox and wit, points out that private property is not only ruinous for those that don’t have it (i.e. the poor) but is also very deleterious for those that do, the middle and upper classes.

The possession of private property is very often extremely demoralising…It involves endless claims upon one, endless attention to business, endless bother… and that is, of course, one of the reasons why Socialism wants to get rid of the institution.

Why? Because getting it and keeping it, maintaining it and worrying about it, are all distractions from what Wilde sees as the purpose of life, which is to cultivate your individuality. All the duties which come with wealth are a burden. Abolishing private property will free not only the poor but the rich as well.

In praise of the rebellious poor Many of the poor accept high-minded charity quiescently but Wilde is on the side of the rebellious poor, who revolt against their wretched condition and recognise charity as the feeble attempts to plaster over a wicked system which they are.

The best amongst the poor are never grateful. They are ungrateful, discontented, disobedient, and rebellious. They are quite right to be so.

And:

Why should they be grateful for the crumbs that fall from the rich man’s table? They should be seated at the board, and are beginning to know it. As for being discontented, a man who would not be discontented with such surroundings and such a low mode of life would be a perfect brute. Disobedience, in the eyes of anyone who has read history, is man’s original virtue. It is through disobedience that progress has been made, through disobedience and through rebellion.

And:

A poor man who is ungrateful, unthrifty, discontented, and rebellious, is probably a real personality, and has much in him. He is at any rate a healthy protest. As for the virtuous poor, one can pity them, of course, but one cannot possibly admire them. They have made private terms with the enemy, and sold their birthright for very bad pottage. They must also be extraordinarily stupid.

(You can see why after just a few pages of this the average Victorian reader would be outraged. So far he has said he wants to abolish all private property, abolish the distinctions between the classes along with the intricate hierarchy of rank, that he is against that great Victorian institution of philanthropy and in favour of the most rebellious, mutinous and violent type of proletarian protester. Radical scandalous stuff.)

The need for agitators Obviously bourgeois Victorians had a great fear of agitators who would rouse the downtrodden masses from their slumber, hence the vicious laws passed against early attempts to form trade unions, but Wilde, with a typically paradoxical flourish, says that this is precisely why they are so important.

What is said by great employers of labour against agitators is unquestionably true. Agitators are a set of interfering, meddling people, who come down to some perfectly contented class of the community, and sow the seeds of discontent amongst them. That is the reason why agitators are so absolutely necessary. Without them, in our incomplete state, there would be no advance towards civilisation.

American slavery For the second time he cites the example of slavery in America. First time was to claim that the ‘good’ slave owner only made the situation worse by glossing over the true horror of the institution. Now he cites the way slavery was abolished not by the slave owners, and certainly not by the utterly cowed slaves themselves, but by outside agitators, the Abolitionists from the North (starting in high-minded Boston) who entered the slave states from outside and often behaved illegally (he doesn’t explain how but I assume in helping to liberate slaves and transport them to freedom in the North).

Against authoritarian socialism Switching theme a bit he repeats the notion that an authoritarian socialism would defeat the object – well, what he sees as the object of such a social transformation, which is the undoing of all restrictions which prevent people from becoming their true selves.

It is to be regretted that a portion of our community should be practically in slavery, but to propose to solve the problem by enslaving the entire community is childish. Every man must be left quite free to choose his own work. No form of compulsion must be exercised over him.

Unfortunately, as we discovered in the twentieth century, because so many people are opposed to a completely propertyless society the only way a socialist state can be made to work is by imposing it by force and maintaining it via surveillance, spies and prison camps… Anyway he writes this because:

Many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary.

How individualism will flourish without private property It’s true that:

A few men who have had private means of their own, such as Byron, Shelley, Browning, Victor Hugo, Baudelaire, and others, have been able to realise their personality more or less completely. Not one of these men ever did a single day’s work for hire. They were relieved from poverty. They had an immense advantage.

Will not we lose the lovely productions of such writers if we abolish the system of private property which produced them? No. Because with the advent of propertyless socialism all people will be freed to cultivate their personalities, it will release ‘the great actual Individualism latent and potential in mankind generally’.

How private property destroys individualism

Private property has crushed true Individualism, and set up an Individualism that is false…It has made gain not growth its aim. So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing is to be. The true perfection of man lies, not in what man has, but in what man is.

Private property debars the great mass of the population from becoming individuals by impoverishing and starving them, but it has trammelled the middle and upper classes by persuading them to devote their lives to money, greed, property, wealth and so on. It has persuaded people that the sole purpose of life is to:

accumulate this property, and to go on wearily and tediously accumulating it long after he has got far more than he wants, or can use, or enjoy, or perhaps even know of. Man will kill himself by overwork in order to secure property, and really, considering the enormous advantages that property brings, one is hardly surprised. One’s regret is that society should be constructed on such a basis that man has been forced into a groove in which he cannot freely develop what is wonderful, and fascinating, and delightful in him – in which, in fact, he misses the true pleasure and joy of living.

So abolish the entire system of private property and the relentless competition to acquire it:

With the abolition of private property, then, we shall have true, beautiful, healthy Individualism. Nobody will waste his life in accumulating things, and the symbols for things. One will live. To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.

Have we ever seen the full expression of a personality in all human history? No. Rather arbitrarily Wilde selects Julius Caesar and Marcus Aurelius from Roman history, the one the most successful general and statesman of his time the other widely thought to be the model of a philosopher-emperor. But both dragged down and prevented from perfection by their multitudinous cares and duties.

Making a wild and drastic leap forward to his own century, Wilde cites the cases of two poets, Byron and Shelley, more to bring out a new theme which is the opposition of brutish philistine English society to any attempt to cultivate your individuality and become a personality. His characterisation of the two men and poets is shrewd and so worth quoting at length:

Most personalities have been obliged to be rebels. Half their strength has been wasted in friction. Byron’s personality, for instance, was terribly wasted in its battle with the stupidity, and hypocrisy, and Philistinism of the English. Such battles do not always intensify strength: they often exaggerate weakness. Byron was never able to give us what he might have given us. Shelley escaped better. Like Byron, he got out of England as soon as possible. But he was not so well known. If the English had had any idea of what a great poet he really was, they would have fallen on him with tooth and nail, and made his life as unbearable to him as they possibly could. But he was not a remarkable figure in society, and consequently he escaped, to a certain degree. Still, even in Shelley the note of rebellion is sometimes too strong. The note of the perfect personality is not rebellion, but peace.

What is this individualism? Since it underlies his entire worldview, it’s worth giving his definition, in its entirety:

It will be a marvellous thing – the true personality of man – when we see it. It will grow naturally and simply, flowerlike, or as a tree grows. It will not be at discord. It will never argue or dispute. It will not prove things. It will know everything. And yet it will not busy itself about knowledge. It will have wisdom. Its value will not be measured by material things. It will have nothing. And yet it will have everything, and whatever one takes from it, it will still have, so rich will it be. It will not be always meddling with others, or asking them to be like itself. It will love them because they will be different. And yet while it will not meddle with others, it will help all, as a beautiful thing helps us, by being what it is. The personality of man will be very wonderful. It will be as wonderful as the personality of a child.

Christianity Surprisingly, Wilde invokes Christianity in his crusade to promote individualism. This raises obvious issues which I’ll address in a moment. First his argument: First of all he says that men may, or may not, invoke Christianity in their personal development. Straightaway that is denying Christianity the kind of absolute truth which its adherents (most of Victorian society) gave it.

Then he gives a lengthy summary of Christ’s teachings reinterpreted solely in terms of his own ideology of self-development and completely omitting a) any mention of God, creator of the universe and of each of us b) of a soul c) of the redemptive power of the crucifixion, resurrection and of the true believer’s faith that we, ourselves, can be reborn through true faith. In other words, Wilde omits the entire theological side of Christianity and reduces it to little more than an optional accessory in the quest for personal development.

The message of Christ to man was simply ‘Be thyself.’ That is the secret of Christ…When Jesus talks about the poor he simply means personalities, just as when he talks about the rich he simply means people who have not developed their personalities…

And so completely rewrites Jesus’ doctrine, in his own terms:

What Jesus meant, was this. He said to man, ‘You have a wonderful personality. Develop it. Be yourself. Don’t imagine that your perfection lies in accumulating or possessing external things. Your affection is inside of you. If only you could realise that, you would not want to be rich. Ordinary riches can be stolen from a man. Real riches cannot. In the treasury-house of your soul, there are infinitely precious things, that may not be taken from you. And so, try to so shape your life that external things will not harm you. And try also to get rid of personal property. It involves sordid preoccupation, endless industry, continual wrong. Personal property hinders Individualism at every step.’

What Jesus says that man reaches his perfection, not through what he has, not even through what he does, but entirely through what he is. And so the wealthy young man who comes to Jesus is represented as a thoroughly good citizen, who has broken none of the laws of his state, none of the commandments of his religion. He is quite respectable, in the ordinary sense of that extraordinary word. Jesus says to him, ‘You should give up private property. It hinders you from realising your perfection. It is a drag upon you. It is a burden. Your personality does not need it. It is within you, and not outside of you, that you will find what you really are, and what you really want.’

To his own friends he says the same thing. He tells them to be themselves, and not to be always worrying about other things. What do other things matter? Man is complete in himself. When they go into the world, the world will disagree with them. That is inevitable. The world hates Individualism. But that is not to trouble them. They are to be calm and self-centred. If a man takes their cloak, they are to give him their coat, just to show that material things are of no importance. If people abuse them, they are not to answer back. What does it signify? The things people say of a man do not alter a man. He is what he is. Public opinion is of no value whatsoever. Even if people employ actual violence, they are not to be violent in turn. That would be to fall to the same low level.

Above all things, they are not to interfere with other people or judge them in any way. Personality is a very mysterious thing. A man cannot always be estimated by what he does. He may keep the law, and yet be worthless. He may break the law, and yet be fine. He may be bad, without ever doing anything bad. He may commit a sin against society, and yet realise through that sin his true perfection.

You’ve got to be impressed by the way Wilde has assimilated and rethought the most powerful ideology in human history in order to suit his own worldview, subtly realigning all Jesus’ sayings so as to underpin Wilde’s own concerns for personal development and individualism. You can also see how scandalous this would be to your average Victorian. As would…

The end of marriage Many communists and socialists thought of marriage and the family as coercive patriarchal institutions, established to allow the dominance of men over women and forming a kind of model for the domination of the rich over the poor (notably Friedrich Engels in his 1884 work ‘The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State’). Wilde sympathises with those who wanted to abolish marriage along with private property:

Socialism annihilates family life, for instance. With the abolition of private property, marriage in its present form must disappear. This is part of the programme. Individualism accepts this and makes it fine. It converts the abolition of legal restraint into a form of freedom that will help the full development of personality, and make the love of man and woman more wonderful, more beautiful, and more ennobling.

This he cites Jesus himself as rejecting family life – in the New Testament this is for the sake of following Jesus and becoming closer to God, in Wilde’s reinterpretation it is in order to cultivate the uniqueness of the self:

Jesus knew this. He rejected the claims of family life, although they existed in his day and community in a very marked form. ‘Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ he said, when he was told that they wished to speak to him. When one of his followers asked leave to go and bury his father, ‘Let the dead bury the dead,’ was his terrible answer. He would allow no claim whatsoever to be made on personality.

And so Wilde zeroes in on this one aspect of Jesus’ preaching to underpin his own ideology:

And so he who would lead a Christlike life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself. He may be a great poet, or a great man of science; or a young student at a University, or one who watches sheep upon a moor; or a maker of dramas, like Shakespeare, or a thinker about God, like Spinoza; or a child who plays in a garden, or a fisherman who throws his net into the sea. It does not matter what he is, as long as he realises the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation in morals and in life is wrong.

In praise of anarchism The fundamental premise of anarchism as a political belief is that nobody should rule over others, that we all be absolutely free. It’s debatable, then, whether Wilde is really praising socialism or anarchism.

Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a natural result the State must give up all idea of government. It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as governing mankind. All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out. I must say that it was high time, for all authority is quite degrading. It degrades those who exercise it, and degrades those over whom it is exercised.

Socialism will bring the end of crime In a wildly utopian extrapolation, Wilde asserts that if you abolish authority i.e. one class or group compelling everyone else to live a certain way, then crime will disappear. This leads him to the counter-intuitive and scandalous thought that it is not crime which requires punishment, but the elaborate set of grotesque punishments which create crime.

The less punishment, the less crime. When there is no punishment at all, crime will either cease to exist, or, if it occurs, will be treated by physicians as a very distressing form of dementia, to be cured by care and kindness.

This utopian claim is based on the notion that all crimes are crime of want and poverty and hunger:

For what are called criminals nowadays are not criminals at all. Starvation, and not sin, is the parent of modern crime. That indeed is the reason why our criminals are, as a class, so absolutely uninteresting from any psychological point of view. They are not marvellous Macbeths and terrible Vautrins. They are merely what ordinary, respectable, commonplace people would be if they had not got enough to eat.

Therefore, create a fair society, where everyone has enough for their needs, and crime will disappear:

When private property is abolished there will be no necessity for crime, no demand for it; it will cease to exist…though a crime may not be against property, it may spring from the misery and rage and depression produced by our wrong system of property-holding, and so, when that system is abolished, will disappear.

Crimes of passion i.e. not incited by poverty and want?

Jealousy, which is an extraordinary source of crime in modern life, is an emotion closely bound up with our conceptions of property, and under Socialism and Individualism will die out. It is remarkable that in communistic tribes jealousy is entirely unknown.

Machines will set men free Up to the present men have been the slaves of the machines they have invented:

Up to the present, man has been, to a certain extent, the slave of machinery, and there is something tragic in the fact that as soon as man had invented a machine to do his work he began to starve. This, however, is, of course, the result of our property system and our system of competition. One man owns a machine which does the work of five hundred men. Five hundred men are, in consequence, thrown out of employment, and, having no work to do, become hungry and take to thieving. The one man secures the produce of the machine and keeps it, and has five hundred times as much as he should have, and probably, which is of much more importance, a great deal more than he really wants.

The role of machinery must be completely rethought:

Were that machine the property of all, every one would benefit by it. It would be an immense advantage to the community. All unintellectual labour, all monotonous, dull labour, all labour that deals with dreadful things, and involves unpleasant conditions, must be done by machinery. Machinery must work for us in coal mines, and do all sanitary services, and be the stoker of steamers, and clean the streets, and run messages on wet days, and do anything that is tedious or distressing.

Thus:

While Humanity will be amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure – which, and not labour, is the aim of man – or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight, machinery will be doing all the necessary and unpleasant work.

Machines will be the new slaves For the third time he cites slavery:

The fact is, that civilisation requires slaves. The Greeks were quite right there. Unless there are slaves to do the ugly, horrible, uninteresting work, culture and contemplation become almost impossible. Human slavery is wrong, insecure, and demoralising. On mechanical slavery, on the slavery of the machine, the future of the world depends.

The role of Art

About half way through the essay it feels as though Wilde has dealt with the organisational, political aspects of the issue of the socialist transformation of society (insofar as he does) and moves onto the subject which really interests him and is the core theme of almost everything he wrote, which is the role of art, the artist and criticism. Thus:

A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.

Wilde’s concept of art and his ideology of individualism are intimately linked, two sides of the same coin.

Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known. I am inclined to say that it is the only real mode of Individualism that the world has known.

The philistine public It is telling that Wilde has barely got going about art before he has to start attacking the philistine (English) public. What he doesn’t directly say but is so obvious from his writings is that his entire conception of art is defined in opposition to the vulgarity of the public.

Art is this intense form of Individualism that makes the public try to exercise over it in an authority that is as immoral as it is ridiculous, and as corrupting as it is contemptible. It is not quite their fault. The public has always, and in every age, been badly brought up. They are continually asking Art to be popular, to please their want of taste, to flatter their absurd vanity, to tell them what they have been told before, to show them what they ought to be tired of seeing, to amuse them when they feel heavy after eating too much, and to distract their thoughts when they are wearied of their own stupidity.

The attempt:

on the part of the community, or the Church, or the Government, to interfere with the individualism of imaginative art…is aggressive, offensive and brutalising.

Which arts escape the public? In England, the arts that have escaped best are the arts in which the public take no interest, such as poetry which it doesn’t read. By contrast the philistine public gets very worked up about the ‘immorality’ of contemporary novels or plays (think of the outcry over the ‘immorality’ of Thomas Hardy’s novel, ‘Jude the Obscure’ which led him to abandon writing novels, or the outcry when Ibsen’s plays were staged in London). Partly this is because:

The one thing that the public dislike is novelty. Any attempt to extend the subject-matter of art is extremely distasteful to the public; and yet the vitality and progress of art depend in a large measure on the continual extension of subject-matter.

The public dislike novelty because they are afraid of it. It represents to them a mode of Individualism, an assertion on the part of the artist that he selects his own subject, and treats it as he chooses. The public are quite right in their attitude. Art is Individualism, and Individualism is a disturbing and disintegrating force. Therein lies its immense value. For what it seeks to disturb is monotony of type, slavery of custom, tyranny of habit, and the reduction of man to the level of a machine.

And he laments the way the general public assimilate then ossify and hollow out the so-called classics:

The acceptance of the classics does a great deal of harm. The uncritical admiration of the Bible and Shakespeare in England is an instance of what I mean. With regard to the Bible, considerations of ecclesiastical authority enter into the matter, so that I need not dwell upon the point. But in the case of Shakespeare it is quite obvious that the public really see neither the beauties nor the defects of his plays. If they saw the beauties, they would not object to the development of the drama; and if they saw the defects, they would not object to the development of the drama either.

The fact is the public make use of the classics of a country as a means of checking the progress of Art. They degrade the classics into authorities. They use them as bludgeons for preventing the free expression of Beauty in new forms. They are always asking a writer why he does not write like somebody else, or a painter why he does not paint like somebody else, quite oblivious of the fact that if either of them did anything of the kind he would cease to be an artist.

A fresh mode of Beauty is absolutely distasteful to them, and whenever it appears they get so angry, and bewildered that they always use two stupid expressions – one is that the work of art is grossly unintelligible, the other, that the work of art is grossly immoral.

What they mean by these words seems to me to be this. When they say a work is grossly unintelligible, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is new; when they describe a work as grossly immoral, they mean that the artist has said or made a beautiful thing that is true. The former expression has reference to style; the latter to subject-matter.

But they probably use the words very vaguely, as an ordinary mob will use ready-made paving-stones. There is not a single real poet or prose-writer of this century, for instance, on whom the British public have not solemnly conferred diplomas of immorality, and these diplomas practically take the place, with us, of what in France, is the formal recognition of an Academy of Letters…

By now you can see that he’s said far less about any particular artist or writer or work of art or literature than he has done about the philistine public. It’s excoriating their stupidity and philistinism which really gets his juices flowing and, you realise, is a vital prerequisite for his entire theory. When he returns to writing about ‘the artist’ he’s curiously thin and unimpassioned:

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself.

That, in itself, is a bit boring and anodyne and so, as if sensing it, Wilde goes on to define what he means by a passage with much more life which is, as I’ve explained, slagging the public.

The true artist is a man who believes absolutely in himself, because he is absolutely himself. But I can fancy that if an artist produced a work of art in England that immediately on its appearance was recognised by the public, through their medium, which is the public press, as a work that was quite intelligible and highly moral, he would begin to seriously question whether in its creation he had really been himself at all, and consequently whether the work was not quite unworthy of him, and either of a thoroughly second-rate order, or of no artistic value whatsoever.

Morbidity In the same vein, further passages about ‘the artist’ really derive their energy from Wilde starting off by describing how the stupid philistine public use certain boo words to try and categorise and control new art, the examples he gives being how the public describes work it doesn’t understand as ‘morbid’ or ‘unhealthy’ or ‘exotic’. As for ‘morbid’, it gives Wilde the pretext to repeat a central theme of his which is that a work of art is neither morbid nor immoral, exotic nor unhealthy, because the artist stands at one remove from his subject matter and merely deploys it to create effects:

[Morbid] is, of course, a ridiculous word to apply to a work of art. For what is morbidity but a mood of emotion or a mode of thought that one cannot express? The public are all morbid, because the public can never find expression for anything. The artist is never morbid. He expresses everything. He stands outside his subject, and through its medium produces incomparable and artistic effects. To call an artist morbid because he deals with morbidity as his subject-matter is as silly as if one called Shakespeare mad because he wrote ‘King Lear.’

Public attacks make the artist stronger

An artist in England gains something by being attacked. His individuality is intensified. He becomes more completely himself. Of course, the attacks are very gross, very impertinent, and very contemptible. But then no artist expects grace from the vulgar mind, or style from the suburban intellect.

Not least because they are the products of:

that monstrous and ignorant thing that is called Public Opinion, which, bad and well-meaning as it is when it tries to control action, is infamous and of evil meaning when it tries to control Thought or Art.

Healthy versus unhealthy The accusation of ‘unhealthy’ is so frequently made against modern art that Wilde devotes a paragraph to very entertainingly standing the definition on its head:

What is a healthy, or an unhealthy work of art? All terms that one applies to a work of art, provided that one applies them rationally, have reference to either its style or its subject, or to both together. From the point of view of style, a healthy work of art is one whose style recognises the beauty of the material it employs, be that material one of words or of bronze, of colour or of ivory, and uses that beauty as a factor in producing the aesthetic effect. From the point of view of subject, a healthy work of art is one the choice of whose subject is conditioned by the temperament of the artist, and comes directly out of it. In fine, a healthy work of art is one that has both perfection and personality.

Of course, form and substance cannot be separated in a work of art; they are always one. But for purposes of analysis, and setting the wholeness of aesthetic impression aside for a moment, we can intellectually so separate them. An unhealthy work of art, on the other hand, is a work whose style is obvious, old-fashioned, and common, and whose subject is deliberately chosen, not because the artist has any pleasure in it, but because he thinks that the public will pay him for it. In fact, the popular novel that the public calls healthy is always a thoroughly unhealthy production; and what the public call an unhealthy novel is always a beautiful and healthy work of art.

The philistine press and canting journalism As I’ve commented, for several pages Wilde has defined his ideas of individualism and art by contrasting them with the stupidity, shallowness and vulgarity of the general public which is happier in conservatism, conformity and hates anything which is new and beautiful. Now he moves onto the vehicle of their prejudices, and gives a sustained critique of journalism and the press, purveyors of ‘prejudice, stupidity, cant, and twaddle.’ Nowadays ‘We are dominated by Journalism’ and:

In England, Journalism, not, except in a few well-known instances, having been carried to such excesses of brutality [as in America], is still a great factor, a really remarkable power. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over people’s private lives seems to me to be quite extraordinary. The fact is, that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything, except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesman-like habits, supplies their demands. In centuries before ours the public nailed the ears of journalists to the pump. That was quite hideous. In this century journalists have nailed their own ears to the keyhole. That is much worse. And what aggravates the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers. The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists, who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who is a leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man upon all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful.

The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all. In France they manage these things better. There they do not allow the details of the trials that take place in the divorce courts to be published for the amusement or criticism of the public. All that the public are allowed to know is that the divorce has taken place and was granted on petition of one or other or both of the married parties concerned.

In France, in fact, they limit the journalist, and allow the artist almost perfect freedom. Here we allow absolute freedom to the journalist, and entirely limit the artist. English public opinion, that is to say, tries to constrain and impede and warp the man who makes things that are beautiful in effect, and compels the journalist to retail things that are ugly, or disgusting, or revolting in fact, so that we have the most serious journalists in the world, and the most indecent newspapers.

In praise of Sir Henry Irving Wilde devotes a rare paragraph of unqualified praise, in this case to the great late-Victorian actor-manager Sir Henry Irving. At this point a dash of background from Wikipedia is necessary:

Sir Henry Irving (1838 to 1905) was an English stage actor in the Victorian era, known as an actor-manager because he took complete responsibility for all aspects of productions (supervision of sets, lighting, direction, casting as well as playing the leading roles) for season after season at the West End’s Lyceum Theatre, establishing himself and his company as representative of English classical theatre. In 1895 he became the first actor to be awarded a knighthood, indicating full acceptance of the profession into the higher circles of British society.

In Wilde’s view Irving’s great achievement has been NOT to pander to the lowest common denominator but stay true to his vision as an artist and, slowly slowly, raise the public’s standards.

Had his sole object been to give the public what they wanted, could have produced the commonest plays in the commonest manner, and made as much success and money as a man could possibly desire. But his object was not that. His object was to realise his own perfection as an artist, under certain conditions, and in certain forms of Art. At first he appealed to the few: now he has educated the many. He has created in the public both taste and temperament…I often wonder, however, whether the public understand that that success is entirely due to the fact that he did not accept their standard, but realised his own.

The importance of ‘receptivity’ Why has the public accepted productions of a higher standard at Irving’s theatres than at others? It is a question of receptivity. Antone who encounters a work of art must cultivate receptivity to its qualities.

If a man approaches a work of art with any desire to exercise authority over it and the artist, he approaches it in such a spirit that he cannot receive any artistic impression from it at all. The work of art is to dominate the spectator: the spectator is not to dominate the work of art. The spectator is to be receptive. He is to be the violin on which the master is to play. And the more completely he can suppress his own silly views, his own foolish prejudices, his own absurd ideas of what Art should be, or should not be, the more likely he is to understand and appreciate the work of art in question.

A temperament capable of receiving, through an imaginative medium, and under imaginative conditions, new and beautiful impressions, is the only temperament that can appreciate a work of art.

Receptivity in the theatre Of all the arts, drama is the one which requires most ‘receptivity’. By its nature a play creates mysteries and uncertainties in the first act which the audience has to wait to have resolved. If the audience started shouting at the end of the first act that they don’t understand what’s going on, they would be idiots. Even a London audience knows that it has to wait and see, and so submit to its artistic effect.

The honest man is to sit quietly, and know the delightful emotions of wonder, curiosity, and suspense. He is not to go to the play to lose a vulgar temper. He is to go to the play to realise an artistic temperament. He is to go to the play to gain an artistic temperament. He is not the arbiter of the work of art. He is one who is admitted to contemplate the work of art, and, if the work be fine, to forget in its contemplation the egotism that mars him – the egotism of his ignorance, or the egotism of his information.

In this way drama, or art in general, is ‘elevating’ in that it exposes us to artistic influences – more complicated, subtle new and insightful than our run-of-the-mill thoughts and perceptions – and, as he’s explained earlier, these are not to be judged in terms of the ‘morality’ of the vulgar herd, as ‘healthy’ or ‘unhealthy’, ‘moral’ or ‘immoral’, but purely by aesthetic criteria, of whether the style matches the subject matter, whether the subject matter is adequately elaborated and so on.

Receptivity in the novel Same with the novel:

Popular authority and the recognition of popular authority are fatal.

A true artist takes no notice whatever of the public. The public are to him non-existent. He has no poppied or honeyed cakes through which to give the monster sleep or sustenance. He leaves that to the popular novelist.

Interestingly, Wilde thinks the pre-eminent serious novelist working in the England of his time (essentially the 1880s) was George Meredith:

To him belongs philosophy in fiction. His people not merely live, but they live in thought. One can see them from myriad points of view. They are suggestive. There is soul in them and around them. They are interpretative and symbolic. And he who made them, those wonderful quickly-moving figures, made them for his own pleasure, and has never asked the public what they wanted, has never cared to know what they wanted, has never allowed the public to dictate to him or influence him in any way but has gone on intensifying his own personality, and producing his own individual work. At first none came to him. That did not matter. Then the few came to him. That did not change him. The many have come now. He is still the same. He is an incomparable novelist.

The decorative arts Wilde knew a thing or two about this subject having written extensively about domestic furnishing and been the editor of The Woman’s World magazine from 1887 to 1889. As you might expect, he thinks popular taste is dire. He calls the famous 1851 exhibition held in Joseph Paxton’s Crystal Palace, ‘the Great Exhibition of international vulgarity’ which led to ‘traditions…were so appalling that the houses in which people lived were only fit for blind people to live in.’

Despite much abuse a new generation of artists and designers has, in fact, produced much beautiful work, effecting a ‘revolution in house-decoration and furniture so that ‘it is almost impossible to enter any modern house without seeing some recognition of good taste, some recognition of the value of lovely surroundings, some sign of appreciation of beauty.’ Presumably he’s referring to the Arts and Crafts movement, most associated with William Morris but with many other designers? It’s irritating that he isn’t clearer.

And ironic that we now regard his idea of beautiful furnishings and furniture as extraordinarily dark, overwrought and cluttered. It’s all very well visiting exhibitions of Morris and Arts and Crafts ware but thank God for the Bauhaus and associated movements which led, eventually, maybe only in the 1970s and 80s, to most people decluttering and streamlining their living spaces.

What kind of government should the artist live under?

The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all. Authority over him and his art is ridiculous. It has been stated that under despotisms artists have produced lovely work. This is not quite so. Artists have visited despots, not as subjects to be tyrannised over, but as wandering wonder-makers, as fascinating vagrant personalities, to be entertained and charmed and suffered to be at peace, and allowed to create. There is this to be said in favour of the despot, that he, being an individual, may have culture, while the mob, being a monster, has none. One who is an Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all. But there is no necessity to separate the monarch from the mob; all authority is equally bad.

Passages like this show pretty clearly that Wilde wasn’t a socialist so much as an anarchist. Not a socialist government – no government is his utopian ideal.

Three types of despotism The essay feels like it’s running out of steam when Wilde tacks on a consideration of what he considers the three types of despotism, namely despotism of the soul, of the body, and of the soul and body. Despotism of the body was exercised by princes. Some of these, particularly during the Renaissance, were immensely tasteful and commissioned great works, but were always dangerous, and imprisoned, exiled or executed as many artists as the commissioned. Despotism over the soul Wilde associates with the Papacy, where much the same applied i.e. some popes were enlightened patrons but also very dangerous, not just to artists but, via their authority over all thought, to free thinking.

It is an obvious shortcoming of this little overview that it is so limited, based on such limited examples from such a rarefied and precious period i.e. the Renaissance. Modern history ranges over the entire history of all peoples and all times and so makes Wilde’s little nostrums feel like dilettantism.

The Renaissance and Louis XIV Same goes for his other sweeping historical generalisations which are interesting for what they say about him more than for the actual periods:

The Renaissance was great because it sought to solve no social problem, and busied itself not about such things, but suffered the individual to develop freely, beautifully, and naturally, and so had great and individual artists, and great and individual men. One might point out how Louis XIV, by creating the modern state, destroyed the individualism of the artist, and made things monstrous in their monotony of repetition, and contemptible in their conformity to rule.

Wilde is anti-democracy The third tyranny, over body and soul, he attributes to Democracy and the People. Important to point out that Wilde despises democracy as pandering to the lowest common denominator of the vulgar herd.

High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people. It has been found out.

And:

An Emperor and King may stoop down to pick up a brush for a painter, but when the democracy stoops down it is merely to throw mud. And yet the democracy have not so far to stoop as the emperor. In fact, when they want to throw mud they have not to stoop at all.

And:

As for the People…their authority is a thing blind, deaf, hideous, grotesque, tragic, amusing, serious, and obscene. It is impossible for the artist to live with the People. All despots bribe. The people bribe and brutalise. Who told them to exercise authority? They were made to live, to listen, and to love…

So – Wilde is profoundly anti-democratic. His idea of socialism is for it to allow a world of people like him to flourish, to create a world of Oscar Wildes.

Wilde’s view of human nature His generalisations reach their most sweeping when he reveals his fundamental view of human nature: this is that human nature is continually changing and evolving.

It is exactly the existing conditions that one objects to and any scheme that could accept these conditions is wrong and foolish. The conditions will be done away with, and human nature will change. The only thing that one really knows about human nature is that it changes. Change is the one quality we can predicate of it.

(After the catastrophes of the past century, I think most people would agree that, despite superficial changes in technology, underlying human nature is sadly impervious to change but born again in each generation with the same vices and weaknesses.)

More anarchic assumptions

Individualism…does not come to man with any claims upon him at all. It comes naturally and inevitably out of man. It is the point to which all development tends. It is the differentiation to which all organisms grow. It is the perfection that is inherent in every mode of life, and towards which every mode of life quickens.

And so Individualism exercises no compulsion over man. On the contrary, it says to man that he should suffer no compulsion to be exercised over him. It does not try to force people to be good. It knows that people are good when they are let alone. Man will develop Individualism out of himself. Man is now so developing Individualism. To ask whether Individualism is practical is like asking whether Evolution is practical. Evolution is the law of life, and there is no evolution except towards Individualism.

A lovely dream for individuals to dream. Never going to happen. As someone who bases his entire worldview on evolutionary materialism, I can’t help smiling at the fairy tale claim that ‘there is no evolution except towards Individualism.’ This obviously has nothing to do with the science of evolution, but it’s not even true in sociological terms. If the triumph of social media over the past 15 years shows anything it’s that people want to find their tribes and then conform to them, adopt their rules, manners, clothes and attitudes. People are naturally anti-individualist.

Paradoxical definition of affectation Again Wilde uses the accusations of the stupid public as the springboard for some witty inversions of conventional thinking. A man (himself, of course) is criticised for being ‘affected’ if he dresses as he wants to but, claims Wilde, he is merely doing what comes naturally i.e. pleasing himself. What is affected is going out of your way to make sure you dress exactly like everyone else, ‘dressing according to the views of one’s neighbour, whose views, as they are the views of the majority, will probably be extremely stupid.’

True definition of selfishness Or a man is called ‘selfish’ if he:

lives in the manner that seems to him most suitable for the full realisation of his own personality; if, in fact, the primary aim of his life is self-development. But this is the way in which everyone should live. Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live. And unselfishness is letting other people’s lives alone, not interfering with them.

You can see here how Wilde’s Anglo-Saxon version of anarchism is a kind of liberalism without limits, with all the social limits and restrictions and safety guards which John Stuart Mill and his followers wrestled with, at a stroke removed. And as such, completely impractical. But his redefinitions of selfishness and unselfishness are extremely persuasive and attractive:

Selfishness always aims at creating around it an absolute uniformity of type. Unselfishness recognises infinite variety of type as a delightful thing, accepts it, acquiesces in it, enjoys it. It is not selfish to think for oneself. A man who does not think for himself does not think at all. It is grossly selfish to require of ones neighbour that he should think in the same way, and hold the same opinions. Why should he? If he can think, he will probably think differently.

More praise of individualism

Under Individualism people will be quite natural and absolutely unselfish, and will know the meanings of these words, and realise them in their free, beautiful lives.

Nor will men be egotistic as they are now. For the egotist is he who makes claims upon others, and the Individualist will not desire to do that. It will not give him pleasure. When man has realised Individualism, he will also realise sympathy and exercise it freely and spontaneously.

Up to the present man has hardly cultivated sympathy at all. He has merely sympathy with pain, and sympathy with pain is not the highest form of sympathy. All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode. It is tainted with egotism. It is apt to become morbid. There is in it a certain element of terror for our own safety. We become afraid that we ourselves might be as the leper or as the blind, and that no man would have care of us. It is curiously limiting, too.

One should sympathise with the entirety of life, not with life’s sores and maladies merely, but with life’s joy and beauty and energy and health and freedom.

So Wilde looks forward to a time when 1) socialism has solved the problem of poverty and 2) science has solved the problem of disease. Is this utopian? So be it.

A map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at, for it leaves out the one country at which Humanity is always landing. And when Humanity lands there, it looks out, and, seeing a better country, sets sail. Progress is the realisation of Utopias.

Last thoughts about Christianity As the essay draws to a close Wilde tacks on a further page about individualism and Christianity. If the earlier passage was broadly sympathetic, largely because Wilde rewrote Christ’s message in his own terms, this second passage is a lot more historically accurate and a lot less sympathetic.

Wilde makes the point that ‘Christ made no attempt to reconstruct society’ and draws the questionable conclusion that ‘consequently the Individualism that he preached to man could be realised only through pain or in solitude’.

Christian solitude Taking those early Christians who chose to go and live in the desert, Wilde says that, maybe by being far from the crowd some of them may have expressed their personalities, but they were liable to be a rather ‘impoverished personality’. (This is open to the obvious criticism that these anchorites and monks and cenobites were seeking the opposite of Wilde’s self-expression, were seeking to annihilate their own personalities in order to be closer to God.)

Christian pain No, many more Christians have sought to express themselves through the path of pain. Wilde’s aim here is to draw a sharp distinction between medieval Christianity (bad for individualism) and the Renaissance (good for individualism).

The Medieval world with its obsession with gruesome suffering, with ‘its wild passion for wounding itself, its gashing with knives, and its whipping with rods’, this bloody mediaevalism is the real Christianity, and the mediaeval Christ is the real Christ.

By contrast, the Renaissance dawned upon the world and brought with it the new ideals of the beauty of life and the joy of living. The result was that artists could not understand the Biblical Christ. They painted him as a harmless baby, as a boy playing.

Even when they drew him crucified they drew him as a beautiful God on whom evil men had inflicted suffering. But he did not preoccupy them much. What delighted them was to paint the men and women whom they admired, and to show the loveliness of this lovely earth.

They painted many religious pictures – in fact, they painted far too many, and the monotony of type and motive is wearisome, and was bad for art. It was the result of the authority of the public in art-matters, and is to be deplored. But their soul was not in the subject. Raphael was a great artist when he painted his portrait of the Pope. When he painted his Madonnas and infant Christs, he is not a great artist at all.

No, the Renaissance couldn’t understand the true, medieval Christ, because he was a kind of epitome of pain and human suffering and the Renaissance artists were too full of Italian joie de vivre to understand.

Christ had no message for the Renaissance, which was wonderful because it brought an ideal at variance with his…to find the presentation of the real Christ we must go to mediaeval art. There he is one maimed and marred; one who is not comely to look on, because Beauty is a joy; one who is not in fair raiment, because that may be a joy also: he is a beggar who has a marvellous soul; he is a leper whose soul is divine; he needs neither property nor health; he is a God realising his perfection through pain.

I suppose the contradiction with his earlier passage about Christ is only apparent. It can be explain by saying that the earlier passage, which made Jesus an evangelist for self discovery and self expression, is Wilde’s interpretation of Jesus’s message – while this passage about the medieval and renaissance Jesus are about how he has been portrayed in the history of art which is, I suppose, a different thing.

Russia and pain Right at the end of the essay he extends this thought into a description of contemporary Russian art and literature. (He mentions no names but surely he is thinking of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy.) Russia’s social system (i.e. the discrepancy between the tiny affluent class and the widespread serfdom and astonishing poverty of the masses) demands that its art be obsessed with pain.

Even now, in some places in the world, the message of Christ is necessary. No one who lived in modern Russia could possibly realise his perfection except by pain. A few Russian artists have realised themselves in Art; in a fiction that is mediaeval in character, because its dominant note is the realisation of men through suffering. But for those who are not artists, and to whom there is no mode of life but the actual life of fact, pain is the only door to perfection. A Russian who lives happily under the present system of government in Russia must either believe that man has no soul, or that, if he has, it is not worth developing. A Nihilist who rejects all authority, because he knows authority to be evil, and welcomes all pain, because through that he realises his personality, is a real Christian. To him the Christian ideal is a true thing.

As history shows, Russia’s addiction to gargantuan suffering, largely self-inflicted, was to be amply demonstrated in the twentieth century. Has it ended yet?

Conclusion With a few deft strokes Wilde brings his essay back from this digression about pain to repeat his generalisations about the brave future, when socialism will have solved the problem of poverty and science solved the problem of pain.

the modern world has schemes. It proposes to do away with poverty and the suffering that it entails. It desires to get rid of pain, and the suffering that pain entails. It trusts to Socialism and to Science as its methods. What it aims at is an Individualism expressing itself through joy. This Individualism will be larger, fuller, lovelier than any Individualism has ever been.

Pain is not the ultimate mode of perfection. It is merely provisional and a protest. It has reference to wrong, unhealthy, unjust surroundings. When the wrong, and the disease, and the injustice are removed, it will have no further place. It will have done its work. It was a great work, but it is almost over. Its sphere lessens every day.

Obviously as wrong as a social prediction could possibly be.

Vision of the future perfection of man

Man has sought to live intensely, fully, perfectly. When he can do so without exercising restraint on others, or suffering it ever, and his activities are all pleasurable to him, he will be saner, healthier, more civilised, more himself.

Pleasure is Nature’s test, her sign of approval. When man is happy, he is in harmony with himself and his environment.

The new Individualism, for whose service Socialism, whether it wills it or not, is working, will be perfect harmony. It will be what the Greeks sought for, but could not, except in Thought, realise completely, because they had slaves, and fed them; it will be what the Renaissance sought for, but could not realise completely except in Art, because they had slaves, and starved them. It will be complete, and through it each man will attain to his perfection.

Thoughts

The most obvious points, for me, are that 1) this essay is very, very long, 2) it is packed with ideas, brilliantly expressed and 3) that it is remarkably consistent, it is the expression of a coherent worldview worked out to some depth and in great detail, taking in a vision of human nature, of history, of different historical epochs, of social change, alongside a coherent attack on the institution of property and its distorting harmful effects on individuals and societies.

It is possible to take issue with numerous aspects of his argument but, insofar as it is not trying to be an essay about evolution or science or economics or history in the scholarly sense, but is more the expression of a particular worldview, it is astonishingly wide-ranging and persuasive. Like the works of art he talks about, there’s not much point quibbling with this or that sweeping generalisation, it’s more a case of submitting to the pace, to the tremendous fluency, and the utopian loveliness of his vision. For the duration of your reading and, therefore, of your submission, his vision of a utopian human nature is beautiful and therefore, in his own terms, as imaginatively true as any work of art.

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by Simon on July 15, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Essays, Literary criticism, Literature

Tagged #democracy, Abolitionists, agitator, American slavery, anarchist, art, Arts and Crafts Movement, Be yourself, Beauty, Bible, Byron, Catholic church, Charity, Christian pain, Christianity, Communism, Crystal Palace, Darwin, despotism over the body, Despotism over the soul, egotism, England, English literature, essay, France, Friedrich Engels, George Meredith, Henry Irving, immoral, individualism, journalism, Julius Caesar, Keats, King Lear, Literature, Louis XIV, Lyceum Theatre, machinery, Marcus Aurelius, marriage, mediaevalism, medieval Christianity, morality, nihilism, nineteenth century England, philistine public, political essay, Politics, poverty, private property, Public Opinion, Rebellion, Renan, Russia, Russian culture, Science, Shakespeare, Shelley, Slavery, socialism, socialist state, the Great Exhibition, The Origin of the Family Private Property and the State, the papacy, the Renaissance, theatre, Victorian England, William Morris

Posted by Simon on July 15, 2024

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John McNab by John Buchan (1925)

‘Could you have me at Crask this autumn?’ [Lamancha] asked…
‘I should jolly well think so,’ cried Archie. ‘There’s heaps of room in the old house, and I promise you I’ll make you comfortable. Look here, you fellows! Why shouldn’t all three of you come? I can get in a couple of extra maids from Inverlarrig.’
(Early exchange from John McNab by John Buchan, page 17)

‘Of course we’re all blazing idiots – the whole thing is insanity – but we’ve done the best we can in the way of preparation. The great thing is for each of us to keep his wits about him and use them, for everything may go the opposite way to what we think.’
(The Earl of Lamancha admitting the absurdity of their prank, page 163)

This is the second of Buchan’s series of books featuring the fictional character, Scottish barrister and Conservative MP, Sir Edward Leithen.

Executive summary

Three posh Scots, eminent figures in the British Establishment, discover they are all bored to tears. They concoct a plan to go stay on the Highland estate of a fourth member of their group and send a challenge to the owners of his three neighbouring estates, to the effect that they will poach game off their estates. They won’t steal the game, they’ll place it on the respective front doorsteps. It’s a bet made in a gentleman’s club like at the start of ‘Around The World in 80 Days’.

Who should these letters of challenge come from? They invent a name, ‘John McNab’. What none of them anticipate is that the very lairds they set out to defeat will themselves come in on their side, that the population around the estates will hear about John McNab’s brave exploits, that they will even be reported in the local and then the national press and even that, in some conversations, some of the characters see in John McNab’s pluck and daring a solution to the widespread malaise afflicting post-First World War Britain.

This atmosphere of comedy reefed with sometimes serious themes, and the way all members of a highly stratified society are brought together in a common endeavour, reminded me of the Powell and Pressburger movie I Know Where I’m Going and, on a lighter tone, the Scotland-based Ealing comedy, Whiskey Galore.

Longer version

Three middle-aged posh Scots meet up at their London club. They were at school and then ‘the University’ together, have prospered in their careers and now discover they are bored and restless, suffering from taedium vitae, ennui. They are:

Sir Edward ‘Ned’ Leithen (lawyer, Member of Parliament and ex-Attorney General)
John Palliser-Yeates (banker)
Charles, the Right Hon. the Earl of Lamancha, M.P., His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Dominions, possessor of ‘insatiable ambition’

They are joined for dinner by Captain Sir Archibald Roylance, D.S.O., prospective Conservative candidate for Wester Ross and Laird of Crask, an estate in the Highlands, an irritatingly boisterous and good-humoured war veteran (game left leg giving him a pronounced limp).

Over dinner and cigars they tell yarns about figures back in Scotland and one mentions Jim Tarras, the fellow who played a prank by poaching game on other people’s estates (this class of character only knows people who own estates) but warning them in advance that he was coming.

The idea catches fire and the bored threesome agree to travel incognito to the estate of Archie Roylance. It is August, fine hunting weather. They arrange to send out letters to the owners of neighbouring estates announcing that they will poach game off their land between set dates. It is an ironic point of gentlemanly etiquette that they will not remove the game from the estate owner’s land, in fact they will deliver the shot stag or caught salmon to their doors, thus not being guilty of anything as common as theft. Lamancha’s letter template reads:

‘Sir, I have the honour to inform you that I propose to kill a stag [or a salmon as the case may be] on your ground between midnight on – and midnight –. [We can leave the dates open for the present.] The animal, of course, remains your property and will be duly delivered to you. It is a condition that it must be removed wholly outside your bounds. In the event of the undersigned failing to achieve his purpose he will pay as forfeit one hundred pounds, and if successful fifty pounds to any charity you may appoint. I have the honour to be, your obedient humble servant.’

Obviously they can’t sign the letters with any of their real names and so cook up the nom de guerre i.e. fictional name, John McNab, hence the title.

The point of poaching is that it is not only technically challenging in itself i.e. stalking game or catching salmon, but also dangerous in that it is illegal and so getting caught, taken to court, named in the papers, would potentially end all their careers.

For example Roylance, whose mansion they hide in and make their base of operations, is planning to stand as Conservative candidate for his constituency; getting caught poaching would ruin him.

‘You’re an ass, John,’ said Leithen. ‘It’s only a couple of pounds for John Macnab. But if these infernal Edinburgh lawyers get on the job, it will be a case of producing the person of John Macnab, and then we’re all in the cart. Don’t you realise that in this fool’s game we simply cannot afford to lose – none of us?’

The thing is that, unlike the other Buchan books I’ve read, John McNab is a comedy, written in high good humour. Here’s an example of Buchan’s dry, understated humour:

Sir Edward Leithen sighed deeply as he turned from the doorstep down the long hot street. He did not look behind him, or he would have seen another gentleman approach cautiously round the corner of a side-street, and, when the coast was clear, ring the doctor’s bell. He was so completely fatigued with life that he neglected to be cautious at crossings, as was his habit, and was all but slain by a motor-omnibus.

Boisterous young Sir Archie in particular is an upper-class noodle with the same posh mannerisms as Bertie Wooster et al, dropping their gs etc. Here’s an example of some of the replies they get to their letter, this is probably the funniest.

‘Sir, I have received your insolent letter. I do not know what kind of rascal you may be, except that you have the morals of a bandit and the assurance of a halfpenny journalist. But since you seem in your perverted way to be a sportsman, I am not the man to refuse your challenge. My reply is, sir, damn your eyes and have a try. I defy you to kill a stag in my forest between midnight on the 28th of August and midnight of the 30th. I will give instructions to my men to guard my marches, and if you should be roughly handled by them you have only to blame yourself. Yours faithfully, Alastair Raden.’

It’s all done in this kind of joshing, posh tone. The three men draw straws to decide who will poach what on which of Lord Archie’s neighbouring estates.

Lamancha is set to poach in the Haripol forest
Palliser-Yeates draws the straw to shoot a stag on the Glenraden estate
Leithen is set to poach salmon on the estate of Strathlarrig

Highland setting

It’s all set in the Highlands with a regular bombardment of Scots place names which might have well been in Ecuador or ancient Greece for all they meant to me. Here’s Lord Archie explaining that:

‘Haripol is about the steepest and most sportin’ forest in the Highlands, and Glenraden is nearly as good. There’s no forest at Strathlarrig, but, as I’ve told you, amazin’ good salmon fishin’. For a west coast river, I should put the Larrig only second to the Laxford.’

There’s miles of description like this, detailed word portraits of places with venerable Scottish names. In his introduction and notes, Buchan scholar David Daniell makes the elementary point that Buchan grew up in rural Fife with regular family holidays in Tweeddale, many hours spent yomping across the heather, through woods etc. He was a keen and expert fisherman from boyhood, publishing a book on the subject when he was barely 21 and continued fishing throughout his life.

So the point being that the descriptions of the landscape encountered by the three bored poachers, and especially the technical details of Leithen’s fly fishing, are painted from life, deep experience and love. It’s a love poem to the land.

However, it’s also a pretty basic fact that all the placenames in the book are fictional. They combine aspects of the various regions Buchan knew well to create a kind of perfect huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ paradise. There’s a map but all the place names and the entire layout are invented. On reflection, the map is a bit too simple and conveniently arranged around the narrative to be true.

Complications

It’s a comedy so there are comic complications, mainly in the shape of new characters. The poaching forays are set for consecutive 2-day periods, so we are introduced to the owners of each of the targeted estates in order.

The Raden family

First up is Glenraden castle where John Palliser-Yeates is slated to shoot a stag and deposit it at the castle door. We are introduced to father of the house, Colonel Radel. More importantly he has two marrying-age daughters.

The Bandicotts

The eldest Radel girl, Agatha, is falling moonily in love with Junius Bandicott, the grown-up son of an elderly American archaeologist, Mr Acheson Bandicott, who has the Colonel’s permission to excavate an ancient barrow on his land, because he is convinced it’s the burial mound of the renowned Viking Harald Blacktooth.

The Bandicotts have rented the second of the neighbouring estates, Strathlarrig House, whose magnificent but very exposed salmon streams Leithen is set to poach.

Janet Raden

Colonel Radel’s youngest daughter is Janet or ‘Nettie’ for short. She’s small and shrewd. In an early comic encounter she watches Lord Archie jumping over stepping stones in order to test his gammy leg, but when he realises he is being watched he slips off a stone and plunges into three foot of water, further emphasising his character as an upper class twit.

Janet sits in on the meetings convened by her father with their groundsmen and gamekeepers as they plan how to prevent this phantom ‘John McNab’ stalking a deer on their land and it’s she who makes the shrewdest suggestions. In the event, she goes out walking over the heather on the second day McNab has promised to strike and catches him, in this case John Palliser-Yeates.

Mission 1. Palliser-Yeates against Glenraden

Our guys had got wind that the American archaeologist was going to use dynamite (!) to blow out the heavy stones concealing the barrow and so the man tasked with the Glenraden estate, Palliser-Yeates, makes his shot in between this series of small explosions. But unlucky for him, Janet was sitting on hilltop not far away, comes running and confronts him just as he’s bending over to hoist the stag up. Being a gentleman, Palliser-Yeates tips his hat, says it’s a fair catch and he’s lost, but then turns and runs.

Fish Benjie

At this point I need to introduce Fish Benjie. Chapter 4 opens with a long and beguiling description of a certain type of all-purpose tinker and hobo you see on the roads of Scotland, then zeroes in on the life story of the young tinker, hustler and survivor, Benjamin Bogle. He’s acquired his nickname because, with his father in prison and his mother unwell, he’s independently travelling the roads of the area where the novel is set and among other hustles, collects fresh fish from the coast and sells it at the big houses.

The point is that Benjie becomes aware of the three posh strangers hiding at Lord Archie’s house and catches one of them, Leithen, sneaking around. Faced with having their whole scam blown, Leithen makes a snap decision to let Benjie in on the secret and take him on the team. He becomes a spy, recording the comings and goings at each of the estates and in the early evening reporting all to our guys at Crask Lodge.

When Palliser-Yeates shoots his stag the plan had been for him to lug it a hundred yards or so to where Benjie was waiting with his cart, towed by a knackered old horse. But Janet came running up before he could hook up with Benjie and, after Palliser-Yeates took to his heels and Janet came across Benjie a 100 yards down the track, she mistakenly thought he just happened to be passing. In the event, she gets Benjie to help her load the dead stag onto the cart telling him to take it to the castle. In fact being the hustler he is, Benjie instead trots in the opposite direction and finds Palliser-Yeates, offering him the stag. Palliser-Yeates is touched by his loyalty (and cunning) but explains that he (Palliser-Yeates) is a gentleman and has given his word to a lady – so Benjie must turn round and deliver the stag to the castle. Here he is richly rewarded by the Radens for his help, thus getting paid twice, by the attackers and defenders. Benjie is that kind of character and deeply enjoyable for it.

Harald Blacktooth

Incidentally the day of dynamiting turns up trumps for the American archaeologist who does indeed discover impressive relics – two massive torques, several bowls and flagons, spear-heads from which the hafts had long since rotted, a sword-blade, and a quantity of brooches, armlets, and rings – but most strikingly, a necklace of shells which could only have come from North America!

On the basis of which Bandicott Senior makes the wild claim that this Harald Blacktooth must have sailed to and back from America (compare The Saga of Eirik the Red) and the even wilder and comic suggestion that, as a result, the Radel family include among their ancestors the discoverers of America! A trope which is repeated with droll humour by other characters for the rest of the story.

But more than that, Bandicott, being American, is all about press and publicity and so he rings up the local and national press, the British Museum, Uncle Tom Cobley and all, telling them about his amazing discovery.

The practical results of this are that a dozen or more journalists descend on Glenraden Castle and the neighbourhood, snooping round, trespassing and generally making the self-appointed mission of the three toffs significantly more difficult.

Mission 2. Leithen against Strathlarrig

Long story short the next night Leithen manages to catch his salmon but is spotted by one of the Strathlarrig gillies, Jimsie who, with two assistants, quickly captures him. Now Leithen had disguised himself as a tramp with a dirty face, ragged clothes and dishevelled hair and so he tries to pretend the salmon had been caught by an otter, which had taken a chunk out of it and he had come across it half eaten. Jimsie hands him over to the Strathlarrig head-keeper, Angus (‘a morose old man near six-foot-four in height, clean-shaven, with eyebrows like a penthouse’) who doesn’t buy Leithen’s story and has him thrown in the estate garage and the door locked pending arrest and charge for trespassing and poaching the next day.

Now it gets a bit complicated. The Americans who have rented Strathlarrig, the Bandicotts, are hosting a fine dinner for their neighbours and persuaded Sir Archie to go along. Now, Angus’s men not only captured Leithen but one of the many journalists brought to the area by the discovery, who recognised Leithen and Leithen was forced to let in on his secret. In fact Leithen had recruited this man, Crossby, to create a distraction by trespassing up near the house.

Now when Junius Bandicott learns that his zealous head-keeper has imprisoned these men, he thinks he’s over-reacted. Also it’s clear that neither of them are the famous John McNab everyone’s het up about. And so he orders them released.

It’s Agatha who goes to the garages and orders the servants to set the men free. Leithen is so discombobulated at the sight of her that he forgets to put on a yokel accent and speaks with his posh educated accent. Agatha realises he is indeed of her class. Leithen quickly improvises a story about being down on his luck having made many bad life decisions.

It’s only the next morning, when the salmon, complete with the bit Leithen cut out to make it look like it had been caught by an otter, restored, and deposited on the doorstep of Strathlarrig House along with a message from ‘John McNab’ saying here is the poached animal he promised, that Agatha, Junius, Archie and Jimsie all realise the rough old tramp they locked up – then released – was McNab himself!

Lord Archie at the hustings

Another complication is that Lord Archie had forgotten that slap bang in the middle of the McNab campaign he has a pre-arranged appointment to give a political speech, part of his campaign to elected Conservative candidate for Wester Ross (arranged by his enthusiastic agent, Brodie, ‘a lean, red-haired man’) a short train ride from Crask Lodge. Buchan gives a vivid description of what it’s like to stand up in front of an audience of thousands and your mind to go completely blank, completely forgetting the tissue of bromides and clichés he had spent days memorising.

But more than that, he finds himself inspired to use the story of ‘John McNab’ who, of course, his entire audience knows about, taking him up as an example of how we must ‘challenge’ ourselves in order to become fully awake, to test the old values which he, as a Tory, believes in but also believes just be renewed in every generation. To his surprise he gets a standing ovation. McNab has become a figure who lights up political campaigns!

Mission 3. Lamancha against Haripol

The owner of Haripol House is a different kettle of fish. He’s not Scots. He’s an Englander, Lord Claybody, who made his pile from business in the Midlands. He’s bought Haripol House and adorned it in horrendous taste. He reacts worst of the three addressees of the John McNab letters, getting his lawyers to send a formal reply threatening arrest and conviction. Now, while the campaigns against Glenraden Castle and Strathlarrig House have garnered a lot of support among the local population and even among the owners of those houses (!) Claybody’s attitude has hardened. He sees McNab’s prank as an assault on property everywhere. To this end, our heroes learn that Claybody has imported 100 navvies from a major dam building project he is responsible for in the vicinity. These men will guard his property making the McNab assault almost impossible.

But that is precisely why Lamancha is determined to see it through. On the eve of the campaign, there comes a night so dark and stormy night that none of the conspirators, poring over maps and exchanging battle plans, notice the front door open and Colonel Raden and his two daughters cross the threshold to escape the weather. At just the moment that Leithen and Palliser-Yeates enter the hall from different rooms. the two daughters, Agatha and Janet both exclaim ‘John McNab!’ for each man is the John McNab who they’ve encountered.

Lord Archie enters, greets his guests, gets them to take off their wet things, come into the study by a fire, and proceeds to come clean, telling them they see before them the collaborators on the great John McNab scam. To everyone’s merriment, the Colonel accepts the situation and goes so far as to say he and his daughters will help the conspirators poach a deer off Claybody, so much do the old lairds of the locality despise the jumped-up new English owner.

But what with all those navvies the situation seems impossible until Janet and Benjie pull off a masterstroke. They kidnap Lady Claybody’s adored little doggie, Roguie. Janet had paid her a visit and noticed a) how she doted on the little critter and b) how she let it off the leash to run wild. So she got Benjie to kidnap it, the idea being that she will insist on a large number of navvies being sent out to find it. Genius!

Long vivid description of Lamancha being led a-stalking by top Crask gillie Wattie Lithgow. He gets a shot at the oldest biggest legendary stag in the region, doesn’t kill him in one but fatally wounds him. They follow the blood trail and find the stag dead in a burn. Wattie lugs him across country to where Lord Archie and Janet are waiting. They load it up and drive it back to Crask without incident.

(While they waited, Janet and Archie had built a bridge across the river Doran (from old planks) during which they’d both gotten wet and messy and as he watched her wash herself in the stream Archie suddenly realised this slender young women was one with the heather and the hills and he proposes to her. ‘Yes,’ she turned a laughing face, ‘of course I will.’ It’s a festive comedy.)

To cut a long story short:

Lamancha bags his stag, which is dragged away by Wattie, down to the car where Lord Archie and Janet drive it back to Crask.
Lord Archie and Janet wash and change and drive over to Haripol House to return Lady Claybody’s kidnapped dog. En route Palliser-Yeates emerges from the heather and they invite him to come along.
Meanwhile Leithen had been given the task of distracting the gillies and navvies and does a very good job of it, his tortuous journeys and then flight from the navvies described in immense detail. It has a comic denouement when he stumbles down towards Haripol House and is astounded to see Lord Archie and Janet there being politely entertained.

Lamancha, the man who shot the stag, is not, however, so lucky. He is cornered by a tough navvy who he can’t dodge, they get into a clumsy wrestling match, fall into a hollow and the navvy’s leg is broken, only at this point does Lamancha realise the fellow is Stokes, his old orderly in the army. Suddenly (when he no longer poses any threat) Lamancha is all aristocratic concern. When a bunch of other navvies and gillies surround him, Lamancha is only concerned that Stokes gets the best treatment, has his leg splinted, and is carried by the gillies down to Johnson Claybody’s car.

In all this Lamancha displays natural, unforced compassion and gentlemanliness, which is strongly contrasted with Johnson Claybody’s selfishness, ill manners and bad grace. Johnson really hates the way Lamancha makes all the right moral decisions and effortlessly commands Johnson’s own keeper and gillies. He has class, dontcha know, whereas Johnson is forced to resort to caddish bluster: ‘Damn your impudence! What business is that of yours?’ etc.

When Lamancha approaches Haripol House, under guard by the head-keeper etc, he is astonished to find waiting for him, not just Lord and Lady Claybody, but his partners in crime, Palliser-Yeates, Leithen, Lord Archie and the lovely Janet!

Happy ending

And there’s a happy ending worthy of a stage comedy. Lamancha admits they he and his friends as ‘John McNab’, something the other two had not, in fact, let on. After their initial astonishment, Lord and Lady Claybody react well, if perplexed. Claybody says he would have given them free range of his estate if they’d wanted it; or organised a real challenge to poaching on it, if only they’d asked.

As they all discuss it, Ned, John and Lamancha come round to feeling they’ve misunderstood the whole enterprise. They were never in any real danger, it was never a real challenge, they feel silly and heartily apologise. Janet apologises for kidnapping Lady Claypole, which momentarily introduces an ill note into proceedings which is glossed over when Lady C learns that young Archie and Janet are engaged, at which point she gives them a big-bosomed hug. Even Johnson Claybody who has behaved so ill-manneredly to Lamancha, now changes his tune and apologises. Everyone shakes hands and Lord and Lady C say they will hold a big dinner tonight, and invited Lord Radel and the Bandicotts, to celebrate the triumph but also the death of the fictional character of ‘John McNab’. If it was a Jacobean or restoration comedy they would have all joined hands, come forward and bowed to the applauding audience.

Snobbery, class, body shape and clothes

Snobbery

The final part of the third mission exists solely, as far as I can see, to express Buchan’s Tory snobbery. The Right Honourable the Earl of Lamancha, MP, His Majesty’s Secretary of State for the Dominions, is caught by one of the navvies deployed by Claybody. Their bodies reflect their class: Lamancha tall and erect, the navvy bent by labour.

He was a tall fellow in navvy’s clothes, with a shock head of black hair, and a week’s beard—an uncouth figure with a truculent eye.

But the working class navvies are really an extension of Lord Claybody who is depicted as a gauche arriviste, a ghastly industrialist who has earned his wealth instead of inheriting it, as all right-minded aristocrats do. He is depicted as lacking all the depth and class, as faking a tartan kilt, doing up his mansion with hideous modern extension while his wife is depicted as foolishly trying to recreate an English country garden in the Highlands which, Janet waspishly observes, won’t last long.

The correct response to this beastly nouveau rich is expressed by Colonel Radel: ‘He and his damned navvies are an insult to every gentleman in the Highlands.’ When Lamancha has his extended argument with Claybody’s son, he comes within an ace of using the ultimate insult and calling him an ‘infernal little haberdasher.’ This is plain snobbery.

The argument is a dramatised contrast between the true class and gentlemanly attitude and behaviour of Lamancha vividly contrasted with the selfish, ill mannered and unchivalrous behaviour of Johnson Claybody towards his own injured employee. Lamancha insists that Stoke is carried down off the moors and then insists that he is placed in the car and driven to the nearest house which a doctor can be called from, Claybody furiously bridling at being ordered about on his own property.

Buchan vividly describes and explains the nature of aristocratic confidence:

The truth is, that if you belong to a family which for a good many centuries has been accustomed to command and to take risks, and if you yourself, in the forty-odd years of your life, have rather courted trouble than otherwise, and have put discipline into Arab caravans, Central African natives, and Australian mounted brigades – well, when you talk about wringing necks your words might carry weight. If, too, you have never had occasion to think of your position, because no one has ever questioned it, and you promise to break down somebody else’s, your threat may convince others, because you yourself are so wholly convinced of your power in that direction. (p.222)

And draws the Conservative conclusion:

It is a melancholy fact which exponents of democracy must face that, while all men may be on a level in the eyes of the State, they will continue in fact to be preposterously unequal.

Class

Alongside it goes the Tory notion of duty. This is vividly depicted in Lamancha’s fight with the navvie. When he’s just an anonymous navvie, he is depicted as foul-mouthed and bent, leaning over i.e. not straight and erect like a gentleman. But after he’s fallen badly and broken his leg it isn’t the fall as such but Lamancha suddenly recognising who he is which transforms him in Lamancha’s eyes.

He recalled now the man who had once been his orderly, and whom he had last known as a smart troop sergeant…’You remember me – Lord Lamancha?’ He had it all now – the fellow who had been a son of one of Tommy Deloraine’s keepers –a decent fellow and a humorous, and a good soldier.

So long as he is an anonymous working class man, he is just a brute antagonist. As soon as he enters into the network of contacts, via gamekeepers and the army, he acquires an identity, a name, and becomes of value. To the Tory ruling class, the great mass of the population have no identity or worth unless they enter into the aristocrats’ networks of privilege. At that point they cease to be a blundering swearing drunken threat and suddenly swim into focus as a gamekeeper’s son or someone’s servant or orderly etc. Only then do they count as human beings.

Body shape and class

All this, believe it or not, is correlated with body shape. Aristocratic men are tall and thin, like Sir Archie:

No other country, she thought, produced this kind of slim, graceful, yet weathered and hard-bitten youth.

Or Colonel Alastair Raden:

A lean old gentleman dressed in an ancient loud-patterned tweed jacket and a very faded kilt. Still erect as a post, he had a barrack-square voice, and high-boned, aquiline face, and a kindly but irritable blue eye.

Or John Palliser-Yeates:

A tall man, apparently young, with a very ruddy face, a thatch of sandy hair, and ancient, disreputable clothes.

Or Edward Leithen:

A tallish man, they said, lean and clean-shaven, rather pale, and with his skin very tight over his cheek-bones. He had looked like a gentleman and had behaved as such.

And:

Before it became the fashion he had been a pioneer in guideless climbing in the Alps, and the red-letter days in his memory were for the most part solitary days. He was always in hard condition, and his lean figure rarely knew fatigue… (p.198)

By sharp contrast, ghastly nouveau riche types like Lord Claybody and his son, are short and squat:

Lord Claybody entered, magnificent in a kilt of fawn-coloured tweed and a ferocious sporran made of the mask of a dog-otter. The garments, which were aggressively new, did not become his short, square figure…(p.196)

A stout gentleman in a kilt…(p.227)

Same goes for what this class calls the memsahibs. The most salient aspect of lovely Janet who Lord Archie falls in love with is that she is slender and boyish.

A slight girl with what seemed to him astonishingly bright hair and very blue and candid eyes

Compare and contrast Lady Claybody, whose ghastly taste, whose foolish plan to plant an English country garden in the Highlands, and whose tacky obsession with her little yapping dog, are all summed up by the fact that she has an extensive bosom:

Lady Claybody was a heavily handsome woman still in her early fifties. The purchase of Haripol had been her doing, for romance lurked in her ample breast, and she dreamed of a new life in which she should be an unquestioned great lady far from the compromising environment where the Claybody millions had been won.

The contrast between busty vulgarity and slender classiness is explicitly made:

For swelling bosoms and pouting lips and soft curves and languishing eyes Archie had only the most distant regard. He saluted them respectfully and passed by the other side of the road – they did not belong to his world. But that slender figure splashing in the tawny eddies made a different appeal. Most women in such a posture would have looked tousled and flimsy, creatures ill at ease, with their careful allure beaten out of them by weather. But this girl was an authentic creature of the hills and winds – her young slimness bent tensely against the current, her exquisite head and figure made more fine and delicate by the conflict.

Bosoms bad, boyish slimness good.

And clothes

Johnson Claybody is pernickety about being properly dressed, clean and trim. Lamancha is a true gentleman because he doesn’t care. He knows his class will shine through no matter what he’s wearing:

Now Johnson was the type of man who is miserable if he feels himself ill-clad or dirty, and discovers in a sense of tidiness a moral superiority. He rejoiced to have found his enemy, and an enemy over whom he felt at a notable advantage. But, unfortunately for him, no Merkland had ever been conscious of the appearance he represented or cared a straw about it. Lamancha in rags would have cheerfully disputed with an emperor in scarlet, and suffered no loss of confidence because of his garb, since he would not have given it a thought.

So hopefully you agree with me that this novel, harmless entertainment though it appears at first sight, is in fact a kind of primer of snobbish, class consciousness.

Disguises

In my review of Buchan’s novel Prester John, I noted how the baddie, the leader of the black rebellion John Laputa, was a man of many disguises, now a Christian minister, now leader of a pagan ritual, a suited and tied westerner among London MPs, a leopard-clad war leader in Africa, and so on. I’ve just watched a kids TV programme where a class went from uniformed, dull and bored, to being allowed to dress up in garish costumes and dance around, and the change in mood and engagement was startling. Maybe dressing up is just a basic element of play.

Intellectuals, historians, theologians, all lard their descriptions of the religious ceremonies of Catholics, the Byzantine Church, Islamic centres or the African ceremonies Chinua Achebe describes, with serious interpretations of symbolism and deep meanings and so on. But maybe, at the same time, it’s just fun, it’s a release and an escape from everyday routine and it’s also, as women know better than men, a very community and team-building and bonding activity to dress up and fuss and fret over costumes and make-up and presentation.

Comedy has always overflowed with disguise and dressing-up. I think of the comic plays of ancient Rome I read last year where at least one of the characters dressed up as someone else, with comic consequences. Or the cross-dressing in most of Shakespeare’s comedies, or in almost all the Restoration comedies.

In a sense reading fiction is a sort of dressing up, an imaginative dressing-up: it allows our imaginations to assume the persona of other people, narrators and characters, for the duration of the reading. Apart from all the heavyweight moralising which fiction often does, and the arousal of serious or intense emotions, maybe its most primal function is to take us out of ourselves. Maybe we need regular holidays from ourselves.

So a little light dressing up and disguising is the least you’d expect in a humorous novel like this. At least some of the comedy derives from supposedly strict and stern, upright and proper Establishment figures like a top lawyer and banker behaving like children. I imagine this had more impact in 1925 than in 2024.

But dressing up and disguise can, of course, have a serious darker side and this is gestured towards in the fertile imagination of Janet Radel, who over-worries about who John McNab is and what he’s going to do.

Horrible stories which she had read of impersonation and the shifts of desperate characters recurred to her mind. Was John Macnab perhaps old Mr Bandicott disguised as an archaeologist? Or was he one of the Strathlarrig workmen? (p.69)

Visions of John Macnab filled her mind, now a tall bravo with a colonial accent, now a gnarled Caliban of infinite cunning and gnome-like agility. Where in this haunted land was he ensconced—in some hazel covert, or in some clachan but-and-ben, or miles distant in a populous hotel, ready to speed in a swift car to the scene of action?

In this excerpt we can clearly see that disguise allows a large element of indeterminism to enter a narrative. Our everyday lives may contain large amounts of uncertainty – will we be given a mortgage, will the man we fancy agree to a date, will you get the pay rise you’ve asked for etc – but generally within finite and boring limits. You can see how, as soon as you allow disguise into a fictitious narrative, the possibilities hugely expand, whether for comic or tragic purposes.

Making fictions

The book is ostensibly about the poaching, but at its centre it is about making fictions and telling stories. John McNab is a completely invented person, but all four conspirators find themselves drawn, despite themselves, into feeling somehow committed to the idea he represents. Arrived at Crask, on the first evening all express overt reluctance to get drawn into this silly prank, but at the same time find it difficult to let the non-existent figure of John McNab down. This makes no logical sense but a lot of emotional sense. It explains how the thing grows into being described as the ‘John Macnab proposition.’ And once they’ve reconnoitred the ground and weighed up the obstacles and begun to commit to the prank, the entirely non-existent persona of ‘John McNab’ begins to assume greater and greater power.

In a different way, all three of the households which receive the John McNab letter are plunged into speculation about who he is, what he looks like – big and bluff or small and cunning – especially in the vivid imagination of young Miss Janet Raden, with her ‘taste for the dramatic’ (p.83).

So the figure of McNab turns into a kind of symbol of the power of creating a fictional character; he comes to demonstrate the uncanny power of fictional characters. It’s one thing that he imposes himself on the three households he has announced he will ‘attack’, that’s understandable, they know no better. But that he comes to dominate the lives and feelings of the three men who invented him says something fascinating about the power of fiction and invention.

Fictions make news

The newspapermen gathered to report on the Harald Blacktooth find that all their editors give ancient archaeology perfunctory attention before switching their interest to the glamorous mystery of ‘John McNab’. Millions of readers read about his failure to get his stag at Castle Raden, his

Nature painting

There are numerous descriptions of this, Buchan’s idealised Scottish landscape.

Darkness gave place to the translucence of early dawn: the badger trotted home from his wanderings: the hill-fox barked in the cairns to summon his household: sleepy pipits awoke: the peregrine who lived above the Grey Beallach drifted down into the glens to look for breakfast: hinds and calves moved up from the hazel shows to the high fresh pastures: the tiny rustling noises of night disappeared in that hush which precedes the awakening of life: and then came the flood of morning gold from behind the dim eastern mountains, and in an instant the earth had wheeled into a new day. (p.67)

Since the war

‘What about yourself?’ she asked. ‘In the words of Mr Bandicott, are you going to make good?’ She asked the question with such an air of frank comradeship that Sir Archie was in no way embarrassed. Indeed he was immensely delighted. ‘I hope so,’ he said. ‘But I don’t know…I’m a bit of a slacker. There doesn’t seem much worth doing since the war.’ (p.127)

Various characters express the feeling that the war knocked the stuffing out of the generation who went through it. It’s dramatised in the dinner party Colonel Raden gives:

‘I suppose,’ said old Mr Bandicott reflectively, ‘that the war was bound to leave a good deal of unsettlement. Junius missed it through being too young – never got out of a training camp – but I have noticed that those who fought in France find it difficult to discover a groove. They are energetic enough, but they won’t ‘stay put’, as we say. Perhaps this Macnab is one of the unrooted. In your country, where everybody was soldiering, the case must be far more common.’
Mr Claybody announced that he was sick of hearing the war blamed for the average man’s deficiencies. ‘Every waster,’ he said, ‘makes an excuse of being shell-shocked. I’m very clear that the war twisted nothing in a man that wasn’t twisted before.’
Sir Archie demurred. ‘I don’t know. I’ve seen some pretty bad cases of fellows who used to be as sane as a judge, and came home all shot to bits in their mind.’
‘There are exceptions, of course. I’m speaking of the general rule. I turn away unemployables every day – good soldiers, maybe, but unemployable – and I doubt if they were ever anything else.’
Something in his tone annoyed Janet. ‘You saw a lot of service, didn’t you?’ she asked meekly.
‘No, worse luck! They made me stick at home and slave fourteen hours a day controlling cotton. It would have been a holiday for me to get into the trenches. But what I say is, a sane man usually remained sane. Look at Sir Archibald. We all know what a hectic time he had, and he hasn’t turned a hair.’
‘I’d like you to give me that in writing,’ Sir Archie grinned. ‘I’ve known people who thought I was rather cracked.’

It’s given a comic turn at the end but there are clearly four points of view here. Bandicott Senior, as a foreigner, makes a valid generalisation about young men of Britain, traumatised by the war. Claybody is revealed as a loudmouth reactionary who is down on the young but did not himself serve in the war, classic example of the reactionary armchair expert. Archie himself did serve and was injured, but takes the thing lightest of all. And Janet, type of the zealous young woman who would have been a suffragette 20 years before and would be a woman’s libber 40 years later, takes up the cudgels on his behalf.

In Chapter 8 Janet and Lord Archie go for a walk across the moors, hills and whatnot, and she reveals herself to be quite a radical, not in a doctrinaire socialist way (she herself and various other characters refer to the ‘Bolsheviks’ who were, of course a relatively recent phenomenon in 1924), but in saying that her family are fading out, their time is up and the land should be held by newcomers.

‘I’m quite serious about politics,’ said Lord Archie. ‘I wonder,’ said Janet, smiling. ‘I don’t mean scraping into Parliament, but real politics – putting the broken pieces together, you know. Papa and the rest of our class want to treat politics like another kind of property in which they have a vested interest. But it won’t do – not in the world we live in to-day. If you’re going to do any good you must feel the challenge and be ready to meet it.’

Basically, she believes in force and energy. In the confused landscape after the war, describing her like that makes her sound more like a proto-fascist. Her emphasis on primal values reminds me of D.H. Lawrence.

Janet had got off her perch, and was standing a yard from Sir Archie, her hat in her hand and the light wind ruffling her hair. The young man, who had no skill in analysing his feelings, felt obscurely that she fitted most exquisitely into the picture of rock and wood and water, that she was, in very truth, a part of his clean elemental world of the hill-tops. (p.127)

Later, in his election speech, Lord Archie articulates sentiments which reminded me of Ernest Hemingway’s rejection of the old words and the old values which the war had destroyed, albeit clothed in posh pukka phraseology:

He began by confessing that the war had left the world in a muddle, a muddle which affected his own mind. The only cure was to be honest with oneself, and to refuse to accept specious nonsense and conventional jargon. (p.145)

McNab started as a prank by three bored toffs but it is instructive to discover just how many other people it gives a sense of purpose. Janet reports that her father has never been so energised as in the few days he got his staff together to repel the advertised attack, and the various groundsmen and gillies reflect this excitement. Beginning as a small personal gag the turns out to shine a light on an entire civilisation, revealing how bored and directionless it is.

For 20 years this generation looked for and hoped for something new but, like Janet, struggled to express it in any meaningful way. In the event, all their hopes for new worlds and new values were sunk by the rise of horrifying evil on the Continent and the advent of the Second World War.

(Incidentally, it’s interesting to see the words ‘waster’ and ‘slacker’ which I thought were of contemporary coinage, being freely used a hundred years ago.)

The active narrator

Breaching protocol, the narrator from time to time refers to himself in the first person:

I am at a loss to know how to describe the first shattering impact of youth and beauty on a susceptible mind. The old plan was to borrow the language of the world’s poetry, the new seems to be to have recourse to the difficult jargon of psychologists and physicians; but neither, I fear, would suit Sir Archie’s case. (p.46)

Colonel Raden plucked feebly at his moustache, and Janet, I regret to say, laughed. (p.87)

He even claims to have visited the scene of one of the hunts and of the book’s triumphant conclusion:

If you go to Haripol, as I did last week, you will see above the hall chimney a noble thirteen-pointer, and a legend beneath proclaiming that the stag was shot on the Sgurr Dearg beat of the forest by the Earl of Lamancha on a certain day of September in a certain year.

This makes the story feel very chummy, like a yarn being told you over dinner. At the same time it places that narrator very much among the charmed circle of this blithe and happy circle of aristocrats, lawyers and bankers. A sound member of the British ruling class.

Tory irony

The well-off can afford to enjoy life little’s ironies.

Sir Edward Leithen was a philosopher, with an acute sense of the ironies of life, and as he reflected that here was a laird, a Tory, and a strict preserver of game working himself into a passion over the moral rights of the poacher, he suddenly relapsed into helpless mirth. (p.155)

An awful joy fell upon Sir Archie’s soul. He realised anew the unplumbed preposterousness of life.

Credit

John McNab by John Buchan was published by Hodder and Stoughton in 1925. References are to the 1994 World Classic’s paperback edition, edited and introduced by David Daniell.

John Buchan reviews

John Buchan reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on February 21, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, Comedy, Novel, Thriller

Tagged Acheson Bandicott, Agatha Radel, Alastair Raden, Angus, Archaeology, Archie Roylance, Benjamin Bogle, Bolsheviks, Brodie, by-election, Captain Sir Archibald Roylance, Castle Raden, Colonel Radel, comedy, Crask Lodge, Crossby, David Daniel, David Daniell, Earl of Lamancha, Ernest Hemingway, Fife, Fish Benjie, fly fishing, gillies, Glenraden, Grey Beallach, Harald Blacktooth, Haripol, Highlands, Janet Raden, Jim Tarras, Jimsie, John Buchan, John McNab, Johnson Claybody, journalism, Junius Bandicott, Lady Claybody, Lamancha, landscape, Lord Claybody, Merkland, Mr Bandicott, narrative, novel, Palliser-Yeates, poaching, Politics, practical joke, prank, Roguie, salmon fishing, Scotland, Scottish Highlands, Sgurr Dearg, Sir Edward Leithen, slacker, stag hunting, story, Strathlarrig, Strathlarrig House, Suffragettes, taedium vitae, The Bandicotts, Tommy Deloraine, waster, Wattie Lithgow, Wester Ross

Posted by Simon on February 21, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/21/john-mcnab-john-buchan/

I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation by Michela Wrong (2005)

Michela Wrong has had a long career as a journalist, working for Reuters, the BBC and the Financial Times, specialising in Africa. She came to the attention of the book-buying public with the publication in 2001 of ‘In the Footsteps of Mr. Kurtz: Living on the Brink of Disaster in Mobutu’s Congo’, which I read and reviewed.

This is the follow-up, a long and thorough (432 pages, including chronology, glossary, notes and index) account of the modern history of Eritrea, the country to the north of Ethiopia which, at independence, was bundled in with Ethiopia and which fought a 30 year war to be free.

The milky haze of amnesia

I’m afraid Wrong alienated me right at the start, in her introduction, by claiming that the ex-colonial and imperial powers (Britain, Italy, America) have made a conscious effort to erase their involvement in such places in order to conceal all the wrongs we did around the world

History is written – or, more accurately, written out – by the conquerors. If Eritrea has been lost in the milky haze of amnesia, it surely cannot be unconnected to the fact that so many former masters and intervening powers – from Italy to Britain, the US to the Soviet Union, Israel and the United Nations, not forgetting, of course, Ethiopia, the most formidable occupier of them all – behaved so very badly there. Better to forget than to dwell on episodes which reveal the victors at their most racist and small-minded, cold-bloodedly manipulative or simply brutal beyond belief. To act so ruthlessly, yet emerge with so little to show for all the grim opportunism; well, which nation really wants to remember that? (Foreword, page xi)

This is an example of conspiracy theory – that everything that happens in the world is the result of dark and threatening conspiracies by shady forces in high places. It may sound trivial to highlight it so early in my review, but it is the conceptual basis of the entire book, and an accusation she returns to again and again and again: that there are so few available histories of Eritrea purely because the imperial powers want to suppress the record of their behaviour there, to display ‘the conquerors’ lazy capacity for forgetfulness’ (p.xxii). I’m afraid I take issue with this for quite a few reasons.

1. First, I tend towards the cock-up theory of history. Obviously there are and have been countless actual conspiracies but, in geopolitics at any rate, events are more often the result of sheer incompetence. Read any of the accounts of the US invasion of Iraq or Britain’s military efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The idea that the establishments of three or four countries have placed an embargo on discussion of imperial interventions in Eritrea is, obviously, unlikely.

2. Second, there has been no embargo on accounts of Britain’s involvement in plenty of other and far worse colonial debacles: the concentration camps we set up during the Boer War or during the Mau Mau emergency in Kenya are common knowledge or, at least, there are loads of books and articles about them. Or take India. Nowadays there’s a growing pile of books about how we looted and ruined the subcontinent; Britain’s responsibility for the catastrophic partition featured in an episode of Dr Who for God’s sake, about as mainstream as you can get.

Books about the evils of the British Empire are pouring off the press, so these are hardly ‘forgotten’ or ‘erased’ subjects. Quite the reverse, they’re extremely fashionable subjects – among angry students, at middle class dinner tables, in all the literary magazines here and in the States, among BBC and Channel 4 commissioning editors falling over themselves to show how woke, aware and anti-colonial they are.

Or check out the steady flow of anti-Empire, anti-slavery exhibitions (like the current installation in Tate’s Turbine Hall about empire and slavery, or Kara Walker’s installation in the same location about empire and slavery, or the upcoming exhibition at the Royal Academy about empire and slavery). Anti-racist, anti-imperialist, anti-slavery sentiments are not some kind of revolutionary disruption but the received opinion of our time, one of its central ideological underpinnings.

Eight reasons why nobody’s much interested in Eritrean history

Wrong makes a big deal of the fact that so many Italians, Brits and Americans she spoke to during her research had no awareness of their nations’ involvements in Eritrean history, but this has at least eight possible explanations, all more plausible than it being due to some kind of joint conspiracy by the British, Italian and American governments. Let’s consider just Britain:

1. British imperial history is huge

First, the history of the British Empire is a vast and complicated subject. Hardly anyone, even specialists, even professional historians, knows everything about every period of every colony which the British ruled at one point or another. Understandably, most people tend to only know about the big obvious ones, probably starting with India and the slave trade, not least because these are hammered home via every channel and medium.

2. Second World War history is huge

Second, the British took over the running of Eritrea from the Italians only after we fought and defeated them in North Africa in the spring of 1941, in a campaign which was wedged in between the bigger, more important and better known Desert War in Libya. So the same principle applies as in the point about the empire as a whole, which is: even professional historians would probably struggle to remember every detail of every campaign in every theatre of the Second World War, so why should they care about this relatively small and strategically insignificant one?

Here’s Wikipedia’s list of the main theatres and campaigns of the Second World War. Did you know them all?

It was only reading up the background to Evelyn Waugh’s ‘Sword of Honour’ trilogy that I realised there was a whole theatre of war in West Africa, Gambia and so on, which I’d never even heard about before. Was this due to what Wrong calls the ‘milky haze of amnesia’ deriving from some government-wide conspiracy to forget? Nope. The reality is people only have so much time and attention to spare.

3. The limited attention span of ordinary people

What percentage of the British population do you think gives a monkeys that Britain was, for ten years or so, from 1941, responsible for administering Eritrea? Weren’t we also running about 50 other countries at the time? I suspect my parents’ experience of being bombed during the Blitz and watching Battle of Britain dogfights over their London suburb were quite a bit more relevant to their lives than the details of British administration of the faraway Horn of Africa. People have only so much hard drive.

4. General historical awareness is dire, anyway

Most people don’t care about ‘history’, anyway. If you gave a quick basic history quiz to the entire British population of 67 million, I wonder how many would pass. Auberon Waugh once joked that the fact that Henry VIII had six wives is the only fact from history which all Britons know, but I suspect this is way out of date. I live in Streatham, the most multi-ethnic constituency in Britain. Most of the people I interact with (doctor, dentist, shopkeepers, postman, electrician, council leafblowers) were not born in this country and many of them barely speak English (e.g. my Chinese postman). I struggle to explain that I want to buy a stamp at the shop round the corner because they don’t speak English so don’t know what ‘stamp’ is until I point to a pack. I can’t believe many of the millions of non-English-speaking people who now live here give much of a damn about the minutiae of Britain’s imperial history unless, of course, it’s the bit that affected their country and possibly not even then.

5. Busy

And this is because people are busy. The difference between Wrong and me is that she thinks it’s of burning importance that the British ‘confront’ every aspect of their ‘colonial past’, whereas I take what I regard as the more realistic view, that a) most people don’t know b) most people don’t care because c) most people are stressed just coping with the challenges of life.

By this I mean trying to find the money to pay their rent or mortgage, to buy food, to pay for the extras their kids need at school, or to find money to pay for their parents’ ruinously expensive social care. Most people are too busy and too stressed to care about what happened in a remote country in Africa 80 years ago. Most people are too busy and worried about the day-to-day to care about even the contemporary global issues that newspapers and magazines are always trying to scare us about, whether it’s the alleged impact of AI or the war in Ukraine or the strategic threat from China. Most don’t know or care about ‘history’ and, I’d argue, they’re right to do so, and to live in the present.

I’m a bookish intellectual who’s interested in literature and history but I’ve had to learn the hard way (i.e. via my children and their friends) that there are lots of people who really aren’t. They’re not ‘erasing’ anything, they just live lives which don’t include much interest in history, be it imperialist, early modern, medieval or whatever. They’re too busy going to music festivals or shopping at Camden market, and sharing everything they do on TikTok and Instagram, getting on with their (exciting and interesting) lives, to know or care about the minutiae of the historical record of every single one of the hundred or so nations Britain had some kind of imperial involvement in.

Wrong thinks it’s some kind of conspiracy on the part of the British authorities not to give Eritrea a more prominent part in our history. I think it’s a realistic sense of perspective.

6. Commercial priorities

Books tend to be published, documentaries commissioned and art exhibitions organised, if the editors think there is a commercially viable audience for them. Last time I visited the Imperial War Museum I spent some time in the bookshop chatting to the manager because I was struck by the very, very narrow range of subjects they stock books about. There were entire bookcases about the First and Second World War, a big section about the Holocaust, one about Women in War, and that was about it. I couldn’t even find a single book about Northern Ireland. Northern Ireland, for God’s sake! When I quizzed him, the bookshop manager explained that they’re a commercial operation, they need to maximise their revenue and so only stock books on the subjects which are reliable bestsellers.

So, living in a commercial/consumer capitalist society as we do, maybe the lack of awareness, books and articles about the modern history of Eritrea is not due to a government conspiracy to suppress it but simply because it is a really niche subject which interests hardly anyone, and so – there’s no money in it. No government conspiracy required.

7. News agendas

Even now, the current conflicts between Eritrea, Tigray and Ethiopia barely reach the news because they are, in fact, minor conflicts, they are far away, they have been going on for decades with no particularly dramatic changes to report on and, crucially, no signs of a conclusion – so they just never make the news agenda. Why would they, when Russia is threatening to start world war three?

8. Predictable

And I suppose there’s an eighth reason which is that, for anybody who is interested in modern history, it is utterly predictable that today’s historians or historical commentators will take a feminist, anti-racist, anti-imperial line. Nothing could be more predictable than a modern historian ‘revealing’ the racist truth about British imperial behaviour. This is the stock, standard attitude across the modern humanities. To reveal that European imperial behaviour in Africa was ‘racist and small-minded, cold-bloodedly manipulative or simply brutal beyond belief’ is the opposite of news – it is the utterly predictable compliance with modern ideology, as expressed through all available channels of print, TV, social media, films and documentaries, art galleries, plays and books and articles.

So, those are my eight reasons for not buying into the central premise of Michela Wrong’s book which is that there has been some kind of conspiracy of silence among the ex-imperial powers, that they have deliberately let the history of their involvement in Eritrea sink into ‘the milky haze of amnesia’ in order to conceal from a public which would otherwise be desperate for every scrap of information they could get about Italy, Britain and America’s involvement in one of the world’s smallest countries 80 years ago.

Presumable origin of the book

Wrong first visited Eritrea in 1996 in order to do a country profile for the Financial Times. She was surprised to discover that there was very little published about the place. She saw an opportunity. She approached her publisher, who agreed there was an opportunity to sell to the kind of niche audience which is interested in the history of tiny African countries. Obviously she would be building on the success of her first book to extend her brand.

But, to make the book more marketable it would have to try and make the story more ‘accessible’, more saleable, and so ought to incorporate several features: 1) elements of touristic travelogue, passages dwelling on, for example, Asmara’s surprising Art Deco heritage or the vintage railway that snakes up into the high plateau of the interior, the kind of thing that appears in ‘Train Journeys of The World’-type TV documentaries. Tick.

The second way to sex it up would be to adopt the modern woke, progressive, anti-imperial ideology so much in vogue, and take every possible opportunity to criticise all the western powers for their racism, sexism, massacres and exploitation. Tick.

And so we’ve ended up with the book we have. It is a history of Eritrea in relatively modern times i.e. since the Italians began annexing it in the 1890s, up to the time of writing in about 2004, written in a superior, judgemental, often sarcastic and sneering tone, regularly facetious and dismissive about every action of the colonial powers, and hugely reluctant to point out that the relevant Black African powers (i.e. Ethiopia) behaved ten times worse than anything the imperialists did.

I’m not saying Wrong is wrong to point out that the Italians were racist exploiters who carried out appalling, semi-genocidal massacres and installed apartheid-style laws; or that the British, to their shame, maintained many of Italy’s racist discriminatory laws and practices while dismantling and carting off much of the country’s infrastructure; or that the UN screwed up big time when it assigned Eritrea to be part of Ethiopia against the wishes of its people; or that the Americans should have done more to foster statehood and encourage Eritrean independence when they used the place as a listening post during the Cold War.

I’m sure all her facts are completely correct and they certainly build up into a damning portrait of how successive western powers abused a small African nation. No, what put me off the book was a) Wrong’s assumption that the lack of knowledge about Eritrea was the result of some kind of cover-up among the imperial powers, and b) her tone of sneering, sarcastic superiority over everyone that came before her. Her snarky asides about this or that imperial administrator or British general quickly become very tiresome.

It is possible to write history in a plain factual way and let the facts speak for themselves. Nobody writes a history of the Holocaust full of sneering asides that the Nazis were ‘racist’ and ‘discriminatory’ – ‘Hitler, in another typically racist speech…’. You don’t need to say something so obvious. The facts speak for themselves. Constantly poking the reader in the ribs with sarcastic asides about the awful colonialists gets really boring.

Travel writing

Wrong strikes a note of travel writer-style indulgence right from the start of her book. The opening pages give a lyrical description of what you see as you fly over the desert and come into land at Eritrea’s main airport. From her text you can tell she regards flying from one African capital to another, jetting round the world, as an everyday activity. It isn’t though, is it, not for most people, only for a privileged kind of international reporter.

She then goes on to explain that Eritrea’s capital, Asmara, has one of the finest collections of Art Deco buildings anywhere in the world. In other words, the opening of her book reads just like a Sunday supplement feature or upscale travel magazine article. Although she will go on to get everso cross about Eritrea’s agonies, the opening of the book strikes a note of pampered, first world tourism which lingers on, which sets a tone of leisured touristic privilege. I know it’s unintended but that’s how it reads.

Anti-western bias

Like lots of posh people who have enjoyed the most privileged upbringing Britain has to offer and then become rebels and radicals against their own heritage, Wrong is quick to criticise her own country and very slow to criticise all the other bad players in the story.

In particular, she downplays the elephant in the room which is that most of Eritrea’s woes stem from its 30-year-long war to be independent of Ethiopia, the imperialist nation to its south. She downplays the extent to which this was two African nations, led by black African leaders, who insisted on fighting a ruinous 30-year war in which millions of civilians died… and then started up another war in 1998, conflicts which devastated their economies so that, as usual, they needed extensive food aid to be supplied by…guess who?.. the evil West.

Gaps and absences

Imperial benefits, after all

There’s a particular moment in the text which brought me up short. In the chapter describing the machinations of various UN commissions trying to decide whether to grant Eritrea its independence or bundle it in with Ethiopia (Chapter 7, ‘What do the baboons want?’), Wrong describes the experiences of several commissioners who toured the two countries and immediately saw that Eritrea was light years ahead of Ethiopia: Ethiopia was a backward, almost primitive country ruled by a medieval court whereas Eritrea had industry and education and a viable economy which were established by the Italians. And the British had given Eritrea an independent press, trade unions and freedom of religion (p.171).

Hang on hang on hang on. Back up a moment. Wrong has dedicated entire chapters to excoriating Italian and British administrators for their racism, their exploitation of the natives, Italian massacres and British hypocrisy. Entire chapters. And now, here, in a brief throwaway remark, she concedes that the Italians also gave the country a modern infrastructure, harbours and railway while the British introduced modern political reforms, freedom of the press and religion, and that taken together these meant that Eritrea was head and shoulders more advanced than the decrepit empire to its south.

When I read this I realised that this really is a very biased account. It reminded me of Jeffrey Massons’ extended diatribe against therapy. Nothing Wrong says is wrong, and she has obviously done piles of research, especially about the Italian period, and added to scholarly knowledge. But she is only telling part of the story, the part which suits her unremitting criticism of the West.

And she is glossing over the fact that the Italians, and the British, did quite a lot of good for the people of Eritrea. This doesn’t fit Wrong’s thesis, or her tone of modern enlightened superiority to the old male, misogynist, racist imperial administrators, and so she barely mentions it in her book. At a stroke I realised that this is an unreliable and deeply biased account.

Magazine feature rather than history

Same sort of thing happens with chapter 10, ‘Blow jobs, bugging and beer’. You can see from the title the kind of larky, sarky attitude Wrong takes to her subject matter. Dry, scholarly and authoritative her book is not.

The blowjobs chapter describes, in surprising detail, the lifestyle of the young Americans who staffed the set of radio listening posts America established in the Eritrean plateau in the 1950s and 60s. The plateau is 1.5 miles high in some places and this means big radio receivers could receive with pinprick accuracy radio broadcasts from all across the Soviet Union, Middle East and rest of Africa. The signals received and decoded at what came to be called Kagnew Station played a key role in America’s Cold War intelligence efforts.

As her larky chapter title suggests, Wrong focuses her chapter almost entirely around interviews she carried out with ageing Yanks who were young 20-somethings during the station’s heyday in the late 60s. One old boy described it as like the movie ‘Animal House’ and Wrong proceeds to go into great detail about the Americans’ drinking and sexual exploits, especially with prostitutes at local bars. She sinks to a kind of magazine feature-style level of sweeping, superficial cultural generalisation:

This was the 1960s, after all, the decade of free love, the Rolling Stones and LSD, the time of Jack Kerouac, Jimi Hendrix and Hunter Thompson. (p.223)

This is typical of a lot of the easy, throwaway references Wrong makes, the kind of sweeping and often superficial generalisations which undermine her diatribes against the British and Italian empires.

Anyway, she tells us more than we really need to know about service men being ‘initiated in the delights of fellatio’ by Mama Kathy, the hotel in Massawa nicknamed ‘four floors of whores’, about a woman called Rosie Big Tits (or RBT) who would service any man or group of men who paid her, about the disgusting behaviour of the gang who accurately called themselves The Gross Guys (pages 225 to 226).

This is all good knockabout stuff, and Wrong explains how it came about after she got in touch with the surviving members of The Gross Guys via their website, and then was given more names and contacts, and so it snowballed into what is effectively a diverting magazine article. She includes photos, including a corker of no fewer than seven GIs bending over and exposing their bums at a place they referred to as Moon River Bridge.

I have several comments on this. 1) Interwoven into the chapter are facts and stats about the amount of money the US government gave Haile Selassie in order to lease this land, money the Emperor mostly spent on building up the largest army in Africa instead of investing in infrastructure, agriculture and industry, with the result that he ended up having loads of shiny airplanes which could fly over provinces of starving peasants. So there is ‘serious’ content among the blowjobs.

Nonetheless 2) the blowjob chapter crystallises your feeling that this book is not really a history of Eritrea, but more a series of magazine-style chapters about colourful topics or individuals (such as the chapter about the Italian administrator Martini and the English activist Sylvia Pankhurst), which don’t quite gel into a coherent narrative.

3) Most serious is the feeling that this approach of writing about glossy, magazine, feature-style subjects – interviews with badly behaved Yanks or Sylvia Pankhurst’s son – distracts her, and the narrative, from giving a basic, reliable account of the facts.

It’s only after the chapter about blow jobs and drinking games that we discover, almost in passing, that the very same period, the late 1960s, saw the rise and rise of the Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) which waged a steadily mounting campaign of attacks against symbols of Ethiopian power e.g. police stations. And that the Ethiopian police and army, in response, embarked on a savage campaign to quell the insurgents / guerrillas / freedom fighters in the time-old fashion of massacring entire villages thought to be supporting them, gathering all the men into the local church and setting it on fire, raping all the women, killing all their livestock, burning all their crops, the usual stuff.

For me, this is the important stuff I’d like to have known more about, not the ‘four floors of whores’ popular with American GIs. Magazine mentality trumps history.

Religious division

And it was round about here that I became aware of another massive gap in Wrong’s account, which is a full explanation of Eritrea’s ethnic and, in particular, religious diversity. Apparently, the low-lying coastal area of Eritrea, and the main port, Massawa, was and is mostly Muslim in make-up, with mosques etc, whereas the plateau, and the capital, Asmara, are mostly Christian, churches etc.

Wrong’s account for some reason underplays and barely mentions either religion or ethnicity whereas, in the countries I’ve been reading about recently (Iraq, Afghanistan, Syria, Sudan, Rwanda, Congo), ethnic and religious divides are absolutely crucial to understanding their histories and, especially, their civil wars.

Instead Wrong only mentions very briefly, in passing, that it was ethnic difference which led to there being two Eritrean independence militias, the ELF and the ELPF. It was only from Wikipedia that I gathered the former was more Arab and Muslim, the latter more Christian or secular, and socialist. Wrong nowhere explains the ideological or tactical differences between them. She nowhere names their leaders, gives histories of the movements or any manifestos or programs they published. All this Wrong herself has consigned to the ‘milky haze of amnesia’. Is she involved in an imperialist conspiracy to suppress the truth, I wonder? Aha. Thought so. It’s all an elaborate front.

Similarly, when the ELPF eventually eclipse the ELF to emerge as the main Eritrean independence militia, Wrong doesn’t explain how or why this took place. Her description of this important moment in rebel politics is described thus:

The EPLF, which emerged as the only viable rebel movement after a final clash with the ELF, built its society on defeat. (p.283)

That’s your lot. A bit more explanation and analysis would have been useful, don’t you think?

Key learnings

Each chapter focuses on a particular period of Eritrea’s modern (post-1890) history and Wrong often does this by looking in detail at key individuals who she investigates (if dead) or interviews (if living) in considerable detail. This is fine, it makes for vivid journalism but biased and partial ‘history’.

Ferdinando Martini

Thus the early period of Italian colonisation is examined through the figure of Ferdinando Martini, governor of Eritrea from 1897 to 1907, who made heroic activities to modernise the country even as he endorsed Italy’s fundamentally racist laws. Wrong draws heavily on his 1920 literary masterpiece about his years as governor, ‘Il Diario Eritre’ which, of course, I’d never heard of before. Maybe Wrong thinks that almost all foreign literature has been sunk in ‘the milky haze of amnesia’ whereas I take the practical view that most publishers find most foreign publications commercially unviable and so not worth translating or publishing.

It was, apparently, Martini who gave the country its name, deriving it from the ancient Greek name for the Red Sea, Erythra Thalassa, based on the adjective ‘erythros’ meaning ‘red’.

It was Martini who commissioned the Massawa to Asmara train line, a heroic feat of engineering from the coast up into the steep central plateau, which Wrong describes in fascinating details and wasn’t completed during his time as governor.

Italian emigration

The Italian government hoped to export its ‘surplus population’ i.e. the rural poor from the South, to its African colonies but Wrong shows how this never panned out. Only about 1% of the Italian population travelled to its colonies compared to a whopping 40% who emigrated to America, creating one of America’s largest ethnic communities.

The Battle of Keren

Wrong’s account of the British defeat of the Italians in Eritrea focuses on a gritty description of the awful Battle of Keren, in March 1941, where British troops had to assault a steep escarpment of bare jagged rocks against well dug-in Italian (and native) troops, in relentless heat, with much loss of life. Once in control the British embarked on a scandalous policy of asset stripping and selling off huge amounts of the infrastructure which the Italians had so expensively and laboriously installed, including factories, schools, hospitals, post facilities and even railways tracks and sleepers.

Sylvia Pankhurst

Surprisingly, one of the most vocal critics of this shameful policy was Sylvia Pankhurst, daughter of the redoubtable Emmeline Pankhurst, the leading suffragette. Sylvia fell in love with Ethiopia and ran a high-profile campaign against Mussolini’s brutal invasion of 1936, demanding the British government intervene. After the war, her relentless pestering of her political contacts and the Foreign Office earned her the gratitude of the emperor Haile Selassie himself. Wrong estimates that the British stole, sold off, or shipped to her full colonies (Kenya, Uganda) getting on for £2 billion of assets (p.136). When she died, in 1960, aged 78, she was given a state funeral and buried in Addis Ababa cathedral. A lot of the material comes via her son, Richard Pankhurst, who was raised in Ethiopia, founder of the Institute of Ethiopian Studies at Addis Ababa University, and who Wrong meets and interviews on several occasions.

John Spencer

Wrong describes several meetings with John Spencer, an American who was international legal adviser to Haile Selassie. In the early 1950s the UN was worried (among many other pressing issues) with the future of Eritrea. There were three options: full independence; full integration into Ethiopia; federal status within Ethiopia. There were strong views on all sides. Independent commentators wondered whether Eritrea could ever be an economically viable state (good question since, 73 years later, it is still one of the poorest countries on earth). Ethiopians wanted complete assimilation in order to give them access to the Red Sea. As a canny, aggressive American lawyer, Spencer lobbied hard for the Ethiopian option with the result that he is remembered with hatred to this day in Eritrea.

Kagnew Listening Station

The Americans discovered the high Eritrean plateau was uniquely located to receive clear radio signals from all over the hemisphere. From the 1950s onwards they paid Selassie a hefty premium, plus military and development aid, for the right to build what ended up being some 19 separate listening stations. Ethiopia became the largest recipient of American aid in Africa. Wrong tells its story via interviews with half a dozen of the thousands of GIs who staffed it in the 1960s. She (repeatedly) blames them for ignoring and erasing the reality of the violent insurgency and brutal repression spreading throughout Eritrea. What does she expect a bunch of 20-something GIs to have done? Launched an independent peace mission?

Wrong works through interviews with Melles Seyoum and Asmerom to tell the story of the widely supported EPLF insurgency against the Ethiopian occupying forces.

Keith Wauchope

Similarly, she tells the story of the brutal Ethiopian crackdown of the 1970s through the eyes of Keith Wauchope, deputy principal officer at Asmara’s US consulate from 1975 to 1977. In particular the ‘Red Terror’ when the Ethiopian revolutionaries, like the French revolutionaries, Russian revolutionaries and Chinese revolutionaries before them, moved to eliminate all political opponents and even fellow revolutionaries who deviated even slightly from the party line. By this stage I’d realised that the book doesn’t proceed through events and analysis but by moving from interviewee to interviewee.

Nafka

Bombed out of their towns and villages by the Soviet-backed Ethiopian regime’s brutal campaign, the EPLF withdrew to the high Eritrean plateau where they holed up for a decade. they developed a cult of total war, total commitment, even down to the details of combat wear (basic, functional), disapproval of romantic relationships between fighters. They built an entire underground town including hospitals and schools, the famous Zero school, around the highland town of Nafka, to evade Ethiopia’s Russian-supplied MIG jets.

Wrong has met and interviewed a number of ex-fighters. It comes over very clearly that she venerates them as, she says, did most of the other western journalists who made their way to the EPLF’s remote bases and were impressed by their discipline and commitment, not least to education, holding seminars and workshops about Marxism, Maoism, the Irish struggle, the Palestinian struggle and so on. Western journalists called them ‘the barefoot guerrilla army’. She calls these western devotees True Believers.

But she is candid enough to admit that the hidden redoubts of Nafka also nursed a fanatical sense of commitment and rectitude. This was the Marxist practice of self criticism and self control, which would translate into the overbearing authoritarianism the Eritrean government displayed once it won independence in 1993.

‘Eritrea is a militarized authoritarian state that has not held a national election since independence from Ethiopia in 1993. The People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ), headed by President Isaias Afwerki, is the sole political party. Arbitrary detention is commonplace, and citizens are required to perform national service, often for their entire working lives. The government shut down all independent media in 2001.’ (Freedom House website, 2023)

Ah, not so cool and fashionable once they actually come to power.

John Berakis

In line with the rest of the book, the chapter about the EPLF’s long years in its secret underground bases and highland redoubts, is told / brought to life via the biography of John Berakis, real name Tilahun (p.299) who was, improbably enough, both a committed fighter but also a qualified chef. Wrong interviews him and hears all about improbable banquets and feasts and recipes which he cooked up for the Fighters.

Asmara tank graveyard

The huge graveyard of tanks and other military equipment on the outskirts of Asmara is the peg for describing the astonishing amount of hardware the Soviet Union gave to Ethiopia: at one point in 1978 Soviet aircraft bearing equipment were arriving every 20 minutes in Ethiopia. By the end of the Soviets’ support for the Derg, the Russians had sent nearly $9 billion in military hardware into Ethiopia , about $5,400 for every man, woman and child in the population (p.314).

She makes the point that the USSR’s influence was on the rise. In 1975 Angola and Mozambique both became independent under Marxist governments. Across Africa one-party rule was ripe for Soviet influence. Ethiopia, Yemen and Somalia all had Marxist governments. It felt like the tide of history was flowing Russia’s way. By contrast America, had been weakened and humiliated by its defeat in Vietnam which had promptly turned communist, as did Laos and Cambodia.

Mengistu Haile Mariam

Wrong profiles Mengistu, his personal grievances for being looked down on by Ethiopia’s racial elite, his slavish devotion to the USSR (he declared Brezhnev was like a father to him), busts of Marx on the table, erected the first statue of Lenin anywhere in Africa etc.

But, of course, over the years Mengistu slowly morphed into another African strongman, driving in his open-topped Cadillac through the hovels of Addis Ababa, eliminating all possible opponents, living in a miasma of paranoia, surrounded by courtiers and flunkeys, turning into Haile Selassie. During the catastrophic famine of 1983/84 Ethiopia continued to spend a fortune on its military, which had ballooned to almost 500,000 troops, and spent $50 million on the tenth anniversary of the overthrow of Selassie and their coming to power. Over a million Ethiopians died in the famine.

Mikhail Gorbachev

The arrival of Gorbachev in 1985 worried all the communist regimes and his coterie slowly changed the tone of political commentary, starting to question the huge amount of aid the USSR was giving to supposedly Marxist African regimes. Even so between 1987 and 1991 Moscow still sent Addis $2.9 billion in weaponry (p.327).

Yevgeny Sokurov

Wrong appears to have interviewed quite a few Russian diplomats and military men. Former major Yevgeny Sokurov has some savagely candid words about the USSR’s entire African policy:

‘Helping Mengistu, that arrogant monkey, was pointless… In Moscow there was a pathological desire to support these thieving, savage, African dictatorships. It was a waste of time.’ (quoted p.340)

Anatoly Adamashin

A really profound comment is made by Anatoly Adamashin, deputy foreign minister under Mikhail Gorbachev, who points out that the Cold War led both America and the USSR and the African countries themselves to believe that each African nation was engaged in a historic struggle between reactionary capitalism and revolutionary communism, but this was never really true, it was a huge historical delusion. In actual fact what was taking place in all those countries was wars between ethnically-based factions, or ambitious individuals, simply for power.

As with Mobutu (Zaire) or Mugabe (Zimbabwe) or Jonas Savimbi (Mozambique) or Eduardo dos Passos (Angola) or here in this story, Mengistu in Ethiopia, when the Cold War evaporated it revealed that most of those conflicts had, in fact, been nothing more than the crudest struggles to achieve and maintain power.

It’s such a powerful view because it comes from a former Soviet official i.e. not from what Wrong regards as the racist imperialist West.

Mengistu flees

As the EPLF closed in on the capital, Mengistu took a plane to Zimbabwe, where he was granted asylum by another bogus Marxist dictator, Robert Mugabe, given a farm (probably confiscated from the ghastly white colonists) and lived an allegedly pampered life for decades. During his rule over a million Ethiopians died in the famine, and over 500,000 in the wars and/or the Red Terror, or the forced relocation of millions of peasants which, of course, led to famine and starvation.

The Organisation of African Unity

Wrong delivers an entertainingly withering verdict on the Organisation of African Unity:

One of the most cynicism-inducing of events: the summit of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), that yearly get-together where insincere handshakes were exchanged, 29-year-old coup leaders got their first chance to play the international statesman, and the patriarchs of African politics politely glossed over the rigged elections, financial scandals and bloody atrocities perpetrated by their peers across the table. (p.357)

Even better, she describes it as ‘a complacent club of sclerotic dictators and psychopathic warlords’ (p.358).

Eritrean independence

In 1993 the population voted for independence and Eritrea became an independent country with its own political system, flag, army and so on. Five years of reconstruction and hundreds of thousands of exiles returned home. When war broke out again, Wrong characteristically doesn’t blame it on the new Ethiopian or Eritrean governments, the parties that actually went to war, but on the wicked imperialists:

The national character traits forged during a century of colonial and superpower exploitation were about to blow up in Eritrea’s face. (p.361)

It’s because of our legacy, apparently, that the Eritreans and Ethiopians went back to war, bombing and napalming and strafing each other’s citizens, killing 80,000 in the 2 years of war, 1998 to 2000. Two of the poorest countries in the world spent tens of millions of dollars trying to bomb each other into submission. Surely the leaders of those two countries have to shoulder at least some of the responsibility themselves?

The result of this second war was impoverishment for Eritrea which was rightly or wrongly seen as the main aggressor. Foreign investment dried up. Ethiopia imposed a trade blockade.

Afwerki Isaias

The man who rose to become secretary general of the ELPF, and then president of independent Eritrea in 1993. The trouble is that, 30 years later, he is still president, in the time-honoured African tradition. To quote Wikipedia:

Isaias has been the chairman of Eritrea’s sole legal political party, the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice. As Eritrea has never had a functioning constitution, no elections, no legislature and no published budget, Isaias has been the sole power in the country, controlling its judiciary and military for over 30 years. Hence, scholars and historians have long considered him to be a dictator, described his regime as totalitarian, by way of forced conscription. The United Nations and Amnesty International cited him for human rights violations. In 2022, Reporters Without Borders ranked Eritrea, under the government of Isaias, second-to-last out of 180 countries in its Press Freedom Index, only scoring higher than North Korea.

Tens of thousands have fled one of the most repressive regimes in the world and the jaundiced reader is inclined to say: you fought for independence; you made huge sacrifices for independence; you won independence; at which point you handed all your rights over to a psychopathic dictator. You had the choice. You had the power. Don’t blame Italy. Don’t blame Britain. Don’t blame America. Blame yourselves.

Paul Collier’s view

Compare and contrast Wrong’s sneering, sarcastic, anti-western tone with Paul Collier’s discussion of Eritrea in his 2008 book The Bottom Billion.

Collier is an eminent American development economist who is concerned to improve the lives of people in Africa here and now. He gives short shrift to third world rebel movements. In very stark contrast to Wrong’s 400 pages of grievance and complaint against the West, Collier’s account of Eritrea’s plight is brisk and no-nonsense:

The best organised diaspora movement of all was the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front. The diaspora financed the war for thirty years and in 1992 they won. Eritrea is now an independent country. But did the war really achieve a liberation of the Eritrean people? In September 2001, after an unnecessary international war with Ethiopia, half the Eritrean cabinet wrote to the president, Isaias Afwerki, asking him to think again about his autocratic style of government. He thought about it and imprisoned them all. He then instituted mass conscription of Eritrean youth. Ethiopia demobilised, but not Eritrea. Eritrean youth may be in the army as much to protect the president from protest as to protect the country from Ethiopia. Many young Eritreans have left the country…Was such a liberation really worth thirty years of civil war?
(The Bottom Billion by Paul Collier, 2008 Oxford University Press paperback edition, page 23)

Or compare Wrong with the chapter describing the horrific punishments, prisons and reign of terror run by Afwerki, in Paul Kenyon’s 2018 book, ‘Dictatorland’. The horror of Afwerki’s rule is glossed over in Wrong’s account because of her relentless concern to blame the West for absolutely everything. These two other accounts provide a necessary balance to Wrong’s biased agenda, or just a simple reminder that sometime African nations’ dire plights are less to do with colonial oppression 80 years ago, and more the result of gross mismanagement and terrible leadership in the much more recent past and even now.

Eritrea timeline

16th century – Ottoman Empire extends its control over the Red Sea/Ethiopian/Eritrean coast.

1800s – The Ottoman Turks establish an imperial garrison at Massawa on the Red Sea coast.

1869 – An Italian priest buys the Red Sea port of Assab for Italy from the local sultan.

1870 – Italy becomes a unified nation.

1885 – The British rulers of Egypt help Italian forces capture the Red Sea port of Massawa. This was to prevent the French getting their hands on it.

1887 to 1911 – Italians construct the Massawa to Asmara railway.

1890 – Italy proclaims the colony of Eritrea.

1894 – revolt of the previously loyal chief, Bahta Hagos, crushed.

1896 – 1 March, Italian army trounced by the Emperor Menelik at the Battle of Adwa; the borders of Eritrea are agreed.

1912 – After defeating Ottoman forces Italy seizes the two provinces of Tripolitania and Cyrenaica, which it joins under the name Libya (a division which reopened after the ousting of Colonel Gaddafi in 2011, and last to this day).

1915 – Italy is persuaded by France and Britain to join their side in the First World War, with the promise of Trieste, southern Tyrol, northern Dalmatia and expansion of her territories in Africa

1922 – Mussolini seizes power, campaigning on many grievances one of which is the Allies never gave Italy the empire they promised

1930 – coronation of Ras Tafari as emperor of Ethiopia; he takes the regnal name Haile Selassie. The coronation is attended by Evelyn Waugh who writes a hilarious satirical account, which is also full of accurate details about the country, Remote People (1931). (As a side note Waugh’s book is extensively quoted in Giles Foden’s humorous account of First World War naval campaigns in Africa, ‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth’.)

1935 – Mussolini launches a campaign to conquer Ethiopia. The Emperor Haile Selassie addresses the League of Nations to complain about the invasion, the use of poison gas and atrocities, but is ignored.

1936 – Italian troops enter Addis Ababa and Eritrea, Ethiopia and Somalia are all incorporated into ‘Italian East Africa’. Italy institutes apartheid-style race laws stipulating segregation. Evelyn Waugh was sent to cover the war and turned his despatches into a book, which includes a surprising amount of straight history of Ethiopia, Waugh In Abyssinia (1936).

1941 – During the Second World War, British advance from Sudan into Eritrea, fighting the brutal Battle of Keren (February to March 1941), which Wrong describes in detail, featuring a map.

1941 to 1942 – Britain crudely strips Eritrea of all the facilities the Italians had spent their 5-year-imperial rule installing, removing factories, ports, even railways sleepers and tracks, stripping the place clean. Britain also keeps in place many of Italy’s race laws.

1945 to 1952 Britain administers Eritrea, latterly as a United Nations trust territory.

1948 – The UN Four Powers Commission fails to agree the future of Eritrea.

1950s – former suffragette Sylvia Pankhurst devoted her final decade (she died in 1960) to denouncing the asset stripping of both Eritrea and Ethiopia carried out by the British.

1950 – A fractious UN commission settles on the idea of making Eritrea a federal component of Ethiopia, which is ratified by the General Assembly in 1952 in Resolution 390 A (V). The US signals that it favours the integrated model because it needs a quiescent Ethiopia as location for its huge radio listening station.

1950s – Ethiopia slowly but steadily undermines Eritrea’s identity: closing its one independent newspaper; having its sky-blue flag replaced by the Ethiopian one; having its languages of Tigrinya and Arabic replaced by Amharic; downgrading the Eritrean parliament, the Baito, to a rubber stamp for the Emperor’s decisions.

1953 – The US and Ethiopia sign a 25-year lease on the Kagnew radio listening station.

1958 – The Eritrean Liberation Front (ELF) is formed with a largely Muslim membership, looking to brothers in the Arab world.

The Eritrean war of Independence

1961 – First shots fired by ELF guerrillas, against a police station.

1962 – On 14 November 1962 members of the Baito were browbeaten and bribed into accepting full union and abolishing themselves i.e. Ethiopia annexed Eritrea without a shot being fired. A day of shame, a day of mourning, many of the Baito fled abroad. For the next few years the UN refused to acknowledge or reply to petitions, letters, legal requests from independence activists. The UN washed its hands and walked away.

1963 – Organisation of African Unity set up in Addis Ababa, largely at the Emperor’s initiative, and freezes African nations’ borders in place.

1967 – Full-scale guerrilla war. The Ethiopian army carries out numerous atrocities.

1970 – ELF splits and the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) is formed, a secular socialist predominantly Christian highlanders. By the early 70s the liberation movements had secured some 95% of Eritrean territory.

1974 – Ethiopian Emperor Haile Selassie is overthrown in a slow-motion military coup (see ‘The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat’ by Polish journalist Ryszard Kapuściński). A military junta calling itself the Dergue or Derg comes to power. After squabbling (and killing) among themselves, a forceful lieutenant, Mengistu Haile Mariam, emerges as its leader and driving force. The Derg declares Ethiopia a socialist state committed to Marxism-Leninism. It rejects Selassie’s alliance with the US and turns instead to the Soviet Union.

1975 – In response to increasing insurgent attacks, the Ethiopian army goes on the rampage in Asmara, slaughtering up to 3,000 civilians, then destroys over 100 villages, killing, burning, raping wherever they go.

1977 to 1978 – Massive Soviet support enable Ethiopian forces to reverse the EPLF’s hard-won gains, thus ensuring the war would double in length, continuing for another 14 years.

1978 – Somalia launches a campaign to seize the Ogaden region of Ethiopia which is now fighting two wars, in the north and east. Soviet ships and artillery mow down EPLF fighters, airplanes carpet bomb Eritrean villages.

1982 – Ethiopia launches a massive military assault named the Red Star Campaign in an effort to crush the rebels, but itself suffers heavy casualties.

1985 – Mikhael Gorbachev comes to power in the Soviet Union.

1988 – March: Battle of Afabet is the turning point of the war, when the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front smashes an armoured convoy and then takes the town with barely a shot fired. Wrong describes the surreal way the Ethiopian commanders destroyed their own armoured column, once it had been trapped in a steep valley, burning hundreds of their own troops to death. Basil Davidson on the BBC described it as the equivalent of the Viet Minh’s historic victory over the French at Dien Bien Phu (p.337). It is described in an article by Peter Worthington.

1989 – May: senior Ethiopian generals try to stage a coup the day after Mengistu flew to East Germany to plea for more arms. The coup was foiled, several key generals, 27 other senior staff and some 3,500 soldiers were executed in the month that followed, further weakening the demoralised Ethiopian army. The Soviets, fed up with supplying Ethiopia (and their other African ‘allies’) huge amounts of munitions, withdraw their ‘special advisers’. The last one leaves in autumn 1989.

1990 – February: The EPLF takes Massawa in a daring land and speedboat operation.

1991 – Spring: the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front captures the entire coast and moves on the Eritrean capital, Asmara. In the last few years disaffected Amharas and Omoros in central and southern Ethiopia had formed the Ethiopian People’s Revolutionary Democratic Front (EPDRF). Running parallel to Eritrea’s history, the equally rebellious province of Tigray had spawned the Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF) in 1975. Now the three groups worked together to topple Mengistu.

Eritrean independence

1993 – In a UN-supervised referendum, 99.8% of Eritreans vote for independence.

1994 – Having won independence, the EPLF reconstituted itself as the People’s Front for Democracy and Justice (PFDJ) and went onto establish one of the most autocratic, dictatorial regimes in the world.

1998 to 2000 – Eritrean-Ethiopian border clashes turn into a full-scale war which leaves some 70,000 people dead.

2001 – September: Eritrea’s president, Isaias Afwerki, closes the national press and arrests a group of opposition leaders who had called on him to implement a democratic constitution and hold elections.

END OF WRONG’S NARRATIVE

That’s as far as Wrong’s narrative covers. What follows is from the internet. There are loads of websites providing timelines.

2007 – Eritrea pulls out of regional body IGAD (Intergovernmental Authority on Development) as IGAD member states back Ethiopian intervention in Somalia.

2008 June – Fighting breaks out between Djiboutian and Eritrean troops in the disputed Ras Doumeira border area. At least nine Djiboutian soldiers killed. The US condemns Eritrea, but Eritrea denies launching an attack.

2009 December – The UN imposes sanctions on Eritrea for its alleged support for Islamist insurgents in Somalia.

2010 June – Eritrea and Djibouti agree to resolve their border dispute peacefully.

2014 June – The UN Human Rights Council says about 6% of the population has fled the country due to repression and poverty.

2016 July – The UN Human Rights Council calls on the African Union to investigate Eritrean leaders for alleged crimes against humanity.

2017 July – UNESCO adds Asmara to its list of World Heritage sites, describing it as a well-preserved example of a colonial planned city.

Peace with Ethiopia

2018 July – Ethiopia and Eritrea end their state of war after Ethiopian diplomatic overtures.

2018 November – The UN Security Council ends nine years of sanctions on Eritrea, which had been imposed over allegations of support for al-Shabab jihadists in Somalia.

Credit

I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation by Michela Wrong was published in 2005 by Fourth Estate. References are to the 2005 Harper Perennial paperback edition.

Related reviews

The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat by Ryszard Kapuściński (1978)
The relevant chapters of The Shadow of The Sun: My African Life by Ryszard Kapuściński (1998)
The relevant chapters of The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence by Martin Meredith (2005)
The relevant chapter of Dictatorland by Paul Kenyon (2018)

More Africa reviews

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by Simon on November 24, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, History

Tagged Addis Ababa University, Afghanistan, Africa, African history, African Union, Afwerki Isaias, al-Shabab, America, Amharas, Amharic, Amnesty International, Anatoly Adamashin, Angola, Anti-imperialism, anti-slavery, Anti-western bias, Arabic, Art Deco, Asmara, Asmara tank graveyard, Asmerom, Assab, Auberon Waugh, Bahta Hagos, Baito, Basil Davidson, Battle of Adwa, Battle of Afabet, Battle of Keren, BBC, Boer War, Brezhnev, British Empire, Cambodia, China, cock-up theory, Cold War, Colonel Gaddafi, colonialism, Communism, Cyrenaica, Derg, Desert War, Dictatorland, Dien Bien Phu, Djibouti, Dr Who, East Germany, Eduardo dos Passos, ELF, ELPF, Emmeline Pankhurst, Emperor Haile Selassie, Emperor Menelik, Eritrea, Eritrean history, Eritrean independence, Eritrean Liberation Front, Eritrean plateau, Erythra Thalassa, Ethiopia, Ethiopian famine, Evelyn Waugh, fellatio, Ferdinando Martini, Financial Times, First World War, Freedom House, Giles Foden, guerrilla war, Haile Selassie, Henry VIII, history of Eritrea, I Didn't Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation, IGAD, Il Diario Eritre, Imperial War Museum, imperialism, India, Institute of Ethiopian Studies, Intergovernmental Authority on Development, Iraq, Isaias, Isaias Afwerki, Islamic terrorism, Israel, Italian East Africa, Italian emigration, Italian Empire, jihadists, John Berakis, John Spencer, Jonas Savimbi, journalism, Kagnew Listening Station, Kagnew Station, Keith Wauchope, Kenya, Laos, League of Nations, Lenin, Libya, Mama Kathy, Maoism, Marx, Marxism, Marxism-Leninism, Marxist governments, Massawa, Massawa to Asmara railway, Mau Mau emergency, Melles Seyoum, Mengistu, Mengistu Haile Mariam, Michela Wrong, Middle East, Mikhail Gorbachev, Mobutu, modern history, Moon River Bridge, Mozambique, Mugabe, Mussolini, Nafka, North Korea, northern Dalmatia, OAU, Ogaden region, Omoros, Organisation of African Unity, Ottoman Empire, Palestine, Palestinian struggle, Paul Collier, Paul Kenyon, People’s Front for Democracy and Justice, Peter Worthington, PFDJ, President Isaias Afwerki, Press Freedom Index, racism, Ras Doumeira, Ras Tafari, Red Sea, Red Star Campaign, Red Terror, Reporters Without Borders, Resolution 390 A (V), Reuters, Richard Pankhurst, Rosie Big Tits, Ryszard Kapuściński, Second World War, slave trade, Somalia, southern Tyrol, Soviet Union, Sudan, Suffragettes, Sword of Honour trilogy, Sylvia Pankhurst, Tate, the Baito, The Bottom Billion, the Cold War, the Derg, the Dergue, The Gross Guys, The Holocaust, the milky haze of amnesia, The Organisation of African Unity, Tigray, Tigrinya, Trieste, Tripolitania, Uganda, Ukraine War, UN Four Powers Commission, UN General Assembly, UN Human Rights Council, UNESCO, United Nations, US foreign policy, Viet Minh, Vietnam War, Waugh in Abyssinia, Yemen, Yevgeny Sokurov, Zaire, Zero school, Zimbabwe

Posted by Simon on November 24, 2023

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Scoop by Evelyn Waugh (1938)

‘I think it is a very promising little war.’
(Lord Copper in Scoop, page 13)

When I read Evelyn Waugh as a student I didn’t have time to read the travel books, in fact I barely had time to read the key novels. This is a shame because, rereading Waugh second time around, I’m realising just how intimately related the novels and travel books are. Not to mention the newspaper articles he wrote, and his letters and diaries (all subsequently published). In other words, the novels, which it’s easy to see as standalone achievements, in reality sit amid an ocean of discourse which Waugh produced, awash with cross-currents, tides and undertows.

So in 1930 he goes to Ethiopia as a journalist, sending back reports on the coronation of Haile Selassie. At the same time he writes letters to friends and keeps a diary. Then he uses all this material for the travel book Remote People (1931). And then he recycles images, impressions and ideas into the novel Black Mischief (1932).

Then he goes on his 90-day trip to British Guyana (January to April 1933), keeps a diary, fills notebooks, writes letters to friends. Writes all this up into the travel book Ninety-Two Days (1934), which is an achievement in itself – but then reuses sights, sounds and characters to create the bleak final third of A Handful of Dust (1934) in which the protagonist goes off to… British Guyana.

The pattern repeated when Waugh was hurriedly hired by a British newspaper in 1935 and packed off to Ethiopia, purely on the basis of his earlier book, in order to be a war correspondent covering the looming conflict between Italy and Ethiopia (October 1935 to February 1937).

Once again Waugh travelled widely, kept extensive notes, diary entries, sent letters and, of course, filed reports back to his paper in London. The result is the fascinating travelogue Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) but, from the present point of view, the point is that for the third time he recycled experiences abroad and the extensive discursive texts they triggered (articles, diary entries, letters, notes and travel book) into yet another fictional text, Scoop (1936).

Scoop combines the three subjects which inspired Waugh’s best work: the trade of journalism, the colourfulness of foreign travel, with the usual mockery of English society providing a frame. It is a broad and very funny satire on the fatuity of the newspaper industry, showing how the role of writer and journalist and the press itself are silkily sewn into the fabric of English life. It is, almost in passing, a fierce satire on the politics and culture of an African country, and on the posh uselessness of British officials abroad. But a wholesale mockery of the newspaper business is its cores subject.

Plot

In a nutshell, high society mover and shaker Mrs Algernon Stitch agrees to do her friend, the novelist and travel writer John Courtenay Boot, a big favour and persuade her other friend, Lord Copper, CEO of the Megalopolitan Newspaper Corporation which owns the popular newspaper Daily Beast, that Boot is the perfect man to send out to the (fictional) African country of Ishmaelia to cover the looming war. For his part, John Courtenay Boot is looking for a good excuse to leave the country because he wants to dump a tiresome American girl he’s going out with. Win-win.

Mistaken identity

There then follows the book’s central joke and premise which is that Lord Copper goes back to the office and tells his senior editorial team to get hold of this Boot fellow, not mentioning his first name, and they in their panic stumble across the fact that there is a William Boot who already writes for the paper – he is their unassuming, quiet and modest nature correspondent, author of a regular column titled ‘Lush Places’ – and in one of the most famous examples of mistaken identity in 20th century English literature, they hire the wrong Boot!

Boot’s style

The Foreign Editor and News Editor quote a sentence from Boot’s latest article in awe of his over-ripe prose style, a fictional quotation which has become a widely quoted sentence wherever literary types are mocking over-writing.

‘Feather-footed through the plashy fen passes the questing vole…’

Panic packing

In an atmosphere of panic and hurry, they call William Boot in, inform the astonished man that he is being packed off Ishmaelia, put him up overnight at an absurdly expensive hotel, send him to buy a vast pantechnicon of equipment at the most imposing emporium in London (Harrods?) and then rush him helter-skelter to the airport.

In fact Boot doesn’t get away that easy because Waugh has a lot more satire to create at the expense while still in London. When Boot arrives at the airport there’s a long comic list of all the things he’s brought with him, and the elaborate bureaucratic hurdles he has to jump through, right up till the comic punchline when an official asks for his passport. Oh. He doesn’t have one. Oh. So all the helter-skelter plans to fly him off to the warzone have to be put on hold and Boot is taxied back to the big hotel for another night of all-expenses-paid luxury.

Lord Copper’s office

The office of Lord Copper is very humorously described. It sounds like the vast offices you see in 1930s American movies, sleekly Art Deco, with chrome finishings. Boot has to penetrate past layers of security and secretaries, the atmosphere becoming steadily more hushed and reverent before he meets the great man.

The Megalopolitan Newspaper Corporation building (‘700 to 853 Fleet Street’) is grandiosely named ‘Copper House’ and sounds just like a satire on those kinds of American office blocks you see in swish 1930s American movies about New York, with no fewer than eight lifts permanently opening and shutting their doors with a loud pinging sound and the announcements of lift girls saying ‘going up’ or ‘going down’.

The great crested grebe

Boot’s trip up to London and all these encounters are coloured by the other Big Joke of the first half. This is that William had written a particularly thorough and well-researched article about the life and habits of the badger for his weekly column. However, he lives in a large ramshackle old house (Boot Magna, quite grand, the drive is a mile long, p.200) shared with numerous members of his large, extended, eccentric, aristocratic family and his sister, Priscilla, got hold of the article before he sent it off and playfully changed ‘badger’ for ‘great crested grebe’ throughout.

When Boot took delivery of the next edition of the Daily Beast and saw what she had done he was furious at her but horrified with fear of punishment. Thus when, a few days later, he received the telegram from Salter demanding his presence in London, William inevitably thought he was heading for the roasting of his life. This explains why he is on tenterhooks of anxiety throughout his initial interview with Mr Salter, who takes him to the pub round the corner from the office and can’t understand why Boot is so anxious and touchy.

This joke lasts a good ten pages and, like the larger conceit of Lord Copper and Mr Salter hiring the wrong Boot, they both display what you might call a deep structural grasp of comedy. I suppose it was always present in Waugh’s writing, for example the way the utterly innocent Paul Pennyfeather is sent down from Oxford when he was the real victim in his first novel, and other extended and clever plot conceits in the others.

But the previous novels have structural or thematic weaknesses: Vile Bodies is deliberately rambling and fragmented and what is probably it most central recurring theme, the on-again, off-again engagement of Adam and Nina, is meant to be shallow and is.

A Handful of Dust has plenty of comic detail but is flavoured by the bitterness of the infidelity and betrayal which is its central plot, is then tainted by the terrible tragedy at its heart, and then utterly overshadowed by the devastating conclusion.

It’s for these reasons that Scoop is many people’s favourite Waugh novel: because it combines plenty of surface comedy, pratfalls and gags, and satirises subjects Waugh knew inside out (journalism and foreign travel) but mostly because it is based on a central premise (Boot’s mistaken identity) which is itself deeply, richly comic, without any of the bitterness or darker tones found in the other novels. It is his most purely comic novel. (And – spoiler alert – it has a happy ending.)

The farce of African wars

Sure there’s a war on, but the satire about it is relatively gentle and genuinely funny. It starts with Lord Copper’s attitude that the war exists solely for his convenience, to help him sell newspapers. It’s in this context he makes his remark that it’s ‘a very promising little war’, by which he means commercially promising, in terms of circulation figures and profits. This satirical attitude extends to the apparently serious way he tells Boot what he expects from it, as if Boot can personally deliver these:

Remember that the Patriots are in the right and are going to win. The Beast stands by them four square. But they must win quickly. The British public has no interest in a war which drags on indecisively. A few sharp victories, some conspicuous acts of personal bravery on the Patriot side and a colourful entry into the capital. That is the Beast Policy for the war.

The humour extends to Mr Salter’s deliberately nonsensical explanation of the war. The satire is at the expense of even the best educated metropolitan Englishmen who generally know little about most other countries in the world and, in general, couldn’t care less. Thus when Boot asks for a pre-trip briefing this is what he gets. Boot asks:

‘Can you tell me who is fighting who in Ishmaelia?’
‘I think it’s the Patriots and the Traitors.’
‘Yes, but which is which?’
‘Oh, I don’t know that. That’s Policy, you see. It’s nothing to do with me. You should have asked Lord Copper.’
‘I gather it’s between the Reds and the Blacks.’
‘Yes, but it’s not quite as easy as that. You see they are all negroes. And the fascists won’t be called black because of their racial pride, so they are called White after the White Russians. And the Bolshevists want to be called black because of their racial pride. So when you say black you mean red, and when you mean red you say white and when the party who call themselves blacks say traitors they mean what we call blacks, but what we mean when we say traitors I really couldn’t tell you. But from your point of view it will be quite simple. Lord Copper only wants Patriot victories and both sides call themselves patriots and of course both sides will claim all the victories. But of course it’s really a war between Russia and Germany and Italy and Japan who are all against one another on the patriotic side. I hope I make myself plain?’

Even scholarly historians and commentators remark on the sometimes farcical aspects of African dictators and African wars. Gerard Prunier, author of the definitive history of the Great War of Africa, frequently comments on the absurdity of all parties, not least the bizarre, corrupt and often farcical rule of the Leopard himself, President Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga of Zaire.

The two Ishmaeli consuls in London

This element of African farce is sounded before Boot has even left London. When he was halted by the lack of a passport at Croydon airport, he was forced to return with his huge train of luggage to London, spend the night in the astonishingly expensive hotel, and next morning visit the Ishmaeli legation for a passport and visa. However, since the country is torn by civil war, there are two legations.

Just as Waugh mocks the grandiosity of Copper Towers and the indifferent cynicism of Lord Copper himself, the anxiety of Mr Salter, and countless other aspects of English journalism, so he satirises the pathetic aspirations of the diplomatic representatives of Ishmaelia. The Consulate for the Patriotic part of Ishmaelia resides in the downstairs flat of a house in Maida Vale where the ‘consul’ turns out to be a man Boot saw earlier in the day haranguing a crowd in Hyde Park Corner. His theme is that everything good in the modern world came out of Africa and all the great personages of history were African.

‘Who built the Pyramids?’ cried the Ishmaelite orator. ‘A Negro. Who invented the circulation of the blood? A Negro. Ladies and gentlemen, I ask you as impartial members of the great British public, who discovered America?’

According to him Karl Marx was a Negro and it was blacks who won the Great War. This is funny as an example of the comic type of the Over-Claimer. But is also given contemporary relevance that in our day, over 80 years later, there are more books, articles, speeches and documentaries than ever before making the same claim, that Western civilisation derives from Africa: the story goes it was the Africans who inspired the Egyptians, the Egyptians who inspired the Greeks, Western civilisation is based on Greek discoveries in almost all fields, so…all Western civilisation is based on African achievements.

What interests me is not the minutiae of the arguments, but the simple fact that a subject which a lot of young, fresh-faced students take to be a brave blow against white supremacy, Eurocentrism etc, was already an argument familiar enough to be satirised in a popular novel ninety years ago.

Anyway, the comic punchline is that this highly vocal propounder of the cause of the Ishmaeli Patriots turns out not to come from Ishmaelia at all. He is ‘a graduate of the Baptist College of Antigua.’

The mockery of the Over-claimer is trumped by the description of the rival Ishmaeli legation, which (comically, absurdly) gives its loyalty to Nazi Germany (!). Despite being an obvious black African the ‘consul’ insists he and his confreres are white, in fact they were the first white colonisers of Africa. Admittedly, prolonged exposure to the hot sun has given he and his colleagues a bit of a tan, but it is the Jewish-backed international Bolshevik conspiracy which promotes the lie that they are Negroes.

I suppose it would be extremely easy to describe this all as howlingly racist, maybe, by modern standards, it is. But it’s also obvious that Waugh is looking for the weak spot, the most absurd aspects, of everything he train his malicious gaze upon. Lord Copper is a fool. Boot’s extended family are decrepit and gaga. Mrs Stitch, the high society hostess who knows everyone is absurdly caricatured. The dimness of the Foreign Editor in hiring Boot is fundamental to the plot. The French colonial administrator he meets on the train across France is classically haughty and supercilious. Everyone is stereotyped and ridiculed.

Waugh’s occasional lyricism

Eventually Boot secures his two passports with visas for the wartorn country, arrives for a second time at Croydon airport and this time manages to get into the plane, which then takes off and Waugh deploys a burst of lyricism of the kind he can turn on like a tap in these early novels:

The door was shut; the ground staff fell back. The machine moved forward, gathered speed, hurtled and bumped across the rough turf, ceased to bump, floated clear of the earth, mounted and wheeled above the smoke and traffic and very soon hung, it seemed motionless, above the Channel, where the track of a steamer, far below them, lay in the bright water like a line of smoke on a still morning. William’s heart rose with it and gloried, lark-like, in the high places.

Satire on journalism

The war and Africans and London high society are mocked, but fundamentally this is a book ripping the piss out of journalism as a trade and journalists as individuals.

Boot lands at Le Bourget airport north of Paris, train into the capital, taxi across to the south-facing Gare de Lyon railway station, then onto the Train Bleu, the regular service to the South. At Marseilles he disembarks and a knackered old steamship, the Francmaçon, which is going to take him and a random assortment of other passengers the length of the Med, through the Suez Canal, down the Red Sea and to the fictional land of Ishmaelia – the same journey Waugh described in his first travel book, Labels, then in Remote People, then in Waugh in Abyssinia. Anyone reading all these texts in sequence becomes pretty familiar with the route, the scenery, and the mixture of boredom and oddity aboard ship, which always piques Waugh’s interest.

On the ship he meets a character who is going to rescue throughout the book, Corker, a rough and cynical freelance journalist or stringer. He also is going out to report the war for his agency, Universal News, which sells his reports on to various papers. Corker explains a few home truths about journalism:

News is what a chap who doesn’t care much about anything wants to read. And it’s only news until he’s read it. After that it’s dead. (p.66)

Corker regales him with stories of heroic scoops, fakes and hoaxes. He tells him a story about the legendary American newsman, Wenlock Jakes, hero to the journalistic community. I’ll give it in full because it perfectly conveys the tone of Waugh’s absurdist satire.

‘Why, once Jakes went out to cover a revolution in one of the Balkan capitals. He overslept in his carriage, woke up at the wrong station, didn’t know any different, got out, went straight to a hotel, and cabled off a thousand word story about barricades in the streets, flaming churches, machine guns answering the rattle of his typewriter as he wrote, a dead child, like a broken doll, spreadeagled in the deserted roadway below his window–you know.

‘Well they were pretty surprised at his office, getting a story like that from the wrong country, but they trusted Jakes and splashed it in six national newspapers. That day every special in Europe got orders to rush to the new revolution. They arrived in shoals. Everything seemed quiet enough but it was as much as their jobs were worth to say so, with Jakes filing a thousand words of blood and thunder a day. So they chimed in too. Government stocks dropped, financial panic, state of emergency declared, army mobilized, famine, mutiny and in less than a week there was an honest to God revolution under way, just as Jakes had said. There’s the power of the Press for you.

So you can single out Waugh’s mockery of some aspects of African culture and blacks in Britain if you are ideologically compelled to, but it seems to me the entire purpose of the book is to mock, satirise and caricature everything he can get his hands on.

One

So the easiest way to satirise the press is to point out that they routinely make stories up, to justify their jobs, to fill pages at the endless, clamorous request of desperate editors.

‘The Beast have been worrying the F.O. Apparently they think you’ve been murdered. Why don’t you send them some news.’
‘I don’t know any.’
‘Well for heavens sake invent some.’ (p.138)

Two

There’s a running joke about the extreme brevity of the telegrams Boot’s office sends him, which appear complete gibberish until Corker patiently explains the way they’re abbreviated in order to save money: you only pay per word in a telegram, hence London’s outlandish code. For example, when they put into the Red Sea port of Aden for a few days, Corker suggests he write a story about the scandal of British unpreparedness:

‘Your story had better be British unpreparedness. If it suits them, they’ll be able to work that up into something at the office. You know – -“Aden the focal point of British security in the threatened area still sunk in bureaucratic lethargy” — that kind of thing.’
‘Good heavens, how can I say that?’
‘That’s easy, old boy. Just cable ADEN UNWARWISE.’

This turns into quite a funny running gag because Boot obstinately fails to understand the code is a money-saving strategy and so persists in sending rambling chatty telegrams which are extremely expensive, to his boss’s chagrin, leading up to the one which drives his colleagues back in London spare with anger, as it is not only wordy, but reveals a breezy ignorance of their desperate need for news, hard news, exciting news, vivid reporting from a warzone but also displays complete ignorance of the staggering cost of each word included in these telegrams.

With one finger, he typed a message. PLEASE DONT WORRY QUITE SAFE AND WELL IN FACT RATHER ENJOYING THINGS WEATHER IMPROVING WILL CABLE AGAIN IF THERE IS ANY NEWS YOURS BOOT.

Three

There’s another running gag about the way journalists automatically turn all human situations into sensationalist headlines. Or to put it another way, journalists have a set of ‘stories’ i.e. narrative paradigms, in their heads, and the rich, varied and chaotic behaviour of people in the real world can all be reduced to one of about 20 stock, stereotypical, clichéd ‘stories’.

A humorous example is when M. Giraud, an official with the railway, accompanies his wife on the train to the coast to see her off on the boat back to Europe. In Corker’s hands this becomes ‘the “panic-stricken refugees” story.’ Even the most trivial event is a) inflated b) given a lurid headline. That’s what journalism is – sensationalism and exaggeration.

Each new train brings 20 or 30 more journalists to the capital of Ishmaelia, Jacksonburg, and Waugh soon builds up quite a community of comic stereotypes: the legendary Wendell Jakes, the English equivalent Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock (now working for Lord Copper and Boot’s rival paper, the Daily Brute), a roomful of surly hacks Shumble and Whelper and Pigge, a comic Swedish character, Olafsen, who’s lived in the capital for years. In a running gag, most of the town’s taxi drivers, who speak no English, if they don’t understand where their customers want them to go, end up taking them to the Swede’s house, so he can hear the desired destination and translate it for the drivers.

More and more journalists arrive

There is an obvious echo of real events as reported in Waugh in Abyssinia when the main hotel in town (The Liberty) becomes full and then starts overflowing with a never-ending stream of gentlemen from the world’s press. Boot moves out to an eccentric boarding house, the Pension Dressler, complete with pig, poultry and milk goat, a gander and a three-legged dog. This is what Waugh had done in real life.

In Waugh in Abyssinia the press corps decides it needs to go to the Front and sets out in a convoy of ragged vehicles heading north, only to encounter various mishaps – getting lost, breaking down, getting arrested by the local police for not having this, that or the other pass to travel and so on. Waugh was among these earnest unfortunates.

More or less the same happens here, except Waugh keeps his protagonist in the capital which suddenly becomes empty of journalists as they all set off to the Front.

Comedy love interest – Kätchen

This brings us to what amounts to the biggest narrative difference between Waugh’s account of actual events in Waugh in Abyssinia and this comic fictional version, which is the introduction of a girlfriend for the protagonist. In the real sequence of events, things petered out. The actual Italo-Abyssinian War took a long time to actually kick off (the Italians delaying until a time and place which suited them) during which various journalists packed up and left, and even when it did break out not many made it to any kind of ‘front’ or saw any actual fighting.

It feels like the invention of a girlfriend for Boot is designed to avoid the shapeless fizzling out which occurred in real life, to give the narrative more of the roundedness of fiction and also, of course, complies with the very old template of boy meets girl: the idea that fiction is predominantly about romance.

But this is Waugh and so it’s a comic satire on the notion of romance. For what the reader quickly realises is that Kätchen is a user, who exploits our hero’s naivety. Kätchen had been living at the German Pension, the subject of endless grumbles from the owner, Frau Dressler. She inveigles her way into Boot’s affections by spinning a sad story of how her prospector husband has gone off into the hills leaving her all alone and without any money. They get to know each other when Frau Dressler kicks her out of the best room in the pension, meaning to give it to Boot. Kätchen asks Boot if she can leave a box of her husband’s rock samples in the room. Then she asks Boot to help pay her rent. Then she asks Boot to buy the samples because she’s sure they’re valuable (for $20). Then she tells him she has lots of contacts in the town and can work as his fixer or source. For this she suggests $100 a week.

To all this Boot agrees because he thinks he has fallen in love. In this respect he is very like Paul Pennyfeather in Decline and Fall, a simple, naive, virgin who is bedazzled by his first encounter with things of the heart. They play ping pong at Popotakis’s Ping Pong Parlour or she gets him to take her for picnics in the country surrounding the capital. He is hopelessly smitten.

‘Kätchen, I love you. Darling darling Kätchen, I love you…’
He meant it. He was in love. It was the first time in twenty-three years; he was suffused and inflated and tipsy with love…For twenty-three years he had remained celibate and heart-whole; landbound. Now for the first time he was far from shore, submerged among deep waters, below wind and tide, where huge trees raised their spongy flowers and monstrous things without fur or feather, wing or foot, passed silently, in submarine twilight. A lush place.

The telegram of a career

Next morning Boot goes to see off the Swede who, in his capacity as part-time medic, has been alerted to an outbreak of plague and is off by train to help. He returns to the pension in time to greet Kätchen, back from shopping and as they chat, she lets fall snippets of gossip from the friends she’s met, casually mentioning that the president has been locked up in his room by Dr Benito and a Russian. With the complete absence of journalistic sense which makes him the comic butt of the book, Boot timidly suggests he should tell his bosses about this, Kätchen agrees but tells him to hurry up because she wants him to take her for a drive, and so he quickly dashes off what will turn out to be a historic telegram.

NOTHING MUCH HAS HAPPENED EXCEPT TO THE PRESIDENT WHO HAS BEEN IMPRISONED IN HIS OWN PALACE BY REVOLUTIONARY JUNTA HEADED BY SUPERIOR BLACK CALLED BENITO AND RUSSIAN JEW WHO BANNISTER SAYS IS UP TO NO GOOD THEY SAY HE IS DRUNK WHEN HIS CHILDREN TRY TO SEE HIM BUT GOVERNESS SAYS MOST UNUSUAL LOVELY SPRING WEATHER BUBONIC PLAGUE RAGING.

When the editors of the Beast receive this they go into overdrive, cancelling the front page, going with a massive splash, digging up a photo of Boot to puff him as their premier foreign correspondent, claiming this is a world scoop. Which it is.

The communist coup

The scenes set in Africa take less than half the book, pages 74 to 178 of a 222-page long text. The end when it comes is quite abrupt and also quite convoluted and all takes place on one action-packed farcical day.

There’s a comic garden party at the British Legation, an opportunity for mocking the British envoy who is frightfully posh and completely out of touch. But it’s an opportunity for Boot’s old chum, Jack Bannister, an official at the legation, to explain what’s going on. This is that large gold reserves have been found in the country and various European countries are manoeuvring to get concessions to mine it and/or run the country’s government. Bannister tells him the Russians are supporting Ishmaelia’s smooth public relations minister Dr Benito and his ‘Young Ishmaelia’ party.

Then Boot is cornered by the very same Dr Benito, the smooth-talking minister of information. He very strongly suggests to Boot that he accept the offer of being taken on an all-expenses tour of the country. Boot strongly resists.

He drives back to the pension where he finds an emissary of Dr Benito’s. He reveals that Kätchen has been taken into custody, for her own safety of course then has another go at persuading Boot to leave town. Boot says no, kicks him out of his room, and the pension goat which has, for months been straining at its leash at every passing human, finally bursts its rope and gives the emissary a colossal but sending him flying.

Fired up with frustration and resentment, Boot sits out at his typewriter and knocks out 2,000 words summarising everything he’s learned from Bannister about the coup and the threat of a Bolshevik takeover of Ishmaelia, threatening ‘vital British interests’, not to mention the imprisonment of a beautiful blonde and the outbreak of the Black Death. It has, literally, comically, everything. Boot takes it to the telegram office, bribes the reluctant official to send it, then goes for dinner alone at Popotakis’s, while the editors of the Daily Beast read his astonishing story and go into a frenzy.

Comedy crushing of love interest

Kätchen’s husband turns up, back from his treks through the outback. He is waiting in Boot’s room which was, of course, previously his and Kätchen’s. He is starving and Boot offers him the Christmas dinner which was included in his absurdly elaborate pack from Harrods. The German eats it all and falls asleep.

It is now night-time and the night watchman comes to tell him a car has arrived for him. Out of the dark stumbles the lovely blonde Kätchen and they embrace and she tells her how relieved she is to see him etc. But as soon as they go into his room and she sees her sleeping husband she completely forgets about Boot. She wakes hubby and they kiss and hug and make up while Boot watches. Then the three of them discuss how they can get out the country, as the German’s papers aren’t in order and the train is not taking foreigners. Kätchen remembers one of the more absurd pieces of Boot’s equipment, an inflatable boat, so they carry it down to the river, construct it, Kätchen and husband get in, along with the case of precious rocks (nearly swamping it), Boot gives it a shove and it is carried off by the swirling river. Well, so much for young love.

Up the revolution

Boot wakes next morning to find the Bolsheviks have taken over Jacksonburg. They are handing out leaflets reading WORKERS OF ISHMAELIA UNITE, they’ve stencilled a hammer and sickle on the front of the post office, hung red flags everywhere, the manifesto is glued to walls. The new government has renamed the capital Marxville, the Café Wilberforce changes its name to the Café Lenin.

Everything has gotten too much. Boot stands on the verandah of the pension and finds himself wishing that a deus ex machina would appear and solve his problems. At which precise point there is a joke for all educated people, in that he hears an airplane flying overhead and then sees a figure jump out, open his parachute and swing gently down to land on the flat room of the Pension Dressler. A god from the machine, literally.

It turns out to be the mysterious figure Boot had let board his plane from Croydon airport all those weeks ago and given a handy little lift across the Channel to Le Bourget. He is a supremely confident suave posh Englishman who is currently going under the name Baldwin and who never goes anywhere without his man Cuthbert.

This fellow knows everything and can do anything. He is entirely candid and friendly. His man has set up a radio in a secret location and lets Boot file his despatches back to the Daily Beast. He sheds more light on the Russian backing from the coup. It was between the Germans who backed a man named Smiles, and the Russians who backed Benito and the Young Ishmaelians. Both are, ultimately, after the gold.

They are drinking in the bar room at Popotakis’s when there is a mighty road and a huge motorbike comes crashing through the door and smashes into the bar. It is being ridden by the Swede who is drunk and angry at being sent off on a wild goose chase, having discovered there is no plague in the country. Mr Baldwin asks Boot if the Swede becomes more pugnacious when drunk. Yes, he does. Good, and Mr Baldwin proceeds to ply the Swede with drink and tell him the damn Russians have arrested nice President Jackson and carried out a commie coup.

They then take him to the palace where Dr Benito is in the middle of making a speech to the assembled crowd. In short, the Swede pushes through the crowd, bursts into the palace, swings a chair round his head demolishing the furniture on the ground floor then climbing the stairs to the balcony where he terrifies Dr Benito and the Young Ishmaelites into jumping off the balcony and felling through the crowd. Then he frees President Jackson from his bedroom. The coup is over.

Back at the pension Boot begins typing out a rather weedy summary of events, when Mr Baldwin politely suggests he can do better, sits down and types:

MYSTERY FINANCIER RECALLED EXPLOITS RHODES LAWRENCE TODAY SECURING VAST EAST AFRICAN CONCESSION BRITISH INTERESTS IN TEETH ARMED OPPOSITION BOLSHEVIST SPIES…

Which brings the Africa section to an end.

Back in Blighty

The Beast’s editors have gone mad with Boot’s story, splashing it across the front pages for days. Lord Copper wants to hold a welcome home Boot grand dinner and insists he gets a knighthood. We then cut to the scene at the Prime Minister’s offices where he receives the message from Lord Copper to make Boot a knight of the realm. When his assistants discuss this later, one has heard of John Courtenay Boot the author, and so the same case of mistaken identity which occurred at the start of the narrative is now repeated at the end, in the other direction. A symmetry which a Restoration playwright would be proud of. So the PM’s assistants think he must have intended the knighthood for Boot the novelist. And so, without having done anything to deserve it, without understanding why, novelist John Courtenay Boot receives a letter informing him he is going to be included in the Order of Knights Commanders of the Bath.

Lord Copper is keen to put on a massive gala dinner. The front page of the Beast announces it and that Boot will make a great speech. Meanwhile William Boot arrives at Dover, checks through customs and loads his vast equipage onto the train. At Victoria he puts it all in one taxi and tells it to go to Copper House, while he jumps in a different taxi and goes straight to Paddington i.e. for trains heading west, home, to Boot Magna.

Once safe and sound and welcomed back into the bosom of his family, Boot sends a telegram to Mr Salter resigning. Meanwhile through social circles, it has leaked out to the editors that the Knighthood is being given to the wrong Boot. Not only that but someone has got to feature at the grand gala dinner Lord Boot has arranged.

Mr Salter at Boot Magna

The senior editors depute Mr Salter to take the long train journey down to the West Country. This whole section is longer than really necessary. it is padded out with a dollop of satire at the expense of an idiot West Country yokel who is sent to collect Mr Salter (he telegrammed ahead that he was coming) in a coal lorry. It’s fairly funny in itself but also proves the general point that Waugh was determined to satirise everything and everyone he could get his hands on

This final section is slow and long, a prolonged satire on the quirks of the extended Boot family, their servants notably the butler Troutbeck, which reminded me of the Ealing comedy Kind Hearts and Coronet. There is a mass of comic detail but, to cut a long story short, William completely refuses to return to London to attend the gala dinner and be recipient of the glorious speech Lord Copper has prepared. But his uncle Theodore doesn’t refuse. He regales a weary Mr Salter with tall tales about his wicked days in gay Paree while Salter passes out in the bedroom chair.

But next day, back in London, just as Mr Salter is telling the managing editor he couldn’t persuade Boot to return to London with him and both are facing the fact they’re going to be sacked, when… Uncle Theodore appears. He is an amiable old cove, he has plenty of foreign stories. Hm. Maybe he can be persuaded to impersonate his nephew, for the duration of the gala dinner.

The gala dinner

Which is, therefore, the comic climax of the novel. The joke is that Lord Copper’s fulsome speech takes as its theme the Promise of Youth which clashes rather badly with Uncle Theodore’s bald, raffish, decrepit appearance. Theodore had only 6 hours earlier been taken on contract with the Beast. Lord Copper knows something is wrong but he can’t quite put his finger on it. Didn’t he meet this fellow Boot before he was sent to Africa? Could’ve sworn he was a young chap.

Lord Copper toasts the future and Waugh takes that as a pretext, in the last two pages, to sketch out what all the characters’ futures will be: ever-larger banquets followed by phenomenal death duties for Lord Copper; days spent at his tailors or club evenings prowling the streets, for Uncle Theodore; Mr Salter promoted sideways to become art editor of Home Knitting; the mistakenly knighted John Courtenay Boot on a long expedition to the Antarctic; Mrs Stitch continuing to be a thoroughly modern hostess. He includes a letter from the ever-optimistic Kätchen, written from a ship bound for Madagascar, and asking William to send her the money he raised by selling her husband’s rocks.

And for innocent William? Back to where he started, as the quiet, innocent, unassuming author of his snug little nature column, Lush Places, and the book ends as he puts down his pen for the evening, half way through a column about owls, and climbs the ancient stairs of Boot Magna to his calm and moonlit room.

Credit

Scoop by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1938. All references are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on December 17, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Comedy, Novel

Tagged A Handful of Dust, Aden, Africa, Art Deco, Black Mischief, Bolshevism, Boot Magna, British Guyana, Café Lenin, civil war, colonialism, comedy, Communism, Copper House, Corker, coup, Croydon airport, Daily Beast, Daily Brute, Dr Benito, espionage, Ethiopia, Evelyn Waugh, Francmaçon, Frau Dressler, Gérard Prunier, gold, gossip, great crested grebe, Haile Selassie, High Society, imperialism, international politics, Ishmaelia, Jack Bannister, Jacksonburg, John Courtenay Boot, journalism, Kätchen, Le Bourget, Lord Copper, Lush Places, M. Giraud, Marseilles, Marxville, Megalopolitan Newspaper Corporation, Mobutu Sese Seko Kuku Ngbendu Wa Za Banga, Mr Salter, Mrs Algernon Stitch, Mrs Stitch, newspaper industry, Ninety-Two Days, novel, Olafsen, Pension Dressler, Pigge, ping pong, Popotakis's Ping Pong Parlour, practical jokes, Priscilla Boot, Red Sea, Remote People, Russia, Satire, Scoop, Shumble, Sir Jocelyn Hitchcock, spies, Suez Canal, The Liberty, The Press, Train Bleu, Troutbeck, Uncle Theodore, Waugh, Waugh in Abyssinia, Wenlock Jakes, Whelper, Young Ishmaelians, Zaire

Posted by Simon on December 17, 2021

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Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh (1930)

At Archie Schwert’s party the fifteenth Marquess of Vanburgh, Earl Vanburgh de Brendon, Baron Brendon, Lord of the Five Isles and Hereditary Grand Falconer to the Kingdom of Connaught, said to the eighth Earl of Balcairn, Viscount Erdinge, Baron Cairn of Balcairn, Red Knight of Lancaster, Count of the Holy Roman Empire and Chenonceaux Herald to the Duchy of Aquitaine, ‘Hullo,’ he said. ‘Isn’t this a repulsive party? What are you going to say about it?’ for they were both of them, as it happened, gossip writers for the daily papers.

I tend to prefer older novels to contemporary novels and poetry because they are more unexpected, diverting, free from our narrow and oppressive modern morality and better written. Go any distance into the past and the characters will have better manners and the narrator write a more grammatically correct English than you get nowadays. There will also be old phrases which I dimly remember from my youth which have now vanished, swamped by all-conquering Americanisms. And, sometimes, you just get scenes which are odder and more unexpected than earnest, issue-led modern fiction can allow itself. Thus, at the opening of Evelyn Waugh’s beautifully written, impeccably well mannered, but ultimately devastating 1932 novel, Vile Bodies, we read:

High above his head swung Mrs Melrose Ape’s travel-worn Packard car, bearing the dust of three continents, against the darkening sky, and up the companion-way at the head of her angels strode Mrs Melrose Ape, the woman evangelist.

Not the kind of sentence you read every day.

Crossing the Channel

Vile Bodies opens on a cross-channel ferry packed with an assortment of Waugh-esque eccentrics, including a seen-it-all-before Jesuit priest, Father Rothschild, a loud and brash American woman evangelist, Mrs Melrose Ape, and her flock of young followers; some members of the fashionable ‘Bright Young People’ aka ‘the Younger Set’ (Miles Malpractice, ‘brother of Lord Throbbing’, and the toothsome Agatha Runcible, ‘Viola Chasm’s daughter’); two tittering old ladies named Lady Throbbing and Mrs Blackwater; the recently ousted Prime Minister, The Right Honourable Walter Outrage, M.P.; and a hopeful young novelist Adam Fenwick-Symes, who has been writing a novel in Paris.

Although there are passages of narrative description what becomes quickly obvious is that Waugh is experimenting with the novel form in a number of ways. One is by presenting short snatches of conversation and dialogue between a lot of groups of characters briskly intercut. No narratorial voice gives a setting or description, there is only the barest indication who’s talking, sometimes no indication at all. You’re meant to recognise the speakers by the style and content of what they say. It’s like the portmanteau movies of the 1970s, like a Robert Altman movie, briskly cutting between short scenes of busy dialogue.

The book as a whole is a concerted satire on the generation of ‘Bright Young Things’, the privileged young British aristocrats and upper-middle-class public schoolboys who were adolescents during the Great War and who graduated from Oxford or Cambridge in the early 1920s, throwing themselves into a lifestyle of wild abandon and endless partying in the rich man’s quarter of London, Mayfair.

As you might expect, we not only get accounts of their activities, but the point of view of their disapproving elders and betters. Here’s the former Prime Minister, who we often find in conclave with Lord Metroland and Father Rothschild:

‘They had a chance after the war that no generation has ever had. There was a whole civilization to be saved and remade — and all they seem to do is to play the fool. Mind you, I’m all in favour of them having a fling. I dare say that Victorian ideas were a bit strait-laced. Saving your cloth, Rothschild, it’s only human nature to run a bit loose when one’s young. But there’s something wanton about these young people to-day.’

The younger generation’s frivolity is exemplified in the way Adam’s engagement with his fiancée, Nina Blount, is on again, off again, on again, their breaking up and making up punctuating the novel right till the end, in a running gag.

To start it off, Adam telephones Nina to tell her that the customs officials at Dover confiscated his novel and burned it for obscenity. She is sad but has to dash off to a party. In London he checks into the eccentric Shepheards Hotel (note the posh spelling), Dover Street, run by the blithely forgetful owner, Lottie Crump, who can never remember anyone’s name (‘”‘You all know Lord Thingummy, don’t you?’ said Lottie”). Lottie was, apparently, based, as Waugh tells us in his preface, on ‘Mrs Rosa Lewis and her Cavendish Hotel’.

Here Adam discovers the posh and eccentric clientele, including the ex-king of Ruritania (my favourite), assembled in the bar (the parlour) and wins a thousand pounds on a silly bet with a fellow guest. So he rushes to phone up Nina to tell her their wedding is back on again. She is happy but has to rush off to a party, as she always does.

Adam goes back to the group of guests, all getting drunk, and an older chap who calls himself ‘the Major’ offers the advice that the best way to invest his money is bet on a horse. In fact, he knows a dead cert, Indian Runner, running in the forthcoming November Handicap at twenty to one. So Adam drunkenly hands over his newly-won thousand pounds to the Major to put on this horse. The reader little suspects that this, also, will become a running gag for the rest of the book.

Then Adam stumbles back to the phone in the hallway and rings up Nina to ask her about this horse. It is a comic premise of the novel that the world it portrays is minuscule and everybody knows everybody else, so it comes as no surprise that Nina just happens to know the horse’s posh owner and tells him it’s an absolute dog and will never win anything. When Adam explains that he’s just handed over his £1,000 to a Major to bet on it, Nina says well, that was foolish but she must dash for dinner and rings off. As usual.

Phone dialogue

A propos Adam and Nina’s conversations, Waugh prided himself that this was the first novel to include extended passages of dialogue carried out on the phone. Something about the phone medium offers the opportunity to make the characters sound even more clipped, superficial and silly than face-to-face conversation would:

‘Oh, I say. Nina, there’s one thing – I don’t think I shall be able to marry you after all.’
‘Oh, Adam, you are a bore. Why not?’
‘They burnt my book.’
‘Beasts. Who did?’

Beasts and beastly. Dreadful bores. Ghastly fellows. I say, old chap. That would be divine, darling. Everyone speaks like that, and focusing on the dialogue brings this out.

Gossip columns and the press

Vile Bodies is wall to wall posh. That was its selling point. Waugh tells us that the ‘Bright Young People’ were a feature in the popular press of the time, as the characters in Made In Chelsea or Love Island might be in ours. Hmm maybe the comparison with a TV show is not quite right. After all, the characters appear in the gossip columns of the papers and some of the characters are themselves part of the set who make a career on the side writing about their friends.

When I was younger there were gossip columns by Taki in the Spectator and Nigel Dempster in the Express and Daily Mail. I imagine the same kind of thing persists today. Obviously people like to read about the goings-on of the rich and privileged with a mixture of mockery and jealousy. That’s very much the mix Waugh was catering to. He’s well aware of it. He overtly describes the ‘kind of vicarious inquisitiveness into the lives of others’ which gossip columns in all ages satisfy.

But over and above the permanent interest in the comings and goings of the very rich, the subject of the dissolute younger generation just happened to be in the news at the time and so Waugh’s novel happened to be addressing a hot topic at just the right moment. He was instantly proclaimed the ‘voice’ of that generation and Vile Bodies was picked up and reviewed, and articles and profiles and interviews were spun off it, and it sold like hot cakes. His reputation was made.

Interesting that right from the start of his writing career, it was deeply involved in the press, in the media. Vile Bodies is, on one level, about the rivalry between two gossip columnists for popular newspapers, and feature scenes in newsrooms and even with the editor of the main paper. Two of his books from the mid-30s describe how he was hired by a newspaper as a temporary foreign correspondent, the two factual books, Remote People and Waugh in Abyssinia. And he used the experiences and material from both books as material for his satirical masterpiece about the press, Scoop (1938). If we look back at Decline and Fall with this in mind, we notice that a number of key moments in that book are caused by newspaper reports, and that many of the events are picked up and reported by and mediated by the Press.

Waugh’s 1930s novels are famous for their bright and often heartlessly comic depiction of the very highest of London high society, but it’s worth pointing out how the topic of the Press runs through all of them, and the extent to which his characters perform their roles and are aware of themselves as performers (see below).

Bright Young People

Anyway, back to Vile Bodies, it is a masterpiece of deliberately brittle superficial satire, the text’s fragmentation into snippets of speech enacting the snippets of apparently random, inconsequent conversation overheard at a party, the world it comes from being one of endless parties, endless frivolity, which he captures quite brilliantly.

‘Who’s that awful-looking woman? I’m sure she’s famous in some way. It’s not Mrs Melrose Ape, is it? I heard she was coming.’
‘Who?’
‘That one. Making up to Nina.’
‘Good lord, no. She’s no one. Mrs Panrast she’s called now.’
‘She seems to know you.’
‘Yes, I’ve known her all my life. As a matter of fact, she’s my mother.’
‘My dear, how too shaming.’

It’s a set, a group, a clique. They all know each other and many are related, couples, parents, children, aunts, cousins. Waugh’s novels themselves partake of this cliqueyness by featuring quite a few recurring characters. Figures we first met in the previous novel, Decline and Fall, include Lord Circumference and Miles Malpractice, little David Lennox the fashionable society photographer. Lord Vanbrugh the gossip columnist is presumably the son of the Lady Vanbrugh who appeared in D&F and Margot Maltravers, formerly Mrs Beste-Chetwynde who was a central character in the same novel, also makes an appearance under her new name, Lady Metroland, hosting a fashionable party. (She confirms her identity by whispering to a couple of Mrs Ape’s angels that she can get them a job in South America if she wishes, the reader of the previous novel knowing this would be at one of Lady M’s string of brothels there). And quite a few of these characters go on to appear in Waugh’s later novels. The effect is to create a comically complete ‘alternative’ version of English high society, with its narrow interconnectedness.

Thus we know from Decline and Fall that Lord Metroland married Margot Beste-Chetwynde. She was heiress to the Pastmaster title. Therefore her son, Peter Beste-Chetwynde, in time becomes Lord Pastmaster. Margot caused a great stir in Decline and Fall by going out with a stylish young black man. Here in Vile Bodies there is a sweet symmetry in discovering that her son is going out with a beautiful black woman. Hence Lord Metroland’s grumpy remark:

‘Anyhow,’ said Lord Metroland, ‘I don’t see how all that explains why my stepson should drink like a fish and go about everywhere with a negress.’
‘My dear, how rich you sound.’
‘I feel my full income when that young man is mentioned.’

Sociolect

The snobbery is enacted in the vocabulary of the text. Various social distinctions are, of course, directly indicated by possession of a title or one’s family. But also, of course, by how one speaks. Obviously there’s the question of accent, the way the upper class distinguish themselves from the middle and lower classes. But it’s also a specific vocabulary which marks one off as a member of the chosen, its sociolect – not only its slang but a very precise choice of key words which mark off a group, signal to other members one’s membership of the group and of course, signal to everyone else their very definite exclusion. Thus:

Divine Mrs Mouse thinks a party should be described as lovely. When her daughter describes the party she’s just been to as divine her mother tut tuts because that single word betokens the class above theirs, indicates that her daughter is getting above her station.

‘It was just too divine,’ said the youngest Miss Brown.
‘It was what, Jane?’

Because it is a word very much associated with the hardest core of the upper classiest of the Bright Young Things, represented in this book by the wild and heedless party animal, Miss Agatha Runcible.

Miss Runcible said that she had heard of a divine night club near Leicester Square somewhere where you could get a drink at any hour of the night.

Bogus This is another word much in vogue to mean simply ‘bad’ with the obvious overtone of fake:

‘Oh, dear,’ she said, ‘this really is all too bogus.’
Miss Runcible said that kippers were not very drunk-making and that the whole club seemed bogus to her.

In fact their use of ‘bogus’ is cited by Father Rothschild as one of the things he notices about the younger generation. He takes a positive view of it, suggesting to his buddies Mr Outrage and Lord Metroland that the young actually have very strict morals and find the post-war culture they’ve inherited broken and shallow and deceitful. (In this way ‘bogus’ for the 1920s was similar to what ‘phoney’ was to be for Americans in the 1950s as popularised by Catcher In The Rye, ‘square’ was for hippies, and ‘gay’ is for modern schoolchildren).

Too ‘Too’ is an adverb of degree, indicating excess. Most of us use it in front of adjectives as a statement of fact, for example ‘This tea is too hot’. But the upper classes use it as one among many forms of exaggeration, indicating the simply superlative nature of their experiences, their lives and their darling selves. Used like this, ‘too’ doesn’t convey factual information but is a class marker; in fact its very factual emptiness, its semantic redundancy, highlights its role as a marker of membership:

‘I think it’s quite too sweet of you…’
‘Isn’t this too amusing?’
‘Isn’t that just too bad of Vanburgh?’

‘It was just too divine’ contains a double superlative, the adverb ‘too’ but also the adjective ‘divine’ itself, which is obviously being used with frivolous exaggeration. The party was divine. You are divine. I am divine. We are divine.

Such and so Grammatically ‘such’ is a determiner and ‘so’ is an adverb. So ‘so’ should be used in front of an adjective, ‘such’ in front of a noun phrase. In this narrow society, they are both used in much the same way as ‘too’, to emphasise that everything a speaker is talking about is the absolute tip top. After listening to someone telling us they had such a good time at such a wonderful party and spoke to such a lovely man, and so on, we quickly get the picture that the speaker lives a very superior life. To get the full effect it needs to be emphasised:

‘Such a nice stamp of man.’
‘It seems such a waste.’
‘Such nice people.’
‘Such a nice bright girl.’

There’s an element of risk in talking like this. Only a certain kind of person can carry it off. Trying it on among people who don’t buy into the entire elite idea, or among the real elite who know that you are not a member, risks ridicule.

So talking like this is a kind of taunt – I can get away with this ridiculous way of speaking but you can’t. The epitome of this verbal bravado is Miss Runcible, whose every word is littered with mannered vocabulary and superlatives, flaunting her superlative specialness, daring anyone else to compete.

Simply Paradoxically, for a very self-conscious elite, the pose is one of almost idiotic simplicity. Consider Bertie Wooster. His idiocy underpins his membership of the toff class. He is too stupid to do anything practical like have a job and his upper class idiocy is a loud indicator that he doesn’t need a job, but lives a life of privilege. Well one indicator of this attitude is use of the word simply.

‘I simply do not understand what has happened’
‘Nina, do you ever feel that things simply can’t go on much longer?’
‘Now they’re simply thrilled to the marrow about it .’
‘She’d simply loathe it, darling.’
‘Of course, they’re simply not gentlemen, either of them.’

Darling Preferably drawled, a usage only the very confident and suave can get away with.

‘Darling, am I going to be seduced?’
‘I’m afraid you are. Do you mind terribly?’
‘Not as much as all that,’ said Nina, and added in Cockney, ‘Charmed, I’m sure.’

Terribly Another denoter of frivolous giddy poshness, since the time of Oscar Wilde at least, via Saki and Noel Coward. Terribly and frightfully.

‘No, really, I think that’s frightfully nice of you. Look, here’s the money. Have a drink, won’t you?’
‘I say, you must be frightfully brainy.’

-making Many of these elements have survived the past 90 years, they continued into the equally frivolous Swinging Sixties and on into our own times, though often mocked, as in the TV series Absolutely Fabulous (1992 to 1996). A locution which is a bit more specific to this generation, or certainly to this book, is creating phrases by adding ‘-making’ to the end of an adjective. Thus:

‘Too, too sick-making,’ said Miss Runcible.
‘As soon as I get to London I shall ring up every Cabinet Minister and all the newspapers and give them all the most shy-making details.’
Miss Runcible said that kippers were not very drunk-making and that the whole club seemed bogus to her.
‘Wouldn’t they be rather ill-making?’
‘Very better-making,’ said Miss Runcible with approval as she ate her haddock.

The usage occurs precisely 13 times in the novel, mostly associated with the most daring character, fearless Miss Runcible, and Waugh pushes it to a ludicrous extreme when he has her say:

‘Goodness, how too stiff-scaring….’ (p.174)

This locution made enough of an impression that Waugh singled it out in his preface to the 1964 edition of the novel for being widely commented on, and even taken up by a drama critic who included it in various reviews: ‘”Too sick-making”, as Mr Waugh would say.’ Did people actually say it, or was it a very felicitous invention?

Cockney

In my review of Decline and Fall I noted how much Waugh liked describing Cockney or working class characters and revelled in writing their dialogue. Same here. Thus a taxi driver tells Adam:

‘Long way from here Doubting ‘All is. Cost you fifteen bob…If you’re a commercial, I can tell you straight it ain’t no use going to ‘im.’

This turns out not to be a personal foible of Waugh’s. In Vile Bodies we learn that mimicking Cockney accents was highly fashionable among the creme de la creme of the Bright Young Things.

‘Go away, hog’s rump,’ said Adam, in Cockney,
‘Pretty as a picture,’ said Archie, in Cockney, passing with a bottle of champagne in his hand.
‘Look,’ said Adam, producing the cheque. ‘Whatcher think of that?’ he added in Cockney.
‘Good morning, all,’ she said in Cockney.

At university I knew very posh public schoolboys who had a cult of suddenly dropping into very thick Jamaican patois which they copied from hard-core reggae music (the extreme Jamaican pronunciation of ‘nay-shun’ kept recurring). Same kind of thing here – upper class types signalling their mockery and frivolity by mimicking the accents of the people about as far away from them on the social spectrum as possible.

Alcohol

Everyone’s either drunk, getting drunk or hungover. Their catchphrase is ‘Let’s have a drink’.

‘How about a little drink?’ said Lottie.

The American critic Edmund Wilson made the same comment about the literary types he knew in 1920s New York, and in general about ‘the Roaring Twenties’, ‘the Jazz Era’. Everyone drank like fish.

They went down the hill feeling buoyant and detached (as one should if one drinks a great deal before luncheon). (p.173)

Everyone was nursing a hangover. Everyone needed one for the road or a pick-me-up the next morning, or a few drinks before lunch, and during lunch, and mid-afternoon, and something to whet the whistle before dinner, and then onto a club for drinks and so on into the early hours. At luncheon with Nina’s father:

First they drank sherry, then claret, then port.

It goes without saying that these chaps and chapesses are not drinking beer or lager. Champagne is the unimpeachable, uncritisable, eternal choice for toffs and all occasions.

(Unless specified in detail, all drinks are champagne in Lottie’s parlour.)
Archie Schwert, as he passed, champagne bottle in hand, paused to say, ‘How are you, Mary darling?’
Adam hurried out into the hall as another bottle of champagne popped festively in the parlour.

Drinking heavily and one more for the road and still partying at dawn are fine if you’re in your 20s (and well off and good looking). Give it 40 years and you end up looking and talking like the Major in Fawlty Towers as so many of these bright young things eventually did.

Ballard Berkeley as Major Gowen in Fawlty Towers

The extended scene at the motor races (Chapter Ten) contains a very funny description of four posh people becoming very drunk. Their progressive inebriation is conveyed entirely via their speech patterns, which become steadily more clipped and the subject matter steadily more absurd, so that when a race steward comes round to enquire where the driver of the car they’re supporting has gone to (his arm was hurt in an accident so he’s pulled into the pits and his car is empty) they immediately reply that he’s been murdered. When the steward asks if there’s a replacement driver, they immediately reply, straight faced, that he’s been murdered too.

‘Driver’s just been murdered,’ said Archie. ‘Spanner under the railway bridge. Marino.’
‘Well, are you going to scratch? Who’s spare driver?’
‘I don’t know. Do you, Adam? I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if they hadn’t murdered the spare driver, too.’

Since they each drink a bottle of champagne before lunch, the three posh friends start to come down at teatime and Waugh is as good on incipient hangovers as on inebriation.

The effect of their drinks had now entered on that secondary stage, vividly described in temperance handbooks, when the momentary illusion of well-being and exhilaration gives place to melancholy, indigestion and moral decay. (p.177)

Politics

The satirical point of view extends up into political circles, one of the jokes being that several of the most extreme and disreputably hedonistic of the Bright Young People are, with a certain inevitability, the sons and daughter of the leaders of the main parties and, since one or other of them is in power at any given moment, children of the Prime Minister.

In fact the mockery extends to the novel’s cheerfully satirical notion that the British government falls roughly every week. In the opening chapter we meet the Prime Minister who’s just been ousted, Outrage, and in the same chapter the supremely modish Miss Runcible. Only slowly does it become clear that she is, with a certain inevitability, the daughter of the current Prime Minister (Sir James Brown).

Half way through the book this Prime Minister is ousted because of stories about the wild party held at Number 10 which climaxed with his half-naked daughter, dressed as a Hawaiian dancer, stumbling drunkenly out the front steps of Number 10 and straight into the aim of numerous press photographers and journalists. Disreputable parties held by Tory toffs at Number 10? Well, it seems that in this, as so many other aspects of British life, nothing has really changed since the 1930s.

Moments of darkness

The best comedy, literary comedy as opposed to gag fests, hints at darker undertones. Shakespeare’s comedies tread, briefly, close to genuine cruelty or torment as, for example, in the hounding of Malvolio in Twelfth Night. Comedy generally is an unstable genre. For a generation or more we’ve had the comedy of cruelty or humiliation or embarrassment. I find a lot of modern comedy, such as The Office too embarrassing and depressing to watch.

Waugh’s comedy goes to extremes. It often includes incidents of complete tragedy which are played for laughs, or flicker briefly in the frivolous narrative as peripheral details, which are glossed over with comic nonchalance but which, if you pause to focus on them, are very dark.

It’s there in Decline and Fall when little Lord Tangent has his foot grazed by a shot from the starting gun at school sports day, the wound gets infected and he has to have the foot amputated. A lot later we learn, in a throwaway remark, that he has died.

Flossie’s death

Something similar happens here when a young woman, Florence or Flossie Ducane, involved in a drunken party in the room of one of the posh guests at the posh Shepheard’s Hotel attempts to swing from a chandelier which snaps and she falls to the floor and breaks her neck. Adam sees a brief report about it in the newspaper:

‘Tragedy in West-End Hotel.
‘The death occurred early this morning at a private hotel in Dover Street of Miss Florence Ducane, described as being of independent means, following an accident in which Miss Ducane fell from a chandelier which she was attempting to mend.‘

1. All kinds of things are going on here. One is the way moments of real tragedy provide a foil for the gay abandon of most of the characters. Each of these momentary tragedies is a tiny, flickering memento of the vast disaster of the First World War which looms over the entire decade like a smothering nightmare – all those dead husbands and brothers and fathers who everyone rushes round brightly ignoring.

(There’s a famous moment in the story, when Adam is hurrying to Marylebone station to catch a train out to the country pile of Nina’s father [Doubting Hall, Aylesbury], when the clock strikes 11 and everyone all over London, all over the country is still and quiet for 2 minutes because it is Remembrance Sunday. Then the 2 minutes are up and everybody’s hurly burly of life resumes. When I was young I read the handful of sentences which describe it as an indictment of the shallowness of Adam and the world, barely managing their perfunctory 2 minutes’ tribute. Now I see it as a momentary insight into the darkness which underlies everything, which threatens all values.)

2. On another level, the way Adam reads about Flossie’s death in a newspaper epitomises the way all the characters read about their own lives in the press; their lives are mediated by the media, written up and dramatised like performances. They read out to each other the gossip column reports about their behaviour at the latest party like actors reading reviews of their performances, and then, in turn, give their opinions on the columnists/critics’s writing up, creating a closed circle of mutual admiration and/or criticism.

3. On another, more obviously comic, level, what you could call the PR level, Adam smiles quietly to himself at how well the owner of the Shepheard’s Hotel, Lottie Crump, handled the police and journalists who turned up to cover Flossie’s death, smooth-talking them, offering them all champagne, and so managing to steer them all away from the fact that the host of the party where the death occurred was a venerable American judge, Judge Skimp. His name has been very successfully kept out of the papers. Respect for Lottie.

Simon Balcairn’s suicide

Then there’s another death, much more elaborately explained and described. Simon, Earl of Balcairn, has his career as a leading gossip columnist (writing the ‘Chatterbox’ column in the Daily Excess) ruined after he is boycotted by Margot Metroland and blacklisted from the London society through whom he makes his living. He gets Adam to phone Margot and plead to be admitted to her latest party, one she is giving for the fashionable American evangelist, Mrs Ape, but she obstinately refuses. He even dresses up in disguise with a thick black beard and gatecrashes, but is detected and thrown out.

Convinced that his career, and so his life is over, Simon phones in one last great story to his newspaper, the Daily Excess, a completely fictitious account of Margot’s party in which he makes up uproarious scenes of half London’s high society falling to their knees amid paroxysms of religious guilt and renunciation (all completely fictitious) – then, for the first time completely happy with his work, lays down with his head in his gas oven, turns on the gas, inhales deeply, and dies. It is, and is meant to be, bleak.

This feel for the darkness which underlies the giddy social whirl, and the complicated psychological effect which is produced by cleverly counterpointing the two tones, becomes more evident in Waugh’s subsequent novels, Black Mischief (1932) and A Handful of Dust (1934). In this novel he describes it as

that black misanthropy…which waits alike on gossip writer and novelist…

And it appears more and more as the novel progresses, like water seeping through the cracks in a dam. Nina starts the novel as the model of a social butterfly, utterly empty-headed and optimistic. After she and Adam have a dirty night in Arundel i.e. sex i.e. she loses her virginity, she ceases being so much fun. She finds the parties less fun. She starts to squabble with Adam. About half way through the novel she is, uncoincidentally, the peg for an extended passage which sounds a note of disgust at the book’s own subject matter (which is where, incidentally, the title comes from):

‘Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties.’
(…Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris–all that succession and repetition of massed humanity…. Those vile bodies…)

Waugh cannily sprinkles among the witty dialogue and endless parties a slowly mounting note of disgust and revulsion.

Comedy is adults behaving like children

From the moment of her deflowering Nina grows steadily more serious, almost depressed. You realise it’s because, in having sex, she’s become an adult. Things aren’t quite so much bright innocent fun any more. At which point I realised that the appeal of the Bright Young Things is, in part, because they behave like children, drunk and dancing and singing (OK, so the drinking is not exactly like young children) but at its core their behaviour is childish, persistently innocent and naive.

The Bright Young People came popping all together, out of some one’s electric brougham like a litter of pigs, and ran squealing up the steps.

Much comedy is based on adults behaving like children. It’s a very reliable way of getting a comic effect in all kinds of works and movies and TV shows. It occurs throughout this book. There’s a funny example when, at Margot Metroland’s party, the ageing ex-Prime Minister, Mr Outrage, gets caught up in the exposure of Simon Balcairn infiltrating the party in disguise but, because of the obscure way the thing is revealed with a variety of pseudonyms and disguises, the PM becomes increasingly confused, like a child among adults and he is reduced to childishly begging someone to explain to him what is going on. The comic effect is then extended when he is made to confess he experiences the same bewildering sense of being out of his depth even in his own cabinet meetings.

‘I simply do not understand what has happened…. Where are those detectives?… Will no one explain?… You treat me like a child,’ he said. It was all like one of those Cabinet meetings, when they all talked about something he didn’t understand and paid no attention to him.

Mr Chatterbox

Balcairn’s suicide creates a vacancy for a new ‘Mr Chatterbox’ and Adam happens to be dining in the same restaurant (Espinosa’s, the second-best restaurant in London) as the features editor of the Daily Excess, they get into conversation and so, with the casualness so typical of every aspect of these people’s lives, he is offered the job on the spot. ‘Ten pounds a week and expenses.’

Adam’s (brief) time as a gossip columnist turns into a comic tour de force. Just about everyone Simon mentioned in his last great fictitious account of Margot’s party (mentioned above) sues the Daily Excess (’62 writs for libel’!) with the result that the proprietor, Lord Monomark, draws up a list of them all and commands that none of them must ever, ever be mentioned in the paper again. This presents Adam with a potentially ruinous problem because the list includes ‘everyone who is anyone’ and so, on the face of it, makes his job as gossip columnist to London’s high society impossible.

He comes up with two solutions, the first fairly funny, the second one hilarious. The first one is to report the doings of C-listers, remote cousins and distant relatives of the great and good, who are often ailing and hard done by. The column’s readers:

learned of the engagement of the younger sister of the Bishop of Chertsey and of a dinner party given in Elm Park Gardens by the widow of a High Commissioner to some of the friends she had made in their colony. There were details of the blameless home life of women novelists, photographed with their spaniels before rose-covered cottages; stories of undergraduate ‘rags’ and regimental reunion dinners; anecdotes from Harley Street and the Inns of Court; snaps and snippets about cocktail parties given in basement flats by spotty announcers at the B.B.C., of tea dances in Gloucester Terrace and jokes made at High Table by dons.

This has the unexpected benefit of creating new fans of the column who identify with the ailments or afflictions of these ‘resolute non-entities’.

The second and more radical solution is simply to make it up. Like a novelist, Adam creates a new set of entirely fictional high society characters. He invents an avant-garde sculptor called Provna, giving him such a convincing back story that actual works by Provna start to appear on the market, and go for good prices at auction. He invents a popular young attaché at the Italian Embassy called Count Cincinnati, a dab hand at the cello. He invents Captain Angus Stuart-Kerr the famous big game hunter and sensational ballroom dancer.

Immediately his great rival gossip columnist, Vanbrugh, starts featuring the same (utterly fictional characters) in his column, and then other characters begin to mention them in conversation (‘Saw old Stuart-Kerr at Margot’s the other day. Lovely chap’) and so on. This is funny because it indicates how people are so desperate to be in the swim and au courant that they will lie to themselves about who they’ve seen or talked to. It indicates the utter superficiality of the world they inhabit which can be interpreted, moralistically, as a bad thing; but can also be seen as a fun and creative thing: why not make up the society you live in, if the real world is one of poverty and war?

But Adam’s masterpiece is the divinely slim and attractive Mrs Imogen Quest, the acme of social desirability, to whom he attributes the height of social standing. She becomes so wildly popular that eventually the owner of the Daily Excess, Lord Monomark, sends down a message saying he would love to meet this paragon. At which point, in a mild panic, Adam quickly writes a column announcing the unfortunate news that Mrs Quest had sailed to Jamaica, date of return unknown.

You get the idea. Not rocket science, but genuinely funny, inventive, amusing.

Father Rothschild as moral centre

Adam and Nina are invited to a bright young party held in a dirigible i.e. airship.

On the same night their more staid parents, politicians and grandees attend a much more traditional party for the older generation at Anchorage House. The main feature of this is the Jesuit Father Rothschild sharing with Mr Outrage and Lord Metroland a surprisingly mild, insightful and sympathetic view of the behaviour of the young generation. They have come into a world robbed of its meaning by the war, a world where the old values have been undermined and destroyed and yet nothing new has replaced them. A decade of financial and political crises ending up in a great crash. No wonder they make a point of not caring about anything. Genuinely caring about someone or something only risks being hurt. Hence the vehemence of the display of aloofness, nonchalance, insouciance, darling this and divine that and frightfully the other, and refusing point blank to ever be serious about anything.

In fact, Father Rothschild is given an almost apocalyptic speech:

‘Wars don’t start nowadays because people want them. We long for peace, and fill our newspapers with conferences about disarmament and arbitration, but there is a radical instability in our whole world-order, and soon we shall all be walking into the jaws of destruction again, protesting our pacific intentions.’

And this was written a few years before Hitler even came to power. Everyone knew it. Everyone sensed it. The coming collapse. The bright young things are laughing in the dark.

A touch of Auden

W.H. Auden often gets the credit for introducing industrial landscapes and landscapes blighted by the Great Depression into 1930s poetry, but it’s interesting to notice Waugh doing it here in prose. In a plane flying to the South of France, Nina looks down through the window:

Nina looked down and saw inclined at an odd angle a horizon of straggling red suburb; arterial roads dotted with little cars; factories, some of them working, others empty and decaying; a disused canal; some distant hills sown with bungalows; wireless masts and overhead power cables; men and women were indiscernible except as tiny spots; they were marrying and shopping and making money and having children.

One episode in the sad and dreary strand of English poetry and prose through the middle half of the twentieth century, E.M. Foster’s lament for the cancerous growth of London in the Edwardian era, D.H. Lawrence’s horrified descriptions of the mining country, John Betjeman’s comic disgust at light industrial towns like Slough, Philip Larkin’s sad descriptions of windswept shopping centres. But during the 1930s it had an extra, apocalyptic tone because of the sense of deep economic and social crisis.

Other scenes

The movie

Adam goes back to visit Nina’s father for a second time to try and borrow money, but is amazed to walk into the surreal scene of a historical drama being filmed at her father’s decaying country house (Doubting Hall, set in extensive grounds) by a dubious film company The Wonderfilm Company of Great Britain, run by an obvious shyster, a Mr Isaacs. (Worth noting, maybe, that Waugh has the leading lady of the movie, use what would nowadays be an unacceptable antisemitic epithet. Waugh himself has some of his characters, on very rare occasions, disparage Jews, but then they disparage the middle classes, politicians, the authorities and lots of other groups. Their stock in trade is amused contempt for everyone not a member of their social circle. Waugh comes nowhere near the shocking antisemitism which blackens Saki’s short stories and novels.)

Isaac is such a shyster he offers to sell Adam the complete movie, all the rushes and part-edited work for a bargain £500. Adam recognises a crook when he sees one. But his prospective father-in-law doesn’t, and it’s a comic thread that, towards the end of the novel, old Colonel Blount has bought the stock off Isaacs and forces his reluctant neighbour, the Rector of his church, to stage an elaborate and disastrous showing of what is obviously a terrible film.

(It is maybe worth noting that Waugh had himself tried his hand at making a film, with some chums from Oxford soon after he left the university, in 1922. It was a version of The Scarlet Woman and shot partly in the gardens at Underhill, his parents’ house in Hampstead.)

The motor race and Agatha

Adam, Agatha Runcible, Miles Malpractice and Archie Schwert pile into Archie’s car for a long drive to some remote provincial town to watch a motorcar race which a friend of Miles’ is competing in. It’s mildly comic that all the good hotels are packed to overflowing so they end up staying in a very rough boarding house, sharing rooms with bed which are alive with fleas. Early next morning they do a bunk.

The car race is described at surprising length, with various comic details (in the pits Agatha keeps lighting up a cigarette, being told to put it out by a steward, and chucking it perilously close to the open cans of petrol; this is very cinematic in the style of Charlie Chaplin).

There is a supremely comic scene where Miles’s friend brings his car into the pits and goes off to see a medic – one of the competitors threw a spanner out his car which hit our driver in the arm. A race steward appears and asks if there’s a replacement driver for the car. Now, in order to smuggle his pals into the pits in the first place, Miles’ friend had handed them each a white armband with random job titles on, such as Mechanic. The one given to Agatha just happened to read SPARE DRIVER so now, drunk as a lord, she points to it and declares: ‘I’m spare driver. It’s on my arm.’ The race steward takes down her name and she drunkenly gets into the racing car (she’s never driven a car before) her friends ask if that’s quite wise, to drive plastered, but she replies: ‘I’m spare driver. It’s on my arm’ and roars off down the course.

There then follow a sequence of comic announcements over the race tannoy as it is announced that Miss Runcible’s car (‘No 13, the English Plunket-Bowse’) has a) finished one lap in record time b) been disqualified for the record as it is now known she veered off the road and took a short cut c) has left the race altogether, taking a left instead of a right turn at a hairpin corner and last seen shooting off across country.

Our three buddies repair to the drinks tent where they carry on getting drunk. When ‘the drunk major’ turns up, promising to pay Adam the £35,000 that he owes him thanks to the bet he promised to make on a racehorse, they each have a bottle of champagne to celebrate.

Eventually it is reported that the car has been spotted in a large village fifteen miles away, town where it has crashed into the big stone market cross (‘ (doing irreparable damage to a monument already scheduled for preservation by the Office of Works)’).

Our threesome hire a taxi to take them there and witness the car wreck, mangled against the stone post and still smoking. Villagers report that a woman was seen exiting the car and stumbling towards the railway station. They make their way to the railway station and the ticket seller tells them he sold a ticket to London to a confused young woman.

(It may be worth noting that this entire chapter, with its extended and detailed description of competitive car racing, was almost certainly based on a real visit to a car race Waugh made, to support his pal David Plunket Greene. The real life race, which took place in 1929, is described, with evocative contemporary photos, in this excellent blog.)

Agatha’s end

To cut a long story short, after interruptions from other strands, we learn that Agatha sustained serious enough injuries in her car smash to be sent to hospital. But that’s not the worst of it. She had concussion and has periodic delusions, so she is referred on to ‘the Wimpole Street nursing home’. Here, in Waugh’s telegraphic style, we are given impressionistic snippets into her nightmares in which she is driving always faster, faster! and the comforting voice of her nurse trying to calm her as she injects her with a tranquiliser.

There’s a final scene in this strand where several of her pals pop round to visit her, bringing flowers but also a little drinky-wink, then some other appear and before you know it there’s a full scale party going on in her room, someone brings a gramophone, they all dance to the latest jazz tune. They even bribe the staid nurse with a few drinks and things are getting rowdy when, inevitably, the stern matron arrives and kicks them all out. Carry on Bright Young Things.

But, long story short, the excitement exacerbates Agatha’s shredded nerves and, towards the end of the narrative, we learn in a typically throwaway comment from one the characters, that Agatha died. Adam:

‘Did I tell you I went to Agatha’s funeral? There was practically no one there except the Chasms and some aunts. I went with Van, rather tight, and got stared at. I think they felt I was partly responsible for the accident…’

The fizzy bubbles mood of the opening half of the novel feels well and truly burst by this stage. Characters carry on partying and behaving like children but it feels like the moral and psychological wreckage is mounting up like a cliff teetering over them all.

Nina’s infidelities

The on again, off again relationship between Nina and Adam comes to a head when she declares she’s in love with a newcomer in their social circle, a man who speaks in even more outrageous posh boy phrases than anyone else. In fact, she casually informs Adam, she and Ginger got married this morning. Oh.

But this is where it gets interesting because Nina is such an airhead that she can’t really decide, she can’t make up her mind between Adam and Ginger. She goes off on a jolly honeymoon to the Med with him, but doesn’t like it one bit, he’s off playing golf most of the day. If you recall, Adam and Nina had had sex, at the hotel in Arundel, so there’s a more than emotional bond between them. Anyway, long and the short of it is she agrees to see him, to come and stay with him and, in effect, to start an affair with him as soon as she gets back to London.

It is all done for laughs but Waugh doesn’t need to draw the moral, to go on about psychological consequences, to editorialise or point out the moral implications for Nina and her set. All of this is conspicuous by its absence. It is left entirely to the reader to draw their own conclusions. Waugh’s text has the chrome-covered sleekness of an Art Deco statuette, slender, stylish, quick, slickly up to date.

He is the English F. Scott Fitzgerald, giving a highly stylised depiction of a generation in headlong pursuit of fun, drinks, drinks and more drinks, endless parties, with the shadow of the coming psychological crash looming closer and closer over his narratives.

The completely unexpected ending

The cinema show

Comedy of a sort continues up to the end, with the scene I mentioned before, of gaga old Colonel Blount, accompanied by Nina and Adam who are staying with him for Christmas, insisting on taking his cinematographic equipment round to the much put-upon local Rector, spending an age setting it up, and then blowing his entire household fuses in showing the terrible rubbish film which the director Isaacs has flogged to him.

It is a great comic scene if, to my mind, no longer as laugh out loud funny as the early scenes, because my imagination has been tainted by a silly death (Flossie), a suicide (Simon Balcairn), the nervous breakdown and death of pretty much the leading figure int he narrative (Agatha).

Anyway, after the power cut, the Colonel, Adam and Nina motor back to Doubting Hall for Christmas dinner and are in the middle of boozy toasts when the Rector phones them with the terrible news. War has broken out. War?

The last world war

In an extraordinary leap in subject matter and style, a startling break with everything which went before it, the very last scene discovers Adam, dressed as a soldier, amid a vast landscape of complete destruction, a barbed wire and mud nightmare derived from the grimmest accounts of the Great War and stretching for as far as the eye can see in every direction. It is the new war, the final war, the war Father Rothschild warned against, the war they all knew was coming and which, in a way, justified their heartless frivolity. Nothing matters. Jobs don’t matter, relationships don’t matter, sobriety or drunkenness, wild gambling, fidelity or infidelity, nothing matters, because they know in their guts that everything, everything, will be swept away.

Waugh’s humour continues till the end, but it is now a grim, bleak humour. For floundering across the mud landscape towards Adam comes a gas-masked figure. For a moment it looks as if they will attack each other, the unknown figure wielding a flame thrower, Adam reaching for one of the new Huxdane-Halley bomb (for the dissemination of leprosy germs) he keeps in his belt. God. Germ warfare. The utter ruined bottom of the pit of a bankrupt civilisation.

Only at the last minute do they realise they’re both British and then, when they take their masks off, Adam recognises the notorious Major, the elusive figure who took his money off him at Shepheard’s all those months (or is it years) ago, to bet on a horse, who he briefly met at the motor racing meet, and now gets talking to him, in that upper class way, as if nothing had happened at all.

‘You’re English, are you?’ he said. ‘Can’t see a thing. Broken my damned monocle.’

Now the Major invites him into the sanctuary of his ruined Daimler car, sunk past its axles in mud.

‘My car’s broken down somewhere over there. My driver went out to try and find someone to help and got lost, and I went out to look for him, and now I’ve lost the car too. Damn difficult country to find one’s way about in. No landmarks…’

It is the landscape of Samuel Beckett’s post-war plays, an unending landscape of utter devastation, dotted with wrecks of abandoned machinery and only a handful of survivors.

Once they’ve clambered into the car’s, the Major opens a bottle of champagne (what else?) and reveals a dishevelled girl wrapped in a great coat, ‘woebegone fragment of womanhood’. On closer examination this turns out to be one of Mrs Apes’ young girls, the laughably named Chastity. When quizzed, Chastity ends the narrative with a page-long account of her trials. It turns out that Margot Metroland did manage to persuade her to leave Mrs Ape’s religious troupe and go and work in one of her South American bordellos –so this fills in the details of the 3 or 4 girls we met during Decline and Fall who were being dispatched to the same fate.

Only with the outbreak of war, she returned to Europe and now presents in a breathless paragraph the story of her employment at a variety of brothels, being forced into service with a variety of conquering or retreating troops of all nations. The Major opens another bottle of champagne and starts chatting her up. Adam watches the girl start flirtatiously playing with his medals as he drifts into an exhausted sleep.

So, Waugh is pretty obviously saying, all of Western civilisation comes down to this: a shallow adulterer, a philandering old swindler, and a well-worn prostitute, holed up in a ruined car in a vast landscape of waste and destruction.

Aftershocks

Vile Bodies is marketed as a great comic novel and it is, and is often very funny, but as my summary suggests, it left me reeling and taking a while to absorb its psychological shocks. The deaths of Flossie, Simon and Agatha, and Nina’s slow metamorphosis into a thoughtless adulterer, all steadily darken the mood, but nothing whatsoever prepares you for the last chapter, which is surely one of the most apocalyptic scenes in the literary canon.

I had various conflicting responses to it, and still do, but the one I’m going to write down takes a negative view.

Possibly, when I was young and impressionable and first read this book, I took this devastating finale to be an indictment of the hollowness of the entire lifestyle depicted in the previous 200 pages. Subject to teenage moodswings which included the blackest despair, I took this extreme vision of the complete annihilation of western civilisation at face value and thought it was a fitting conclusion to a novel which, from one point of view, is ‘about’ the collapse of traditional values (restraint, dignity, sexual morality).

But I’m older now, and now I think it represents an artistic copout. It is so extreme that it ruins the relative lightness of the previous narrative. All the light touches which preceded it are swamped by this huge sea of mud.

And it’s disappointing in not being very clever. Up to this point any reader must be impressed, even if they don’t sympathise with the posh characters, by the style and wit with which Waugh writes, at the fecundity of his imagination, and the countless little imaginative touches and verbal precision with which he conveys his beautifully brittle scenarios.

And then this. Subtle it is not. It feels like a letdown, it feels like a copout. It’s not a clever way to end a noel which had, hitherto, impressed with its style and cleverness. It feels like a suburban, teenage Goth ending. It’s not much above the junior school essay level of writing ‘and then I woke up and it was all a dream’.

A more mature novel might have ended with the funeral of Agatha Runcible and recorded, in his precise, malicious way, the scattered conversations among the usual characters, momentarily brought down to earth and forced to confront real feelings, before swiftly offering each other and drink and popping the champagne. In this scenario the Major might have turned up as a fleeting character Adam still can’t get to meet, Nina unfaithful thoughts could have been skewered, Margot Metroland’s society dominance reasserted despite heartbreak over her dead daughter, Lord Monomark appointing yet another bright young thing as Mr Chatterbox, the ousted Prime Minister Mr Outrage still utterly confused by what’s going on, and maybe a last word given to sage and restrained Father Rothschild. That’s what I’d have preferred.

Instead Waugh chose to go full Apocalypse Now on the narrative and I think it was a mistake – an artistic error which became more evident as the years passed and the world headed into a second war, which he was to record much more chastely, precisely, and therefore more movingly, in the brilliant Sword of Honour trilogy.

Credit

Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh was published in 1930 by Chapman and Hall. All references are to the 1983 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on December 6, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Novel, War

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Posted by Simon on December 6, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/12/06/vile-bodies-evelyn-waugh/

Waugh in Abyssinia by Evelyn Waugh (1936)

On Monday night there was a bacchanalian scene at Mme Idot’s, where, among other songs of international popularity, ‘Giovanezza’ was sung in a litter of upturned tables and broken crockery.
(Waugh in Abyssinia, page 107)

In 1935 Italy declared war on Abyssinia, an independent sovereign state in north-east Africa, and Evelyn Waugh was hired by a British newspaper (I think it’s the London Evening Standard) and sent to the capital, Addis Ababa, to cover the conflict. This was because it was widely assumed that he knew about the country because of the hilarious and colourful, but also detailed and thoughtful, account of the 1930 coronation of the Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie which he had covered for The Times and then expanded into his book, Remote People.

Serious opinions

Waugh in Abyssinia opens a lot more seriously than its predecessor, with a chapter he jokingly titles ‘The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to the Ethiopian Question’ (a humorous reference to the book ‘The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism and Capitalism’, published by George Bernard Shaw in 1928.)

This opening chapter reads like an entry in the Encyclopedia Britannica. It gives a detailed history of Abyssinia from the turn of the nineteenth century till the present day. The facts Waugh gives are illuminating but what’s really striking is his opinions: this dyed-in-the-wool Tory repeats at face value the standard Marxist critique of Empire, that the scramble for Africa, although dressed up in pious sentiments, was mainly motivated by the need of Western capitalists for:

new sources of raw material, new markets, but, more than anything, for new fields of profitable investment.

Even more surprisingly, he frankly agrees with modern ideas that Africa was seized by force from its traditional owners, who were swindled or simply out-gunned out of their land.

The most remarkable feature of the partition was the speed with which it was accomplished. In less than ten years the whole of pagan Africa was in the hands of one or other of the European Powers. Explorers pushed on from village to village armed with satchels of draft treaties upon which hospitable chiefs were induced to set their mark; native interpreters made gibberish of the legal phraseology; inalienable tribal rights were exchanged for opera hats and musical boxes; some potentates, such as the Sultan of Sokoto, thought they were accepting tribute when they were receiving a subsidy in lieu of their sovereign rights, others that it was the white man’s polite custom to collect souvenirs of this kind; if, when they found they had been tricked, they resisted the invaders, they were suppressed with the use of the latest lethal machinery: diplomats in Europe drew frontiers across tracts of land of which they were totally ignorant, negligently overruling historic divisions of race and culture and the natural features of physical geography, consigning to the care of one or other white race millions of men who had never seen a white face. A task which was to determine the future history of an entire continent, requiring the highest possible degrees of scholarship and statesmanship, was rushed through in less than ten years.

These are the kind of progressive sentiments which authors writing in the 1990s or 2000s pride themselves on and yet here they are, forcefully and clearly stated as long ago as 1935, and not just as the property of the left or progressives, but as a universally acknowledged truth held by all educated people of the day:

But the avarice, treachery, hypocrisy and brutality of the partition are now a commonplace which needs no particularisation…

Not only that, but this Tory patriot then zeroes in on the record of his own country and the particular brand of hypocrisy which the English brought to their colonising.

It is worth remembering indeed, in the present circumstances, the particular nature of the reproach which attaches to England. France, Germany and Belgium were the more ruthless; we the more treacherous. We went into the shady business with pious expressions of principle; we betrayed the Portuguese and the Sultan of Zanzibar, renouncing explicit and freshly made guarantees of their territory; we betrayed Lobenguela and other native rulers in precisely the same method but with louder protestations of benevolent intention than our competitors; no matter into what caprice of policy our electorate chose to lead us, we preached on blandly and continuously; it was a trait which the world found difficult to tolerate; but we are still preaching.

And then his comments about the important impact of African art on Western art:

For centuries Africa has offered Europe successive waves of aesthetic stimulus…the gracious, intricate art of Morocco or the splendour of Benin…the dark, instinctive art of the negro — the ju-ju sculpture, the carved masks of the medicine man, the Ngomas, the traditional terrifying ballet which the dancing troops carry from the Great Lakes to the islands of Zanzibar and Pemba.

Although we might bridle at some of his phrasing, nevertheless this is the kind of claim you find made in up-to-the minute art exhibitions by the wokest of curators (for example, Tate’s self-flagellating exhibition about British Imperialism). I was genuinely startled that a man who’s often seen as an epitome of blimpish reaction held views 90 years ago which are identical with the most progressive of progressives in 2021.

Abyssinia and Ethiopia

As to Ethiopia’s origins:

At the beginning of the nineteenth century Abyssinia consisted of the four mountain kingdoms of Amhara, Shoa, Tigre and Gojjam, situated in almost complete isolation from outside intercourse.

Waugh says the word ‘Abyssinia’ is a corruption of the Arabic Habasha, variously said to mean ‘mongrels’ or ‘members of the Arabian Habashat tribe.’

They believed they had migrated from Arabia at some unrecorded date, probably before the Christian era; they employed a common literary language, Ghiz, which had some affinity with ancient Armenian, and spoke dialects derived from it, Tigrean and Amharic; they shared a common culture and feudal organisation and recognised a paramount King of Kings as their nominal head.

He says he will use the term ‘Abyssinian’ to describe the Amharic-speaking, Christian peoples of the four original kingdoms, and Ethiopian to describe the tribes and naturalised immigrants subject to their rule.

He describes the series of kings who sought to unite the four squabbling kingdoms, namely Emperor Theodore and Emperor Johannes, and then goes on to describe the rule of Menelik II, who is the key figure in the story. It was Menelik II (ruled 1889 to 1913) whose organisation, diplomacy and buying up of Western guns and ammunition allowed the well organised Ethiopian army to massacre an Italian army which had been sent to colonise his country, at the decisive Battle of Adowa in 1896. For the rest of his reign, from 1896 to 1913, Menelik devoted himself to expanding his ’empire’, and is a record of conquests, treaties and submissions by neighbouring tribes and chieftains until, by 1913, he had quadrupled the size of his ‘country’.

This long opening chapter is designed to show that the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in 1935 was far from being a simple act of unprovoked aggression. His aim is to show that Ethiopia was a much more complex place, with a complex and troubled history, than the simple shape on the map of Africa suggested. It was itself the product of imperial conquest, above all by the legendary King Menelik II, who attacked Tigray in the north, Somalia in the south and East, seizing territory, forcing countless chieftains, sheikhs and local leaders into obeisance. ‘Ethiopia’ was the result of conquest every bit as brutal as the European conquest of Africa, a ‘country’ which was more a:

vast and obscure agglomeration of feudal fiefs, occupied military provinces, tributary sultanates, trackless no-man’s-lands roamed by homicidal nomads; undefined in extent, unmapped, unexplored, in part left without law, in part grossly subjugated; the brightly coloured patch in the schoolroom atlas marked, for want of a more exact system of terminology, ‘ Ethiopian Empire’.

Return to farce

So the opening chapter is surprisingly serious, factual and (liberally) opinionated. But as soon as we move to chapter two we enter the more familiar territory of Waugh farce and fiasco.

He describes for comic effect the panic throughout London’s media as war in Abyssinia looms and companies scrabble to capitalise on the fact: publishers dust off rubbish old books about the north east Africa, which suddenly sell like hot cakes, press agencies buff up photos of Borneo head hunters or Australian aborigines to flog them as pics of Abyssinian natives.

Above all anyone with the slightest acquaintance with Ethiopia is suddenly in great demand and thus it is that Waugh finds himself able to wangle another commission as a foreign correspondent, sent by his paper to buy a mountain of comic equipment, catching the boat train to Paris, train to Marseilles, boarding a steamer along with hordes of other journalists, steaming across the Med and through the Suez Canal to Djibouti, then scrambling aboard the shabby stopping train across the barren desert and then up into the Ethiopian highlands to Addis Ababa.

Comedy

There is ample comedy about the farcical aspects of journalism, war, and Africa. Here is Waugh at his magisterial comic best, this paragraph like a magnificent galleon sailing though a comic extravaganza of his own devising.

There were several hotels in Addis Ababa, all, at the time of our arrival, outrageously prosperous. The ‘Splendide,’ at which we all assumed we should stay — the Radical had had the name painted in large white letters on his medicine chest — was completely full with journalists and photographers living in hideous proximity, two or three to a room even in the outbuildings. It was a massive, shabby building of sepulchral gloom, presided over by a sturdy, middle-aged, misanthropic Greek, who had taken it over as a failing concern just before the troubles. There was something admirable about the undisguised and unaffected distaste with which he regarded his guests and his ruthless disregard of their comfort and dignity. Some attempted to be patronising to him, some dictatorial, some ingratiating; all were treated with uniform contempt. He was well aware that for a very few months nothing that he did or left undone could affect his roaring prosperity; after that anything might happen.

Deadpan

A very Waughesque effect is the deadpan statement of bizarre or extreme facts.

Presently [the Italian consul’s] luggage arrived, prominent in its midst a dripping packing case containing bottled beer on ice, and a caged leopard.

Charles G. had had the fortune to witness a fight between two of the European police officers. As a result he had lately been expelled on a charge of espionage. His parting act was to buy a slave and give her to Mati Hari as a tip.

We secured [a cook] who looked, and as it turned out was, all that a cook should be. A fat, flabby Abyssinian with reproachful eyes. His chief claim to interest was that his former master, a German, had been murdered and dismembered in the Issa country. (p.125)

The chauffeur seemed to be suitable until we gave him a fortnight’s wages in advance to buy a blanket. Instead he bought cartridges and tedj, shot up the bazaar quarter and was put in chains. (p.125)

[The soldiers] were ragged and dilapidated, some armed with spears but most of them with antiquated guns. ‘ I am sorry to disturb you,’ said James [our servant] politely, ‘ but these people wished to shoot us.’ (p.129)

Waugh doesn’t approve of a slave being given as a tip any more than he approves of a German being murdered and dismembered. His records a world brimful of violent absurdities. It is the harshness of some of these absurdities which gives his books their bite, and also helps to explain the depth of his Roman Catholic faith. Only faith in a benevolent God could stay him against the panorama of violence, futility and fiasco he saw all around him. He reports it deadpan for its comic effect. But sometimes his despair peeks through.

Before the war

Although there were armed clashes in late 1934, and Mussolini made a steady stream of blustering warnings throughout the spring and summer of 1935, in reality Italy was happy to bide its time till the right time and place to commence hostilities.

With the result that ship after shipload of correspondents arrived from all over Europe, America, Japan and beyond, booking up all the rooms at every hotel and, like Waugh, spilling over into neighbouring boarding houses, engaging in feverish rounds of press conferences, meetings with diplomats, interviewing every official they could find, creating an over-excited community of feverish scribblers liable to over-react to every new rumour no matter how far fetched, and yet – long weeks went by and nothing happened.

Waugh is tempted to go on excursions to locations said to be vital in the strategic planning of the attackers, and so find himself going with an old friend (Waugh’s world is full of old friends from public school or Oxford or London’s narrow literary clique) back to Harar, the town he first visited in 1930, which is east of Addis. They had an interesting time, he gives an evocative description of how the place had changed in just 5 years since he was previously there. They press on further east to the town of Jijiga on the border with Somalia (p.70) and here Waugh and Balfour stumble on the story of a French aristocrat, Count Maurice de Roquefeuil du Bousquet, who runs a mining concession in the district and who has just been arrested, along with his wife, for spying for the Italians. He had been taking photographs of Ethiopian defences and sending the rolls of film by secret courier to the Italian Consulate at Harar (p.74). Balfour and Waugh take photographs of all the relevant locations, of the count himself in prison and send off excited despatches to their papers back in Blighty.

Slowly, however, their excitement at having secured a scoop fades and by the time they arrive back at Addis they realise that, by being absent for those few days, they have missed one of the great scoops of the period, which was that the emperor had granted to an American consortium, led by one Mr Rickett, the mineral concession for the entire north of Ethiopia, precisely the territory an invading Italian army would have to cross, in a typically canny attempt to invoke international law and get the international community on his side (p.80). In fact it failed, as a diplomatic ploy, because the US government refused to ratify the concession and by doing so, in effect, gave the green light to Italy to invade.

Comic characters

In Waugh’s hands every person he meets becomes a comic character: Mr Kakophilos the gloomy Greek owner of the Hotel Splendide; Herr and Frau Heft, owners of the Deutsches Haus boarding house, also home to two fierce geese and a pig; the Radical journalist, a high-minded reporter for, presumably, the Manchester Guardian; Mme Idot and Mme Moriatis, French owners of the only two places of entertainment in town and bitter enemies; Dr Lorenzo Taesas, the beady-eyed Tigrayan head of the Press Bureau; the accident-prone American newsreel cameraman, Mr Prospero; the avaricious Greek owner of the only hotel in Harar, Mr Caraselloss; the bibulous chief of police in Harar; a spy Waugh hires, an imposing old Afghan named Wazir Ali Beg who roams the country sending Waugh ever-more ludicrous reports (p.68); the spy his friend Patrick Balfour hires, who they all nickname Mata Hari (p.69); Gabri, Patrick’s Abyssinian servant who speaks eccentric French; the wily customs officer of Jijiga, Kebreth Astatkie; the Swiss chef hired by the emperor who, when he doesn’t get paid for a few months, quit in high dudgeon and the emperor tried to persuade to return by arresting his entire kitchen staff (p.93).

These aren’t people so much as a cast, the cast of a wonderful comic extravaganza. At several points Waugh just lists the weird and wonderful types who have washed up in Addis, for their oddity value.

There was a simian Soudanese, who travelled under a Brazilian passport and worked for an Egyptian paper; there was a monocled Latvian colonel, who was said at an earlier stage of his life to have worked as ringmaster in a German circus; there was a German who travelled under the name of Haroun al Raschid, a title, he said, which had been conferred on him during the Dardanelles campaign by the late Sultan of Turkey; his head was completely hairless; his wife shaved it for him, emphasising the frequent slips of her razor with tufts of cotton-wool. There was a venerable American, clothed always in dingy black, who seemed to have strayed from the pulpit of a religious conventicle; he wrote imaginative despatches of great length and flamboyancy. There was an Austrian, in Alpine costume, with crimped flaxen hair, the group leader, one would have thought, of some Central-European Youth Movement; a pair of rubicund young colonials, who came out on chance and were doing brisk business with numberless competing organisations; two indistinguishable Japanese, who beamed at the world through hornrimmed spectacles and played interminable, highly dexterous games of ping-pong in Mme. Idot’s bar. (p.81)

And:

Two humane English colonels excited feverish speculation for a few days until it was discovered that they were merely emissaries of a World League for the Abolition of Fascism. There was a negro from South Africa who claimed to be a Tigrean, and represented another World League for the abolition, I think, of the white races, and a Greek who claimed to be a Bourbon prince and represented some unspecified and unrealised ambitions of his own. There was an American who claimed to be a French Viscount and represented a league, founded in Monte Carlo, for the provision of an Ethiopian Disperata squadron, for the bombardment of Assab. There was a completely unambiguous British adventurer, who claimed to have been one of Al Capone’s bodyguard and wanted a job; and an ex-officer of the R.A.F. who started to live in some style with a pair of horses, a bull terrier and a cavalry moustache—he wanted a job to.

In my review of Remote People I remarked that these collections of eccentrics and oddballs reminded me of the Tintin books from the 1930s and 40s, a seemingly endless supply of colourfully cosmopolitan eccentrics.

Dodgy dossier

I was fascinated to learn that the Italians compiled a dossier of grievances against Ethiopia which they presented to the League of Nations in Geneva as justification for their invasion. It brought together all the evidence they could muster from the legalistic to the cultural.

Thus they claimed the emperor had signed a contract giving an Italian firm the job of building a railway from Addis to the coast but in the event gave the work to a French company. They complained that Ethiopia had breached various clauses of the 1928 Treaty of Friendship between the two states. The new arterial road, which was specifically provided in the 1928 agreement, joining Dessye with Assab was abandoned and, instead, Selassie concentrated in opening communications with the British territories in Kenya and Somaliland. The construction of a wireless station at Addis Ababa was undertaken by an Italian company, heavily subsidised by the Italian government, but on completion was handed over to the management of a Swede and a Frenchman. They documented slights, insults, abuse and even the arrest of Italian citizens.

The Italians accused Ethiopia of what we would nowadays call ‘human rights abuses’, namely the fact that slavery and slave-raiding were universal (and this isn’t a bootless accusation; Waugh meets many officials or rich Ethiopians who are accompanied by one or more slaves). The Italians claim that justice, when executed at all, was accompanied by torture and mutilation; the central government was precarious and only rendered effective by repeated resort to armed force; disease was rampant, and so on.

How similar to the ‘dodgy dossier’ assembled by our own dear government and presented to the UN and the nation to justify our attack on Iraq back in 2003.

The state of Ethiopian prisons was confirmed by Waugh who made a horrified visit to one, discovering prisoners manacled to the walls of tiny hutches by chains which barely let them crawl a few yards into a courtyard to catch a little sun, no food or water provided, the prisoners surviving amid their own excrement. It was ‘the lowest pit of human misery’ he had ever seen (p.94)

The feverish press pack attend various ceremonies connected with the week-long festival of Maskar, some officiated over by the emperor, understanding little or nothing of what was going on.

Waugh becomes so bored he buys a baboon who, however, turns out to be ‘petulant and humourless’, and ‘added very little to the interest of these dull days’ (p.101)

The war

War finally broke out – that’s to say Italy invaded northern Ethiopia without any formal declaration of war – on 3 October 1935. It immediately resulted in a ramping up of baseless rumours and shameless speculation. The Italian forces consisted entirely of natives; a Red Cross hospital full of women and children had been obliterated by Italian bombing; the Italians were deserting in droves. All turned out to be utterly false.

The absurdity intensifies. The press pack in Addis is remarkably isolated from the front and the outside world. Therefore they routinely find themselves discovering by telegraph or even in newspapers, events which are happening in the war they’re meant to be covering. Waugh discovers a perverse law is at work: the London editors imagine stereotyped scenes, for example riots at the Addis railway station as desperate refugees fight their way onto the last train out of town weeks before anything like that happens; so that when there finally is something approximating to fights to get onto what everyone believes (erroneously, as it turns out) will be the last train, the newspaper editors aren’t interested: it’s old news even though it’s only just happened. Again and again Waugh has the dizzy experience of seeing the media-manufactured fictions precede the facts, creating ‘an inverted time lag between the event and its publication’ (p.113).

Eventually the press pack begin to discuss leaving. The most experienced foreign correspondent does in fact depart. Waugh embarks on another visit to Harar where there is a serious interlude when he talks to venerable Muslim elders of the town, who tell him, at some risk to themselves, how saddened they are by the attrition of the Muslim culture and customs of the place by the swamping Abyssinian Christians with their drunkenness, prostitution and corruption. It is to Waugh’s credit that he listens and retails their concerns with sympathy.

Back in Addis he discovers the press have been granted permission to head north to the town of Dessye, nowadays called Dessie. He decides to travel there with the Radical journalist and they buy a knackered lorry off a shifty looking Syrian. In the event the outing is a total farce. At the first little town on the way they are pulled over and given the third degree by the officious chief of police who their servant, ‘James’ buys off with a half pint of whiskey. But a few hours drive further along the road, at Debra Birhan, the shabby mayor and chief of police conspire to forbid their further progress. When they return from the chief’s shabby office they find the locals have built barricades of stone in front and behind their lorry. They are obliged to spend the night camping there, and in the morning the chief removes the barricade behind them and obliges them to trundle back to Addis. Oh well.

Barely have they got back than the Press Office gives the entire press corps permission to travel to Dessie, so now our heroes set out on the same road but this time accompanied by many other cars and lorries packed with journalists and are not hindered or stopped.

In other words, Waugh at no time gets anywhere near a front, sees no fighting, doesn’t even hear the roar of distant artillery, never sees an enemy airplane. The text is entirely about the fatuity of the press corps and the obstructiveness of the Ethiopian authorities.

The emperor arrives at Dessye which would thenceforward be his headquarters for the war, until, in the spring, he was forced to flee the Italian advance, driving fast back to Addis, then catching the train to the coast and then by ship into exile.

By now it was December and the European press and American film companies were bored of the lack of action, coverage, footage, photos and stories. One by one the journalists find themselves being withdrawn. Everyone expects the war to drag on and end with some kind of diplomatic fudge which would revert to the status quo ante, Italy with a bit more influence, maybe Britain and France intervening under cover of a League of Nations mandate, foreign companies seeking concessions, then demanding justice if there was any murder or harassment. Same old.

Waugh’s newspaper terminates his contract. Having come this far he toys with staying on as a freelancers but, like everyone else, expects nothing will happen. He blags a seat in a Red Cross car heading back for the capital.

The German driver — an adventurous young airman who had come to look for good fortune after serving in the Paraguayan war — kept a rifle across the wheel and inflicted slight wounds on the passing farmers at point-blank range. (p.142)

Bereft of its emperor, the capital is dead. The bars are empty. The thronging press pack has gone, He packs his things and gets the train to Djibouti where he discovers a little community of journalists who never even bothered to go to the capital, but were making a perfectly happy living reporting events which they entirely invented. Ship back up through the canal, to Palestine where he fulfils an ambition to see Christmas in Bethlehem. And so by easy stages back to dear old Blighty.

Collapse

The final chapter reports events as a historian, from England. The Italian advance through February and March 1936, the sudden complete collapse of Ethiopian forces and the flight of the emperor to Djibouti and into exile. It had to compete with the German occupation of the Rhine and the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War.

But he follows events, aware as few others how much being printed in the papers was nonsense, eventually overcome by curiosity he applies for permission to return to Abyssinia and, one year after his initial setting off, once again crosses France, then the Mediterranean, then down the Red Sea and so to Djibouti. It is packed with Italians and native hawkers.

Waugh is amused at the sight of the Italian soldiers having to travel from Djibouti, which was in French Somaliland, as far as the border with Ethiopia proper, in mufti. At the border they were allowed to change back into the garish uniforms. Absurdity.

Immediately things are counter-intuitive. He had read that his favourite town of Harar had been bombed and devastated. His friend Patrick Balfour wrote an eloquent obsequy for it in a newspaper. Except it hadn’t. If anything it was cleaner. the pavements had been fixed. The town was packed with Italians. The Hararis looked happy as sandmen to replace the oppressive rule of the Abyssinians with the more permissive – and lucrative – rule of the bon vivant Italians.

He discovers currency chaos with seven different currencies in circulation. There have been attacks on the train by ‘bandits’ prompting ‘pacification’ measures by the Italians in the surrounding villages. When the emperor left there was wholescale looting in Addis Ababa. Waugh discovers no building was untouched, curtains ripped down, electric light fittings torn out.

Waugh meets the Italian general running the new imperial administration, the Viceroy, Field Marshall Graziani. He is frank and forthright, happy to give Waugh whatever help he needs. Slowly it is revealed how extensively Addis was not only looted but burned down. The main hotel looted, the boarding house where Waugh stayed, attacked and burned. Accommodation is difficult. Everywhere is overflowing with the new Italian soldiers and administrators. The streams of lazy Abyssinians riding mules in their white cloaks have disappeared. Crops have not been sown. Food prices are astronomical. There will be famine.

Addis feels besieged. Groups of armed men, sometimes in their hundreds, penetrate the defences on raids. In the four days he spends there, Waugh hear of a substantial attack on the airdrome, and numerous other incursions. Waugh’s trademark deadpan humour:

I had an appointment that afternoon to visit Ras Hailu ; drove out to his house beyond the American hospital and was politely informed that his Highness was unable to see me ; he had gone out to a battle. (p.157)

The Europeans fear for the day a massed attack will be met by an insurrection of blacks within the city and they’ll all be murdered in their sleep. Uneasy sleeps the colonist.

Waugh gives his view frankly and openly, as he did at the start about the process of Western colonialism, as he did in the previous book about the cause of the white settlers in Kenya. For him the central fact is nobody expected the Abyssinian nation to collapse to quickly and completely. Instead of Abyssinians fighting against the Italians and their former subject peoples (which he and other intelligent commentators expected) the Abyssinians themselves had disintegrated into scores of warlords and warrior bandits, living off the peasantry and fighting each other. Complete anarchy, in other words.

As always, the colonists hold the cities and towns, the railway and most of the roads, during the day at least. but the vast expanse of the country is the home of warring bandits as per Afghanistan in our time, as per Vietnam, as per so many colonially occupied countries. Waugh thinks the Italians are tougher than opinion credits them and they’ll make a go of their new empire, but it will be hard.

The road

The book closes with a short chapter describing progress on the new modern motorway the Italians are constructing to run the length of their new colony, praising the engineers and navvies who have built a wide, modern trunk road from the north coast through the heart of the country to Addis and which is still being constructed south towards Somalia and Mogadishu as he writes.

Waugh is positively propagandistic about the new Italian empire. He sees white men working very hard to build the road, something incomprehensible to the Abyssinians who watch them.

The Italian occupation of Ethiopia is the expansion of a race. It began with fighting, but it is not a military movement, like the French occupation of Morocco. It began with the annexation of potential sources of wealth, but it is not a capitalistic movement like the British occupation of the South African goldfields. It is being attended by the spread of order and decency, education and medicine, in a disgraceful place, but it is not primarily a humane movement, like the British occupation of Uganda. It can be compared best in recent history to the great western drive of the American peoples, the dispossession of the Indian tribes and the establishment in a barren land of new pastures and cities.

Very surprising that someone with such a shrewd, pitilessly realistic eye, and a temperament disposed to ennui and sometimes depression, should write such rose-tinted hogwash.

He goes on a whistlestop tour of the occupied north of the country: Asmara, Axum, Adowa and many more now made accessible in hours via the modern autostrada which only a year before had been inaccessibly remote hypothetical places marked on the journalists’ maps, which would have taken weeks of driving then mule trekking to reach. Quite obviously, it is this incredible turnaround in wretched, backward, squalid Ethiopia’s landscape which prompted his raptures about the Italian occupation.

Abandoning everything which makes him such good company, such an alert, malicious, eagle-eyed observer, such a cynic, with such an acute eye for human foibles and follies, right at the very end Waugh delivers a ridiculous hymn of praise to Italian Fascism. I quote it in full a) to give the full mounting rhythm of the thing but b) because it reviews and summarises some of the places he visited and experiences he described and c) it’s an important passage:

They [the engineers and navvies] are at work there at this moment, as I write. They will be at work there when these words appear, and in a few months the great metalled highway will run uninterrupted along the way where the Radical and I so painfully travelled a year before, past the hot springs where our servants mistook the bubbles for rising fish, past the camping ground where Dedjasmach Matafara entertained us to breakfast, up the immense escarpment, past Debra Birhan, where the one-eyed chief held us prisoner, to Addis, where a new city will be in growth — a real ‘New Flower’ — to take the place of the shoddy ruins of Menelik and Tafari. And from Dessye new roads will be radiating to all points of the compass, and along the roads will pass the eagles of ancient Rome, as they came to our savage ancestors in France and Britain and Germany, bringing some rubbish and some mischief; a good deal of vulgar talk and some sharp misfortunes for individual opponents; but above and beyond and entirely predominating, the inestimable gifts of fine workmanship and clear judgement — the two determining qualities of the human spirit, by which alone, under God, man grows and flourishes.

What utter horseshit. I wonder what Evelyn’s friends, let alone his enemies, made of this misplaced paean seven short years later when many of them were fighting against and being killed by these same charming Fascists in the Italian campaign of the Second World War.

Pondering Waugh’s imperialist rhetoric

This florid passage is, on the face of it, a stunning contrast with the entirely progressive, left-wing view of colonialism which he expressed in chapter one of the book. Then again, revisiting that opening rhetoric may be a clue to its meaning or its origin. Waugh lived in a world where there were no aid agencies (with the notable exception of the International Red Cross which, however, restricted itself to treating victims of war). There were none of the long-established mechanisms of international aid, foreign loans, ministries of overseas aid, ministries of international development, nor the hundreds and hundreds of charities which offer medical help, teaching, water aid, famine relief, mine clearing, humanitarian assistance and all the other mechanisms for assisting developing countries which I have grown up with and take entirely for granted. (Although, thinking about it, I realise that there were quite a number of missionary agencies which had been operating since at least the mid-nineteenth century, and supported schools and, to a lesser extent, hospitals.)

Waugh had visited the country twice, travelled round it more extensively than most Westerners. He had learned that it was a ramshackle ’empire’ built on the conquest and suppression of neighbouring peoples and tribes. He had seen that, even at the centre, it was characterised by backward obscurantism, inefficiency, endless delay and inaction. No roads worth the name, hardly any hospitals, rarely any schools, and a population mostly illiterate living in poverty in the towns and absolute destitution in the countryside, where famine often brought starvation, many parts of which were prey to wandering bands of murdering bandits.

It is worth, therefore, mentally trying on Waugh’s position, I mean experimenting with the view he is clearly expressing, that Italian colonisation genuinely might offer the best way forward for the people of Abyssinia. If you genuinely cared for the population, if you wanted to see roads built, and the economy developed, and modern commerce, and schools and hospitals built in regional centres and the population educated…then the building of the big new trunk road to run right across the country was a symbol of a new life for Ethiopia’s people.

This perspective goes some way to explain Waugh’s enthusiasm, this and maybe the decision to end the book on an upbeat, positive note. It still doesn’t justify the extravagance of his rhetoric, which seems ludicrous to us now. And, as with his support for the white settlers in Kenya which he expressed in Remote People, we have the immense advantage of hindsight, of knowing that his view was swept away by three or four cumulative forces: that Italian colonisation would be short-lived and ineffectual; that Mussolini’s government would be swept away by the Second World War; that the entire ideology of imperialism and colonisation would a) be swept away in the early 1960s and b) become associated with criminal exploitation.

I’m not defending his position, I’m just pointing out that Waugh knew none of this was going to happen and that, at the time of writing, while the colonisation process had barely even begun, he was genuinely inspired with hope that Italian hegemony would bring a new era of education and enlightenment to a country he had ample evidence for thinking backward and, in some areas (take his harrowing description of Addis Ababa’s prison) positively barbaric.

It is also worth remembering that we, in our fabulously enlightened modern era, despite knowing vastly more about international development than Waugh, have been prone to the same kind of triumphalist rhetoric. Witness the gushingly positive commentary that surrounded the Western invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 and of Iraq in 2003, when Western nations invaded Third World countries and overthrew their dictatorial regimes, promising a new dawn of peace and prosperity, the rule of law, hospitals, schools and all the rest of it – only to find themselves bogged down in years of violent conflict with unreconciled resistance fighters.

The opening chapter of the book makes it clear that Waugh was very aware that high-minded European involvement in a developing country all-too-often masked self-serving commercial and strategic considerations. This makes it all the odder that he gave way to such a booming passage of high-minded rhetoric at the end of the narrative.

Well, a Western country hadn’t invaded a developing country in quite that way, with quite the modern facilities Italy brought to Ethiopia in the 1930s, for quite a while, when Waugh wrote. Presumably he thought this time it’ll be different.

And he had actually seen with his own eyes the impressive new trunk road being built across the country and seen the contrast between the dynamic Italian navvies and the shiftless, poverty stricken native peasants who looked on in amazement. So he has the excuse that he was writing about what he had actually seen at first hand and this included his genuine excitement that genuine change was at hand for the country’s people.

Whereas 70 years later, the armchair commentators, politicians and populations of Western countries who greeted America’s invasion of first Afghanistan and then Iraq had no excuses. Seventy years of brutal, disillusioning global history had intervened and they should have known better. But hope springs eternal in the human breast and the supporters of those invasions, just like Waugh supporting the Italian invasion, thought this time it’ll be different.

But it’s never different. It’s always the same.

Some Ethiopian words

dedjasmatch = civic leader or commander in the field
khat = wild plant whose leaves, when chewed, release a stimulant drug which produces mild euphoria and makes people feel more alert and talkative
tedj/tej = a honey wine, like mead, that has an alcohol content generally ranging from 7 to 11%
tukal/tukul = a traditional thatched roof hut

Credit

Waugh in Abyssinia by Evelyn Waugh was published by Longmans in 1936. All references are to the 1985 Penguin paperback edition.

Waugh in Abyssinia online

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by Simon on December 1, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Slavery, Travel writing

Tagged 1935, Abyssinia, Addis Ababa, Africa, Amhara, Amharic, Armenian, Assab, autostrada, Battle of Adowa, colonialism, comedy, Count Maurice de Roquefeuil du Bousquet, Debra Birhan, Dedjasmach Matafara, dedjasmatch, Dessie, Dessye, Deutsches Haus, Djibouti, dodgy dossier, Dr Lorenzo Taesas, Ethiopia, Ethiopian Empire, Evelyn Waugh, Evening Standard, Field Marshall Graziani, Frau Heft, George Bernard Shaw, Ghiz, Giovanezza, Gojjam, Haile Selassie, Harar, history, imperialism, invasion, Iraq, Islamic culture, Italian Empire, Italian Fascism, Italy, Jijiga, journalism, Kebreth Astatkie, Kenya, khat, Lobenguela, Mata Hari, Menelik II, Mme Idot, Mme Moriatis, Mr Caraselloss, Mr Kakophilos Herr Heft, Mr Prospero, Mussolini, Patrick Balfour, Ras Hailu, Ras Tafari, Red Cross, Red Sea, Remote People, reportage, Satire, Second World War, Shoa, Slavery, Somalia, Somaliland, Spanish Civil War, Sultan of Sokoto, Sultan of Zanzibar, Tafari, tedj, tej, Tigre, Tigrean, Treaty of Friendship, tukal, tukul, war, Waugh in Abyssinia, Wazir Ali Beg

Posted by Simon on December 1, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/12/01/waugh-in-abyssinia-evelyn-waugh/

Remote People by Evelyn Waugh (1931)

How wrong I was, as it turned out, in all my preconceived notions about this journey.
(Remote People, page 97)

Waugh is a wonderful writer, clear and smooth – admittedly with occasional old-fashioned locutions and sometimes antiquated word order which makes you realise he was closer to the Victorians than to us – but he is nonetheless a deep pleasure to read because of his calm, clear, quietly cynical, drily humorous attitude. For his sophistication and style. For his combination of super-civilised manners and bright heartlessness. For his permanent alertness to the absurdity of life.

We sat in the open under an orange-tree and drank chianti and gossiped about the coronation, while many hundreds of small red ants overran the table and fell onto our heads from above. (p.72)

We saw a bridge being built under the supervision, apparently, of a single small boy in gumboots. (p.153)

[Jinja golf course] is, I believe, the only course in the world which posts a special rule that the player may remove his ball by hand from hippopotamus footprints. (p.156)

Temporary correspondent

Waugh establishes his a) posh, country house party persona and b) all-important membership of the network of posh public schoolboys who ran everything in 1930s England, by telling us that he was travelling by train back to London from a splendid country house in Wales when he bumped into an old chum who worked for The Times and, by the time the train journey had ended, his chum had promised him a job as a temporary correspondent to cover the upcoming coronation of the new emperor of Ethiopia, scheduled for November 1930.

So that’s why the reader opens the book to discover Waugh aboard a steamship, the Azay le Rideau, which has sailed from Marseilles across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and is now docking at Djibouti on the coast of French Somalia. The ship is packed with dignitaries, royal guests, diplomats, journalists and cameramen, plus a unit from the Foreign Legion down in 4th class, and even military bands, all heading for the coronation.

There is ample Carry On comedy about the behaviour of guests on the ship, fuss about porters and baggage, and endless complications about who’s going to get priority places on the very occasional train service which runs from Djibouti up to the capital of Ethiopia, Addis Ababa.

Haile Selassie

A few words about Haile Selassie. He didn’t inherit the ancient throne of Ethiopia in a straightforward manner, by being the eldest son of the previous emperor, it was much more complicated than that. His most notable forebear was the emperor Menelik II (ruled 1889 to 1913) who extended and consolidated Ethiopia’s imperial rule over its neighbouring territories and defeated the invading Italian forces at the Battle of Adowa in 1896. Menelik left no immediate male heir and was succeeded on his death in 1913 by young Lij Iyasu (Lej Yasu, in Waugh’s spelling), who was the son of Menelik’s eldest daughter.

However, Lij Iyasu quickly alienated the powerful Ethiopian aristocracy with his erratic behaviour and the last straw came when he abandoned the millenium-old Ethiopian Christianity for Islam. He was dethroned and replaced by his aunt, his mother’s half-sister, Zewditu (or Zauditu as Waugh spells it). (Waugh also mentions that many of Lij’s Muslim followers were massacred at the town of Harar, p.18.)

Zewditu is an interesting figure in her own right, the first female ruler of Ethiopia in its history, she ruled as empress till her death in 1930. However, long before that, she had appointed young Ras Tafari Makonnen her heir.

Ras is a traditional title in Ethiopia. It translates somewhere between ‘duke’ and ‘prince’, which explains why accounts of its history are full of people with ras in their names. Tafari is a personal name which means ‘one who is respected or feared’. Makonnen was his family name.

Tension arose between Empress Zewditu and Ras Tafari because she was a deeply conservative and devout Christian whereas the young Tafari thought Ethiopia needed to modernise. In 1928 conservative elements in the court tried to overthrow Tafari and have him exiled, but they were defeated by a majority of the more progressive aristocracy. Zewditu was forced to confer on him the title of Negus or king, confirming his position as regent and heir to the throne.

Renewing the feud, in 1930, Zewditu’s own husband Ras Gugsa Welle led a rebellion against Negus Tafari in Begemder, hoping to end the regency in spite of his wife’s repeated pleas and orders to desist. But Gugsa was defeated and killed in battle by the Ethiopian which Tafari had devoted the previous decade to modernising, at the Battle of Anchem in March 1930.

A few days later the empress died, whether as a result of long-term illness or from shock at the death of her husband remains a subject of speculation to this day. Either way the path was now clear for Ras Tafari to inherit the throne and he was officially recognised by his peers as Negusa Nagast which translates as ‘King of Kings’. It is this title which is usually translated into English as ‘Emperor’.

It took 6 months to arrange for the actual coronation to be organised. It took place on 2 November 1930. It was traditional that, upon his coronation, the emperor choose a regnal name and Tafari chose to retain the name given to him at his baptism, Selassie, and incorporate it into his full imperial name – Haile Selassie. In the ancient Ethiopian language of Ge’ez, Haile means ‘power of’ and ‘Selassie’ means Trinity – so Haile Selassie means ‘Power of the Trinity’.

So much for his names. They’re just one aspect of the way that, the more you study it, the more the history of Ethiopia and Selassie’s place in it, become complicated and flavoursome.

Waugh at the coronation

Ethiopia was, at the time, more or less Africa’s only independent country, untainted by colonial rule. Italy had tried to colonise it in the 1890s but the Italian army was massacred at the Battle of Adowa in 1896 and signed a peace treaty with Ethiopia recognising its borders and independence.

Once news of this grand imperial coronation became known, the European countries sent their own princes and dukes to attend the ceremony of a fellow royal. There were also ambassadors quietly jostling for position, and the Americans sent business representatives to try and do deals with the new ruler. Hence the presence of the Duke of Gloucester (King George V’s son), Marshal Louis Franchet d’Espèrey of France, Prince of Udine representing King Victor Emmanuel III of Italy and representatives of the United States, Egypt, Turkey, Sweden, Belgium and Japan.

This all explains the atmosphere of colourful and confused diplomatic parties and Ethiopian ceremonies which were held during the official week of celebrations leading up to the coronation and which Waugh reports with glee and satire.

He emphasises the surreal atmosphere of posh Westerners in top hats and monocles walking through streets full of white-robed locals riding mules and wearing bandoleers and antiquated rifles.

Every man in Abyssinia carries arms; that is to say, he wears a dagger and bandolier of cartridges around his waist and has a slave boy walking behind with a rifle.

The nearest thing he can compare the ‘galvanised and translated reality’ of Addis Ababa in coronation week to is Alice in Wonderland. In fact surreal details crop up throughout the narrative, making the reader gasp. I was particularly struck when, later in the story he goes for a stroll round the shabby town of Harar and discovers that a lion in a wooden cage is kept behind the courthouse (p.83).

The text continually teeters on the edge of fiction. I mean it is continually turning into a novel. Presumably most of what he reports actually happened but Waugh’s account dwells on characters and incidents which feel like they’re from a fiction. Thus (characteristically showing off his intimacy with the aristocratic Bright Young Things of his generation) he falls in with ‘old friend’ Irene Ravensdale, the fantastically posh Mary Irene Curzon, 2nd Baroness Ravensdale, Baroness Ravensdale of Kedleston, and they go on trips together to local attractions. They spend an afternoon scrambling through the forest of Jemjem ‘in hopeless pursuit of black-and-white monkeys’ (p.71).

He also becomes friendly with an American professor – Professor W. – who is depicted as a comic character because he is supposedly an expert on Ethiopian history and culture yet doesn’t speak the language and consistently misunderstands what is going on – particularly at the coronation service itself where he gives a running commentary on proceedings which turns out to be wrong in every detail.

Despite this Waugh decides to go on a mini expedition with the professor, to Debra Lebanos, a remote monastery which has for four centuries been at the heart of Ethiopia’s spiritual life. The chapter describing this little jaunt exemplifies many of Waugh’s strengths as a traveller, observer, writer and, dare one say it, thinker.

First of all there are the colourful characters: the Armenian taxi driver they hire to take them on the long, gruelling desert journey, with his no-nonsense attitude and catchphrase, repeated at every crisis: ‘Ça n’a pas d’importance.’ The professor, who’s brought along a crate of empty Vichy water bottles to fill with holy water from the sacred spring but which keep rolling underfoot or falling out the car every time they stop. Then, once they get to the ‘monastery’ there are extended descriptions of the priests who turn out to be a pretty shabby lot, though not as shabby as many of the ‘monks’ who are, in reality, the sick and the halt and the lame who came on pilgrimages and stayed on to populate the place.

One aspect of these blunt descriptions is Waugh’s lack of pretence. About two things he has sentimental blind spots – the Catholic faith and a shamelessly sentimental, William Rees-Mogg-style fantasy about an Old England of enlightened paternalistic squires. But about everything else he is pitilessly, inexorably accurate.

Thus he doesn’t hesitate to describe the sacred monastery as a filthy dump, full of shabby undisciplined ‘monks. Even when they deign to take him and the professor up to the sacred stream, their guide gives a good indication of their general level of piety by pausing the walk to shuffle off into the nearby rocks and have a crap.

The chapter makes a more general point about travelling, or about the kind of travelling Waugh is doing, to very out of the way places – which is he doesn’t hesitate to show that a lot of these ‘legendary’ places turn out to be nothing like they’re cracked up to be. It is refreshingly not the tourist brochure or movie version, but a pitiless gaze at the impoverished, scrappy reality. Same goes for the various coronation scenes and religious ceremonies he witnesses which are often chaotic and shabby.

Then there’s broad comedy, epitomised by the honey scene. Waugh and the professor have brought with them a hamper full of choice Western delicacies (jars of olives, tins of foie gras, crackers), but when the priests offer them food they can’t, of course, refuse.

At first the priests insist that they sacrifice a beast, either a sheep or a goat, despite our heroes’ protestations. It takes the Armenian driver to make them understand that the priests exist on a very scanty diet and so killing a goat for visitors is a big treat for them, the priests. It is typical sly satire that, even when he knows this, Professor W.’s high-minded Boston principles – he is a vegetarian – make him refuse the gift, to the priest’s obvious disappointment.

But what happens next is brilliant. The priests offer to put them up in the only spare room they have, which they describe as a great honour, so Waugh and the professor are horrified to discover it is a filthy shack full of lumber and junk and pullulating with fleas.

Worse is to follow for the priest then returns with some traditional food, namely some rounds of disgusting local soggy grey ‘bread’ and, worse still, a jar of local ‘honey’. This is not the honey you buy at Harrods; it is authentic Ethiopian honey collected the traditional way, scraped off the trees where wild bees have their nests. And so the jar of translucent gloop visibly contains bits of bark, dead insects and bird poo.

Our heroes are horrified but the priest hunkers down and then looks on expectantly, evidently waiting for his honoured visitors to tuck into the monks’ bounty. Stymied and refusing to touch the poisonous viands, our heroes are at a pass, until the professor overcomes his scruples and feigns an attack of severe stomach upset, holding his tummy, pretending to be faint, mimicking throwing up.

Suddenly all attentive, the priest goes to fetch some water, then makes sure they are comfortable for the night, condoling with the poor professor. As soon as he’s left the squalid little hut, our starving heroes tear open their hamper, pull out tins of grouse and bottles of beer and have a feast – being very careful to tidy every scrap of evidence back into the suitcase before the priest returns a few hours later (pages 63 to 64).

And the last point to be drawn from this chapter, is that on occasion Waugh rises to the level of really serious insight. Not allowed into the inner sanctum of the monastery to watch the priests perform their hidden rituals, Waugh has an epiphany. He realises the enormous contrast between the obscure, secret and hidden rites of the pagan East and the bright, open, public ceremonies of Western Christianity. He spends a page explaining how Roman Christianity performs its rituals in the open, in the light, for all to see and participate in and, the corollary of this, how its liturgies and theology give clear, hard-edged verbal definition to the hazy, murky intuitions, the holy terrors and ecstasies of the East.

Obviously whether this is precisely true is debatable, but it’s a big, thought-provoking idea and it arises naturally from the bed of pitiless observation and dry comedy which he creates for it. The unflinching gaze, the comedy and satire, are all based on deeper ideas, which you may or may not agree with, but which provide a serious, substantial foundation for the comedy.

Gentlemen of the press

Waugh is well aware he is masquerading as a foreign correspondent aware that he has no experience of such a role and nothing to qualify him except the self confidence inculcated at a jolly good public school and Oxford. He is alert to the ridiculousness of his own position but also to the farcical aspects of the job. For example, the assembled press cohort realise that the coronation itself is going to take place too late for their copy to make the first editions. Waugh gives a comic survey of the way the entire press corps responds by deciding to make up descriptions of the coronation and gives us choice excerpts of detailed descriptions of the exotic ceremony which were published in various British newspapers and which were entirely fictional. There are also grace notes, as it were, describing the unruly pushing and jostling of the cameramen, especially the one and only film crew in attendance (from America, of course).

The point for Waugh fans is this sets the tone for the even more farcical description of the press and foreign correspondents which he gives in the book’s sequel, Waugh in Abyssinia (1936) and which formed the basis for what is often described as the funniest satire ever written about the British press, the magnificent comic novel Scoop (1938).

Harar

The assignment to cover Selassie’s coronation forms the first part of the book but it is only the start of an odyssey in which Waugh takes the opportunity to visit a number of British colonies in East Africa. All in all, the trip was to take 6 months (p.84) and take in an impressive list of countries, namely Aden, Kenya, Zanzibar, the Belgian Congo and South Africa.

He explains how, once he had filed the requisite number of reports via telegraph back to The Times his contract came to an end and he was a free man. In London he had booked passage by boat from Djibouti to Zanzibar, but now finds he has ten days to kill and is uncertain what to do. Until, that is, the British Consul in Harar, Mr Plowman, kindly invites him to come and stay.

In fact the consul has to remain a few more days in Addis, so Waugh decides to make his own way overland to Harar, travelling by train and taxi. Harar was the first Ethiopian town visited by the famous Victorian explorer Sir Richard Burton and one of the first territories conquered by the warrior emperor Menelik II. It was the town where the caravans met between highlands and coastal lowlands; where Galla, Somali and Arab interbred to produce women of outstanding beauty.

Or so Waugh fantasised. In reality, he finds it to be a dingy medieval town. He is visited by the bishop of Harar and quizzes him about the French poet, the boy wonder Arthur Rimbaud, who lived here after he fled France and became a gun runner to the emperor Menelik II. He is disappointed to learn that the bishop remembers him only as a solemnly serious man, who took a native wife and had a gammy leg (p.79).

The owner of the hotel where he stays, the Leon d’Or, is ‘an Armenian of rare character’, Mr Bergebedgian, who has a wonderfully relaxed attitude to life. The Armenian takes him to all the shops in the town, where he incites himself in, has a coffee and chat with the owner, moves on, telling Waugh all the gossip of the town, shows him the town prison and courthouse (the one with a lion in a wooden cage behind it).

In an aside Waugh says he grew to really admire this man’s character: he thinks he is the most tolerant man he has ever met. Bergebedgian takes him to a hilarious local party at the governor’s house, and then on to a wedding party, which he only dares visit when fully armed and accompanied by two armed police.

Slavery

Last point about Ethiopia. When Haile Selassie ascended the throne, slavery was still legal and common in Ethiopia. An estimated 2 million of the population were slaves. As a modernising ruler the King of Kings moved quickly to abolish it but, inevitably, it lingered on in remote rural areas for decades.

First nightmare

This is the name Waugh gives a short 6-page section describing his unbearable tedium at missing a train connection and so being marooned in the dull dusty town of Dirre-Dowa and then, when he did manage to get a train to the coast, just missing the steamship to Zanzibar and so being marooned in Djibouti.

It is a dithyramb on the excruciating dullness of being stuck in a tropical town with nothing to do and no-one to visit. His attempts to alleviate the boredom are accurate and funny, including a painstaking attempt at reading the complete works of Alexander Pope which he has (for some reason) brought with him. When he gives up Pope, he is reduced to reading through a small French dictionary in alphabetical order. Then he sits staring out the window in a state of stupefaction. As he accurately notes, most travel books don’t honestly recount the amount of time that is spent in boredom and inanition and frustration and, occasional, depression.

This short chapter certainly rang a bell with me, reminding me of many moments of boredom and loneliness on my various foreign travels. It’s another aspect of Waugh’s unflinching truthfulness.

Aden

It is very surprising to discover the importance which politics assume the moment one begins to travel. (p.120)

His description of Aden as a shabby rundown dump is a masterpiece with many laugh-out-loud moments. He meets the usual cast of eccentrics, or people who, in his novelist’s hands, become eccentrics, such as the two enterprising young German engineers who are working their way round the world. He finds the bachelor world of chaps dining at their clubs very congenial. After all, he says, it’s the womenfolk who ruin colonies, insisting their menfolk stay at home in the evenings, indulging in ferocious snobbery and pooh-poohing the natives.

Waugh describes going to the open air cinema where, a few minutes into the black and white comedy he realises almost everyone around him has fallen fast asleep. He attends a scout meeting where the patient British scoutmaster hopelessly tries to teach Arab youths how to build a fire or the ten rules of scout law.

He attends a council of local Arab chiefs and goes into great detail about the social and political situation of Yemen and southern Arabia. It was barely ten years since the entire area was taken over by the British after the fall of the Ottoman Empire which had run it for centuries. There is a detailed analysis of the complicated rivalries among the tribes, exacerbated by Ottoman rule and now complicated by British attempts to bring peace between internecine feuds. The council is a jurga hosted by the Sultan of Lahej and attended by Sir Stewart Symes, Resident at Aden from 1928 to 1931. He gives detailed insight into the challenges of trying to manage such a fissiparous people.

The tendency of Arab communities is always towards the multiplication of political units.

Disintegration, tribalism, feuding, rivalry, enmity and war. Britain withdrew from South Yemen in 1967. Since September 2014 (seven years and 2 months) Yemen has been torn apart by a brutal civil war in which about 380,000 people have died, including some 85,000 children who have died of starvation. Still. Independent of the ghastly British.

Zanzibar

Zanzibar turns out to be an ordeal. Sweltering oppressive heat and the subterranean prevalence of black magic. December is the worst time of year to visit. He spends all day sweating, only achieving peace a few times a day for a few minutes under a cold shower.

The general point he makes about Zanzibar is that it was taken over by the British with the express aim of abolishing the long-standing East African slave trade run by Arabs, which had increased in volume after the Sultan of Oman relocated his court to Zanzibar in 1840.

Now, in 1930, Waugh sees all around him evidence of the decay of Arab rule and ownership and the steady buying up of everything by merchants and businessmen from India. Waugh overtly likes the old aristocratic Arab culture and deprecates the ascension of what he sees as the ‘mean and dirty’, lower middle class merchant culture of the Indians (p.128) (but then he dislikes the sharp-elbowed middle classes of every race).

Kenya

He has an unpleasant experience with two officious British passport control officials at Mombasa on arriving at the Kenya coast, but once he gets to Nairobi he starts to have a wonderful time. It is Race Week and he has letters of introduction to top chaps, such as the Governor’s aide-de-camp, and spots various chaps and chapesses he knows from school and London (the benefits of being part of that network of public schoolboys and their sisters, wives and girlfriends), and so is swept away in a whirl of race meetings, parties, gambling, cocktails and nightclubs. It is London’s Bright Young Things nightclub society recreated on the equator.

This chapter contains a long serious section about the race issue in Kenya, about race and imperialism and the problems of the white settlers. It is fascinating to read an account from the period, as he grapples with what, to him, are recent developments, such as the government White Paper on the future of Kenya published in 1923.

Basically, Waugh comes out strongly in favour of the colonial settlers. He thinks they acquired the land legitimately, by buying it at fair auction. He thinks most of the land was waste and uncultivated before white farmers invested their life savings to buy it, then reinvested their profits to develop it. He accepts at face value the idea that the whites have a special ‘love’ for the country and its people.

He brings in the broader argument that all of human history has been a record of mass migrations and so the white settlement of the best parts of Africa is just another form of migration and time will tell whether it works out or not.

And finally, he makes the case that many of the white settlers represent a model of the traditional English squirearchy which has died out in the motherland, that they represent something fine and noble, with a patriarchal concern for the natives who they are slowly lifting out of savagery and into civilisation.

More than that, he thinks the way the mindset of the white settlers is so at odds with the socialising ideology of the modern they live in that they have a sort of special connection with the figure of The Writer, who is also at odds with his time.

Hmm. He’s wrong and the settlers were wrong. They might have had legal right on their side, but it was a system of law imposed by the conquering empire, a system which, notoriously, took no account of the African natives.

Waugh’s account is valuable and interesting because it isn’t an out-and-out racist, white supremacist argument, it’s much more mixed and nuanced than that. He happily criticises the whites, saying Anglo-Saxons are peculiarly prone to paranoid fears of other races. He says the appropriation of Masai land was a great injustice. He dislikes incidents of overt anti-black racism when he sees them. But, at the same time, his depiction of the white settlers as country-loving squirearchy is laughably sentimental and rose-tinted.

His account is valuable because it takes you into the complex dynamic of the situation circa 1930. There are:

the hard-working white settlers and farmers
the white professionals living in Nairobi and the towns who have made a killing out of property speculation
the distant government and civil service in Whitehall who all the settlers think don’t understand them and are gagging to sell them out
the colonial government on the ground in Nairobi which tries to mediate between London and the settlers, while also taking into account the interests of the natives
the native Africans who remain almost completely invisible and silent in Waugh’s account
much more visible and vocal are the Indians, successful businessmen who outnumber the whites, are often richer and more successful than them, but are infuriated at the way they are excluded from all aspects of white colonial life by a solid colour bar

In this account it is the Indians who are subject to pronounced racist attitudes. Waugh gives a tendentious account of three Indians he has a conversation with in Mombassa who get very heated. They are angry that they have no rights in Kenya, no legal or political rights and are discriminated against. Then they get angry about Indian independence. Waugh clearly dislikes them.

But they’re in the right. And he acknowledges the fact when he spends half a page dwelling on the hysteria which perfectly ordinary Anglo-Saxon people are driven into when abroad, when part of this absurd empire and their white privilege is threatened. He finds it incredible that the merest speculation that the governor might amend the law to allow Indians a vote in the Kenyan government has hot-headed whites muttering in their clubs about kidnapping the Governor and staging an anti-London protest similar to the Boston Tea Party.

He concludes the 4 or 5 pages he devotes to the subject by saying the entire colonial thing is an experiment. It’s perfectly possible that in the next 25 years the whole thing will be swept away. And, of course, eerily enough, that is just what happened. The entire ants nest of squabbling interest groups was swept away in the great tide of African independence which reached Kenya just 30 years later in 1963, to be replaced by an entirely new dynamic of tribally based political parties and much more severe problems.

Race and class

It comes as no surprise that a public schoolboy travelling the British Empire in 1930 occasionally betrays a condescending and patronising tone towards the ‘natives’. The two obvious things to go on to say are:

1. That he regularly expresses more or less the same condescending criticism towards Europeans, royalty, the English middle classes, colonists and so on, in fact about the entire enterprise of Empire which, like so many of his generation, he finds endlessly ridiculous. When he has dinner with a Quaker doctor and his wife there was ‘no nonsense about stiff shirts and mess jackets’; they eat dinner outside in their pyjamas.

2. For every negative comment about this or that group or tribe, there are plenty of positive remarks about other groups or nations or races or tribes.

For example, he goes out of his way to remark that the two most impressive and congenial people he met in his entire 6-month trip were Armenians and gives extended descriptions of their characters.

When I came to consider the question I was surprised to realise that the two most accomplished men I met during this six months I was abroad, the chauffeur who took us to Debra Labanos and Mr Bergebedgian, should both have been Armenians. A race of rare competence and the most delicate sensibility. (p.84)

No white supremacy there. He is full of admiration for the beauty of the women of Harar. And what prompted me to write this little section was a remark he makes à propos of his time in Zanzibar.

The Arabs are by nature a hospitable and generous race… (p.128)

He very much enjoys the company of a Turk he met on the boat to Zanzibar, enjoys discussing history and hearing history from an intelligent man born and bred entirely from the Mohammedan point of view (p.124).

The dividing line for Waugh isn’t race, as such: it is the line between civilisation and barbarism. Black men who can read and write, are educated, or maybe neither but still have manners and decorum are, for him, civilised. The Arabs demonstrate tremendous courtesy and hospitality. His two favourites among the hundreds of people he met were Armenians for their tolerance and capability. So it’s not to do with race, it’s to do with culture and civilisation.

On the other side of the line are what he calls the savages, the uneducated, illiterate, filthy and threatening natives, the ‘savages with filed teeth’ with long hair glued together by rancid butter dressed in rags. And then the homicidal behaviour of natives remote from all townships, who murder strangers on sight, sometimes eating them. For Waugh it’s not about skin colour as such, but behaviour and values, and these can be shared by anyone regardless of skin colour or ethnicity.

There is a third category which is the pushy, angry, Indian merchants and the occasional Jewish entrepreneur he encounters, and who he takes an instinctive dislike to. But again this isn’t necessarily about race. He just dislikes money-minded merchants of any culture: he is reliably contemptuous of British businessmen, especially lower-middle-class shopkeepers, and deprecates the commercially minded Yanks who hang round the emperor’s coronation. It’s not racism, it’s snobbery.

Alert and malicious

One contemporary described the young Waugh as having the appearance of ‘an alert and malicious faun’. Exactly. He is always alert. He notices (or invents) details which give his descriptions and accounts a tremendous specificity.

But this alertness of observation only ‘exists’ because of the way it is embodied within the text by the preciseness of his vocabulary and the timing of his phrasing, which themselves enact the aloof, scrupulous, alertness of attitude.

After a profoundly indigestible dinner, Mr Bergebedgian joined us – the unsmiling clerk and myself – in a glass of a disturbing liqueur labelled ‘Koniak’. (p.80)

I’m not claiming Shakespearian mastery of the language for Waugh, but pointing out the accuracy of observation and description. The way he casually mentions that the dinner was ‘profoundly indigestible’ is funny, continuing a theme about the general poverty and dirtiness of most of the places he stayed in – the hotel kept by the affable Armenian Mr Bergebedgian is described in the only travel book of the region as one to be avoided at all costs.

But it’s the placement of the adjective ‘disturbing’ which made me burst out laughing. The unexpectedness but preciseness of the word.

It is also part of the stylised vocabulary of the public school Bright Young Things. It is part of the pose they are trained in to underplay disasters and setbacks. ‘Oh I say, how unfortunate / how regrettable / how simply ghastly’ they say as their plane falls out of the sky, canoe goes over the falls, or the roast beef is a trifle overdone.

‘Disturbing’ is typical of that public school understatement: why say something as crudely explicit as ‘disgusting’ or ‘unpalatable’ when you can achieve humour and mastery of the situation with English understatement? So this one word raises a host of connotations. It is a complex effect delivered with immaculate timing, and it is this combination of a) surreal detail described with b) English understatement c) with perfect timing, which is such a key part of Waugh’s reliably entertaining style.

On other occasions it is just the sheer beauty of his descriptions. On the ferry across Lake Tanganyika he is forced to make a rough bed on the deck, all the cabins having gone to the savvy passengers who had bribed the captain:

As we got up steam, brilliant showers of wood sparks rose from the funnel; soon after midnight we sailed into the lake; a gentle murmur of singing came from the bows. In a few minutes I was asleep. (p.170)

It’s not the most dramatic scene, but he describes it with such smoothness and style. Having taken a few overnight ferries I recognise the mood, I felt I was there. When it is appropriate to be simple and descriptive, he is.

At the other end of the spectrum, sometimes it is the extended caricatures of the people he meets:

Soon after five the captain appeared. No one looking at him would have connected him in any way with a ship; a very fat, very dirty man, a stained tunic open to his throat, unshaven, with a straggling moustache, crimson-faced, gummy-eyed, flat-footed. He would have seemed more at home as the proprietor of an estaminet. (p.168)

Variety and innocence

This leads into my last point which is that the book contains a great diversity of characters. Alright, there aren’t any speaking parts for Africans once he’s left Ethiopia; but this large caveat aside, I found it wonderful that wherever he went, there was this diversity of races and nationalities: the two Armenians stick out, but plenty of Italians, French, Belgians, Germans, the Indians in Zanzibar, the Arabs and Jews in Aden.

And it’s not just nationalities, but a florid variety of characters and types, ranging from the shabby ship’s captain mentioned above to the most correctly dressed Governors and ambassadors, via Quaker missionaries in pyjamas, the monks of Debra Labanos in their filthy tunics, Kikuyu serving ‘boys’, Abyssinian bandits dressed in white gowns and riding donkeys, the historically-minded Turk, any number of demoralised Greek hotel keepers.

It has the same abundant mix of nationalities and types all rubbing along together which you get in the Tintin books of the 1930s and 40s. One of the things I loved about Tintin when I was a boy was the way all the characters are so colourful, come from different countries, speak different languages, cook different cuisines, are so wonderfully varied. The argumentative sea captain, the dotty professor, the dignified butler, the unstoppable opera singer, her timid assistant, the piratical South American dictator, the nitwit detectives – how unlike the boring, samey suburban English people I grew up among, what a wonderful escape into a realm where everyone has a vivid and distinct character.

The same variety is evident right from the opening scenes of this book, on the cruise ship bringing Waugh to Djibouti with its colourful cast of passengers, from princes to Foreign Legionaries.

I’ve just read half a dozen books about African countries where, at independence, almost the entire European population fled (Congo, Angola) or, soon afterwards, was expelled and all their businesses nationalised (Zaire, Uganda).

Buried in the chaos of the Second World War were huge ethnic cleansings and attempted genocides. The Cold War saw ideological differences stop being entertaining and become murderous. In Africa (and South America and South-East Asia) communist guerrillas kidnapped and murdered foreigners, dictatorships ran death squads, the world became a much more dangerous place. In Africa, specifically, successive nationalist regimes nationalised all foreign businesses and expelled their owners. The Greek hotel owners, the Armenian taxi drivers, the Russian who runs a hide company in Addis Ababa, the other European oddballs who’d fetched up in remote corners and, of course, the large Indian business communities in many African countries – all expelled, all banished, all swept away. Replaced by much more homogeneous societies, 100% black, 100% African.

I think that’s what happened. By the time I went a-travelling in the late 1970s it felt like the colourful bricolage or personalities you regularly encounter in Tintin or pre-war travel books had vanished: in Egypt I met only Egyptians, in Thailand only Thais, in Turkey only Turks, in Greece only Greeks.

The colourful world in which you pulled into an Ethiopian or Ugandan town to find the only hotel run by a morose Greek and the only taxi in town driven by a cheerful Armenian taxi driver and got chatting with a jolly Turk happy who explained the Mohammedan view of history – that colourful world of variety and diversity had gone for good.

Credit

Remote People by Evelyn Waugh was published in 1931. All references are to the 1985 Penguin paperback edition.

Remote People online

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by Simon on November 29, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, British Empire, Travel writing

Tagged Abyssinia, Addis Ababa, Aden, Africa, Alice in Wonderland, Arabs, Arthur Rimbaud, barbarism, Battle of Adowa, Battle of Anchem, Belgian Congo, Bright Young Things, Cold War, colonialism, comedy, coronation, Debra Lebanos, Djibouti, Duke of Gloucester, Ethiopia, Evelyn Waugh, Foreign Legion, French Somalia, Galla, Ge'ez, Haile Selassie, Harar, imperialism, Irene Ravensdale, Jemjem, Jews, journalism, jurga, Kenya, Kikuyu, Lake Tanganyika, Lej Yasu, Lij Iyasu, Marshal Louis Franchet d'Espèrey, Mary Irene Curzon, Masai, Menelik II, Mombasa, Mr Bergebedgian, Nairobi, Negus, Negusa Nagast, Ottoman Empire, Prince of Udine, race, racism, Ras Gugsa Welle, Ras Tafari, Ras Tafari Makonnen, Remote People, Satire, savagery, Sir Richard Burton, Sir Stewart Symes, Slavery, Somalians, South Africa, South Yemen, Sultan of Lahej, The Times, Tintin, Travel writing, Victor Emmanuel III, Waugh in Abyssinia, Zanzibar, Zauditu, Zewditu

Posted by Simon on November 29, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/11/29/remote-people-evelyn-waugh/

In The Footsteps of Mr Kurz by Michela Wrong (2000)

Comparing Michela Wrong and David van Reybrouck

David van Reybrouck’s account of Congo’s modern history is basically an orthodox chronological account and political analysis interspersed with interviews with the many veterans and eye witnesses he has tracked down and spoken with at length.

Wrong’s account feels completely different, less chronological or, indeed, logical, more thematic. Instead of historical analysis, she brilliantly conveys what it felt like to live in Zaire under Mobutu as she sets about systematically exploring and describing different aspects of Zaire society and culture. Her vividness of approach is demonstrated by the way the book opens with the fall of Mobutu in 1997, going light on political analysis and strong on vivid descriptions of what it felt like to live in a crumbling, corrupt third world country.

Chapter one dwells on the role played in so many African states by key international hotels in their capitals, in Rwanda the Mille Collines, in Zimbabwe the Meikles, in Ethiopia the Hilton, in Uganda the Nile, hotels where presidents mingle with mercenaries, dodgy diamond deals are struck between smartly dressed middlemen, security goons lurked in the background muttering into their lapel mics, and the corridors were cruised by the most expensive hookers in town. And how it felt to be one among the pack of foreign correspondents living in Kinshasa’s Intercontinental Hotel as rumours swirled, troop carriers arrived, the president’s son turned up with a pack of soldiers furiously trying to track down the men who betrayed his father. And then suddenly, overnight, all the military figures switched to wearing tracksuits and casual wear in anticipation of the arrival of the rebel troops.

That’s the kind of picture painting and atmosphere Wrong is ace and conjuring up. How a country’s decline can be measured by the way the expensive carpeting in its hotels starts to smell of mildew, the lifts stop working, the blue paint on the bottom of pools comes off on the swimmers’ feet. Van Reybrouck takes an essentially academic approach spiced with extensive interviews. He is a historian whereas Wrong is a journalist, with a telling eye for detail and snappy one-line quotes.

Obviously, in this 314-page book she tells us an awful lot about the origins, rise and fall of the Mobutu dictatorship which lasted from 1965 to 1997, but it is the fantastically evocative way she conveys what it felt like that makes this book such a classic.

Van Reybrouck gives a detailed explanation of the ethnic tensions in eastern Congo which were exacerbated by the Rwandan genocide and then the constellation of political forces which led the Rwandan and Ugandan presidents to decide to invade eastern Congo and create a military coalition (the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, the AFDL) and select as its leader the long-time Maoist guerrilla leader Laurent-Désiré Kabila. This is to the good. His account is worth reading and rereading.

But Wrong tells you what it felt like to be in Kinshasa as the rebel army drew ever closer. The panic among Mobutu’s cronies, the so-called mouvanciers up in their gated mansions in the smart Binza district, the rush by the city’s moneyed classes to get visas for foreign destinations, the way the various western embassies practised evacuating their staff across the river Congo to Brazzaville, capital of the once-French colony the Republic of Congo which was unaffected by Mobutu’s fall.

Van Reybrouck gives you high-level analysis, Wrong gives you the sweat and the fear, the paranoia. She tells us everyone knew the game was up when the grizzled old piano player who’d been playing cocktail jazz in the bar of the Intercontinental for as long as anyone could remember one day disappeared.

She describes how the shopkeepers and population prepared for the mass looting which always accompanies regime change, and passes on the advice of an old hand that it’s best to select in advance one and only one item you want to loot and, once the anarchy begins, focus on getting that and only that. Wrong selects a $1,000 leather jacket for when the great pillaging begins.

She describes the way rumours are spread by ‘Radio Trottoir’, Pavement Radio i.e. word on the street. She conveys the mad, feverish atmosphere of a city about to be taken by rebel forces (p.27).

Another difference is that van Reybrouck sees the history of Congo as a tragedy, or series of tragedies, and he affects the reader with his sense of high seriousness. Wrong, on the other hand, has a lively sense of humour and an eye for the absurd detail. She finds almost everything about Zaire farcical, but then she appears to find all of Africa farcical and hopeless.

As for rebuilding the impression given by the scaffolding and myriad work sites dotted around Kinshasa is misleading. The work has never been completed, the scaffolding will probably never be removed. Like the defunct street lamps lining Nairobi’s roads, the tower blocks of Freetown, the faded boardings across Africa which advertise trips to destinations no travel company today services, it recalls another era, when a continent believed its natural trajectory pointed up instead of down. (p.20)

As this quote indicates, another difference is that whereas van Reybrouck’s account is focused with laser-like precision on the history of just the Congo, Wrong’s anecdotes and comparisons freely reference the many other African countries she’s visited and worked in as a foreign correspondent. There’s a lot more international comparison and perspective. Wrong visits places around Congo but also Brussels to interview historians, to visit the Congolese quarter, and Switzerland to track down some of Mobutu’s luxury properties.

And whereas van Reybrouck is optimistic, on the side of Congo’s bloodied but resilient people, Wrong is both more humorous and more pessimistic. According to her, the story is the same all across Africa, one of unstoppable decline and fall.

Talking to the melancholic Colonel, I was suddenly overwhelmed by the sense of tragic waste, of crippled potential that so often sweeps over one in Africa. (p.178)

In Ronan Bennett’s novel The Catastrophist the Belgian colonials who describe the Congolese as ‘children’ who need order, discipline and control and will make a horlicks of their country if granted independence are condemned as racist bigots – so you must never say anything like that. However, Wrong’s book freely refers to African politics as farcical, its politicians as clowns, and that, apparently, wins prizes.

At times, too many times, politics on Congo resembled one of those hysterical farces in which policemen with floppy truncheons and red noses bounce from one outraged prima donna to another. ‘I’m the head of state. Arrest that man!’ ‘No, I’M the head of state. That man is an imposter. Arrrest him!’ (p.66)

So it’s OK to mock Africans as long as you use the correct phraseology and attitude. Calling them children is a no-no; calling their countries farcical, absurd, ludicrous, surreal, Alice in Wonderland – that’s fine.

And perfectly acceptable to be tired and bored of the absurdity of Africa’s rulers, the comical proliferation of rebels and freedom fighters and guerrilla movements, the bleak iteration of yet another massacre or round of ethnic cleansing somewhere on this blighted continent, like the western media’s news producers and sub-editors ‘shaking their heads over yet another unfathomable African crisis’ (p.7). Africa is for Wrong, ‘a disturbing continent’, ‘Africa, a continent that has never disappointed in its capacity to disappoint’, whose countries brim with ‘anarchy and absurdity’ (p.10).

When the AFDL’s representatives started calling the BBC office in Nairobi in late 1996, claiming they would march all the way to Kinshasa, journalists dismissed them with a weary shrug as yet another unknown guerrilla movement, the length of its constituent acronyms only rivalled by its obscurity, making wild plans and farcical claims. Africa is full of them: they surface, splinter into factions – yet more acronyms – only to disappear with equal suddenness. (p.245)

Several times she mentions Liberia’s drugged freedom fighter who wore wedding dressed and pink lipstick as they mowed down innocent civilians and gang-raped the women. She describes the teenage FAZ recruits preparing to defend Kinshasa who were so drunk they could barely lift their grenade launchers. When the AFDL rebel soldiers arrive they turn out to be mostly teenagers wearing flip-flops or no shoes at all. Kabila promised to relinquish power once he’d overthrown Mobutu but of course does nothing of the sort. In turn Kabila was himself assassinated (in 2001), replaced by a family member even more corrupt and the whole of East Congo engulfed in a huge, often incomprehensible and seemingly endless war. Farce and tragedy.

The Latin Quarter hit, ‘I’m hearing only bad news from Radio Africa‘ seems as true when Wrong was writing in 2000 or now, in 2021, as when it was released in 1984.

Chapter by chapter

Introduction

Wrong arrived in Zaire as a foreign correspondent in 1994, found her way around, did features on Mobutu and his corrupt circle, the prostration of the economy (‘a country reverting to the Iron Age’, p.31) the uselessness of the army, the universal vibe of fear and poverty. Less than three years later, in autumn 1996, the AFDL seized eastern Congo and began its systematic assault on the country, seizing the mining centre of Lubumbashi in the south while other forces marched on the capital Kinshasa in the west. Wrong is perfectly placed to report on the paranoia of the last days, to fly out to the hot spots, to interview soldiers, shopkeepers, street traders, as well as army officers and government spokesmen.

So the introduction gives us tasters, snapshots: Wrong flying to the pretty lakeside town of Goma which was pillaged by its own inhabitants when the occupying army left. Wrong wandering through the rooms of Mobutu’s legendary palace at Gbadolite, now ruined and looted, the five black Mercedes, the Ming vases.

And she explains the title which is a quote from Joseph Conrad’s classic novella Heart of Darkness about the madness and barbarism he, personally, encountered, in the Congo Free State in 1890, epitomised by the fictional character of Mr Kurz, the high-minded exponent of civilisation who is sent to man an ivory station up the Congo, far from civilisation, and decays and degrades to become an epitome of barbarism and nihilism. Wrong sees herself literally following in Kurz’s footsteps as she explores all aspects of the absurd rule of Mobutu in the mid-90s, then watches his regime collapse in ruins.

Chapter 1

Plunges us into the endgame with a wonderfully evocative description of the atmosphere in Kinshasa and the Intercontinental Hotel where all the foreign correspondents stayed, during the last few days in 1997 October 1997 before Laurent Kabila’s AFDL took the city and Mobutu and his cronies were forced to flee. Snapshots of a city under siege, with brief explanations of Mobutu’s rule, the character of the AFDL and its leader Kabila, their determination to clean up the pigsty and abolish corruption.

Chapter 2

Gives a brisk but effective summary of Stanley’s exploration of the Congo (with backstory about Stanley’s biography) and King Leopold’s disgustingly barbaric regime of cruelty and exploitation, which he called the Congo Free State, 1885 to 1908 (with backstory explaining why Belgium was a relatively new country – founded in 1830 – and its king wanted a colony so as to be taken seriously by the big boys.)

In Brussels she visits the Belgian scholar Jules Marchal, once a whip-wielding colon himself, who has devoted his life to editing and publishing definitive records of the Congo Free State. She visits the Royal Museum for Central Africa and is shocked by the complete absence of references to the atrocities the Belgians carried out there, and to learn that Belgian colonial history is not taught in Belgian schools (p.55).

She takes a tour of buildings by the noted Art Nouveau architect Victor Horta, before pointing out that all the raw materials crafted into these beautiful buildings – the hardwood, onyx, marble, and copper – all came directly from the forced labour of Congolese blacks. Horta was rewarded for his services to Belgian architecture with a barony.

She describes how many of the Free State’s exploitative practices continued after the colony was handed over to Belgian government rule in 1908, including forced labour and use of the dreaded chicotte, the whip made of dried hippopotamus hide. It was only after the Second World War that Congo became less brutally exploitative and a tiny black middle class began to emerge, but if anything the colour bar or informal apartheid against this new breed of évolués or ‘evolved’ blacks grew worse.

Which moves into a description of the appearance, sights and sounds and mentality of the Congolese quarter in Brussels. She ends by making a strong case that Leopold’s atrocities, many of which continued under Belgian colonial rule, acculturated an entire region for 85 long years to abject humiliation, subservience, black market, illegal operations and corruption. Prepared the way, in other words, for just such a dictator as Mobutu.

No malevolent witch doctor could have devised a better preparation for the coming of a second Great Dictator. (p.57)

Chapter 3

Interview with Larry Devlin, the long-retired former CIA station chief in Kinshasa, who emphasises that Wrong only saw the regime at its bitter, pitiful end. She never knew the young, vibrant, charismatic Mobutu or knew the situation of anarchy between elected politicians which his 1965 coup rescued the country from (p.61).

She makes clearer than van Reybrouck or Bennett that Lumumba had actively invited the Soviets to give arms and advisers to crush the secessions. Devlin thinks Lumumba was never a communist, but he was naive. He thought he could invite in thousands of communist advisers at no cost. Devlin says he’d seen that happen in Eastern Europe after the war: your country falls to a communist coup and then Moscow is in charge. So Mobutu’s first coup of September 1960 was not just to bring political peace but to keep the Congo out of Soviet hands – and it worked. Soviet bloc personnel were given 48 hours to leave the country (p.67).

His account emphasises not just that, when the UN and US were slow to respond, Lumumba turned to the Soviets to supply him with arms and strategic advice to put down the secession of two major provinces – but that people of Devlin’s generation had seen this happen before. This was how the Soviets effected their coups in Poland and Czechoslovakia. This is how they established their tyrannies, by taking control of the army and placing personnel in key administrative and political positions. It had never been done in Africa before, but the Americans weren’t about to sit back and watch the Soviets make the experiment. So that’s why the Americans, backed by his political enemies within the country, decided he had to be eliminated. President Eisenhower personally approved CIA plans to assassinate Lumumba (p.77).

Then she backs up to give us the hasty run-up to independence from Belgium in June 1960, the army mutinying for better pay and promotion within days, triggering a mass exodus of the Belgian administrators and technicians who kept the country running, the political rivalry between ‘lethargic’ President Kasavubu (p.66) and passionate Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba and how the deadlock between them was broken by young Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, previously Lumumba’s personal secretary, who Lumumba himself had put in charge of the army and who, very bravely, faced down the army mutiny and restored order. Mobutu was encouraged then and ever afterwards by America.

A detailed look at the boyhood and young manhood of Joseph Mobutu from the Ngbani tribe, one of the smaller of Congo’s 250 ethnic groups, emphasising his brightness, reasonableness and extraordinary charisma; educated by Belgian priests, expelled for being a trouble-maker, a few years in the Force Publique rising to rank of sergeant, then contributing (anonymous) articles to new magazines set up for the Congolese, before he committed to becoming a journalist and then came to the attention of Lumumba who was looking for a secretary (pages 68 to 76). Devlin, the CIA man explains how Mobutu was really the best man available when he staged his 1965 coup.

Soon after the 1965 coup Devlin was posted to Vietnam. When he returned to Zaire in 1974 he found a drastically changed man and country. Surrounded by yes men, drinking pink champagne in his palaces, Mobutu was ‘already round the bend’ (p.82).

Chapter 4 Economics

In the immediate aftermath of the coup there were hangings, a new secret police was set up and so on. But the fundamental fact about Mobutu’s regime was he was an economic illiterate. Therefore his sole economic policy was to loot and plunder his country’s natural resources (when the going was good in the late 60s and early 70s) and then creaming the top off huge loans from the World bank and aid agencies. In other words, he didn’t know how to create or run a modern economy. He built a few high-profle white elephants, like the Inga dam, but when the builders left Zaire had no technicians to run it and there was never any coherent plan to create the infrastructure to distribute the electricity to where it was needed. Thus Congo has the greatest hydro-electric potential in the world in the shape of its huge and mighty river – and yet is a country whose cities suffer continual power cuts and outages.

He took up the creed of Pan-Africanism pioneered by Kwame Nkrumah, first Prime Minister of Ghana (who made himself president for life in 1964 and was overthrown by a military coup in 1966 supported by the CIA).

Mobutu promulgated his policies of authenticité, forcing everyone in the country to drop their European Christian names and adopt African names, renaming the state Zaire, renaming Leopoldville Kinshasa and Elizabethville Lubumbashi. He forced everyone to stop wearing European suits and mini skirts and adopt traditional African dress (p.90). He persuaded promoters to hold Miss World and the Ali-Foreman boxing match in Zaire (described in detail in van Reybrouck’s book).

In other words, he demonstrated how facile it is to address ‘cultural’ issues, fuss over ‘identity’ and language and culture. Meanwhile, in the absence of an economic or development plan, the economy tanked and the infrastructure rotted. The first years of his rule were bolstered by the high prices for Zaire’s raw materials created by the Vietnam war, but the end of the war in 1974 combined with the oil crisis to plunge Zaire into an economic hole it never crawled beck out of (p.94).

In 1973 he launched ‘Zaireanisation’ i.e. all foreign held businesses were confiscated by the state with a view to handing them over to ‘the people’ (p.92). The only problem was that ‘the people’ turned out, as when Robert Mugabe did the same thing 20 years later in Zimbabwe, to consist entirely of cronies and clients of Mobutu, who needed to be paid off or kept onside. None of them had a clue how to manage anything and ran businesses large and small into the ground, selling off the assets, living high off the proceeds, then needing further bribes or corruption money when they ran dry. $1 billion of assets were confiscated then squandered. It was gangster economics, ‘Alice in Wonderland finances’ (p.124).

And run on a massive system of cronyism. Mobutu needed so much money because he had to distribute gifts to all his important stakeholders in the manner of a traditional chieftain. Mobutu bought properties for himself around Europe, but he encouraged a system where hundreds of thousands of people scrabbled into the state administration, into the army or civil service, and then used their positions to embezzle, steal, demand bribes and generally be as corrupt as possible. By the mid-1990s Zaire had 600,000 people on the state payroll, doing jobs the World Bank calculated could be done by 50,000 (p.97).

The ambassador to Japan, Cleophas Kamitatu, simply sold the Zairian embassy and pocketed the proceeds. France sold Zaire a fleet of Mirage jets and ten years later, Defence Ministry officials simply sold them and kept the money (p.256). Ministers allotted themselves huge monthly salaries, lavish per diems, and insisted on having two of the very latest Mercedes, and their example was copied all the way down through their ministries, in state-run businesses and onto the street. Everyone stole everything they could, all the time. That’s what a kleptocracy is.

Chapter 5 Congo’s ruined mineral industries

Wrong flies to Katanga to report how nationalisation, corruption and utter mismanagement ran Congo’s mineral industries into the ground, beginning with astonishing stats about the country’s mineral huge wealth, then on to how Mobutu nationalised the Belgian mining corporation, Union Minière, consolidating it into the state-run company Gécamines. Sounds good, doesn’t it, one in the eye for the old imperial power, claiming the nation’s resources for the nation.

Except the nation never saw any of the profits. By 1978 the central bank had ordered Gécamines to transfer its entire annual profit of $500 million directly into a presidential bank account. By 1980 American researchers discovered that company officials were stealing $240 million a year from Gécamines. Not only stole but smuggled, with huge amounts of diamonds, gold and other precious metals never reaching the books because they were stolen and smuggled abroad. In such an environment, nobody at any level gave a damn about investing in the company, in its stock and infrastructure, and so everything the Belgians had bequeathed the Congolese slowly rotted, decayed, was stolen, till the entire plants were rusting skeletons.

Wrong tours these sites giving us eerie descriptions of entire towns full of abandoned workings, derelict factories, rusting railways. That’s what she means when she described the entire country as slipping back into the Iron Age.

Wrong testifies to the decrepitude of the Shituri plant, describes the white elephant of Inga dam project built solely so Kinshasa kept control over Katanga. Pays an extended visit to the diamond town of Mbuji Mayi in the neighbouring province of Kasai, and interviews traders who explain the deep-seated corruption at every level of the diamond trade and ‘controlled’ by the Societe Miniere de Bakwanga (MIBA). She interviews its long-standing government representative, Jonas Mukamba (p.118) who paid Mobutu a hefty slice of the profits and in exchange was allowed to run Mbuji Mayi as he liked.

Eventually the infrastructure of Mbuji Mayi crumbled and collapsed, as had the mining infrastructure of Katanga. World mineral prices slumped but also, what was being produced was now being almost entirely smuggled. The rake-off from official trade collapsed because official trade collapsed. As the 90s progressed Mobutu lost his power of patronage.

She visits the central bank and the alleyway behind it jokingly referred to as Wall Street because it’s lined with unofficial street money changers. As Mobutu borrowed more and more from abroad and printed more money inflation soared and the currency collapsed. Wheelbarrows full of notes. A 500,000 zaire (the currency) note was printed to general resignation. Printing money led to mind-boggling inflation 9,800% and printing of the 500,000 zaire note. Mobutu had presided over the utter ruination of the economy.

Chapter 6

The collapse in Kinshasa epitomised by 1960s high-rise ministries without functioning lifts. The collapse of public phone system which was replaced by mobile networks, Telecel, for the wealthy. The collapse of the health system exemplified by Mama Yemo hospital which employs guards to prevent patients leaving without paying their bills.

Wrong pays a visit to Kinshasa’s small nuclear reactor, built on sandy soil liable to landslips, hit by a rocket during Kabila’s takeover of power, which had no security at all on the day she visited, and where one or two nuclear rods have recently gone missing.

Chapter 7

An explanation of ‘Article 15’, which is, apparently, the much-quoted ironic dictum by which most Congolese live their lives.

When the province of Kasai seceded soon after independence, it published a 14-article constitution. So many ethnic Luba people returned to the region expecting to become rich that the exasperated secessionist ruler made a speech in which he referred to a fictional, hypothetical 15th article of the constitution, which basically said, in French, ‘Débrouillez-vous!’ meaning ‘get on with it’, ‘figure it out yourself’, ‘deal with it’ or ‘improvise’. Since 1960 has become a universal expression throughout the country to explain ‘the surreal alternative systems invented by ordinary Zaireans to cope with the anarchy’ (p.11) they find themselves living in.

And so Wrong gives an overview of the hundred and one street professions of a people struggling to live in an economy with no jobs and no wages. Wrong gives an extended description of the Mutual Benefit Society run by the disabled street people of Ngobila Beach and the tiny loopholes in the law they exploit to smuggle and sell items.

She meets a fervent Kimbanguist, the religion described by van Reybrouck. Van Reybrouck’s account of Kimbanguism is much more thorough, lucid and logical, but Wrong’s is an in-your-face explanation via one particular believer, Charles, a Zairian who combines high moral principles (‘we are never naked’) with the profession of ‘protocol’ or fixer of bribes at Kinshasa’s notorious N’Djili International Airport.

Chapter 8

Le Sape, Congo’s equivalent of Mods, snappily dressed proles. The origin and purpose of the Society of Ambiencers and Persons of Elegance (SAPE), as explained to Wrong by self-styled ‘Colonel’ Jagger (p.176) as a protest against poverty and the drabness of the constricting African authenticité style demanded by Mobutu.

Then she gives a portrait of the ex-pat community of European idealists and chancers and romantics who came out in the 1950s or 60s and stayed on past independence and into the Mobutu years. This focuses on the example of Daniel Thomas a French construction worker who has repeatedly tried to start small farming businesses only to be repeatedly looted and ruined by his neighbours, and now all of his money is tied up in a farm he can’t sell and who has lost all hope. His wife is exhausted and disillusioned and wants to leave this sick land but they are stuck.

Chapter 9

Wrong details the vast sums loaned or given to Zaire over the years by international banks and especially the World Bank and International Monetary Fund. She interviews insiders who explain that during the 1960s, 70s and 80s very few conditions were attached to vast loans which, predictably, disappeared straight into the bank accounts of Mobutu and cronies.

Chapter 10

Details of the vast palace Mobutu had built for himself at Gbadolite in the jungle in the north of the country, right on the border with Central African Republic. It’s said to have cost $100 million, with an airstrip big enough for Concorde to land on. Musical fountains, ornamental lakes, model farm, gilt, marble. This is what a lot of Western aid paid for. Eventually it came to seem too big and imposing so… he had another one built a few miles away at Kwale, with an olympic size swimming pool,

The story of Pierre Janssen who married Mobutu’s daughter, Yaki, on 4 July 1992, and so became the only white person in Mobutu’s inner circle and a few years later revealed all in a kiss-and-tell memoir. The Moules flown in from Belgium, huge bouquets of flowers flown in from Amsterdam, cakes flown in from Paris along couturiers and barbers.

The weirdness that after his first wife, Marie Antoinette, generally reckoned to be a restraining influence on him, died in 1977, he married his mistress Bobi Ladawa, and took as a new mistress…her twin sister, Kossia. They socialised together, were seen together. Wrong speculates that there might have been a voodoo, animistic belief that the twins would ward of the nagging spirit of his first wife, for twins are regarded in Africa as having totemic powers (p.223).

Chapter 11

A brisk account of the Rwandan genocide which is in a hurry to explain the longer and more significant consequence, which was the creation of vast camps for Hutu refugees just across the borders in Zaire and how these camps, supported by huge amounts of foreign aid, were reorganised by the thuggish Hutu genocidaires who set about planning their revenge attack on Rwanda. By 1995 there were some 82,000 thriving enterprises in the camps which had become mini-towns (p.239), no surprise when you consider that the UNHCR and aid organisations had pumped at least $336 million into them, more than the Kinshasa government’s total annual operating budget.

In early 1996 the Hutu leadership undertook a mission to ethnically cleanse the North Kivu region of its ethnic Tutsis, massacring those it could find, forcing the rest to flee. In late 1996 it was south Kivu’s turn to be cleansed. The local Tutsis, known as the Banyamulenge had watched the Hutus slowly take control of the region, launch revenge raids into Rwanda, and had called on the UN and Kinshasa to neutralise the Hutu genocidaires but the UN did nothing and Mobutu gave them tacit support.

Which is why in October 1996 four rebel groups, with the backing of the Rwandan and Ugandan governments formed the Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire (AFDL) and took the fight to the Hutus, forcing the genocidal Interahamwe to flee west and majority of the refugees to traipse back into Rwanda.

Chapter 12

The main thing about the so-called First Congo War is there was hardly any fighting. The Zairian army, the Forces Armées Zairoises, the FAZ, was a joke and ran away at the first threat of conflict. The only violence came from the FAZ as they looted, burned and raped their way through the villages en route back to Kinshasa. There were a few set-piece battles but for most of the AFDL forces the war consisted of a very long march through jungle, sometimes using Zaire’s decaying roads, mostly using the jungle paths which have replaced tarmacked roads in many areas.

Wrong interviews Honoré Ngbanda Nzambo Ko Arumba, for five years the feared head of Zaire’s security service who explains why the FAZ was so useless. It all stems from Mobutu’s basic management technique which was to keep the army divided between different factions, to create a series if confusingly titled security and military units, to have a multitude of generals and security ministers and to keep them all guessing. To set them in deliberate rivalry, to give them contradictory orders, to create permanent confusion, suspicion and paranoia. Why? Simples: to prevent any single person or unit from becoming a centre of real power and so a threat to his rule.

Also, most of these units were kept down in Bas Congo, close to Kinshasa. Zaire had almost no border guards or forces. Why? Because the army was not designed to fight other countries or protect the country’s security; it was an internal security machine whose sole raison d’etre was protecting the president.

Another reason was simple corruption. The many generals and senior ranks Mobutu created, solely with a view to placating the numerous tribes and/or keeping prominent figures onside, to a man practiced various forms of corruption and graft, the simplest of which was to take the soldiers’ pay for themselves. Which explains why soldiers went without any pay at all for months on end, sometimes half a year. Which was the central reason why they mutinied and not only mutinied but went on great rampages of looting; they were claiming their back pay, taking what they though society owed them. That was the root cause of the two great Pillagings of 1991 and 1993.

And then there was greed raised to the level of comic farce. Most officers or army administrators had been selling off stock for cash for years. Thus the FAZ had out of date East European guns, the wrong ammo for their guns. Initially army commanders in Kivu sold the best of their munitions to the AFDL for a quick profit, arms and ammo the AFDL then turned back on the FAZ, who turned and ran.

Lastly, the neighbouring countries turned against Mobutu. Rwanda and Uganda were the AFDL’s main backers, but the Angolan government had for decades resented Mobutu’s support for the UNITA rebels and took the opportunity to send forces into Zaire to crush their base camps. Zambia co-operated by letting the AFDL cross its land to reach the south. Zimbabwe and Eritrea sent the rebels modern arms and Tanzania turned a blind eye to rebel bases on its territory.

By March 1997 the AFDL had taken Kisangani, next came Mbuji Mayi, then Lubumbashi, capital of the mining region in the south. It took just seven months from the launch of their campaign till the first AFDL troops arrived outside Kinshasa prompting the atmosphere of paranoid panic Wrong describes in the first chapter of this book.

Chapter 13

As so often happens with tyrants, Mobutu’s overthrow coincided with his final fatal illness. It’s as if their imminent fall from power triggers a collapse in their bodies. King Leopold II lasted barely a year after he handed the Congo Free State over to the Belgian government (February 1908) and in an eerily parallel way, the AFDL’s seven-month advance on Kinshasa coincided with 66-year-old Mobutu’s diagnosis with prostate cancer.

As the rebel forces relentlessly advanced westwards, Mobutu was in and out of the most expensive private clinics in the world in Switzerland. Thus his personal intervention and decision making was almost entirely absent during the crucial months. When he returned to his capital in March 1997, he could barely walk and had to be supported from the plane.

On 16 May 1997, following failed peace talks chaired by President of South Africa Nelson Mandela, Mobutu fled into exile and Kabila’s forces proclaimed victory. Mobutu died in exile in Morocco 3 and a half months later, 7 September 1997.

This is where Wrong places a fascinating interview with Mobutu’s son by his second wife Bobi Ladawa, Nzanga Mobutu. He mourns his father and insists he loved his family and loved his country. Wrong gives her account of the very last few days, especially negotiation with the Americans who tried to broker a deal with Kabila, partly through Nzanga’s eyes, partly through the account of US ambassador Daniel Simpson who took part in the actual discussions, and Bill Richardson, the troubleshooter US President Bill Clinton handed the tricky task of persuading Mobutu to relinquish power and tell his troops not to fight the AFDL as it entered Kinshasa, a confrontation which would have led to a bloodbath, anarchy and another Great Pillaging (p.271).

What comes over is the absolute centrality of the Americans as power brokers in the situation, but the refusal of a very sick Mobutu to formally abdicate and of Kabila to make any concessions. Right at the last his generals abandoned him. The knackered Russian Ilyushin jet Mobutu and his close family flew out of Kinshasa to Gbadolite in was peppered with machine gun fire by his very pissed-off personal guard, the Division Spéciale Présidentielle (DSP) who he was abandoning to their fates (p.279).

Chapter 14 Ill-gotten gains

A few months after Kabila took power, he set up the quaintly named Office of Ill Gotten Gains (OBMA) to identify Mobutu’s looted assets, including his multiple properties abroad (p.286). Wrong meets the first director of OBMA, former nightclub owner turned rebel soldier Jean-Baptise Mulemba lists and visits some. Three years after his fall, Wrong visits his large Swiss mansion at Les Miguettes, now falling into neglect.

Epilogue

The epilogue reminds us that this book was published in 2000, when Congo was still in the toils of what became known as the Second Congo War and Kabila was still president. She was not to know Kabila would be assassinated in 2001 and the war drag on for years.

Wrong shows us the dispiriting process whereby the initial high hopes about him and his crusade to undo corruption soon faded, as he found himself having to resort to all Mobutu’s old techniques for trying to hold his wartorn country together, namely creaming money off foreign loans, the mining companies, and even introducing tougher taxes on ordinary Congolese, in order to keep the regional governors and all manner of fractious stakeholders onboard.

Anyway, as Wrong’s book went to press in 2000 it ends with a survey of the many depressing tokens which indicated that Kabila was falling into Mobutu’s old ways, only without the dictator’s charisma or shrewdness. Blunter. Cruder. She calls Kabila a ‘thug’ (p.300).

And she ends with an assessment of whether Mobutu’s missing billions will ever be recovered. The short answer is No, for the simple reason that they don’t exist. All the evidence is that millions went through his hands but en route to the key stakeholders, political rivals, regional warlords, he needed to pay to follow him.

At a deep structural level, the corruption and gangster economy run by Mobutu and then Kabila may be the only way to keep such a huge country, divided into starkly different regions, populated by some 250 different ethnic groups, together.

God, what a thought. The population of Congo in the 1920s when the first estimates about how many died during Leopold’s rule, was said to be 10 million. By the date of independence 1960 described in Ronan Bennett’s novel The Catastrophist it had only risen to 15 million or so. When Wrong’s book went to press in 2000 she gives Congo’s population as 45 million. And now, in 2021? It is 90 million! Good grief. What future for a ruined country overrun by its own exploding population?

France

The French come out of this account, as usual, as scumbags. France was ‘Mobutu’s most faithful Western friend’ (p.287), ‘always the most loyal’ of his Western supporters (p.258). From the 1960s Zaire came to be regarded by the French government as part of its ‘chasse gardée’:

that ‘private hunting ground’ of African allies whose existence allowed France to punch above its weight in the international arena. (p.196)

The French believed they understood the African psyche better than the Anglo-Saxon British or Americans. They clung on to belief in their mission civilisatrice despite their not-too-impressive record in Vietnam and Algeria. Since the 1960s the French government has promoted la francophonie “the global community of French-speaking peoples, comprising a network of private and public organizations promoting equal ties among countries where French people or France played a significant historical role, culturally, militarily, or politically.” (Wikipedia)

The practical upshot of this high-sounding policy was that the French government promised Mobutu their undying support, no matter how corrupt and evil he became. The French government funded schools and media – so long as they promoted the French language. Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, French president from 1974 to 1981, was a great friend of African dictators and secured them many loans which just happened to coincide with a building firm run by Valery’s cousin winning quite a few contracts to build Zairean ministries and bank buildings and so on (p.131). Very handy.

It meant military aid, too. When rebels invaded Shaba from Angola, France parachuted legionnaires in to fight them. During the First Pillaging of 1991 France flew in troops to police the streets.

After his downfall, when the OBMA set out to track down the billions of dollars Mobutu had sequestered abroad, the lack of co-operation from the French government stood out.

Confronted with the AFDL’s legal and moral crusade, the silence from France, Mobutu’s most faithful Western friend, was deafening. (p.287)

But France’s standout achievement in the region was to protect the Hutu instigators of the great genocide of Rwanda. This is a hugely controversial subject, which I’ll cover in reviews of specifically about the Rwanda genocide, but in brief: the French government supported the Hutu government. The French president was personal friends with the Hutu president Juvenal Habyarimana, so when his plane was shot down and the Hutu government went into panic mode, the French government’s first response was to support them and to carry on supporting them even as they carried out the 100-day genocide. When the Tutsi Rwandan Patriotic Front invaded Rwanda to put an end to the genocide, France continued to support the Hutus and helped the genocidaires escape, along with millions of other Hutu refugees into eastern Congo, where they continued to support them, even after the evidence was long in the public domain that they had just carried out the worst genocide since the Holocaust.

Because for the French government, all that matters is the glory of France, the prestige of France, the strength of the Francophonie. Morality, justice, human rights, all come a poor second to France’s unwavering commitment to its own magnificence.

Hence France’s unwavering support for the evil kleptocratic dictator Mobutu right up till his last days; hence France’s support of the Hutu government, even after it became clear they were carrying out a genocide. A guilt France has taken a long time to face up to, has finally admitted, albeit hedged with reservations and caveats.

Macron asks Rwanda to forgive France over 1994 genocide role (May 2021)

Repeated stories

Stories, gossip and educational facts are learned through repetition. Wrong repeats the description of big statue of Henry Morton Stanley, long ago torn down and lying rusting outside a warehouse in Kinshasa. Several times she refers to the two great Pillagings of 1991 and 1993.

She repeats the story about the Congo’s store of uranium dug from the mines of Shinkolobwe being sent by a foresightful colonial administrator to New York where it was discovered by scientists from the Manhattan Project and refined to become the core of the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima (p.140).

Her chapter about King Leopold’s rape of Congo under hypocritical claims of freeing it from slavery and barbarism repeats much of the material I’ve read in Hochschild and van Reybrouck. She repeats Hochschild’s mentions of Congolese historian Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem’s estimate that 13 million died or fled the region during Leopold’s rule.

Van Reybrouck thought the tragic story of Lumumba betrayed by his secretary and friend Mobutu was like a Shakespearian tragedy. Wrong thinks it is Biblical like Cain and Abel, two beloved brothers who end up betraying each other. It certainly haunts the imagination of novelists and historians and commentators in a way the later, long rule of Mobutu rarely did, and the rule of Laurent Kabila not at all.

Credit

In The Footsteps of Mr Kurz by Michela Wrong was published by Fourth Estate in 2000. All references are to the 2001 paperback edition.

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by Simon on October 7, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Politics

Tagged Adam Hochschild, AFDL, Africa, aid agencies, Alliance of Democratic Forces for the Liberation of Congo-Zaire, Angola, Art Nouveau, Article 15, authenticité, évolués, Banyamulenge, Bas Congo, Belgium, Bill Clinton, Binza, Bobi Ladawa, Central African Republic, chicotte, CIA, Cleophas Kamitatu, Colonel Jagger, colonialism, Communism, Congo, Congo Free State, copper, coup, Daniel Simpson, Daniel Thomas, David Van Reybrouck, diamonds, Division Spéciale Présidentielle, DSP, Elizabethville, Eritrea, Ethiopia, FAZ, First Congo War, First Pillaging, Force Publique, Forces Armées Zairoises, foreign aid, France, Francophonie, Gécamines, Gbadolite, genocide, Ghana, Heart of Darkness, Henry Morton Stanley, Hiroshima, history, Holocaust, Honoré Ngbanda Nzambo Ko Arumba, hyper-inflation, imperialism, In The Footsteps of Mr Kurz, international affairs, international aid, International Monetary Fund, Isidore Ndaywel e Nziem, Jean-Baptise Mulemba, Jonas Mukamba, Joseph Conrad, Joseph Mobutu, Joseph-Désiré Mobutu, journalism, Jules Marchal, Juvenal Habyarimana, Kasai, Katanga, Kimbanguism, King Leopold II, Kinsangani, Kinshasa, kleptocracy, Kwame Nkrumah, Larry Devlin, Latin Quarter, Laurent Kabila, Laurent-Désiré Kabila, Le Sape, Leopold II, Leopold of the Belgians, Lubumbashi, Manhattan Project, Marie Antoinette, Mbuji Mayi, MIBA, Michela Wrong, Mobutu, modern history, Morocco, Mr Kurz, Muhammed Ali, N'Djili International Airport, Nelson Mandela, Ngbani, Ngobila Beach, North Kivu, nuclear reactor, Nzanga Mobutu, OBMA, Office of Ill Gotten Gains, Pan-Africanism, Patrice Lumumba, Pavement Radio, Pierre Janssen, Politics, President Eisenhower, President Kasavubu, Radio Trottoir, Republic of Congo, Robert Mugabe, Ronan Bennett, Royal Museum for Central Africa, Rumble in the Jungle, Russia, Rwanda, Rwandan genocide, Second Pillaging, Second World War, Shinkolobwe, Societe Miniere de Bakwanga, Society of Ambiencers and Persons of Elegance, South Africa, south Kivu, Soviet, The Catastrophist, Tutsis, Uganda, UNHCR, Union Minière, UNITA, United Nations, USSR, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, Victor Horta, Vietnam, World bank, Zaire, Zaireanisation, Zimbabwe

Posted by Simon on October 7, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/10/07/in-the-footsteps-of-mr-kurz-michela-wrong/

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Part 1

Part 2

Wilde’s own summary

Thoughts

Quotable quotes

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The role of Art

Thoughts

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Executive summary

Longer version

Highland setting

Complications

The Raden family

The Bandicotts

Janet Raden

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Since the war

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The milky haze of amnesia

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2. Second World War history is huge

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