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Alan Furst reviews

Alan Furst (born 1941) is an American author of historical spy novels. He published a few novels in the 1970s but hit paydirt in the late 1980s when he had the idea of setting his spy thrillers 50 years earlier, back in the 1930s, and in Europe, particularly Eastern Europe, in the murky, threatening years leading up to the Second World War.

The first of these historical spy novels was ‘Night Soldiers’, which follows a Soviet spy across war-threatened Europe and which has given its name to the entire series, published from 1988 to the most recent one in 2019. Because of the 1930s settings, Furst has been called the ‘heir to the tradition of Eric Ambler and Graham Greene’ who both, of course, actually wrote ominous thrillers in the 1930s. As the series progressed, Furst sometimes deploys recurring characters and settings (notably the Brasserie Heininger in Paris, which appears in all 15 novels) to bind the stories together and please fans (like me).

List of my reviews

List with plot summaries

1988 Night Soldiers An epic narrative which starts with a cohort of recruits to the NKVD spy school of 1934 and then follows their fortunes across Europe, to the Spain of the Civil War, to Paris, to Prague and Switzerland, to the gulags of Siberia and the horrors of the Warsaw ghetto, in a Europe beset by espionage, conspiracy, treachery and murder.

1991 Dark Star The story of Russian Jew André Szara, foreign correspondent for Pravda, who finds himself recruited into the NKVD and entering a maze of conspiracies, based in Paris but taking him to Prague, Berlin and onto Poland – in the early parts of which he struggles to survive in the shark-infested world of espionage, to conduct a love affair with a young German woman, and to help organise a network smuggling German Jews to Palestine; then later, as Poland is invaded by Nazi Germany, finds himself on the run across Europe. (390 pages)

1995 The Polish Officer A long, exhausting chronicle of the many adventures of Captain Alexander de Milja, Polish intelligence officer who carries out assignments in Nazi-occupied Poland and then Nazi-occupied Paris and then, finally, in freezing wintertime Poland during the German attack on Russia.

1996 The World at Night A year in the life of French movie producer Jean Casson, commencing on the day the Germans invade in June 1940, following his ineffectual mobilisation into a film unit which almost immediately falls back from the front line, his flight, and return to normality in occupied Paris where he finds himself unwittingly caught between the conflicting claims of the Resistance, British Intelligence and the Gestapo. (304 pages)

1999 Red Gold Sequel to the World At Night, continuing the adventures of ex-film producer Jean Casson in the underworld of occupied Paris and in various Resistance missions across France. (284 pages)

2000 Kingdom of Shadows Hungarian exile in Paris, Nicholas Morath, undertakes various undercover missions to Eastern Europe at the bidding of his uncle, Count Janos Polanyi, a kind of freelance espionage controller in the Hungarian Legation. Once more there is championship sex, fine restaurants and dinner parties in the civilised West, set against shootouts in forests, beatings by the Romanian police, and fire-fights with Sudeten Germans, in the murky East.

2003 Blood of Victory Russian émigré writer, Ilya Serebin, gets recruited into a conspiracy to prevent the Nazis getting their hands on Romania’s oil, though it takes a while to realise who’s running the plot – Count Polanyi – and on whose behalf – Britain’s – and what it will consist of – sinking tugs carrying huge turbines at a shallow stretch of the river Danube, thus blocking it to oil traffic. (298 pages)

2004 Dark Voyage In fact numerous voyages made by the tramp steamer Noordendam and its captain Eric DeHaan, after it is co-opted to carry out covert missions for the Allied cause, covering a period from 30 April to 23 June 1941. Atmospheric and evocative, the best of the last three or four. (309 pages)

2006 The Foreign Correspondent The adventures of Carlo Weisz, an Italian exile from Mussolini living in Paris in 1938 and 1939, as Europe heads towards war. He is a journalist working for Reuters and co-editor of an anti-fascist freesheet, Liberazione, and we see him return from Civil War Spain, resume his love affair with a beautiful German countess in Nazi Berlin, and back in Paris juggle conflicting requests from the French Sûreté and British Secret Intelligence Service, while dodging threats from Mussolini’s secret police.

2008 The Spies of Warsaw The adventures of Jean Mercier, French military attaché in Warsaw between autumn 1937 and spring 1938, during which he has an affair with sexy young Anna Szarbek, helps two Russian defectors flee to France, is nearly murdered by German agents and, finally, though daring initiative, secures priceless documents indicating German plans to invade France through the Ardennes – which his criminally obtuse superiors in the French High Command choose to ignore!

2010 Spies of the Balkans The adventures of Costa Zannis, senior detective in the northern Greek port of Salonika, who is instrumental in setting up an escape route for Jews from Berlin through Eastern Europe down into Greece and then on into neutral Turkey. The story is set against the attempted Italian invasion of Greece (28 October 1940) through to the German invasion (23 April 1941).

2012 Mission to Paris The adventures of Hollywood movie star Fredrick Stahl, who travels to Paris to make a movie and becomes embroiled in increasingly sinister Nazi attempts to bully, blackmail and intimidate him into making pro-German or at least pacifist statements, and then gets caught up in actual espionage with more and more at stake.

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by Simon on April 2, 2026 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Spy novel, Thriller

Tagged 1930s, Alan Furst, Alexander de Milja, American fiction, André Szara, Anna Szarbek, Blood of Victory, British Intelligence, British Secret Service, Carlo Weisz, Civil War Spain, Communism, conspiracy, Costa Zannis, Count Janos Polanyi, Count Polanyi, Dark Star, Dark Voyage, Eastern Europe, Eric Ambler, Eric DeHaan, espionage, Europe, fascism, fiction, Fredrick Stahl, French Surete, Graham Greene, historical spy novel, Ilya Serebin, Italian invasion of Greece, Jean Casson, Jean Mercier, Kingdom of Shadows, Liberazione, Mission to Paris, murder, Mussolini, Nazi Germany, Nazi-occupied Paris, Nazi-occupied Poland, Nicholas Morath, Night Soldiers, NKVD, Noordendam, Paris, Prague, Pravda, Red Gold, River Danube, Romania, Salonika, Siberia, Spanish Civil War, Spies of the Balkans, spy fiction, The Brasserie Heininger, The Foreign Correspondent, the Gestapo, The Polish Officer, The Resistance, The Spies of Warsaw, The World at Night, thriller, treachery, Warsaw ghetto

Posted by Simon on April 2, 2026

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2026/04/02/alan-furst-reviews/

The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse (1938)

The sinister affair of Gussie Fink-Nottle, Madeline Bassett, old Pop Bassett, Stiffy Byng, the
Rev HP (‘Stinker’) Pinker, the eighteenth-century cow-creamer and the small brown leather-covered notebook.
(Bertie summarises the plot at the beginning)

‘Man and boy, Jeeves,’ I said, breaking a thoughtful silence which had lasted for about eighty-seven
miles, ‘I have been in some tough spots in my time, but this one wins the mottled oyster.’
(and the plot hasn’t really kicked in yet)

‘Travel is highly educational, sir.’
‘I can’t do with any more education. I was full up years ago.’
(Servant and Master repartee)

‘Good old blackmail ! You can’t beat it. I’ve always said so and I always shall. It works like magic in an emergency.’
(Aunt Dahlia proving what a good egg she is)

‘Didn’t you tell me once that the Code of the Woosters was “Never let a pal down”?’
(Stiffy explaining the title of the book)

‘The Code of the Woosters’ is the third full-length novel to feature Bertie Wooster and his valet Jeeves.

The Jeeves and Wooster narratives come in two forms: in the 1920s Wodehouse published about 35 J&W short stories; thereafter he switched to novels and wrote 11 novels (from 1934 to the last one, in 1974). What’s interesting is the way the novels refer back to events in the short stories. It’s as if the short stories defined a sort of palette of colours, which he then invoked in the larger canvases of the novels. To be less pretentious, the novels regularly refer back to incidents featured in the stories, say something like ‘Remember old so-and-so; it was him I was involved with in the adventure of the so-and-so’. Thus at various points Bertie, the posh dim narrator, reminds us:

that his Aunt Dahlia edits a lady’s magazine to which he once contributed an article (as told in ‘Clustering Round Young Bingo’)
that Madeline Bassett’s father is a judge who once fined him £5 for disorderly conduct (as told in ‘Without The Option’)
of the occasion when Gussie Fink-Nottle gave a speech at a school prize-giving while very drunk (in the previous novel in the series, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves”))
(twice) of the time Roberta Wickham persuaded him to sneak into the bedroom of a fellow guest at a country house and puncture his hot-water bottle with a darning-needle on the end of a stick (‘Jeeves and the Yule-Tide Spirit’)
of the time when the American millionaire J. Washburn Stoker kidnapped Bertie who escaped by blacking up with boot polish to pretend to be part of a minstrel party (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
the time a temporary replacement for Jeeves named Brinkley, tried to attack Bertie with a carving knife then set fire to his cottage (‘Thank You, Jeeves’)
the time Bertie had to look after his Aunt Agatha’s dog (‘Jeeves and the Dog McIntosh’)
the time Bertie saved the Cabinet Minister A.B. Filmer from a wild swan (‘Jeeves and the Impending Doom’)

The effect is very much to create a world of its own, full of references to a fairly small number of characters in its orbit. Bertie himself is made to notice the fact:

It bore out what I often say—viz, that it’s a small world.

Except that it is very much not a small world. It is a very big world with over 8 billion people in it who mostly speak languages you and I can’t speak, and hold values and beliefs we can’t relate to. Which is why it’s so comfy and reassuring to retreat to a small, hermetically sealed and safe place like WoosterWorld.

The cup of tea on arrival at a country house is a thing which, as a rule, I particularly enjoy. I like the crackling logs, the shaded lights, the scent of buttered toast, the general atmosphere of leisured cosiness.

Nothing wrong with that. Highfalutin’ critics like to claim that fiction engages with the world, subverts this or that power structure etc, missing the obvious point that sitting in a quiet room or train or plane, quietly reading a novel is more or less the opposite of engaging with the world.

The Mixture as Before

When Somerset Maugham published a volume of short stories in 1936 The Times rather rudely described it as ‘the mixture as before’. This nettled Maugham so much that he titled his next short story The Mixture As Before. The same could be said of Wodehouse’s Jeeves and Wooster novels. He had established a set of comic conventions for the series, including:

Bertie struggles to find the right word

There was a brief and—if that’s the word I want—pregnant silence.
A confirmed recluse you would have called him, if you had happened to know the word.
She made what I believe is known as a moue…. Is it moue?.. Shoving out the lips, I mean, and drawing them quickly back again.
‘What? Incredulous!’
‘Incredible, sir.’
‘Thank you, Jeeves. Incredible!’
‘Spode, qua menace… is it qua?’
‘Yes, sir. Quite correct.’
‘I thought so.’

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

‘You remember that fellow you’ve mentioned to me once or twice, who let something wait upon something? You know who I mean the cat chap.’
‘Macbeth, sir, a character in a play of that name by the late William Shakespeare. He was described as letting ‘I dare not’ wait upon ‘I would, ‘like the poor cat i’ th’ adage.’
‘Well, that’s how it is with me. I wabble, and I vacillate—if that’s the word?’
‘Perfectly correct, sir.’

The joke in this one is you have to know that ‘The Sensitive Plant’ is the name of a poem by the Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, the kind of thing soppy Madeline knows and Bertie is clueless about.

‘I remembered something Jeeves had once called Gussie–’A sensitive plant, what?’
‘Exactly. You know your Shelley, Bertie.’
‘Oh, am I?’

Shelley crops up again later on:

After what Gussie had said, I ought to have been expecting Stiffy, of course. Seeing an Aberdeen terrier, I should have gathered that it belonged to her. I might have said to myself : If Scotties come, can Stiffy be far behind?

Which is a reference to Shelley’s well-known poem, ‘Ode to the West Wind’, the line being ‘If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?’ Mind you, Bertie can pull off the big quotes when he wants to; in a previous novel he referred to Keats’s sonnet ‘On First Looking Into Chapman’s Homer and he goes to town on the key lines here.

Pop Bassett, like the chap in the poem which I had to write out fifty times at school for introducing a white mouse into the English Literature hour, was plainly feeling like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, while Aunt Dahlia and Constable Oates resembled respectively stout Cortez staring at the Pacific and all his men looking at each other with a wild surmise, silent upon a peak in Darien.

And it’s not just Bertie who struggles with classic quotes and has to be put right by Jeeves. Here’s Stiffy struggling to remember the right name of a literary character:

You remind me of Carter Patterson… no, that’s not it… Nick Carter… no, not Nick Carter… Who does Mr Wooster remind me of, Jeeves?’
‘Sidney Carton, miss.’
‘That’s right. Sidney Carton.’

That would be the Sidney Carton who ends up being the hero of Charles Dickens’ novel ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ by offering to lay down his life to be executed by the French revolutionaries so that the male lead of the story, Charles Darnay, can escape. Not that Bertie sees him as the hero. Later on he reflects:

I drew no consolation from the fact that Stiffy Byng thought me like Sidney Carton. I had never met the chap, but I gathered that he was somebody who had taken it on the chin to oblige a girl, and to my mind this was enough to stamp him as a priceless ass.

Jeeves’s literary quotes

It feels slightly new that Jeeves recites famous literary quotations in their entirety, not prompted by Bertie, with the comic intention of showing that Bertie hasn’t a clue what he’s on about. Mostly from Shakespeare because it’s a fair bet that Wodehouse’s original audience should have known their Shakespeare:

‘I quite understand, sir. And thus the native hue of resolution is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, and enterprises of great pitch and moment in this regard their currents turn awry and lose the name of action.’
‘Exactly. You take the words out of my mouth.’
(Shakespeare: Hamlet)

‘Childe Roland to the dark tower came, sir,’ said Jeeves, as we alighted, though what he meant I hadn’t an earthly.
(Shakespeare: King Lear)

I remember Jeeves saying to me once, apropos of how you can never tell what the weather’s going to do, that full many a glorious morning had he seen flatter the mountain tops with sovereign eye and then turn into a rather nasty afternoon.
(The italicised phrase is from Shakespeare, Sonnet 33)

Jeeves and clothes

In almost all the stories, right at the start Jeeves and Bertie have a falling out over an item of clothing, there follows the long complicated narrative, and by the end of the story Bertie is so grateful to him for solving everything that he gives in. Not in this one. But there are still some choice ‘clothes moments’. Bertie is getting dressed for dinner when Jeeves advises a quarter inch adjustment in the trousers, prompting Bertie to say:

‘There are moments, Jeeves, when one asks oneself “Do trousers matter?”‘
‘The mood will pass, sir.’

In this case, the plan which starts the story, Jeeves’s wish which Bertie categorically refuses but then, by the end of the complex series of events, finds himself exhaustedly acquiescing in, is the idea of going on a cruise.

The comic strategy of stating the obvious

I call her a ghastly girl because she was a ghastly girl. The Woosters are chivalrous, but they can speak their minds.

The antique shop in the Brompton Road proved, as foreshadowed, to be an antique shop in the Brompton Road.

I spoke with satirical bitterness, and I should have thought that anyone could have seen that satirical bitterness was what I was speaking with.

He had been looking like a man who had missed the finer shades, and he still looked like a man who had missed the finer shades.

Clash of registers

It’s a tried and tested comic trope to have two characters who speak in different registers – the straight man who expresses things in a high-falutin pretentious style, and then the comic who puts it in the crudest demotic. Jeeves and Wooster embody a variation on this comic trope. Bertie expresses something in his poshboy slang and then Jeeves repeats the same idea but expressed in his refined, restrained, verbosely intellectual manner. The result = comic contrast.

‘You agree with me that the situation is a lulu?’
‘Certainly a somewhat sharp crisis in your affairs would appear to have been precipitated, sir.’

The village constable

Speaking of registers, Wodehouse briefly gives the village constable a comic accent, the tone of the officious provincial copper.

‘I was proceeding along the public highway,’ he began, in a slow, measured tone, as if he were giving evidence in court, ‘and the dorg leaped at me in a verlent manner. I was zurled from my bersicle.’

Abbreviations

Either a) trimming a word of a few syllables or b) paring it right back to the first letter. Sometimes a little hard to follow.

Trimmed

And now it was plain that he was hep.

I uttered an exclamash.

That is the posish, I fear.

I had managed to put in two or three hours’ sleep in my cubicle, and that, taken in conjunction with the healing flow of persp. in the hot room and the plunge into the icy tank, had brought the roses back to my cheeks to no little extent.

The gravity of the situash had at last impressed itself upon her.

It was entirely owing to Stiffy that I found myself in my present predic.

One letter

I told the man to take me to the nearest Turkish bath. It is always my practice to linger over a Turkish b.

That sojourn of mine in the T. bath had done much to re-establish the mens sana in corpore
what-not.

I sank into a c. and passed an agitated h. over the b.

‘Let me explain, aged r.’

I sank into the chair which she had vacated, and mopped the b.

The sight of Gussie and Madeline Bassett sitting side by side at the other end of the table turned the food to ashes in my m.

‘You’re talking absolute rot,’ she said, but it was with a quaver in the v.

I turned on the h. again.

Kipling was right. D. than the m. No getting round it.

I proceeded to work off the pent-up f’s.

I let out a mirthless l.

Formulaic phraseology

Homer is famous for coining poetic phrases or formulas to describe common objects (rosy-fingered dawn, wine-coloured sea) and Wodehouse does something similar by devising humorous phrases for common elements in Bertie’s life. They’re a sort of Metonymy which is ‘a figure of speech where a word or phrase is replaced by another’, in this instance by related adjectives but shorn of the expected noun – so in that respect also a kind of abbreviation.

I was able to imbibe about a fluid ounce of the hot and strengthening before he spoke. [tea]

Her eyes were misty with the unshed, and about the size of soup plates. [tears]

Inappropriate

Related to which is using inappropriate terminology, often using phrases normally used to describe inanimate objects to people, as if from sales brochures advertising houses or cars.

I looked round. Those parted lips… Those saucerlike eyes… That slender figure, drooping slightly at the hinges…

For Madeline Bassett was undeniably of attractive exterior—slim, svelte, if that’s the word, and bountifully equipped with golden hair and all the fixings.

Slang phrases

Sometimes Bertie uses phrases which may reflect the slang of his class but are obscure to us.

In that shop, on the other hand, he had given the impression of a man who has found the blue bird. [?]

After that exhibition of his at the prizegiving, she handed Gussie the mitten. [dumped him]

The news of the betrothal was, therefore, conveyed to him by letter, and I imagine that the dear girl must have hauled up her slacks about me in a way that led him to suppose that what he was getting was a sort of cross between Robert Taylor and Einstein. [boasted]

‘Suppose old Bassett does find that book, what do you think will ensue?’ I could answer that one. ‘He would immediately put the bee on the wedding.’ [cancel]

‘Consult Jeeves, you mean?’ I shook the lemon. [head]

Stiffy’s map, as a rule, tends to be rather grave and dreamy. [face]

I can testify that when you are riding [a bicycle] without your hands, privacy and a complete freedom from interruption are of the essence. The merest suggestion of an unexpected Scottie connecting with the ankle-bone, at such a time, and you swoop into a sudden swerve. And, as everybody knows, if the hands are not firmly on the handlebars, a sudden swerve spells a smeller.

The nibs [higher-ups, those in authority, clever ones, superiors]

‘Ha!’ said Spode, and biffed off with a short, sharp laugh. [left, walked away]

I got into the full soup and fish, and was immediately conscious of a marked improvement. [evening dress]

Brass rags had been parted by the young couple… [they’d broken up]

I racked the bean. [head, brain, mind]

‘Who do you think you are, coming strolling into a girl’s bedroom, sticking on dog about the right way and the wrong way of pinching helmets?’

I lit a cigarette and proceeded to stress the moral lesson to be learned from all this rannygazoo.

Aunt Dahlia’s insults

In the second novel it became noticeable how Aunt Dahlia lost no opportunity to cheerfully insult Bertie and the pattern continues here. She calls him:

‘Hello, ugly’
my little chickadee
young hound

What feels new is that Bertie feels confident enough to bandy friendly nicknames right back at her, to her face calling her:

aged relative
my fluttering old aspen
my dear old mysterious hinter
old ancestor
old flesh and blood
old thicker than water
My dear old faulty reasoner
my misguided old object

Jeeves’s wisdom

‘We are as little children, frightened of the dark, and Jeeves is the wise nurse who takes us by the hand and–’,
‘Switches the light on?’
‘Precisely.’

Sir Roderick Spode

Rather surprisingly, this Sir Roderick Spode turns out to be leader of a Fascist party i.e. is a satire on the real-world English fascist leader, Oswald Mosely.

‘Don’t you ever read the papers ? Roderick Spode is the founder and head of the Saviours of Britain, a Fascist organization better known as the Black Shorts. His general idea, if he doesn’t get knocked on the head with a bottle in one of the frequent brawls in which he and his followers indulge, is to make himself a Dictator.’

Bertie clarifies an important element:

‘By the way, when you say ‘ shorts,’ you mean ‘ shirts,’ of course.’
‘No. By the time Spode formed his association, there were no shirts left. He and his adherents wear black shorts.’
‘Footer bags, you mean?’
‘Yes.’
‘How perfectly foul.’
‘Yes.’
‘Bare knees?’
‘Bare knees.’
‘Golly!’
‘Yes.’

Spode is a huge, threatening bully right up to the moment when Bertie discovers he has a dark secret and threatens to reveal it – at which point he becomes oilily sycophantic i.e. like all bullies, can be instantly deflated. When pressed, right at the end of the novel, Jeeves reveals Spode’s guilty secret: it is that he moonlights as a designer of women’s underclothing and is the uncredited owner of the emporium in Bond Street known as Eulalie Soeurs. Would ruin his reputation as a manly Fascist if that ever came out. A ludicrous puncture of his sub-Mussolinian braggadocio.

Plot

This third Jeeves and Wooster novel feels longer and even more insanely complicated than its predecessors. Wodehouse has this reputation for comedy and I start off loving the tone and characters but do rather find that halfway through the novels they begin to seem quite long, and the blizzard of farcically improbable twists and turns does, eventually, become quite wearing. I’m always very relieved as I enter the final furlongs.

As briefly as I can:

Uncle Tom Travers is a collector of silverware and has his eye on a fine silver cow creamer at an antique shop on the Brompton Road. His wife, Bertie Wooster’s Aunt Dahlia, wants Tom not to buy it, as she needs to touch him for money to fund her magazine, Milady’s Boudoir, particularly as she has just signed up an expensive lady novelist to write some articles for it.

In the event the cow creamer is purchased by Sir Watkyn Bassett, the odious magistrate who fined Bertie £5 for drunkenly stealing a policeman’s helmet a few years earlier, and who has now retired to his country estate, Totleigh Towers. This Bassett has a daughter, soppy Madeline Bassett, who’s still in love with the hopeless newt-fancier, Bertie’s friend Gussie Fink-Nottle, who Sir Watkyn thoroughly disapproves of. At the same time, Bassett’s niece, Stephanie ‘Stiffy’ Byng, who lives at the Towers, is in love with the local curate, another old college pal of Bertie’s, one Harold ‘Stinker’ Pinker. Another guest of Sir Watkyns is a giant of a man called Roderick Spode—leader of a silly fascist organisation called the Black Shorts—who takes an instant dislike to Bertie when he happens to bump into him in the Brompton Road antique shop, and keeps a fierce and jealous eye over Stephanie Byng. There’s one last element which is that Gussie, a guest at Totleigh Towers, has been keeping a notebook containing very unflattering portraits of both Bassett and Spode.

Right. That’s a summary of the cast and main issues. The ball gets rolling when Bertie is summoned to Totleigh by a telegram from Madeline, asking his help to sort out her troubled engagement to Gussie; but he has simultaneously been instructed to get his hands on the silver cow creamer, in order to placate her husband Tom. Then Stiffy arbitrarily decides to test her boyfriend Harold’s devotion to her, by demanding that he knock off and steal the helmet of the local constable, Oates, because she thinks he’s been beastly to her beloved dog, Bartholomew. Then Gussie stupidly manages to lose the notebook full of incriminating descriptions of Bassett and Spode.

For an impressive 300 pages, Wodehouse manages to wring every conceivable variation on these themes, having all the couples fall out with each other, make impossible demands, threaten Bertie, while the silver cow, the notebook and the policeman’s helmet all get stolen, stolen again, hidden, found, searched for, accompanied by all manner of threats and blackmail between various characters far too complicated to set down in detail.

In the end it is Jeeves who saves the day, managing to blackmail both Sir Watkyn (with a suit for malicious libel and damages) and Spode (with revealing his guilty secret) into acquiescing in the marriages of the two young couples, and releasing Bertie from the various charges he faced. This is because, at various points, Bertie is angrily accused of stealing all the two central objects – the cow creamer and the policemen’s helmet – which he keeps being caught red-handed with because the actual thieves (Aunt Dahlia and Stiffy, respectively) dump them on him at incriminating moments – anyway, once all the comic complications have been utterly wrung out of the plot, Jeeves manages to get Bertie cleared of all charges, in return for which, as I mentioned above, Bertie acquiesces in Jeeves’s wish to go for a big cruise.

Cast

Bertie Wooster – narrator of the stories, amusingly dim upper-class layabout
Jeeves – his suave and hyper-intelligent valet
Aunt Dahlia aka Mrs Dahlia Travers
Uncle Tom Travers – her husband, famous for his delicate digestion, and (newly introduced in this novel) a keen silverware collector:

This uncle is a bird who, sighting a nephew, is apt to buttonhole him and become a bit informative on the subject of sconces and foliation, not to mention scrolls, ribbon wreaths in high relief and gadroon borders, and it seemed to me that silence was best.

Anatole – their legendary cook, from Provence
Gussie Fink-Nottle – ‘a fish-faced pal of mine who, on reaching man’s estate, had buried himself in the country and devoted himself entirely to the study of newts’
Madeline Bassett – ‘A droopy, soupy, sentimental exhibit, with melting eyes and a cooing voice and the most extraordinary views on such things as stars and rabbits’
Sir Watkyn Bassett, CBE – retired judge, father of Madeline, residing at Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Gloucestershire
- Butterfield – his butler
Sir Roderick Spode – guest of Sir Watkyn’s and leader of the Fascist organisation, the Saviours of England; according to Bertie a ‘Big chap with a small moustache and the sort of eye that can open an oyster at sixty paces’
Pomona Grindle – popular novelist – funny how popular novelists like Wodehouse or Agatha Christie, enjoy putting fictional popular novelists into their novels to satirise
Miss Stephanie Byng aka Stiffy – Madeline’s cousin, who lives at Totleigh Towers
- Bartholomew – her dog
Constable Oates – the local policeman
Harold Pinker aka Stinker Pinker – village curate who Stiffy’s engaged to – ‘a large, lumbering, Newfoundland puppy of a chap—full of zeal, yes—always doing his best, true, but never quite able to make the grade; a man, in short, who if there was a chance of bungling an enterprise and landing himself in the soup, would snatch at it’

The Junior Ganymede club

The Junior Ganymede is a club for gentlemen’s personal gentlemen in Curzon Street, to which Jeeves has belonged for some years. Under Rule Eleven, every new member is required to supply the club with full information regarding his employer. This not only provides entertaining reading, but serves as a warning to members who may be contemplating taking service with gentlemen who fall short of the ideal.

Menus

I have often lamented that in the majority of Great Literature people regularly have meals, lunches and dinners, but the author never tells you what they ate, which is extremely frustrating. In this book there’s a rare mention of a complete menu of a country house dinner:

Grade A soup (content unknown)
a toothsome fish (species unknown)
a salmi of game which
asparagus
a jam omelette
some spirited sardines on toast

A jam omelette?

On aunts

One minute aunts are the bane of his life:

‘If I had my life to live again, Jeeves, I would start it as an orphan without any aunts. Don’t they put aunts in Turkey in sacks and drop them in the Bosphorus?’
‘Odalisques, sir, I understand. Not aunts.’
‘Well, why not aunts ? Look at the trouble they cause in the world. I tell you, Jeeves, and you may quote me as saying this—Behind every poor, innocent, harmless blighter who is going down for the third time in the soup, you will find, if you look carefully enough, the aunt who shoved him into it.’

But on the other hand:

‘I should have known better than to doubt Aunt Dahlia. Aunts always know. It’s a sort of intuition.’

Why so many aunts? And why are aunts such figures of fun? Aunts dominate almost all the J&W stories and crop up in many others outside the series. They are also prominent in works by other popular authors as figures of fun, such as Agatha Christie. Why? Two big reasons.

1. Because aunts are parent replacements. They are parents but without the strict control of parents. They are representatives of the older and so, in theory, controlling generation, the generation which should bridle and control the young, but without any of an actual parent’s actual legal responsibilities and duties. This is partly why they’re figures of fun: they’re parents but stripped of all actual parental authority.

2. Because they’re female. A hundred years ago fathers were figures with total legal control over their children until they reached the age of 21, as well as dominating moral and psychological power. An uncle is a male authority figure from the parental generation but, typically, stripped of responsibility, is classically considered a more approachable and sympathetic figure, someone you can turn to for help and advice, maybe. Whereas an aunt is two times removed from the figure of authority being a) not the legal guardian and b) a female, and so one step removed from the classically male patriarchal authority role.

Why are they funny, exactly? Tradition

P.S. Mind you, the whole point of the 1920s was the widespread feeling that the younger generation scorned parental control, something Bertie himself comments on:

A glance at her [Madeline] was enough to tell one that she belonged to that small group of girls who still think a parent should have something to say about things…

Bertie on girls and women

This aunt is a formidable old creature, when stirred.

Earnest Americans, academics and feminists have plenty of ammunition to denounce Bertie – and through him, Wodehouse – as a misogynist. Certainly he misses no opportunity to roll his eyes about women, and the underlying premise of the stories is his morbid fear of ever losing his bachelor status and getting hitched to a woman. I read it, I’m aware of it, but I read it as a comic trope, like Bertie’s own stupidity, his heedless drunkenness, like Jeeves’s Godlike omniscience, like the bad-tempered old judge, the priceless chef, and so on. They’re all stereotypes. But for the record I’ll record some of the grosser incidences.

I stared at the young pill, appalled at her moral code, if you could call it that. You know, the more I see of women, the more I think that there ought to be a law. Something has got to be done about this sex, or the whole fabric of Society will collapse, and then what silly asses we shall all look.

When you really read many of these comments them, you realise the real victim of them is Bertie, because any time he expresses any opinion about anything, he reveals what a dimwit he is.

‘I am implying nothing derogatory to your cousin Madeline, when I say that the idea of being united to her in the bonds of holy wedlock is one that freezes the gizzard. The fact is in no way to her discredit. I should feel just the same about marrying many of the world’s noblest women. There are certain females whom one respects, admires, reveres, but only from a distance. If they show any signs of attempting to come closer, one is prepared to fight them off with a blackjack.

If you wanted to take a feminist line, I suppose you could say that, no matter how humorously intended, the anti-women sentiments which are found throughout Wodehouse’s works are just one more brick in the huge wall of misogynistic patriarchy which dominated British society until late in the 20th century and can, of course, still be found in many places. I.e. the humorous context doesn’t count, or doesn’t invalidate the essentially negative attitude. Whether funny or not, it’s still negative.

‘You know, Jeeves,’ I said, ‘when you really start to look into it, it’s perfectly amazing how the opposite sex seems to go out of its way to snooter me. You recall Miss Wickham and the hot-water bottle?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Gwladys what-was-her-name, who put her boy friend with the broken leg to bed in my flat?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘And Pauline Stoker, who invaded my rural cottage at dead of night in a bathing suit?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘What a sex! What a sex, Jeeves! But none of that sex, however deadlier than the male, can be ranked in the same class with this Stiffy.’

Or:

‘She wasn’t kidding. She meant business. She was fully aware that she was doing something which even by female standards was raw, but she didn’t care. The whole fact of the matter is that all this modem emancipation of women has resulted in them getting it up their noses and not giving a damn what they do. It was not like this in Queen Victoria’s day. The Prince Consort would have had a word to say about a girl like Stiffy, what?’

It’s a literally humourless interpretation, but I’m sympathetic to it…

Bertie and Sherlock and Hercule

In my review of the previous novel, ‘Right Ho, Jeeves’, I pointed out the surprisingly large influence on Wodehouse of Sherlock Holmes, so much so that Bertie refers to his adventures as ‘cases’ and the people who come to him and Jeeves for help as ‘clients’. And very obviously the entire idea of a partnership solving problems, one of whom is the super-intelligent problem-solver while the other is his dim sidekick (i.e. Jeeves and Wooster), obviously echoes Holmes and Watson.

The Holmes influence is toned down in this novel so that there’s only one reference to Watson and one to Holmes. Instead what surprised me is that Wodehouse chucks in a reference to Hercule Poirot! It’s an interesting indication of how Christie’s detective had penetrated so deeply into popular culture that he could be jokily referenced in other popular fiction.

I mean, imagine how some unfortunate Master Criminal would feel, on coming down to do a murder at the old Grange, if he found that not only was Sherlock Holmes putting in the weekend there, but Hercule Poirot, as well!

But in fact there’s more to it than that. Wodehouse deliberately drops a number of Christie references throughout the novel, turning the text itself into a sort of Christie-esque mystery.

Bertie is reading a murder mystery

To while away the time I pulled the arm-chair up and got out the mystery story I had brought with me from London. As my researches in it had already shown me, it was a particularly good one, full of crisp clues and meaty murders and I was soon absorbed.

And the novel even gives him clues what to do, as when he’s looking for the hidden notebook and the mystery he’s reading has the detective recommend looking on top of the suspect’s wardrobe.

Comparison with thrillers: Here’s Bertie recruiting Jeeves to help him write out a summary of the situation:

‘I think it would help if we did what they do in the thrillers. Do you ever read thrillers?’
‘Not very frequently, sir.’
‘Well, there’s always a bit where the detective, in order to clarify his thoughts, writes down a list of suspects, motives, times when, alibis, clues and what not. Let us try this plan. Take pencil and paper, Jeeves, and we will assemble the facts. Entitle the thing ‘ Wooster, B.—position of.’

That’s exactly what Poirot does in many of his stories.

Adversary Earlier there’d been a passing reference in a telegram. Bertie had described Bassett being suspicious of him as:

like ambassador finding veiled woman snooping round safe containing secret treaty.

This is precisely what happens in one of Christie’s early spy adventures, The Secret Adversary.

Fiddling Further, in chapter 4 while wondering what to do, Gussie stands at the mantlepiece and fiddles with a statuette on it. This is exactly what Poirot does in many of the Christie stories, rearranging bits and bobs on mantlepieces or desks under the influence of his symmetry obsessive compulsive disorder.

Little grey cells And it becomes unquestionable that Wodehouse is parodying Poirot when a moment later:

He pondered, frowning. Then the little grey cells seemed to stir.

This phrase is copyright Poirot, occurs in all the stories, and lays any doubt to rest.

Psychology Christie was at pains to distinguish Poirot from Holmes in all sorts of ways but one is to make Poirot focus not on material clues but on analysing the psychology of the murderer. Well, it’s no coincidence that throughout this novel Bertie, and others, insist on Jeeves’s superior reading of psychology. It is clearly meant to align him with Christie’s Poirot.

In these delicate matters of psychology [Jeeves] never errs.
‘I think we can find one [a solution], sir, if we approach the matter from the psychological angle.’
‘Oh, psychological?’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘The psychology of the individual?’
‘Precisely, sir.’
‘Jeeves,’ I explained to Stiffy, who, of course, knew the man only slightly, scarcely more, indeed, than as a silent figure that had done some smooth potato-handing when she had lunched at my flat, ‘is and always has been a whale on the psychology of the individual. He eats it alive.’

Gooseflesher Incidentally, Bertie converts the thriller into his own poshboy argot and refers to it as a gooseflesher.

Comic phrases

About seven feet in height, and swathed in a plaid ulster which made him look about six feet across, he caught the eye and arrested it. It was as if Nature had intended to make a gorilla, and had changed its mind at the last moment.

I had described Roderick Spode to the butler as a man with an eye that could open an oyster at sixty paces, and it was an eye of this nature that he was directing at me now. He looked like a Dictator on the point of starting a purge.

‘Oh, Bertie,’ she said, in a low voice like beer trickling out of a jug, ‘you ought not to be here.’

She looked at me like someone who has just solved the crossword puzzle with a shrewd ‘Emu’ in the top right-hand corner.

Stiffy stood for a moment looking after him a bit yearningly, like a girl who wished that she had half a brick handy.

I turned to Aunt Dahlia, who was making noises like a motorbicycle in the background.

Animal similes

He paused, and swallowed convulsively, like a Pekingese taking a pill.

The Dictator had to shove his oar in. He asked if he should call a policeman, and old Bassett’s eyes gleamed for a moment. Being a magistrate makes you love the idea of calling policemen. It’s like a tiger tasting blood.

I turned to Gussie, who was now looking like a bewildered halibut.

He gave me a hard stare. The eyes behind the spectacles were cold. He looked like an annoyed turbot.

Old Bassett had been listening to these courtesies with a dazed expression on the map—gulping a bit from time to time, like a fish that has been hauled out of a pond on a bent pin and isn’t at all sure it is equal to the pressure of events.

I now gazed at him hopefully, like a seal awaiting a bit of fish.

However, the last female had no sooner passed through the door than Gussie, who had been holding it open, shot after her like a diving duck and did not return.

He was staring incredulously, like one bitten by a rabbit.

She snorted like a bison at the water-trough.

Old Bassett, who had gone into a coma again, came out of it and uttered a sound like the death-rattle of a dying duck.

There came the sound of furniture being dragged away, and presently the door opened and his head emerged cautiously, like that of a snail taking a look round after a thunderstorm.

I don’t say I didn’t leave my chair like a jackrabbit that has sat on a cactus.

The Drones club

Wodehouse’s fictitious Drones Club was located in Dover Street, off Piccadilly. A drone is a male bee that does no work and lives off the labour of others so the name is a satire on the 1920s stereotype of rich, idle young men. The Drones Club appears in not just the Jeeves and Wooster stories, but the Psmith and Blandings series, as well as others. Members mentioned in this book are:

Bertie
Freddie Widgeon
Bingo Little
Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright
Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps
Oofy Prosser

Addresses

Bertie’s address:

Bertram Wooster
Berkeley Mansions
Berkeley Square
London

Aunt Dahlia’s address:

Mrs Dahlia Travers
47 Charles Street
Berkeley Square
London.

Credit

‘The Code of the Woosters’ was published in 1938 by Herbert Jenkins. I read it online.

Related reviews

P.G. Wodehouse reviews

This lax post-war world

She was naming the Price of the Papers. In other words, after being blackmailed by an aunt at breakfast, I was now being blackmailed by a female crony before dinner. Pretty good going, even for this lax post-war world.

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by Simon on December 8, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, English literature, Novel

Tagged A Tale of Two Cities, A.B. Filmer, abbreviations, Aberdeen terrier, Anatole, Aunt Dahlia, Barmy Fotheringay-Phipps, Bartholomew, Bertie Wooster, Bingo Little, Black Shorts, Bond Street, braggadocio, Brompton Road, Butterfield, Catsmeat Potter-Pirbright, Charles Dickens, comic novel, Comic simile, Constable Oates, Curzon Street, dictator, Dover Street, Dr Watson, Drones Club, Einstein, Eulalie Soeurs, fascism, Feminism, fiction, Freddie Widgeon, Gloucestershire, gooseflesher, Gussie Fink-Nottle, Hamlet, Harold Pinker, Herbert Jenkins, Hercule Poirot, humour, J. Washburn Stoker, Jeeves, Jeeves and Wooster, Junior Ganymede, Keats, King Lear, Kipling, little grey cells, Macbeth, Madeline Bassett, metonymy, Milady's Boudoir, misogyny, Murder Mystery, Mussolini, newts, novel, Ode to the West Wind, Oofy Prosser, Oswald Mosely, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Piccadilly, Poirot, Pomona Grindle, Pop Bassett, Provence, Psychology, Queen Victoria, rannygazoo, Rev HP Pinker, Robert Taylor, Roberta Wickham, Roderick Spode, Shakespeare, Sherlock Holmes, Sidney Carton, silverware, Sir Roderick Spode, Sir Watkyn Bassett, Somerset Maugham, Spode, Stiffy Byng, Stinker Pinker, the Black Shorts, the Code of the Woosters, the Drones Club, The Junior Ganymede club, the Saviours of Britain, The Secret Adversary, The Sensitive Plant, The Times, Totleigh Towers, Totleigh-in-the-Wold, Uncle Tom Travers, Upon Reading Chapman's Homer, WoosterWorld

Posted by Simon on December 8, 2025

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Trouble for Lucia by E.F. Benson (1939)

‘I won’t give up the morning shopping. Besides, one learns all the news then. Why, it would be worse than not having the wireless! I should be lost without it.’
(Georgie Pillson, like all the Mapp and Lucia characters, gaga for gossip)

Only a few minutes ago some catastrophic development seemed likely, and Tilling’s appetite for social catastrophe was keen…
(The endless thirst for gossip)

Her eye had that gimlet-like aspect, which betokened a thirst for knowledge.
(What happened? Any news? What’s the latest?)

Endless interpretations could be put on this absorbing incident…
(Summary of Benson’s technique)

Lucia… went down to the High Street for her marketing. Her mind resembled a modern army attended by an air force and all appliances. It was ready to scout and skirmish, to lay an ambush, to defend or to attack an enemy with explosives from its aircraft or poison gas.
(The unrelenting battle for social supremacy which is the books’ subject)

‘There’s nothing that stings so much as contemptuous oblivion. I have often found that.’
(Lucia’s revenge)

‘Trouble for Lucia’ is a 1939 comic novel written by E.F. Benson. It is the sixth and final novel in the ever-popular Mapp and Lucia series. As you know by now, the novels are set in the town of Tilling, a thinly disguised version of Rye on the Sussex coast where Benson himself lived (and, like his fictional heroine Lucia, served as mayor).

The novels give minute descriptions of the petty rivalries and jealousies among a tiny cohort of characters, the comedy deriving from the discrepancy between the intense triviality of the tiny events described, and the po-faced earnestness of Benson’s treatment. It struck me this could be symbolised by the rich Wyses’ who own an enormous Rolls Royce complete with chauffeur but only ever use it to drive the 50 yards from their house to Lucia’s house, or the 100 yards down to the High Street to go shopping.

The lead characters are Mrs Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas, her long-time friend, lieutenant and piano duet partner, Georgie Pillson, and her bitter rival for supremacy of Tilling’s social scene, Elizabeth Mapp. At one point Georgie says of Lucia that:

That was her real métier, to render the trivialities of life intense for others.

in a phrase which could be Benson describing his own subject matter.

Cast

Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas, now Pillson (since she married Georgie, in the preceding novel)
- Grosvenor – her maid
- Chapman – her chauffeur (I was puzzled whether this was a mistake; the chauffeur is called Cadman in all the other novels)
- Mrs Simpson – the lady she hires to be her secretary
Georgie Pillson – her camp husband, ‘He and his petit point, and his little cape, and his old-maidish ways…’
- Foljambe – his peerless parlour-maid and valet
Elizabeth Mapp-Flint – Lucia’s longstanding enemy
Major Benjamin ‘Benjy’ Mapp-Flint – Elizabeth’s long-suffering husband, plays golf every day, given to sneaking off to have a few whiskeys whenever his wife’s back is turned
Godiva ‘Diva’ Plaistow – along with gay Irene, the only single woman in the set; speaks in telegraphese: ‘Lovely to see you after all this long time. Tea going on. A few friends’ or ‘Two of your councillors here just now. Shillings. Didn’t charge them. Advertisement’; during the course of this novel she sets up a successful tea rooms
- Janet – her maid
- Paddy – her Irish terrier
‘quaint’ Irene Coles – the unshockable lesbian painter – I was staggered to learn in this novel for the first time that she is only 25 years old! (page 196) I thought she was middle-aged like all the others…
- Lucy, her 6-foot-tall maid
Mr Algernon’s Wyse – rich, owner of a Rolls Royce
Mrs Susan Wyse MBE – fat, her ‘immense bulk’, ‘Susan’s great watery smile spread across her face’
Amelia, Contessa di Faraglione – Algernon’s sister, married an Italian count, makes occasional flying visits to Tilling where she’s always hugely amused by the tittle tattle
The Reverend Kenneth Bartlett – vicar, addicted to speaking a weird combination of Highland Scots and Elizabethan English so as to be barely comprehensible
Evie Bartlett – his mousey wife; ‘Evie emitted the mouse-like squeak which denoted intense private amusement’
Olga Bracely – the internationally renowned opera singer, ‘a dream of beauty with her brilliant colouring and her high, arched eyebrows’, who appeared in the first and third novels but has been on a world tour; in those books Georgie was deeply in love with her
Cortese – the Italian composer
Dorothy – Cortese’s English wife
Lady ‘Poppy’ Sheffield – owner of rundown Sheffield Castle, the cause of so much trouble in the final part of the novel, develops an amusing crush on Georgie
Miss Susan Leg – real name of the world-famous novelist, Rudolph da Vinci
Mr Rice – the poulterer
Mr Twistevant – the grocer
Mr McConnell – editor of the Hampshire Argus in which a lot of these shenanigans are reported
Mr Fergus – the dentist
Inspector Morrison – of the Tilling police

Plots and storylines

‘Trouble for Lucia’ takes up very soon after where its predecessor left off. To the reader’s amazement, in the preceding novel, ‘Lucia’s Progress’, the forceful widow Mrs Emmeline ‘Lucia’ Lucas had married her long-time friend, lieutenant and piano duet partner, Georgie Pillson, thus becoming Mrs Pillson.

She had also made herself the most eminent person in the town of Tilling through a string of charitable donations, to the local church, the local hospital, the cricket and football clubs, until she was finally nominated first woman Mayor of Tilling. (For the biographically minded, Benson himself served as Mayor of Rye between 1934 and 1937 so a lot of the detail of council business and formal costume is presumably based on first-hand knowledge.)

This final novel opens at this point: it is October and Lucia’s nomination to Mayor is confirmed but she hasn’t yet taken up office, she’s due to do that in a month’s time. So she’s fussing about related problems. When she’s mayor should she continue to do her own shopping in the high street?

She shares with Georgie her plans: to make Tilling a centre of intellectual and artistic activity, to help the poor, to clear away the old slums, an end to overcrowding, pasteurisation of milk, strict censorship of films, benches in sunny corners, flower boxes in windows, affordable concerts of first-rate music. All very admirable.

Meanwhile, Georgie is offended that no place might be found for him at her inaugural dinner, which is usually restricted to the Corporation, the aldermen, other councillors and so on; until Lucia comes up with a seating suggestion for him. He has bought a red velvet jacket specially, to mark his new status. Lucia has engaged a shorthand and typewriting secretary, a Mrs Simpson, in readiness for her mayoral work.

Today’s gossip: Diva wants to convert her house into a café; Iris has been refused permission by the council to cover her house with a fresco depicting an immense naked woman standing on shell representing motherhood; Susan Wyse has sat on her own pet budgerigar and squashed it flat.

Everyone Lucia and Georgie meet in the High Street asks who she is going to choose to be her Mayoress, and all the usual suspects are soon vying for the post, appealing directly like Diva or getting their partners to send begging letters. This wave of appeals coincides with a dinner and bridge evening Lucia holds at which the different parties make their pitches.

Typically muted comedy as Georgie, immensely proud of the new red velvet jacket he’s ordered, is dismayed to find Mr Wyse turning up in a similar velvet jacket but of sapphire blue. As Diva puts it:

‘Aren’t the Tilling boys getting dressy?’

But Lucia has decided. She will have Elizabeth as her mayoress and invites her round to tell her so. Within an hour Elizabeth has told everyone. Her version is that Lucia begged her to take the post. Lucia doesn’t lower herself to tell the truth which is that Elizabeth had been loitering round her house all day, gagging for the job. And the reality is that Lucia, although she doesn’t put it like this, would, in Lyndon B. Johnson’s words, rather have Elizabeth inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in.

Irene’s photo

Irene is outside her house enjoying the sun and making sketches for her fresco when Elizabeth hoves into view, fresh from Lucia telling her she’ll be her mayoress. Flush with enthusiasm she happily adopts a silly pose for Irene to sketch and take a photo of. But when she goes on to boast of how Lucia begged her to take the role, Irene (a passionate fan of Lucia) knows she’s lying and despises her. When Lucia comes by later on, and tells the true account of the interview, Irene’s suspicions are confirmed and she tells Lucia she will send the photo of Elizabeth in a silly pose to the newspaper, the Hampshire Argus, purporting to be a serious image of the new mayoress.

When the paper uses the disrespectful photo of Elizabeth in their story about the mayoress appointment, Liz and husband Major Flint are furious and Flint sets off for the newspaper offices with a riding-whip which he promises his wife he’ll horsewhip the editor with. But 1) while he waits he has a few nips of the newspaper’s hospitality scotch and 2) the editor turns out to be an imposingly massive man. Combine the two and the result is that a tipsy major not only ends up having a nice chat with Mr McConnell, but brings him home to Grebe (the cottage where Elizabeth and Benjy live) for dinner!

But the repercussions haven’t finished. Drunk Benjy Flint left his riding-whip at the newspaper offices so Elizabeth calls by to collect it. On the way home she stops at Diva’s place, where Diva is testing her tea offering on a few guests (Evie, the Padre and Georgie). Here she 1) puts a brave face on the Benjy-visiting-the-Chronicle story (claiming not to have seen the silly photo of herself, though all present know she has). But 2) she puts the riding-whip down for the duration and it is swiftly grabbed by Diva’s dog Paddy who (unseen by everyone) takes it outside and chews it to pieces. So that when Elizabeth rises to leave she can’t find it anywhere, searches high and low and leaves in high dudgeon. Only later does Diva spot the shiny silver cap of the riding-whip in her garden, attached to some chewed remains and realise her dog has destroyed it. So she guiltily buries the silver cap in her back garden and hopes the whole thing will blow over.

This is typical of how Benson takes the most trivial incidents and spools them into low-key, mildly amusing but very endearing comedy. It’s too low-key to be called farce (which is frantic and extreme), it’s more like charming amusement. And in this particular case, it’s not over yet because the issue of the riding-whip is destined to crop up later in the book…

Mayoring day

The great day arrives and Lucia is inducted as mayor of Tilling amid much pomp and ceremony. Later on she takes the first tea at Diva’s new tea rooms although, as she insists, purely in a personal capacity, as Mrs Pillson – mustn’t lower the dignity of her high office! After tea she and her friends repair to the back room to play bridge (which the characters are all addicted to) while actual paying customers arrive in the front.

Then the mayoral banquet in the evening. Not all the local dignitaries attend, but Lucia makes a fine speech and even gets to play her signature tune, the slow movement from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata, on the piano, to respectful applause. That night she tells a tired Georgie she is determined that a new era in Tilling’s history is about to begin.

The new era

Lucia plunges into teaching herself about planning regulations and zoning policy and scads of other local government concerns. She becomes ‘excruciatingly didactic’, insisting on sharing every particle of her new knowledge with Georgie whose eyes glaze over. Elizabeth is a pest, phoning her bright and early every day: ‘Anything I can do for you, dear Worship?’ she asked. ‘Always at your service.’

She takes to referring to Lucia as ‘dear Worship’, to her face and to all their friends, to the latter’s intense irritation.

The new parsimony

Now that Lucia is mayor, she believes she needs to set an example of frugality and restraint. She orders her maid Grosvenor to prepare more humble meals at home (mutton hash and treacle tart). And decides to set an example to the general population by giving up gambling in the form of the little bets she and her friends have on their bridge games (threepence per hundred points).

In both these Puritan moves she is, of course, under the delusion that anybody in the general population either knows or cares what she does in her private life, but the bridge decision, in particular, upsets her friends. The harmless little stakes they place on their bridge games are what give them their zest and they resent Lucia’s high-handedness. As Diva puts it:

‘She may be Mayor but she isn’t Mussolini.’

The unintended consequences of Lucia ceasing to play bridge for money are 1) all the games when she invites guests round at a stroke become boring and flat, and so 2) the others start inviting Georgie alone to their games, without killjoy Lucia, because he resists Lucia’s new rule and continues to gamble. All of a sudden he finds himself invited everywhere without Lucia. In addition, 3) the group as a whole finds it most congenial to go to Diva’s for tea then cards afterwards. None of the bother of hosting and providing refreshments, and everyone pays their own way. Thus Diva’s cafe becomes a new social haunt, not only for the bridge set but with the town at large, and she’s soon coining it.

The council election

An election approaches for a vacancy on the town council. I don’t understand how, but apparently Elizabeth can stand for this as well as being mayoress. So Lucia persuades Georgie that he must stand against her (Elizabeth). The campaign is briskly described and then the announcement from the steps of the town hall in a howling gale: Elizabeth got 805 votes, Georgie is humiliated with just 421. It is universally seen as a humiliation for Lucia.

Budgie spirituality

I mentioned that right at the start there was gossip about whether large Susan Wyse accidentally sat on her pet budgerigar and squashed it to death. Answer: yes. I neglected to mention that, in a ghoulish development, she attached the wings and body to a hat as decoration (you have to remember how ornate many ladies’ hats were in the 1920s and ’30s). But this theme persists because Susan becomes convinced that she is in touch with the spirit of the dead bird and starts to have budgie séances.

The twist is that, on the afternoon before Lucia is invited to such a séance, Mr Wyse himself appears at her door, explains how his wife is becoming obsessed with the séances, has lost interest in all other activities, and spends hours mulling over the voluminous automatic writings which are generated at each session. Now since the sessions focus round a little shrine to the dead (and reassembled and stuffed) budgie placed on the séance table, Mr Wyse has gone to the subterfuge of stealing the bird when his wife was otherwise busy, wrapping it up, and has brought it to Lucia to hide. Which she agrees to do.

Cut to that evening when Lucia and Georgie arrive at the Wyse house, Starling Cottage. It is of course all ludicrous. Susan is a large lady and is wearing a white dress and a wreath in her hair so she looks like an immense Ophelia. The lights are low and the room is full of incense. In the event Lucia decides to play along, saying the can feel the little bird’s wings fluttering against her cheek and then, just before Susan goes to open the shrine, declares she feels an immense manifestation: ‘Blue Birdie has left us altogether!’ Which is just what Susan discovers when she opens the doors of the little ‘shrine’: the bird has gone. Lucia piles on the deceit, claiming that the bird has spent enough time in the temporal plane and has now decided to depart forever to the spiritual plane and what a good thing that is, leaving Susan puzzled and sad at the loss of her new hobby.

Bicycling

Talking of hobbies, Lucia and Georgie take up a new one, bicycling. They get trainers from the bicycle shop to jog along beside them holding the bicycles upright until they’ve gained enough confidence. Then they feel confident enough to go for trial runs along the flat wet sand of the beach, which has wide enough space for turning, until they’ve mastered that manoeuvre.

And so the grand day comes when they are ready to cycle in unison down to the High Street. Here they encounter the seven or eight people in their circle who are all dazzled by their skills and cycling quickly becomes the new fad of the town. The comic climax comes when Lucia and Georgie decide to be adventurous and cycle out from the town to the country, which first entails going down the steep Landgate Street. Lucia quickly hits such speed that she panics and, instead of pulling her brake rings her bell. When a policeman steps out in front to block the way she’s going far too fast to stop and so, in the manner of an Ealing Comedy, at the last minute he has to leap out of the way. She only narrowly makes the gap between a van and a pedestrian and runs along the flat for some way before finally trundling to a halt.

Next day the Inspector of Police calls to say that one of his officers spotted a female riding a bike at dangerous speed and the bicycle shop confirmed it had recently been sold to her address. Lucia confesses straightaway, insists on signing a summons issued to herself. At the next court sessions she tries a couple of cases with fellow magistrates, before announcing that she needs to take her place in the court, and coming before them as a plaintiff. She pleads guilty to dangerous cycling and is fined 20 shillings. Far from triggering the public shame which Elizabeth hoped for, this little scandal has the opposite effect, with the people of Tilling quietly proud to have such a spirited female mayor, and cycling becomes even more fashionable. Very sweetly:

It became fashionable to career up and down the High Street after dark, when traffic was diminished, and the whole length of it resounded with tinkling bells and twinkled with bicycle lamps.

It’s notable that fat rich Susan Wyse buys a grown-up tricycle, making her an amusing figure, trundling up and down the high street.

Olga Braceley

Back in the first novel in the series, ‘Queen Lucia’, we met the opera singer Olga Bracely who visited and then, for a season, moved into the novel’s setting, the village of Riseholme. She popped up again in ‘Lucia in London’, on both occasions ruffling Georgie’s gay heart and making him fall head-over-heels in love with her.

Now Georgie receives a letter saying she is back again, after an extensive world tour performing in the modern opera Lucrezia composed by the Italian composer Cortese, and she is writing to invite him and Lucia to Covent Garden Opera House for a gala performance.

The trouble is that Lucia has arranged a series of public lectures, starting and ending with ones given by herself, and one of these clashes with the gala night. For once, the worm turns. Georgie has gotten fed up with her municipal obsessions, and insists he will go to the gala night, with or without Lucia which gives Lucia pause.

Public lectures

Back to Lucia’s plan to raise the tone with a series of public lectures. It’s quietly amusing that none of the celebrities she improbably invited (John Gielgud, Sir Henry Wood) can attend and, in fact, not even many Tillingites buy tickets, so she ends up having to give out hundreds of ‘complimentary’ tickets.

Lucia gives the first lecture, on Shakespearian drama, using Lady Macbeth’s soliloquy to demonstrate the simplicity of Shakespeare, no sets, hardly any props, just extreme force of personality and situation. It’s effective, as well as comic moments (the torch she intends to place under her face once the house lights go out, fails to work first time).

The saga of the Major’s riding-whip

Major Flint’s lecture is all about shooting tigers in India, with some tigerskins dramatically hanging on the wall. But remember I mentioned the riding-whip earlier, now it recurs. Because Elizabeth and Benjy have had the leather goods man in town create a new one. This is due to a sequence of small farcical events, namely:

Georgie offers to help Diva plant tulip bulbs for the spring and as he is digging a hole for the third or fourth one digs up the silver head of the famous riding-whip; realising what it is, he quietly pockets it and gets on with his gardening
for the next few days he carries it round in his jacket pocket pondering how it got reduced from whip to silver caps
one day he is rooting around in his pockets and accidentally spills it onto the table where neither he nor Lucia notices it (‘It fell noiselessly on the piece of damp sponge which Mrs Simpson always preferred to use for moistening postage-stamps, rather than the less genteel human tongue.’)
later the same day Elizabeth comes for a visit to Mallards, spots the cap lying on Lucia’s the stamp sponge and quickly pockets it, taking it home and is just as puzzled as Georgie was as to a) how it got reduced to just the cap and b) what it’s doing in Lucia’s house when she thought she’d left it at Diva’s

But Elizabeth determines to puzzle her enemies and this is why she gets the leather goods man to knock up a complete replica of the original riding-whip and then has Major Flint very visibly brandish it during his lecture and even make it the centrepiece of one of his stories about biffing a fearsome tiger with it. To the great puzzlement of Lucia, Georgie and Diva.

Irene’s allegorical painting

Meanwhile, remember that when Elizabeth came swanning past Irene on the way from Lucia having told her she was going to choose her to be her mayoress, and that Irene made her pose in a boisterous pose (like a skater with one arm stretched in front of her and the other stretched out behind)? And how she sent the photo to the newspaper which published it and made Irene a laughing stock?

Well, Irene continued on to use this photo of Elizabeth as the model for a sort of parody of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, updated to mock the Victorians, with large Miss Map, dressed in Victorian costume, as Venus, with a parody of Major Flint, in full uniform, lounging in the clouds and blowing a great gale of wind which is propelling Elizabeth across the waves towards Tilling in the distance. Well Irene finishes this satirical masterpiece and sends it to the Royal Academy of Art annual competition, no less, which is not only chosen to be included in, but becomes the hit of the season! Irene’s painting is reproduced in a number of national newspapers, including The Times and the Daily Mirror!

Mapp and Benjy go up to London and see it 3 times in one day and come back glowing with fame. Lucia is bitterly jealous and wishes now that it was she who Irene had satirised, seeing as how it’s brought Elizabeth national fame!

More of the Major’s riding-whip

To partly get her own back, Lucia hatches a plan to do with the famous riding-whip. Like Diva and Georgie Lucia was mystified how the Major produced his riding-whip onstage when they knew it had been reduced to a silver cap and buried in Diva’s garden. So Lucia hatches a slightly bizarre plan. She goes to the leather goods shop and asks the man to make a perfect replica of the Major’s riding-whip, using the silver cap, which he hands over a day or two later. Lucia then wedges it in the climbers outside her window in order to weather it, where it will be assailed by wind and rain and birds and insects and generally weathered and aged.

When she thinks it’s looking worn and used, she extracts it, wraps it up and takes it with her to the next bridge session at Diva’s place. She gets there earlier than the others and, while Diva’s off serving customers, slips it behind the crockery cupboard in the bridge room. There follows a long game of bridge during which tempers (as usual) fray, not least because of Lucia’s barely concealed jealousy of Elizabeth’s great Painting Triumph.

But when the game is finally concluded and everyone is getting their things to leave, she says she can’t find her umbrella and gets Georgie to agree that maybe it fell behind the crockery cupboard and together they pull the wardrobe forward and… out falls the Major’s missing riding-whip!! This plunges Diva into even deeper confusion as well as embarrassing but also puzzling Elizabeth and the Major.

Georgie is as puzzled as anyone by this mysterious turn of events, as well he might be, but when, on the way home, he asks Lucia to let him into the secret meaning of her hiding the fake Benjy riding-whip in Diva’s house, she refuses to tell him and this makes Georgie genuinely cross.

‘You’re too tarsome,’ said Georgie crossly. ‘And it isn’t fair. Diva told you how she buried the silver cap, and I told you how I dug it up, and you tell us nothing. Very miserly!’

For the first time dawned on me that, what with his frustration at her endless yakking about municipal affairs, what with her mysterious behaviour in this and other incidents, what with the reappearance of his old flame Olga — is Benson setting us up for Georgie to leave Lucia?

Chapter 8. To London

Regarding Olga’s gala concert, Lucia gives in to Georgie and rearranges the schedule of public lectures. So Lucia and Georgie go up to London 1) to see Irene’s famous picture at the Academy, and then 2) on to Covent Garden Opera House to see Olga sing in Lucrezia.

(In an interesting aside, on page 155, the narrator tells us it was only three years ago that Georgie met and fell in love with Olga Bracely, as described in the first novel in the series, ‘Queen Lucia’. Since that novel was published in 1920 and this one was published a generation later, in 1939, the narrative asks us to accept the rather ludicrous notion that all the events which have occurred in the intervening 4 novels – 19 years apart – have taken place in just three years. I’m betting Benson never meant people to take this literally, it’s merely a gesture towards explaining why, despite the passage of so much time ‘in the real world’, his characters don’t appear to age.)

That night, in bed in his London hotel room, Georgie can’t get Olga out of his head and for the first time admits that he feels trapped in Tilling and by marriage to Lucia.

Next day he goes to meet Olga for lunch at the Ritz. She adores him and he is thrilled but then Lucia arrives and kills the spirit. The lunch is also attended by the same ‘your grace’ as the night before, who Olga casually introduces as ‘Poppy Sheffield’ and who affably chats. Olga tells them she is going down to Riseholme for a week and invites them to come and stay with her. When Lucia says she is far too busy infuriates Georgie so much that she is forced to concede that maybe she could spare a short weekend. But it isn’t the only thing that angers Georgie. When the Italian composer arrives at the end of dinner, Lucia, terrified of being humiliated all over again (by having it shown that she can speak hardly any Italian), insists that she and Georgie are busy and must leave. Georgie acquiesces but is furious at being forced to leave the lunch and the company of the woman he still carries a torch for.

Next evening Lucia meets up with the ladies for bridge and milks her London experiences. During the opera, a large grand lady (‘a large lady, clad in a magnificent tiara, but not much else’) and diminutive escort had been introduced into their box (the box reserved for guests of the main singer i.e. Olga) by the attendant who referred to her as ‘Your Grace’. This woman held completely aloof from Lucia, in fact the latter only finds out her name (Lady Sheffield) by asking the attendant after the show.

But the presence of Lady Sheffield in her box is reported in the next day’s edition of The Times so that by the time Lucia holds a bridge party the following evening (for ‘Mr. Wyse and Diva, (Susan being indisposed) the Mapp-Flints and the Padre and Evie’) they are dying to know more. This allows Lucia to skate dismissively quickly over seeing Irene’s famous painting at the Academy and tell outrageous lies about how she is on first-name terms with Lady Sheffield (‘poor Poppy Sheffield’), knows all about her little foibles (‘she simply lives off dressed crab and black coffee’), awing the Tilling ladies with her snobbish showing-off. But once again, Georgie is not impressed.

Back to Riseholme

Next morning Georgie and Lucia drive to Riseholme. In many ways it’s a shock to be back here. Lucia left it behind in the fourth novel, ‘Mapp and Lucia’, but it feels like an age ago. And for some reason, I’d forgotten how genuinely patronising and condescending she could be. It’s as if simply stepping out the car in Riseholme transforms her back to the painful snob she was in the early books.

Olga gave a garden-party in her honour in the afternoon, and Lucia was most gracious to all her old friends, in the manner of a Dowager Queen who has somehow come into a far vaster kingdom, but who has a tender remembrance of her former subjects, however humble, and she had a kind word for them all.

When everyone’s left, Lucia loftily dismisses the place as a vegetating backwater, but Georgie bristles and delivers a summary of the exciting developments in the place, providing a neat summary of most of the charming old characters we haven’t heard of for three books. (I always liked deaf old Mrs Antrobus who wielded an ear trumpet and had to be pushed everywhere in a bath-chair. I’d like to be pushed everywhere in a bath-chair. All this walking around under your own steam is much over-rated.)

Lucia infuriates Georgie and Olga with her endlessly boasting and humblebragging about how much work she has to do as mayor, but how rewarding it is to serve. But when Olga announces that the Italian composer Cortese will be coming tomorrow night, with his lovely wife, Lucia is struck with terror that, once again, she will be found out and humiliated. Benson puts it more bluntly than I’ve seen in any of the previous books, having Lucia admit to herself that she can’t speak Italian and knows next to nothing about music.

‘If only I could bring myself to say that I can neither speak nor understand Italian, and know nothing about music!’ thought Lucia. ‘But I can’t after all these years. It’s wretched to run away like this, but I couldn’t bear it.’

This has never been so explicitly stated before, nor has Lucia’s voice been so bluntly referred to as ‘her superior, drawling voice.’

Anyway, to escape the looming humiliation of meeting Cortese, Lucia tells Olga she must leave on Sunday evening to return to Tilling. But when Olga begs Georgie to stay, he simply says yes. Lucia wasn’t expecting him to say this, but Georgie is fed up of being bossed around by the impossible woman.

Chapter 9. The Lady Sheffield fiasco

There then follows something approaching real farce in its complexity.

For a start, ten minutes before she sets off for Tilling Cortese arrives and it turns out that his wife is English and has told him to speak only in English so he can learn it. In other words, Lucia would not have been humiliated and so she need not have fled so precipitately.

Not only that, but Cortese has arrived with the first act of his new opera, for Olga to try out. So Lucia is missing this incredible private world premiere opportunity.

And not only that but it turns out that Cortese’s English wife, Dorothy, is cousin to Lady Sheffield and, half an hour after Lucia’s left, Lady Sheffield phones up and invites cousin, Cortese, Olga and all to drive over to her place, Sheffield Castle, the next evening for dinner and stay the night. During the call there is a misunderstanding because the cousin tells Lady Sheffield that a guest of Olga’s is the mayor of Tilling, and the old lady mistakenly thinks this refers to Georgie, who she remembers meeting at Covent Garden, then for lunch at the Ritz, and took rather a fancy to, him and his stylish Van Dyck beard.

So next morning Georgie phones Lucia in Tilling and tells her the exciting news that they’ve all been invited to Lady Sheffield’s castle (‘A Norman tower. A moat. It was in Country Life not long ago’). Lucia is thrilled for him, and pleased when he goes out of h is way to explain that Lady Sheffield was pleased at the thought of seeing the Mayor of Tilling again (both of them misunderstanding Lady Sheffield’s misunderstanding that the Mayor is Georgie). But, as Lucia’s day wears on, and she has little if any work to do, she is bitten by the desire to join the party. What’s more, won’t it be a lovely surprise for everyone if she just turns up out of the blue and unannounced!

And so she asks her deputy to stand in for her, gives her secretary Mrs Simpson the rest of the day off (making sure to tell her why i.e. she’s going to stay at Lady Sheffield’s, with the result that the news spreads like wildfire around Tilling). After lunch she packs her things, brings the car round and is about to set off when there’s a phone call. It’s a servant from Sheffield Castle phoning ‘the mayor’ to tell her that her Grace has been taken ill and has cancelled the party. Lucia thinks quickly and wheedles the woman on the phone, telling her she still wants to come, not for dinner but just to check that Her Grace is alright. The servant goes away to convey this to her Ladyship, and returns with the reply that Her Grace would be delighted to see the Mayor, but the rest of the party has been cancelled. Neither of them realise the old lady is mistaking ‘the Mayor’ for Georgie.

She puts down the phone and finalises her packing. Just as she’s leaving the phone rings again but, scared that it will be Lady S ringing to cancel, she ignores it. What she doesn’t realise it that it’s Georgie phoning to say that, since the party has been cancelled, he and Olga are going to motor back to Tilling, for Olga to stay a few days.

So on the same afternoon that Lucia sets off for the long drive across England to Castle Sheffield on a doomed mission, Georgie and Olga are driving in exactly the opposite direction, from the heart of England to the South Coast. Both are to be surprised.

When Lucia finally arrives at Sheffield Castle she is, of course, surprised to find it dark and not lit up as for a party. A reluctant servant shows her into the courtyard and the first disappointment is that the whole place is overgrown, dirty and weed infested. The second one is that Lady Sheffield is dozing on a bench and when she awakes, asks who Lucia is. When Lucia answers ‘the mayor of Tilling’ Lady S says ‘No you’re not’ and Lucia realises her mistake. All along Lady Sheffield just wanted to spend some solo time with Georgie, who she’d taken a fancy to!

Lady Sheffield makes it crystal clear that she was looking forward to a quiet evening with a handsome male companion, not a middle-aged snobbish woman. She is most disappointed. This really is a test of Lucia’s mettle and she rises to the occasion. She persuades Lady Sheffield to show her round her home, snapping away on the camera she’s brought with her to record the heady social party which turns out not to exist.

But after barely an hour of this (in fact 45 minutes) Lady Sheffield is visibly tired and escorts Lucia to the door, shaking her hand, thanking her for coming and politely but firmly getting rid of her. What to do? It is still the middle of the evening. She toys with staying at the local inn but realises Foljambe, the maid who’s come with her, would give her away. Best to brazen it out and return to Tilling. So they have dinner at the inn and then set off on the long drive home, arriving at 10.30m back at Mallards. Reflecting on what a busy day she’s had, Benson has Lucia make an uncharacteristically up-to-date literary reference:

‘Quite like that huge horrid book by Mr. James Joyce, which all happens in one day,’ she reflected, as she stepped out of the car.

The Olga surprise

As she steps out of the car, Lucia is astonished to hear the sound of piano and of Olga singing in her house. She waits till she’s finished and then enters the garden room. Georgie is astonished but, strange to say, relieved. Having spent to long with Olga he was troubled by his old feelings for her. Lucia’s return will help him to return to superficial politeness. Olga, for her part, is tickled by Lucia’s absence and return: she finds Lucia a hilarious person. When Lucia in her pompous superior way goes on to congratulate her for her performance of the Prayer from Lucrezia, Olga restrains herself from saying she was actually singing some Berlioz.

It was only by strong and sustained effort that Olga restrained herself from howling with laughter.

So they chat gaily, have a few sandwiches and then, it being well past 11, they all go to bed.

The affair misapprehension

But the ramifications are far from complete. Because the next morning everyone in Tilling sees Georgie proudly squiring round town the gorgeous, lipsticked Olga. Heads turn and tongues wag. Soon everyone knows that he had her to stay at Mallards the second Lucia was away. Surprisingly, people aren’t moralistic but nod in sympathy. Diva goes so far as to say it must be hard for Georgie, living among so many ‘old hags’. To their surprise, the ladies of Tilling see Georgie in a new light, as a red-blooded Lothario.

Unaware of the impact all this has had, Lucia (who, as we saw, came home the previous evening i.e. there was never any hanky panky) phones round her friends, strongly gives the impression she has only just returned from Sheffield Castle, and invites everyone to dinner that evening.

The beauty fad

Olga is so ravishing and cosmopolitan that the old ladies (or ‘hags’ as Diva calls them) set about beautifying themselves with comic results, trying to hide from each other the little packets they set about buying in the chemist’s shop, and turning up at Lucia’s dinner looking grotesque (p.191). Here’s an extensive quote, to give the full comic effect.

Evie’s finger nails looked as if she had pinched them all, except one, in the door, causing the blood to flow freely underneath each. She had forgotten about that one, and it looked frost-bitten. Elizabeth and Benjy came next: Elizabeth’s cheeks were like the petals of wild roses, but she had not the nerve to incarnadine her mouth, which, by contrast, appeared to be afflicted with the cyanosis which precedes death. Diva, on the other hand, had been terrified at the aspect of blooming youth which rouge gave her, and she had wiped it off at the last moment, retaining the Cupid’s bow of a vermilion mouth, and two thin arched eyebrows in charcoal. Susan, wearing the Order of the British Empire, had had her grey hair waved, and it resembled corrugated tin roofing: Mr. Wyse and Georgie wore their velvet suits. It took them all a few minutes to get used to each other, for they were like butterflies which had previously only known each other in the caterpillar or chrysalis stage, and they smiled and simpered like new acquaintances in the most polite circles, instead of old and censorious friends.

Olga, when she appears, effortlessly outclasses them all. Over dinner they all babble to get her attention. There is no bridge, but Lucia insists Georgie does a little dance with her to Olga’s accompaniment and when she turns she sees all of them staring at her with their tongues hanging out like dogs that want to go for a walk, and so she gives in and sings for them.

Chapter 10. The Poppy and Olga crisis

The fad for wearing make-up endures. Lucia commissions Irene to paint her portrait. To my astonishment Irene tells her she is 25 years old! (page 196)

But when Irene says how much she admired Lucia for being so daring and so modern as to spend the night away (at Lady Sheffield’s) in order to give her husband and her lover (Georgie and Olga) a night of passion together, Lucia is genuinely horrified at how everyone must be interpreting those events. She realises she has to put the record straight. She has to confess to Irene that she did not spend the night at Sheffield Castle but, having driven all the way there, found Lady Sheffield unwell, had some tea and a little tour, and then drove home, arriving in time to find Olga serenading Georgie. And then everyone went off to their own bedrooms. Irene is disappointed:

‘Darling, what a disappointment!’ said Irene. ‘It would have been so colossal of you. And what a comedown for poor Georgie. Just an old maid again.’

Soon the disappointing news is spread all round town and Tillingites feel let down. ‘Everything had been so exciting and ducal and compromising, and there was really nothing left of it…’ As Mapp puts it:

‘Worship let it be widely known that she was staying the night with Poppy, and then she skulks back, doesn’t appear at all next morning to make us think that she was still away–‘

The annual Tilling art exhibition

The annual Tilling art exhibition comes round and all the characters donate works typical of them (Elizabeth and Georgie’s rival watercolours). Since you ask, they are:

Elizabeth – ‘A misty morning on the Marsh’ she likes mist because the climatic conditions absolutely prohibited defined draughtsmanship
Georgie – ‘A sunny morning on the Marsh’ with sheep and dykes and clumps of ragwort very clearly delineated
Mr Wyse – one of his still-life studies of a silver tankard, a glass of wine and a spray of nasturtiums
Diva – a still life of two buns and a tartlet on a plate
Susan Wyse – a mystical picture of a budgerigar with a halo above its head and rays of orange light emanating from its wings

But the show is, of course, dominated by Irene’s famous allegory of Elizabeth and Benjy and her new portrait of Lucia. She has depicted Lucia in her home, with the piano, an art set, municipal boxes of papers and various other adjuncta of her character. Unfortunately it makes her look like the auctioneer at a jumble sale. Lucia tries to grandiosely donate it to the Council to hang in the town hall but Elizabeth is now a councillor (as well as mayoress) and she sways the other councillors (who can’t make head or tail of it) not to.

But Elizabeth doesn’t have it her own way because Irene, reviewing her allegory, decides it is too pale and insipid, especially given the Tilling ladies new penchant for wearing make-up. And so after the first hang, Irene adds some rouge and a line of lipstick to Elizabeth’s portrait, scandalising Miss Mapp. She goes round to beg Lucia use her influence on Irene to get her to remove the additions.

August rents and the arrival of Miss Leg

August comes round again, the season when all our characters rent out their homes and move into smaller properties to turn a little profit. Miss Mapp rents hers out to a Miss Susan Leg, who turns out to be none other than the world-famous novelist, Rudolph da Vinci. (Elizabeth and Benjy have temporarily moved into the house of the vicar who has gone with his wife on holiday to Scotland.)

Immediately Mapp and Lucia start fighting over who will own and influence Miss Legg and Elizabeth gets a good head start since Leg is renting her property, showing her round town, introducing everyone (with her own comments) and then hosting a dinner where she comprehensively rubbishes her rival.

However, the tide turns as Miss Leg turns out not to be so obliging. She fiercely dislikes the famous Botticelli portrait but, ironically, raves over the Lucia portrait. She offends half the people Mapp proudly introduces her to as being pushy and vulgar. When Elizabeth rings up Lucia to ask her to get access (in the town hall) to the Corporation plate and let Miss L sign the visitors’ book, Lucia apologises but says it’s impossible. Suddenly Elizabeth finds she’s hitched her wagon to a falling star.

And by the same token, it dawns on Miss Leg that she might have made a mistake. After a few days she draws the conclusion that maybe the Lucia that Elizabeth has spent so much time defaming is, in fact, the key to Tilling, and so she pays Lucia a solo visit. Lucia expected this and is set up with Georgie to receive her, playing the piano, art works on display, and so on, in order to create the best impression. Miss Leg perceives Lucia’s snobbery and artistic pretensions but can also see she is the Top Dog of Tilling and so likely to provide the best copy for a writer like herself.

Lucia lays on tea and buns and then plays a trump card, ringing up the town hall and instructing the Serjeant on duty to get the corporate plate and visitors’ book out for Miss Leg to sign, thus demonstrating her clout. Then she invites her to dinner with the gang, carefully excluding Elizabeth and Benjy, so that Miss Leg is shown who runs the Real Tilling. Miss L has a delightful evening, by the end of which she and Lucia are on first name terms (her name is Susan).

Chapter 11. More blows

1. Georgie and Olga leave This is a surprise. The narrative doesn’t follow them, but Georgie and Olga go for a week’s holiday at Le Touquet (on the north French coast). The tongues which wagged about their (erroneous) night of passion together, wag all over again.

2. The council reject Lucia’s portrait Second shock is that the council art committee chaired by Elizabeth decides not to buy the portrait of Lucia done by Irene and not to hang it in the town hall. This is a real blow to Lucia’s pride and prestige, and she goes home grinding with envy that the Mapp Botticelli painting is going on display at a big London gallery and then is likely to be bought by an American millionaire, while the portrait of her will simply come home to her house, with the same kind of status as Diva’s wretched watercolours.

3. Lady Sheffield publicly doesn’t know who Lucia is The third blow is that she sets off down the hill to put a brave face on the portrait debacle when who should she almost bump into getting into her posh car, but Lady Sheffield. But it’s bad, very bad, because 1) although Lucia goes to shake her hand, Lady Sheffield has no idea who she is and has to be elaborately reminded, and even then reveals out loud that she only met invited Lucia to her castle because she thought she was handsome Georgie. But worse, 2) Elizabeth is with her, Elizabeth witnesses first hand this excruciating encounter, and double worse, her Grace has just emerged from Diva’s tearooms where Elizabeth will have manipulated the situation to make it perfectly plain to all her Tilling friends that Lady S had no idea who Lucia was, and she was the opposite of a bosom friend.

Lucia is fearless as ever and invites her Grace up to her simple abode to view the photographs she took, but it turns out that her ladyship is also catching the ferry across the Channel, planning to go and stay with Georgie and Olga. Lucia squeezes in an invitation for her to come and stay on her way back. Maybe. Please. And her Ladyship climbs into her car and is gone, leaving Lucia standing distraught with smirking Elizabeth.

Lucia is committed and so has to go on, into the tea rooms, and face all the ladies who’ve just witnessed Lady Sheffield’s complete ignorance of her. She puts on her very best face, and braves their sarcasm, but she is mortally wounded.

Making her tea as brief as possible, Lucia returns home a stricken animal and this is new. Suddenly Lucia acquires something like actual depth. In all of these novels she and the other characters have been comic mannequins, puppets put through never-ending series of humiliations which they outface with heroic chutzpah but this novel is the first one which has anything like depth. For the first time you feel genuinely sorry for Lucia, something the reader never has before. And she feels sorry for herself.

Surely some malignant Power, specially dedicated to the service of her discomfiture, must have ordained the mishaps (and their accurate timing) of this staggering afternoon: the malignant Power was a master of stage-craft. Who could stand up against a relentless tragedian? Lucia could not, and two tears of self-pity rolled down her cheeks. She was much surprised to feel their tickling progress, for she had always thought herself incapable of such weakness, but there they were. The larger one fell on to her blotting-pad, and she dashed the smaller aside.

She pulls herself together, of course, but it’s a very rare moment of something like psychological realism. For a moment we glimpse the Samuel Beckett bleakness which is lurking beneath the endless backbiting and rivalry.

And then, finally, a break. She is playing the piano when the phone rings and guess who it is? Lady Sheffield! She missed her boat, will catch the one tomorrow, and remembers Lucia’s hurried invitation, and now wants to take her up on it: may she come and stay the night? To say Lucia is overwhelmed with relief is an understatement. She rings for Grosvenor and they hurriedly get the place ready, and Lady S does indeed arrive, have a little supper, spend the night, then get up early the next morning and leave.

Lucia can’t wait till marketing hour, when all the ladies mingle in the High street, but she is down there as soon as possible, and very calmly tells Elizabeth who came to stay last night. Elizabeth immediately pops into Diva’s tearoom, tells her but ridicules the whole thing as a desperate attempt to save face.

As it happens, Elizabeth and Benjy have invited Lucia to dine with them that evening. She goes but doesn’t understand why they keep changing the subject whenever she mentions Poppy Sheffield, but there you go, they’re odd people, and after dinner they play bridge as usual. It’s only on her walk home that the truth hits her: they don’t believe her. All her ‘friends’ think she made up the entire story of Poppy coming to stay. Indeed, seen one way, her coming late and leaving early and being seen by no-one is worse than if she’d never come at all.

Once again Lucia is plunged into real ‘misery’ and once again the reader is struck. These ‘troubles’ are the real thing, are really biting into her character.

Quite suddenly Lucia knew that she had no more force left in her. She could only just manage a merry laugh.

Chapter 12. Lucia’s low point

Very unlike her, Lucia is so demoralised that she can’t face going out the next morning. The day after is Sunday and she attends church and puts on a brave face but again, after the service, confronts Elizabeth’s scepticism and for once, and very unlike her, Lucia loses her temper and delivers a series of cutting ripostes to each of her ‘friends’.

At that precise moment there took possession of Lucia an emotion to which hitherto she had been a stranger, namely sheer red rage. In all the numerous crises of her career her brain had always been occupied with getting what she wanted and with calm triumph when she got it, or with devising plans to extricate herself from tight places and with scaring off those who had laid traps for her. Now all such insipidities were swept away; rage at the injustice done her thrilled every fibre of her being, and she found the sensation delicious.

Georgie returns

Next morning she drives to Seaport (presumably a fictional name) to meet Georgie off the boat back from Le Touquet. She is delighted to see him but so is the reader; in his absence she hasn’t been herself at all. All this plunging into misery and tears of vexation are very unlike her and threaten the rationale of the whole series, which is how comically unsinkable she is, the comedy lies in her ability to bounce back from every kind of humiliation and setback.

With Georgie’s return we enter the final end phases of the narrative. Lucia tells Georgie everything that has happened, in full unvarnished detail and Georgie refreshes her with his sympathy and support. In exchange Georgie tells us that Poppy Lady Sheffield was a pain at Le Touquet. She insisted on sitting right next to Georgie on the sofa and at meal times touching his hand and generally coming on to him. Olga thought it was hilarious, which wasn’t much help.

At which point he springs the news that Poppy said she’d like to stop over at Lucia’s for a couple of days on her way back. Lucia leaps out of her chair. Salvation! Yes! If Lady Sheffield stays for a few days, then all her friends will be poked in the eye. They’ll have to admit it’s true. And at that moment a telegram arrives confirming the request.

Georgie is horrified. If Poppy’s coming he’ll leave but Lucia begs him not to go and he reluctantly acquiesces.

Lucia’s revenge

And so Lucia has her revenge. Poppy Lady Sheffield does indeed come to stay with her the following evening and the next day Lucia makes quite sure to take her for a stroll through Tilling at marketing hour. Lucia and Georgie debate whether to invite her friends for tea or dinner. Georgie is all for ignoring them both nights but Lucia ponders and concludes that the best revenge would be to rise above all the slights and sarcasm she’d received and invite them as if nothing had happened.

‘There’s nothing that stings so much as contemptuous oblivion. I have often found that.’

She will adopt a policy of what Benson amusing calls ‘vindictive forgiveness’. Although she doesn’t lower herself to call them in person, She gets Foljambe to ring them all to apologise for the short notice and ask if they’d like to pop round for dinner that evening. The last little burst of comedy comes from the way all of them had other appointments, often with each other, and how they all worm out of them with weasel words, but then all arrive at Lucia’s realising how they’d lied to each other.

Poppy is late coming down and all the guests have arrived and are trying to control their excitement at meeting a real live Duchess. For a moment I thought Benson might pull one last comic trick and have her having expired in Lucia’s spare bedroom, but nothing that dramatic happens in Benson (well, not very often) and instead Lady Sheffield makes a modest but dramatic entrance and the evening is a great success. The last touch of comedy is that Poppy still fancies Georgie, insists on sitting next to him, touching his hand more than necessary and tries, after dinner, to go for a walk with him in the garden until Lucia hastens to Georgie’s rescue and fetches them both back indoors. But overall:

A most distinguished suavity prevailed, and though the party lacked the gaiety and lightness of the Olga-festival, its quality was far more monumental.

And so, after the genuine trials and tribulations of the last few chapters, the novel, and the series, ends on a quiet but firm note of Lucia triumphant.

Thoughts

This one feels different from the previous five M&L novels. Long though they all are, the preceding five stick to the same superficial equable tone throughout. Lots happens – the novels, after all, consist of long series of events, often fairly disconnected, one incident after another with rarely what you’d call an overarching ‘plot’ – but the tone rarely varies from one of amused and charming social satire.

But as I’ve indicated, all that changes in this one. In the last few chapters, Lucia is genuinely humiliated, experiences real ‘misery’ and, for the one and only time in all six novels, loses her temper. For the 30 or 40 pages in question, the novel hints at something like real psychological depth, more depth and ‘realism’ than we’ve previously seen before, as I’ve summarised, ending abruptly with Lucia’s unqualified triumph. But you’re left wondering how deliberate this was. Did Benson even know he was doing it, giving his character, right at the end of her history, more depth and genuine feeling than in the previous 1,000 pages? It feels not because the ending, when it comes, when Lucia is redeemed in those last few pages, feels incredibly abrupt. It just ends.

Credit

‘Trouble for Lucia’ by E.F. Benson was published by Hutchinson in 1939. Page references are to the 1992 Black Swan paperback edition.

Mapp and Lucia reviews

Queen Lucia (1920)
Miss Mapp (1922)
Lucia in London (1927)
The Male Impersonator (1929: short story)
Mapp and Lucia (1931)
Lucia’s Progress (1935)
Trouble for Lucia (1939)

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by Simon on November 21, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, English literature, Novel

Tagged Algernon's Wyse, Amelia, Benson, Birth of Venus, Botticelli, Cadman, Chapman, comedy, comic novel, Contessa di Faraglione, Cortese, cosmetics, Covent Garden, cycling, Daily Mirror, Diva, Diva Plaistow, Dorothy, E.F. Benson, Ealing Comedy, Elizabeth Mapp, Elizabeth Mapp-Flint, Evie Bartlett, Foljambe, gay, Georgie, Georgie Pillson, Godiva Plaistow, gossip, Grosvenor, humour, Inspector Morrison, Irene Coles, James Joyce, Janet, John Gielgud, Lady MacBeth, Lady Sheffield, Le Touquet, lesbian, London, Lucia, Lucrezia, Lucy, Lyndon B. Johnson, Major Benjamin Flint, makeup, Mayor of Rye, Miss Leg, Mr Fergus, Mr McConnell, Mr Rice, Mr Twistevant, Mrs Antrobus, Mrs Emmeline Lucas, Mrs Simpson, Mussolini, novel, Olga Braceley, Olga Bracely, opera, Ophelia, Paddy, Poppy Sheffield, Riseholme, Rolls Royce, Royal Academy of Art, Rye, séance, Shakespearian drama, Sir Henry Wood, snobbery, spiritualism, Susan Wyse, Sussex coast, the Hampshire Argus, The Reverend Kenneth Bartlett, the Ritz, The Times, Tilling, Trouble for Lucia

Posted by Simon on November 21, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/11/21/trouble-for-lucia-e-f-benson/

Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence (1923)

It was usually the same. He started by holding himself aloof, then gradually he let himself get mixed in, and then he had revulsions.
(Lawrence’s alter-ego Richard Somers, painfully aware of the trajectory all his relationships follow)

Richard loved the look of Australia, that marvellous soft flower-blue of the air, and the sombre grey of the earth, the foliage, the brown of the low rocks: like the dull pelts of kangaroos. It had a wonder and a far-awayness…
(One of many passages which vividly convey the strangeness of the Australian landscape)

In his critical biography of Lawrence, Anthony Burgess calls ‘Kangaroo’ ‘the strangest but in some ways most satisfying novel of his entire career’ (p.135). It is a strange book, long and rambling, full of mad obsessions but also wonderful delights. I’d say it’s made up of about five elements.

Plot There’s a sort of plot in the sense that things happen, but that’s the least important element.

Dialogue There’s a lot of dialogue and conversations, which I think Lawrence was really bad at. Almost any other novelist I can think of writes better dialogue. Every Lawrence character sounds like Lawrence and their verbal duels are often painfully contrived and sometimes incomprehensible.

Australia There are lots of descriptions of Australia, the Australian countryside, sky, bush, towns and people, which are truly inspired, wonderfully vivid, put you right there, magical.

Politics At one point the novel rotates around the figure of a would-be political revolutionary, Ben Cooley, who runs a secret organisation of political radicals and whose codename is Kangaroo which gives the novel its title. With this figure and his acolyte Jack Callcott, Richard Lovat Somers, the character who is transparently Lawrence’s avatar within the novel, has numerous conversations on Big Topics of the Day. These include:

the meaning of life (growth and change)
the nature of love (mainly between men; the famous Australian mateship: ‘Men fight better when they’ve got a mate. They’ll stand anything when they’ve got a mate,’ says Jack)
contemporary politics (static and inadequate)

These are all beguiling and the political discussions shed an oblique light on the history of the day (the Bolsheviks had been in power less than five years, in May 1922 Mussolini was barely heard of, hadn’t undertaken his famous march on Rome (October 1922)). Parallel to Cooley, is the figure of Willie Struthers, head of the Labour movement (described by the papers as communist, and he says he wants to establish a soviet of workers). Theoretically, Somers is caught in the force field between these two opposing political standpoints although, in practice, Kangaroo, the more prominent figure, has a weirdly under-developed ideology which mostly consists of vague spiritual uplift about love.

Portrait of a marriage The central couple, Richard Lovat Somers and his wife Harriet, are transparently based on Lawrence and his wife, Frieda. On a gossipy level, it’s fascinating to read such vivid descriptions of their humdrum domestic life, with plumping of cushions and laying of the venerable table cloth they’ve carried through all their travels. I was interested in the precise content of their meals, something which was irritatingly absent from all the previous Lawrence novels I’d read (‘They had tea and toast and quince jam’). On a more meaningful level, it’s fun to watch the interplay between the married couple, in particular the way the down-to-earth Harriet-Frieda is always puncturing Lovat-Lawrence’s pretensions, moods and high-falutin’ rhetoric:

‘You’re never happy unless you’re upsetting somebody’s apple-cart.’

‘Ah, why was I ever pestered with such a viperish husband as you!’

‘I’ve got one thing to tell you. Without me you’d be nowhere, you’d be nothing, you’d not be that,’ and she snapped her fingers under his nose.

‘I feel it’s my fate to go now.”
‘Ha, your fate!’ said Harriet. ‘It’s always your fate with you. If it was me it would be my foolish restlessness.’ (p.317)

‘It’s really shameful. Men are like impish children — you daren’t leave them together for a minute.’ (p.322)

‘He’s always breaking his heart over something—anything except me. To me he’s a nether millstone.’ (p.383)

So he had preached at her, like a dog barking, barking senselessly. And oh, how it had annoyed her. (p.387)

Self portrait It’s obvious from the start that the character of Richard Lovat Somers contains a good deal of introspective description of Lawrence himself but it’s still a big surprise when the second half of the book blossoms into a massive act of self revelation. The most important thing about the character is his wish to be utterly alone, solitary, not enmeshed in anyone else’s business. In fact the central theme or drama of the novel really derives from his inner conflict, between the invitation to join the secret organisation, which Jack and Cooley offer him and his great temptation to do so, to act in the world, to make a difference – conflicting with his profound need to keep himself pure, aloof, intact and separate. It’s only in the long revelatory chapter, ‘Nightmare’, that describes in unsparing detail the humiliations Lawrence was subjected to during the First World War, that the book completely changes tone and we realise the traumatic experiences which lie behind Lawrence’s wish to flee, to fly, to leave behind cloying, wretched, bullying humanity.

(Incidentally, the initials RLS seem like a deliberate homage to that other great British exile to the South Seas, Robert Louis Stevenson.)

Types of power

Alternatively, seen from a different angle, you could say it is a novel about power, about different types of power exercised in different arenas, from the individual, through relationships, to the political and then onto the geographical. From this point of view, the novel contains extended meditations on:

the sources of life and agency in the individual, using Somers’ many ponderings on his own nature and wish for self control, mixed with…
the power of change, evolution, the dying off of the old, birth of the new, as outlined by Cooley
power in marriage, with chapter 9 being entirely dedicated to a fanciful, metaphor-laden analysis of Lawrence and Frieda’s marriage (marriage compared, at length, and with heavy humour, to an ocean-going vessel, ‘the good ship Harriet and Lovat)
mateship i.e the very powerful bond between men, much deeper than the love between men and women, the love-hate relationship with Jack Callcott and then the really deep attraction-repulsion with Cooley – a subject Lawrence writes obsessively about in ‘Women in Love’, ‘Aaron’s Rod’ and here
the sources of political power, exemplified in two figures:
- Ben Cooley, with his quasi-military, proto-fascist organisation of ex-servicemen, the Diggers
- Willie Struthers who, as far as I could tell, runs New South Wales’ socialist party
chapter 11 is devoted to a detailed comparison between the two men and their philosophies of life, as explained in extended conversations with Somers, who compares Cooley to Napoleon and Struthers to Lenin
the power of the British state as described at length in the long Nightmare chapter listing the suspicions, interrogations, searches and stripping Lawrence was subjected to by the agents of the wartime England he came to loathe
the power of the land – behind puny human worries likes the landscape of Australia which Lawrence, like so many visitors to it, experiences as profoundly old, ancient, secret and impenetrable

Richard Aldington’s factual introduction

Richard Aldington was a poet and biographer, who knew Lawrence well during the latter’s London phase at the end of the Great War. Years later he contributed short introductions to the Penguin editions of the classic novels. In the introduction to ‘Kangaroo’ he gives the timeline behind the novel’s composition:

Lawrence and Frieda were living on Sicily when, at the end of 1921, they received an invitation from Mabel Dodge Luhan to join her artists’ colony in Taos, New Mexico, in the south-western United States. Rather than cross the Atlantic they decided to go the long way, taking ship in February 1922 across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal, stopping at Ceylon in March and staying just long enough not to like the tropics.

The arrived in Perth at the start of May 1922. On 15 May Lawrence wrote a letter saying they’d been staying for a fortnight at a place called Darlington, 15 miles south of Perth. Here he met local writer Mollie Skinner who showed him a manuscript of a novel she’d written. Lawrence recognised its amateur nature but was taken by its detailed knowledge of Australian flora, fauna and landscape and he agreed to help rewrite it. The result was the novel ‘The Boy in the Bush’, credited to both of them and part of Lawrence’s official oeuvre.

After a fortnight or so they took a boat round the coast to Sydney, arriving 26 May. Lawrence stayed here just two days, before removing to a rented cottage in the small mining town of Thirroul 30 miles south of Sydney. On June 3 he wrote a letter saying he’d commenced writing a new novel. Letters written to various correspondents throughout June indicate that he was racing on with it. By 3 July he wrote in his diary that he’d nearly finished it. In other words, he wrote some 150,000 words in a month!

Aldington makes the point that Lawrence’s great novels of the 1910s, like ‘Sons and Lovers’, ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’, were worked over and over, written and rewritten, to create a greater and greater sense of depth and primordial power. By stark contrast, the novels of the 1920s like ‘Aaron’s Rod’ and ‘Kangaroo’ were what Aldington calls ‘improvisations’. Lawrence set off without any idea where he was going to end and busked it from chapter to chapter. They eventually have endings and a narrative arc of a sort but never acquire the primordial depth of the classics. Lawrence was in such a hurry that he delivered manuscripts of both novels to the printers without corrections, leading to errors which have been reproduced down the years.

All this sounds very ramshackle, almost amateurish and yet Aldington emphasises the benefits of the improvisation approach, namely that Lawrence wrote with tremendous spontaneity, giving the texts what he calls ‘magical freshness and immediacy’. And, as Anthony Burgess points out more than once in his critical biography of Lawrence, it often feels like you are in the workshop, watching Lawrence hammer out his phrases, sentences, paragraphs and pages. Lawrence’s prose is not so much to be analysed as jumped aboard and ridden.

What is weak about the novel in terms of character and structure is compensated for, so the argument goes, by the extraordinary vividness of the descriptions and the general atmosphere of Australia, which Lawrence captured with uncanny skill, seeing as he was there for such a short period of time.

The Australian landscape

The novel includes countless descriptions of Australia, its eerie loneliness and ‘manlessness’. Here’s a sample, describing what the protagonist Richard Lovat Somers sees looking out the window of a train he’s travelling in.

That curious sombreness of Australia, the sense of oldness, with the forms all worn down low and blunt, squat. The squat-seeming earth. And then they ran at last into real country rather rocky, dark old rocks, and sombre bush with its different pale-stemmed dull-leaved gum-trees standing graceful, and various healthy looking undergrowth, and great spikey things like zuccas. As they turned south they saw tree-ferns standing on one knobbly leg among the gums, and among the rocks ordinary ferns and small bushes spreading in glades and up sharp hill-slopes. It was virgin bush, and as if unvisited, lost, sombre, with plenty of space, yet spreading grey for miles and miles, in a hollow towards the west. Far in the west, the sky having suddenly cleared, they saw the magical range of the Blue Mountains. And all this hoary space of bush between. The strange, as it were, invisible beauty of Australia, which is undeniably there, but which seems to lurk just beyond the range of our white vision. You feel you can’t see — as if your eyes hadn’t the vision in them to correspond with the outside landscape. For the landscape is so unimpressive, like a face with little or no features, a dark face. It is so aboriginal, out of our ken, and it hangs back so aloof. Somers always felt he looked at it through a cleft in the atmosphere; as one looks at one of the ugly-faced, distorted aborigines with his wonderful dark eyes that have such a incomprehensible ancient shine in them, across gulfs of unbridged centuries.

And captures the shanty shallowness of Australian towns, in this case a place named Wolloona.

It was a wonderful Main Street, and, thank heaven, out of the wind. There were several large but rather scaring brown hotels, with balconies all round: there was a yellow stucco church with a red-painted tin steeple, like a weird toy: there were high roofs and low roofs, all corrugated iron: and you came to an opening, and there, behold, were one or two forlorn bungalows inside their wooden palings, and then the void. The naked bush, sinking in a hollow to a sort of marsh, and then down the coast some sort of ‘works’, brick-works or something, smoking. All as if it had tumbled haphazard off the pantechnicon of civilisation as it dragged round the edges of this wild land, and there lay, busy but not rooted in. As if none of the houses had any foundations.

Bright the sun, the air of marvellous clarity, tall stalks of cabbage palms rising in the hollow, and far off, tufted gum trees against a perfectly new sky, the tufts at the end of wire branches. And farther off, blue, blue hills. In the Main Street, large and expensive motor-cars and women in fuzzy fur coats; long, quiescent Australian men in tired-out-looking navy blue suits trotting on brown ponies, with a carpet-bag in one hand, doing the shopping; girls in very much-made hats, also flirtily shopping; three boys with big, magnificent bare legs, lying in a sunny corner in the dust; a lonely white pony hitched as if forever to a post at a street-corner.

And Harriet loves the half-built, half-abandoned, unfinished feel of these places.

Synopsis

The novel opens with Richard Lovat Somers and his wife, Harriet in Sydney, Australia. They are getting a hansom cab from their temporary digs to a house he’s rented for three months at number 51 Murdoch Street. Somers is transparently Lawrence (a writer and essayist), Harriet is Frieda. They are both dismayed that the house has a vulgar name, Torestin i.e. to-rest-in. Their neighbours are Jack Callcott and wife, Victoria.

Somers feels a long way from England and is madly homesick. He’s bursting with observations about Australians, the most salient of which is that the strong rule which is required in England seems quite unnecessary here. There is more genuine equality.

Somers for the first time felt himself immersed in real democracy — in spite of all disparity in wealth. The instinct of the place was absolutely and flatly democratic, à terre democratic. Demos was here his own master, undisputed, and therefore quite calm about it.

These thoughts about the political and social setup of Australia establish the importance of politics which is what the novel turns out to be about.

Harriet and Richard take a trip to Manly, one of Sydney’s bathing suburbs where they admire the youth sunbathing and splashing in the sea, before bumping into Jack and Victoria who invite them for tea with the latter’s sister and her husband, William James Trewhella (Cornish name). The Callcotts give the Somers a lift back to the house in their car, and Victoria and Harriet knock up a high tea.

Weeks pass. The couple get friendly. The woman play music – Victoria plays the piano and Harriet sings – while the men play chess, Jack treating it more like checkers. One night Jack Callcott buttonholes Somers about politics: does he want to see the power of capital smashed? So I think he’s some kind of socialist.

After a series of conversations establishing trust between the two men, Jack reveals that he’s part of a secret political organisation. They are concerned about the future of Australia. They want to overthrow the old rotten democracy and establish rule by strong men, men who know how to give and obey orders. Most of them are servicemen who served in the Great War, whose slang name is ‘diggers’. They are divided into small groups (Diggers’ clubs) and the overall leader is a man nicknamed Kangaroo = Benjamin ‘Ben’ Cooley:

Eyes set close together behind his pince-nez: and his body was stout but firm. He was a man of forty or so, hard to tell, swarthy, with short-cropped dark hair and a smallish head carried rather forward on his large but sensitive, almost shy body. He leaned forward in his walk, and seemed as if his hands didn’t quite belong to him. But he shook hands with a firm grip. He was really tall, but his way of dropping his head, and his sloping shoulders, took away from his height.

Somers has a bee in his bonnet that Cooley is Jewish.

Surely, thought Somers, it is Jewish blood. The very best that is in the Jewish blood: a faculty for pure disinterestedness, and warm, physically warm love, that seems to make the corpuscles of the blood glow. And after the smile his face went stupid and kangaroo-like, pendulous, with the eyes close together above the long, drooping nose. But the shape of the head was very beautiful, small, light, and fine. The man had surely Jewish blood. And he was almost purely kind, essential kindliness, embodied in an ancient, unscrupulous shrewdness. He was so shrewd, so clever. And with a rogue or a mean man, absolutely unscrupulous. But for any human being who showed himself sincere and vulnerable, his heart was pure in kindness. An extraordinary man. This pure kindliness had something Jehovah-like in it.

Cooley is characterised by a rarified type of love for his fellow men. Later Lawrence puts these words into Cooley’s mouth:

‘You are hopelessly facile, Lovat,’ he said gently. ‘In the first place, the greatest danger to the world to-day is anarchy, not bolshevism. It is anarchy and unrule that are coming on us — and that is what I, as an order-loving Jew and one of the half-chosen people, do not want. I want one central principle in the world: the principle of love, the maximum of individual liberty, the minimum of human distress…’ (p.230)

Cooley is a deep thinker, with the charisma of a prophet. His basic premise is to do with the life force. Life continually changes. Here he is explaining it to Somers:

‘The secret of all life is in obedience: obedience to the urge that arises in the soul, the urge that is life itself, urging us on to new gestures, new embraces, new emotions, new combinations, new creations. It is a subtle and conflicting urge away from the thing we are. And there lies the pain. Because man builds himself in to his old house of life, builds his own blood into the roads he lays down, and to break from the old way, and to change his house of life, is almost like tearing him to pieces.’

Which is why people need help, need a leader who is like a father to help them into the new way of living.

‘Man needs to be reassured and suggested into his new issues. And he needs to be relieved from this terrible responsibility of governing himself when he doesn’t know what he wants, and has no aim towards which to govern himself. Man again needs a father — not a friend or a brother sufferer, a suffering Saviour. Man needs a quiet, gentle father who uses his authority in the name of living life, and who is absolutely stern against anti-life. I offer no creed. I offer myself, my heart of wisdom, strange warm cavern where the voice of the oracle steams in from the unknown; I offer my consciousness, which hears the voice; and I offer my mind and my will, for the battle against every obstacle to respond to the voice of life, and to shelter mankind from the madness and the evil of anti-life.’

He is against any belief or form being set in stone. Beliefs must change and evolve, have their day and die. Those who try to trap, fix and petrify it are the enemies of life.

‘Evil is the great principle that opposes life in its new urges. The principle of permanency, everlastingness is, in my opinion, the root of evil. The Ten Commandments which Moses heard were the very voice of life. But the tablets of stone he engraved them on are millstones round our necks. Commandments should fade as flowers do. They are no more divine than flowers are. But our divine flowers — look at those hibiscus — they don’t want to immortalise themselves into stone. If they turned into stone on my table, my heart would almost stop beating, and lose its hope and its joy. But they won’t. They will quietly, gently wither. And I love them for it. And so should all creeds, all gods, quietly and gently curl up and wither as their evening approaches. That is the only way of true holiness, in my opinion… There is a principle of evil. The principle of resistance. Malignant resistance to the life principle.’

Fear of foreigners / xenophobia

BUT it isn’t all lovely veneration of the life force. On a more human, social level, Jack Callcott (not Cooley) also expresses fear about Australia’s future, the very specific fear of being overrun by non-white races. I’m going to quote at length so you get the full tone of xenophobia, of the paranoia about being invaded and conquered and enslaved by dark-skinned foreigners, which really fuels Jack’s politics. Here he is explaining it all to Somers who, caught up in this sudden impassioned friendship with Callcott, enthusiastically agrees:

‘Look at Australia. Absolutely fermenting rotten with politicians and the will of the people. Look at the country — going rottener every day, like an old pear.’
‘All the democratic world the same.’
‘Of course it’s the same. And you may well say Australian soil is waiting to be watered with blood. It’s waiting to be watered with our blood, once England’s got too soft to help herself, let alone us, and the Japs come down this way. They’d squash us like a soft pear.’
‘I think it’s quite likely.’
‘What?’
‘Likely.’
‘It’s pretty well a certainty. And would you blame them? If you was thirsty, wouldn’t you pick a ripe pear if it hung on nobody’s tree? Why, of course you would. And who’d blame you.’
‘Blame myself if I didn’t,’ said Somers.
‘And then their coloured labour. I tell you, this country’s too far from Europe to risk it. They’ll swallow us. As sure as guns is guns, if we let in coloured labour, they’ll swallow us. They hate us. All the other colours hate the white. And they’re only waiting till we haven’t got the pull over them. They’re only waiting. And then what about poor little Australia?’
‘Heaven knows.’
‘There’ll be the Labour Party, the Socialists, uniting with the workers of the world. They’ll be the workers, if ever it comes to it. Those black and yellow people’ll make ’em work — not half. It isn’t one side only that can keep slaves. Why, the fools, the coloured races don’t have any feeling for liberty. They only think you’re a fool when you give it to them, and if they got a chance, they’d drive you out to work in gangs, and fairly laugh at you. All this world’s-worker business is simply playing their game.’
‘Of course,’ said Somers. ‘What is Indian Nationalism but a strong bid for power — for tyranny. The Brahmins want their old absolute caste-power — the most absolute tyranny — back again, and the Mahommedans want their military tyranny. That’s what they are lusting for — to wield the rod again. Slavery for millions. Japan the same. And China, in part, the same. The niggers the same. The real sense of liberty only goes with white blood. And the ideal of democratic liberty is an exploded ideal. You’ve got to have wisdom and authority somewhere, and you can’t get it out of any further democracy.’
‘There!’ said Jack. ‘That’s what I mean. We s’ll be wiped out, wiped out. And we know it. Look here, as man to man, you and me here: if you were an Australian, wouldn’t you do something if you could do something?’
‘I would.’
‘Whether you got shot or whether you didn’t! We went to France to get ourselves shot, for something that didn’t touch us very close either. Then why shouldn’t we run a bit of risk for what does touch us very close. Why, you know, with things as they are, I don’t want Victoria and me to have any children. I’d a jolly sight rather not — and I’ll watch it too.’
‘Same with me,’ yelled Somers.
Jack had come closer to him, and was now holding him by the arm.
‘What’s a man’s life for, anyhow? Is it just to save up like rotten pears on a shelf, in the hopes that one day it’ll rot into a pink canary or something of that?’
‘No,’ said Somers.
‘What we want in Australia,’ said Jack, ‘isn’t a statesman, not yet. It’s a set of chaps with some guts in them, who’ll obey orders when they find a man who’ll give the orders.’

Well, there’s the logic of the argument, Jack’s character and Somers’s enthusiastic agreement, in a nutshell.

Somers’ conflicted attitude

Jack of course had to talk about it to the people there, while Somers hung back and tried to make himself invisible, as he always did when there were strange onlookers.

For although, when he’s with him, Somers enthusiastically agrees with everything Jack says, and he is very swayed by Cooley’s talk about new forms of life, as soon as he’s alone again, Somers reverts to his core attitude of singleness, aloofness, separation.

He had all his life had this craving for an absolute friend, a David to his Jonathan, Pylades to his Orestes: a blood-brother. All his life he had secretly grieved over his friendlessness. And now at last, when it really offered… he didn’t want it, and he realised that in his innermost soul he had never wanted it.

This is expressed over and over, scores of times. Here he is reflecting on a meeting with Cooley, as he looks out over the ocean. I’ll give an extended quote because it exemplifies 1) Somers’ deep wish for isolated self-sufficiency but also 2) is a good example of Lawrence’s brilliant nature description, which also exemplifies 3) his habit of repetition, of beating out and varying and exploring a handful of key words in varying combinations.

These days Somers, too, was filled with fury. As for loving mankind, or having a fire of love in his heart, it was all rot. He felt almost fierily cold. He liked the sea, the pale sea of green glass that fell in such cold foam. Ice-fiery, fish-burning. He went out on to the low flat rocks at low tide, skirting the deep pock-holes that were full of brilliantly clear water and delicately-coloured shells and tiny, crimson anemones. Strangely sea-scooped sharp sea-bitter rock-floor, all wet and sea-savage. And standing at the edge looking at the waves rather terrifying rolling at him, where he stood low and exposed, far out from the sand-banks, and as he watched the gannets gleaming white, then falling with a splash like white sky-arrows into the waves, he wished as he had never wished before that he could be cold, as sea-things are cold, and murderously fierce. To have oneself exultantly ice-cold, not one spark of this wretched warm flesh left, and to have all the terrific, icy energy of a fish. To surge with that cold exultance and passion of a sea thing! Now he understood the yearning in the seal-woman’s croon, as she went back to the sea, leaving her husband and her children of warm flesh. No more cloying warmth. No more of this horrible stuffy heat of human beings. To be an isolated swift fish in the big seas, that are bigger than the earth; fierce with cold, cold life, in the watery twilight before sympathy was created to clog us.

These were his feelings now. Mankind? Ha, he turned his face to the centre of the seas, away from any land. The noise of waters, and dumbness like a fish. The cold, lovely silence, before crying and calling were invented. His tongue felt heavy in his mouth, as if it had relapsed away from speech altogether.

He did not care a straw what Kangaroo said or felt, or what anybody said or felt, even himself. He had no feelings, and speech had gone out of him. He wanted to be cold, cold, and alone like a single fish, with no feeling in his heart at all except a certain icy exultance and wild, fish-like rapacity. ‘Homo sum!’ All right. Who sets a limit to what a man is? Man is also a fierce and fish-cold devil, in his hour, filled with cold fury of desire to get away from the cloy of human life altogether, not into death, but into that icily self-sufficient vigour of a fish. (p.140)

The ‘ice-fiery, fish-burning’ sea. Wow. There’s a plot but who cares, really. One way of reading Lawrence’s novels is to regard these psycho-descriptive as oases in the deserts of dialogue and to stop and read and savour them like beautiful pictures. Take, for example, the brilliant description of Somers stripping off on the beach on a grey louring day as it starts to rain and running into the icy cold sea in the rain and exulting, then returning to the shore, showering and, full of life, making love to Harriet (pages 162 to 164). Life! To be alive! So many paragraphs you want to stop and savour.

He left off kicking himself, and went down to the shore to get away from himself. After all, he knew the endless water would soon make him forget. It had a language which spoke utterly without concern of him, and this utter unconcern gradually soothed him of himself and his world. He began to forget. (p.171)

All E.M. Forster’s novels are littered with gaseous paragraphs invoking the Greek gods which I found bloviated and irritating. I learned to skip them in order to focus on the dialogue and what happens next. The experience with Lawrence is the exact opposite: I tended to skim the badly written dialogue and didn’t much care what happened next, but found myself mesmerised by his descriptions of the sky, sunset, the bush and, most of all, the unceasing sea.

The sky was tufted with cloud, and in the afternoon veils of rain swept here and there across the sea, in a changing wind. But then it cleared again, and Somers and Harriet walked along the sands, watching the blue sky mirror purple and the white clouds mirror warm on the wet sand. The sea talked and talked all the time, in its disintegrative, elemental language. And at last it talked its way into Somers’ soul, and he forgot the world again, the babel. The simplicity came back, and with it the inward peace. (p.172)

Harriet’s attitude

Harriet, meanwhile, and probably despite Lawrence’s intentions, is a great comic character, appalled by all this nonsense, and continually pouring cold water on Somers’ pretensions. Here’s one from hundreds of examples of her down-to-earth comments on his wild opinions.

It always seems to me,’ said Somers, that somebody will have to water Australia with their blood before it’s a real man’s country. The soil, the very plants seem to be waiting for it.’
‘You’ve got a lurid imagination, my dear man,’ said Jack.
‘Yes, he has,’ said Harriet. ‘He’s always so extreme.’

And Somers knows this about himself. He knows he’s continually jumping in the deep end. When, at the start of chapter 8, he vows not to take everything so damn seriously, to lighten up and not be so judgemental, we and Harriet know it can’t last. Somers (and Lawrence) are made to over-react, sometimes into absurd beliefs and statements:

Some men have to be bombs, to explode and make breaches in the walls that shut life in! (p.184)

But sometimes into perceptions and descriptions of breath-taking vividness.

More plot

After some weeks at Torestin, Somers and Harriet move to another house, at a place some distance (a train ride) south of Sydney called Mullumbimby. The cottage is right on the coast, with a sweep of beach washed by breakers and a jetty in the distance. The house is called Coo-Ee and they love it. Lots of warm domestic details.

Here Jack and Victoria come to visit them and from here Somers makes visits to Cooley’s offices (he is a successful lawyer) back in Sydney.

Chapter 11. Willie Struthers and Kangaroo

Jack Callcott has a friend, a man named William James, a Cornishman we meet early on. His workaday nickname is Jaz. He pops up from time to time. On a memorable day up in Sydney, Jaz takes Somers to see Willie Struthers, head of the New South Wales Socialists, who delivers a great long spiel about brotherly love. Then Jaz and Somers visit the Sydney zoo, where Lovat is very taken with some of the birds. And on the evening of the same day visits Cooley, with whom he has a big argument. Even after Cooley (a big man) has clasped weedy Somers to his bosom and told him he loves him, Somers finds himself, ultimately, unable to commit to his cause. And Cooley’s resulting hatred is so powerful Somers suddenly sees him as a horror, a monster.

Chapter 12. The nightmare

This chapter is famous. It is a long, detailed, barely fictionalised account of Lawrence’s experiences stuck in England during the First World War. For the first year or so living in Hampstead, over which he and Frieda memorably saw a zeppelin in the searchlights. Later, in midwinter 1915, they moved to Cornwall, from where he was called to attend a medical examination in Bodmin, which he convincingly failed. Sickly and frail, he was a non-starter as a soldier. In Lawrence’s opinion the war destroyed a man’s ‘manly isolation in his own integrity, which alone keeps life real’ for millions of. Even the survivors had been stripped of something, which all their wives and sweethearts noticed when they returned.

It was in 1915 the old world ended. In the winter 1915-1916 the spirit of the old London collapsed; the city, in some way, perished, perished from being a heart of the world, and became a vortex of broken passions, lusts, hopes, fears, and horrors. The integrity of London collapsed, and the genuine debasement began, the unspeakable baseness of the press and the public voice, the reign of that bloated ignominy, John Bull.

Many details but in amid them all, a mockery of the accusation thrown at him in Cornwall, that he was a German spy.

One of the most intensely English little men England ever produced, with a passion for his country – even if it were often a passion of hatred.

The chapter is surprisingly long at 53 pages, an eighth of the entire novel, more like a massive chunk of barely disguised and hugely aggrieved autobiography shoehorned into a novel about something completely different. And also, it is uncharacteristically lucid. Although lightly impressionistic in style, it makes more sense than most of the rest of the book, the little bits of dialogue with local police or soldiers or Harriet far more focused and to-the-point than the long, rambling, unfocused fictional dialogues with Jack Callcott or Ben Cooley.

Its realism, its earnestness, its seriousness, highlight the diffuseness and frequent absurdity of much of the rest of the book. there is some wonderful nature description, especially of the pagan landscape of Cornwall.

It was January, and there was a thin film of half-melted snow, like silver, on the fields and the path. A white, static, arrested morning, away there in the west of Cornwall, with the moors looking primeval, and the huge granite boulders bulging out of the earth like presences. So easy to realise men worshipping stones. It is not the stone. It is the mystery of the powerful, pre-human earth, showing its might. And all, this morning, static, arrested in a cold, milky whiteness, like death, the west lost in the sea. (p.250)

And in Cornwall he spends a halcyon summer becoming friendly with a local farming family, helping them bring in the hay. Descriptions of building haystacks and lying around on them looking at the sky while he waits for the cart to return instantly reminded me of the novella ‘Love Among The Haystacks’.

But the police call round, they learn that locals are informing on them as spies, they realise that people are actually lying behind the garden walls listening to their conversations, the house is ransacked while they’re out, then legally searched by a soldier with a warrant and a troupe of local goons. Finally they are compelled by the authorities to leave Cornwall with just three days notice and no reason given, reducing Harriet to tears. They take refuge with friends in London and then another friend lets them a cottage near Oxford.

He is called for three different physical inspections. The final one is in Derby and the abusive, aggressive attitude of the military officials and doctors making the men strip naked and wait in humiliation, cupping their balls and making them cough, making them bend over so as to inspect their anus (for chancres, sores and signs of disease) reduces Lawrence to a seething rage.

The upshot of the Derby trip is it snaps his attachment to the Midlands, to his home territory, for good. He realises he much prefers the soft countryside of Oxford, and certainly the granite pagan landscape of Cornwall. But the real impact is bigger: he comes to hate England. He, a devout Englishman, a poet of England’s countryside, in verse and prose, comes to fear and hate ‘the base and malignant power of the mob-like authorities’. He is disgusted by the tone of shrieking patriotism he associates with the new Lloyd George government which came in in December 1916, epitomised by Horatio Bottomley’s jingoistic magazine John Bull.

So: Lawrence’s disgust at the vulgar jingoism of the media, his feeling for the millions of men whose independent spirit was crushed, and his own outrageous experiences of persecution, arbitrary search and expulsion, and the physically humiliating experiences of three strip searches, all combined to make him hate England, so different from the gentle bucolic England of Shakespeare and Hardy he grew up with. Now he couldn’t wait to get away.

Why, the fictional character Somers asks himself, does all this come flooding back to him in nauseating detail in Australia, on the other side of the world? Why not during his sojourns in Italy or Sicily, or on the ship across the Indian Ocean? Maybe it’s because the Australians are English speaking and of English descent, hearing and speaking English has triggered his traumatic memories. Also, maybe it’s because Australia has the same Anglo-Saxon form of ‘democracy’ which, in England, for all the reasons given, he now associates with crude and terrifying mob rule, baying snarling jingoism?

Antisemitism

I’ve made a point of calling out the casual antisemitism in all Lawrence’s novels. Here It’s important to put it in a broader context and understand that Lawrence, like everyone of his day, was given to making sweeping generalisations about all races – this book also contains insensitive generalisations about Indians, Chinese, Japanese and Africans. And people of the day made sweeping generalisations about the ‘races’ of Europe, stereotyping Italians, Germans and French, for example. And within England, Lawrence distinguishes between the Anglo-Saxon English and the Celts of Cornwall etc. So his writings and to a large extent his thinking about life as a whole, is based on a kind of methodology which confidently generalises about all races, nations, peoples and ethnicities. And Lawrence/Somers goes out of his way to emphasise not only that Cooley is Jewish but that he is gentle, kind, loving and loveable etc etc.

BUT in the mental recoil from the hurt and humiliation recorded in the long nightmare chapter there is one passage which leaps out at the reader.

Somers knew nothing about Lloyd George. A little Welsh lawyer, not an Englishman at all. He had no real significance in Richard Lovat’s soul. Only, Somers gradually came to believe that all Jews, and all Celts, even whilst they espoused the cause of England, subtly lived to bring about the last humiliation of the great old England. They could never do so if England would not be humiliated. But with an England fairly offering herself to ignominy, where was the help? Let the Celts work out their subtlety. If England wanted to be betrayed, in the deeper issues. Perhaps Jesus wanted to be betrayed. He did. He chose Judas. (p.251)

As you can see, even in this passage ‘the Celts’ are indicted more than the Jews. Still, it was the Jews who were the smaller and more vulnerable group as the history of the 1920s and 1930s was to show. I think the passage is more about indicting Lloyd George, widely judged to have initiated a step change in Britain’s war effort but who Lawrence associated with the new tone of hysterical war-mongering and paranoid jingoism from which he was to suffer so personally. In this respect the blaming of ‘the Celts’ has a glimmer of truth: Lloyd George was a Celt and oversaw what Lawrence saw as the breaking of the old English culture.

What doesn’t have any justification at all is blaming ‘all Jews’. This is a kind of mental giving-in to the kind of thinking which blames enormous sweeping historical changes on one particular group (in our time the same xenophobic small-mindedness blames immigrants, Muslims, refugees etc for social changes which have, in fact been supervised by Tony Blair, Gordon Brown, David Cameron et al, the whitest of white men). Unable to cope with the sheer scale and complexity of changes in an enormous society, the temptation is to give up the attempt and just blame X, where X stands for an easily identifiable and blameable social group, almost always numerically small and vulnerable.

It’s only one throwaway sentence in an enormous, verbose, 400-page novel, and a novel which deliberately makes its most charismatic and appealing character (Cooley) Jewish. Nonetheless it is a tiny fracture, a crack, which indicates the massive fault-line which lies beneath Lawrence’s entire position. He is emphatically not a thinker about anything: he is a feeler, a tremendously sensitive perceiver of people and places, hyper-sensitive to moods and atmospheres, extraordinarily expressive and over-articulate, but whose solid, isolatable opinions are often gibberish.

Like the flaw in an otherwise perfect diamond, Lawrence’s knee-jerk antisemitism, if you choose to notice or dwell on it, undermines otherwise magnificent works of art.

Chapter 13. ‘Revenge!’ Timotheus Cries

So chapter 13 commences with Somers back in Coo-ee cottage, puzzling over why his unconscious has chosen now to dredge up all his wartime humiliations in their full horror. Maybe the sound of English voices. Maybe the discussions about a very English form of democracy, with all the susceptibility to crude demagoguery that implies. Or maybe the inversion of the rhythm of the seasons, winter when it should be summer, the familiar constellations upside down, has jangled his nerves.

‘Aaron’s Rod’ referred repeatedly to the external changes the war made, to England where it starts and then to Italy where it continues. This book, this very long passage, makes explicit the personal, psychological impact.

He was full of a lava fire of rage and hate, at the bottom of his soul. And he knew it was the same with most men. He felt desecrated. And he knew it was the same with most men. He felt sold. And he knew most men felt the same. (p.290)

This is a new chapter but it’s as if writing the Nightmare chapter has snapped something in Lawrence. He can’t shut up about it. It transforms the tone of the novel. Previously it had been about events; now it turns into an extended essay, Lawrence in essay mode pontificating about human nature, and feelings and the deep rage within himself which he attributes to everyone else broken by the war, and which he broadens out into an attack on all worn-out creeds and ideas. Ideas and religions have a natural lifespan, grow, flower then fade and die. And using this impressionistic logic, Somers now dismisses both Cooley-Kangaroo and Struthers as labouring at a creed, the creed of humanistic love and equality, which has in fact had its day, is dead. All that lies behind both of them is the image of the vengeful mob, the thing that terrifies Lawrence most.

And so he repeats again and again the central theme of the novel, which is his desperate wish to be free, to free himself of wretched clinging humanity, to stand aloof.

That was now all he wanted: to get clear. Not to save humanity or to help humanity or to have anything to do with humanity. No—no. Kangaroo had been his last embrace with humanity. Now, all he wanted was to cut himself clear. To be clear of humanity altogether, to be alone. To be clear of love, and pity, and hate. To be alone from it all. To cut himself finally clear from the last encircling arm of the octopus humanity. To turn to the old dark gods, who had waited so long in the outer dark. Humanity could do as it liked: he did not care. So long as he could get his own soul clear. (p.294)

The chapter rises to a climax of swirling rhetorical declarations, explaining how Life makes no absolute statements, everything is a flux, but one must dig deep below the surface, and deep below a Christianity which has become mechanical, fossilised, and seek out the dark gods at the core of man’s being. Lots of sentences like that.

Chapter 14. Bits

After 50 pages of war reminiscence followed by 20 pages of increasingly delirious speculation about the human soul, the novel lands back on earth and we return to The Plot.

Next morning he wakes up in Sydney and reads the Bulletin, which has a section of entertaining trivia or ‘bits’. This bombardment of everyday silliness makes him see everything he’s just written about seem like pompous nonsense.

He could have kicked himself for wanting to help mankind, join in revolutions or reforms or any of that stuff. And he kicked himself still harder thinking of his frantic struggles with the ‘soul’ and the ‘dark god’ and the ‘listener’ and the ‘answerer’. Blarney — blarney — blarney! He was a preacher and a blatherer, and he hated himself for it. Damn the ‘soul’, damn the ‘dark god’, damn the ‘listener’ and the ‘answerer’, and above all, damn his own interfering, nosy self. (p.300)

That’s Lawrence for you. Ever-changing, never stationary, intensely experiencing one moment, one emotion, one set of thoughts and the next moment… dismissing it all as blather, moving onto the next thing, sights, scenes, people, arguments. As his wife Harriet continually tells him, he can’t stop jumping from one extreme to another. Later, in the same vein:

‘I am a fool,’ said Richard Lovat, which was the most frequent discovery he made. It came, moreover, every time with a new shock of surprise and chagrin. Every time he climbed a new mountain range and looked over, he saw, not only a new world, but a big anticipatory fool on this side of it, namely, himself. (p.308)

Anyway, puncturing all this blather, Somers takes Harriet along the coast to a half-built settlement named Wolloona which they stroll around, go to the sea and pick shells till they are caught in small waves, Somers’ hat blows off into the sea and he wades in to retrieve it while Harriet collapses on the sand in hysterical laughter. It is a wonderful couple of pages, not only describing the scene with godlike powers but capturing the profoundly same wavelength these two dissimilar people operated on. It’s a wonderful record of life and living!

Breaking the fourth wall

In fact this passage breaks the fourth wall, so to speak, and the author observes that the novel, this novel anyway, amounts to a a record of the author’s musings and preachings.

I am sorry to have to stand, a sorry sight, preening my wings on the brink of the ointment-pot, thought Richard. But from this vantage ground let me preach to myself. He preached, and the record was taken down for this gramophone of a novel.

And, having broken the wall once, Lawrence keeps on doing it, spilling into the next chapter which he begins in a thoroughly post-modern way, suddenly stepping back from his narrative and saying, yeah there’s all these characters yadda yadda yadda, doing stuff and there’s chapters, because a novel needs them, and if you don’t like the book chum, don’t read it.

Chapter follows chapter, and nothing doing. But man is a thought-adventurer, and his falls into the Charybdis of ointment, and his shipwrecks on the rocks of ages, and his kisses across chasms, and his silhouette on a minaret: surely these are as thrilling as most things… To be brief, there was a Harriet, a Kangaroo, a Jack and a Jaz and a Vicky, let alone a number of mere Australians… We can’t be at a stretch of tension all the time, like the E string on a fiddle. If you don’t like the novel, don’t read it. (p.312)

Chapter 15. Jack Slaps Back

As to the plot, dear me the plot, if you’re still interested in such a thing after 90 or more pages of autobiography and preaching, well, Lawrence fumbles his way back to it, although it now feels completely different, almost irrelevant compared with the power of the autobiography and then the autobiographical ideas streaming from it.

Jack calls round and is deeply unpleasant. He’s heard that Somers and Cooley had a big argument, that Somers turned down the offer of joining the movement and was shown the door. With polite smiles he threatens Somers not to tell anyone about their plans. Somers replies that he’s planning to leave Australia now, in 6 weeks maybe, but Jack snarling says, only if they let him. Somers feels as threatened and bullied as he did in wartime England, the visit triggers that anger, resentment and humiliation.

Harriet arrives back at the veranda wondering what the two men have been arguing about. They part in angry silence.

Chapter 16. A Row in Town

This book feels like it’s really abandoning any pretence to be a novel. The first 11 pages of this chapter are a preposterous farrago of scientifically illiterate pontificating about the nature of ‘the mob’, starting with an attack on the human sciences and talk about the dark god knocking on the door of our souls before going on to develop the idea of telepathy, giving an ‘explanation’ based on the made-up notion of ‘vertebral-telegraphy’ whose power Lawrence then goes on to describe in ants, fish, reptiles, birds and sperm whales.

The narrative justifies this hogwash by coalescing to become a sort of backdrop to or explanation of Richard’s ‘thoughts’:

What Richard wanted was some sort of a new show: a new recognition of the life-mystery, a departure from the dreariness of money-making, money-having, and money-spending. It meant a new recognition of difference, of highness and of lowness, of one man meet for service and another man clean with glory, having majesty in himself, the innate majesty of the purest individual, not the strongest instrument, like Napoleon. Not the tuppenny trick-majesty of Kaisers. But the true majesty of the single soul which has all its own weaknesses, but its strength in spite of them, its own lovableness, as well as its might and dread. The single soul that stands naked between the dark God and the dark-blooded masses of men. (p.334)

And, finally, eventually, we descend back down to earth and the plot gets going again. There have been political developments. The Conservative Party is fighting back against Labour, passing laws to allow non-union labour to break strikes, protecting scab workers, and making union leaders responsible for any violence that breaks out.

Richard reads that the Labour Party will be holding meetings at its base, Canberra Hall in Sydney, and so catches a train up on the day of the meetings, a small discussion one in the morning, a big mass meeting in the evening.

In the evening Somers watches a long speech about class, demanding equality between the classes and ridiculing the ‘upper’ classes, from Willie Struthers. He demands the creation of a Soviet with a maximum daily pay for anyone, including millionaires, of one pound, and screw the ridiculous Empire with ‘its out-of-date Lords and its fat-arsed, hypocritical upper classes’. The speech, unfortunately, contains familiar antisemitic tropes about Hebrew financiers being among the exploiting class that must be overthrown, as well as racial terms describing Chinese, Indians and Africans which are unacceptable to us, a hundred years later.

Anyway, a cohort of diggers from Kangaroo’s movement are in the hall and they interrupt Struther’s speech with an impressive calling out of a countdown, in fact shouting slowly and in unison up to eight, and then the hall explodes into a fight, a riot. Fighting everywhere, Somers’ guide, Jaz, tries to pull him free, but not before he’s had his collar ripped and taken a nasty blow on the forehead. Outside in the streets is a huge riot with mounted police arriving, then a bang as of a bomb going off, then the lights of ambulances arriving, as Jaz pulls a dazed Somers away and down back streets to a quiet Diggers club where he lays him on a couch to recover before heading back to find out what’s going on.

Jaz returns with Jack who’s got a bloody chin but eyes are fiery from the fight. They tell him someone shot Kangaroo in the gut but was then torn to pieces by the diggers. From the club they go out into the night which is hushed and dark with mounted cops at every street corner and make their way unhindered back to Jack’s house by about 1am. Victoria calls out but he tells her to shut up. Jack pours whiskey. After a while Jaz goes to bed leaving the enemies Jack and Somers. Jack is exultant, convinced he killed at least three of Struther’s followers with an iron bar.

‘Having a woman’s something, isn’t it? But it’s a flea-bite, nothing, compared to killing your man when your blood comes up.’ (p.352)

After which Somers goes back to his house. Over the coming weeks the papers report it as a fight between Communists and Nationalists but remarkably few people are named or arrested. A couple are convicted and sentenced to prison but Jack, for example, is merely bound over, and nobody fingers the would-be assassin of Kangaroo.

Somers and Harriet go to visit him. There is a long and what I thought pointless conversation. I can’t credit that this nationalist leader, instead of a bullish Mussolini is depicted as a feeble Jewish lawyer who goes on and on about teaching the workers to love each other. It seems a completely mad, uninformed description of the authoritarian nationalist ideology. Kangaroo is obviously wounded and his room smells of faeces and infection. He clasps Somers’ hand and passionately begs him to join his crusade to bring love to the working man.

‘They have never known the full beauty of love, the working classes. They have never admitted it. Work, bread has always stood first. But we can take away that obstacle. Teach them the beauty of love between men, Richard, teach them the highest—greater love than this hath no man—teach them how to love their own mate, and you will solve the problem of work for ever. Richard, this is true, you know it is true. How beautiful it would be! How beautiful it would be!’ (p. 358)

The crux of whether Richard will join the movement is redirected to whether Richard can love Kangaroo, or whether he loves Kangaroo but doesn’t want to, or whether he wants to but can’t bring himself to. All this seems sublimely beside the point and is plain weird to have in a novel about ‘politics’. They leave the very sick Kangaroo whose last words are ‘Don’t let me die.’

Somers’ reaction to all this is more philosophising about God and love and the dark gods. He rejects both Kangaroo and Struthers’ insistence on love, strongly preferring that a man look to himself and be true to himself and his own dark god.

He believed in the God of fear, of darkness, of passion, and of silence, the God that made a man realise his own sacred aloneness…

And:

Man’s isolation was always a supreme truth and fact, not to be forsworn. And the mystery of apartness. And the greater mystery of the dark God beyond a man, the God that gives a man passion, and the dark, unexplained blood-tenderness that is deeper than love, but so much more obscure, impersonal, and the brave, silent blood-pride, knowing his own separateness, and the sword-strength of his derivation from the dark God. This dark, passionate religiousness and inward sense of an indwelling magnificence, direct flow from the unknowable God, this filled Richard’s heart first, and human love seemed such a fighting for candle-light, when the dark is so much better.

And:

he proceeded, as ever, to try to disentangle himself from the white octopus of love. Not that even now he dared quite deny love. Love is perhaps an eternal part of life. But it is only a part. And when it is treated as if it were a whole, it becomes a disease, a vast white strangling octopus. All things are relative, and have their sacredness in their true relation to all other things. And he felt the light of love dying out in his eyes, in his heart, in his soul, and a great, healing darkness taking its place, with a sweetness of everlasting aloneness, and a stirring of dark blood-tenderness, and a strange, soft iron of ruthlessness.

Somers goes walking by the seashore day after day until night falls which Lawrence describes with his usual wonder, and feels his soul is null, he has no soul. He has shed the world and meaning, he never wants to go back.

Harriet and he? It was time they both agreed that nothing has any meaning. Meaning is a dead letter when a man has no soul. And speech is like a volley of dead leaves and dust, stifling the air. Human beings should learn to make weird, wordless cries, like the animals, and cast off the clutter of words. Old dust and dirt of corpses: words and feelings. The decomposed body of the past whirling and choking us, language, love, and meaning. When a man loses his soul he knows what a small, weary bit of clock-work it was. Who dares to be soulless finds the new dimension of life. (p.367)

In this null mode he is asked to visit Kangaroo again. He is on his death bed, pale and weak. Once again he clutches Somers’ hand and begs him to say ‘I love you’ and once again Somers can’t quite bring himself to. So Kangaroo shouts out ‘you’ve killed me’ which shocks Somers and brings the nurse running, and Jack. Outside, walking in the daylight, Jack tells him what a selfish bastard he is not to say those three little words and fulfil a dying man’s wish. Is it because he’s from the Old Country where everyone’s so uptight and scared? Or just because he’s a heartless bastard?

They part and Somers spends the afternoon making arrangements at the Customs House and American consulate to take ship for San Francisco. Love Kangaroo? He hates him. He hates everyone. He wants to be left alone. In the end is that what this novel was about? Not about politics at all, but one man’s rejection of not just politics, but society as a whole with all its problems and culture and religion, and striking out utterly on his own with his own sense of the dark gods and the need for complete integrity.

He goes down to the sea at night as the moon rises for one last magnificent Laurentian hymn and paean and beyond-human perception of the natural world.

Chapter 17. Adieu Australia

Kangaroo dies and has a big funeral. Somers is beyond caring. His ship sails for America in six weeks. During that time he communes with the Australian spring. Pages of wonderful description of not just the sea, but the landscape inland and the scattered settlements. He hated the half built shanty bungalows, scattered randomly over the barren land when he first arrived; but now he’s learned to see them as entirely appropriate to the emptiness and unfinishedness of the Australian landscape. In fact he’s come to love the place, as he tells Jaz who calls by for a final chat and cup of tea out on the veranda. Lawrence describes Somers having a dream of a quaint old town in Europe, all gables and cobbled streets with a big Gothic cathedral looming over everything and waking in a panic, feeling stifled and strangled! How lovely they both feel to be free of old Europe, ruined old Europe with all its terrible history, and free to to wander the virgin bush where everything is ancient and new at the same time.

In the last act of the book the tail end of a typhoon comes down the east coast, hitting Sydney and then the town the Somers are staying in, and they’re trapped inside their little house by vicious winds and whipping rain, feeling like they’re in a submarine. The storm rages for four days and, when they emerge, has completely transformed the beach, turning it from soft sand into a warzone of mud and wreckage with a new deep stream cutting across it. They are discombobulated. Turning away from this wrecked area, in their last weeks the couple take to riding a little horse and cart into the bush, exploring its big vivid flowers and eerie emptiness.

The last days come, they close up the house and pack and travel to Sydney. Victoria Callcott and Jaz’s wife come to wave them off and to act the traditional Australian farewell whereby those on the wharf hold one end of long colourful streamers, the other end held by passengers on the ship, which finally weights anchor as the streamers slowly uncurl, pull tight and then snap. And so Frieda and Lawrence, I mean Somers and Harriet, set their faces towards America.

Apparently this final chapter was written entirely in Taos, New Mexico, after he arrived there in September 1922, which might explain the sense of nostalgia, the emotion behind the writing, a traditional sense of lovely loss you in which could possibly detect something like sentimentalism.

Summary

Chaotic and nonsensical as long tracts of the novel have been, somehow, as with all Lawrence, its emotional intensity and candour and the endless vividness of its countless descriptions leave you with an impression of uncanny magnificence.

Credit

‘Kangaroo’ by D. H. Lawrence was first published in the UK by Martin Secker in 1923. Page references are to the 1972 Penguin Classics paperback edition.

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by Simon on February 19, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Novel

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Posted by Simon on February 19, 2025

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Aaron’s Rod by D. H. Lawrence (1922)

He paid hardly any outward attention to his surroundings, but sat involved in himself.
(The D.H. Lawrence posture, Aaron Sisson riding a train across northern Italy in chapter 14)

‘What’s the good of running after life, when we’ve got it in us, if nobody prevents us and obstructs us?’
(Motto of the gnarly little writer, Rawdon Lilly, p.337)

‘Aaron’s Rod’ isn’t a very good book. Well down the D.H. Lawrence reading list. Richard Aldington’s introduction to the Penguin edition does a good job of putting you off reading it. He describes it as a confused pot-boiler, a minor work. This is for two reasons:

1. The books consists of two halves which were written at different times: Lawrence began writing ‘Aaron’s Rod’ early in 1918 but abandoned it after writing the first eleven chapters, and you can see why: it’s not really clear what it’s about or where it’s going: the lead character keeps changing, from Aaron, to Jim Bricknell, to Rawdon Lilly for a while and only at the end back to Aaron again. Three years later, in 1921, Lawrence picked it up again and wrote the remaining ten chapters, in which he abruptly whisks his English protagonist off to Italy. But it’s not to much that: the problem is not just the change of scene but the drastic change of atmosphere and, above all, of style. It abruptly switches from being thin social satire of the first half to something more long-winded and earnest like the densest parts of ‘Women in Love’.

2. In his biography of Lawrence, Anthony Burgess quotes a letter in which Lawrence described rewriting ‘Women in Love’ seven times. This effort shows in the novel’s astonishing depth of characterisation and in the densely written depictions of human beings stripped back to elemental level. The highly wrought nature of the prose completely matches the theme and aim. By contrast, ‘Aaron’s Rod’ is not only inconsistent in tone and details (the kind of thing you’d correct by rewriting) but, for the first 11 chapters, is much, much thinner in texture and effect.

It’s the first of Lawrence’s really satirical works. As the war was starting (1914), the success of ‘Sons and Lovers’ (1912) and the scandal of ‘The Rainbow’ (1915) gave Lawrence an entrée into London’s literary and artistic society, a far cry from the colliers and farmers of Eastwood where he grew up. Soon he was hobnobbing with Lady Ottoline Morell and Bertrand Russell, meeting lots of other writers, artists and poets, and discovering just how horribly competitive, mean and backbiting they could be.

There were two results: 1) satire, taking the mickey out of the new, posh people he was meeting, their empty lives, their boredom and superficiality; 2) but satire is itself a superficial medium, ridiculing people’s appearance, behaviour and speech; it generally doesn’t attempt to reach the depths of human experience.

So it’s not just the fact that it’s a novel of two distinct parts, or the lack of consistency in tone or details, it’s the almost complete abandonment, in the first 11 chapters, of the flayed, primeval depth which The Rainbow and Women in Love achieved so awesomely. Instead, the first half is closer to the silly, social satire of Lawrence’s friend, Aldous Huxley but – crucially – without the comedy.

Lawrence invents a small group of bored bourgeois – a couple of rich couples, an artist, a painter, their wives and mistresses – and then invents half a dozen scenes for them to display their shallow worthlessness and silly affairs. But maybe in doing so he discovered that this really wasn’t his metier and, by chapter 11, had gotten understandably bored of the whole thing and dropped it.

The finished published novel isn’t cast in two parts but because that’s what Aldington and Burgess say about it, and also because there’s such an obvious break in the reading, I’ve divided this summary of it into two parts.

The title

In the Old Testament Aaron is the older brother of Moses. Unlike Moses, Aaron had a place at Pharaoh’s court and acted as Moses’ spokesman. His rod features in several stories. It was a divine symbol of Aaron’s authority as the first high priest of the Israelites. When Moses called up the first three of the plagues he brought down upon Egypt, it was via Aaron’s use of his magic rod. Later, when free and wandering in the wilderness, there was argument among the different tribes as to who deserved primacy. To emphasize the validity of the Levites’ claim to the offerings and tithes of the Israelites, Moses collected a rod from the leaders of each tribe in Israel and laid the twelve rods overnight in the tent of meeting. The next morning, Aaron’s rod was found to have budded and blossomed and produced ripe almonds. The rod was then placed before the Ark of the Covenant to symbolize Aaron’s right to priesthood (Wikipedia).

All these overtones are contained in the novel’s title. Within Lawrence’s story, ‘Aaron’s rod’ refers to the flute played by the central character, Aaron Sisson. The comparison is made, explicitly, by the writer Rawdon Lilly, in chapter 10. Here is the exchange in full. As you can see, like a lot of things in the novel, it starts with the promise of wit and deep meaning but peters out into inconsequentiality.

Aaron suddenly took his flute, and began trying little passages from the opera on his knee. He had not played since his illness. The noise came out a little tremulous, but low and sweet. Lilly came forward with a plate and a cloth in his hand.
‘Aaron’s rod is putting forth again,’ he said, smiling.
‘What?’ said Aaron, looking up.
‘I said Aaron’s rod is putting forth again.’
‘What rod?’
‘Your flute, for the moment.’
‘It’s got to put forth my bread and butter.’
‘Is that all the buds it’s going to have?’
‘What else!’
‘Nay—that’s for you to show. What flowers do you imagine came out of the rod of Moses’s brother?’
‘Scarlet runners, I should think if he’d got to live on them.’
‘Scarlet enough, I’ll bet.’

It ought to mean something, shouldn’t it, but like a lot of things in the novel, is heavy on promising rhetoric but, in the end, means nothing. Periodically there are discussions of music in the novel but not as many as you might expect. Lady Williams prefers Bach and Beethoven. In his pensione in Florence, Aaron:

studied some music he had bought in Milan: some Pergolesi and the Scarlatti he liked, and some Corelli. He preferred frail, sensitive, abstract music, with not much feeling in it, but a certain limpidity and purity. Night fell as he sat reading the scores. He would have liked to try certain pieces on his flute. But his flute was too sensitive, it winced from the new strange surroundings, and would not blossom. (p.251)

But the term really comes into its own in chapter 18, where it comes to symbolise the flowering of Aaron’s lust for the Marchesa (see summary of chapter 18, below). Here it is equated with his maleness and transparently symbolises the male member.

Part one. Beldover, Hampshire and London

Chapter 1. The Blue Ball

It is Christmas Eve after the First World War. We are in an ugly little mining town of Beldover, in the small home of Aaron Sisson. Aaron is a ‘men’s checkweighman’ at the local coalmines mines. He is 33 and a noted amateur player of the flute. He is blonde with a fair moustache and quite handsome.

He watches his two girls playing and squabbling over Christmas tree decorations. One of them finds a glass blue ball which has been handed down to him as a family heirloom. In the way of children the two sisters wonder how strong it is, what would happen if you drop it (it survives), what would happen if you throw it in the air and let it fall on the tiled floor – it breaks, angering their father.

Chapter 2. The Royal Oak

The children want candles for their Christmas tree so when Aaron sets off for his nightly visit to the pub, his wife, Lottie, asks him to buy some, and this is an opportunity for Lawrence to describe Christmas Eve in the main shopping street of a miners’ town like Beldover. Lawrence makes a point of stating: ‘The war had killed the little market of the town.’ Aaron buys eight candles in a shop.

Then he goes on to the pub, the Royal Oak. It’s a small space with benches and a couple of tables. Conversation with the men. This morphs into conversation with the local doctor who is, surprisingly, an Indian. Discussion of Indian independence. Strong hint that Aaron is close to, has slept with, the pub landlady. But the Indian conversation puts him in a bad mood, to the landlady’s irritation. At 10pm, chucking out time, she invites him into the back parlour to share a mince pie but he refuses. Reluctant to go home, on an impulse Aaron sets off down Shottle Lane.

Chapter 3. The Lighted Tree

Scene cuts to Shottle House, owned by Alfred Bricknell, ‘one of the partners in the Colliery firm. His English was incorrect, his accent, broad Derbyshire, and he was not a gentleman in the snobbish sense of the word. Yet he was well-to-do, and very stuck-up.’ His son, 6-foot Jim Bricknell, almost bald, ugly, ‘a cavalry officer and fought in two wars’. Josephine Ford, the girl Jim was engaged to. Alfred’s daughter, Julia Bricknell. Julia’s husband, Robert Cunningham, a lieutenant about to be demobilised, when he would become a sculptor once more. House guest Cyril Scott,

They’re rich and bored. They decide to place live candles in a big tree outside and are in the middle of doing this when Sisson strolls up, wearing a bowler hat and buttoned-up greatcoat. They are surprised but pleased to have someone interrupt the tedium. they invite him back into the house, give him drink and fete him, all of which Aaron greets with surprising sang-froid and indifference.

For some reason Jim warms to him and offers to put him up on the couch in his room, leads him off to his room, everyone goes to bed.

Chapter 4. ‘The Pillar of Salt’

Aaron has run away and abandoned his wife, Lottie. He’s sent her letters giving her access to money. The chapter opens with him having returned to the house at night, and now watching it hidden in the garden. He sees the comings and goings of Lottie and children through the window. Finally he sneaks inside to retrieve his flute, piccolo and music, and their case. Hiding, he overhears the visit of the Indian doctor, because one of his daughter’s is sick in bed and Lottie is scared. Aaron overhears the doctor’s rather over-familiar reassurance of his wife. When the doctor leaves and his wife goes upstairs to the sick girl’s room, Aaron silently slips out of the house and over the low garden wall.

Chapter 5. At The Opera

The same group of bored posh people we met in chapter 3 are lolling in a box at the opera in London, bored and sniping at each other. In addition there’s Rawdon Lilly, a writer, a dark ugly man, ‘bare-headed wispy, unobtrusive Lilly’, married to Tanny. Tanny is half Norwegian. And Struther, a painter.

The big topic of conversation is whether Julia Bricknell will take up the invitation of Cyril Scott to run off and leave her husband of eight years, Robert Cunningham, to have an affair. Robert is there, present, while the others discuss it. they all encourage her to have an adventure, and Robert doesn’t much mind, but she just can’t decide.

Incidentally, they all loathe the opera itself, hate the music and despise the fat oafish singers. It’s hard to make out whether Lawrence is satirising them for a bunch of philistines, or this is Lawrence’s own attitude to the opera. Either way, Lawrence completely lacks the gift for comedy. Although the characters laugh a lot at each others’ jokes or behaviour.

Argyle was somewhat intoxicated. He spoke with a slight slur, and laughed, really tickled at his own jokes.

But none of it is actually funny, none. Instead of comedy, the best Lawrence can usually deliver is acidulous contempt, jeering., something which is unconsciously echoed in the way so many of his characters are described as jeering. It’s a favourite word of his.

Chapter 6. Talk

Jim spots Aaron playing in the orchestra. After the opera he finds Aaron and invites him along with the rest of his party to his rooms at the Albany, decorated in fashionably Bohemian style. They are joined by a Mrs Browning, Clariss. A lot of pointless banter. Jim is convinced he is dying because no-one will love him. He asks Aaron whether he believes in love. Lilly has the larky idea of writing down the Grand Truths they are discovering in marker pen on the fire mantlepiece, choice insights such as LOVE IS LIFE and LOVE IS THE SOUL’S RESPIRATION. Jim is a champagne socialist.

Jim had been an officer in the regular army, and still spent hours with his tailor. But instead of being a soldier he was a sort of socialist, and a red-hot revolutionary of a very ineffectual sort.

This partly explains why he’s attracted to Aaron who he imagines is a proletarian. When he finds him after the opera, Jim walks Aaron to his rooms ‘talking rather vaguely about Labour and Robert Smillie, and Bolshevism. He was all for revolution and the triumph of labour.’ Then again, several of the little group of posh wastrels share a laughable attraction to ‘revolution’, notably sad Josephine:

‘My, wouldn’t I love it if they’d make a bloody revolution!’
‘Must it be bloody, Josephine?’ said Robert.
‘Why, yes. I don’t believe in revolutions that aren’t bloody,’ said Josephine. ‘Wouldn’t I love it! I’d go in front with a red flag.’

Callow. The party breaks up, they all go to Embankment tube station and then head off in their different directions. Aaron is rooming in Bloomsbury.

Chapter 7. The Dark Square Garden

A while later Josephine Ford hosts Aaron to dinner in a Soho restaurant. She quizzes him about his background, his family and why he left them. Aaron comes over quite appealingly as a man who just wants to be left alone. They walks across the Charing Cross Road past the British Museum to a Bloomsbury Square. There’s a high wind in the trees. Josephine talks about marriage, wanting to be loved etc. She was engaged to Jim Bricknell but has gone off him. She starts crying though Aaron doesn’t notice partly because of the storm in the trees. Then she asks him to kiss her, but he refuses. He doesn’t want to be forced into caring. He just wants to be left alone. She’s understandably insulted. They walk out of the garden and he sees her to the door of her lodging in offended silence.

Chapter 8. A Punch in the Wind

Lilly and Tanny live in a labourer’s cottage in Hampshire. They are poor. One day Jim Bricknell cables that he’s coming to visit. He brings sausages and fish paste. They gossip. Julia did go off with Taylor, leaving Robert alone. He’ll probably have a pop at Josephine. Jim’s started seeing his divorced French wife again.

Jim’s work in town was merely nominal. He spent his time wavering about and going to various meetings, philandering and weeping. (p.93)

Jim is trying. He stuffs his face with food, takes a loaf of bread to bed, and argues with Lilly. They argue about Christianity, Lilly like a good modern writer finding it detestable, Jim declaring it’s ‘the finest thing humanity’s ever produced’ and saying he’s looking for the Christ-like in man. When he asks if he can stay the Saturday, Lilly bluntly says no, tells him he has to leave tomorrow (Thursday).

They send a telegram to a girlfriend of Jim’s (Lois) to meet him at a station en route back to London so they can walk together, walk through the woods. Jim’s thing is he needs to be falling in love otherwise he feels life is empty and drinks to fill the void.

Back at the cottage they consume the tea Tanny has prepared and sit round the fire. Tanny is exasperated that Jim can’t just lead his own life without needing a woman to hold his hand and Lilly continues his mockery of Jim’s attitudes, till the big man suddenly leaps at him and punches him several times in the torso, hard. The odd thing is this doesn’t lead to an argument, all the characters accept it as somehow natural, in fact Tanny regards this as a wake-up call to dark little Lilly for constantly criticising his friends. This has the true Lawrence weirdness.

Next day they walk Jim to the train station, he invites them to come and stay at his country place, but it’s the last time Lilly and Tanny ever see Jim.

Chapter 9. Low-Water Mark

Tanny goes off to see ‘her people’ in Norway and Lilly rents a flat in Covent Garden, spends days watching the comings and goings. Just as the focus of the novel seemed to be settling on Lilly, Aaron reappears. One day Lilly sees a posh gent cross through the busy market and then slip over. Running downstairs he arrives the same time as a policeman, recognises Aaron, gets the copper to help Aaron up the stairs to his flat. It’s cosy with a piano and bookshelves.

What emerges is Aaron ‘gave in’ to Josephine, allowed himself to have feelings for her, and as soon as he stopped being aloof, something in him snapped. He is ill and Lilly puts him in his spare bed and calls a doctor, but Aaron gets worse. The doctor diagnoses the flu. Days pass as Aaron declines. Suddenly, with Lawrentian irrationality, little Lilly decides to strip him and rub him all over with oil, which he does laboriously, then recovers him with blankets, and Aaron starts to slowly recover.

Meanwhile, Lilly is given an extended rant which sounds just like Lawrence, betting that Aaron will be ungrateful when he recovers, then wandering off to the principle that man must stick up for himself, be himself, not rely on women (like Jim), give into women (like Aaron). This morphs into a rant about the races of the world, which is worth quoting to give you the full Lawrence flavour of a serious point stifled by madness and bigotry.

‘I can’t do with folk who teem by the billion, like the Chinese and Japs and orientals altogether. Only vermin teem by the billion. Higher types breed slower. I would have loved the Aztecs and the Red Indians. I KNOW they hold the element in life which I am looking for—they had living pride. Not like the flea-bitten Asiatics – even niggers are better than Asiatics, though they are wallowers – the American races – and the South Sea Islanders – the Marquesans, the Maori blood. That was the true blood. It wasn’t frightened. All the rest are craven – Europeans, Asiatics, Africans – everyone at his own individual quick craven and cringing: only conceited in the mass, the mob. How I hate them: the mass-bullies, the individual Judases. Well, if one will be a Jesus he must expect his Judas. That’s why Abraham Lincoln gets shot. A Jesus makes a Judas inevitable. A man should remain himself, not try to spread himself over humanity. He should pivot himself on his own pride.’ (p.120)

Slowly Aaron recovers while Lilly goes about the household chores, making him tea and darning his socks, which he enjoys. The chapter ends with a joint rant against women, which is so weird / mad / entertaining that I’ve made it a separate post.

Chapter 10. The War Again

We’re still in Lilly’s flat. It’s a week or so later. Aaron is much better. They chat. Lilly tells Aaron he’s signed on a merchant vessel sailing to Malta as a ship’s cook. Aaron, sounding like Lawrence, says what’s the point going anywhere if you remain the same, to which Lilly replies the with equally Lawrentian argument, ‘There are lots of me’s. I’m not only just one proposition. A new place brings out a new thing in a man.’

Then Lilly explains his theory of male and femaleness, that one must be absolutely oneself, in a relationship, but that makes the unity all the more profound: anyway, he despises most couples who are just a queasy oneness. When he talks about this unity being achieved after much fighting and sensual fulfilment, you strongly suspect he’s describing Lawrence and Frieda’s stormy relationship.

The two men have been living together for a fortnight. They have discovered a close sympathy.

The two men had an almost uncanny understanding of one another—like brothers. They came from the same district, from the same class. Each might have been born into the other’s circumstance. Like brothers, there was a profound hostility between them. But hostility is not antipathy. (p.129)

Lots more bickering then a friend of Lilly’s turns up, Herbertson, a captain in the Guards, had been right through the war, 45 and getting stout, very posh (p.137). Turns out he has a compulsion to talk about the war, and has found Lilly a good listener.

It was the same thing here in this officer as it was with the privates, and the same with this Englishman as with a Frenchman or a German or an Italian. Lilly had sat in a cowshed listening to a youth in the north country: he had sat on the corn-straw that the oxen had been treading out, in Calabria, under the moon: he had sat in a farm-kitchen with a German prisoner: and every time it was the same thing, the same hot, blind, anguished voice of a man who has seen too much, experienced too much, and doesn’t know where to turn. None of the glamour of returned heroes, none of the romance of war: only a hot, blind, mesmerised voice, going on and on, mesmerised by a vision that the soul cannot bear.

In this officer, of course, there was a lightness and an appearance of bright diffidence and humour. But underneath it all was the same as in the common men of all the combatant nations: the hot, seared burn of unbearable experience, which did not heal nor cool, and whose irritation was not to be relieved. The experience gradually cooled on top: but only with a surface crust. The soul did not heal, did not recover.

Five pages of very intense war stories are given to Herbertson, some very gruesome indeed (headless bodies) all told in the posh pukka way of an officer on the edge of hysteria. Damning indictment of war. In amid the gore, Herbertson expresses his belief that all the men who were killed had a presentiment of their deaths.

Then he lifted his face, and went on in the same animated chatty fashion: ‘You see, he had a presentiment. I’m sure he had a presentiment. None of the men got killed unless they had a presentiment – like that, you know….’
Herbertson nodded keenly at Lilly, with his sharp, twinkling, yet obsessed eyes. Lilly wondered why he made the presentiment responsible for the death – which he obviously did – and not vice versa.
Herbertson implied every time, that you’d never get killed if you could keep yourself from having a presentiment. Perhaps there was something in it. Perhaps the soul issues its own ticket of death, when it can stand no more. Surely life controls life: and not accident.

It’s two in the morning before he leaves, leaving Lilly and Aaron depressed and arguing about the war. Lilly takes the Lawrence line that the war was, in some sense, false because it didn’t happen to him, it didn’t occur at the really deep level.

‘Damn all leagues. Damn all masses and groups, anyhow. All I want is to get MYSELF out of their horrible heap: to get out of the swarm. The swarm to me is nightmare and nullity—horrible helpless writhing in a dream. I want to get myself awake, out of it all—all that mass-consciousness, all that mass-activity—it’s the most horrible nightmare to me. No man is awake and himself. No man who was awake and in possession of himself would use poison gases: no man. His own awake self would scorn such a thing. It’s only when the ghastly mob-sleep, the dream helplessness of the mass-psyche overcomes him, that he becomes completely base and obscene.’

When Aaron demurs, Lilly tells him he (Aaron) has to leave tomorrow (in the same peremptory way he demanded that Jim Bricknell leave his Hampshire cottage ahead of time). He’s serious about it, and turfs Aaron out the next morning. When Aaron pops round a few days later to say a final goodbye before Lilly sails, Lilly makes sure to be out. It is a serious breach in their friendship.

Chapter 11. More Pillar of Salt

The opera season ended, Aaron was invited by Cyril Scott to join a group of musical people in a village by the sea. He accepted, and spent a pleasant month. It pleased the young men musically-inclined and bohemian by profession to patronise the flautist, whom they declared marvellous. Bohemians with well-to-do parents, they could already afford to squander a little spasmodic and self-gratifying patronage. And Aaron did not mind being patronised. He had nothing else to do.

The chapter is titled ‘More’ because Aaron returns to the Midlands, to his town, and to his house. First crouching in the garden at the night, then walking up the garden path and into the house to surprise and dismay his wife. She, obviously, is upset and hurls reproaches at him which he is too vague to formulate replies to. The style reverts to the ‘Women in Love’ style of lots of repetition of key phrases and the man and the woman conceived as primal archetypes, along with that fundamental Lawrentian characteristic, of conflicting and contradictory emotions. His wife berates him, but then gives way to floods of tears, comes, kneels by his side her head on his thigh, wailing.

Him it half overcame, and at the same time, horrified. He had a certain horror of her. The strange liquid sound of her appeal seemed to him like the swaying of a serpent which mesmerises the fated, fluttering, helpless bird. She clasped her arms round him, she drew him to her, she half roused his passion. At the same time she coldly horrified and repelled him. He had not the faintest feeling, at the moment, of his own wrong. But she wanted to win his own self-betrayal out of him. He could see himself as the fascinated victim, falling to this cajoling, awful woman, the wife of his bosom. But as well, he had a soul outside himself, which looked on the whole scene with cold revulsion. (p.154)

So this fraught scene receives the full Lawrence treatment but… it doesn’t really work. The satirical or light characters, the effusions of vapid dialogue which have filled the intervening chapters, have undermined the ‘Women in Love’ vibe, invalidated it. He can’t write 150 pages of thin, surface stuff then suddenly turn on the primeval style and expect the reader to fall in line. ‘Aaron’s Rod’ demonstrates how the Lawrentian style, when applied to an unworthy object (or undeveloped characters) fails.

Anyway, Aaron tears himself away from his weeping wife and simply walks out, down the garden, over the wall, across fields till he finds a hay rick and makes up a bed and lies on it under the September stars. And formulates the fundamental Lawrence theme:

Love was a battle in which each party strove for the mastery of the other’s soul. So far, man had yielded the mastery to woman. Now he was fighting for it back again. And too late, for the woman would never yield. But whether woman yielded or not, he would keep the mastery of his own soul and conscience and actions. He would never yield himself up to her judgment again. He would hold himself forever beyond her jurisdiction. Henceforth, life single, not life double.

Part two. Italy

Chapter 12. Novara

So Aaron goes back to London and gets gigs playing the flute. He plays for the famous socialist Artemis Hooper, in her boudoir, attended by various other high society guests. He becomes tired of being a plaything of the idle rich, one minute talking to the latest socialite at a posh reception, the next walking home to his shabby lodgings in the rain. So he does what many the hero of an Edwardian novel does, and leaves England for Italy.

Lilly had written saying he was staying with a Sir William Franks in a place in Italy called Novara. So Aaron travels there. When he finally manages to get a cab to take him to the grand estate of Sir William, he is met at the gates, is met at the door, is shown up the stairs to a palatial bedroom, Lawrence makes space for a little dig at the degrading impact of cinema.

He had fallen into country house parties before, but never into quite such a plushy sense of riches. He felt he ought to have his breath taken away. But alas, the cinema has taken our breath away so often, investing us in all the splendours of the splendidest American millionaire, or all the heroics and marvels of the Somme or the North Pole, that life has now no magnate richer than we, no hero nobler than we have been, on the film. Connu! Connu! Everything life has to offer is known to us, couldn’t be known better, from the film. (p.163)

It is a grand house and when Aaron arrives Sir William, the frail old man, is in the middle of holding a grand dinner, servants serving up posh food to half a dozen eminent guests, including a couple of officers in khaki, namely:

little Sir William
Lady Sibyl Franks
a young, slim woman with big blue eyes and dark hair like a photograph
a smaller rather colourless young woman with a large nose
a stout, rubicund, bald colonel, dressed in khaki
a tall, thin, Oxford-looking major, tall and slim with a black patch over his eye, dressed in khaki
a good-looking, well-nourished young man in a dinner-jacket

After dinner there is some fol-de-rol with pinning three medals he’s been awarded on to the old man’s chest. Then Sir William questions Aaron about his life, leaving his wife, having to earn a living and so on. He dwells on his and Lilly’s faith in a Providence to look after them, rather than have a job or career. Aaron takes it all with the same puzzling indifference he takes everything else in his life, a ‘fine, mischievous smile’ on his face.

Chapter 13. Wie Es Ihnen Gefällt

Which is German for ‘As you like it’. Next morning Aaron is woken in his plush guest bed by a servant bringing coffee, rolls and honey. He dresses, wanders through the mansion observing the servants doing their chores, then out into the garden and up the grape terraces behind the house to a bench where he can admire the breath-taking view over the valley, the river, the town of Novara to the majestic Alps beyond.

Aaron walks down to the town and Lawrence vividly describes the sight and sounds and feel of an Italian town. He goes to the train station and finds out about trains to Milan, then back up to the Franks’ house. There’s a formal tea but we don’t hear much about it. Instead the evening finds Aaron in the hall, before the vast fire, tired and depressed, thinking about his wife, Lottie. And Lawrence gives him a vast screed about the eternal female, about fighting against woman’s smothering, how during their ‘terrible and magnificent connubial deaths in his arms’ (sex) he had always held back, never gave himself.

In other words, the novel mutates from the dialogue-heavy satire of the first 11 chapters into the long-winded, primeval, elemental archetype writing of ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’. All this is combined with an unusually direct address to the reader, which feels rather clumsy. After pages and pages exploring Aaron’s coming-to-awareness of his own personality and limitations, the narrator says the man himself wouldn’t have put it into words like this, he would have expressed it as music.

The inaudible music of his conscious soul conveyed his meaning in him quite as clearly as I convey it in words: probably much more clearly. But in his own mode only: and it was in his own mode only he realised what I must put into words. These words are my own affair. His mind was music.

Don’t grumble at me then, gentle reader, and swear at me that this damned fellow wasn’t half clever enough to think all these smart things, and realise all these fine-drawn-out subtleties. You are quite right, he wasn’t, yet it all resolved itself in him as I say, and it is for you to prove that it didn’t. (p.199)

The thrust of this long delirious passage seems to be Lawrence’s latest belief, that, no matter how deeply in love you are, how deeply you commune with another person, you can give yourself, but you cannot and should not give yourself away. Something must remain indissolubly private. The best communion is of two people who, despite all the modern clichés about love, remain at the deepest level, rigorously separate.

The completion of the process of love is the arrival at a state of simple, pure self-possession, for man and woman… It is life-rootedness. It is being by oneself, life-living…

Then the tone cuts drastically back to social satire mode. Sunday evening dinner at Lord Franks’s house. Here Aaron gets into conversation with Lady Franks, who explains why she prefers old classical music to Strauss and Stravinsky: it has more depth and more religion. She’s also convinced she has a guardian spirit watching over her.

Dinner is described in excruciating detail, as the four men get drunk, then have a pointless conversation, then stagger drunkenly up the stairs. In the drawing room they have to submit to an agonisingly boring rendition of Schumann on the piano by Lady Frank and then Aaron is called on to perform on his flute, like a trained seal. Throughout he has the sense of licking the rich people’s boots.

Lawrence is slack about details. In part 1 the war had very obviously only just ended, was fresh. Here in part 2, is the sentence:

‘Now, Colonel,’ said the host, ‘send round the bottle.’ With a flourish of the elbow and shoulder, the Colonel sent on the port, actually port, in those bleak, post-war days!

Those bleak, post-war days – signalling that the author is now writing, or the book being published, at some remove from those days. A tiny indication of the later date at which Lawrence wrote the second half of the novel.

Chapter 14. XX Settembre

Next morning Aaron wakes into a scared feeling of heading into nothingness. All he knows is he has snapped his ties with the past, but he has no plan for the future. A servant brings in coffee and toast and he feels better. At 8am sharp Lady Franks’ car is ready to take him in upholstered luxury to the train station. He hates being in the car and is glad to climb out and into the busy, open air life of the common people.

He checks into the Hotel Britannia then goes wandering round the town giving a characteristically vivid but acidulous description of it, notably the famous cathedral with all its pointy bits. Lawrence doesn’t bother with history or scholarship, architectural knowledge or anything like that. Absolutely everything he encounters is described for the immediate impact it makes on his senses, senses stripped back. When he’s on form, these descriptions are amazingly vivid; when he’s not at the top of his game, they can sound repetitive and forced.

Back at his hotel he witnesses a big political march. There’s been a rally and now a march of workers is moving through the town and, for some reason, tearing the Italian flag – ‘the red, white and green tricolour, with the white cross of Savoy in the centre’ – down off buildings. the house bang opposite his hotel has the flag flying on the third floor. After arguing with the woman who keeps the shop on the ground floor but apparently has no access to higher floors, a young lad bravely climbs the outside of the building up to the third floor, tears the flag off and throws it to the crowd below, who cheer.

At that point a crowd of carabinieri (Italian police) charge into the square and start beating up and arresting anyone not quick enough to flee. The boy on the third floor is trapped and, with guns trained on him, meekly descends and is arrested.

Aaron becomes aware of two Englishmen looking out a nearby window of his hotel at the scene. He retreats into his room and plays the flute to calm down. At dinner he hears their posh voices discussing their holiday itinerary. Franz ‘Francis’ Dekker and Angus Guest (p.230). Remember how the snobbish English tourists in E.M. Forster’s Room With A View detested all the other English tourists? Twenty years later nothing has changed.

Said Francis, in a vehement whisper, ‘After all, we are the only three English people in the place.’
‘For the moment, apparently we are,’ said Angus. ‘But the English are all over the place wherever you go, like bits of orange peel in the street.’ (p.227)

Francis cross-questions Aaron about his origins. The two men are very camp in their speech, presumably gay. They simply adored his playing on the flute. Aaron explains he’s heading to Venice to meet up with Lilly but they’ve heard rumours that Lilly is in Munich being psychoanalysed. they ask him to come with them to Florence.

Chapter 15. A Railway Journey

I haven’t mentioned that the narrator voice is irritatingly intrusive and buttonholing – ‘ Behold our hero…’, ‘There sat our friend…’, ‘Our two young heroes…’, ‘our gypsy party…’, ‘Don’t grumble at me then, gentle reader…’

So Aaron goes with this gay couple to Florence. He rides in third class while they swank in first class, which triggers a long disquisition about class consciousness (see below). English versus Italian train passengers:

Sitting there in the third-class carriage, he became happy again. The presence of his fellow-passengers was not so hampering as in England. In England, everybody seems held tight and gripped, nothing is left free. Every passenger seems like a parcel holding his string as fast as he can about him, lest one corner of the wrapper should come undone and reveal what is inside. And every other passenger is forced, by the public will, to hold himself as tight-bound also. Which in the end becomes a sort of self-conscious madness. But here, in the third class carriage, there was no tight string round every man. They were not all trussed with self-conscious string as tight as capons. They had a sufficient amount of callousness and indifference and natural equanimity. True, one of them spat continually on the floor, in large spits. And another sat with his boots all unlaced and his collar off, and various important buttons undone. They did not seem to care if bits of themselves did show, through the gaps in the wrapping. Aaron winced – but he preferred it to English tightness. He was pleased, he was happy with the Italians. He thought how generous and natural they were

When he goes to have lunch with them, some peasant takes his seat, despite Francis’s outraged remonstrances, so he joins them in their first class compartment. When the train is delayed at Prato, they get water from the restaurant car, nip out for chestnuts and figs, and have themselves a tidy little picnic.

They arrive late in Florence and the two gays put up at a posh hotel, making it clear they’d prefer Aaron to push off. Next morning he’s up and exploring the great Florence, treading where hundreds of thousands of British and American tourists had oohed and aahed themselves. He finds a cheap pension, 10 francs a day, with wonderful views. A room with a ‘superb’ view (p.256).

Chapter 16. Florence

Life at the Pension Nardini which is cold and dreary, with a group of Scandinavian guests and a German family. Aaron likes being detached, solo. It is November and rainy. He tours Florence in the dark and wet and is inspired. The Palazzo Vecchio, the Piazza della Signoria, Michelangelo’s David, ‘the genius [in the sense of presiding spirit] of Florence’ (p.253). This triggers a bonkers paean to men and masculinity.

He went out, he found the Piazza della Signoria packed with men: but all, all men. And all farmers, land-owners and land-workers. The curious, fine-nosed Tuscan farmers, with their half-sardonic, amber-coloured eyes. Their curious individuality, their clothes worn so easy and reckless, their hats with the personal twist. Their curious full oval cheeks, their tendency to be too fat, to have a belly and heavy limbs. Their close-sitting dark hair. And above all, their sharp, almost acrid, mocking expression, the silent curl of the nose, the eternal challenge, the rock-bottom unbelief, and the subtle fearlessness. The dangerous, subtle, never-dying fearlessness, and the acrid unbelief. But men! Men! A town of men, in spite of everything. The one manly quality, undying, acrid fearlessness. The eternal challenge of the unquenched human soul. Perhaps too acrid and challenging today, when there is nothing left to challenge. But men – who existed without apology and without justification. Men who would neither justify themselves nor apologize for themselves. Just men. The rarest thing left in our sweet Christendom. (p.254)

The gays invite him to a posh dinner which consists of Francis and Angus, and a writer, James Argyle (‘a finely built, heavy man of fifty or more’), and little Algy Constable (‘small and frail, somewhat shaky,’), and tiny Louis Mee, and deaf (Jewish) Walter Rosen. They get drunk and talk rubbish. Lawrence is really bad at middle class dinner conversation. He takes to old Argyle.

Next day he goes to a group lunch at Algy’s, talks to some ancient Italian beau, Signor di Lanti, then the Marchesa del Torre, an American woman from the Southern States, who had lived most of her life in Europe, who seems to Aaron like a modern Cleopatra brooding, bereft of her Anthony, although her husband is there, Manfredi, the Marchese, a little intense Italian in a colonel’s grey uniform, he fought in the war the full four years. He and his wife are musicians (piano and singer) but when Algy asks the nervous Marchesa to play she refuses. Something to do with the war.

The tea party breaks up and the Marchesi and Marchesa invite Aaron to walk to their rented palazzo. it has a grand music room which used to be filled with Saturday mornings of classical music. The small, bosomy (‘a full-breasted, soft-skinned woman’), nervous, chainsmoking Marchesa confides in Aaron that music makes her feel sick: it’s the clutter of notes in chords, it feels like too much. At which point Aaron reveals that he has his flute in his coat pocket and she asks him to play. He goes into the big empty music room, tells the colonel to leave the lights off to continue the mystique, and plays. This is the only description of his playing in the book.

There, in the darkness of the big room, he put his flute to his lips, and began to play. It was a clear, sharp, lilted run-and-fall of notes, not a tune in any sense of the word, and yet a melody, a bright, quick sound of pure animation, a bright, quick, animate noise, running and pausing. It was like a bird’s singing, in that it had no human emotion or passion or intention or meaning—a ripple and poise of animate sound. But it was unlike a bird’s singing, in that the notes followed clear and single one after the other, in their subtle gallop… What Aaron was playing was not of his own invention. It was a bit of mediaeval phrasing written for the pipe and the viol. It made the piano seem a ponderous, nerve-wracking steam-roller of noise, and the violin, as we know it, a hateful wire-drawn nerve-torturer. (p.271)

All this melts something in the Marchesa and Aaron and she have an unspoken bond. Now we learn that she feels horribly trapped by her kind, rational husband and wants to escape from the dungeon of human conventions. Are she and Aaron going to have an affair?

Aaron takes his leave, promising to return another evening with his flute, and flies out into the dark town with a rush of excitement. He is jostled by mobs of soldiers and then realises someone has picked his pocket. Once back at his hotel room he double checks all his coats but it’s definitely gone, his wallet with some letters and personal things about £12 in sterling and lire, all his money. And it happened because he rushed out into the streets in a state of excitement, of emotion, having opened himself, exposed himself, let his guard down.

This reminds us of his ramblings back in part one, when Lilly found him collapsed in Covent Garden, where he blamed his fever not on the flu but on having given in to Josephine’s emotions. If this novel is anything it is (half-heartedly) about one man’s attempt to remain aloof, independent, and self contained.

And Aaron never forgot. After this, it became essential to him to feel that the sentinel stood guard in his own heart. He felt a strange unease the moment he was off his guard. Asleep or awake, in the midst of the deepest passion or the suddenest love, or in the throes of greatest excitement or bewilderment, somewhere, some corner of himself was awake to the fact that the sentinel of the soul must not sleep, no, never, not for one instant. (p.275)

Chapter 17. High Up Over The Cathedral Square

Still in Florence. With no explanation Rawdon Lilly the writer has appeared and the chapter opens with him and Aaron sitting on the balcony of Argyle’s loggia, in the autumn sunshine, rhapsodising over the beauty of Florence. Apparently they just bumped into each other in the street, in the Via Nationale. The little Marchese arrives and is shown through the low window onto the balcony. Argyle serves the last of his whiskey, then tea. They have a rubbish Lawrence conversation, for example when Aaron says he came to Florence by accident the others tut and say there is no such thing as accident: a man is drawn by his fate. Worse, the Marchese launches into a long, a really long, disquisition about the imbalance of male and female desire in marriage.

‘Our Catholic religion tried to keep the young girls in convents, and innocent, before marriage. So that with their minds they should not know, and should not start this terrible thing, this woman’s desire over a man, beforehand. This desire which starts in a woman’s head, when she knows, and which takes a man for her use, for her service. This is Eve. Ah, I hate Eve. I hate her, when she knows, and when she wills. I hate her when she will make of me that which serves her desire.—She may love me, she may be soft and kind to me, she may give her life for me. But why? Only because I am hers. I am that thing which does her most intimate service. She can see no other in me. And I may be no other to her…’

And much more in the same ilk.

‘You are quite right, my boy,’ said Argyle. ‘You are quite right. They’ve got the start of us, the women: and we’ve got to canter when they say gee-up. I—oh, I went through it all. But I broke the shafts and smashed the matrimonial cart, I can tell you, and I didn’t care whether I smashed her up along with it or not… And women oh, they are the very hottest hell once they get the start of you. There’s nothing they won’t do to you, once they’ve got you. Nothing they won’t do to you. Especially if they love you. Then you may as well give up the ghost: or smash the cart behind you, and her in it. Otherwise she will just harry you into submission, and make a dog of you, and cuckold you under your nose. And you’ll submit. Oh, you’ll submit, and go on calling her my darling. Or else, if you won’t submit, she’ll do for you. Your only chance is to smash the shafts, and the whole matrimonial cart. Or she’ll do for you. For a woman has an uncanny, hellish strength – she’s a she-bear and a wolf, is a woman when she’s got the start of you. Oh, it’s a terrible experience, if you’re not a bourgeois, and not one of the knuckling-under money-making sort.’ (p.286)

This is misogynist tripe, isn’t it? When something similar – the struggle between the sexes – is dramatised in ‘Women in Love’, it feels vital and penetrating to some archetypal depth. Here, in the mouths of a bunch of grumpy old men sitting round drinking whiskey, whining that ‘these days’ women are in charge and men come running like dogs, it sounds like sexist bullshit.

The Marchese goes on to explain that in the good old days a man could retreat from his bitch-wife and go after a younger woman, innocent, easier to dominate. But nowadays even the young women are ‘modern women’ – ‘Terrible thing, the modern woman,’ put in Argyle. Then Lilly repeats what we take to be Lawrence’s position, because it has recurred throughout the novel, is its central theme (insofar as it has one):

‘Can’t one live with one’s wife, and be fond of her: and with one’s friends, and enjoy their company: and with the world and everything, pleasantly: and yet know that one is alone? Essentially, at the very core of me, alone. Eternally alone. And choosing to be alone. Not sentimental or lonely. Alone, choosing to be alone, because by one’s own nature one is alone. The being with another person is secondary…’ (p.289)

Chapter 18. The Marchesa

Aaron goes for dinner with the Marchese and Marchesa. She is so made-up he is scared of her and her sexy outfit.

Her beautiful woman’s legs, slightly glistening, duskily. His one abiding instinct was to touch them, to kiss them. He had never known a woman to exercise such power over him. It was a bare, occult force, something he could not cope with.

Aaron says he’s been to the Uffizi Gallery and seen Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus which gives rise to (yet another) discussion about womanhood, specifically whether Venus is a type of the ‘modern woman’ in her fake innocence, pretending not to know too much. There is a heavy atmosphere of seduction and Aaron feels himself being seduced, no matter how hard he knows he needs to remain aloof, separate and independent.

After an exquisite dessert of persimmons, they go out onto the palazzo terrace. The Marchesa stands so close she is touching him as she points out the window of his apartment in the pensione, not too far away. ‘My window is always open,’ says Aaron as she stands so close they’re touching, and he knows they will become lovers. He goes into the music room and plays the flute again, which has a powerful physical impact on her.

And the music of the flute came quick, rather brilliant like a call-note, or like a long quick message, half command. To her it was like a pure male voice—as a blackbird’s when he calls: a pure male voice, not only calling, but telling her something, telling her something, and soothing her soul to sleep. It was like the fire-music putting Brunnhilde to sleep. But the pipe did not flicker and sink. It seemed to cause a natural relaxation in her soul, a peace. Perhaps it was more like waking to a sweet, morning awakening, after a night of tormented, painful tense sleep.

But when he asks the Marchesa to sing, she does a couple of verses of a French song, but with her voice faltering and then failing. So Aaron takes up the music and plays it on the flute and after a moment she joins in and is wafted on his notes, is liberated, experiences a wonderful creative elation. This is the song.

When the song is over there is an embarrassed silence. The Marchesa is liberated and exultant but there is tension between the men because the Marchese knows Aaron has achieved what he could never manage, and Aaron feels he now ‘owns’ the woman.

And Aaron said in his heart, what a goodly woman, what a woman to taste and enjoy. Ah, what a woman to enjoy! And was it not his privilege? Had he not gained it? His manhood, or rather his maleness, rose powerfully in him, in a sort of mastery. He felt his own power, he felt suddenly his own virile title to strength and reward. Suddenly, and newly flushed with his own male super-power, he was going to have his reward. The woman was his reward. (p.300)

Aaron is consumed with lust but the husband is sitting right there (like a wizened old monkey, in Aaron’s view) so he politely takes his leave. Back in his room, he regards his flute and humorously recalls Lilly calling it Aaron’s rod. Well, it’s about to flower alright!

He reflects that he has for so long been hard and unyielding but now is being melted. This would be more effective if we hadn’t observed him not really being hard and unyielding but just good-naturedly indifferent, floating and drifting from place to place.

And now came his desire back. But strong, fierce as iron. Like the strength of an eagle with the lightning in its talons. Something to glory in, something overweening, the powerful male passion, arrogant, royal, Jove’s thunderbolt. Aaron’s black rod of power, blossoming again with red Florentine lilies and fierce thorns. He moved about in the splendour of his own male lightning, invested in the thunder of the male passion-power. He had got it back, the male godliness, the male godhead.

Deeply in lust he goes back the next morning to see her, politely asking to see her book of chansons, and she stands close to him as he leafs through them, and he offers to play her one. But the connection of the day before isn’t there. He stops, they sit, the tension becomes unbearable and he asks straight out: Shall we be lovers? She says yes. Where? She says in her bedroom. She takes him upstairs and shows him the door then asks him to wait ten minutes. He gives her fifteen then opens the door and enters. She is in bed with her back to him.

But the sex isn’t as he’d hoped. In bed she isn’t full and womanly but clings to him like a child. And – the great issue which has resonated through the book – doesn’t surrender herself to him. Which explains why, after a doze, he wants to get away, to escape, to disentangle himself. She begs to see him again but he wants to flee. Silly man.

He gets out as quickly as he can and, in the classic Lawrence style, decides he hates her but, just as characteristically, tries to resist his impulse.

And in his male spirit he felt himself hating her: hating her deeply, damnably. But he said to himself: ‘No, I won’t hate her. I won’t hate her.’

He had received a wry letter from Sir William asking how his providence or fate was turning out. Aaron goes to the post office and writes a bitter reply.

‘I don’t want my Fate or my Providence to treat me well. I don’t want kindness or love. I don’t believe in harmony and people loving one another. I believe in the fight and in nothing else. I believe in the fight which is in everything. And if it is a question of women, I believe in the fight of love, even if it blinds me. And if it is a question of the world, I believe in fighting it and in having it hate me, even if it breaks my legs. I want the world to hate me, because I can’t bear the thought that it might love me. For of all things love is the most deadly to me, and especially from such a repulsive world as I think this is…’ (p.308)

And so dinner and to bed, alone, in blessed independence. If he didn’t want to feel like this, why did he cave in to lust? In the words of the song, ‘if you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime.’

Chapter 19. Cleopatra but not Anthony

Not knowing what to do, Aaron takes a train out to the countryside and has a vision.

He lay and watched tall cypresses breathing and communicating, faintly moving and as it were walking in the small wind. And his soul seemed to leave him and to go far away, far back, perhaps, to where life was all different and time passed otherwise than time passes now. As in clairvoyance he perceived it: that our life is only a fragment of the shell of life. That there has been and will be life, human life such as we do not begin to conceive. Much that is life has passed away from men, leaving us all mere bits. In the dark, mindful silence and inflection of the cypress trees, lost races, lost language, lost human ways of feeling and of knowing. Men have known as we can no more know, have felt as we can no more feel. Great life-realities gone into the darkness. But the cypresses commemorate. In the afternoon, Aaron felt the cypresses rising dark about him, like so many high visitants from an old, lost, lost subtle world, where men had the wonder of demons about them, the aura of demons, such as still clings to the cypresses, in Tuscany. (p.310)

Whether you like this goes a long way to answering whether you like Lawrence or not. It reminds me of the passages in St Mawr where its owners sense that the horse has seen more, known more, than they ever can; or again the opening of England, My England, where the old cottage has seen more traumatic events than the current occupants can hope to understand.

Anyway, there are pages of Aaron rationalising his feelings to himself, lengthy justifications that he is a husband, even if it’s to a woman who was trapping him (Lottie) and so cannot be a lover, and all women want nowadays is a lover, and so blethering on. He cannot see what is obvious to us which is that he was blinded by lust, seduced the woman, had one shag and, having achieved his aim, is happy to dump her. Standard male behaviour, in other words.

But next day he goes to see her, finds her with guests, is polite till they leave, and then asks if they can just be friends, not lovers. You see, he is married etc etc. And she says yes. Then they play some music together, the husband comes home and finds them, he joins in on the piano, then the men go through sheet music finding things to play at the next music Saturday.

The Lillys and many others are at the Saturday morning music and it irritates him to see her playing the hostess, treating him like everyone else. She invites him for dinner the next day, Sunday. It’s a week since they slept together and all his caution is being over-ridden by his loins. The old lust rises, hoping his ‘rod’ will blossom again.

So imagine his frustration when he arrives for dinner and discovers the guest of honour is the venerable old English authoress, Corrina Wade, talking of the old ideas and old ways as if no cataclysmic war had shattered them forever; plus an old English snob, Mr ffrench, fussy and precious like an old maid. These feel like caricatures of real people.

Eventually these old fossils leave our lovers alone and the Marchesa asks if he will stay. He says yes. Gives her 15 minutes to get ready. Sleeps with her. Once again is overcome by a desperate need to get away, to be alone.

Lawrence goes into detail on two points. She is scared of his penis.

Strange, she was afraid of him! Afraid of him as of a fetish! Fetish afraid, and fetish-fascinated! Or was her fear only a delightful game of cat and mouse? Or was the fear genuine, and the delight the greater: a sort of sacrilege? The fear, and the dangerous, sacrilegious power over that which she feared. (p.318)

I’ve slept with women who refused to acknowledge that the whole thing involved a penis, refused to touch it, mention it, or acknowledge what was going on, so I identify with Aaron’s perplexity. Second thing is that almost the best bit, for la Marchesa, is afterwards curling up on his chest, snuggling into his chest, like a child wanting to be protected. He speculates that maybe the sex is the means to what she really wants, which is this comfort and reassurance. Daddy.

In line with the book’s theme of women triumphing over men, Aaron feels she uses him and his rod to achieve her pleasure. He is a tool, a means, a ‘magic implement’. She uses him with the skill of a high priestess, sacrificing a victim. He associates himself with the many lovers Cleopatra was said to enjoy and then have killed in the morning.

Chapter 20. The Broken Rod

Next day it rains and he stays indoors copying out music. Well into the evening, 9pm, he ventures out towards the cafe in the Piazza Vittoria Emmanuele which is the centre of Florence’s nightlife. En route he sees three men crouching suspiciously over a dark form with a flaming torch. He avoids them but they come trotting up the ally he takes and he panics that he’s going to be mugged but they just trot by carrying a stretcher and, presumably, a body.

At the cafe he is spotted by 50-something Argyle, drunk, who hauls him over to a table where sit Lilly and a newcomer named Levison. Levison tells them there was a big socialist protest earlier in the day and when the head of the carabinieri told them not to go down a half-built road, someone shot him dead on his horse after which all hell broke loose.

This triggers Argyle to make the ludicrously drunken statement that what the world needs is the revival of slavery, for pretty much everyone in society. Earnest young Levison asks who would be these slaves?

‘Everybody, my dear chap: beginning with the idealists and the theorising Jews, and after them your nicely-bred gentlemen, and then perhaps, your profiteers and Rothschilds, and all politicians, and ending up with the proletariat,’ said Argyle.
‘Then who would be the masters? — the professional classes, doctors and lawyers and so on?’
‘What? Masters. They would be the sewerage slaves, as being those who had made most smells.’

You can see how, in a world shattered by war, where all traditional values have been overthrown, and where the huge experiment of Bolshevik communism in Russia was just commencing, all social theories are up for grabs and many of them would involve overthrowing the useless ‘democracy’ which triggered the war and instituting something more scientific, the rule of one really strong man. Out of this melee emerged Mussolini’s Fascism a few years later.

Levison cuts across this ludicrous suggestion and earnestly points out that ‘socialism is the inevitable next step…’ This also must have been a widespread belief among the kind of people who waste their time thinking about politics. This ‘discussion’ clearly only exists so that Lilly can ridicule both types of talk, in classically Lawrentian – that’s to say irrational and subjective – language.

LILLY: ‘The idea and the ideal has for me gone dead — dead as carrion —’
LEVISON: ‘Which idea, which ideal precisely?’
LILLY: ‘The ideal of love, the ideal that it is better to give than to receive, the ideal of liberty, the ideal of the brotherhood of man, the ideal of the sanctity of human life, the ideal of what we call goodness, charity, benevolence, public spiritedness, the ideal of sacrifice for a cause, the ideal of unity and unanimity — all the lot — all the whole beehive of ideals — has all got the modern bee-disease, and gone putrid, stinking. — And when the ideal is dead and putrid, the logical sequence is only stink. — Which, for me, is the truth concerning the ideal of good, peaceful, loving humanity and its logical sequence in socialism and equality, equal opportunity or whatever you like.’

Concepts like ‘stink’ and ‘slime’ were to appear more and more in Lawrence’s writing as he became more disgusted with the world and everyone’s turning away from what he saw as the real, primitive, pagan life forces.

Lilly goes on to say that people are insects and instruments and will, eventually, vote for their own slavery as a refuge from facing reality: inferior beings will elect their superior to rule them. This sounds mad but, arguably, is what the German nation did ten years later.

But then Lawrence pulls a trick by having Lilly say he doesn’t believe what he’s just said. He could easily say just the opposite. All he cares is about the primacy of the individual to himself.

‘I’ll tell you the real truth,’ said Lilly. ‘I think every man is a sacred and holy individual, never to be violated; I think there is only one thing I hate to the verge of madness, and that is bullying.’ (p.328)

Things are getting heated when a bomb goes off! That’s not something you expect in a Lawrence novel. The cafe is bombed, glass and chairs and clothes and blood flying everywhere. Stunned, Aaron staggers to his feet, sees men fighting over coats in a corner, finds his amid the pile and discovers the flute is smashed beyond repair.

He staggers out into the street with Lilly (no mention of Argyle or Levison) and they stagger away from the scene down to the river. Nothing in the book so far has effected Aaron like the loss of his flute. Lilly tells him to chuck it in the Arno, which he does. Lilly tells him he’ll grow a new one, until then he’ll have to do without a rod.

Chapter 21. Words

Aaron wakes from a long complicated dream. Over breakfast he realises he is done. The destruction of his flute-rod marks the end. He could call on numerous contacts (the gay painters, Sir William, the Marchese) and they would simply buy him a new one.

But instead he wants to make a new start in life. And this takes the form of realising he must submit to one man. And the man he chooses is the funny little, ugly, cantankerous Lilly. Not to ‘the quicksands of woman or the stinking bogs of society’, to one odd man.

Burgess and Aldington explain this dramatises the real-world situation in which, during the war, Lawrence lured John Middleton Murray and his wife Katherine Mansfield to live with them on a commune in Cornwall, and tried to persuade Murray to become blood brothers with him. It reflects the extremely intense notion of male camaraderie which Lawrence espoused, and dramatised more successfully in the very close relationship between Gerald Crich and Rupert Birkin in ‘Women in Love’.

At that moment Lilly pops round. He explains he’s going away. Screw society and politics, he can’t influence any of that. He has to be true to himself like a migrating bird. Maybe he’ll go to a different continent, he’s tired of this one.

He persuades Aaron to catch a train with him out to the country and they have lunch at a lovely rural inn by a stream where Italian boys are swimming. Aaron asks Lilly what he’s going to do and this is the trigger for Lawrence’s last great sermon of the book. Lilly tells him he can’t lose himself in a woman, in humanity or in God. At the end of the day you only have yourself.

‘You can’t lose yourself. You can try. But you might just as well try to swallow yourself. You’ll only bite your fingers off in the attempt. You can’t lose yourself, neither in woman nor humanity nor in God. You’ve always got yourself on your hands in the end: and a very raw and jaded and humiliated and nervous-neurasthenic self it is, too, in the end.

‘You can’t lose yourself, so stop trying. The responsibility is on your own shoulders all the time, and no God which man has ever struck can take it off. You ARE yourself and so BE yourself. Stick to it and abide by it. Passion or no passion, ecstasy or no ecstasy, urge or no urge, there’s no goal outside you, where you can consummate like an eagle flying into the sun, or a moth into a candle. There’s no goal outside you—and there’s no God outside you. No God, whom you can get to and rest in. None.

‘There is no goal outside you. None.

‘There is only one thing, your own very self. So you’d better stick to it. You can’t be any bigger than just yourself, so you needn’t drag God in. You’ve got one job, and no more. There inside you lies your own very self, like a germinating egg, your precious Easter egg of your own soul. There it is, developing bit by bit, from one single egg-cell which you were at your conception in your mother’s womb, on and on to the strange and peculiar complication in unity which never stops till you die—if then. You’ve got an innermost, integral unique self, and since it’s the only thing you have got or ever will have, don’t go trying to lose it. You’ve got to develop it, from the egg into the chicken, and from the chicken into the one-and-only phoenix, of which there can only be one at a time in the universe. There can only be one of you at a time in the universe—and one of me. So don’t forget it. Your own single oneness is your destiny. Your destiny comes from within, from your own self-form. And you can’t know it beforehand, neither your destiny nor your self-form. You can only develop it. You can only stick to your own very self, and never betray it. And by so sticking, you develop the one and only phoenix of your own self, and you unfold your own destiny.’

‘If your soul’s urge urges you to love, then love. But always know that what you are doing is the fulfilling of your own soul’s impulse. It’s no good trying to act by prescription: not a bit. And it’s no use getting into frenzies. If you’ve got to go in for love and passion, go in for them. But they aren’t the goal. They’re a mere means: a life-means, if you will. The only goal is the fulfilling of your own soul’s active desire and suggestion. Be passionate as much as ever it is your nature to be passionate, and deeply sensual as far as you can be. Small souls have a small sensuality, deep souls a deep one. But remember, all the time, the responsibility is upon your own head, it all rests with your own lonely soul, the responsibility for your own action.

‘Your soul inside you is your only Godhead. It develops your actions within you as a tree develops its own new cells. And the cells push on into buds and boughs and flowers. And these are your passion and your acts and your thoughts and expressions, your developing consciousness. You don’t know beforehand, and you can’t. You can only stick to your own soul through thick and thin.

‘You are your own Tree of Life, roots and limbs and trunk. Somewhere within the wholeness of the tree lies the very self, the quick: its own innate Holy Ghost. And this Holy Ghost puts forth new buds, and pushes past old limits, and shakes off a whole body of dying leaves. And the old limits hate being empassed, and the old leaves hate to fall. But they must, if the tree-soul says so…’

But this isn’t all. This is just the sermon about love. There’s an equal amount about the centrality of power. Lilly sees power not as a superficial will to power like Nietzsche’s, not as a conscious thing, but as a submission to the deep power urge in our core. And this power urge comes out of our deep core and we (men) must submit to it and then women, too, must submit to the man’s power urge.

‘Once the love-mode changes, as change it must, for we are worn out and becoming evil in its persistence, then the other mode will take place in us. And there will be profound, profound obedience in place of this love-crying, obedience to the incalculable power-urge. And men must submit to the greater soul in a man, for their guidance: and women must submit to the positive power-soul in man, for their being.’

Aaron the sceptic, says this will never happen. Lilly says oh yes it will. And the book ends on an ominous and cryptic note.

‘All men say, they want a leader. Then let them in their souls submit to some greater soul than theirs. At present, when they say they want a leader, they mean they want an instrument, like Lloyd George. A mere instrument for their use. But it’s more than that. It’s the reverse. It’s the deep, fathomless submission to the heroic soul in a greater man. You, Aaron, you too have the need to submit. You, too, have the need livingly to yield to a more heroic soul, to give yourself. You know you have. And you know it isn’t love. It is life-submission. And you know it. But you kick against the pricks. And perhaps you’d rather die than yield. And so, die you must. It is your affair.’
There was a long pause. Then Aaron looked up into Lilly’s face. It was dark and remote-seeming. It was like a Byzantine eikon at the moment.
‘And whom shall I submit to?’ he said.
‘Your soul will tell you,’ replied the other.

Thoughts on part 1

The thinness of satire

The first part feels like a try-out of Huxleyan social satire. Lawrence has the characters, alright, but he has completely the wrong temperament for satire, because Lawrence is rarely if ever humorous. Mostly he radiates seething contempt for the upper class types he portrays.

His dialogue is rarely acute, deft and skewering. All his characters tend to speak in the blunt, assertive tones of their author. Almost any other author I can think of is sharper, with the possible exception of Conrad. Instead of using dialogue for precise or witty digs, stabs and insights, Lawrence gives his characters endless arguments, which aren’t funny or particularly informative: take Josephine’s pointless vapourings about revolution, or Lilly and Jim’s squabbling about Christianity, or Lilly and Aaron’s argument about the ‘true’ meaning of the war. Or just works up the dialogue through pointless repetition and has characters laugh at their own non-existent jokes. In part two the dinner party conversation at Lord and Lady Franks feels heavy and contrived and absolutely unfunny.

Snobbishness

Alongside the supposed satire, Lawrence the miner’s son displays a rather shameful wish to be in-the-know with the fancy foreign tags and exaggerated slang of the upper middle classes. Burgess freely accuses him of snobbishness.

Thus Lawrence has not just his characters but the narrator himself drop into French: poupée, pas seul, de haut en bas, merde, amour, a la bonne heure, bonne bouche, coeur à coeur, dégagé, seul, moue, comble, eprise, maquereau, pis-aller, ebloui, littérateur – or, in the Italian half of the book, into Italian: natura morta, bella figura, milordo, signori, a riverderci, salota, niente – with some splashes of German thrown in.

And alongside all this, the jolly slang of the Edwardian posh: good egg, champion idea, I say, rather, and so on, which often sounds ludicrous alongside the primeval, hyperbolic passages.

Class consciousness

Connected with Lawrence’s social climbing impulse is his unremitting sense of class consciousness. With Jim Bricknell and his friends, with Sir William and his guests, with the two young gay artists, Aaron is never for a moment unaware of coming from a different class. It’s vivid the way he is deeply uncomfortable being driven in Sir William’s chauffeur-driven car and what a relief it is to get out into the piazza full of common people. Or entering the train:

Aaron got his seat, and the porter brought on his bags… Aaron gave the tip uneasily. He always hated tipping – it seemed humiliating both ways. (p.236)

The issue is then spelled out:

Aaron had lived long enough to know that as far as manhood and intellect went, nay, even education – he was not the inferior of the two young ‘gentlemen’. He knew quite well that, as far as intrinsic nature went, they did not imagine him an inferior: rather the contrary. They had rather an exaggerated respect for him and his life-power, and even his origin. And yet – they had the inestimable cash advantage – and they were going to keep it. They knew it was nothing more than an artificial cash superiority. But they gripped it all the more intensely. They were the upper middle classes. They were Eton and Oxford. And they were going to hang on to their privileges. In these days, it is a fool who abdicates before he’s forced to… They were being so awfully nice. And inwardly they were not condescending. But socially, they just had to be. The world is made like that. It wasn’t their own private fault. It was no fault at all. It was just the mode in which they were educated, the style of their living. (p.236)

References to the war

The First World War had only just finished and haunts the book which is peppered with references to its aftermath. The opening sentences of the novel are:

There was a large, brilliant evening star in the early twilight, and underfoot the earth was half frozen. It was Christmas Eve. Also the War was over, and there was a sense of relief that was almost a new menace. A man felt the violence of the nightmare released now into the general air.

Aaron feels everything has changed but nothing has changed.

To Aaron Sisson, this was home, this was Christmas: the unspeakably familiar. The war over, nothing was changed.

But the appearance and atmosphere have changed.

He crossed the fields towards the little town, which once more fumed its lights under the night. The country ran away, rising on his right hand. It was no longer a great bank of darkness. Lights twinkled freely here and there, though forlornly, now that the war-time restrictions were removed. It was no glitter of pre-war nights, pit-heads glittering far-off with electricity. Neither was it the black gulf of the war darkness: instead, this forlorn sporadic twinkling.

Here’s the impact on the town’s Christmas market.

The war had killed the little market of the town. As he passed the market place on the brow, Aaron noticed that there were only two miserable stalls. But people crowded just the same. There was a loud sound of voices, men’s voices. Men pressed round the doorways of the public-houses.

In the scene at Jim’s Albany apartments:

All the men, except Aaron, had been through the war in some way or other. But here they were, in the old setting exactly, the old bohemian routine.

Overall, there’s a sense the war has spoiled and degraded things and yet the people carry on in the same old routines, only shabbier. Like Vladimir and Estragon in part two of Waiting for Godot.

And then the character of Herbertson, the bluff, posh Guards officer who has been damaged by the war and has to talk to Lilly, five pages of genuinely harrowing war stories. (Like a lot of the book) this passage feels like it’s been arbitrarily shoe-horned into the narrative, but is harrowing nonetheless.

In Italy, something comparable.

At the little outdoor tables of the cafes a very few drinkers sat before empty coffee-cups. Most of the shops were shut. It was too soon after the war for life to be flowing very fast. The feeling of emptiness, of neglect, of lack of supplies was evident everywhere.

An Italian waiter asks:

‘What would you like to drink? Wine? Chianti? Or white wine? Or beer?’—The old-fashioned ‘Sir’ was dropped. It is too old-fashioned now, since the war. (p.226)

Angus:

‘Have a Grand Marnier,’ he said. ‘I don’t know how bad it is. Everything is bad now. They lay it down to the war as well. It used to be quite a decent drink. What the war had got to do with bad liqueurs, I don’t know.’ (p.230)

Aaron likes Florence because it is half empty:

Altogether Aaron was pleased with himself, for being in Florence. Those were early days after the war, when as yet very few foreigners had returned, and the place had the native sombreness and intensity. So that our friend did not mind being alone. (p.255)

The Marchesa del Torre refuses to sing at Algy’s tea party because the war has ended her ability to sing in a heartfelt carefree way – ‘another disaster added to the war list.’

Summary criticism

The character of Aaron Sisson is never properly developed. Through the first 11 chapters he is a kind of bumbling, well-meaning non-entity. His appeal is his smiling indifference to the people he meets and whatever they say to him, up to and including not caring much when Josephine asks him to kiss her, and not being very upset when Lilly kicks him out after his bout of flu.

In the second half everything changes and he is given pages of deep soul stuff like the male protagonists of the Rainbow and Women in Love but it fails to persuade. The light triviality of the satirical scenes undermines, renders implausible the would-be deep moments.

Beneath all this lurks the fundamental problem: the theme most frequently expressed, and so the ostensible theme of the book, seems to be this thing about men and women, consisting of two parts: 1) that modern women have the whip hand over men, who submit themselves like dogs; and 2) the best philosophy of life is to remain absolutely independent, free of ties, untrammelled – even if you have a sexual affair with a woman not to submit but to keep your essential core intact.

These are potentially interesting, if often garbled and sometimes laughable, themes but the book’s problem is that Aaron Sisson is too flimsy a character to bear them.

In his introduction, Richard Aldington says ‘Aaron’s Rod’ was a hastily written text, similar in this respect to Lawrence’s novels The Lost Girl (1920) and Kangaroo (1923). What these lesser novels demonstrate is the immense rewards achieved by Lawrence in the books he did rewrite, over and again – ‘Sons and Lovers’, ‘The Rainbow’ and ‘Women in Love’. In those books there is a great unity of characters and themes and scenes in which the themes are fully and deeply dramatised. By contrast, ‘Aaron’s Rod’ contains characters and scenes and themes which are fairly memorable but fall apart like pick-up sticks; remain fatally unintegrated and fragmentary.

Credit

‘Aaron’s Rod’ by D. H. Lawrence was first published in the UK by William Heinemann in 1922. Page references are to the 1972 Penguin Classics paperback edition.

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by Simon on February 17, 2025 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Novel

Tagged A Room with a View, Aaron, Aaron Sisson, Aaron's Rod, Aldous Huxley, Alps, Anthony Burgess, Ark of the Covenant, Artemis Hooper, Bach, Beethoven, Beldover, Bertrand Russell, Birth of Venus, Bloomsbury, Bolshevism, Botticelli, British Museum, Brunnhilde, Charing Cross Road, Clariss Browning, class consciousness, Communism, Corelli, Corrina Wade, Covent Garden, Cyril Scott, D.H. Lawrence, D.H. Lawrence posture, Eastwood, Embankment tube, fascism, fiction, First World War, Florence, Gerald Crich, Hampshire, Herbertson, Hotel Britannia, Italy, James Argyle, Jim Bricknell, John Middleton Murray, Josephine Ford, Julia Bricknell. Robert Cunningham, Katherine Mansfield, Lady Sibyl Franks, Lady Williams, Lloyd-George, London, Lottie, Lottie Sisson, Louis Mee, Manfredi, Marchesa del Torre, Michelangelo, Milan, Moses, Mr ffrench, Mrs Browning, Music, Mussolini, Nietzsche, Novara, novel, Old Testament, opera, Ottoline Morell, Palazzo Vecchio, Pension Nardini, Pergolesi, Piazza della Signoria, Piazza Vittoria Emmanuele, Rawdon Lilly, Richard Aldington, Robert Cunningham, Robert Smillie, Rupert Birkin, Russia, Scarlatti, sex, Shottle Lane, Signor di Lanti, Sir William Franks, Sons and Lovers, Strauss, Stravinsky, Struther, Tanny, The Rainbow, The Royal Oak, Uffizi Gallery, Via Nationale, Waiting For Godot, Walter Rosen, Women in Love

Posted by Simon on February 17, 2025

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2025/02/17/aarons-rod-d-h-lawrence/

Brecht: fragments @ Raven Row

This is a fascinating and thought-provoking exhibition, in a lovely setting, I’m just kicking myself that I found out about it too late to see the theatrical performances (see below).

Raven Row

Raven Row is a secret treasure of a gallery tucked away in Spitalfields. It’s adapted from the domestic rooms of a tall thin eighteenth century building at the eastern end of Artillery Lane (nearest tube station Liverpool Street station). Raven Row is a charity committed to displaying art which is diverse and unusual, sometimes by established international artists, sometimes more out-of-the-way figures, united by having escaped the notice of the big name London art galleries. Their programme aims to be ‘improvisatory and undogmatic.’

This photo of the interior of one of the rooms immediately gives you a feel for how they’ve retained most of the original Georgian features and decoration.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row (photograph by Marcus J Leith)

Bertolt Brecht

Bertolt Brecht (1898 to 1956) has a claim to be the greatest German writer of the twentieth century, certainly the most famous. He had a first burst of fame when his musical, The Threepenny Opera, became a hit, and its signature tune, ‘Die Moritat von Mackie Messer’ was covered by American performers as ‘Mack the Knife’.

But it was after the Second World War when the radically innovative approach of his so-called ‘epic theatre’, as performed by his touring theatre company The Berliner Ensemble, revolutionised the possibilities of theatre. The spread of his technique was also helped by the fact that he wrote some of the great plays of the period such as ‘Mother Courage’, ‘The Chalk Circle’, ‘Galileo’ and many others.

But Brecht wasn’t just a world class playwright, he was also a noted poet, he wrote many essays in support of his theatre theory and, as this exhibition sets out to show, he could also be considered an artist of a particular type.

brecht: fragments

In the late 1930s Brecht came under attack from Soviet administrators of the new doctrine of Socialist Realism, most notably the powerful critic Gyorgy Lukács, who criticised him for using elitist, avant-garde techniques which were difficult for ‘the masses’ to understand. In one of his replies defending the use of modernist aesthetics for revolutionary communist purposes, Brecht mentions that, even though he was now in exile in Denmark, he was currently working on a surprising number of projects and goes on to mention 2 novels, a play and a book of poetry, not including the essay in which he describes all this (Aesthetics and Politics, Verso Books, 1977, p.70).

In other words, it was Brecht’s working practice throughout his career to be working on a multitude of projects, and to be surrounded by fragments of works in progress, across a range of genres and forms.

Found images

What this many-sided exhibition at Raven Row shows is how this concept, or category, of ‘fragments’ can be seen as not just a side effect of Brecht’s work-in-progress, but a fundamental principle which applies to them at every level. For, as this exhibition shows, Brecht was a compulsive collector of found images, often from newspapers and magazines. He pasted these into notebooks where he collected them by theme. He strewed his manuscripts with them where they obviously acted as inspiration or captured ideas, sometimes literal, sometimes tangential.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing a typical page from his notebook from the mid-1920s (photo by the author)

For example, why paste a postcard image by Pieter Breughel onto the front page of the manuscript of his great play ‘The Caucasian Chalk Circle’ except that it, in some sense, crystallised or captured the mood, or a mood, which the work was designed to present?

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing the cover page of the manuscript of The Caucasian Chalk Circle, showing the cut and pasted letters and a postcard of a painting by Breughel (photo by the author)

Photomontage

Photos could be used in another way, to create photomontages, cutting out images from one context and pasting them into others, in the style of the radical photomontage artist John Heartfield. In actual fact, there isn’t much here in that style. For the most part, Brecht didn’t interfere with, cut and paste together, his images. They tended to go into his albums and notebooks and be pasted into play manuscripts unaltered. The artistry was in the initial selection.

The War Primer

Another use of news photos was when Brecht began collecting images during the Second World War and writing one four-line quatrains underneath them, producing what he came to call ‘photo-epigrams’. Over time this developed into a book which, after the war, came to be called the ‘War Primer’, containing 75 photo-epigrams.

A bunch of the original paste-ups for the book (actually created by Ruth Berlau, one of Brecht’s long-term collaborators) are hung across one wall. The quatrains, like most of Brecht’s poetry, consist of direct statement, unadorned by similes and metaphors, blunt and political. For example, under a photo of a bombardier in uniform inside a bomber:

You’re looking at a bastard, and a poor one!
‘I laugh at news of other men’s distress,
A corset salesman, formerly from Nürnberg,
A dealer now in death and wretchedness.’

Here’s an example, a striking magazine image of men in a steelworks which inspired Brecht to write the quatrain you can see, typed out, cut and pasted beneath it.

Paste-up for a page of War Primer (1940 to 1949) by Bertolt Brecht in collaboration with Ruth Berlau. Courtesy the Bertolt Brecht Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (BBA 2096/38)

The quatrain for this one reads (in English translation):

‘What are you making, brothers?’ ‘A car of steel.
‘And what about these plates here, lying on the side?’
‘For shells that slice through sheer armoured walls.’
‘Why all this, brothers?’ ‘That we stay alive.’

Encyclopedia of gestures

Yet another use for images was that, heavily involved as he was in the staging of his plays, he was very interested in the actors’ gestures. What happens if you get an actor to stand on a stage so? Or hold his arms just so? And now in this position? And now in that? How much can be achieved without words, without even action, just by posture and gesture? And then what happens if you add words to gestures, is it possible to make the words and gestures contradict each other or at least play off each other.

Dictatorial poses

Which explains why there’s a room of sheets from his numerous notebooks, which consists of newspaper photos of generally eminent men of the time (the obvious tyrants – Hitler, Mussolini and Stalin – with other lesser known politicians such as Daladier, Laval et al). Anyway, Brecht managed to get hold of photos them making speeches and it’s genuinely fascinating to study how they held themselves and what they did with their arms and hands. Thus prompted I adopted some of the poses of Hitler in full flow (hold two clenched fists up, palms towards you, in front of your chest – and instantly felt some of the coiled rage at the world. Elsewhere, Brecht picked up this improbable series of snaps of the Führer throwing a few shapes.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing the sheet of photos of Hitler posing and prancing (terrible photo by the author)

And, in the next glass case, copied a series of poses of Comrade Stalin addressing a meeting, which have him leaning forward and pointing an accusing finger, – and you immediately feel yourself dominating a room full of people petrified that there going to be the next one accused of some crime and hauled off to the gulag.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing the sheet of photos of Stalin, smiling, playing the affable good fellow, and pointing a finger at people he’s about to send to the gulag. Copy the poses for yourself and see how they make you feel (photo by the author)

Collaboration

Back to the plays, the wall labels tell us that it was Brecht’s common practice to be highly collaborative, to sit round a table with other writers, director, actors, to discuss parts and action and dialogue. Lines of dialogue or action were typed on strips of paper and often moved around in a process of continual shuffling and improvement.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing a typical Brecht manuscript showing how sections of dialogue were created as blocks before being moved around, all accompanied by a typical contemporary news photo (photo by the author)

Pictures for plays

Once you grasp the centrality of collaboration in Brecht’s practice then it makes perfect sense that so many of his manuscripts are not neatly typed out finished products, but highly fragmented texts made out of typed lines pasted onto notebook pages, often with lines of commentary scrawled around then and, as mentioned, often with a photo from a newspaper pasted in. Now you can see how the use of images like this 1) helps everyone involved understand the directly political context of a piece 2) captures the mood of discussions and decisions without needing to be put into words. ‘Yes, that’s it.’

Hence the examples here of work notebooks, and ‘finished’ manuscripts, which are festooned with cut out lines of dialogue or text, crystallised in newspaper photos.

Many scenes

In his conversations with Walter Benjamin, Brecht explained how he conceived of his plays less as made from ACTS, in the traditional way, but more as collections of lots of freestanding scenes. In the reply to Lukács mentioned above, he describes how the play he’s working on, describing life under the Nazis, consists of 27 short scenes with no overarching narrative arc. In other words, Brecht constructed many of his plays as if they were a series of snapshots.

Development and flux

Because another key part of Brecht’s practice is that the plays were never really finished. They always changed and developed in production as the actors and director discovered what worked, and from production to production as Brecht changed lines, or action or moved about the scenes. Narrative ideas, situations and segments of dialogue were subject to continuous cutting and rearrangement, often literally, using scissors and glue.

Recap

So from the smallest photo cut out from a magazine and pasted into a notebook, to the large scale of his three-hour-long plays, this sense of flux and fragments was foundational to Brecht’s conception of his works and his practice in assembling them.

The Brecht Archive

That’s probably enough to give you a feel for the exhibition and the light it sheds on the practice and process of Brecht’s imagination, and an indication of the kind of visual material you see (lots of pages from his notebooks and scrapbooks, lots of news and magazine photos from the 1930s, ’40s and ’50s).

Just a note that the entire thing hails from the Brecht Archive now, of course, housed in Berlin and this is the first time most of this (largely unknown) material has ever been shown in the UK. It is, as I hope I’ve indicated, a fascinating treasure trove of ideas, images, documentary background to not only Brecht’s numerous works, finished and unfinished, along with glimpses of the social history of the period (1930s to the early 1950s) all combined.

Performances

A major part of the exhibition was the theatrical performances which took place twice a day during most of its run. Because I only stumbled across this so late, like a fool I missed them. The idea was that twice a day a bunch of actors led visitors through the gallery spaces, performing dramatic fragments from four of Brecht’s unfinished plays from the 1920s, showing how montage and snapshot techniques played a crucial part in his conception of playwriting.

Unfinished

Because that’s another aspect of the show I’ve forgotten to mention, which was that not only a lot of his plays changed and evolved during production, but a sizeable number never even made it that far. In short, Brecht left behind lots and lots of unfinished works. So four of the galleries contain props and production notes, including photos and visual materials relating to four plays which were never completed, but are here summarised and explained, namely:

Performance 1: The Breadshop

A 1930 collaboration addressing issues of poverty and hunger after the Wall Street Crash, which eventually ran to 245 pages but was never completed or performed. For some reason the conception began to focus on the role of the Salvation Army (SA), with a surprising number of accompanying images and biographies of SA notables.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing the performance space for The Breadshop (note the production notes and accompanying photos pasted to the wall) (photo by the author)

Performance 2: The Flood

An unfinished draft for a radio play, written 1927 to 1928, about a man-made apocalypse, inspired by a hurricane which devastated Miami in 1926.

Performance 3: Fleischhacker

A collaboration with Elisabeth Hauptmann, worked on till 1931, this told the story of Jae Fleischhacker, a futures trader in Chicago, as he plays the wheat market. This is interwoven with the story of a ‘Family from the Savannah’, who move to Chicago to try their luck following crop failure in the wheat district.

Installation view of ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row showing the performance space and props for the performance of Fleischhacker (photo by the author)

Performance 4: Fatzer

Title of a dramatic fragment that Brecht worked on intensively for four years, from 1926 to 1930, and returned to throughout his creative life. It tells the story of a four-man tank crew, led by Johann Fatzer, who desert their post during the First World War. Amazingly, the manuscript ended up running to 500 pages but remained fragmented and unresolved and unperformable – until, that is, some scenes were reshaped and performed here, for this show.

Concluding scene from the performance of Fatzer in ‘brecht: fragments’ at Raven Row (2024) photograph by Anne Tetzlaff

Two films

And there are two films.

1. On a small TV monitor an experimental contemporary filming of a production of Mann ist Mann (Man Equals Man) from 1931. Set in British colonial India, the play concerns the brainwashing of an ordinary civilian, Galy Gay, into the perfect soldier. This film documents the 1931 production of the play at the Berlin State Theatre, for which Brecht was director, Peter Lorre played Galy Gay, and stage design was by Brecht’s long-time collaborator Caspar Neher. It was made using the experimental procedure of shooting film at a slowed rate of around one frame per second.

2. And in a darkened room, projected on a larger screen, are excerpts from the 1932 German feature film ‘Kuhle Wampe or Who Owns the World?’ about unemployment, homelessness and left-wing politics in the Weimar Republic. Brecht conceived and wrote the script, and directed the final debate scene, while the music was written by his long-term collaborator Hanns Eisler.

Gallery

Here’s the star performer of the era, Herr Adolf Hitler, cut out and pasted on the back of a manuscript page from ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’. There are many photos of him, the most fascinating ones being the series depicting him in the full flood of his impassioned speeches.

Manuscript page from ‘The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui’ (1941) courtesy the Bertolt Brecht

This one is a highly political photo showing Spanish peasants marching off to seize land owned by exploitative landlords.

From an album compiled by Brecht in the late-1940s, courtesy the Bertolt Brecht Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (BBA 1198/058)

Here’s a vivid snapshot of Berlin men, the guy at the back giving it a particularly thuggish, threatening tone.

Image from research for Fatzer (1926 to 1930) by Bertolt Brecht. Courtesy the Bertolt Brecht Archive, Akademie der Künste, Berlin (BBA 0111/062)

The booklet

Usually galleries produce coffee-table catalogues to accompany their exhibitions, large-format, heavy books full of colour reproductions, which cost anything from £20 to £50.

Rather amazingly, the brecht: fragments exhibition at Raven Row is accompanied by an impressive 113-page pamphlet, consisting of five high quality essays by experts in the field, along with a chronology and bibliography, and it is COMPLETELY FREE. I can’t remember a comparably generous gesture by any gallery I’ve ever visited.

Envoi

One of the things that made Brecht such an interesting, innovative and powerful poet was his commitment to direct statement undeformed by the needs of scansion or rhyme. The power derives from the fundamental gestus, a word he coined to mean attitude or opinion but indicating more than that, evoking the pose and gestures of an actor onstage, a kind of mental image of how you would stand and move as you declaim the words. It’s a style epitomised by the plain but powerful final poem in the huge volume, ‘Poems 1913 to 1956’, edited by John Willett and Ralph Mannheim (1976):

And I always thought

And I always thought: the very simplest words
Must be enough. When I say what things are like
Everyone’s heart must be torn to shreds.
That you’ll go down if you don’t stand up for yourself
Surely you see that.

Although most of us disagree with his doctrinaire Marxism and foolish faith in Soviet communism, it’s hard not to be impressed by Brecht’s unflinching commitment to the victims of tyranny and exploitation everywhere, captured in so many of these photos, and in the texts and poems and fragments he derived from them.

Related reviews

Peter Kennard: Archive of Dissent @ the Whitechapel Gallery (July 2024)
Peter Kennard @ the Imperial War Museum London (May 2015)
Weimar Republic reviews
Western Marxism reviews
Communist reviews

1 Comment

by Simon on August 17, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Marxism

Tagged 1931, 1932, Adolf Hitler, Anne Tetzlaff, art, Artillery Lane, Berlin State Theatre, Bertolt Brecht, Brecht: fragments, Caspar Neher, Chicago, collaboration, Denmark, Die Moritat von Mackie Messer, Elisabeth Hauptmann, epic theatre, exhibition, Fatzer, First World War, Fleischhacker, Galy Gay, German literature, gesture, Hanns Eisler, Hitler, Jae Fleischhacker, Johann Fatzer, John Heartfield, Kuhle Wampe, Liverpool Street station, Lukacs, Mack the Knife, Man Equals Man, Mann ist Mann, Marxism, modernist aesthetics, montage, Mussolini, Peter Lorre, photo-epigrams, photography, photomontage, Raven Row, revolutionary communism, Salvation Army, Second World War, Spitalfields, Stalin, The Berliner Ensemble, The Breadshop, The Brecht Archive, The Caucasian Chalk Circle, The Flood, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, Wall Street Crash, Walter Benjamin, War Primer, Weimar Republic, Western Marxism

Posted by Simon on August 17, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/08/17/brecht-fragments-raven-row/

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

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

Overview

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

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

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

Central characters

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A chapter per character

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

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

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

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

Politicians

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Captain Antonio Corelli

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

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

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

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

Detailed plot summary by chapter

1. Dr Iannis Commences his History and is Frustrated

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

2. The Duce

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

3. The Strongman

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

4. L’Omosessuale (1)

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

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

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

5. The Man who Said ‘No’

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

6. L’Omosessuale (2)

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

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

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

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

7. Extreme Remedies

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

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

8. A Funny Kind of Cat

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

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

9. August 15, 1940

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

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

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

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

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

10. L’Omosessuale (3)

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

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

11. Pelagia and Mandras

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

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

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

12. All the Saint’s Miracles

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

13. Delirium

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

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

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

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

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

14. Grazzi

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

15. L’Omosessuale (4)

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

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

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

16. Letters to Mandras at the Front

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

Why are people such animals? (p.107)

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

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

17. L’Omosessuale (5)

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

18. The Continuing Literary Travails of Dr Iannis

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

19. L’Omosessuale (6)

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

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

20. The Wild Man of the Ice

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

21. Pelagia’s First Patient

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

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

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

22. Mandras behind the Veil

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

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

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

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

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

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

23. April 30, 1941

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

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

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

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

24. A Most Ungracious Surrender

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

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

25. Resistance

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

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

26. Sharp Edges

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

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

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

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

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

27. A Discourse on Mandolins and a Concert

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

28. Liberating the Masses (1)

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

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

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

29. Etiquette

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

30. The Good Nazi (1)

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

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

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

31. A Problem with Eyes

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

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

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

32. Liberating the Masses (2)

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

33. A Problem with Hands

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

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

34. Liberating the Masses (3)

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

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

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

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

36. Education

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

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

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

38. The Origin of Pelagia’s March

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

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

39. Arsenios

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

40. A Problem with Lips

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

41. Snails

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

42. How like a Woman is to a Mandolin

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

43. The Great Big Spiky Rustball

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

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

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

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

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

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

44. Theft

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

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

45. A Time of Innocence

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

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

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

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

46. Bunnios

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

47. Dr Iannis Counsels his Daughter

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

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

48. La Scala

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

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

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

49. The Doctor Advises the Captain

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

50. A Time of Hiatus

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

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

51. Paralysis

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

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

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

52. Developments

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

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

53. First Blood

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

54. Carlo’s Farewell

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

55. Victory

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

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

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

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

56. The Good Nazi (2)

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

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

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

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

57. Fire

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

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

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

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

58. Surgery and Obsequy

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

59. The Historical Cachette

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

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

Fine words but meaningless because – whose truth?

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

60. The Beginning of Her Sorrows

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

(p.345)

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

61. Every Parting is a Foretaste of Death

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

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

62. Of the German Occupation

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

63. Liberation (the communists)

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

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

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

Return of Mandras

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

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

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

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

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

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

64. Antonia (the baby)

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

Iannis returns

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

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

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

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

L’omosessuale

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The revenant

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

65. 1953 (earthquake)

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

Wars

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

Earthquake

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

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

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

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

66. Rescue

De Bernière’s attitude to his homeland, Britain:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

67. Pelagia’s Lament

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

68. The Resurrection of History

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

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

69. Bean by Bean the Sack Fills

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

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

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

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

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

70. Excavation

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

71. Antonia Sings Again

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

And Spiro teaches Iannis how to play the mandolin.

72. An Unexpected Lesson (reappearance of Corelli)

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

73. Restitution (Corelli and Pelagia reunited)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE END.

The unsaid as a central theme

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hummel’s concerto for mandolin

Greek words

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

Credit

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

Modern Greek reviews

The Dancing Floor by John Buchan (1926) [set on a fictional Greek island]
Ill Met by Moonlight by William Stanley Moss (1950) [kidnapping a German general on Crete]
Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh (1955) [the German invasion of Crete]
Charmed lives in Greece: Ghika, Craxton, Leigh Fermor @ the British Museum (March 2018)

Second World War reviews

Second World War reviews

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by Simon on April 26, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Novel, Second World War, War

Tagged 'L'Omosessuale, 1961, 1973, 1993, 996th Regiment, Acqui Division, agapeton, Albania, Albanian Kingdom, Alekos, Alexi, andarte, Antonia, Antonio Corelli, Apodosis, Argostóli, Balkans, BBC, Benito Mussolini, Bertie Wooster, bouzouki, Brigadier Myers, Brindisi, Bulgaria, Bunnios, Bunny Warren, Captain Antonio Corelli, Captain Corelli, Captain Corelli's Mandolin, Carlo Piero Guercio, Casa Nostra, Cephallonia, Cephalonia, Charlie Chaplin, Christmas, Churchill, Colonel Barge, Colonel Rivolta, Communism, Conservative Party, Corfu, crochet, de Bernières, Dr Iannis, Drosoula, Duce, ELAS, Ellinikós Laïkós Apeleftherotikós Stratós, Emanuele Grazzi, Eton, Evelyn Waugh, existentialism, Exterminate all the brutes, Father Arsenios, Feast of the Dormition of the Theotokos, Feminism, fiction, First Indochina War, Franc-Tireur, Francesco, General Gandin, German army, Great Britain, Greco-Italian war, Greece, Greek civil war, Greek islands, Greek Orthodoxy, Greek People's Liberation Army, Greek Prime Minister, Heart of Darkness, Hector, history, Hitler, homosexuality, Hummel, iatre, Il Duce, invasion of Greece, Ioannis Metaxas, Italian Army, John Buchan, John Major, Joseph Conrad, Julia Division, kapheneion, Katyn, Kefalonia, King Paul, King Zog I, Kingdom of Italy, Kokolios, Korean War, Koritsimou, kyria, La Scala club, Lemoni, Leutnant Günter Weber, liberation, Lieutenant Bunny Warren, Lili Marlene, Lixouri, Louis de Bernières, love, Lulu, Madam Butterfly, madness, Mandras, mangas, Marlowe, Marshal Badoglio, Master Race, Megalo Velisarios, Mount Aenos, Mr Kurtz, Mrs Thatcher, Mussolini, narrative, Nazi, novel, papakis, partisans, patir, pederasty, Pelagia, Pelagia's March, petit-bourgeois, poll tax riots, Psipsina, rape, Romance, Rome, Royalists, Saint Gerasimos, Second World War, snails, Special Operations Executive, Spiridon, St Gerasimos, Stalinism, Stamatis, Stukas, Tony Blair, Unconditional Surrender, Velisarios, Wagner, Walkman, war, war crime, Yugoslavia, Zakynthos

Posted by Simon on April 26, 2024

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Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby (1971)

Eric Newby (1919 to 2006) was a much-loved travel writer, author of such British travel classics as ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ (1958) and ‘Slowly Down the Ganges’ (1966). In 1971 he published this classic wartime memoir.

It describes how:

serving in the Special Boat Section, he was captured during an operation off the coast of Sicily in August 1942. He was then held at prisoner of war camps, first in Chieti, a few miles inland from Pescara on the Adriatic coast, and later at Fontanellato, near Parma
after the Italians made peace with the Allies in September 1943, he escaped from the camp by the simple expedient of walking through the now-unguarded gates
he was helped to hide for 6 months from the occupying Germans in the Apennine mountains, initially by a Slovene anti-fascist woman, Wanda Skof, her father the schoolteacher, a doctor, and then by a whole succession of colourful villagers and characters

Newby would later marry Wanda and she became the lifelong companion of his travels and adventures.

Newby’s core quality is a wonderful, self-mocking sense of humour; every turn of events is an opportunity for an amused, ironic remark or insight. Add to this his great way with natural descriptions of landscapes and weather, and then his acute descriptions of the many people he meets through the course of his adventure, and it makes for an extremely interesting, sometimes dramatic, but above all charming book.

The 298-page book is divided into 17 chapters.

1. Operation Whynot

Very detailed description of the secret small-scale operation during which Newby was captured on 12 August 1942, in the Bay of Catania off Sicily. He and five other members of M Detachment of the Special Boat Service had been taken into the bay by submarine (the Una commanded by Pat Norman, p.15), then manhandled inflatable canoes into the sea and rowed quietly to the beach. The plan was to attack a German airfield four miles south of Catania and take out as many of the 50 to 60 Junkers 88 bombers parked there as possible. The mission was lent urgency because a massive fleet of merchant ships had just entered the Mediterranean with the aim of sailing to British-held Malta to provide vital supplies to the besieged island (p.16).

They actually made it to the airfield when they encountered an Italian patrol, shots were fired, at which the airport alarm and all its floodlights went on. Now way they could cover the half mile to where loads of Ju 88s were lined up so they aborted, ran back to the beach, through the barbed wire, reclaimed their canoes and headed back out to sea.

But they completely missed the rendezvous point with the submarine (which, turned out, not only turned up and waited, but came back at the same time for several days in the hope of meeting them). Instead the seas got rough, the canoes swamped and sank and they were all pitched into the freezing water, clinging to various bits of wreckage.

Thus they were in very poor shape when they were discovered by a small Sicilian fishing fleet and dragged aboard the little fishing smacks about 8am. Newby’s attitude, tone of voice and wry humour are established on the opening page:

I remember lying among the freshly caught fish in the bottom of the boat, some of them exotic, all displaying considerably greater liveliness that we did… (p.13)

The most Newby aspect of the entire account is that one of his party brought along their pet dog from Malta (in the submarine, not on the actual airfield mission), a dachshund named Socks who disappeared for long period, returning bloated with food and her long underbelly soaked in oil which she invariably rubbed all over Newby’s uniform when he jumped up to lick him.

The fishermen handed the captured Brits over to the Italian army, who put them in prison, interrogated them etc, till a German officer arrived and insisted they be properly fed and given dry clothes. Eventually they were shipped over to the mainland and taken under armed escort to a POW barracks in Rome.

Newby found Rome beautiful. He quite liked being alone in a cell. This was his first time in Europe. He was just twenty-two years old (p.34).

2. Grand Illusion

Cut to a year later (September 1943) and Newby is being held in what had been built as an orphanage or orfanotrofio attached to a convent, but was still not finished when war broke out. It was a three-storey building so unstable that if anyone jumped up and down the entire facade wobbled. It was in a village called Fontenallato.

The Italian guards are relaxed, the food is OK and supplemented by Red Cross parcels and stuff bought off the black market. There’s cheap if risky liquor available. Newby tells a typical story about the first lieutenant-colonel who became senior officer and hosted a big party on his first night, with lots of illegal booze. Finally he declared the party over, rose, and opened the door to a tall cupboard, striding inside as if into his bedroom. Because, when he pulled the door shut behind him, he wedged his thick coat in it, it took the others some time to free him, by which time he was fast asleep and sleeping.

The prisoners were forbidden to look out of any of the windows facing into the road into the village. If they did so the Italian guards fired at them, and the walls opposite the windows were studded with bullet holes.

For some reason local pretty young women made a point of promenading past the prison, to the great joy of the young men inside who risked death by bullet to get a sight. This leads to the subject of sex and Newby points out that most of the men were probably too undernourished to perform. In the absence of women there was always masturbation, which he describes as ‘pull our puddings’, something difficult to do in a dormitory of 26 men, packed close and illuminated by searchlights, although some of them revived the ancient skills of subterfuge perfected at boarding school.

To my surprise there’s an extended passage which expresses considerable dislike for the public school senior ranks who dominated life in the prison. Newby calls them ‘the OK people’, who’d all been to the same schools, were members of the same clubs in London, were officers in the best regiments, knew each other’s families and treated all outsiders like muck (pages 47 to 49). The passage includes bitter memories of privileged boys being pushed in prams in Hyde Park or hogging all the toys at Hamleys (‘Go away,’ he said, ‘It’s my rocking horse.’) The ‘OK people’ i.e. the nobs, rarely if ever read, or discuss anything except each other’s fabulous families, but they do gamble – on anything, for any stakes.

The orfanotrofio was more like a public school than any other prison camp I was ever in. If anybody can be said to have suffered in this place it was those people who had never been subjected to the hell of English preparatory and public school life; because although there was no bullying in the physical sense…there was still plenty of scope for mental torment; and although the senior officer thought he ran the camp it was really run by people elected by the coteries, just like Pop at Eton, where so many of them had been. (p.55)

All the prisoners mock and joked about the ‘Itis’ (Newby’s spelling of what, according to the internet should be spelled ‘Eyeties’ i.e. slang abbreviation for Italians) but really it just channeled and controlled their frustration at being locked up.

In fact Newby philosophically comments that the prisoners were in fact more ‘free’ than they ever would be again, free from money, worries about careers, free from having to work, for responsibility for dependents and so on.

(The chapter is titled ‘Grand Illusion’ because a new commanding officer arrives who instils discipline and makes it resemble the prisoner of war camp in the 1937 French movie La Grande Illusion.)

3. Armistizio

On 25 July 1943 Mussolini was dismissed from power by King Victor Emmanuel. He was arrested, imprisoned and moved from place to place. The king appointed Marshal Pietro Badoglio as the new prime minister. On 3 September 1943 Badoglio agreed to an Armistice between Italy and the Allies. The formal announcement was made on the radio five days later and plunged Italy into chaos. The complicated diplomatic and military manoeuvres are laid out on the Wikipedia Armistice of Cassibile article.

The only impact this made on the orfanotrofio was the guards stopped shooting through the windows and their daily escorted exercise marches came to an end. That evening the entire camp held a massive party with booze bought and smuggled in on the black market.

There was a couple of days of wild rumours that the Allies were landing in northern Italy leading to massive breakthroughs and that the war would be over in a week. In fact it was to last nearly two years more. What happened is the Germans turned on their former allies and seized positions all across Italy.

4. The Ninth of September

Their Italian captors let the entire camp population leave. They just walked out the door. All except Newby who hobbled. Just a few days earlier he’d managed to trip and fall down the grand staircase at the centre of the orfanotrofio and break his ankle. Now, as everyone walks out the building and through the previously guarded wire fences, Newby has to hobble, supported by two reluctant paratroopers. They’re only too happy to hand him over to a (small) horse secured for him by a British orderly and named Mora. Characteristically: a) Newby has never ridden a horse before (unlike the huntin’, shootin’, fishin’ OK people inside the camp) b) he’s terrified of horse and c) the landscape is criss-crossed by irrigation ditches so terrible terrain for a horse to cross.

Pretty quickly the horse goes front legs into a ditch pitching Newby over its neck. I was surprised that his class consciousness surfaces even here.

‘Bloody funny, that Iti must have stuck a lit cigarette up her chuff,’ someone said.
‘One way of crossing the Rubicon,’ someone else said who had had a different sort of education. (p.64)

He’s still in the general procession of escaping prisoners, looking like a troop of lunatics he once came across in Surrey. Later they discover that:

some lorryloads of Germans, probably feldgendarmen, military policemen, had arrived at the camp, had fired a few rounds in the air, the Italian soldiers had capitulated immediately, the colonello had been arrested and the Germans had taken him away as a souvenir of their visit. (p.66)

The senior British officer in the column of escaping prisoners tells Newby that he can’t spare the men to help him hobble along and so he’s arranged for him to stay with a local farmer while the column heads off. So Newby is hidden in the hayloft of the first of a long line of Italian peasants. He hears the distant roar of traffic and wonders if it’s Germans on the Via Emilia (the modern A1 that runs between Piacenza in the north-west to Parma to the south-east). In the evening the farmer and his wife give him a hearty meal of home-made pasta and cheese and wine, the first of many flavours of the real, rustic Italy which Newby was to come to love.

An Italian translator from the orfanotrofio turns up and shares the latest news that the Germans are approaching in force from the north. Looks like the Great Liberation will be pushed back a bit.

5. Interlude in an Ospedale

Next day an Italian doctor comes and tells him he needs to go to hospital to have his ankle fixed. So Newby changes into Italian farmer clothes given him by his hosts and drives off in the doctor’s car. But not before one of the many land girls who had begun to arrive at the farm takes his notice, mainly because she’s blonde not dark-haired, and then comes over to the car to promise to visit him in hospital. It is Wanda, his future wife.

So he is driven back into Fontanellato and admitted to the Ospedale Perachi only a few hundred yards from the orfanotrofio. Wanda comes to visit, introduces herself and sets about giving him hilariously bad Italian lessons in her heavy Slovak accent. She pronounces his name ‘Hurrock’ (p.73).

She was wearing a white, open-necked shirt and a blue cotton skirt. She was brown, she was slim, she had good legs, she had ash-blonde hair and blue eyes and she had a fine nose. When she smiled she looked saucy, when she didn’t she looked serious. (p.76)

Newby describes the staff at the hospital, strong nurses with no false modesty about stripping him and putting him into regulations pyjamas, a formidable matron, a silent consultant.

That evening German bombers drop leaflets telling the population the capitulation of their country is a disgrace and the Germans are coming to provide freedom and security. Wanda had told him he was right next door to the maternity wing of the hospital and the screams of a woman giving birth keep him up till late.

For some time life in the hospital is peaceful and quiet. Wanda comes every afternoon for more bad Italian lessons and gossip about how his former prisoners are doing. She thinks he should head north to Switzerland.

Wanda describes how Slovenia was annexed by Mussolini in the 1920s who forbade the use of the Slovenian language and deported all Slovenian teachers to Italy (p.80).

The radio gives the news: on 12 September Mussolini was rescued from prison by German paratroopers. 14 September news that the Germans had launched a fierce counter-offensive against the Allied landings at Salerno (as described by where . 16 September all Italian officers and men were ordered to present themselves in uniform at the nearest German headquarters.

The newspapers carry a threatening announcement from the head of the SS who has now taken control of Parma, just 20 km to the south.

6. Back to Nature

Newby realises he has to get away. But he’s left it late and now two carabinieri have been stationed outside his hospital room to guard him.

With one of his meals come detailed instructions on how to escape. he had been pretending to have diarrhoea and keep having to go to the toilet until his guards stopped paying attention. That evening he squeezes through the toilet window, shimmies down a drainpipe and goes stumbling and hopping across fields to the rendezvous point a kilometre away. Here he is collected by the doctor who has been treating him and another middle-aged man. It is Wanda’s father. They refer to each other as dottore and maestro, respectively.

We set off at a terrific rate on a road which had all the qualities necessary to produce a fatal accident. (p.90)

They drive for miles before giving him a full set of clothes, a knife and dumping him in a wood telling him he’ll be found by a middle-aged man named Giovanni. They tell him he’s near the river Po, then drive off, leaving him to stumble into the wood armed with a sleeping bag and a bottle of mosquito repellent.

7. Down by the Riverside

After a rough night in the woods, Newby blunders down to the river and has a revelatory view of the mighty River Po. Back in the woods he falls asleep and is roughly woken by Giovanni who takes him to a rock overlooking the river and treats him to home-made soup and pasta, slices of unsmoked ham and home-made wine. Giovanni explains the geography of the Po, its regular flooding, its shifting estuary.

Wanda arrives by bicycle and brings bad news. Field Marshall Kesselring has set up his base in the castle at Fontenallato. If he’d remained at the hospital he would have been sent to a POW camp in Germany. Worse, some British escapees were found and arrested at a farm and one of them had kept a diary including the names of everyone who had helped him. Idiot. Cretin.

Giovanni and Wanda’s father dig a kind of grave for Newby, line it, make him lie in it, then cover it with planks and soil, leaving a breathing hole, for him to hide in that night. Next morning he’s woken and dug out and still stiff from being cooped up Newby stumbles to the doctor’s car.

Newby discovers he’s not the only passenger as there’s an ancient man, bent over, dressed all in black, who appears to be deaf and spends a lot of the journey quietly chuckling to himself, ‘Heh, heh, heh’ (p.108).

The doctor drives them along a country road till it joins the Via Emilia only to discover a vast armoured column is driving along it. Trying to look Italian in his Italian clothes, Newby is bricking it as the doctor overtakes the column slowly and sensibly.

Eventually they outdistance the column, drive along open roads and arrive in the city of Parma where the Fiat promptly breaks down and the doctor spends some time under the bonnet fixing it. Despite some German traffic cops being about nobody interferes with them, the car is fixed, and they drive through Parma towards the mountains.

8. Haven in a Storm

The doctor drops Newby with the Baruffas, farmers in the foothills of the mountains, telling him he’ll be safe there. It’s all smiles and handshakes but the minute the doctor has driven off Senor Baruffa tells him he must leave. Now. Straightaway. They are terrified of reprisals. They tell him he must go to the farm of Zanoni, further up the valley beyond the mill. And with that, throw him out into the farm courtyard just as a ferocious rainstorm starts.

Newby trudges up along the cobbled track that leads beside the overflowing stream as the storm howls around him and brings him to the bubbling frothing watermill. From there a path leads further up the hill to a house which was more like a stone hut built against the mountainside. He knocks and enters a dark and smelly cowshed to find Signor Zanoni. This dirt-poor farmer takes him into the main ‘house’, more like a cavern, feeds him and lets him sleep in the only bed.

It’s the dark and stormy evening of 25 September 1943 and Newby spends the night in the most comfortable bed he’s ever slept in, before or since (p.118).

Next morning Zanoni informs him that the Germans have installed a new Fascist government in Italy and it is offering 1,800 lire for the capture of Allied prisoners. That’s about £25 at contemporary rates, a fortune for these peasants. Then again he explains the typical Italian attitude which is not to try too hard; most of the country’s officials know the Allies will eventually win the war at which point there’ll be a reckoning for anyone who gave away hiding soldiers.

The thin signora beings him coffee made from acorns and their own home-cured ham but he realises these people are very poor and making a real sacrifice. He has to leave soon. It’s a Sunday and all through the day neighbours drop in for a chat and socialise and he has to remain deathly silent upstairs.

9. Appointment at the Pian del Sotto

Next day he tells kindly Zanzoni that he really must leave, he wants to stay somewhere he can earn his keep through labour. After running through possible candidates Zanoni’s wife suggests old Luigi who lives up on the Pian del Sotto.

So Zanzoni takes him a long roundabout walk through old oak forest, cutting his way through the dense brambles, heading further up to the treeline and to a three-storey concrete house, the Pian del Sotto, owned by Luigi. He’s in the kitchen with his flat-chested wife Agata, Rita the skinny daughter, an Amazon woman helper Dolores, and a chunky young labourer Armando. Zazoni negotiates terms in heavy dialect. Eventually Luigi agrees to take him on as an unskilled labourer, given room and board.

Kindly old Zanzoni says he’ll tell Giovanni back in the plain that he’s OK and with that turns and leaves. Luigi immediately tells Newby to start clearing the fields he can see from the house of all their rocks and stones.

10. Life on the Pian del Sotto

A warm-hearted, humorous description of the very basic life with Luigi’s peasant family, up at 6 for coffee and dried bread before the back-breaking work of the day begins. The crushing boredom of spending all day excavating stones from fields, loading them into the cart, dragging the cart to a cliff and tipping then over the edge. At 10am the merenda when everyone has woken up and is lively. It is here that the women in the household discuss their dreams and interpret them with the use of a popular guide.

Dinner after which the conversation, strangely enough, turns to London, or what they call la citè d’la fumarassa, which they all know is packed with peasouper fogs, streets clogged with hansom cabs, and the gruesome murders of Jack the Ripper solved by Sherlock Holmes.

A feature of the house is the ferocious, angry demented hound, Nero, which barks like mad and makes a lunge for Newby every time he goes in or out of the house. He takes to throwing the contents of his chamber pot at it every morning.

11. Encounter with a Member of the Master Race

One of the girls brings a letter back from the village written by Wanda and addressed to ‘Enrica’ which tells him in code that her father and Giovanni have been arrested, and warning him not to go on any long journeys i.e. not to try and escape north to Switzerland.

Sunday comes and while the rest of the family head down the mountain to villages, Newby chooses to spend the day hiking higher up the mountain, discovering the circular areas of soil cleared by the seasonal charcoal burners. It’s a wonderful walk beautifully described up – especially a couple of pages itemising all the different types of funghi he sees about which he knows absolutely nothing – through the thinning tree cover and then out onto a steep downland of cropped grass and across to an immense cliff. The sun is out, it’s warm and mazy and he lies down and falls asleep in the meadow.

He’s awoken by a German soldier in uniform. After he gets over the shock he realises the German means him no harm. In fact he is an eccentric figure, a keen butterfly collector who has got a rare day off and come up to the meadows armed with a butterfly net. He speaks good English and quickly spots that Newby is English. He introduces himself as Oberleutnant Frick, Education officer. He offers Newby a cool quality bottle of beer from Munich and speaks quite candidly, saying it is horrible to be hated simply for being German. He advises Newby to spend the winter where he is rather than head south where the fighting is going to become very hard. When Newby asks him about the fighting in Italy Frick says they can hold the Allies till the spring, probably the summer, but it is not here the war will be won or lost, it is in Russia where German losses are catastrophic. Then he shakes hands, makes a formal goodbye and runs off to catch butterflies.

When Newby arrives back at the house he discovers the arrival of the Oberleutnant created a mass panic among the villages, many of which conceal not Allied POWs but deserters, who all promptly headed for the hills. Then Newby produces the backpack full of fungi which he had collected up the hill, leading the women to scream at him to take the poisonous ones off the table, and Luigi to tick him off for collecting fungi which, it turns out, belongs to an old farmer who’s paid the commune for the right to pick them from a certain part of the wood, which is therefore his fungaia. The women cook the edible ones and they all enjoy them for dinner.

Newby’s decided not to head south, after what the German told him. He asks when the snow comes and Luigi says the first snow comes in November but the Big Snow comes at the end of December and then people can only get about on skis. Also he says, as the others go quiet, that’s when, wherever he’s hiding, ‘they’ will come and arrest him.

12. The Great Paura

Paura means fear as in ‘Ho paura’ meaning I’m afraid.

After a week or so Newby finally completes the task of clearing the rocks from the fields. The last massive boulders are removed by building fires next to or on them, then pouring icy water over then so they crack and explore and the fragments can be cleared.

One day as he’s heading to the primitive outside toilet Nero finally breaks his chain and comes bounding after him. Newby flees for a barn with hay piled against it and is scrabbling to climb the bales when two huge hands appear and yank him by his overalls up into the hayloft. It is the Amazonian landgirl Dolores and she promptly tells him to kiss her. Then to touch her. She had been working in the hot loft and had taken her jumper off to reveal a light slip. The reader can imagine the rest. They would have proceeded to sex is Agata hadn’t delivered one of her deafening yells to the menfolk to come and sort Nero out, which curtailed that adventure.

But a couple of days later the girls doll themselves up for a ballo down in the village and insist that Newby have a wash, shave, put on clean clothes and accompany them, which he reluctantly does, descending the steep cobbled path to the village with Rita and Dolores on each arm.

The ballo is in the hot kitchen of a village farm, music provided by old men playing a violin and an accordion and a drunken Dolores is coming on very strong when there’s a cry of ‘Germans! Germans!’ and the place empties in seconds.

Newby makes his way sideways, across fields and up towards the house and sees the entire village and the main path alive with torches. He climbs the ‘cliff’ which is made of clay and has gotten soft in the evening’s rain, and sees torches at the Pian del Sotto and is terrified that Luigi and Agata have been arrested or shot. He had always hidden a backpack ready to be grabbed at any moment and now he digs it out and then squats under the trees in the rain.

Some time later Luigi appears. He explains that it was a really big raid, a ‘sweep’ of the hills and villages looking for deserters. They knew he was here, a spy had blabbed, but Luigi and Agata lied and the searchers believed them. Now Luigi tells him he must climb through the woods to the meadows where he fell asleep and Frick found him, and go even higher till he encounters the lonely shepherd known as Abram. He shakes his hand, thanks him for clearing the rocks, and walks away, leaving Newby alone in the night in the rain.

13. Interlude in Cloud-Cuckoo-Land

So Newby climbs up through the woods, beyond the tree line and up the meadows, all the while feeling guilty that he ought to be heading south to try and hook up with ‘his people’ i.e. the Allied armies. Except he’s gotten used to living up here in the mountains which has taken the edge off his courage and motivation. It’s foggy. He hears the flock of sheep before he sees it and then looming out of the mist the big shepherd, Abramo, who ironically shows him his castello (a sheepfold made of stones linked by branches) and palazzo (a shepherd’s hut). Newby is actually in a bad way, soaked through and shivering, so Abramo dries him in front of the fire and gives him new clothes, plus generous helpings of home-made gin.

Newby is out of it for several days while the gentle giant cares for him. Once he’s on the mend, Abramo shares hare stew and home-made cheese. After a couple of days a small boy arrives with instructions to take him back down to the village which he does with an agility and speed Newby can’t keep up with.

He’s taken to a house he hasn’t seen before, a splendid medieval building, in which a committee of six men announce that, since their own sons are far away in prisons or fighting at the front or on the run, they will look after him as if he was their own son and look after him through the coming winter which otherwise he won’t survive. they are going to build him a secret dwelling.

14. A Cave of One’s Own

After a wonderful meal and then a heavy night drinking with the men, at 4am the next morning they head up into the hills accompanied by a mule carrying equipment and corrugated iron. They select one of many clefts in the cliff and then, with deep expertise, build a cabin, built back into the cliff overhand, with stone and wooden walls and a sloping ceiling so it’s invisible. The man who supervises the work is tall and handsome with a nose like an eagle’s beak, named Francesco (p.220). Then they go inside, make a fire, have a round of drinks, give him instructions about not going out during daylight, shake hands and leave. It is Wednesday 27 October 1943.

Newby calls it his cave. It reminded me of Robinson Crusoe’s fort by way of the cabin in the snowy woods Johnny Frizel builds for Edward Leithen in John Buchan’s Sick Heart River.

Newby can stand upright nowhere except by the (remarkably efficient) fire. Every day a messenger from the village comes, using the agreed password Brindisi, sometimes children but often black-dressed old grandmothers who brought sausage or eggs or soup and milk and acorn coffee. Extraordinary kindness and generosity.

Then he gets a message to go, two nights hence, on 16 November, to go to a hut he knows, a long convoluted journey through the impenetrable forest in the pouring rain, and here he meets Signor Zanoni who has brought Wanda. Hugs, kisses and lots of news. The Italian campaign is going badly, the Allies are stuck below Rome. The Germans have tightened control over Italy. Food is tightly rationed, petrol is becoming rare, she uses a bicycle.

In an earlier message he had learned that the doctor and Wanda’s father, the two men who got him out of the hospital, had both been arrested by the Nazis and imprisoned. Now she tells him the doctor faked appendicitis and then absconded from the hospital he was sent to is somewhere in the mountains, while her father got a job as an interpreter, having fought for the Austrians in the Great War.

There’s rumours of submarines picking up scattered groups of POWs and soldiers on the run off the coast which she’ll try to confirm. Then it’s time to go, they have last kisses and then he’s on his own in a cold hut and he bursts into tears.

15. Journey to the End of the Known World

Before she left Wanda had suggested Newby hike up out of the cleft he’s in, along a ridge to the spine or crinale of the mighty Apennines with a view to familiarising himself with the route and looking down over the mountains to the plains and the sea where, maybe, a mythical submarine might one day pick him up. She leaves him a densely detailed and almost indecipherable map.

Luckily the next visitor from the village with provisions happens to be Francesco, extremely intelligent and very experienced, who first tries to dissuade him from making the journey, and then gives him a very detailed account of what so look for.

Next morning at 5am Newby sets out with a backpack for the epic journey. There’s lots and lots of circumstantial description of the landscape and the route which, I think, you have to be a particular kind of person to enjoy. Takes him 11 hours to trek from the cave to the spine of the mountains. The view north is spectacular, he can see the Alps ranging east towards the Dolomites. But closer to hand he can see paths leading up from the plain to a crossing over the mountain, paths which are jam-packed with peasants struggling uphill bent under huge loads, bringing goods to trade and barter, which really brings home the deleterious impact of total war on ordinary impoverished people.

By now it’s getting dark and he retraces his steps to spend the night in an empty shepherd’s hut, well built to withstand the fierce winds.

Next morning there’s a dense fog and he can barely see 20 yards. This is why he gets lost. From the central spine of the Apennines countless ridges run off in both directions. In the fog he takes the wrong ridge heading north (i.e. back towards his valley, the villages and the cave) and has gone some way before he realises it as this new ridge starts descending far earlier than it ought. He ought to have retraced his steps back up to the spine and taken the correct ridge but, being tired and making poor decisions, instead he decides to descend the side of the ridge, into the river valley, and go up the other side onto ‘his’ ridge. What he hadn’t bargained for is the monstrous jungle of brambles growing under the trees. Huge entangled jungles of brambles twenty feet long with no paths or trails. He tries to cut his way through but loses his knife, tries to use his rucksack as a shield but it gets torn, his clothes are torn to pieces he is covered with cuts and bleeding all over by the time he emerges at a cliff looking down into the little stream at the bottom of the valley. Further dangerous teetering along the cliff edge before it becomes low enough for him to manoeuvre via rotting trees down to the valley floor. He wades along the freezing stream until the path up the other side becomes clear and sets about staggering up the other side.

As it begins to get dark he spies a hut on the hillside and makes for it, completely oblivious of security. An old man comes out to greet him well before he gets there and to his amazement it is the same deaf old man who sat in the back of the dottore’s car on that car journey to Parma and up into the foothills. A coincidence of Buchanesque proportions which makes you stop and wonder whether it’s made up, at which point you start to wonder how much of the account has been, well, embroidered if not plain invented.

The bent old deaf man welcomes him into his strange house, an Aladdin’s cave full of weird and wonderful contraptions which the man has obviously made himself, all the time keeping up a running commentary, in Italian, to himself.

Once they’ve eaten home-made chestnut polenta and a bitter salad, the old man sets off telling long rambling folk stories heedless of whether Newby is listening or not. In fact he nods off during the second one.

Next morning the old man shows him his extraordinary forge in which every implement is home made. He then gives him lunch and, just as Newby is about to broach the subject of moving on, the man puts on his coat, whistles for his dog, and sets off up the side of the valley

Two hours later they reach the top of the ridge and Newby recognises where he is. He tries to thank the man, who can’t hear him, and is wondering whether to shake his hand, when he turns and leaves.

A few hours later Newby is descending through the labyrinth of forest when he senses something is wrong. As he approaches his cave he sees there is smoke rising from the chimney. He hides his rucksack and lifts the rough sacking which forms the door. To his surprise he hears a posh English voice and is astonished to discover it is James, one of his friends from back at the orfanotrofio.

16. Gathering Darkness

James is a god friend, tall, burly with a ruddy complexion and a Roman nose, great at games, honest and sound. As he tells the stories of his hiding out Newby is a bit downcast to realise that James’s story is very like his i.e. his has not been such a unique adventure after all.

Francesco comes calling, tells Newby off for trying to cut through the forest from the wrong ridge, then tells him a lot more about the mysterious old man of the mountain who’s named Aurelio and is a legendary craftsman and storyteller.

Newby was to spend many weeks of November and December in the cave with James. The leaves fall off the trees making the passage of people to and from the cave more conspicuous. Then the snow comes. They amuse themselves reading passages from Surtees and Gibbon but are forced to spend all day inside, choking from the smoke from the fire. James develops impetigo, Newby gets a bad cough.

Then they are visited by three earnest young men with rusty guns who tell them they are forming a bande of partisans. They have a crack-brained scheme to blow up a petrol dump three days march away on the Via Emilia. James and Newby give a detailed analysis of why this is a dreadful idea but feel duty bound to help. The local people have put themselves out so much to help them it feels shameful and churlish not to act when asked. Luckily the three young zealots fail to turn up at the rendezvous they fix for a few nights later and they never see them again.

Then, a few days after the really heavy snowfall has blanketed the forest, freezing the stream where they get their water, Francesco arrives with bad news. The milizia are coming to capture them at 8pm that evening. They must leave the cave right away.

17. Beginning of the End

So they pack a bag – Francesco has brought them a sack of rice and 20 loaves of bread – and tramp through the thick snow up out of the forest to the hut of the shepherd Abramo, who we met several chapters ago. Here they say goodbye to Francesco and are handed over to a young guide, Alfredo, who takes them down into the next valley, freezing cold wind, stopping for cigarettes and once a fire and a meal, before carrying on, fording a river, on the run, carrying heavy bags in freezing conditions.

They climb again until they come across a group of charcoal burners, existing in a primitive baracca, all quite black with the smoke of their work. Newby had never met people quite so degraded and immiserated.

Alfredo hands them over to one of the charcoal burners, turns and goes back the way he came. The burner takes them onto a hut where they were meant to rendezvous with a bande i.e. partisans, but it is empty and abandoned, so they press on, the charcoal burner leaving them.

Almost at the end of their tethers they come across a haystore built into a slope of the mountain, force open the door and pass out. Hours later they are woken by a little boy asking who they are, who returns in a bit with a middle-aged man who is almost blind. To their inexpressible gratitude he says he will look after and feed them.

And so this man, Amadeo, looks after them, getting the barn made habitable with beds and a fireplace, and sending his children with food every day. In return he regularly comes and sits with them and asks questions about the great world which Newby and James do their best to answer.

On Christmas Eve and Christmas Day James and Newby are invited down to the village to festivities at the houses of various villagers, stuffed full of local food and then given the best Christmas present ever, a hot bath in half a wine barrel. And then Newby receives an unexpected bonus, a slip of paper with the simple message, ‘Kisses, Wanda’.

About noon on 29 December they are captured. The barn is surrounded by evil-looking troops from the Fascist militia, they are marched down the hillside and loaded into a waiting lorry, and taken off to a second period of captivity.

Epilogue

Surprisingly, Newby doesn’t describe anything about his second incarceration or his second liberation, not a thing. Instead he jumps to 1956 when he and Wanda, now married with two children, return to the scenes of his escapades. In fact the pair had worked in 1946 for a charity which sought to reward families who had helped Allied soldiers on the run. But it’s the later 1956 trip which Newby makes into a big set-piece, with him and Wanda revisiting the houses of everyone who helped them, and shaking hands and having reunions. Some of the old houses have fallen down, the charcoal burners have gone, everyone uses methane gas now. Electricity lines drape the valleys, roads penetrate higher, the sound of petrol-driven tractors from the valley, no more driving cattle-led ploughs like Armando did.

Right at the very end, old Francesco who helped him survive in the cave, takes Newby to one side and says he knows the identities of the man who betrayed them in his village, and the woman who betrayed them in the haybarn village. He assures him that both did it to protect their villages and their people and turned down the cash rewards the milizia offered. Does he want to know who they were? And Newby’s last word is ‘No’. There have been enough recriminations and vendettas. It was a long time ago. Forgive and forget.

Thoughts

What an amazing book, what incredible experiences, and what a moving tribute to the kindness and generosity of human nature. It made me overflow with feelings of gratitude and respect. What a wonderfully life-affirming book.

Newby and God

In the final passages where James comes to stay in the cave, Newby describes his friend’s straightforward Christian faith and contrasts it with his own more heterodox views:

James used to read out bits of the Bible, usually some bloodthirsty piece of Old Testament military history which he thought appropriate and would amuse me. He was a conventional Christian. Just as he had before the war, he used to go to church every Sunday in the orfanotrofio, and it would never have occurred to him not to do so. It was not just lip service to the established religion. He believed in the existence of God and the efficacy of prayer. I believed in God, and had done ever since I had been a sailor in a sailing ship before the war; but the God I believed in was neither beneficent nor hostile. As he was everything how could he be? And if he was everything how could he be moved by prayer? If it was a question of life and death you died when the time came for you to do so, peacefully or horribly. My time had not yet come when the foot of an upper topsail had flicked me off the yard, a hundred and thirty feet above the Southern Ocean in 1939; or that night in the Bay of Catania, or the following one in the fortress where they told us that we were going to be shot; but it could be any time. It might be quite soon now.

At one time I prayed that a bomb would not fall on the people in England I loved; but it seemed almost impertinent; better, if anything, to pray that bombs would cease to fall on anyone. To me prayer had no efficacy as a preservative, at the most it was a profession of love, a remembrance, a reminder that there had been a past and might be a future, and perhaps this was its vale. At this time, whether I was right or wrong, I felt clearer in my mind about these things than I have ever done since. (pages 274 to 275)

This is very eloquent but it’s not Christianity, is it, surely it’s stoicism? Surely the belief that the universe is equivalent to a God who is everywhere, and that our destinies are foreordained, without any reference to the Trinity, Christ or the resurrection, is textbook stoicism? See:

Newby’s humour

Newby is a charming narrator, a lovely man with an endearingly self-deprecating sense of humour.

I had a fatal aptitude for being good at interviews, the results of which I invariably regretted subsequently, almost as much as the interviewers. (p.127)

After what seemed an eternity the conversation rumbled to a close, rather like a train of goods wagons coming to rest in a marshalling yard. (p.134)

Credit

Love and War in the Apennines by Eric Newby was published in 1971 by Hodder & Stoughton. References are to the 1975 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on April 24, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Adventure, Autobiography, Italy, War

Tagged Abramo, Adriatic, Agata, Apennine mountains, Armando, Armistice of Cassibile, Armistizio, baracca, Baruffas, Bay of Catania, Chieti, Christianity, Dolores, Eric Newby, Eyeties, Field Marshall Kesselring, Fontanellato, Fontenallato, Francesco, German army, Giovanni, Hamleys, Ho paura, Hurrock, Hyde Park, It is, Italians, Italy, John Buchan, Ju 88s, King Victor Emmanuel, la citè d'la fumarassa, La Grande Illusion, Love and War in the Apennines, Malta, Marshal Pietro Badoglio, masturbation, Mediterranean, Mora, Mussolini, near Parma, Oberleutnant Frick, Old Testament, Operation Whynot, orfanotrofio, Ospedale Perachi, Parma, Pescara, Pian del Sotto, POWs, prep school, prisoner of war camp, public school, pull your pudding, Rita, river Po, Rome, Salerno, Second World War, Sicily, Slovenia, Socks, Special Boat Section, SS, Stoicism, The Bible, the Dolomites, the milizia, Travel writing, Via Emilia, Wanda Skof, wartime memoir, Zanoni

Posted by Simon on April 24, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/04/24/love-and-war-in-the-apennines-eric-newby/

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon (2018)

I very much enjoyed this book and highly recommend it – but it is not at all what I expected. With the title ‘Dictatorland’ and a photo of an African dictator on the cover, I expected it to be an entertaining romp through the careers of Africa’s most notable dictators and kleptocrats, and it certainly contains that element, with chapters describing the rise to power of the following notable crooks and dictators:

Mobutu Sese Seko (Congo)
Robert Mugabe (Zimbabwe)
Muammar Gaddafi (Libya)
Sani Abacha (Nigeria)
Francisco Macías and Teodoro Obiang (Equatorial Guinea)
Félix Houphouët-Boigny (Ivory Coast)
Isaias Afwerki (Eritrea)

Kenyon gives potted biographies consisting of short, punchy sections, scenes depicting the origins, education and early years of each baddie, their early involvement with their country’s independence movements or army (training ground for most dictators) or with a nationalist guerrilla movement.

Then he moves on to gruesome snapshots from their years in power, their madcap schemes (Mobutu’s Versailles-sized palace and Houphouët-Boigny’s basilica in the deep jungle vie for winner of the most expensive African folly) – descriptions of their secret police and torture chambers (Equatorial Guinea’s Macías Nguema is estimated to have had up to a quarter of the entire population of his country executed, making him ‘one of the most brutal dictators in history’) – and then on to the inevitable economic collapse, and their final overthrow, leaving a country in ruins.

In telling these stories Kenyon gives excellent backgrounders on the colonisation of the relevant country; the behaviour of its colonial government; the rise of nationalist agitation during the 1950s; the fraught political manoeuvres around independence, and so on.

All these profiles and pocket histories are clear and authoritative. They make for an immensely enjoyable read which conveys a lot of historical information with a sure, light touch.

The geological context

BUT there is one more crucial aspect of the book which I hadn’t expected at all; this is that Kenyon places the careers of all his dictators within a broader, what you could call, geological context. The entire book starts not with the this or that imperial conquest of this or that part of Africa, as you might expect, but with a description of the earliest ancestor of the genus Homo which has so far been found in Africa, the so-called specimen LD 350-1.

The point is that this introduces a deep historical perspective, far deeper than the past century or so of political history, a deep perspective from which Kenyon describes the geological history of Africa, and in particular the origin of the high value minerals and resources which were to play such an important part in modern Africa’s history, namely copper, diamonds, gold and then oil.

So, for example, he tells us about the discovery of the enormous stands of diamonds in southern Africa which caused the white invaders to seize the land from its black African inhabitants, and then to start fighting among themselves. He tells us the origin of the de Beers company and why the Kimberly region got its name, none of which I knew before.

This ‘geological perspective’ provides a deeper historical context for the actions of all the imperial conquerors, the colonial administrators, and then the newly independent black African leaders. It shows how they all tended to be dazzled by, fall victim to, act on the basis of, lust for Africa’s mineral wealth.

This perspective explains why the first few years of Congo’s independence era were characterised by civil war when the mineral-rich province of Katanga tried to secede from the nation (with the help of the Belgian government which wanted to hang on to its copper and diamond industries). It helps you understand how the Great War of Africa (1998 to 2002) developed into a struggle between numerous factions and foreign armies to seize parts of the country rich in minerals (diamonds, copper, gold, cobalt).

In the same vein, chapter three isn’t about a dictator at all but consists of an extended, and very readable, history of the rise of oil as the central fuel of the twentieth century. Kenyon gives the history of oil discoveries, first of all in Persia, then in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, in the 1920s and 30s, the controlling role played by Britain – which still owned or ran many of those places – alongside the growing power of America and how, by contrast, for decades, no oil companies thought Africa would yield oil deposits.

The oil chapter introduces us to a number of white, European oil prospectors, from back in the glory days of prospecting, the 1950s. We meet more of them than we do Africans, especially the ones Kenyon has tracked down and interviewed, old white men in their 80s (men like Dave Kingston, Rex Brown, David Orser) who still remember the excitement of the primitive conditions they worked under in the deserts of Libya or the malarial swamps of the Niger Delta.

The point is that a lot of those early prospectors and the oil companies they worked for (BP, Shell, Esso) were dead wrong about Africa: certain parts of it turned out to be sitting on top of vast oceans of oil, starting with Nigeria, where oil was struck in 1956, and then in Libya in 1959, then offshore Angola.

But the deep political-historical point is that, just as the so-called winds of political change were sweeping through Africa, many if not most places on the continent were about to undergo a sweeping economic change which would see their entire economies becoming orientated around a handful of commodities, commodities which the West would not only discover and develop, but do everything in their power to keep their sweaty hands on.

The dictators didn’t plan it, but they came to power just as a handful of commodities emerged as the dominant factor in their countries’ economies and the key importance of this is that an industry like gold or copper or oil is a) highly centralised and b) generates fantastic wealth.

The coincidence of mineral discoveries with independence gave the dictators immense personal control about which foreign companies were awarded contracts and licences to mine and extract the resources, and taught the dictators how to cream off for themselves and their families, hangers-on and clients, truly vast fortunes, billions and billions of dollars.

To put it another way: although nobody understood it at the time, the mineralisation of the economies of so many African nations was to create and entrench the rule of dictators and elites who acquired obscene wealth, while their nations’ infrastructures fell to pieces and their populations starved in the streets.

Many resource-rich African nations were to turn into rentier states (p.225), a rentier state being ‘a state which derives all or a substantial portion of its national revenues from the rent paid by foreign individuals, concerns or governments…With virtually no taxes citizens are less demanding and politically engaged and the income from rents negates the need for economic development… Instead, the government essentially ‘bribes’ the citizenry with extensive social welfare programs, becoming an allocation or distributive state…In the words of Noah Feldman in his book After Jihad, “no fiscal connection between the government and the people. The government has only to keep its people in line so that they do not overthrow it and start collecting the oil rents themselves.”‘ (Wikipedia).

Dictators like Mobutu or the successive rulers of Nigeria dealt solely and exclusively with multinational corporations dealing in oil, copper, diamond or gold, raking in fortunes from licensing fees and a cut of the profits.

With this guaranteed income the rulers of rentier states do not need to consult the population (no need for pesky elections) because their administrations aren’t reliant on taxation the way ‘normal’ western states are; with a guaranteed income not reliant on elections or representative assemblies of any kind, billionaire dictators become ever-more detached from conditions in their countries which they let go to rack and ruin. They can spend a fortune on building up a state-of-the-art military and still earn enough in corrupt rake-offs to build a palace in the jungle and hire Concorde to fly in ice cream from Paris (as Mobutu did) or build the biggest most expensive folly in Africa (as Félix Houphouët-Boigny did), while their populations see their standard of living collapse, prices hit by hyper-inflation, food become rarer, drinking water unavailable, and ultimately starve.

Back to Kenyon’s book, so it’s only after this long disquisition on the early history of oil exploration in chapter 3, that Kenyon returns to his ostensible subject, the dictators, in chapter 4. This gives an excellent summary of the 1969 Libyan coup staged by the Free Officers Movement which overthrew King Idris (friend to the West), and which installed what was supposedly a free socialist society, but which quite quickly came to be dominated by Colonel Gaddafi and became more and more authoritarian – spies and eavesdroppers in all public places, midnight arrest, torture and imprisonment without trial, the usual stuff. The point being, he was able to do pretty much what he wanted, set up a security state, claim to have invented a whole new political philosophy, and provide training bases for terrorist groups from around the world, because of the vast oil revenues his government acquired year after year without lifting a finger.

I expected a book titled ‘Dictators’ to consist of maybe a chapter each about Africa’s top ten dictators, amounting to an ‘Observer I Spy Book of African Dictators’ – but although that is, obviously, the ostensible subject, it’s not really the core of the text. It’s this geological or mineralogical context which is, arguably, the book’s most distinctive feature.

The book is divided into the following parts:

Part One: Gold and Diamonds

Part Two: Oil

Part Three: Chocolate

Part Four: Modern Slavery

Cocoa

Clearly the topic of chocolate doesn’t quite fit into my initial suggestion that the book has a ‘geological’ or ‘mineralogical’ perspective. Chocolate is very much about geography, as I learned from Kenyon’s typically clear and interesting description, which explains that cocoa bean trees only grow in very restricted latitudes, in the right kind of tropical forest. The plant originated in South America but was experimentally introduced into Africa by Europeans, and nowadays Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana are by far the two largest cocoa growing countries, accounting for over 60 % of global cocoa production.

Which is why, after chapter 7 introducing and explaining the history and development of cocoa in Africa, chapter 8 of the book focuses in on Côte d’Ivoire and the notorious figure of Félix Houphouët-Boigny who started out as a mild-mannered doctor, union leader, and cocoa planter himself, before winning election to the French Assembly and then becoming Ivory Coast’s first president, a position he held from 1960 to his death in 1993, making him the longest-serving leader in Africa’s history (a record subsequently beaten by Robert Mugabe, ruler of Zimbabwe from 1980 to 2017). So a chapter about a dictator, alright; but placed in the broader context of a history of the relevant basic resource.

Anyway, chocolate is obviously not a mineral, which left me a little stumped at how to give an overall summary of the book’s perspective. ‘A resource-based history of some dictatorial African rulers’? ‘A commodities-based explanation of African tyrants’? Not exactly catchy, are they? I can see why Kenyon’s publishers will have struggled to come up with a title capturing what it’s taken me three or four paragraphs to explain and how ‘Dictatorland’, although very catchy, doesn’t begin to convey this historical and resource-led backgrounding which I’ve been banging on about.

So: the book is not at all what I was expecting because its focus on precious resources makes it much more interesting, and much more penetrating, than just another purely political history would have done.

Lots of context, not so much analysis

A reviewer on Amazon points out that, entertaining and well told though the dictators’ stories are, the book lacks any kind of political or intellectual analysis.

Well, yes and no. Kenyon has no ideological axe to grind and amid his many anecdotes, his stories about oil, independence struggles, his very readable accounts of the early days and triumphant rises of his dictators, it’s true that there’s little or no effort to question or dig deeper.

If you compare him with Michael Ignatieff’s books about international affairs, the latter uses examples and interviews to make searching points about the nature of nationalism and society which I found immensely illuminating and useful. There’s nothing or not much like that here. Kenyon tells his stories, describes key scenes from each country’s history, interviews survivors from those times, very well and very readably, and that tends to be your lot.

The Amazon reviewer wanted answers to more theoretical questions like: Why has post-independence Africa been such a disaster? What is it in African culture which makes Africans incapable of ruling themselves? Is democracy impossible in Africa and if so, why? Kenyon never asks those kinds of questions. He’s a descriptive not an analytical writer.

Except that, arguably, the mineralogical and resource-focused context is his theory, his analysis, his explanation. His mineral and resource-based perspective in fact goes a long way to presenting an explanation which underpins many of Africa’s troubles, and which, although it may be familiar to experts, I hadn’t come across in the dozen or so other books about Africa which I’ve read or not, I think, considered in such detail.

His short reference to ‘rentier states’, so brief it doesn’t merit inclusion in the book’s index, is a mighty key which unlocks not just the behaviour, but the tendency to total corruption, and the longevity which characterised so many of the dictators.

That first generation of dictators, coming to power in the early 1960s, is now routinely vilified, but their longevity did ensure stability of sorts. Since their overthrows, whether in the 90s (Houphouët-Boigny), in the Arab Spring (Gaddafi) or later (Mugabe in 2017), their countries have often got even worse and the resource perspective explains why: it’s because the dictators weren’t followed by ‘democracy’ in any sense we in the West understand. The demise of the dictators resulted in the eruption of multiple groups, parties and leaders, including the ever-intrusive armies, who themselves set about squabbling for control of the narrow range of commodities which generate such obscene wealth.

The West and the aid organisations have been fighting a battle for over 50 years to persuade the ruling classes of African countries to give a damn about their populations, to invest in infrastructure, industry and agriculture, to make long-term plans to develop the country as a whole and thus remove their populations from poverty. Meanwhile the elites themselves have been engaged in often cut-throat competition to fight their way to the seat of absolute power which the first generation of post-independence rulers showed is the pathway to unimaginable wealth, power and prestige.

This deep economic and political conflict is still at work in many African countries to this day, it’s arguably the key to understanding African affairs, and Kenyon’s excellent, hugely readable, enjoyable and illuminating book really helps to explain why.

Let the facts speak for themselves

There’s one other really strong aspect to Kenyon’s narrative which I want to emphasise. This is his admirable ability to let the facts speak for themselves.

The last two books about Africa I’ve read – ‘I Didn’t Do It For You: How The World Used and Abused A Small African Nation’ by Michela Wrong and ‘Blood River: A Journey To Africa’s Broken Heart’ by Tim Butcher – are both excellent in their ways, but irritated me because the authors banged on and on about the evils of imperialism and the racism of the colonial administrations, throwing these terms of abuse around on every page, repeating the same old accusations in the same old clichéd phrases, all the while generally downplaying the role of modern African rulers in Africa’s woes.

In my Wrong review I pointed out that simply venting the opinion that the colonial regimes were racist and exploitative, and insistently blaming ‘the West’ for everything that ever went wrong in Eritrea, soon becomes boring, irritating and, eventually, counter-productive.

By complete contrast Kenyon’s text is studded with facts, gives the facts, just the facts. For example, the opening chapter about diamonds states the facts about how the imperialists in the 1880s and 1890s stole the land from its native owners, in the Congo, in Rhodesia, in stark, straight, factual terms which really bring home the inexcusable iniquity of their behaviour.

Kenyon gives the facts about how local chieftains and rulers were swindled out of their land by crooked legal documents they didn’t understand, or simply driven off it at gunpoint; how Africans were corralled into small, unhealthy, infertile areas, while the whites stole all the best agricultural land (notably in Kenya and Rhodesia), or any land which showed signs of gold, copper or diamonds (South Africa in particular).

In the chapter about Mugabe Kenyon describes the surreal maze of passes and identity cards and papers which the British colonial authorities in what was Southern Rhodesia demanded that every African needed just to get around, just to walk down the street, how they had to step off the pavement if white people were walking towards them, how the slightest infringement of this world of rules triggered shouted abuse, beatings or arbitrary arrest.

In other words, Kenyon’s simple statements of the facts of imperial conquest, imperial land grabbing, imperial hypocrisy, imperial greed, the imposition of deliberately discriminatory, deliberately demeaning and humiliating regulations, at every level and every minute of an Africans’ life, is infinitely more powerful than Wrong or Butcher’s more generalised sloganeering about ‘racism’ or ‘the West’.

I don’t think Kenyon anywhere in the book uses the word ‘racist’ because he doesn’t have to. Kenyon’s plain, lucid stating of the facts of each of these issues does the same job but infinitely better; makes you quiver with anger, shrivel with embarrassment, and totally understand the rage and the impatience for freedom which drove agitators like Lumumba and Mugabe.

And this is another reason why I think this is an excellent book.

Eritrea

The very last chapter demonstrates Kenyon’s strengths and weaknesses. It gives a good account of the rise to tyranny of Isaias Afwerki, the man who rose steadily through the ranks of the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front (EPLF) to lead them to victory in the bitter 30-year-long war against Ethiopia, which finally came to an end in May 1991, with Ethiopia’s granting of Eritrea’s independence.

Kenyon tells the same story as Michela Wrong does in her long, digressive book ‘I Didn’t Do It For You’ in literally one-tenth of the space (one 44-page chapter versus Wrong’s 432 pages). Moreover, Kenyon’s account is more up to date, Wrong, published in 2005, hoping Afwerki’s regime might be overthrown or soften, Kenyon, published in 2018, giving the bad news that Afwerki’s regime not only didn’t soften but has become steadily more harsh and repressive.

Since independence Eritrea has had no elections, no constitution, no free press or media. It is almost impossible to gain entry to report on it. Eritrea commonly competes with North Korea as least free country in the world.

Eritrea Country Profile by Freedom House

Also, Kenyon is balanced. Michela Wrong, as I’ve mentioned, comes over as very biased, repeating whenever she can the strongest criticisms of western nations like Italy, Britain and the West, very slow to blame anyone else (such as the brutal Derg regime in Ethiopia or its Soviet suppliers or the vile Afwerki), very slow to concede that the colonial period brought any benefits.

Kenyon, by contrast, feels fair and balanced. He clearly states that Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia was imperialism at its most brutal, involving poison gassing of entire villages; but that the Fascist regime did then set about building roads and harbour facilities and wide boulevards and a modern infrastructure. Similarly, he mentions that the Brits asset stripped the country after they’d won it from Italy in 1940 but also introduced democracy, a free press and trade unions. In other words, he shows that the imperial legacy was mixed.

Something also emerges from Kenyon’s account which doesn’t so much from Wrong’s, which is the importance of the visit by Afwerki and a few other EFPL leaders to Maoist China in the mid-1960s. They arrived in the middle of the so-called Cultural Revolution and were very impressed by the zeal and sense of embattled virtue of the young Red Guards who rounded up the entire bourgeoisie and shunted intellectuals off to the country to work alongside peasants.

This more than anything explains how Afwerki went from being a hero of the independence struggle to one of the most repressive dictators in the world – because he knows no better. All he knows is The Struggle, and so he imagines himself surrounded by conspirators, a paranoia which is occasionally proven true because people have, understandably enough, conspired to overthrow him, and then was confirmed when was broke out anew with Ethiopia in 1998, and then 9/11 confirmed the rising threat from Islamists in the country, and then the civil war between Tigrayans from the north fighting against the Ethiopian government and so, you can see it from his point of view: there is constant struggle; the revolution is in continual jeopardy; only one man can save the revolution and save his country, and that’s why he can’t afford to hold elections. What if Islamists, if regional separatists, if rebels or traitors were elected? No, of course not. Only one man can save the nation, and he has to carry on his embattled lonely duty for as long as it takes.

And so another African dictator is born.

Wrong spends 400 pages trying to persuade us that it was Italy, Britain and the wicked West who are responsible for Eritrea’s current plight. In Kenyon’s account, both imperial nations were guilty of bad or atrocious acts, and the UN of foolish ones, but the real responsibility falls on Afwerki’s Maoist indoctrination, the man’s personal paranoia and delusions of destiny.

(The same goes, in spades, for the career of Paul Kagame who’s been at the heart of Rwandan Political Front (RPF) activity since the late 1980s and, like Afwerki, brought the paranoid style developed when the RPF was a small outfit hiding out in the mountains into office into general government when the RPF seized power in 1994, where this anxious guerrilla mindset has blossomed into intolerance of any dissent, arbitrary arrest, imprisonment and execution worthy of Stalin or North Korea. See ‘Do Not Disturb’, the breath-taking indictment of the Rwanda regime, by Michela Wrong.)

Credit

Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa by Paul Kenyon was published in 2018 by Head of Zeus Ltd. References are to the 2018 Apollo paperback edition.

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by Simon on December 1, 2023 • Permalink

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Tagged Africa, African dictator, African history, African leaders, Afwerki, Angola, Arab Spring, Belgian government, BP, Britain, British Empire, Côte d'Ivoire, Chocolate, cobalt, Cocoa, cocoa growing country, Colonel Gaddafi, colonialism, Concorde, Congo, copper, corruption, Cultural Revolution, Dave Kingston, David Orser, de Beers, diamonds, Dictatorland, Dictatorland: The Men Who Stole Africa, EPLF, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Eritrean People's Liberation Front, Esso, Ethiopia, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, Francisco Macías, Free Officers Movement, geography, geological perspective, geology, geopolitics, Ghana, gold, Great War of Africa, Gulf states, Homo, Houphouët-Boigny, hyper-inflation, imperialism, international affairs, Isaias Afwerki, Ivory Coast, Katanga, Kimberly mines, King Idris, kleptocracy, Libya, Lumumba, Macías Nguema, Maoist China, Michael Ignatieff, Michela Wrong, Mobutu, Mobutu Sese Seko, modern history, modern slavery, Muammar Gaddafi, Mugabe, Mussolini, Niger Delta, Nigeria, Noah Feldman, oil, oil industry, Paul Kagame, Paul Kenyon, Persia, racism, Red Guards, rentier state, rentier states, resource-rich, Rex Brown, Rhodesia, Robert Mugabe, RPF, Rwandan Political Front, Sani Abacha, Saudi Arabia, Shell, South Africa, South America, Southern Africa, specimen LD 350-1, Teodoro Obiang, the Derg, the West, Tigray, Tim Butcher, Zimbabwe

Posted by Simon on December 1, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/12/01/dictatorland-the-men-who-stole-africa-paul-kenyon/

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)

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3 Comments

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

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/11/24/i-didnt-do-it-for-you-how-the-world-used-and-abused-a-small-african-nation-michela-wrong/

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The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse (1938)

The Mixture as Before

Bertie struggles to find the right word

Bertie struggles with classic quotes

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The comic strategy of stating the obvious

Clash of registers

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Trouble for Lucia by E.F. Benson (1939)

Cast

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Irene’s photo

Mayoring day

The new era

The new parsimony

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Budgie spirituality

Bicycling

Olga Braceley

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Irene’s allegorical painting

More of the Major’s riding-whip

Chapter 8. To London

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Chapter 10. The Poppy and Olga crisis

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August rents and the arrival of Miss Leg

Chapter 11. More blows

Chapter 12. Lucia’s low point

Georgie returns

Lucia’s revenge

Thoughts

Credit

Related links

Mapp and Lucia reviews

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Kangaroo by D.H. Lawrence (1923)

Types of power

Richard Aldington’s factual introduction

The Australian landscape

Synopsis

Fear of foreigners / xenophobia

Somers’ conflicted attitude