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To Step Aside by Noel Coward (1939)

He felt a strong urge – as indeed who doesn’t? – to write a really good modern novel.
(Of Aubrey Dakers in ‘The Wooden Madonna’)

‘It’s a queer world and no mistake.’
(Aunt Tittie)

‘To Step Aside’ is a collection of seven short stories by Noël Coward, published in 1939. They aren’t great literature, meaning they aren’t notable for style or psychological depth, but they are entertaining enough – amusing, sad, wry, droll – oddly memorable and written in an attractively brisk, crisp, plain style.

List of stories

  1. The Wooden Madonna
  2. Traveller’s Joy
  3. Aunt Tittie
  4. What Mad Pursuit?
  5. Cheap Excursion
  6. The Kindness of Mrs Radcliffe
  7. Nature Study

Prose style

A commenter on GoodReads said she loved Coward’s ‘elegant’ style but that’s a classic example of people reading what they think ought to be there, based on the author’s reputation, rather than what’s in front of their eyes. In fact I found Coward’s prose more notable for its blank lack of style – the prose’s deliberate minimalism, the sense of looking at scenes through a pane of glass, reminded me of Christopher Isherwood.

Here’s an example of what I mean, from ‘Aunt Tittie’, describing Aunt Tittie’s arrival at a Spanish hospital:

Eventually we got to a very quiet ward with only a few beds occupied. A Sister of Mercy was sitting reading at a table with a shaded lamp on it. She got up when we came in. ‘Then the doctor took me downstairs to the waiting-room and said that he was afraid Aunt Tittie had a very bad appendix but that he was going to give her a thorough examination and make sure and that I’d better go home and come back in the morning. I said I’d rather stay in case Aunt Tittie wanted me, so he said ‘very well’ and left me. I lay on a bench all night and slept part of the time. In the early morning two cleaners came in and clattered about with pails.

See what I mean by minimalist and functional? It’s closer to the conscious minimalism of an Ernest Hemingway than the zippy, flippant style of Coward’s famous plays, and all the better for it.

‘To step aside’

The title of the book sounds innocuous enough but in fact contains a strong moral message. It is a quotation from a poem by Robert Burns, ‘Address to the Unco Guid, Or the Rigidly Righteous’, which is available online in the original Scots and an English translation:

The poem is an attack on the showily religious and morally self-righteous for being quick to judge anybody less high-minded and fortunate than themselves. The relevant lines are:

Then gently scan your brother man,
Still gentler sister woman;
Though they may go a little wrong,
To step aside is human…

In other words, the exact same message as the famous couplet from Alexander Pope’s 1711 poem, An Essay on Criticism:

Good-nature and good sense must ever join;
To err is human, to forgive, divine.
(Part 2, lines 424 to 425)

The Burns poem concludes:

Who made the heart, it is He alone
Decidedly can try us:
He knows each chord, its various tone,
Each spring, its various bias:
Then at the balance let us be mute,
We never can adjust it;
What is done we partly may compute,
But know not what is resisted.

These are ancient sentiments. The Pope is a literal translation of a well-known Latin tag from ancient Rome, ‘Errare humanum est’, while the idea that God alone knows the secrets of each soul and therefore we shouldn’t judge anyone else, is expressed by Jesus Christ in several places: ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged’ (Matthew 7:1) which is itself linked to ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone’ (John 8:1-11 ).

None of which has, of course, stopped the Christian authorities in every country where they had power from being ferociously judgemental – from banning, censoring, persecuting, imprisoning and burning alive anybody who departed from its narrow definitions of ‘normality’ and permissible thought, speech and action.

Coward’s mother was a devout Christian but Noel from his earliest boyhood thought the entire thing was ridiculous, and all his famous plays are mockeries of conventional, narrow and bigoted morality, and spirited defences of non-conformity, defiance and free living. Good for him.

1. The Wooden Madonna (17 pages)

Comic story of a naive young man in Switzerland convinced he is surrounded by spies who fails to recognise a real spy who uses him as an unwitting courier.

Aubrey Dakers, 27, is a former antique shop owner. We get a lot of backstory about his time running this shop with his partner Maurice. They do this very happily for 6 years until a series of unfortunate events puts an end to their happy life, being: 1) a titled lady opens a smarter boutique next door; 2) a fire in the basement destroys a number of their finest treasures; 3) Maurice gets pneumonia and has to go on an extended holiday; and 4) returns with a new Russia lover, announces he’s fed up with his current life, and promptly leaves for America.

Suddenly without a job Aubrey succumbs to a lifelong ambition and writes a play, a very obvious comical play, which a nice young man from Hounslow is persuaded to stage in the local theatre. To everyone’s surprise it becomes a smash hit success and promptly transfers to the West End, its success prompting giddy comparisons of young Aubrey to successful playwriting contemporaries such as Somerset Maugham and a certain Noel Coward.

At first being taken up by the worlds of the theatre and smart London society are exhilarating but after a year Aubrey is feeling the strain, especially the increasingly pressing need to follow up his dazzling success with something equally as dazzling. His new literary agent suggests he should try a novel rather than another play.

He felt a strong urge – as indeed who doesn’t? – to write a really good modern novel.

And so the narrative proper opens as Aubrey arrives in Switzerland, at a quiet hotel where he’s come for a rest cure and to try and figure out his next move. But barely has he unpacked and gone down to the bar than he is buttonholed Edmundson who he goes to great lengths to avoid but keeps turning up, following him, insisting on drinking and dining with him.

Now here’s the joke, the gag, the centre of the story: on the ship and the trains to Switzerland, Aubrey is consciously trying to be a novelist, closely observing everyone around him, his fellow passengers and crew and so on. His agent tells him to copy Somerset Maugham and so Aubrey, with comic earnestness, tries to be like Somerset Maugham, looking for mystery and secret passions everywhere. He takes to heart Maugham’s brilliant collection of spy short stories Ashenden, and looks for intrigue in everyone he meets. The one person he doesn’t look for it in is this tedious fellow Edmundson who keeps buttonholing at the bar, inviting himself to dine with Aubrey, telling endless boring yarns. And yet Edmundson is a spy. That’s the gag. He’s insistently buttonholing Aubrey because he’s going to use him.

Sure enough Aubrey can’t stand him so much that he announces he’s moving on, travelling on to Italy, to Venice. Edmundson asks if he can come with and when told no, insists on buying Aubrey a present from an antique shop they happen to be walking past at the time. It’s a wooden madonna, hence the title of the story and Edmundson forces it onto Aubrey, despite the latter’s misgivings.

Eventually, in a bid to escape him, Aubrey abruptly leaves his hotel and takes a sleeper train to Venice. In the middle of the night he wakes to find someone leaning over his bed and sleepily assumes it’s the ticket inspector. In the morning he wakes to find everything as it should be except that when he picks up the madonna it’s head drops off and he discovers the body is hollow. How odd! What he doesn’t realise but the reader does, is that Edmundson somehow inserted something valuable into the hollow statue, used Aubrey as an unwitting mule to carry it across the border into Italy, where it was opened and the secret contents retrieved by the mysterious figure in the night.

2. Traveller’s Joy (8 pages)

Portrait of a tired old actor and his sad affair with his middle-aged deformed landlady.

Herbert Darrell is a faded old actor, eking out his days at some provincial Theatre Royal. He lives in a room in a house which backs on to the dressing rooms, so he can see into his room when he’s making up. He has a ritual of slowly drinking a pint of Guinness as he applies his slap, and then drinking a few more while he’s waiting in the wings for his scenes. Sounds like an alky. In the early 1900s he was acclaimed as one of the great stage lovers of his time. That was 30 years ago. Now it’s 1934 and he’s old.

The story describes the sense of failure that afflicts him sometimes, in the early hours. Bad notices, being dropped from parts, consciousness of failure which sends him running to the nearest pub.

And moves on to describe the owner of the boarding house, Miss Bramble, in her 40s, who has a humped back and spindly little legs. He likes to reminisce about his many loves, recalling their bedrooms, the beds and furnishings, the funny little sounds they made, Julia Deacon, Marion Cressal, Minnie who he married.

It was while married to Minnie that his career began to go on the skids, his last part in the West End, coming home early from a party to find Minnie in bed with someone else.

At 7am on Sunday the alarm wakens Miss Bramble. Coward devotes a lot of time to a detailed description of what she sees when she opens her eyes, her sad bedroom. It is implied that she slept with Herbert Darrell the night before, before coming back to her bedroom. Apparently they have a routine where she gets up and makes his breakfast and takes it into his room as if nothing had happened.

She boils his egg and makes some toast and totters up to his second floor room but then puts the tray down and stares out the window at the churchyard not far away and feels sad how her aunt, whose house this used to be, would disapprove of how she’d let herself be seduced by a sad old has-been actor.

3. Aunt Tittie (27 pages)

Charming fictionalised account of young Noel’s induction into theatre life, but transposed from London to Edwardian Paris and beyond, full of bright colours until it ends in tragedy.

First-person narrative by a boy named Julian describing his ramshackle boyhood in south London. His mother, Amanda, had him out of wedlock and died in childbirth, at which point he passed to the care of his two aunts, Aunt Christina and Aunt Titania, the Aunt Tittie of the title.

The two women are diametrically opposite characters, Christina is a religious bigot while Titania is more free-spirited. Julian lives under the religious tyranny of Aunt Christina for years and records significant incidents from his boyhood and early adolescence. At last she dies, a sudden attack of pneumonia. Aunt Tittie’s estranged husband, Jumbo, takes him in for a day or two, thus giving a vivid insight into his life as a stage performer, before packing him off on the boat train to his Aunt Tittie in Paris.

And it’s here, after this very enjoyable pen portrait of an Edwardian boy’s upbringing, that the story really starts. For Julian discovers that his aunt works as an entertainer in a rough Paris club, the Café Bardac, populated by prostitutes male and female. She doesn’t have much money and so moves to get the club owner to pay the boy to become an assistant in her act with her partner Mattie Gibbons. Enough time is spent on all this for us to be introduced to all aspects of a cheap performer’s life in such a place, including the revelation that Aunt Tittie allows the club owner, Monsieur Claude, to take liberties with her.

But then one drunken night Tittie has a massive fight with Mattie which results in blows and blood and throwing up and next day she packs up and leaves. This inaugurates an epic odyssey across the continent of Europe and even across the sea to Algiers, which last for years and years, as kind Aunt Tittie gets jobs at numerous clubs in numerous cities, always on the lookout to hook up with a man who’ll look after her, which she succeeds in doing with a married man, Mr Wheeler – till his wife tracks him down and drags him home – and, elsewhere, with a rich old boy who keeps them in wine and roses for a while before he dies.

All this goes on for 6 long years packed with colour and incident, from Julian’s 11th to his 17th birthday, until there’s a disaster at a theatre they’re playing in Barcelona. It catches fire while a conjuror is doing a trick onstage, with the woman he’s going to ‘saw in half’ trapped in her cabinet. Julian runs round to find Tittie and they flee through the flames and smoke and screaming crowds, though she gets knocked to the floor and kicked by a fleeing stagehand.

It’s a disaster in which they lose much of their belongings but much worse, it exacerbates the pain Tittie’s had in her side for some time. Julian gets her to a hospital where the doctors find she has a burst appendix which has infected her abdomen. They put her on painkillers, she drifts in and out of consciousness, and then dies, leaving Julian, aged 17, all alone in the world.

There’s nothing modernist or avant-garde or experimental about the story at all. It’s just a rather exaggerated but straight-talking account of this fictitious boy’s life. And yet the feeling between him and his aunt, the closeness, her protectiveness, her honesty and love for him, all this come over and make it very memorable.

4. What Mad Pursuit? (39 pages)

Very funny satire about a successful English novelist, Evan Lorrimer, who travels to New York to start a series of lectures to promote his latest work.

At a penthouse party given by his American publisher, he meets a sensible-sounding American woman, Louise Steinhauser, who asks if he’d like to come and stay at her place in the country, with her and her husband, Bonwit Steinhauser, far from the city, with only one other guest, it’ll be lovely and quiet and he can rest and prepare for his lectures. Evan needs complete peace and quiet to do his work, in fact he makes a fetish of having the full eight hours sleep back in England, and so is easily persuaded and accepts a lift from the party to their tranquil house by the sea.

The comedy comes in when it turns out that this woman, Louise’s, idea of a quiet weekend is inviting loads of friends for lunch, preceded by umpteen cocktails, then insists they all pile into several cars and drive over to some neighbours who have even more guests staying, and many more drinks, until Evan is completely plastered and completely bewildered by the sheer number of strangers he’s being introduced to and their insistence that he join them in one more drink, play any number of games, strip and come swimming in an indoor swimming pool, and in general drive him to the edge of a nervous breakdown.

It’s a humorous and sometimes very funny depiction of that time-honoured subject, the innocent Englishman at sea in America.

Incidentally, the title is a literary quotation, from John Keats’s 1819 poem, ‘Ode to a Grecian Urn’, where he describes the scenes of ancient Greece painted on the side of the Greek urn.

What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

‘What struggle to escape’ is particularly relevant, given Evan’s increasingly desperate attempts to escape the never-ending party which climax with him finally making it back to his allotted bedroom only to find another party guest strewn unconscious across it, at which point he thinks he might go mad with frustration.

Eventually he realises he must leave the madhouse and sneaks out in the middle of the night and walks through the snow, getting lost in the unfamiliar country but picked up by an early morning milkman and taken to the nearest train station and so, finally, exhausted and chastened, back to his hotel in Manhattan where he discovers, amongst his mail… a very polite offer from a lady fan in Chicago, that when he comes to lecture there. he is welcome to stay at her house, which is well outside the city and lovely and peaceful…

5. Cheap Excursion (13 pages)

A powerful journey into the nerve-racked anxious mind of famous actress Diana Reed, just reaching the dangerous age of 40, outwardly successful but lonely and unhappy. Right from the start we learn that she is having an affair with Jimmy the assistant stage-manager and is ashamed of it. It is portrayed as something she can’t help, which she’s ashamed of and desperate to keep from the rest of the cast because then word will spread throughout theatreland and her reputation will be in tatters.

The entire piece is set one evening after a performance, showing Diana arriving home at her flat, and consumed with anxiety, hoping Jimmy will ring, bitterly disappointed when the phone rings and she answers it but it’s just friends. Eventually so on edge that she decides she has to go and see him, at his digs over on the Strand, so she gets a taxi there and makes a complete fool of herself, working herself up into near hysteria, walking towards his flat but then horrified to see two of the other actors from the production she’s in walking towards her along the Strand and so ducking into a shop and in a blind panic buying the first thing she sees.

It is a persuasive study in nerves and anxiety and Coward conveys this by his precise attention to details, the kinds of details which reveal a person’s life or mind or habits:

Someone had once told her that if you sat still as death with your hands relaxed, all the vitality ran out of the ends of your fingers and your nerves stopped being strained and tied up in knots. The frigidaire in the kitchen suddenly gave a little click and started whirring. She stared at various things in the room, as though by concentrating, identifying herself with them she could become part of them and not feel so alone. The pickled wood Steinway with a pile of highly-coloured American tunes on it; the low table in front of the fire with last week’s Sketch and Bystander, and the week before last’s New Yorker, symmetrically arranged with this morning’s Daily Telegraph folded neatly on top; the Chinese horse on the mantelpiece, very aloof and graceful with its front hoof raised as though it were just about to stamp on something small and insignificant.

After getting a cab to his place, then abandoning it and getting a cab back towards Regent Street, she thinks she sees him walking along the pavement, leaps out and chases him into the Haymarket but a fraction before the grabs his arm he turns to look at her and it’s not Jimmy at all. She almost bursts into tears and realises she is overwrought but nonetheless heads back to his flat at the Adelphi but the lights are off there’s no-one home, so she takes to walking back and forth and sets herself a number of circuits before she’ll finally leave. Twenty pacings, back and forth. And she’s just about to finish and in a funny way has almost forgotten Jimmy when he turns the corner and she comes face to face with him.

So it’s Diana’s mad odyssey across central London which is the ‘excursion’ of the title. And the piece is a strange story of very everyday obsession, not Poe or anything baroque or extreme, just a middle-aged woman going almost out of her mind with frustrated love and anxiety.

6. The Kindness of Mrs Radcliffe (48 pages)

Mrs Radcliffe is 60-something and a religious prig and bigot. She is the worst kind of self-righteous moraliser, the kind who thinks of themselves as being especially sensitive and forgiving, while in reality being hard and small-minded and intolerant. She is always so ready to forgive those around her who aren’t lucky enough to be as kind and sympathetic and imaginative and artistic and moral as she is, the poor things! She is a martyr to her fine feelings.

It was, she reflected without bitterness, inevitable that a woman of her temperament should feel things more keenly, with more poignance than ordinary people. It was one of the penalties of being highly strung. After all, that awareness of beauty, that unique sensitiveness to the finer things of life, had to be paid for.

It’s not so much a story as a day in the life.

Mildred First she loses her temper at the orphan, resentful clumsy Mildred, who she’s taken into her home to become her maid when the latter spills the cooked breakfast she’s brought her onto the bedroom floor.

Matron Then she takes the train into London to see her semi-estranged grown-up daughter, but stops off at the orphanage she’s a vice-chairman of, to have a flaring argument with its matron, who she leaves in tears.

Marjorie and Cecil This daughter, Marjorie, ran off to marry a most unsuitable young man, Cecil who, although very handsome, is a complete failure of an artist, having sold one painting in the last 18 months. The couple live in a small house entirely funded by Mrs Radcliffe’s husband, Stanley.

An uncomfortable lunch (badly prepared and cooked) leads into a full-scale argument. Mrs R thinks it behoves her to tell Cecil some home truths i.e. isn’t it time he got a proper job? which in turn triggers Marjorie to tell her mother just what she thinks of her. At which point Cecil is wise enough to step in and shush her but then politely escort Mrs R off the premises.

Marion She has one more appointment, to meet a friend, Marion, at Harrods and walks there steaming with rage and resentment of her rude, unmannerly, ungrateful daughter. (With all these people – Mildred, Matron, Marjorie – Coward gives us quite a lot of backstory, which explains why this is the longest story in the collection.)

The Marion section describes how she and Mrs Radcliffe met at school when they were plain Adela Wyecroft and Marion Kershaw, the latter weak and silly and hero-worshipping tough Adela, star of the school lacrosse team. Now they meet in Harrods, wander round Knightsbridge when Marion remembers she promised to take Mrs R to the shop of a friend of hers, who turns out to be a wan and mousey loser, Maud Fearnley.

Maud Here Mrs R conceives the notion that Marion has brought her to this sad woman’s shop to get a commission and when she tries on a hat that actually does suit her very well, and spots feeble Maud giving Marion a triumphant glance, she becomes convinced of it and denounces the pair for setting her up like this. Of course she is completely wrong, mortally offends her old friend and reduces Miss Fearnley to tears but doesn’t give a damn and stalks haughtily out of the shop.

Lady Elizabeth Next scene is set in Hyde Park where she is sitting quietly reflecting on the perfidy of her friends and how difficult it is to be such a rarefied, sensitive and spiritual person, when a posh lady comes and sits on the bench opposite, who she recognises with a start to be Lady Elizabeth Vale.

Now Mrs Radcliffe is a snob, as we know from an earlier incident when a rough working class family insisted on invading her first class compartment on the train up to London until she intimidated them into getting out at the next stop. And so now we are treated to Mrs R’s having a comically pompous fantasy, as she imagines some charming little incident such as a little child falling over and Mrs R leaping to sweetly pick them up and dust them off, and how this earns the respect of Lady Elizabeth who just has to thank her, and who invites her for dinner and how they become firm friends and how this allows Mrs Radcliffe to everso casually show off her acquaintance with such refined company to the other female members of the orphanage committee, with whom she has a fierce but suppressed rivalry.

In the event there is comic bathos, because of a sweet little child to help Mrs R suddenly realises a smelly, ragged old beggarwoman has arrived at her bench wheedling for money. By the time she’s given this human wreck half a crown and got rid of her, Lady Elizabeth has risen and walked away without sparing her a second glance. Damn!

Dinner At the start of the story Mrs R had argued with her husband because he insisted on inviting a couple he likes to the dinner that evening which Mrs R had invited another couple to. Cut to after the dinner (which mostly went OK, apart from Mildred spilling custard on Mrs Duke’s dress) and the guests have departed, as Mrs R changes into her nightwear, puts curlers in her hair and face cream on, thinking her usual captious, uncharitable thoughts about the evening’s guests.

Stanley’s reproach Her husband appears. She expects him to kiss her goodnight and then go to his own room but to her surprise he tells her off for talking all the time one of the guests, Miss Layton, was playing the piano. She noticed and it upset her and made her cry.

Miss Layton we know is just the last of a list of people Mrs R has made cry today, starting with Mildred and including Matron, Marjorie, Marion and Maud. (I assume it’s a joke that their names all start with M.)

Mrs R now calls her husband idiotic, and he replies he may be idiotic but at least he’s not unkind and exits, slamming the door on the way out.

Mrs Radcliffe is left, not for the first time, trembling with fury. Oh! How everyone has had it in for her today! She kneels to pray to the good Lord but it takes her some time to get into the right frame of mind. But then she remembers giving half a crown to the beggar woman earlier in the day and that (although we saw that it was largely motivated by a snobbish desire to suck up to a watching aristocrat) reassures her that she is a kind woman, no matter what anyone says.

Coward and Christianity

Coward loathed organised religion, religious cant and moralistic humbug, all of which are repeatedly mocked by the smart young protagonists of his subversive 1920s plays. Rather than a head-on critique of Christian pride and hypocrisy, this story dramatises it in the shape of the sanctimonious and pompous believer Mrs Radcliffe, who makes everyone around her unhappy, with her bullying and superiority and snobbery, and yet has erected around herself an impenetrable wall of Christian bigotry which makes her incapable of even seeing the misery she causes wherever she goes.

This is a story and a character to be referenced whenever anyone is discussing Coward’s skewering of conventional ‘morality’ in his radical plays.

Mrs R and Mrs D

Mrs Radcliffe’s snobbery, self-righteous high-mindedness and lack of humour, combined with all this rambling round central London and episodic encounters, specifically sitting on a bench in the park, all these elements reminded me very much of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway but with all that book’s consciously experimental avant-gardeness completely removed.

7. Nature Study (19 pages)

1

The unnamed first-person narrator is a playwright and writer on a cruise liner returning from the East towards the Suez Canal and the Med. One of the loudest of his fellow passengers is a Major Cartwright returning from India. When most of his cronies get off at Marseilles, Cartwright is at a loose end and buttonholes the narrator who is too kind to say no and so gets lumbered with this windy old bore.

At one point Cartwright invites the narrator to look through his old photo albums and there, amid pictures of huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ parties, he spots someone he knows, Ellsworthy Ponsonby. Cartwright is excited to learn they have a mutual acquaintance and tells the narrator about meeting Ponsonby and being shown his fantastically luxurious yacht, out East, near Java. But he’d barely been shown round the yacht than Ponsonby told him the great tragedy of his life, that his adored wife left him for his chauffeur, and burst into tears. Damn sad thing!

2

At which point the narrative cuts suddenly, cuts back into the past to tell the story of how young Ponsonby met his wife-to-be, the fresh and lively Jennifer Hyde in a smart hotel in Italy just after the war. She is there with cousins and her aunt, he is there with his hawk-like scheming mother who, after doing research into Jennifer’s background, contrived to bring them together. They’ve just had some nice lunches and walks together when Ponsonby’s mother suddenly died.

3

The scene then cuts, just as abruptly, to 1933 when the narrator meets her, in the gambling rooms at Monte Carlo. The narrator reveals a very world-weary soul, familiar with all the best resorts in Europe and on familiar terms with all the best people, in fact bored of them. He hails Jennifer, gambles with her a bit, shares a drink, asks after Ponsonby (who he doesn’t like) who, she tells him, is away in Taormina. Suddenly, from her sharp movements and her overloud laugh, he realises she is wretched.

He remember back to when he first met her, young and fresh, in 1920 or 1921, just married to her rich American, and ponders how she has changed. He’s walking back to his hotel when a little Baby Fiat comes to a screeching halt right by him and it’s Jennifer. She tells him to jump in and drives him to his hotel but then, when they’ve parked, bursts into tears. He hugs her and tries to cheer her up and suggests they drive up to a local beauty spot and she tells him all about it.

Here, sitting by the woods and looking out over Cape Ferrat and the sea, she recapitulates her meeting with Ponsonby, how his mother schemed to bring them together then, when she died suddenly, how Ponsonby went to pieces and clung on to Jennifer who didn’t know what to do. She was only 19. He invited her for a long walk by the sea and spent hours telling her about himself, about how lonely and confused he was, about his teenage conversion to Catholicism and how he’d been offered a role in the Church by the family priest but it didn’t feel right, and how difficult life was for people like him, for ‘misfits’, on and on about all his problems, and then he asked her to marry him. They’d only known each other a week. And like a fool, she agreed. Why? Out of a naive sense of duty, she felt she was doing her good deed for the day, so they were quickly married in a registry office in Nice.

And then the problems began. His family disapproved. They had to eat humble pie and have a proper Catholic wedding in Boston. Some of his relatives were unpleasant. Sex turned out to be a big disappointment. He took her round the world, sure enough, to loads of glamorous destinations, but because things weren’t right with them, nothing was enjoyable. And so to her meeting with the narrator in London, by which time she’d already become experienced and hardened.

Because she had discovered that Ponsonby, despite all his money and perfect manners, was ‘mean, prurient, sulky and pettishly tyrannical almost to a point of mania’. By contrast Jennifer says, being much more innocent, and poor, and a woman, she prefers naturalness and kindness. Ponsonby and his kind are expert at identifying ancient paintings or sculptures as being of this type or that school, but:

‘I don’t believe it’s enough, all that preoccupation with the dead and done with, when there’s living life all round you and sudden, lovely unexpected moments to be aware of. Sudden loving gestures from other people, without motives, nothing to do with being rich or poor or talented or cultured, just our old friend human nature at its best. That’s the sort of beauty worth searching for; it may sound pompous, but I know what I mean. That’s the sort of beauty-lover that counts. I am right, aren’t I?’

This is placed in the mouth of a fictional character but it repeats the carpe diem theme repeated throughout the plays, and the worldview which is against stifling convention and in favour of life life life, as evidenced in a story like ‘Aunt Tittie’.

Anyway, the marriage deteriorated steadily, climaxing in some unpleasantness in New York wherein Ponsonby was blackmailed. Jennifer claims not to know the details but says she was forced to tell all kinds of lies (is this a hint that Ponsonby is gay? ‘He distrusted me, principally I think because I was a woman’?).

They sailed for Europe to get away from it all but he became steadily sarcastic and insulting, both in private and in public. Finally in Paris they had a blazing row. She told him she wanted a divorce but he went berserk, pointing out they were both Catholics so it was impossible. At which she told him what he really thought of him, that he was a terrified spoilt little boy who had used his mother and Catholicism as shields against the world. She stormed out and fled to London. He followed her and begged for her to return etc etc.

And this brings her up to date. This is her life, now. Ponsonby goes off now and then and does his own thing for a while, then comes back and they then entertain in Paris, or undertake Mediterranean holidays or cruises or whatnot, like everyone on their wealth bracket.

And that’s about it. They walk back to the car and, as dawn breaks, she drops him back at his hotel. On the way she says she’s thought about having an affair but never found anyone worth the risk and sacrifice. She’s everso grateful to him for having listened to her etc, gives him a nice peck on the cheek, and drives off.

4

And so the story cuts back to the present, four years after that conversation by the sea, and the narrator is sitting next to Major Cartwright with his photo album still open and he’s still in mid-stream, telling the narrator how Jennifer ran off with the chauffeur and how poor Ponsonby was gutted by it. Except that now we have a vastly bigger sense of who Ponsonby and Jennifer both were and why their marriage failed. And the narrator’s ghostly role as witness of various parts of the story. Very similar in structure and feel to many Somerset Maugham stories.

The final scene is simple. Cartwright packs away his photo albums and the two chaps go up on deck. It’s night-time, they see of a lighthouse on the French coast. The Major calls a steward for drinks. He says he can’t forget the memory of poor Ponsonby breaking down in tears. And imagine, he says, leaning forward, running off with a chap’s chauffeur! And the payoff, if that’s what it is, is the narrator quietly pointing out that that – i.e. the social humiliation – is what Ponsonby was really crying about.

The structure of the tale, with its big flashback in the middle, is hardly original, but it just worked very well, and I found this a deeply satisfying story, of its type.

Philip Hoare

In his excellent 1995 biography of Coward, Philip Hoare opines that the stories consistently succeed because the scene-setting and the characters are so well observed. The plots are less substantial. ‘The effect is all’ (Hoare, p.289).

Thought

In his own way, Coward’s insistence that there is no God and so we have to live for the moment and damn all the stupid restrictions of society, the way  his characters flout traditional morality and the narrow conventional lives so many people lead and want to impose on others, in order to live, now, to the maximum, to rejoice in the day – well, surprisingly maybe, I can see a secret brotherhood between the flippant, superficial, snobbish, gay Noel Coward and the aggressively heterosexual, anti-high society, anti-fashion and anti-jazz prophet of sex and the spontaneous life, D.H. Lawrence. In their different ways, both defied their native society and promoted life life life. And both could only do so, by moving abroad.

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Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence by Anthony Burgess (1985)

Man belonged to the cosmos and was fulfilled through his natural instincts, of which love was the greatest.
(Burgess’s summary of Lawrence’s credo, page 62)

Anthony Burgess (1917 to 1993) was a composer, poet, novelist, essayist, librettist, screenwriter, critic, provocateur and media personality. In the 1980s I watched him appear on TV arts programmes and read his numerous book reviews, essays and novels (notably ‘Earthly Powers’, 1980, and ‘The End of the World News’, 1982). He was great fun, an unashamed entertainer. This book is a classic example of his work: opinionated, interesting, drily amusing, sensible, packed with ideas and insights.

Preface

Part of this is because Burgess, like Lawrence, was an outsider. Most 20th century English authors went to private school and Oxbridge and so, whether they were radicals or conservatives, maintained the same kind of tone and worldview, the same manners, the same limited, privileged experience of life in their works. Burgess, as he explains in his preface, grew up in the pub and shop culture of working class Manchester, with little cultural capital and, like Lawrence, largely had to teach himself about literature. And they both married foreign wives and left England to live abroad, Lawrence in his pilgrimage round the world, Burgess to live in Monte Carlo.

That said, Burgess says there are also big differences. Burgess came of an Irish family and was raised a Catholic. This explains his attraction to James Joyce. But also puts him in a different tradition from Lawrence who came from non-conformist stock, proud of his puritanism, attracted to the old pagan gods, son of a miner.

Burgess admires Lawrence’s intransigence and sympathises with his sufferings on behalf of free expression. Lawrence stands for:

that fighting element in the practice of literature without which books are a mere decor or confirmation of the beliefs and prejudices of the ruling class. (p.x)

‘Literature is essentially subversive’ and Lawrence was a leading practitioner of that subversion.

Chapter 1. Lawrence and Myself When Young

Burgess quotes Lawrence’s biographer and critic Richard Aldington saying Joyce and Lawrence are diametrically opposed: Joyce is about being and Lawrence is about becoming.

Stylistically Joyce is drawn to economy and exactness, Lawrence to a diffuseness which looks for what he is trying to say while he is saying it. (p.4)

This strikes me as the single most important aspect of Lawrence’s style as a writer of prose and poetry. His paragraphs feel like they’re being shaped and formed, often reusing the same words and phrases, as you watch. It’s a unique experience of being involved in the writing, as it happens.

His writing does not seem to have emerged, lathed and polished, from the workshop: when we read him we are in that workshop, witnessing a hit-and-miss process of creation in which orthodox faults – prolixity, repetition, apparent absurdity – are idiosyncratic virtues. (p.9)

He is a writer taking chances and trusting that he will be taken seriously.

In the 1910s literature was influenced by the serious scientific predictions of H.G. Wells and George Bernard Shaw with their promotion of Scientific, Rational solutions to society’s ills. Lawrence reacted against all this, despised all politics – maybe all rationality – and spoke for the Natural Man.

The purest exponent of the Natural Man after the Great War was Ernest Hemingway who saw that the complex sentences of Edwardian literature reflected a society and values which had all been exploded. He developed a stripped back, simple and repetitive style which promoted a simplistic code of honour. I like where Burgess says:

It may be that Hemingway’s prose is the biggest stylistic innovation of the century… Hemingway genuinely starts again from scratch. (p.8)

When I was a schoolboy and student, that was my view. From E.M. Forster to Ernest Hemingway was a leap from the 19th into the 20th century and, reading literary books today, they almost all still copy the Hemingway formula: short sentences, simple vocabulary, delete all adjectives and adverbs.

The pre-scientific or irrational in Lawrence made him a genuine primitive man, a pagan. He has a profound feeling for the pagan gods. Even the books set in England contain characters who talk like pagan deities. His people aspire to be naked, and their dialogue is voices from the unconscious, from another realm of experience.

Chapter 2. Beginnings

Lawrence’s father was a miner who worked at Brinsley Colliery, Eastwood, so you might have expected Lawrence’s subject to be squalor, dirt and struggle, for him to have become a proletarian writer. But Eastwood, ten miles north-east of Nottingham, in his day looked out over countryside, and Lawrence chose instead to become a writer of the countryside, flowers and animals.

Lawrence’s parents’ marriage was a warzone. His father was a miner, technically a ‘butty’ or supervisor of a gang of other miners. He was almost illiterate, spelling out the newspaper a word at a time, whereas Lawrence’s mother had been a teacher and clung to the idea that she came of gentle stock. Lawrence was unusually close to his mother – she is the central figure in his first major novel Sons and Lovers, and he was devastated when she died – but, by the same token, he was impressed by his father’s big beefy masculinity and the sodality of the miners.

Lawrence was an amateur painter till he was 20. His surviving paintings are vivid but demonstrate his complete lack of training in perspective or anatomy. Words were different. Poems and prose bent to the force of his imagination with little or no training.

At 17 he went as a pupil-teacher to Ilkeston training centre. At 21 he went to Nottingham University. Aged 23 he went to teach in Croydon. He discovered the ‘English Review’, edited by Ford Madox Hueffer, who ‘had the greatest editorial flair of his time, if not of the century’ and sent in some poems (p.20). Hueffer recognised the boy’s genius, invited him up to tea, introduced him to Ezra Pound. Lawrence showed Hueffer his first novel, ‘The White Peacock’.

Burgess makes a characteristically sweeping statement:

One of the uses of fiction is to affirm the values of the bourgeoisie. (p.24)

Lawrence is ‘this most visual of novelists’. Burgess emphasises the brilliant physical details in so many scenes.

Joyce, by contrast, was an urban man and knew nothing of flowers. Lawrence is the great novelist of flowers.

Snobbishness Lawrence’s mother felt she married down when she married his father. She aspired for her boys, wanted them to climb the social ladder. This is reflected from as early as ‘The Peacock’, with characters saying ‘awfully’ and ‘frightfully’, words never used in the Lawrence household. He was aping his social superiors, he was pitching the narrative at a higher social level.

Chapter 3. The Denial of Life

Lawrence’s second novel, ‘The Trespasser’, was published in 1912. It’s set on the Isle of Wight which was as far abroad as he’d managed to get by that point. The lead character Siegmund, hangs himself. The is the only suicide in Lawrence’s oeuvre.

In 1912 Lawrence eloped with Frieda Richtofen, the wife of his French tutor at Nottingham University, philologist and professor of modern languages, Ernest Weekley. She describes how they fell in love in her memoir, Not I, but the Wind…, how she was forced to abandon her three children when they eloped abroad, ending up in a rented house on Lake Garda in north Italy.

Mr Noon: Lawrence drafted the first part of this novel before the war. It was published as a fragment in 1934. Only 50 years later, in 1984, was the second part, which existed in papers belonging to a friend of Lawrence’s, published. The two halves or parts were first published together in 1984. The second half is quite different from the first. It appears to be a factually accurate and barely fictionalized account of Lawrence and Frieda’s early sexual relations. Burgess makes the point that:

It was common practice for Lawrence to write half a novel, abandon it, and then pick it up again with no great concern for plausible continuity; when in doubt, change your main character’s character, though retaining the name, and make him or her start a new life somewhere, preferably in Italy. (p.33)

This happens in ‘Mr Noon’, ‘The Lost Girl’ and ‘Aaron’s Rod’.

Marriage It is amusing that Lawrence was very fierce for marital fidelity, had a pagan reverence for the union of one man and one woman and yet the partner of his life was secured by wrecking her marriage to Professor Weekley. Also ironic that Frieda was (allegedly) unfaithful to him.

Anywhere Lawrence was one of those rare writers who could write anywhere, even amid noise and distractions. He never had a permanent home and so no book-lined study, was able to be interrupted mid-sentence to meet people or go and do some chore, come back hours later and pick up where he left off. In the relationship with Frieda, he did all the household chores while she lay in bed smoking. He reflected this aspect of himself in the character of Rawdon Lilly in ‘Aaron’s Rod’:

He put on the kettle, and quietly set cups and plates on a tray. The room was clean and cosy and pleasant. He did the cleaning himself, and was as efficient and inobtrusive a housewife as any woman. While the kettle boiled, he sat darning the socks which he had taken off Aaron’s feet when the flautist arrived, and which he had washed. He preferred that no outsider should see him doing these things. Yet he preferred also to do them himself, so that he should be independent of outside aid. (Aaron’s Rod, p.121)

England, My England Soon after eloping, Burgess quotes letters in which Lawrence lambasted the English and England in extreme terms. And yet he remained an Englishman through and through. Richard Aldington amusingly said Lawrence was as English as a wet Sunday in Hull.

Son and Lovers Another joke: given the theme of this novel is a young man’s struggle to break free from the smothering influence of his mother, Frieda playfully suggested it should be titled ‘Sons and Lovers: Or, His Mother’s Darling’. Lawrence was not amused.

Chapter 4. Son and Lover

David Herbert Lawrence was called Bert in the family home. He disliked his first name. After he eloped and became more cosmopolitan he liked his female admirers, starting with Frieda, to call him Lorenzo.

‘Sons and Lovers’ was published in May 1913. Giving its protagonist the French surname Morel is symptomatic of Lawrence’s aspiring cosmopolitanism. Burgess describes it as a ‘florescent, leafy, pullulent’ book (p.50).

Lawrence’s modernism lies not in the formal technique of his novels: they display none of the agonising over technique obvious in Conrad, Ford Madox Ford, James or Joyce. The modernism is in the content for two reasons to do with the characters.

1) His characters’ identities are extraordinarily labile: they change all the time. Not just that, but sometimes they disappear altogether, subsumed into the weather, the moonlight or other settings or environments.

2) All Lawrence’s characters point away from the conventions of normal social life towards primeval depths. They repeatedly sink to, or strip back layers to reveal, the elemental layer of human existence. This is deeper than anything in the history of the novel, deeper even than the Greeks in their tragedies.

Symptomatic that, ‘no strong believer in the solidity of human identities’ Lawrence had a lifelong fondness for charades (p.54). This spilled over into the best poems where he mimics or inhabits a bird, beast or flower to an extraordinary degree.

Masculinity All his life Lawrence kept a reverence for beautiful men, for the beauty of the male body, linking back to the strong nudity of his coal-miner father (stripped to the waist and washing in a tin bath every evening) and the community of tough men he managed.

Chapter 5. Coming Through

Lawrence was ‘arrogant, dogmatic, messianic, inconsistent’ but also loveable. He wasn’t troubled by his own faults or the impression they gave in society because society was a spume, a phantom: reality lay much, much deeper, and chasing, revealing and describing the depths of human experience was his challenge.

Reason Lawrence never understood rational argument, which was a kind of giving-in to the surface, the superficial, instead of seeking the core.

Friendship pattern The success of ‘Sons and Lovers’ introduced him to the upper echelons of English culture and society and inaugurated the rhythm he enacted with almost everyone he met: 1) ingratiating charm; 2) lecturing about eternal depths which they barely understood; 3) bitter rejection and immortalisation as satirised characters in whichever novel he was working on; 4) with the frequent threat of libel action (p.55).

‘Love Poems and Others’ published February 1913. In the summer Lawrence and Frieda returned from Germany to England principally because Frieda wanted to see her three children by Weekley.

In the autumn of 1913 he wrote a good deal of The Rainbow, provisionally titled ‘The Sisters’. In July 1914 Frieda’s divorce came through and the couple came to London to sign the papers, then get married. A few weeks later the Great War erupted and they were trapped in England for four long bitter years.

Chapter 6. Dementia

The Lawrences didn’t have money to pay the lawyers’ fees for the divorce so he was declared bankrupt. In December The Prussian Officer and Other Stories was published. In 1915 the odd story England, My England‘. Lawrence is always unsettling because he says the uncomfortable, inconvenient thing.

In 1915 Lawrence worked on ‘The Sisters’ and decided to divide it in two. He developed the notion of setting up a commune of like-minded artistic people in Cornwall. He tried to recruit Lady Ottoline Morrell for this. He wrote long letters raving about the collapse of British society to poor Bertrand Russell, with whom he was initially very taken before they had a huge falling out. Russell accused him (after his death) of being a proto-fascist.

Lawrence said he rewrote ‘The Rainbow’ about seven times. It was published on 30 September 1915. Just a week later, a negative review in the Daily News triggered outcry at the book’s supposed obscenity. The book was taken to court for breaching obscenity laws. Many witnesses for the prosecution and none for the defence. Lawrence wasn’t called. His publisher, Methuen, meekly apologised, withdrew the book, pulped the remaining copies and paid a fine of ten guineas. Britain’s writers did nothing. The Society of Authors did nothing. That maligned figure, Arnold Bennett, was the sole author to publicly protest (he had already sent the impoverished author a gift of £40).

The impact was to ruin Lawrence’s reputation, livelihood and career. It delayed publication of the second half of the novel, Women In Love, by five years, giving the misleading impression that it is a book of the 1920s, which it very much isn’t.

Burgess, of course, defends ‘The Rainbow’ but even he, in his summary, zeroes in and quotes some of the passages describing sex (in extremely vague and gaseous way). He himself doesn’t convey how much of the novel isn’t about sex at all, but about the tempestuous and primeval emotions of the characters, described in an amazingly impassioned prose.

In my review of The Rainbow I point out that with the arrival of Ursula to young womanhood the novel drastically changes tone, moving out of its kind of primitive pagan rural background and arriving in the modern world of schools and trams. Burgess makes the nice point that this is the ‘Wellsian mode’, the tone of Ann Veronica and Wells’s Edwardian social novels.

Chapter 7. Westward

Lawrence fantasised about setting up a colony of like-minded artists in America, maybe Florida, until the authorities made it clear he couldn’t leave the country. So he settled on Cornwall where he founded an artistic community. Two leading figures were the gifted editor John Middleton Murry and the brilliant New Zealand short story writer, Katherine Mansfield.

Lawrence was at one point so close to Murry that he suggested becoming blood brothers. The quartet shared a cottage for a while but inevitably fell out. Nearly 20 years later Murray was cruelly satirised as the slimy seducer Denis Burlap in Aldous Huxley’s novel ‘Point Counter Point’.

In Cornwall Lawrence revised part two of The Sisters, which came to be titled Women in Love. He finished in November 1916 but could find no publisher. July 1916, his travel book about his time in Italy, Twilight in Italy, was published.

During this period he was summoned to several Army medicals in Bodmin. He was always rejected but found the poking and prodding of his body deeply humiliating. His horrible wartime experiences are dramatised in the long, brilliantly vivid ‘Nightmare’ chapter in ‘Kangaroo’.

Lawrence spoke openly against the madness of the war. His wife was German. On 12 October 1917 local police raided his home and ransacked it for evidence they were spies, signalling to German U-boats with their washing or their late-night lights. No evidence was found but Lawrence was ordered to leave Cornwall.

Lawrence and Frieda went to stay with H.D. in London. He started writing Aaron’s Rod. In November 1917 the poetry collection ‘Look! We Have Come Through’ was published. In 1918 they went to live in Derbyshire. In October ‘New Poems’ came out. As soon as the war finished (November 1918) they set about leaving England but it took a year, until October 1919, before they could get passports.

During this period Lawrence did the reading for his book of criticism, Studies in Classic American Literature, which was eventually published by Thomas Seltzer in the United States in August 1923. It contains essays on Benjamin Franklin, Hector St. John de Crevecoeur, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Richard Henry Dana Jr., Herman Melville and Walt Whitman. It contributed to establishing Herman Melville as a seminal figure in American literature.

Some critics criticise it for being a rushed, superficial and highly impressionistic study; Burgess calls it ‘a series of jolts and lunges… meant to jolt Americans’ into reading their great authors. He claims it is one of the few books which created an entire new discipline, as it apparently helped jolt Americans into creating course of America literature at their universities.

Chapter 8. Nakedness

Burgess devotes an entire chapter to ‘Women in Love‘ which Burgess considers one of the ten great novels of the century. The central point of the novel is the way the characters are stripped down to their essentials, stripped to their primitive emotional cores which are depicted as bubbling over with extreme emotions, continually changing.

They are not human beings as we expect to meet them either in real life or in fiction. They are close to animals in the discontinuousness of their emotions, with unpredictable shifts of feeling which are always intense… they are capable of great emotional and even physical violence; they seem to have a skin missing. This is the peculiar quality of Women in Love which could as well be called Women in Hate. (p.89)

He outlines the main characters, identifies some of their real-life bases (Rupert Birkin is Lawrence, Hermione Roddice was partly based on Ottoline Morrell, Gudrun bears many of the traits of Katherine Mansfield).

Burgess singles out three big scenes: 1) how the violence of the big half-wild rabbit scene, in which it scratches and draws blood from both Gudrun and Gerald, anticipates the violence of their relationship and his final attempt to murder her.

2) When Ursula comes across Rupert throwing stones at the reflection of the moon in the millpond to try and abolish the power of the feminine moon over him.

3) The naked wrestling scene between Birkin and the mine owner Gerald Crich, which is deeper than homoerotic, far more primal, and its sad incompletion, the way Gerald can’t rise to Birkin’s wishes.

If we are startled by this scene we are merely experiencing the shock that it was Lawrence’s lifelong mission to impart – the shock of meeting [elemental] truths which logic and science… have tried to drive out. (p.96)

Burgess thinks it is a great novel because it is completely new: the novel, as a form, is mostly concerned with people in a social context, it is the quintessentially bourgeois art form, hedged round by manners and etiquette. From Samuel Richardson through Jane Austen to Henry James and E.M. Forster, the most earnest novels had always been about social convention and good manners. Lawrence tears the face off all this and shows his characters as madly irrational complexes of blood and nerves; primal, pagan wild animals: they have a social face (they have jobs and responsibilities) but their private lives are thronged with out-of-control primeval forces, ‘naked primitives’.

He makes the further point that the novel, up to that point, existed to convey a plot, a story. In their different ways Joyce, Lawrence, Hemingway and Ford Madox Ford showed that you could achieve new literary heights by jettisoning the straitjacket of a logical plot and instead showing human reality in a heightened form.

Chapter 9. A Snake and Sardinia

Burgess is dismissive of ‘Aaron’s Rod’, the novel Lawrence began in 1918, set aside, then completed in the spring of 1921. ‘It is a loose improvisation of which not much need be said’ (p.101).

More interesting is The Lost Girl, which he had also abandoned, and now took up and completed. It is a hokey tale in the popular style of Arnold Bennett with lots of authorial buttonholing – ‘Now fancy our two young heroes walking up the steps to the hotel…’ and, being absolutely unthreatening, won a literary prize and £100.

Lawrence and Frieda visited Florence, which he liked. He fancied it a place of manliness and virile statues, now gone to seed and packed with a large expatriate British community of ‘aesthetes’. Some of these are portrayed pretty blatantly in ‘Aaron’s Rod’ leading to accusations of bad manners and caddishness.

They moved on to Sardinia, then to Sicily where they found a cottage where they lived, off and on, for two years. The stay in Sardinia inspired Sea and Sardinia the most charming book Lawrence ever wrote and, in Burgess’s opinion, the best single introduction to his oeuvre.

Chapter 10. The Prophecy is in the Poetry

This chapter covers:

  1. Lawrence’s best book of poems, Birds, Beasts and Flowers
  2. his two works triggered by Freud, Psychoanalysis and the Unconscious and Fantasia of the Unconscious
  3. his final, posthumous work, Apocalypse

Chapter 11. Eastward

1921, year of The Captain’s Doll, in which the captain and his German paramour turn into Lawrence and Frieda, endlessly bickering, with their famously arduous trek up a glacier during which they bickered and argued every inch of the way there and back.

In October 1921 ‘Sea and Sardinia’ was serialised in The Dial magazine and was read by the American socialite Mrs Mabel Dodge Luhan. She was starting an artists’ community in Taos, New Mexico, with the aim of preserving the arts and crafts of the local Indians. She fancied having a writer-in-residence to record the way of life and ‘Sea and Sardinia’ convinced her that D.H. was the man. She wrote offering him free board and lodging and Lawrence bit.

He and Frieda decided to visit America not by crossing the Atlantic but by heading East. They took ship from Naples in February 1922, passed through the Suez Canal arriving at Ceylon in March. He discovered he really hated tropical jungles.

They sailed on to Australia, arriving at Perth at the start of May 1922 and stayed with friends for a fortnight. Staying in a town outside Perth they met Maria Louisa Skinner, a minor writer who was emboldened to show Lawrence her manuscript of a novel. For reasons that puzzle Lawrence scholars to this day, he was inspired to take it up as a collaboration and rewrite it the Lawrence way. It was eventually published as The Boy in the Bush with Skinner credited as co-author. Burgess thinks Lawrence collaborated because Australia made a big impact on him but he simply wasn’t there long enough to pick up the local lore. This manuscript was packed with local lore and just needed the psychological depth which he tried to add.

After just two weeks, they took ship to Sydney. He only stayed here two days (too expensive) before heading to a house 50 kilometres south.

Chapter 12. A Comical-Looking Bloke

Here Lawrence wrote Kangaroo which Burgess calls ‘the strangest but in some ways most satisfying novel of his entire career’ (p.135). It was an improvisation i.e. he set off without having a plot or characters but the book’s slapdash unevenness of tone 1) allows for all kinds of elements, including extended lyrical descriptions of the Australian landscape and 2) creates an overall sense of spontaneity and immediacy which is very appealing.

Kangaroo’s main characters are transparently based on Lawrence and Frieda, being Richard Lovat Somers, an English writer, and his wife Harriet, who has a foreign look. They arrive in Sydney, find a house to rent. The neighbours are a childless couple and the husband, Jack Callcott, explains he’s a member of a secretive authoritarian political movement, the Diggers, who are seeking to overthrow democracy. He introduces Lovat to their leader, a charismatic Jewish lawyer named Ben Cooley and codenamed ‘Kangaroo’.

Burgess points out that the novel is about types of power:

  • there is an entire chapter devoted to the dynamic of Frieda and Lawrence’s marriage, and Lawrence’s preposterous efforts to convince her that she should submit to him as lord and master, which she robustly ridicules
  • the political plot, sort of, about the Diggers and Cooley, although his so-called ideology is disappointingly wishy-washy, all about love of your fellow men, and Colley asks Somers (in several embarrassingly bad scenes) to love him

The plot, such as it is, leads up to a riot at a meeting of the Australian Socialist Party, which is attacked by a phalanx of pseudo-fascist Diggers, complete with gunshots, a bomb being thrown, and Kangaroo being mortally wounded. Burgess points out how all this is prefaced by an extended passage about the nature of the ‘mob’, reminiscent of Freud’s work ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ which had just come out (in 1921), which Burgess says ‘shows an acuteness worthy of Adolf Hitler’ (p.142). I found it, like most of Lawrence’s attempts to tackle serious political or sociological issues, so wordy, so convoluted, and so embroiled with his personal mythology around the sexes and the deep gods, as to be almost unreadable.

Burgess briskly summarises that Lovat cannot give his allegiance to Kangaroo because the latter’s philosophy of brotherly love is shallow piffle beside Lovat’s deep feeling for the dark gods lying behind everything, deeper than humanity.

In a side note, Burgess picks out one of the final scenes of Lovat walking by moonlight by the seashore as being as magical and symbolic as Burkin throwing stones in the millpond to break the image of the moon in ‘Women in Love’. Lawrence’s novels overflow with wonderful, wonderful nature descriptions.

Chapter 12. Quetzalcoatl

After their Australian sojourn Lawrence and Frieda continued their odyssey east, arrived in San Francisco and took train to the artists’ community at the pueblo town of Taos, New Mexico, in the south-west USA. They had, as you recall, been invited by its owner Mabel Dodge Luhan, the American socialite, who had read Lawrence’s poetry and thought he’d be a perfect fit.

They were found a ranch fifteen or so miles from the town and endured a tough and demanding winter in its very primitive conditions, helped by a couple of Danish artists they sub-let some outhouses to.

By spring 1923 they needed a break and Lawrence took Frieda to Mexico. After some weeks in Mexico City, they headed south west and settled in a house on Lake Chapala. Over the next few years they made three trips in all. Out of them came a long novel, The Plumed Serpent (1926), an epic 462 pages in the Penguin edition, and the travel book, Mornings in Mexico (1927).

Burgess gives a workmanlike summary of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ but doesn’t do this vast, complex, brilliant and ridiculous book justice. He calls it ‘the least liked of Lawrence’s novels and one can see why’. It is humourless, and pontificates, at length, on a subject of little interest to most English readers (a couple of Mexicans leading the rise of the new religion of the old Aztec god Quetzalcoatl ).

One key point I nearly forgot by the time I’d staggered to the end of it, is that it, also, was very obviously written at two different times. The opening chapters are written in a surprisingly pared-back prose, lacking the usual Lawrentian guff, repetition and rhetoric. Almost as if he’d been reading Hemingway (who, however, hadn’t published much yet). Whereas the second half, describing the proponents of the new religion of the old Aztec god Quetzalcoatl is an orgy of half-baked mysticism, pseudo-psychology and tedious ‘hymns’.

Burgess suggests the difference in style is explained by facts on the ground. After 6 months Frieda was fed up of Mexico’s searing heat and (probably) Lawrence’s insistence on her submission to his religious fantasies. So she booked a berth on a ship from New York back to Britain (as the novel’s protagonist Kate Leslie, also does). On the New York quayside they had such an intense argument that they for a while thought the marriage was over.

He travelled west across America, stopping in the young Hollywood, before making it back to Mexico City. Here he completed the novel unrestrained by Frieda’s presence and influence. So you could argue that the first, very restrained and unLawrentian half, with its sensible characters doing believable things, was written under Frieda’s influence; and that the wildly self-indulgent second half, a fantasia of the new religion, accompanied by long poem-hymns he attributes to the new religionists, is Lawrence unleashed.

In real life Lawrence for a while felt he had lost Frieda and that, in her insistence on being free, independent and going her own way (home), she had ‘won’ their endless battle; whereas in the novel, Lawrence has the very strong character Kate Leslie in the end bow and submit to the male principle of her dark native husband. I.e. in the novel Lawrence faked that he’d won. In reality he swallowed his pride, and also took ship to Britain, ending in London where he realised just how much he disliked the English.

In his brisk summary of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ Burgess doesn’t mention the book’s countless breath-takingly beautiful prose descriptions of the Mexican landscape and mood. Equivalents to the wonderful evocation of the Australian landscape in ‘Kangaroo’. In both these novels, for my money, the ‘plot’ is dubious but the sense of place is astonishing.

Burgess thinks ‘there is no less convincing ending in the Lawrence oeuvre’ (p.157) but I found the ending of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ appropriately ambiguous and uncertain. It just stops in mid-conversation as the protagonist, Kate Leslie, rather hopelessly asks the Mexican general she’s married and who wants her to join their religious movement, Cipriano Viedma, to make her stay with him – despite the fact that we’ve seen her pining for Britain and booking a berth on a ship home. It ends on a note of irresolution and ambiguity which, I thought, accurately sums up the Lawrentian protagonist, endlessly conflicted and contradictory and changeable.

Chapter 13. A Spot of Red

In London Frieda and Lawrence became close to the artist (the Right Honourable) Dorothy Brett, and she accompanied them when they sailed back across the Atlantic in March 1924. They travelled from New York to Chicago and then back to Taos. Here Mable Luhan gave the Lawrences 170 acres of land and Lawrence, always surprisingly practical, threw himself (alongside native labourers) into rebuilding the adobe shacks, clearing the irrigation ditches, planting a flower garden.

In this period Lawrence wrote St Mawr. Like so many of Lawrence’s fictions it splits into two distinct parts (England and America), maybe three (London, Shropshire, Texas). The first, longer part portrays the posh, upper-middle-class world Lawrence was now moving in (the miner’s son had come a long, long way in a little over 10 years), set in London mews cottages and posh grand houses.

St Mawr is the name of a horse, a stallion, bought by Mrs Witt, a redoubtable American widow of independent means, for her son-in-law Henry Carrington, so he can join her and her daughter, Louise (Lou), as they go riding in Rotten Row (in Hyde Park) and mingle with London’s elite. Here the nervy, uncontrollable horse causes a scene and is banned as a danger to the public.

The scene then shifts to the West Midlands on the Welsh border, where a posse of posh people go for an extended break and where St Mawr is startled by a snake in the heather and rears backwards, kicking one of the men in the party in the face then rolling onto Henry and crushing his foot.

In part two, the leading figure, Mrs Witt, takes daughter, son-in-law and difficult horse by ship back to America, to the ranch where she grew up and whose profits pay for her pampered lifestyle travelling round Europe (and which explains why she and her daughter like horses).

But they don’t stop here. Lou looks for somewhere isolated where she can be herself and discovers a half-abandoned old ranch in the foothills of the Rocky Mountains and buys it, and persuades her mother to join her and the family retainer, a native American named Phoenix, in rebuilding and furbishing it.

Burgess makes the obvious point that the entire narrative arc of the story follows Lawrence’s recent life, from posh nobs in London, via an excursion into the English countryside, then back to the States, to the dusty desert reminiscent of Taos, and then the final 20 pages are a pretty literal description of the ranch which Mabel Luhan, with great generosity, gave to Lawrence.

Burgess goes on to make the fairly obvious point which I’d completely missed that St Mawr is Lawrence: wounded, angry, liable to lash out. When the horse kicks a nice posh chap in the face up in the Shropshire hills it is Lawrence spitting in the face of the posh people he met in London and claimed to love his work and who he loathed. In fact St Mawr overflows with hatred of just about everyone, as I itemise in my review of it.

According to Burgess, right at the end of 1924 Lawrence travelled with Frieda and Brett back to Mexico. The British vice-consul found them a cottage in Oaxaca and it was here that he completed ‘The Plumed Serpent’, in all its madness.

He also completed the odd book of travel sketches combined with anthropological reportage, ‘Mornings in Mexico’. The book starts out as restrained and observant sketches of his hacienda, his servant, a long walk to a remote village and a description of a market day; but then the second half and the last three or four chapters become more anthropological, describing trips to observe traditional Indian music and dances, and taking it on himself to explain the Indians’ entire animistic worldview. Several of these chapters do not take place in Mexico at all, but in the United States, so the title of the book is pretty misleading.

Here in Oaxaca, in early 1925, Lawrence fell very ill. He went down with malaria but also food poisoning causing diarrhoea. To compound his misery, the region was hit by an earthquake. He was moved to the one decent hotel in Oaxaca. He was left weak and ill. All the old fight went out of him. For years he had written fantasies of subjecting Frieda to his imperious male will. Now he could barely walk and realised how utterly dependent on her he had become.

A doctor in Mexico City diagnosed tuberculosis and told Frieda that Lawrence only had a year or two left to live. When they tried to return to Taos the US immigration officials prevented him, until overridden by a kindly official in the embassy in Mexico City. But only with a 6-month visa.

In the event Lawrence recovered back on the ranch and was fit enough to get involved in all manner of outdoor chores and work. Burgess dwells on his finding a porcupine with cactus needles in its nose and carefully extracting them, which led to one of his many essays about man’s place in nature.

In September 1925 his US visa expired, he travelled to Washington with Frieda, then they caught a liner back across the Atlantic. He kidded himself he’d come back but, of course, he never did. His ranch is now a museum dedicated to him, the D.H. Lawrence ranch.

Lawrence disapproved of the Atlantic – ‘a dismal kind of ocean; it always affects me as the grave of Atlantis’ – although not as much as he disapproved of England.

Chapter 14. Life in Death

Lawrence passed through England en route for the continent. Burgess thinks Italy was Lawrence’s true home and the Mediterranean his proper sea. By the autumn of 1925 they had settled at a place called Spotorno, on the coast just over the border from France. Here he turned 40.

Burgess summarises Lawrence’s life to date: he had travelled right around the world looking for a race unspoiled by western materialism but hadn’t found it. He had hated the tropics (Ceylon), ignored the native people of Australia, seen the corruption and lassitude of the Mexicans, hated America’s Fordist culture, loathed England’s imperial snobbery.

Etruscan Places Now, back in Italy, he persuaded himself he’d found it in the long-extinct and legendary race of the Etruscans. Hence his book Etruscan Places. The Etruscans created a civilisation in west and north-west Italy which reached its height around 500 BC. To Lawrence’s mind they were an example of a primitive people in touch with their sensual pagan selves who were crushed out of existence by the cerebral, law-obsessed, imperialistic Romans.

This is obviously a grotesque distortion of the historical facts since 1) if crushed they were, it was by the Roman Republic, centuries before there was a Roman Empire (see Roman–Etruscan Wars), 2) the Romans were indeed an obsessively militaristic culture but at the same time they also practiced a florid variety of blood-thirsty cults, traditions and ceremonies which you’d have thought Lawrence would have had sympathy for.

But really what Lawrence does is reshape the Etruscans into his own image, as embattled outsiders fighting several types of ‘establishment’. This is why the book opens with an attack on all historians of the ancient world who Lawrence accuses of being in thrall to the glamour of Greece and Rome and downplaying all other cultures.

And, as Burgess points out, when Lawrence was anathematising an empire which crushed scores of native peoples in the name of ‘freedom’ he was also obviously referring to the British Empire, whose subjugation of native peoples around the world Lawrence deplored.

The Man Who Died Burgess devotes 4 pages to a summary of this vivid short story depicting Jesus waking from the dead in his tomb. In the story Jesus stumbles out and takes shelter with a peasant before the several encounters with disciples described in the New Testament.

These encounters are given according to the Biblical sources but we see that the resurrected man who lived them is radically different from the Jesus of the Bible account. For he has thrown off his mission to convert the world to love. He now sees all that as a form of narcissism. Now he will live for the instinctive life within him i.e. become Lawrentian man.

And so in the second half of the story (and, as Burgess points out, so many of Lawrence’s stories and novels fall into two distinct halves) he travels south along the coast. Here he comes to a small domestic temple to the goddess Isis and falls under the spell of its priestess, culminating in their having sex at the pagan altar.

Burgess doesn’t quite bring out how brilliantly vivid and imaginative this story is, with scores of moments of insight, starting with the searing description of what it feels like to rise from the dead – but he correctly points out the other striking thing about it which is – why wasn’t it banned? Why wasn’t Lawrence prosecuted for blasphemy? What kind of story could possibly be more blasphemous? Instead, as we know, the Establishment reserved its fury for his next novel, Lady Chatterley’s Lover. It’s always sex with the philistine, guttersnipe British, who are too thick to notice transgressive ideas.

Chapter 15. A Woman’s Love

‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ is a book about fidelity. Lady Constance Chatterley and the gamekeeper Oliver Mellors must be true to each other and what they awaken in each other – a true awakening of their bodies’ sensual and sexual identities – despite the full panoply of opposition society can throw at them: gossip and rumour, social disapproval, censure from her father and sister, the howling anger of his shrewish wife, the cold anger of her husband, and the minefields of the law.

He began it at Scandicci in Italy in October 1926 and over the next two years wrote three versions. Many critics think the shorter first version is best, but it was the longest version which he chose to have privately printed in 1928.

Burgess correctly points out that for a book which supposedly champions free and ecstatic sex, ‘Chatterley’ is embarrassingly limited and ignorant. Lawrence is embarrassingly fixated on the penis, the phallus, on Mellors’s erect penis, and the sex is entirely orientated around his quick phallic penetration of Lady C. There is little or no foreplay and no attention whatsoever is given to Connie’s pleasure or orgasm. She is condemned to find all her pleasure in response to his quick thrusting cock.

As Burgess says, not just any modern westerner with an interest in the subject, but any literate member of the world’s other cultures, readers of Japanese, Chinese or India erotica, would know vastly more than Lawrence describes. Lawrence’s supposed sex set-pieces make us look like an embarrassment on the world stage. ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ only counts as a ‘sexy’ book when set against the narrow, blinkered, strangled, philistine background of early 20th century Anglo-Saxon culture. Compared with the erotic writings of virtually any other tradition, it is pitifully inadequate.

Burgess is critical of it. He thinks Connie isn’t as interesting a female figure as Ursula, Gudrun (who is?) or Kate Leslie, while her desertion of a crippled husband subverts her moral standing. Mellors is less attractive than the gamekeeper in The White Peacock. In my reading, I didn’t like Mellors. He is unnecessarily chippy and shirty with Clifford and, especially with the painter Duncan Forbes who offers to help them out and Mellors rudely dismisses. By the end I didn’t like either of the lovers. My sympathy went out to Mrs Bolton, a battling single mum from the village who comes to be Clifford’s housekeeper and manages to stay sympathetic to all three parties in the love triangle.

Both Lawrence’s US and British publishers refused to publish it. Lawrence had a full version privately printed in Italy and distributed 2,000 copies. Wikipedia describes the fate of various expurgated and pirated editions. Burgess summarises Lawrence’s own account of printing a private edition, as given in ‘A Propos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover’.

The famous 1960 trial came about because Penguin decided to use the text as a test of the recent Obscene Publications Act 1959.

When the jury found against the prosecution i.e. that paperback publication could go ahead, Burgess and other critics like him were relieved because now they were free to discuss the book on its merits and admit the fact that it’s a flawed novel.

Official persecution continued. When he sent the manuscript of his poetry collection ‘Pansies’ to his London publisher, it was intercepted, opened, and alleged ‘obscenities’ cut.

In 1919 the Warren Gallery held an exhibition of Lawrence’s paintings. A surprising 12,000 people paid to see them. They yellow press got wind of the nudity and egged on the police to raid the gallery and confiscate 14 of the pictures. The authorities proposed to destroy the paintings and the book of the exhibition though the gallery owners rounded up some contemporary artists to defend him.

Burgess doesn’t think much of the paintings, says the paintings ascribed to Mark Rampion, the character based on Lawrence in Huxley’s novel Point Counter Point, are better.

Chapter 17. Death in Vence

Burgess dwells on the friendship between Aldous Huxley and Lawrence and he quotes a nice section from an interview given late in life where Huxley says that Lawrence was, above all, happy. Burgess thinks Huxley absorbed enough of the scientific worldview ‘to bring a new intellectual rigour to the novel’. Having just read a load of Huxley’s novels I think this is rubbish. There’s nothing intellectually rigorous about them, my abiding impression is of the endless vapouring gaseous trip about Love and Art gassed by preposterous pseudo-intellectual rentiers. And his later writings about drugs and religion dress up in scientific terminology but are basically spiritualist nonsense.

What comes over from Lawrence’s last months spent dying from tuberculosis was his own foolish denialism, and the complete wretched inadequacy of contemporary medicine. Only antibiotics can treat TB and they hadn’t been discovered/invented yet.

Testimony from various sources suggest that Frieda was worse than useless at looking after Lawrence. She couldn’t cook, turned the kitchen of the villa where he spent his last weeks into a slum. Everything had to be cleaned and tidied by Aldous and especially Maria Huxley who worshipped Lawrence like a god.

We have it on the testimony of Aldous Huxley that, a day or two before he died, Lawrence said of his wife: ‘Frieda, you have killed me.’ The best source for his final days is from the English poet Robert Nichol. He wrote:

Aldous would not repeat such a terrible saying unless he felt it to be true. And he said, ‘I like Frieda in many ways but she is incurably and incredibly stupid – the most maddening woman I think I ever came across. Nevertheless she was the only sort of woman with whom D.H.L. could live. (quoted p.196)

Burgess makes the point that if Lawrence had married little Maria Huxley, she would have been a faithful, efficient, kind wife, creating order and tidiness everywhere, as she did for Huxley – but Lawrence needed chaos. He thrived on the battle of wills, the clash between his domesticity and Frieda’s slovenliness, between his working class background and her aristocratic hauteur, between his English puritanism and her continental sensuality, on her willingness to fight back.

Mind you, these comments shed light on Frieda’s own memoirs, one of the most salient parts of which, for me, was the way she doesn’t actually comment on any of the numerous books he wrote during their 18-year marriage. I thought it was tact. Maybe she was just too stupid, and didn’t try.

He died peacefully in his sleep and was buried at Vence. A year later he was exhumed and shipped over to Taos where Fried built a shrine for him at the ranch.

Burgess calls him ‘the most English of our writers’, is that true? More English than Chaucer, Shakespeare or Dickens? He’s nearer the mark when he says:

The British expect comfort from their writers, and Lawrence offers very little. (p.197)

The tenor of the text and endings of most of his stories offer very little comfort, from the bleak endings of ‘Women in Love’ and ‘The Fox’, to the uncertain ending of ‘The Plumed Serpent’ or the hanging ending of ‘Lady Chatterley’s Lover’ – you go through these great emotional rollercoaster rides reading his stories but then, at the end… what?

Chapter 18. On The Side of Life

Burgess has a half-hearted go at speculating what might have happened if Lawrence had lived longer. Would he have come over to Huxley’s way of seeing i.e. combining all the blood and dark gods stuff with a more rational point of view? Unlikely.

Like most critics, Burgess thinks Lawrence had, in fact, done his best work. Some people think Sons and Lovers is his masterpiece; Burgess thinks it’s Women In Love. But after that it was all slowly downhill, there is a steady diminution in force, he is never so wildly radical again.

Then Burgess adds his own interpretation which is that Lawrence was a professional writer. He could sit down anywhere and bang out letters, stories, essays, poems or continue with a novel. More than most we have to take his oeuvre, across its many genres, as one thing.

Was he a prophet? Burgess acknowledges Lawrence’s writings about power, his dislike of Italian fascism, but his own flirting with power and submission in ‘Kangaroo’ and ‘The Plumed Serpent’. But he doesn’t mention what I think is stronger, which is the sense of doom which dogs Mellors in ‘Lady Chatterley’. Mellor’s conviction that a great crash was coming and the future was going to be very dark proved to be right.

Lawrence would have been dismayed to learn his name is associated in the common culture with sex, with the scandal surrounding Lady Chatterley, with the soft porn movie versions, as a prophet of soft-porn sensuality. There’s nothing soft porn about Lawrence: his writings are hard and rebarbative, they are not relaxing or lulling.

This is Burgess at his weakest. He wanders off into a lengthy consideration of Henry James and his criticism of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky as he tries to define what ‘life’ means in the context of a novel. But he’s over-thinking it. Think back to reading ‘The Rainbow’: it is the most fantastic depiction of the complexity of human existence, of being a person plonked down amid families, in settlements and cultures, in the natural and man-made worlds, and the endless fizzing popping confusing experience of being alive to all these endless inputs and experiences. Comparisons with Henry James or James Joyce or any other writers are beside the point. Lawrence was the poet laureate of the teeming richness of Life and delves so deep, drilling beneath all conventional notions of identity, taking his characters to primeval, archetypal depths. And his novels inhabit the animals they describe and bring to life the myriads of flowers quite as fully as his human characters, maybe more so.

It seems overblown when Lawrence writes about the ‘cosmos’ but surely Lawrence, more than any other writer, had the right to do so, because he deliberately moved out of all his comfort zones, left England behind, and wrote dazzling evocations of the landscapes, flora and fauna of the Mediterranean, Australia, and the American and Mexican desert. Who cares what Henry James wrote about ‘form’ or why James Joyce deployed such complex symbolical structures – you only have to read any of Lawrence’s descriptions of the Australian outback, of the silver fish in the cold Pacific, of the thunderhead clouds massing over the distant mountains in Mexico, and you realise you are in the presence of a great, great writer, who owned and described more of the world than most of his contemporaries even saw.

Burgessian vocabulary

  • allumeuse = French for ‘tease’
  • hypergamy = the action of marrying or forming a sexual relationship with a person of a superior sociological or educational background (as working class men do with upper class women, as Lawrence men do in a number of his stories: Virgin and Gypsy, Lady Chatterley)
  • prevernal = relating to the early stages of spring, or the end of winter

Credit

Flame Into Being: The Life and Work of D.H. Lawrence by Anthony Burgess was published by William Heinemann in 1985. Page references are to the 1986 Abacus paperback version.

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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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Posted by Simon on February 19, 2025

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The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad (1902)

‘Ha! My dear boy. The men we have known – the ships we’ve sailed – ay! and the things we’ve done…’
(Captain Ned Elliot in sentimental mood, page 76)

‘The End of the Tether’ is a novella by Joseph Conrad, written and published in 1902. It is 52,564 words long.

Cast

Captain Whalley, otherwise known as Dare-devil Harry or Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day. Whalley has been fifty years at sea, forty of them out East but now he is old and fallen on hard times.

Mrs Whalley, his soul mate, who painted his cabin on the Condor with roses. But tragically she passed away 23 years ago, leaving Whalley only…

Ivy, his daughter, living in Melbourne, married to…

His son-in-law, consistently unlucky in business. When Whalley loses his life’s savings the son in law takes to a bath chair and doctors say he will never walk again.

Old Swinburne, his mate on the Condor who wept when they buried Mrs Whalley at sea.

Mrs Gardner, the wife of the senior partner in Gardner, Patteson, & Co, the owners of the Condor,  who was kind to him after his wife died.

Captain ‘Ned’ Elliott, Singapore Master-Attendant, a fat jovial blusterer, same age as Whalley, much exercised by worry about the future of his three layabout daughters, and with such a dearth of decent men. (As so often in Conrad, a secondary character provides a contrast to the central protagonist, in this case Elliott’s daughters versus Whalley’s daughter.)

Carlo Mariani (commonly known as Paunchy Charley), the Maltese hotel-keeper at the slummy end of Denham Street, witness on the night Massy wins the lottery.

The lawyer who draws up the contract between Whalley and Massy, ‘a young man fresh from Europe and not overburdened with business’ (p.121).

Historic figures

Mr Denham, the early, jacket off, hands-on governor of Singapore who encouraged young Whalley to captain the Dido on a voyage to

Evans, ‘with his red face, his coal-black whiskers, and his restless eyes, who had set up the first patent slip for repairing small ships, on the edge of the forest, in a lonely bay three miles up the coast’.

On the Sofala

Captain Whalley

George Massy the resentful engineer and owner: ‘His black hair lay plastered in long lanky wisps across the bald summit of his head; he had a furrowed brow, a yellow complexion, and a thick shapeless nose. A scanty growth of whisker did not conceal the contour of his jaw. His aspect was of brooding care.’

Mr Stern, first mate, ‘tall, young, lean, with a mustache like a trooper, and something malicious in the eye.’

Second engineer, Jack, who never talks to the rest of the crew but only grunts or hoots, and goes on periodic benders when he locks himself in his cabin and rants and raves.

The Serang, ‘an elderly, alert, little Malay, with a very dark skin’, like a wizened pygmy next to Whalley’s bulk. ‘Narrow of shoulder, in a suit of faded blue cotton, an old gray felt hat rammed down on his head, with a hollow in the nape of his dark neck, and with his slender limbs, he appeared from the back no bigger than a boy of fourteen.’

The Malay leadsman, ‘the sleeves of his thin cotton shirt, cut off close to the shoulder, bared his brown arm of full rounded form and with a satiny skin like a woman’s’ (p.83)

The quartermaster, ‘a middle-aged, pock-marked, Sumatra Malay, almost as dark as a negro’.

The carpenter, ‘a timid, sickly, opium-fuddled Chinaman, in loose blue drawers for all costume, who invariably dropped his tools and fled below, with streaming tail and shaking all over’ before the fury of the generally furious Massy (p.118).

On land

Mr Van Wyk, ‘a short, dapper figure’, ‘the white man of Batu Beru, an ex-naval officer who, for reasons best known to himself, had thrown away the promise of a brilliant career to become the pioneer of tobacco-planting on that remote part of the coast’ (p.125).

The Sultan, ‘a restless and melancholy old ruler who had done with love and war, for whom life no longer held any savour (except of evil forebodings) and time never had any value’ (p.125).

1. Background and setup

The story is set in the mid-1880s and centres on old Captain Whalley, Henry Whalley, otherwise known as Dare-devil Harry or Whalley of the Condor, a famous clipper in her day. Whalley has been fifty years at sea, forty of them out East. The text is dotted with his memories of the good old days, way before steam, when places like Singapore were just a muddy creek.

For years he was captain of the Condor, famous in her day. Somewhere between Australia and China lie a Whalley Island and a Condor Reef, named after him and his ship.

But his wife, his best friend and soul mate, who had elaborately painted the state room of the Condor with flowers, passed away, 26 years ago. He buried her at sea, keeping his voice steady as he read the service while his chief mate, old Swinburne, cried like a baby.

They had a daughter named Ivy and Whalley imagined her twined around his heart forever. When she was of age she settled in Melbourne and married a weakling, a man not worthy of her, a man continually unlucky in business.

He was looking forward to a comfortable retirement when he was caught up in the crash of the notorious Travancore and Deccan Banking Corporation, ‘whose downfall had shaken the East like an earthquake’ and lost his life savings.

He retained enough, however, to run a pretty little barque, the Fair Maid. In this he undertook small cargo trips but times have changed. Commercial sailing has become professionalised and dominated by large companies running shipping routes like trams. Not much room for a freelancer and an elderly one at that.

But then, as he turned 65, his daughter’s husband has some kind of collapse and takes to a bath chair; the doctors say he will never walk again. It’s then that Ivy sends him a letter saying she’s decided to open a boarding house and needs £200 seed money.

All that day and night he walks the maindeck thinking, to the astonishment of his officers who are used to his methodical, regular routine. By the morning he’s decided the only way to raise the money the apple of his eye has asked for is to sell his beloved barque, the Fair Maid.

And so the narrative finds him coming out of an office in the main strip at Singapore, having just sold his beloved barque to a Japanese speculator. He got £500 for it, £200 of which he is sending to his daughter in Melbourne. But as he walks through the half-built streets of Singapore he feels bereft. For the first time in 50 years he isn’t attached to a ship and for the first time feels like a back number. His mood is reinforced by the realisation that when he first set foot her, some 40 years earlier, back when ‘individuals were of some account’, the place was just a fishing village on a muddy creek. It is then that he bumps into Captain ‘Ned’ Elliott, a Master-Attendant friend of his.

A master-attendant is a superior sort of harbour-master; a person, out in the East, of some consequence in his sphere; a Government official, a magistrate for the waters of the port, and possessed of vast but ill-defined disciplinary authority over seamen of all classes.

They get talking, Whalley tells him about selling the Fair Maid and Elliott tells him he’s heard about a vacancy on a ship called the Sofala. The catch is that the owner, George Massy, is also the engineer. He’s a prickly character who came into port on a ship which couldn’t wait to get rid of him, and gained a reputation for surly resentment. But then he went and won (second prize) in the Manilla lottery. At which point he bought the Sofala, a ship generally considered too small and not quite modern enough for the sort of  coastal trade she was in. And with one swoop Massy adopted the swaggering mannerisms of the worst kind of ship owner, larded with a vast chip on his shoulder and an urge to get revenge on everyone who’d ever wronged him.

Which is why Massy keeps sticking his oar in and arguing with his captains, which is why they all keep quitting (he’s run through 11 captains in three years). The deuce of it is that, after buying the ship Massy ran through the remainder of his winnings trying to win a second time and now has almost no capital. What he needs is not just a captain but a business partner.

So in, his slow quiet way, Whalley realises this is just the opening which suits him, with his £500 from the sale of the Fair Maid to invest. And so, despite his misgivings, and his strong sense of going down in the world, Whalley negotiates a deal with Massy. It is a three-year contract. In return for his investment of £500, he will brook no interference in his actions as captain and will take a sixth part of the profits from the ship’s voyages (p.90).

2. Captain of the Sofala

And so the main narrative commences. In this timeline (with which the text actually opened) it is three years later and Whalley has skippered the Sofara through the same outward voyage along the coast, stopping at trading stations, and back, no fewer than 36 times, once a month for three years, so that he knows the route off by heart.

The long central passages describe the tensions between the four white crew of the Sofala, being sturdy, taciturn old Whalley with his vast white beard; the angry resentful engineer-owner, Mr Massy; Jack the monosyllabic second engineer; and the malicious and ambitious, competent but widely disliked Mr Stern.

There’s a great deal about their inter-relationships, with a lot of backstory about Massy’s conviction that the whole world is against him. One factor in this is that he has run through all his lottery winnings, partly in futile efforts to win a second time, and the ship desperately needs repairs. Specifically, the boilers are reaching their end of their life, are harder to maintain. The alcoholic second engineer complains about the effort required endlessly, but this only infuriates Massy because any talk of repairing them throws him into a panic; almost certainly he’ll have to borrow the money and it will mean the ship being laid up for some time and losing custom, maybe permanently, probably to the bloody German coast steamers which are spreading everywhere. Anyway, this explains why Massy and Jack are almost continuously shouting abuse at each other.

All this squalid human business is juxtaposed with stunning descriptions of the jungle foliage as the steamer slowly makes its way upriver to its terminus at Batu Beru.

But towards the end of this section, the dominant thing becomes the fact that Mr Stern is convinced he has made a massive discovery which changes everything. Right at the very start of the text, before it cut back in time to give Whalley’s backstory, and again, now, during this passage describing the ship’s 36th journey up the river, much has been made of the way Whalley relies on ‘the Serang’, a wizened old Malayan to do the majority of the navigating. Their close, professional relationship is nicely described, alongside the physical disparity between the massive Whalley and tiny native figure.

But observing them as, for the 36th time, they position the ship to pass through a break in the mud bar at the entrance to the river, Stern has a brainwave. He realises that it’s the Serang steering the ship. Conrad spends several pages describing Stern’s excitement at his discovery but it’s not for some time that we get the central gist, of this discovery and, indeed, of the entire story: Whalley is going blind. Stern is excited because he instantly thinks that he will be able to step into the captain’s shoes, once he is forced out – blithely ignoring the fact that Massy absolutely detests him.

3. Mr van Wyk

The Sofala travels slowly up the river before docking at a tobacco plantation. This is owned by Mr Van Wyk, a Dutchman, a dapper, civilised figure who, after a devastating heartbreak in love, has chosen to isolate himself in the back of beyond. A flashback describes their first meeting three years earlier, on the Sofala’s first trip skippered by Whalley, and how the rather fierce Wyk came to respect and like the optimistic, ancient old seaman with his sturdy faith in his Creator. Noticeably, he is the only member of the crew he routinely invites up to his house for dinner, regarding the others as trash.

Having painted the origins of their friendship, Conrad comes back to the present and this particular trip. As he walks down from his house to the quay where the Sofala has just docked, Van Wyk is intercepted by Stern who, in his sneaky unlikeable way, quickly tells him Whalley’s secret.

Disturbed and upset, Van Wyk hurries to invite Whalley for dinner, as usual. He notices Whalley’s clumsiness and then that he knocks over a tumbler at dinner, and then Whalley admits it: he is going blind but he has told no one. And this makes the ship technically unseaworthy. It is illegal and greatly against the simple principles of a man who’s devoted his life to the sea. He is ashamed.

He had nothing of his own – even his past of honour, of truth, of just pride, was gone. All his spotless life had fallen into the abyss. He had said his last goodbye to it. (p.157)

But, as he explains, by the terms of his contract with Massy, at the end of the three years, he is paid back the £500 he invested in the business. But, if he is dismissed for negligence, illness and so forth, Massy can withold this payment for a year. In which case he, Whalley would have no money to live on and nowhere to live for a year. There are only 6 weeks of the contract left. So, Whalley explains, he plans to complete this trip, and one more, and then will leave at the expiry date of his contract with all his money.

I haven’t properly conveyed how Whalley considers himself as doing all this for his daughter. His daughter is the one thing he has left in his life, the spitting image of his beloved wife. For the three years of his service on the Sofala he has sent her all his salary. In the last few pages it is fidelity to her which Conrad positions as the key motive for Whalley lying to everyone and desperately hoping to make it through the last few weeks of his contract. For then he will collect his £500 investment and take it to her, the daughter, in Melbourne, and place himself in her care.

4. The climax

During this last trip, while anchored off Van Wyk’s plantation, the second engineer goes on another bender, locking himself into his cabin, ranting and raving. Massy, as usual, kicks and bangs on the door yelling at him to shut up. But in among his ravings, the engineer rants about letting the whole bloody ship go to the bottom, and this triggers an idea in Massy’s head.

It’s a simple idea and a common one (in fiction, at least) for someone at their wits’ end for how to get money. He’ll deliberately contrive the shipwreck of his own ship, then claim the insurance. the ship is worth more to him dead than alive.

So Massy fills the pockets of his jacket with old nuts and bolts and iron filings from the filthy cargo hold then strolls casually onto the bridge when Whalley is on watch, depending, as usual, on the Serang to actually steer the ship. He loiters by the compass, blocking the steersman’s view, claiming to be studying it, in reality hanging his jacket on the hook. Everyone’s used to the owner hanging his jacket at random place round the ship so nobody notices this. When he strolls away the steersman is surprised to see that, according to the compass, the ship is way off course and so swings the helm round to come back to its proper course heading north.

Massy goes below and sits with his knees shaking going over and over his plan. He intends the ship to strike a reef east of Pangu, sit on them till the can release the boats, have the ship declared a write-off, collect the insurance cash.

They have sailed this route 36 times and so know it backwards. When they fail to sight land after three hours the Serang becomes increasingly anxious and begs Whalley to look around for sights and to check the compass for himself, both of which he can, of course, not do, for he cannot see.

In bending down to see the compass Whally slips and his hand catches Massy’s jacket which tears its little hanging cord and falls to the deck with a loud clang as all the nuts and bolts fall out the pockets. On his hands and knees Whalley feels them, realises what they are and realises in a flash what Massy has done, deliberately set the ship off course, but at that very second the ship runs into a huge reef just below the surface, like a car hitting a wall. There is a tremendous shock, all kinds of cables snap, the lights go out, the engines stutter.

When the ship rebounds and strikes the reef again the huge funnel amidships topples over onto the bridge which a great smashing. Whalley staggers to his feet, cut and shaken.

Stern comes running out of his cabin and Whalley quickly explains and orders him to lower the lifeboats. Massy and Whalley have a great confrontation on the deck in which Massy points out that, if Whalley tells the truth and reports him to the authorities the ship’s insurance won’t be paid, Massy won’t be able to pay Whalley his £500 back, and Ivy will never get the money. Massy has him by the short and curlies. Whalley is stricken. And for the first time Conrad deploys the book’s signature phrase:

Captain Whalley did not move. True! Ivy’s money! Gone in this wreck. Again he had a flash of insight. He was indeed at the end of his tether. (p.167)

And we reach the climax of the other great symbol, the association of Whalley’s gathering blindness with the darkness of  his fate. Ever since Conrad revealed his protagonist was going blind he’s rung changes on the idea that the light has slowly leeched out of his life, overcome by darkness.

For Ivy he had carried his point, walking in his darkness to the very verge of a crime. God had not listened to his prayers. The light had finished ebbing out of the world; not a glimmer. It was a dark waste; but it was unseemly that a Whalley who had gone so far to carry a point should continue to live. He must pay the price. (p.167)

And in that passage you can see how, suddenly, Conrad has his protagonist realise two or three related things: he cannot live because if he does he will have to lie about Massy’s shipwrecking to enable Massy to claim the insurance which will allow him to pay Whalley back so he can pass the money onto his daughter. But he, couldn’t live with himself if he lied. And he can’t live if Ivy is to thrive. And so the decision to go down with the ship.

Once the crew are in the lifeboat he unties the rope holding it to the ship and returns to the bridge. They shout for him to jump but instead he puts on Massy’s jacket with its pockets full of iron. If he’s going to go down, it ought to be as quick and definitive as possible.

Coda

Rather like the move at the end of ‘Typhoon’ which suddenly cuts away altogether from the scene of the dramatic storm, to describe the letters the crew write to their loved ones back home i.e. shows the effect (or lack of effect) on people far removed from the central drama, same here.

The sinking of the Sofala is described with uncharacteristic brevity and then the last three pages of the text cut to its impact on two others. First, Mr Van Wyk. When the Sofala doesn’t return a month later he immediately intuits that he’ll never see it again. A few weeks later he travels to the Sofala‘s port of registration and hears about the board of enquiry and official decision that she was carried onto the reefs by freak currents.

He bumps into Stern by accident, who tells him that Massy got his insurance money, all the time babbling about a new ship, but as soon as he had the cash in hand, caught a ship to Manilla where, the reader knows, he will squander it all playing the lottery. Stern also tells him that Whalley made a conscious decision to go down with the ship, he could have easily jumped and they would have pulled him aboard the lifeboat. He wanted to die though Stern has no idea why. Only the reader knows the full story.

Second, the famous daughter, Ivy, whose wellbeing Whalley has obsessed about all through the story. She receives a letter from Whalley’s lawyer informing her of her father’s death, and including a letter from him. In this he says that, if she’s reading it he must be dead. He always did his best for her. He reveals he is going blind. God seems to have forgotten him. He did so want to see her one last time but his death is probably best for everyone.

And then the story ends very beautifully by dwelling on this daughter. She is thin-faced, pinched and worn with cares. Her husband is upstairs in his wheelchair. The kids are at school. She doesn’t cry. She leans her head against the window. On one level Conrad, by letting us see the dry narrow worn life she now leads, begs the obvious question: was Whalley’s devotion to her really worth it? Did he make very much difference to her tough life?

And then Conrad writes a phrase which, as the father of a grown-up daughter, made me cry:

Even the image of her husband and of her children seemed to glide away from her into the gray twilight; it was her father’s face alone that she saw, as though he had come to see her, always quiet and big, as she had seen him last, but with something more august and tender in his aspect.

Big, reassuring, august and tender, God I hope I’ve been half as steadfast for my daughter as Captain Whalley.

1. Incommunication

All the characters struggle to communicate effectively, sometimes to talk at all. Whalley is, to put it mildly, not very talkative.

Good fellow – Harry Whalley – never very talkative. You never knew what he was up to – a bit too off-hand with people of consequence, and apt to take a wrong view of a fellow’s actions.

In the Sofala passages he makes a point of almost completely ignoring Massy’s whining. When he does reply it is in a ‘strange deep-toned voice’.

Massy only speaks in resentful murmurs and mutters but us characterised by repeated use of the word ‘whine’. He is a whiny little so-and-so.

Jack, the second engineer on the Safola, never talks to anyone; at best he hoots like an owl.

He was a middle-aged man with an inattentive manner, and apparently wrapped up in such a taciturn concern for his engines that he seemed to have lost the use of speech. When addressed directly his only answer would be a grunt or a hoot, according to the distance. For all the years he had been in the Sofala he had never been known to exchange as much as a frank good morning with any of his shipmates.

Except when he gets drunk, when he goes to the opposite extreme, from taciturn to overflowing with a multitude of voices:

Twice or perhaps three times in the course of the year he would take too much to drink. On these occasions he returned on board at an earlier hour than usual; ran across the deck balancing himself with his spread arms like a tight-rope walker; and locking the door of his cabin, he would converse and argue with himself the livelong night in an amazing variety of tones; storm, sneer, and whine with an inexhaustible persistence.

Mr Van Wyk: ‘When absolutely forced to speak he gave evasive vaguely soothing answers out of pure compassion.’ ‘The gleam of low patent shoes peeping under the wide bottom of trowsers cut straight from the same stuff as the gossamer coat, completed a figure recalling, with its sash, a pirate chief of romance, and at the same time the elegance of a slightly bald dandy indulging, in seclusion, a taste for unorthodox costume.’

Ivy By contrast with all these surly men, Whalley has a special relationship with his daughter, in which much doesn’t need to be said, proving that the deepest bonds often go too deep for words, words aren’t necessary, in fact words expressed in writing or speech often get in the way of the deeper understanding.

The ‘natives’

Much the largest gap in communication is, of course, between the white men and the different types of ‘native’, mostly either Malay or Chinese. And by further contrast, the Serang, the old Malay who steers the ship, finds white people inexplicable – which raises the larger issue of the enormous communication gulf between white or Western men, and all types of ‘natives’.

Incomprehension

A pause as of extreme astonishment followed. They both seemed to have lost their tongues… Massy seemed dazed, uncomprehending.

An incomprehensible growl answered him… (p.155)

And the upshot of everyone’s inability to talk or communication, is mutual incomprehension. Talk a lot or a little, shout or murmur, whine or command, in the end it barely matters because nothing anyone says can reduce the iron walls of incomprehension everyone is trapped behind.

A pause as of extreme astonishment followed. They both seemed to have lost their tongues… Massy seemed dazed, uncomprehending.

He [Whalley] remained incomprehensible in his simplicity, fearlessness, and rectitude.

I’ve mentioned the habit of Jack the second engineer of getting drunk and then overflowing with voices. But Conrad uses the passage to highlight, yet again, the way these drunken rants make hardly any difference to the Malays who find everything about the white man incomprehensible.

Outside the solitary lascar told off for night duty in harbour, perhaps a youth fresh from a forest village, would stand motionless in the shadows of the deck listening to the endless drunken gabble. His heart would be thumping with breathless awe of white men: the arbitrary and obstinate men who pursue inflexibly their incomprehensible purposes – beings with weird intonations in the voice, moved by unaccountable feelings, actuated by inscrutable motives.

Everyone is trapped in their silo, unable to understand or even hear each other’s wishes.

The rather opaque ending with the daughter in faraway Melbourne opening the letter from her dead father subtly begs, raises, juggles this issue because, in the end, did father and daughter understand each other? Conrad’s phrasing is ambiguous to allow of both a yes and a no to that question.

Vivid turns of phrase

It’s one of the ironies of Conrad’s writing that a man so obsessed with people’s failures to communicate was himself prone to unstoppable eloquence and loquacity. Some contemporaries criticised him for being long-winded, windy and verbose. This may or may not be true, depending on whether you enjoy his repetitive, incantatory style. Certainly all of Conrad’s (early) stories are full of descriptions which are as lush and beautiful as the English language allows:

The slight quiver agitating the whole fabric of the ship was more perceptible in the silent river, shaded and still like a forest path. The Sofala, gliding with an even motion, had passed beyond the coast-belt of mud and mangroves. The shores rose higher, in firm sloping banks, and the forest of big trees came down to the brink. Where the earth had been crumbled by the floods it showed a steep brown cut, denuding a mass of roots intertwined as if wrestling underground; and in the air, the interlaced boughs, bound and loaded with creepers, carried on the struggle for life, mingled their foliage in one solid wall of leaves, with here and there the shape of an enormous dark pillar soaring, or a ragged opening, as if torn by the flight of a cannonball, disclosing the impenetrable gloom within, the secular inviolable shade of the virgin forest. The thump of the engines reverberated regularly like the strokes of a metronome beating the measure of the vast silence, the shadow of the western wall had fallen across the river, and the smoke pouring backwards from the funnel eddied down behind the ship, spread a thin dusky veil over the sombre water, which, checked by the flood-tide, seemed to lie stagnant in the whole straight length of the reaches.

It’s long, langorous, sensual descriptions like this which led Conrad to be described as an ‘impressionist’, along with comments in his various prefaces where he explicitly says his aim is to make the reader see and feel and smell the scenery.

But also, alongside the lush landscapes, and the passages of trouble dialogue, Conrad regularly slips in a really vivid metaphor or simile, something out of left-field which makes your jaw drop:

The sun had set. And when, after drilling a deep hole with his stick, [Captain Whalley] moved from that spot the night had massed its army of shadows under the trees. They filled the eastern ends of the avenues as if only waiting the signal for a general advance upon the open spaces of the world… (p.76)

‘Sofala,’ articulated Captain Whalley from above; and the Chinaman, a new emigrant probably, stared upwards with a tense attention as if waiting to see the queer word fall visibly from the white man’s lips. (p.77)

Conrad’s cosmic vision

All these stories contain moments when Conrad’s vision leaves the dull earth and wheels off into space, invoking cosmic visions, invoking the planet or the universe on a scale which, to me, have a slight science fiction tinge.

The perspiration poured from under his hat as if a second sun had suddenly blazed up at the zenith by the side of the ardent still globe already there, in whose blinding white heat the earth whirled and shone like a mote of dust. (p.87)

Their ears caught the panting of that ship; their eyes followed her till she passed between the two capes of the mainland going at full speed as though she hoped to make her way unchecked into the very bosom of the earth.

It was as if nobody could talk like this now, and the overshadowed eyes, the flowing white beard, the big frame, the serenity, the whole temper of the man, were an amazing survival from the prehistoric times of the world coming up to him out of the sea. (p.132)

In the steadily darkening universe a sinister clearness fell upon his ideas. In the illuminating moments of suffering he saw life, men, all things, the whole earth with all her burden of created nature, as he had never seen them before. (p.160)

It’s a consistent aspect of his work. Compare this, from Heart of Darkness:

We were wanderers on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet.

History

Changing patterns of sea trade

The piercing of the Isthmus of Suez, like the breaking of a dam, had let in upon the East a flood of new ships, new men, new methods of trade. It had changed the face of the Eastern seas and the very spirit of their life; so that his early experiences meant nothing whatever to the new generation of seamen.

These were the halcyon days of steam coasting trade, before some of the home shipping firms had thought of establishing local fleets to feed their main lines. These, when once organized, took the biggest slices out of that cake, of course; and by-and-by a squad of confounded German tramps turned up east of Suez Canal and swept up all the crumbs. They prowled on the cheap to and fro along the coast and between the islands, like a lot of sharks in the water ready to snap up anything you let drop. And then the high old times were over for good…’ (p.72)

‘If he misses a couple more trips he need never trouble himself to start again. He won’t find any cargo in his old trade. There’s too much competition nowadays for people to keep their stuff lying about for a ship that does not turn up when she’s expected.’ (p.73)

‘The earth is big,’ he said vaguely…
‘Doesn’t seem to be so much room on it,’ growled the Master-Attendant, ‘since these Germans came along shouldering us at every turn. It was not so in our time…’ (p.75)

Remembering the early days of Singapore

Captain Whalley, who had now no ship and no home, remembered in passing that on that very site when he first came out from England there had stood a fishing village, a few mat huts erected on piles between a muddy tidal creek and a miry pathway that went writhing into a tangled wilderness without any docks or waterworks.

He remembered muddy shores, a harbour without quays, the one solitary wooden pier (but that was a public work) jutting out crookedly, the first coal-sheds erected on Monkey Point, that caught fire mysteriously and smouldered for days, so that amazed ships came into a roadstead full of sulphurous smoke, and the sun hung blood-red at midday. He remembered the things, the faces, and something more besides – like the faint flavor of a cup quaffed to the bottom, like a subtle sparkle of the air that was not to be found in the atmosphere of to-day.

Credit

The End of the Tether by Joseph Conrad was first published in Blackwood’s Magazine in 1902. Page references are to the 1975 penguin Modern Classics paperback edition which also contains ‘Youth and The End of the Tether’.

Related links

Conrad reviews

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Posted by Simon on December 4, 2024

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An Ideal Husband by Oscar Wilde (1895)

After the country setting of ‘A Woman of No Importance’, Wilde’s third social comedy is set firmly back in the heart of London’s High Society. The four acts alternate in setting between Sir Robert Chiltern’s House in Grosvenor Square and Lord Goring’s House in Curzon Street (0.4 miles and 5 minutes walk apart according to Google Maps) and the society it satirises and the values it mocks are just as circumscribed and limited. And it’s barely started before he is mocking his audience, London high society:

MABEL CHILTERN: Oh, I love London Society! I think it has immensely improved. It is entirely composed now of beautiful idiots and brilliant lunatics. Just what Society should be.

London ‘Society’ continues to be mocked and satirised by various characters but, despite the incessant raillery, ‘An Ideal Husband’, like all the other plays, fundamentally accepts this class and its values as the premise of the story and setting.

Plot summary

Act 1. The Octagon Room in Sir Robert Chiltern’s house in Grosvenor Square

Sir Robert Chiltern is a Member of Parliament (MP) and junior government minister and his wife, the upstanding Lady Chiltern, are hosting a party. Leading guests are the dandified Wilde avatar, Lord Goring, Chiltern’s sister Mabel, and other guests.

Storming into the party is the smooth-talking, suave but genuinely malevolent Mrs Cheveley. Lady Chiltern recognises her from her schooldays when Mrs C was expelled. Nothing has changed and she waits till she gets Sir Robert alone before bluntly blackmailing him. Mrs Cheveley and colleagues have invested in a blatantly fraudulent scheme to build a canal in Argentina. Sir Robert has been notable for opposing any British involvement in it on the basis of a parliamentary report he’s commissioned (‘a commonplace Stock Exchange swindle.’). Now Mrs Cheveley wants him to completely reverse his position, suppress the report and say he is in favour of the canal!

Obviously Sir Robert refuses to do so which is when Mrs C pull out her blackmailing threat. Turns out that Sir Robert’s vast wealth, name, reputation and influence all stem from a bad thing he did 20 years ago, back at the start of his career. He learned a Cabinet secret – that the British government was about to purchase the Suez Canal company and tipped off a stockbroker acquaintance of his, Baron Arnheim. The Baron bought shares which the British government then purchased at a much higher price, making the Baron three-quarters of a million pounds, of which he gave Sir Robert £110,000, enough capital to commence speculations of his own which brought him to his present dizzy wealth.

Anyway, Mrs Cheveley has a copy of Sir Robert’s letter to Arnheim, shows it to Sir Robert, and threatens to make it public unless he does what she wants. Not only will it ruin him, lose him his job in government, possibly lead to criminal proceedings – but will lose him the love of his life, his upright, morally unbending wife. He has no choice, he has to agree, and Mrs Cheveley leaves the party with his promise to suppress the report.

However, spurred on by Lady Chiltern’s earlier rudeness towards her, Mrs Cheveley cannot resist telling her (Lady Chiltern) about her husband’s sudden change of heart about the canal scheme. When the guests have gone and they are alone, Lady Chiltern confronts her husband with it and, blithely unaware of both her husband’s past and Mrs Cheveley’s blackmail plot, insists that Sir Robert goes back on his promise to her. In fact she stands over him and watches him write the letter doing so which she then summons one of the servants to deliver to Mrs Cheveley’s hotel.

And here is the crux of the play: for Lady Chiltern her husband is ‘an ideal husband’, a model partner in both public and private life who she can trust and worship with no reservations.

Now so far I’ve given the impression that the play is a tragic melodrama but, of course, it’s anything but, seeing as how it’s festooned with witty banter and sparkling repartee, mostly thanks to the Wilde avatar in the play, witty Lord Goring, especially when he is sparring with Sir Robert’s sister, clever young Mabel Chiltern (very similar to the way the Wilde avatar in the previous play, ‘A Woman of No Importance’, Lord Illingworth, fenced with his female equivalent, Mrs Allonby).

In addition there are, as in the previous plays, three or four other guests, mostly older ladies – Lady Markby and Mrs Marchmont, generically referred to as ‘the dowagers’ – who are comic in their own right:

MRS CHEVELEY: Wonderful woman, Lady Markby, isn’t she? Talks more and says less than anybody I ever met.

LADY MARKBY: I don’t think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it? With regard to women, well, dear Gertrude, you belong to the younger generation, and I am sure it is all right if you approve of it. In my time, of course, we were taught not to understand anything. That was the old system, and wonderfully interesting it was. I assure you that the amount of things I and my poor dear sister were taught not to understand was quite extraordinary. But modern women understand everything, I am told.

But these old buffers also act as foils to the ‘amoral’ and ‘shocking’ and oh-so-modern Lord Goring (‘Young people nowadays, I don’t understand a word they say’ etc). Plus the comic figure of the absurd Vicomte de Nanjac, French Attaché.

Back to the plot, towards the end of the party had been verbally sparring when she spots a diamond brooch one of the guests has left on the sofa. Lord Goring asks for it and puts it away in his pocket, explaining that he gave it to someone many years ago, and asking Mabel to inform him if anyone comes back to the house to retrieve it.

Aha! Could the lost brooch by any chance turn out to be the solution to Sir Robert’s dilemma?!

Act 2. Morning room in Sir Robert Chiltern’s house

Next morning Lord Goring is round at Sir Robert’s house, being surprisingly earnest and supportive for such a ‘dandy’, telling him to fight Mrs Cheveley and admit his guilt to his wife. During the conversation Goring also reveals that he and Mrs Cheveley were once engaged, in a characteristically droll way:

SIR ROBERT CHILTON: Did you know her well?
LORD GORING: [Arranging his necktie.] So little that I got engaged to be married to her once, when I was staying at the Tenbys’. The affair lasted for three days…nearly.

He tells Lord Chiltern to telegraph the British embassy in Vienna (where Mrs Cheveley lives) to see if they know any dirt about her. But his efforts to persuade Lord Chiltern to do come clean to his wife fail – the latter is too afraid of losing the only woman he’s ever loved.

After finishing his conversation with Chiltern, Goring indulges in more flirtatious banter with young Mabel. Then, when she exits for some reason, finding himself alone with Lady Chiltern, Lord Goring does a very decent thing and tries to urge her to less morally inflexible and more forgiving. Since it’s the core of the play (and, possibly of Wilde’s work as a whole) it’s worth quoting in full:

LORD GORING: Lady Chiltern, I have sometimes thought that . . . perhaps you are a little hard in some of your views on life. I think that . . . often you don’t make sufficient allowances. In every nature there are elements of weakness, or worse than weakness. Supposing, for instance, that – that any public man, my father, or Lord Merton, or Robert, say, had, years ago, written some foolish letter to some one…
LADY CHILTERN: What do you mean by a foolish letter?
LORD GORING: A letter gravely compromising one’s position. I am only putting an imaginary case.
LADY CHILTERN: Robert is as incapable of doing a foolish thing as he is of doing a wrong thing.
LORD GORING: [After a long pause.] Nobody is incapable of doing a foolish thing. Nobody is incapable of doing a wrong thing.
LADY CHILTERN: Are you a Pessimist? What will the other dandies say? They will all have to go into mourning.
LORD GORING: [Rising.] No, Lady Chiltern, I am not a Pessimist. Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

Lord Goring leaves, having offered both Lord and Lady Chiltern his help. After some comic chat between Lady C and Mabel about the man who keeps proposing to her, one Tommy Trafford, they are interrupted by the return of Mrs Cheveley accompanied by the bufferish Lady Markby. They finally get rid of Lady M, at which point Lady Chiltern coldly tells Mrs C it was she who made her husband write the latter the night before.

At which point Mrs Cheverley brutally exposes Sir Robert’s secret to his wife, telling her all about the act of betrayal and corruption which made him his fortune and began his public career – with the result that  Lady Chiltern orders the servants to more or less kick her out. Left alone, Lady Chiltern begs her husband to tell her it is not true:

LADY CHILTERN: You sold a Cabinet secret for money! You began your life with fraud! You built up your career on dishonour! Oh, tell me it is not true! Lie to me! Lie to me! Tell me it is not true!

But Sir Robert cannot tell a lie, tells her it is all true, this crushing her worship of him, thus wrecking their marriage, for she denounces her husband and refuses to forgive him. At which point Lord Chiltern delivers another iteration of the play’s moral:

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: There was your mistake. There was your error. The error all women commit. Why can’t you women love us, faults and all? Why do you place us on monstrous pedestals? We have all feet of clay, women as well as men; but when we men love women, we love them knowing their weaknesses, their follies, their imperfections, love them all the more, it may be, for that reason. It is not the perfect, but the imperfect, who have need of love. It is when we are wounded by our own hands, or by the hands of others, that love should come to cure us – else what use is love at all? All sins, except a sin against itself, Love should forgive.

Act 3. The library of Lord Goring’s house in Curzon Street

There’s a lot of hectic coming and going in this scene. It opens with Lord Goring doing the Wilde avatar thing with his monosyllabic manservant, Phipps.

LORD GORING: Other people are quite dreadful. The only possible society is oneself.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.
LORD GORING: To love oneself is the beginning of a lifelong romance, Phipps.
PHIPPS: Yes, my lord.

Lord Goring receives a letter from Lady Chiltern who, having learned about her husband’s error, wants to take him up on his offer of support. This letter is, however, ambiguously worded:

‘I want you. I trust you. I am coming to you. Gertrude.’

So he expects her to arrive at any minute and tells the servants to take her into his drawing room. Instead the master and servant banter is interrupted by the arrival of Lord Goring’s father, Lord Caversham. The old man makes a sustained attack on Lord G, telling him he must get married.

While he’s getting rid of his father, instead of Lady Chiltern, Mrs Cheveley arrives and, as arranged, is shown into Lord Goring’s drawing room. Lord Goring manages to get ride of his father but, on the doorstep of the apartment, as Lord Caversham is leaving, Sir Robert arrives. He has come to tell Lord Goring that his wife knows everything and beg for his help.

While Chiltern and Goring converse in another room, Mrs Cheveley finds Lady Chiltern’s letter open on a table before sneaking back into the drawing room. The two men come back onto the main stage and it is here that Sir Robert overhears a chair being banged in the drawing room and realises that someone is there! Someone has been eavesdropping while he pours his heart out! He makes Goring swear on his word of honour that there is no-one in there, but nonetheless storms in and, of course, sees Mrs Cheveley.

He comes out onto the main stage disgusted with Lord Goring who a) lied to him on his word of honour and b) he jumps to the conclusion is having an affair with the woman. Lord Goring, still under the misapprehension it is Lady Chiltern in the other room, makes a series of claims which are either comic or tragic, depending on how it is acted, claiming that the woman in there is blameless and loves him dearly.

Outraged, Sir Robert storms out at which point Mrs Cheveley enters the main room with a broad smile on her face. They revert to Wildean banter:

LORD GORING: I am glad you have called. I am going to give you some good advice.
MRS CHEVELEY: Oh! pray don’t. One should never give a woman anything that she can’t wear in the evening.

Lord Chiltern discovers Mrs Cheveley in the drawing room and, convinced the two former lovers must be having an affair, he storms out of the house.

When Mrs Cheveley and Lord Goring confront each other, she makes a proposal. Claiming to still love Goring from their early days of courtship, she offers to exchange Chiltern’s letter for Goring’s hand in marriage. Lord Goring declines, accusing her of defiling love by reducing courtship to a vulgar transaction. Also, he can only despise her for evilly wishing to ruin the Chilterns’ marriage.

Then two dramatic things. 1) Mrs Cheveley says she never went back to the Chilterns’ house to taunt Lady Chiltern, but simply to retrieve the brooch she thought she must have lost there. This reminds Goring that it is in his possession and he takes it out. He charmingly points out that it can also be used as a bracelet and slips it onto Mrs Cheveley’s arm where it clicks fast. It is now that he reveals his plan. He reveals that he recognises this brooch because ten years earlier he gave it to his cousin, Mary Berkshire. At a country house weekend it went missing, presumed stolen, and the finger of blame pointed at a servant who was sacked. Now he has the evidence that Mrs Cheveley stole it. He is going to get his servant to call the police and present Mrs Cheveley with the incriminating bracelet on her arm. Furiously, she tries to claw it off but Lord Goring says it has a hidden spring which only he knows how to operate. He will remove the bracelet if she gives him Sir Robert’s letter. At first she refuses but then gives up, hands it over, Lord Goring burns it and then unclips the bracelet. Phew. Everything sorted, right?

BUT 2) earlier Mrs C had spotted Lady Chiltern’s note to Goring and, while he is offstage instructing his servants, she steals it from his desk. When he returns, she announces that she has it and plans to take revenge on Lord G by presenting it to Sir Robert as a love letter from Lady Chiltern to Goring. Goring tries to grab it back but a servant enters and one does not argue in front of the servants. And so Mrs Cheveley exits the house in triumph.

Act 4. Back to the morning room in Sir Robert Chiltern’s house

Lord Goring is at Sir Robert’s house, waiting to see any of the family but they are all busy.

His father arrives and 1) there is the paternal badgering of him to get married; Goring jokes that he will be engaged by lunchtime which his father doesn’t know is a joke or not. But 2) his father brings a copy of the Times which reports Sir Robert’s speech in the House of Commons the night before, a thundering attack on the Argentine canal scheme and modern finance in general.

Mabel Chiltern arrives from her ride in the Park, the one which Lord Goring absolutely positively promised to meet her for and she comically ignores him for a while before relenting into banter. He announces that he is finally going to propose to her which she turns into banter by pointing out that it’s her second proposition that morning since Tommy Trafford has already made one.

MABEL CHILTERN: It is one of Tommy’s days for proposing. He always proposes on Tuesdays and Thursdays, during the Season.

Lady Chiltern appears, and Lord Goring tells her that Chiltern’s letter has been destroyed but that Mrs Cheveley has stolen her note and plans to use it to destroy her marriage. They are just planning how to get his secretaries to intercept the letter (written on pink paper) before it gets to Sir Robert when he enters reading it.

At that moment Lord Chiltern enters while reading Lady Chiltern’s letter, but as the letter does not have the name of the addressee he is assuming it was meant for him, and reads it as a letter of forgiveness. The two are reconciled. (To be honest I was expecting a lot more complication to be caused by this letter. All the possible complications it could have caused seem to be conveniently swept under the carpet.)

This leaves one last Big Issue, which is whether Sir Robert should remain in public life. He tentatively suggests to his wife that, although the evidence against him has been destroyed, maybe he should leave public life to which she replies: ‘Oh yes, Robert, you should do that. It is your duty to do that.’

With heavy dramatic irony it is at this moment that Lord Goring’s father, the egregious Lord Caversham appears again, having come hot foot from Number Ten bringing news that the Prime Minister has offered him a seat in the cabinet! He is astonished, thrilled and then…downcast, as he catches Lady Chiltern’s look. Very reluctantly he tells Caversham he will have to reject the offer and that he is giving up public life and goes into another room to write his letter of refusal.

Which, of course, allows Lord Goring to deliver a long speech saying forcing her husband to quit public life will not only ruin his life but kill his love for her, ruining both their lives. But he actually couches his argument in stupefyingly sexist terms:

LORD GORING: A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s. It has larger issues, wider scope, greater ambitions. A woman’s life revolves in curves of emotions. It is upon lines of intellect that a man’s life progresses.

Which is why she must forgive him, because women must forgive their men.

LORD GORING: Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission.

As I’m always saying, the provocative paradoxes in some of the banter, the slightly camp attitude of some of the men, none of that supposedly ‘transgressive’ discourse can hold a candle to the thumpingly sexist, gender stereotyping which the plots of the plays absolutely rely on. Suffice to say that when Lord Chiltern re-enters the room, Lady Chiltern has changed her mind and tells him to remain in public life directly quoting Goring’s ‘A man’s life is of more value than a woman’s’ speech.

Right. So everything’s sorted, is it? Not quite. One last issue. Lord Chiltern has barely finished thanking Lord Goring for saving his career and his marriage, when Goring follows up by asking for his sister (Mabel)’s hand in marriage. To everyone’s surprise Sir Robert refuses! Why? Because he still thinks that he discovered Mrs Cheveley in Goring’s rooms at 10.30 last night (the lateness of the hour is crucial and is referred to by all the characters as the clinching argument) because they are still in love.

When Goring denies this, Sir Robert doesn’t believe him. It takes Lady Chiltern to overcome her scruples and reticence and confess to her husband that it was she who planned to visit Lord Goring to ask his help about what to do in her marriage, and that Lord Goring honestly thought he had her waiting in his drawing room, which is why he said those absurdly inappropriate things about Mrs Cheveley. This has the incidental effect of making clear that the letter on pink paper wasn’t a loving reconciliation addressed to Lord Chiltern but a cry for help addressed to Lord Goring.

Anyway, this sufficiently explains Goring’s behaviour the night before and Sir Robert smiling relents and awards Goring his sister’s hand. So, to conclude:

  • Lord and Lady Chiltern are reconciled and now live on a new, more realistic basic to their marriage in which both recognise the frailties and fallibility of the other
  • Mabel and Goring are engaged to be married
  • Lord Caversham is delighted that his son is finally doing the right thing
  • and lunch is served, a pale echo of the feasts which ended comic plays from the time of the ancient Greeks

The old couple reconciled, the young couple newly engaged. What could be more thumpingly conventional?

The journey from rectitude to sympathy

The moral storyline is the same as the previous two. A woman of rigorous, unbending, inflexible moral rectitude is forced to realise, through her own suffering, that people are more complicated, more fallible, and more deserving of understanding, compassion and sympathy, than she previously thought.

In the ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ and ‘A Woman of No Importance’ the stern unbending female moralists were Lady Windermere and the young American, Miss Worsley. In this play it is stern Lady Chiltern:

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: Lord My wife! Never! She does not know what weakness or temptation is. I am of clay like other men. She stands apart as good women do – pitiless in her perfection – cold and stern and without mercy.

It is Lady Chiltern who must learn to abandon her unbending morality and forgive her husband. The author’s message is delivered by the Wilde avatar in the play, raffish Lord Goring.

LORD GORING: No, Lady Chiltern, I am not a Pessimist. Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

And:

LORD GORING: Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission.

When you know how his own marriage was wrecked by the trial which revealed his secret gay life, it’s is hard not to be distressed at how little the charity and forgiveness promoted in his plays were available in his own tragic fall.

Wilde avatars

In all of these stories there is one male character who echoes, mimics or acts as the Wilde surrogate, or as the figure Wilde would like to be, so I call him the Wilde avatar, avatar being a Sanskrit word which means ‘an incarnation, embodiment, or manifestation of a person or idea’, and so the embodiment, in the plays, of the ideal Wilde protagonist:

  • in his 30s (and so younger than Wilde, who turned 40 in 1894)
  • a genuine member of the aristocracy
  • an unattached man-about-town with a reputation for ‘wickedness’ i.e. saying the most outrageous things (not actual wickedness)
  • rich and idle
  • overflowing with witty and ‘shockingly’ unconventional repartee

These avatars are:

  • The Picture of Dorian Gray – Lord Henry Wotton
  • Lady Windermere’s Fan – Lord Darlington
  • A Woman of No Importance – Lord Illingworth
  • An Ideal Husband – Lord Goring
  • The Importance of Being Earnest – Jack Worthing

Apparently, Wilde added the elaborate stage directions and character descriptions after the play had been premiered. He really goes to town with the description of Lord Goring at the start of Act 3:

Enter Lord Goring in evening dress with a buttonhole. He is wearing a silk hat and Inverness cape. White-gloved, he carries a Louis Seize cane. His are all the delicate fopperies of Fashion. One sees that he stands in immediate relation to modern life, makes it indeed, and so masters it. He is the first well-dressed philosopher in the history of thought.

Apothegms, one-liners, facetious remarks and

As I worked my way through the third Wilde play it struck me that the banter sometimes descends to pointless wittering welded onto a plot of stock melodrama (husband’s dark secret revealed to noble wife), something many critics pointed out at the time (I particularly like the contemporary critic William Archer’s view that ‘An Ideal Husband…simply suffers from a disproportionate profusion of inferior chatter’).

However, in a good production in the theatre, the welter of one-liners and bons mots – if well delivered – can carry the audience along, especially the repartee between witty Lord Goring and his sparring partner and beloved, clever young Mabel Chiltern.

Mocking their own high society milieu

LADY MARKBY: Ah, nowadays people marry as often as they can, don’t they? It is most fashionable.

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: She looks like a woman with a past, doesn’t she?
LORD GORING: Most pretty women do. But there is a fashion in pasts just as there is a fashion in frocks.

Politics

LADY MARKBY: Sir John’s temper since he has taken seriously to politics has become quite unbearable. Really, now that the House of Commons is trying to become useful, it does a great deal of harm.

LADY MARKBY: Really, this horrid House of Commons quite ruins our husbands for us. I think the Lower House by far the greatest blow to a happy married life that there has been since that terrible thing called the Higher Education of Women was invented.
MRS CHEVELEY: The higher education of men is what I should like to see. Men need it so sadly.
LADY MARKBY: They do, dear. But I am afraid such a scheme would be quite unpractical. I don’t think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it?

The importance of artifice

SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: May I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions left to us nowadays.
MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, I’m neither. Optimism begins in a broad grin, and Pessimism ends with blue spectacles. Besides, they are both of them merely poses.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You prefer to be natural?
MRS CHEVELEY: Sometimes. But it is such a very difficult pose to keep up.

Casual mockery of expected sentiments

In this case sending up the Victorian expectation of filial piety.

LORD GORING: Really, I don’t want to meet my father three days running. It is a great deal too much excitement for any son. I hope to goodness he won’t come up. Fathers should be neither seen nor heard. That is the only proper basis for family life. Mothers are different. Mothers are darlings.

Men and women aka gender stereotyping

As I’ve noted in the first two plays, it is ironic that this hero of the LGBTQIA+ movement (which has made such efforts to question, undermine and subvert gender stereotypes) relies so heavily in these plays on the stereotyping of men and women in both the plot itself and in the endless conversation gambits  based on sweeping generalisations about men and women, husbands and wives – what often feels like endless riffing off utterly conventional stereotypes, that there are two genders, that they behave like this, think like this, and so on.

MRS CHEVELEY: Ah! the strength of women comes from the fact that psychology cannot explain us. Men can be analysed, women . . . merely adored.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: You think science cannot grapple with the problem of women?
MRS CHEVELEY: Science can never grapple with the irrational. That is why it has no future before it, in this world.
SIR ROBERT CHILTERN: And women represent the irrational?
MRS CHEVELEY: Well-dressed women do.

LORD GORING: No man should have a secret from his own wife. She invariably finds it out. Women have a wonderful instinct about things. They can discover everything except the obvious.

MRS CHEVELEY: My dear Arthur, women are never disarmed by compliments. Men always are. That is the difference between the two sexes.
LORD GORING: Women are never disarmed by anything, as far as I know them.

MRS CHEVELEY: Oh, there is only one real tragedy in a woman’s life. The fact that her past is always her lover, and her future invariably her husband.

Husbands and wives

LADY MARKBY: They do, dear. But I am afraid such a scheme would be quite unpractical. I don’t think man has much capacity for development. He has got as far as he can, and that is not far, is it? With regard to women, well, dear Gertrude, you belong to the younger generation, and I am sure it is all right if you approve of it. In my time, of course, we were taught not to understand anything. That was the old system, and wonderfully interesting it was. I assure you that the amount of things I and my poor dear sister were taught not to understand was quite extraordinary. But modern women understand everything, I am told.
MRS CHEVELEY: Except their husbands. That is the one thing the modern woman never understands.
LADY MARKBY: And a very good thing too, dear, I dare say. It might break up many a happy home if they did.

You don’t have to be non-binary to find this kind of thing gets pretty wearing, pretty quickly.

Lord Goring, the Wilde avatar, posing as a wicked man

MABEL CHILTERN: How very selfish of you!
LORD GORING: I am very selfish.
MABEL CHILTERN: You are always telling me of your bad qualities, Lord Goring.
LORD GORING: I have only told you half of them as yet, Miss Mabel!
MABEL CHILTERN: Are the others very bad?
LORD GORING: Quite dreadful! When I think of them at night I go to sleep at once.

LORD GORING: My father told me to go to bed an hour ago. I don’t see why I shouldn’t give you the same advice. I always pass on good advice. It is the only thing to do with it. It is never of any use to oneself.

LORD CAVERSHAM: Do you always really understand what you say, sir?
LORD GORING: [After some hesitation.] Yes, father, if I listen attentively.

A basic conceit repeated at:

LORD CAVERSHAM: Humph! Never know when you are serious or not.
LORD GORING: Neither do I, father.

Why this is tiresome is that Lord Goring perfectly well does know when he’s being serious. When he makes his plea to lady Chiltern to forgive her husband and let him continue his public career, he is very consciously serious. This ‘I never know when I’m being serious’ trope is just a joke or a pose, which is dropped the second it has to be.

Author’s message

Same message as in ‘Lady Windermere’s Fan’ and ‘A Woman of No Importance’, in both of which the stern unbending moralist (Lady Windermere and Miss Worsley) is taught compassion and forgiveness by realising their own fallibility. In this case it is stern unbending Lady Chiltern who must learn to abandon her unbending morality and forgive her husband, who learns that love is not holding people accountable to the highest standards, but forgiving people for their weakness and sins.

LORD GORING: No, Lady Chiltern, I am not a Pessimist. Indeed I am not sure that I quite know what Pessimism really means. All I do know is that life cannot be understood without much charity, cannot be lived without much charity. It is love, and not German philosophy, that is the true explanation of this world, whatever may be the explanation of the next.

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Going Solo by Roald Dahl (1986)

What a fortunate fellow I am, I kept telling myself. Nobody has ever had such a lovely time as this!
(Going Solo, page 92)

In my simplicity I had thought that Going Solo was an account of Roald Dahl’s time in the RAF in Africa; I hadn’t realised it is simply the continuation of his autobiography, which had begun with Boy: Tales from Childhood (1984), that it picks up precisely where that book ended, and that the RAF memoirs form only a part of the book.

To be precise, the text starts with Dahl setting off in 1938 at the age of 22 for his first job, a three-year contract with the Shell Oil company in East Africa. Little did he or anyone else know that the Second World War would break out only a year later and that Dahl would volunteer for, and be accepted into, the Royal Air Force.

The book therefore falls naturally into two halves: his experiences as a civilian in East Africa and the RAF period. This latter can itself be sub-divided into half a dozen or so parts:

  • training in Nairobi
  • more training in Iraq
  • his crash in the North African desert and the long hospitalisation and recovery which followed
  • fully recovered and returned to service for aerial combat in Greece
  • aerial combat over Vichy Syria

Before he becomes increasingly incapacitated by blinding headaches and is invalided home, arriving back at his mum’s house three years after he left, and that’s where the narrative ends.

I also hadn’t expected it to be a children’s book. Even Dahl’s ‘grown-up’ stories have an element of cartoon simplicity about them. They tend to be packed with eccentric characters who perform grotesque actions except that, in the ‘adult’ books, in the Tales of the Unexpected stories or a book like Uncle Oswald, these often involve sex. In this book there are, as you would expect, quite a few deaths, some pretty gruesome. And yet the same cartoon simplicity, the noticing of odd characters with silly names, the sense that situations and people are rounded and simple, is basically the same as he uses in his famous children’s books, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Twits and so on.

Thus the narrator of this book portrays himself as ‘a conventional young lad from the suburbs’ (p.3) and, in the Africa section especially, the main content focuses on the oddballs, eccentrics and freaks that he meets. This air of an innocent boy abroad in the crazy adult world is emphasised by two notable features of the text:

1. The way that each of the generally short chapters ends by including the text of one of the many, many letters he wrote home to his beloved Mother throughout the three year period, often repeating what we’ve just been told in the main text.

2. The photos. At various points Dahl tells us about cameras he’s bought (and which get stolen from him, as on a Greek airfield) and it’s clear he was a compulsive snapper. The book is liberally sprinkled with photos illustrating every step of his adventures, images which become increasingly dramatic when he sees action in Greece and which include photos of improvised airfields, crashed Messerschmitts and burned-out Hurricanes. The photos of him also bring out what a devilishly handsome young man he was, and freakishly tall, at a strapping six foot six.

Roald Dahl wearing flying helmet, goggles and scarf standing in front of a hedge

Roald Dahl aged 24 training to fly with the RAF in Nairobi

By ship to Tanganyika

In the opening chapters the narrator travels by ship, the SS Mantola, in the old, lazy style, across the Mediterranean, through the Suez Canal and into the Red Sea, but the focus isn’t on places and atmosphere or history. It is on the peculiar upper-class types who, back then, in the 1930s, ran the British Empire and were, without exception, ‘the craziest bunch of humans I shall ever meet’. There’s Major Griffiths and his wife who, every morning, run round the ship’s deck stark naked to keep fit; the elderly Miss Trefusis who eats fruit with a knife and fork so as to avoid the beastly germs on one’s fingers; Dahl’s cabin-mate, the improbably named U.N. Savory, manager of a cotton mill in the Punjab who, it turns out, is bald but wears a series of four wigs, each thicker and fuller than the one before, in order to give the impression his luxuriant black hair is growing, before its monthly trim, all to impress the Sikhs he employs.

  • On the SS Mantola just about everybody had his or her own particular maggot in the brain (p.3)
  • Everyone on this ship was dotty (p.12)
  • The man was as potty as a pilchard. (p.19)

These chaps and chapesses had generated a special lingo, a dialect incorporating numerous words from Swahili, Hindi and so on.

  • sundowner = evening drink
  • chota peg = drink at any other time of day
  • the memsahib = the wife
  • a shufti = a look around
  • shenzi = poor quality
  • tiffin = supper

Dahl arrives in Dar es Salaam, the Red Sea port of what was then Tanganyika and is now Tanzania, which he describes as made up of small white and yellow and pink buildings set on a sweeping bay of golden sand against luxuriant tropical jungle. Wow. Reminder that it is 1938, before the world was ruined by over-population, tourism and pollution. The whole book is like this, conveying a fairytale sense of wonder and joy at everything Dahl sees and everyone he meets, he is continually reflecting:

what a lucky young fellow I was to be seeing all these marvellous places free of charge and with a good job at the end of it. (p.23)

The clarity of his prose and the untroubled enthusiasm of his schoolboy mentality makes this an extremely enjoyable book to read. Coming from such a modest background he doesn’t feel any class entitlement to the wonders of the Empire but is continually amazed and astonished at it – precisely as a schoolboy traveller back in time from our day might be.

Working for Shell in Dar es Salaam

Thus he is amazed to discover the Shell office in Dar es Salaam is run by just three Englishmen but set in a grand villa with an astonishing cohort of native servants, a cook, a gardener, and a ‘boy’ each. He is a personal valet who looks after every aspect of your clothes and shoes and rooms etc, but in return you were expected to look after him, his wives (at least two) and children. Dahl’s ‘boy’ is Mdisho. Dahl describes how one day he saved their ‘shamba-boy’ Salimu from being bitten by a black mamba snake and thus secured his undying loyalty.

He gets to be driven all around Tanganyika, visiting Shell customers in a wide range of farms and businesses, and revelling in the scenery and the wildlife, which is described as a boy would describe the wonders of a zoo, for there are lions! and hippos! and elephants! and zebra! Apart from the snakes. Dahl hates snakes.

Oh, those snakes! How I hated them! (p.44)

He is taking a sundowner on the terrace of a district officer, Robert Sanford, and his wife when a servant comes running round the corner of the house yelling that a lion is carrying away the cook’s wife. Sanford grabs a gun and gives chase so we have the comic sight of the lion loping along with cook’s wife between his jaws, chased by the cook, chased at a distance by Sanford brandishing his rifle, followed by Dahl wondering what he’s doing. Sanford fires a shot into the ground ahead of the lion who turns round and, seeing all these humans chasing him, drops the cook’s wife and canters off into the jungle. The cook’s wife is perfectly unharmed and gets to her feet smiling, and the whole crew return to the house where another drink is served and the cook gets on with preparing dinner.

Can this possibly have happened? Surely not as pat and neatly as he describes. The book is like this all the way through, perceived, imagined and written in the style of a crisp, clean children’s book. But, regarding this particular story, he goes on to write that the story became a legend and he was eventually asked to write up his version for the local paper, the East African Standard which paid him £5, his first published work. So maybe it did happen.

But whereas events like this in the hands of, say, Hemingway would have become a gripping insight into the eternal contest between man and beast, or in the hands of Graham Greene would have had a much messier ending involving someone’s adultery and guilt – under Dahl’s light touch it becomes a neat children’s story with a happy ending.

War breaks out

After a few more colonial adventures (the main one featuring ‘the snake man’, i.e. a little old European who specialises in catching poisonous snakes as and when they enter people’s homes) the Second World War breaks out on page 66 of this 223-page edition i.e. about a third of the way through.

To Dahl’s horror, he is conscripted by the captain of the King’s African Regiment and put in charge of a platoon of native soldiers (‘askaris’), armed with rifles each and one machinegun. He tells us that, as it had originally been a German colony (‘German East Africa’) there are far more German citizens in Tanganyika than all other European nationalities put together, and the army officer expects that, as soon as war is declared, all the Germans will try to escape on the one road which heads south towards Portuguese East Africa (nowadays called Mozambique). Dahl is ordered to stop them, and send them back to Dar where the men will be interned in a camp for the duration and the women and children remain free.

So he heads south in a lorry full of askaris. Like so many inexperienced young officers he has to rely on the experience of his (black) sergeant, who tells him where to stop and how to set up a roadblock. They camp for the night and the platoon cook makes a delicious meal of boiled rice and bananas.

Next day they get a phone call telling them war has, indeed, been declared and later that morning a convoy of German citizens in cars and vans arrives at the roadblock. In this account the German men get out of their cars holding guns and a young inexperienced Dahl finds himself confronted by the bullish leader of the convoy who refuses to return. He tells his comrades to start dismantling the roadblock and points his gun directly at Dahl. At which point a single rifle shot rings out and the man’s head explodes, his body falling to the road like a puppet. Dahl’s askaris emerge from their hiding places and the civilians mutely put down their guns, get in their cars and turn round, to be escorted to the camp by his lorryload of native soldiers (pages 59 to 70).

The thing is, in a story Dahl wrote a decade earlier, Lucky Break (1977), the shooting doesn’t happen. The Germans meekly turn around and return to Dar. Is this later version the true, unabridged version of events? Or a deliberately more violent and garish version, reflecting the uninhibited nature of culture as a whole, which became steadily more interested in graphic violence from the 1970s onwards? Or an old man (Dahl was 70 when this memoir was published) enjoying giving his readers the shivers?

Dahl joins the RAF and trains

In December 1939 Dahl enrols in the RAF. His employer, Shell, release him and continue to pay his salary for the duration of his service (!).

Dahl gives a beautifully boyish description of the long solitary drive from Dar up to Nairobi in Kenya, stopping to marvel at giraffes and elephants.

At Nairobi he is quickly inducted and taught to fly a Tiger Moth, which you started by swinging the big wooden propeller by hand, making sure not to topple forwards because then it would chop your head off. The text radiates boyish glee in the macabre and violent.

How many young men, I kept telling myself, were lucky enough to be allowed to go whizzing and soaring through the sky above a country as beautiful as Kenya? (p.90)

Once he can fly he is sent by train to Kampala, flown to Cairo, which was lovely, and then on to Habbaniya in Iraq, ‘the most godforsaken hellhole in the whole world’ (p.94) where he spends six months, from 20 February to 20 August 1940 (p.98) training in Hawker Harts.

Finally he ‘gets his wings’ and is transferred to RAF Ismailia on the Suez Canal, and posted to 80 Squadron, who were flying Gladiators against the Italians in the Western Desert of Libya. He is boyishly fascinated by the way the Gladiator’s two fixed machineguns fire bullets through a propeller rotating at thousands of times per minute (p.99).

He is stunned to be told no-one is going to show him either how to fly a Gladiator nor anything at all about aerial combat. He’s just going to be plonked in one and given the map co-ordinates of 80 Squadron and told to make his way there by himself. Here he makes the first of what become many comments and criticisms about the RAF and army’s lack of imagination and planning.

There is no question that we were flung in at the deep end, totally unprepared for actual fighting in the air, and that, in my opinion, accounted for the very great losses of young pilots that we suffered out there. (p.101)

He crashes

Dahl is at pains to point out that, although it was reported in the press that he was shot down by enemy planes, this was propaganda cooked up to make the incident sound patriotic.

On 19 September Dahl was ordered to fly his new Gladiator from RAF Abu Suweir on the Suez Canal to join 80 Squadron in the Western Desert. He refuelled at Amariya near Alexandria and flew on to Fouka. It is mind-boggling to learn that he had no radio and only a map strapped to his knee for guidance. The CO at Fouka gave him the co-ordinates of his final destination, the current 80 Squadron base, and he set off. But it wasn’t there. He flew up and down and round and round looking for it, as the desert dusk drew in and he ran short of fuel. He realised he had to make an emergency landing, tried to find a flat long stretch of desert and took the Gladiator down.

The plane hit a boulder at about 75 miles an hour. He regained consciousness to discover his nose was smashed, his skull fractured, he’d lost a few teeth and he couldn’t see. In one of the most vivid parts of the book, he describes the incredibly lethargy he felt, he just wanted to sleep, but the plane was on fire and eventually the scorching heat persuaded him to undo his straps and reluctantly leave the nice cosy cockpit and crawl onto the sand. Here he just wanted to curl up and sleep but, again, the fierce heat persuaded him reluctantly to crawl away towards the cool desert night.

Later he discovered the area he crashed in was no man’s land between the Italian and British front lines and that three brave British soldiers ventured out after nightfall to check the wreckage and were surprised to find the pilot had survived. They carried him back to British lines and thence began the long, complicated journey back to hospital in Alexandria.

Anglo-Swiss Hospital, Alexandria

In his clear, boyish style, Dahl vividly describes his prolonged hospital treatment. He spends around six months recovering from his injuries, under the care of the hospital staff, in particular nurse Mary Welland whose gentle ministrations to the swollen flesh around his eyes is calming and reassuring. He has various operations, including an adventure with a spanking new anaesthetic, sodium pentathol, which turns out not to work at all (pages 112 to 116).

Then one day, as Mary is laving his swollen eyes, one opens a crack and light floods in. For six weeks he had been blind, his other senses heightened. The return of light is a revelation (pages 118 to 122).

Dahl was discharged from hospital in February 1941, five months after he was admitted, and goes to stay with a wealthy English family in Cairo, the Peels.

When he reports to RAF Ismailia he is told 80 Squadron are now in Greece, and are no longer flying Gladiators, but Mark I Hurricanes. Once again he is thrown in the deep end, given just two days solo practice, the first time he’d flown a modern, super-speedy plane, the first plane with retractable undercarriage, with wing flaps, with a variable pitch propeller, with machineguns in the wings, that he’s ever flown.

Two days to teach himself then he’s ordered to fly solo across the Med to Greece. The Flight-Lieutenant tells him they’re fitting it with extra fuel tanks, but if the pump doesn’t work, he’ll run out and be forced to ditch in the sea. Then swim home.

Fighting in Greece

As soon as he lands his Hurricane at Elevsis airfield near Athens, the ground crew set him straight about the parlous situation. The entire RAF has just 15 Hurricanes and four clapped-out Blenheims. Dahl explains the background: the Italians invaded Greece in October 1940 but ran into unexpected resistance. The British government took a vital slice of Field-Marshall Wavell’s Eighth Army and planes and sent them to Greece in March 1941. When it was just the Italians to hold off, this was fine. But on 6 April 1941 the Germans invaded and began a steady advance which was to bring them to Athens just three weeks later on 27 April. The German Luftwaffe outnumbered the measly little RAF outfit by anything up to 100 to 1.

So Dahl had flown into an utterly hopeless situation, and the pilots and ground crew let him know it straightaway. Sending British forces to Greece had been a colossal miscalculation. Now the best that could be hoped for was managing their withdrawal. It was like Dunkirk but was being hushed up in the press.

Dahl immediately made friends with David Coke, in line to inherit the title Earl of Leicester, who is appalled to learn that Dahl has absolutely no idea about air combat whatsoever. Over a couple of pages he fills Dahl (and the reader) in on the basics.

There follow a sequence of absolutely thrilling and terrifying descriptions of aerial warfare. On his first flight he takes on a pack of 6 Junker 88s, apparently downing one but making every mistake in the book. The Squadron CO barely looks up when he tells him. Every day more men and planes are being lost. In the small ‘mess’ there are no friendships, people don’t talk. They are all alone with their thoughts, convinced they will all die within days.

Next day he tries to defend a British ammunition ship from attack, engaging with Stukas and being chased by what he says felt like 30 or so Messerschmitts to avoid which he descends right down to tree level, then fence level, terrifyingly dangerous. Did this actually happen or is the professional author in Dahl giving the reader a thrill for their money? It’s noticeable how many times he directly addresses the reader, as if in one of his children’s books:

You may not believe it but I can remember having literally to lift my plane just a tiny fraction to clear a stone wall, and once there was a herd of brown cows in front of me and I’m not sure I didn’t clip some of their horns with my propeller as I skimmed over them. (p.153)

There follows a chapter packed with incident as he details the four consecutive days leading up to the Battle of Athens:

  • 17 April he went up 3 times
  • 18 April went up twice
  • 19 April went up 3 times
  • 20 April went up 4 times

They try to defend ships in Piraeus harbour from German bombers. On 20th the entire squadron of 12 Hurricanes is sent up to fly over Athens to try and bolster morale, led by legendary air ace Flight-Lieutenant Pat Pattle, but of course the Germans send hundreds of Messerchmitts after them and it turns into a mad bloodbath. His description of the intensity of split second perceptions required continually is amazing.

Dahl survives but five of the 12 Hurricanes were lost. After he lands he finds he is drenched in sweat. His hands are shaking too much to light a cigarette. He has stripped and is washing alongside his friend David when the airfield is strafed by Me 109s.

Amazingly all seven planes survive and the Messerschmitts don’t return, probably expecting the little airfield to be heavily defended, not knowing it is only protected by one measly Bofors gun.

Next thing Dahl and the other 6 are ordered to fly to a new landing strip along the coast, near Megara. The existing ground crew will decamp with all tents etc that evening. Next morning the seven pilots awaken to a camp stripped almost bare. There’s no mess tent, no cooks, no food. As dawn breaks they climb into their planes, assemble at 1,000 feet and fly down the coast to Megara.

They land in a field which has been rolled flat. There is absolutely no-one else about. They wheel the planes into the cover of olive trees and climb a ridge from where they can see the sea. There’s a large oil tanker 500 yards out. They watch as Stukas dive bomb it, blow it into a fireball, and watch as the crew leap off into the flaming water and are roasted alive (pages 174 to 175).

The ground crew and other ancillaries arrive in lorries and set up tents. Again the pilots ask why the devil they’re not being sent straight to Egypt. They conclude it’s so that propagandists/the Press/the government can claim that the RAF stayed till the bitter end to protect ‘our troops’. Words like ‘mess’, ‘balls-up’, ‘muddle headed’, ‘incompetent’, ‘terrific cock-up’ sprinkle the text. The Commanding Officer unhappily tells them they have to stay.

A flight of Messerschmitts flies over. Their new base has been rumbled. They calculate they have an hour and a half before a bombing raid returns but the commanding officer idiotically refuses to let them take off and be prepared. Instead they must wait till 6pm on the dot and then fly off to cover the evacuation of troops. a) this gives the Germans exactly the right amount of time to return and shoot up the new airbase, killing one pilot in his plane as it is taking off and b) when they get to the location where they’re told they’re meant to be protecting the troops, there’s nothing there: no troops, no ships. In actuality the troops were being disembarked down the coast at Kalamata where they were being massacred by Ju 88s and Stukas. Another complete cock-up.

When they return from this pointless errand they find the new landing base has indeed been heavily bombed and have to land in smoke. In a hurry the Adjutant finally orders five other pilots to fly the five remaining Hurricanes to Crete, all other pilots to take a lorry and cram into a de Havillande Rapide. This includes Dahl. He carries his Log Book and crams in next to his buddy David.

Two hours later they land in the Western Desert and catch a truck back to Alexandria where the superbly well-mannered Major Peel and his wife immediately put their entire mansion at the disposal of nine filthy, hungry, smelly, penniless pilots.

‘The whole thing was a cock-up,’ someone said.
‘I think it was,’ Bobby Peel said. ‘We should never have gone to Greece at all.’ (p.195)

Although whether Bobby Peel actually said that, or even existed, is a moot point, given the neat roundedness of so many of the facts and anecdotes in this account.

So what comes over very powerfully indeed is the stupidity and futility of the short-lived British expedition to Greece. On the last page of this section Dahl gives his opinion straight, which is that diverting troops and planes from the African desert to Greece fatally weakened the Eighth Army and condemned it to years of defeats against the Germans under Rommel who at one stage threatened Cairo and thus the entire Middle East. It took two years for the British Army’s strength to be rebuilt sufficiently for them to drive Rommel and the Italians back into Tunisia and ultimately win the war in the desert.

Fighting in Syria

Lebanon and Syria were French colonies. When the Vichy government came to power in France, the French forces in Lebanon and Syria switched to the Vichy side and became fanatically pro-German and anti-British. They could obviously provide beachheads for the Germans to land in the Middle East and so threaten a) our oil supplies from Iraq b) the Suez Canal, our gateway to India (and large numbers of Indian troops). Which is why there was a bitter and hard-fought battle for control of Lebanon and Syria which pitched British, Australian and South African forces against the Vichy French.

In May 1941 80 Squadron were redeployed to Haifa in northern Palestine. They consisted of 9 pilots and Hurricanes and their task was to protect the Royal Navy as it pounded Lebanon’s ports. Dahl briefly describes a series of run-of-the-mill sorties, during which 4 of the 9 pilots were killed.

He spends much more time describing a solo mission he was sent on, to go, land and reconnoitre a satellite landing field 30 miles away. Here he discover a strip of land which has been flattened but has absolutely no other facilities whatsoever. It is ‘manned’ by one tall old man and a surprising legion of children.

It’s a peculiar scene, whose sole point is that the old man and the children are Jewish refugees from Nazi Europe. Dahl goes out of his way to demonstrate his naivety on the Jewish Question, and emphasises that he has been totally out of touch with European news for 2 years, and so simply doesn’t know about the escalating Nazi attacks on Jews (p.208). Which explains why he doesn’t understand what the man means when he says that he and the children are refugees, and really doesn’t understand it when the man says this is his country. What, you’re going to become a Palestinian, asks Dahl in his naivety. But the man is clearly a Zionist, clearly a believer that the Jews have a right to a homeland the same as every other nation on earth, and clearly believes that he and his comrades are going to build that homeland right here, in Palestine. Dahl is ‘flabbergasted’ at his attitude and, maybe, this is a good indicator of the lack of understanding of many British people and armed forces during and immediately after the war, as the Jews’ struggle to establish the homeland of Israel reached its climax.

Demobilised and return to England

Dahl continues dutifully flying missions from the Haifa base but during the month of June 1941 begins to suffer increasingly intense headaches, including ones which lead him to black out. The base medical officer reads his history, particularly the fractured skull from his crash, and orders him to cease flying. He is demobilised, takes a bus back to Cairo, catches a luxury liner to South Africa, then a troop ship which makes the perilous journey up the west coast of Africa, threatened by enemy planes but especially U-boats, eventually docking in Liverpool.

From here he makes phone calls to relatives and discovers his mother’s house in Kent was bombed out and so she’s bought a cottage in rural Buckinghamshire. It’s worth reminding that every few pages of this text includes excerpts from the letters he wrote to his mother regularly as clockwork throughout this period. Cumulatively, these convey a very close bond between mother and son. He catches a train to London, stays overnight at a relative’s place in Hampstead, then catches a train and a bus to his mother’s village, steps down from the bus and into his mother’s waiting arms, and it is with this moment that this exciting, eye-opening, boyish and fresh-faced memoir comes to a dead halt.

Credit

Going Solo by Roald Dahl was published by Jonathan Cape in 1986. All references are to the 2018 Centenary Collection Penguin paperback edition.

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Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy MacLean (1949)

The situation, I felt, was fraught with amusing possibilities.
(Fitzroy’s confidently aristocratic attitude in a nutshell, page 142)

Brigadier Sir Fitzroy Hew Royle Maclean, 1st Baronet (1911 to 1996) was phenomenally posh, came from a landed Scottish aristocratic family with a long history of service in the British Army, and had the very best education Britain could provide (Eton, King’s College Cambridge), before joining the Diplomatic Service in 1933.

This classic, awesomely impressive (and surprisingly long) memoir reeks of the confidence and privilege of the class and generation of British aristocrats who ruled a quarter of the world at the peak  extent of the British Empire between the wars, and then led Britain’s war against Nazi Germany.

The book covers the eight years from 1937 to 1945 and divides into three distinct periods of employment and adventure:

  1. serving in the British Embassy in Moscow from 1937 until late 1939
  2. as soon as the war broke out he enlisted (as a private in the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, his father’s old regiment) but the adventure really kicks off when, in early 1942, he joined the newly formed Special Air Service and spent a year or so in the North African desert
  3. in summer 1943 Churchill chose Maclean to lead a liaison mission (‘Macmis’) to central Yugoslavia to liaise with Josip Broz (also known as Tito) and his partisan forces, the longest, most detailed part of the book

It’s a long book at 540 pages. With a few more photos and maps, it crossed my mind that these three quite distinct adventures could possibly have been broken up into three smaller, more focused books. Combined like this, the range of the three subjects gives it an epic, almost unmanageably vast reach.

(Incidentally, the chapters in each of the three parts each start again at number 1, so there are three sets of chapters 1, 2, 3 etc.)

Part 1. Moscow and Central Asia (pages 11 to 179)

Paris politics

Maclean joined the Diplomatic Service in 1933 and in 1934 was posted to the Paris Embassy. The book kicks off with a brief summary of his experiences at the British Embassy in Paris and French politics of the mid-1930s i.e. hopelessly divided and chaotic, at times almost verging on civil war. It’s important to bear these divisions in mind when considering 1) the creation of the Vichy regime and how the Vichy French fought the British, especially in the Middle East (see A Line In The Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That Shaped the Middle East by James Barrine) and 2) the nature of the French Resistance which, as numerous eye-witness accounts in Ben Macintyre’s book about the SAS explain, was tremendously fractured and often bitterly divided, including everyone from right-wing monarchists to fiery communists who often fought each other as much as the Germans.

Moscow and the show trials

Anyway, after a few years Maclean bored of Paris and in February 1937 asked to be sent to the Moscow embassy. Here he discovers the small foreign diplomatic community lives very isolated from the ordinary Russian people who, he discover, live in terror of the regime, everyone scared of any contact with foreigners, repressed, tight-lipped because of the spies and informers everywhere.

He arrives at a fascinating moment, just as Stalin’s show trials are getting into their swing. For the political analyst this is the best part of this section. He describes how Stalin’s purges swept away huge swathes of the top leadership in the Red Army and Navy – notably the charismatic Marshal Tukhachevsky – and then leading figures in the Soviet administration – notably the trial and execution of Zinoviev, Kamenev and other Old Bolsheviks in 1936.

The purges created a climate of terror in which the ordinary round of diplomatic parties and receptions became painful as all the Soviet officials stood on one side of the room, all of them terrified that the slightest contact with a foreigner would be reported and doom them, literally, to death. The centrepiece of all this is his eye-witness description of the trial of a dozen or so key figures in the Party, centring on Nikolai Ivanovich Bukharin.

Bukharin was tried in what came to be known as the ‘Trial of the Twenty One’, which took place on 2 to 13 March 1938, along with ex-premier Alexei Rykov, Christian Rakovsky, Nikolai Krestinsky, Genrikh Yagoda and 16 other defendants alleged to belong to a so-called ‘Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites’. The trial was designed to be the culmination of the previous show trials, a climactic Final Act. The prosecutor alleged that Bukharin and others had been traitors from the start, had conspired to assassinate Lenin and Stalin, had murdered Maxim Gorky with poison, and planned to overthrow the regime, partition the Soviet Union and hand her territories over to their foreign collaborators in Germany, Japan and Great Britain.

All this is given in great detail in the book’s longest chapter, chapter 7, ‘Winter in Moscow’, pages 80 to 121, with vivid portraits of the state prosecutor Andrey Vyshinski and President of the Court Vasiliy Ulrich.

The purpose of the show trials

To many in the West the grotesque aspect of the show trials – the ridiculously lurid accusations and the grovelling obeisance of the accused – confirmed that Stalin’s rule was a dictatorship of the crudest kind. The trial was a breaking point for many western communists, the moment they were forced to concede that the dream of a communist utopia was in fact a totalitarian nightmare.

But Maclean spends a couple of pages explaining not only why the accused were reduced to grovelling self-accusation, but also the purpose the trials served within the Soviet Union. You should never forget that the majority of any population is not very well educated and not very interested in politics and this was especially true of the USSR where the majority of the population was still illiterate peasants. That’s why the accusations had to be so lurid and extreme, to create cartoon images of total iniquity – that the accused had conspired to murder Lenin, conspired with foreign powers to overthrow the regime, had kidnapped, tortured and murdered people. Their villainy had to be caricatured enough to be understood by the most illiterate peasants and workers.

The extremity of the alleged crimes was designed to scare peasants and workers into thinking there was a relentless conspiracy against the regime, even at the highest levels, and this justified the atmosphere of fear, paranoia and suspicion which characterised Soviet Russia. Everybody should be on their guard all the time because anyone – even the highest in the land such as those on trial – could turn out to be wicked traitors.

This worked in Stalin’s favour because it universalised the climate of fear in which people would barely be able to think about questioning the regime, let alone organising meetings or planning anything.

Stories about foreigners bringing their foreign plans to overthrow the Workers’ Paradise would also make the entire population suspicious not only of foreigners and foreign ideas and the whole notion of outsiders. Good. This suited Stalin, too.

And the trials also provided scapegoats for the failings of the state. If there were famines, if there were shortages, blame it on the wreckers and the saboteurs. Papa Stalin is doing everything he can to combat the traitors and it’s a hard struggle but you can help him and help your comrades by reporting anyone you see talking or behaving suspiciously.

So the very grotesqueness and extremity and absurdity which broke the allegiance of western intellectuals like Arthur Koestler were precisely the qualities Stalin was aiming at in order to spread his message to the furthest reaches of the Soviet regime and its dimmest least educated citizens (p.118).

Travels in Central Asia

But the show trial, dramatic though it is, only takes up one chapter. The Russia section is better known for MacLean’s extensive travels to legendary locations in Central Asia, namely the romantic cities of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bokhara. Only a handful of Europeans had traveled to these places during the later Victorian period and then, with the war, revolution and civil war, then Bolshevik rule, they had been completely inaccessible under Soviet rule.

The chapters describing his attempts to visit them are, therefore, as much about his convoluted machinations to evade Soviet bureaucracy and play local officials and NKVD operatives as about the places themselves, with lengthy descriptions of the difficulties of travelling by Russian train, bus, lorry, horse or just walking, in his relentless odysseys around central Asia.

He undertook these epic journeys during periods of leave from the embassy.

Trip 1 – Baku

By train to Kharkov. Rostov on Don. Kuban Steppe. Baku. By boat (the Centrosoyuz) to Lenkoran. Boat back to Baku. Train to Tiflis, capital of Georgia, where he visits the British Military Cemetery and meets old English governess, Miss Fellows. By truck along the Military Road to Ordzhonikidze. Train back to Moscow.

Trip 2 – Alma Ata-Tashkent-Samarkand (September 1937)

Trans-Siberian train from Moscow. Alights at Sverdlovsk (former Ekaterinburg, p.54). Train to Novosibirsk. Changes to Tirksib railway (only completed in 1930) south towards Turkmenistan (p.56). The three categories of Soviet railway carriage: international, soft and hard. Alights at Biisk. Takes another train, south to Altaisk then onto Barnaul. Enter the Soviet Republic of Kazakhstan near Semipalatinsk. Alights and catches a lorry to Alma Mata ‘one of the pleasantest provincial towns in the Soviet Union’ (p.65), one of the first Russian towns built in Central Asia, in the 1850s, and which is ten miles from the railway. Lorry 40 miles to the village of Talgar in the foothills of the Tien Shen mountains. Dinner with locals then hitched a lorry back to Alma Ata. By dilapidated Ford motor car up into the mountains, to Lake Issik and magnificent view over the Steppe. Sleeps in a hut. Next morning bit of an explore then car back to Alma Ata.

Next day catches train the 500 miles south-west to Tashkent. It stops at Samarkand where he alights for a few hours and explores, seeing the domes of Shakh Zinda and the Gur Emir (p.73) then back onto the very crowded train. Extensive description of Samarkand pages 73 to 76. Tashkent, centre of the Soviet cotton industry (pages 76 to 78).

Having achieved his goals, by train back to Moscow, first across the Kazakh Steppe, then (in Russia proper) by way of Orenburg, Kuibyshev and Penza. But he had conceived two new goals: further south-west to Bokhara, and east across the Tien Shan mountains into the Chinese province of Sinkiang…

Trip 3 – Failing to get to Urumchi, capital of Sinkiang province (June 1938)

(Chapter 8) To Maclean’s delight he is given an official mission to travel to Urumchi, capital of Sinkiang, to ask the Chinese authorities for better treatment of Indian merchants. After comic wrangling with the Chinese embassy in Moscow he sets off on the 5-day rail journey to Alma Ata, two days across European Russia arriving at Orenburg ‘base of the imperial Russian forces in their campaign against the rulers of Tashkent, Samarkand and Bokhara during the second half of the last century’ (p.125). On past the Sea of Aral and along the course of the river Syr Darya, through Arys, Chimkent and Mankent to Alma Ata. Change rail lines to the Turksib line and head north and east 400 miles to Ayaguz, where starts the main road out of Soviet Russia and into Sinkiang.

At Ayaguz the Soviet officials and local NKVD are surprisingly helpful and lay on a bus (which quickly fills up) to take him to the border town of Bakhti. Overnight in the village of Urdjar, next morning arrive in Bakhti (p.130). Here a Sovsintorg official commandeers a lorry and they set off on the 48-hour journey to Urumchi.

However they barely get across the border with China, and arrive at the Chinese border post, when there are problems. His passport is taken off him and he is detained for hours. He discovers the passport has been sent by special messenger to the governor of the local area, Chuguchak, and they have to wait for a reply. Eventually a car returns from this mission and a sleek Chinese official informs Maclean the governor has received no information or authorisation about him and so, despite all his protestations, he must return to the Soviet Union, in fact all the way back to Alma Ata where he must contact the Chinese consul.

At the border Maclean gets the impression the Soviet officials knew all along this would happen and gently mock him. As it happens, one says with a smile, the same bus that brought him is still waiting. He can board it now and return to Bakhti. After driving all night he arrives at Ayaguz in time to catch the train back to Alma Ata.

Here there is more fol-de-rol between the Soviet authorities and the local Chinese Consul, a seedy man residing in a rundown building. The Soviet plenipotentiary instructs the Chinese to send a message to Urumchi. Next day the Chinese inform him that he is not allowed into the country, and an imposing NKVD officer tells him he must leave Alma Ata immediately, as it is a restricted area. The entire trip has been a complete failure (p.137).

It is interesting to read that Sinkiang was a rebellious troublesome province for the Chinese ever since it was incorporated into their empire and was in Maclean’s time because of course, it still is today:

Trip 4 – through Soviet central Asia to the Oxus and on to Kabul (autumn 1938)

(Chapter 9) He sets his sights on visiting Bokhara, former capital of the emirs, of reaching the fabled river Oxus, and crossing into Afghanistan. Leaves Moscow on 7 October on a train bound for Askabad. Third evening arrive at Orenberg ‘which for more than one hundred years marked the furthest point of Russia’s advance against the Kirghiz and Turkomans and the Khans of Bokhara and Khiva.’ Two more days the train passes through the Kara Kum or Black Desert past the bleak mud flats of the Aral Sea. On the fifth night reached Tashkent and woke not far from Samarkand but he decides not to revisit it, but to continue on the train, west, following the river Zaravshan, to Bokhara.

He alights at Kagan. He learns that the daily train to Bokhara has left so, on impulse, seeing a lorry laden with cotton bales just starting off down the road to Bokhara, he runs and jumps in the back. Unfortunately so does one of the NKVD minders who’ve been following him, and he’s been reported so after a short stretch a car packed with officials pulls the lorry over but by this time it is packed with Uzbeks who’d followed his example so Maclean is able to sneak off and hide behind a tree. Eventually, after the lorry has been thoroughly searched and no foreigner found it is allowed to continue on its way and the NKVD car turns back to Kagan. There’s nothing for it but to walk. It’s a very long walk, into the night, until he tops a slight rise and finds himself looking at the legendary city of Bokhara by moonlight.

(Chapter 10) Story of the Reverend Joseph Wolff. He explores Bokhara, finds no inn to take him so sleeps rough in a public garden, which irks the NKVD agents who he knows are tailing him. Next day he’s up and exploring again, seeing the ‘Tower of Death’, the principal mosques, the Kalyan, or Kok Gumbaz (Blue Dome), the grim thousand-year-old Ark or Citadel of the Emirs. He gives us a characteristically pithy historical summary.

With the capture in 1868 of Samarkand and the upper reaches of the Zaravshan by the Russians, who thus gained control of his water supply, the Emir of Bokhara was obliged to accept the suzerainty of the Tsar and Russian control of his relations with the outside world; but inside his own dominions he maintained his own army and enjoyed absolute power of life and death over his unfortunate subjects. The Russian population was limited to a few officials and merchants, while the Emir excluded other Europeans from his domains with a jealousy which has been emulated by his Bolshevik successors. Bokhara thus remained a centre of Mohammedan civilization, a holy city with a hundred mosques, three hundred places of learning, and the richest bazaar in Central Asia. It was not until 1920, three years after the downfall of his imperial suzerain, that the last Emir, after vainly invoking the help of both the Turks and the British, fled headlong across the Oxus to Afghanistan, dropping favourite dancing boy after favourite dancing boy in his flight, in the hope of thus retarding the advance of the pursuing Red Army, who, however, were not to be distracted from their purpose by such stratagems. (A leading part was played in these events by the same Faisullah Khojayev, whom I had seen condemned to death in Moscow six months earlier.)

He could have stayed a month but his leave is limited, so he catches a train back to Kagan, then another one south, heading towards Stalinabad, the capital of Tajikistan. The last section follows the course of the Oxus (Amu Darya) passing through eastern Turkmenistan. The far bank of the river was Afghan territory and that’s where he wanted to head next.

(Chapter 11. Across the Oxus) He alights at Termez, which he explores then seeks out the chief of police  and presents his diplomatic laisser passer which should allow him to the exit the Soviet Union anywhere, in this case crossing the river Oxus into Afghanistan. The chief of police gives him permission but when Maclean arrives at the actual frontier post at Patta Hissa, they haven’t been notified. By gentle persistence Maclean eventually persuades the officer in charge to arrange for the repair of one of the three paddle boats kept to cross the river but which had fallen into disrepair. Soldiers and engineers get the most viable steamer, ‘which rejoiced in the name of Seventeenth Party Congress,’ working and fix it up enough to put-put him across the river, it takes half an hour because of treacherous sand banks.

On the Afghan side some locals take his bags and him under their wing. They examine his passport without understanding it and he manages to convey he wants to head to Mazar-i-Sharif. Dinner and sleep. Next morning a horse is provided and he sets off under escort. the riverside reeds give way to desert. He is detained at a saria or mud fort by fierce locals before being grudgingly allowed to continue.

Off to the west are the ruins of Balkh, the ancient Bactria. The oasis of Seyagird. Tea with the headman who provides a cart for his baggage, then a further trek across desert eventually arriving at Mazar. He discovers a Russian couple who take him in but inform him of the cholera epidemic sweeping the area which means it is quarantined. He locates the local Director of Sanitation who agrees, after some negotiation, to sign a medical certificate declaring Maclean has had cholera and recovered. Portrait of Mazar, main point being it is the capital of what he calls Afghan Turkestan, which is cut off geographically and ethnically from Kabul and the south (p.164).

A truck was scheduled to drive the 300 or so miles to Afghanistan and the authorities assign him a seat. Tashkurgan and then up into rocky mountains to a place named Hai-Bak and, at 3 in the morning, to Doaba in the Andarrab valley, where he sleeps in a government rest house. In the way of British aristocrats, especially the Scots, he discovers ‘a fellow clanswoman’ Mrs Fraser-Tytler who, it turns out, he had known during his childhood in Inverness.

He takes a detour west to the Bamyan valley to see the two immense Buddhas carved in the rock. Then across the mountain which is the watershed between the Oxus and the Indus at a height of 12,000 feet and soon arrives at Kabul.

(Chapter 12. Homeward bound) He had hoped to head west to Herat and cross back into the USSR at Kershk and join the railway at Merv but none of this was to be. the Soviet consulate in Kabul made it quite clear that, because of the cholera epidemic, nobody was being allowed back into the USSR from Afghanistan.

Instead he is forced to head south into British India and fly. The route is: Kabul. Jalalabad. The Khyber Pass. Into British India and the town of Peshawar. Train to Delhi. As a pukka diplomat he meets the most senior British officials, dinner, good beds, a world away from his recent experiences. He obtains the visa he’ll need to exit Persia into the USSR.

From Delhi by plane to Baghdad, stopping over in Basra. After staying over in Baghdad, ‘a disappointing city’, he takes a car towards Tehran. Across the border into the Persia at Khanikin. Along a road built by the Brits to Kermanshah, and then to Hamadan, ‘the Ecbatana of the ancients’ (p.170). Changes car and car shares with four bulky Iranians driving north for the border with the USSR at Djulfa. Stops at Kavin (to eat), Zenjan (to sleep), through Mianeh, arriving at Tabriz the capital of Persian Azerbaijan.

Two days hobnobbing with the British Consul and haggling with the Persian governor about the validity of his exit visa. Eventually given permission to head north to the border, Djulfa in the valley of the Araxes. Comic scene where the Persian guards happily allow him onto the bridge across the river but the Soviet guard at the other end refuses to let him enter the USSR and when he turns to re-enter Persia the Persian border guard says this is impossible. Luckily a car arrives with a Soviet official who, reluctantly, accepts his diplomatic laisser-passer and lets him enter. He cashes money at the post office and checks into an inn.

Train to Erivan, capital of Soviet Armenia, running alongside the river Araxa which forms the border. Portrait of Erivan. Train to Tiflis, capital of Soviet Georgia, and so on to Batum, the second largest city in Georgia, on the banks of the Black Sea. He observes that so many of these central Asian towns were only conquered by the advancing Russian from the 1870s and many only began to be developed in a modern way after the Russian Civil War, so many of them have the same air of being half built, of having grand central squares full of vast totalitarian Soviet buildings, quickly giving way to a few streets of bourgeois wealth, and then extensive hovels and shacks.

He had hoped to sail from Batum but storms meant departures were cancelled. So by train back to Tiflis. It was 18 months since he was last there (on his first trip) and he finds it has been noticeably Sovietised and security tightened. He is arrested by the NKVD and spends a day arguing with NKVD officers until the commander returns and releases him back to his hotel.

Next morning he takes a lorry to Ordzhonikidze by the Georgian Military Road which is covered in snow; they regularly have to stop and dig the lorry out of drifts. From Ordzhonikidze he catches the sleeper train back to Moscow, arriving two days later in time to receive an invitation to dinner from the Belgian chargé d’affaires (see below).

What an extraordinary adventure! What a mind-boggling itinerary! It is a mark of how backward we have gone that Maclean was able to travel through all those countries in complete safety whereas now, in the supposedly enlightened and progressive 2020s, I don’t think any Westerner in their right mind would want to travel through central Asia, let along Afghanistan, or contemplate a jolly car trip across Iraq and Iran.

The glamour of central Asia

For those susceptible to it, all these places – Tashkent, Samarkand, the Oxus, western outposts of the legendary Silk Road – have a tremendous glamour and attraction. Reading his account you realise it’s  1) partly because they’re so remote and inaccessible and so simply to have visited them is an achievement which gains you kudos in a certain kind of upper-middle class circle; 2) partly because of the wonders and treasures when you arrive, such as the grand Registran in Samarakand; but also 3), as so often with travelling, because it is an escape from the humdrum modern world. A number of throwaway remarks indicate this, including one which leapt out at me: ‘Uzbek houses have changed very little since the days of Tamerlane‘ (p.143). These are places where you can, for long spells, believe that you have travelled back in time to the Middle Ages and not just of banal Britain, but to the glamorous days of Tamerlane and such legendary figures, or even further back, visiting the ruins of cities founded by Alexander the Great! It is, in a way, an escape back to the Arabian Nights wonderlands of childhood.

And picking up on the previous section, reading it now, in 2024, one can only marvel at the relative peacefulness and security and scope of where you could travel freely in the 1930s – albeit the entire system was about to be plunged into a global holocaust.

The methodology of Soviet imperialism

On a political level his travels in Central Asia give him an insight into the effectiveness of the Soviet empire:

As the basis for a policy of imperialism, this system has much to recommend it. Power is vested in the hands of a group of reliable natives, who are responsible for seeing that the wishes of the central authority are carried out. If they prove unreliable, they can be replaced by others, while, if the worst comes to the worst, an emissary of the central authority can be sent to put things right. By this means, no risks are taken and an appearance of autonomy is preserved. Moreover it is a system which is capable of application to any new country which happens to fall under Soviet dominion. Thus, more recently, in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania Soviet Socialist Republics have been set up and politically reliable governments formed from members of the local Communist Parties. It is, we are now learning, a stereotyped pattern into which almost any people or country can be made to fit with a little squeezing and pushing. (p.35)

A German official predicts the course of the war

All this took place at the end of the 1930s as Europe hurtled towards war but there is surprisingly little about Hitler and the Nazis; in fact, given that MacLean was a diplomat, there’s surprisingly little about international affairs at all.

It’s only at the very end of the Asian adventures section, after he’s arrived back in Moscow exhausted, filthy and unshaven from his final trip to discover an invitation to a formal dinner being given by the Belgian chargé d’affaires that very evening, that there’s finally something about the broader international situation. And this is given as a prediction by a friend of his, his opposite number at the German embassy, Johnny Herwarth von Bittenfeld.

Herwarth (in MacLean’s account) makes a number of predictions which all were to come true. He thinks Britain backing down at Munich (September 1938) is a disaster because:

  • it will embolden Hitler to make more and more outrageous demands
  • it will weaken all voices within Germany calling for restraint
  • it will, thus, make war inevitable
  • war is only tenable if Germany can make peace with the Russians
  • if not, there will be a war on two fronts which Germany will lose and be utterly ruined

Part 2. War (183 to 299)

Coming from a long line of soldiers, when war breaks out Maclean wants to fight but discovers that it is impossible for someone serving in the Diplomatic Service to join the army. He is not allowed to resign in order join up. So he studies the Foreign Office rules intensely and realises there’s a loophole. He is allowed to resign from the service in one situation – if he wants to go into politics. So he contacts the Conservative Party who say they’ll be happy to have him as a candidate for the next constituency which becomes vacant and, armed with this, marches into his boss’s office (the Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs, Sir Alexander Cadogan) and declares that he wants to go into politics, resignation in hand. As he predicts, his superiors are unable to stop him and so let him resign.

He promptly walks round to the recruiting office of his father’s regiment, the Queen’s Own Cameron Highlanders, where he enlists as a private soldier. (p.184). But, when the next by-election crops up he is  legally obliged, under the terms of his resignation letter, to stand and so finds himself the Conservative candidate and then wins the election to become Conservative MP for Lancaster in 1941 (p.189). He hadn’t hidden from the electors that he was in the Army and first duty was to serve and all through his subsequent service he remains, I think, Tory MP for Lancaster.

There are some pages about basic army life and training. As you might expect of someone so over-qualified to be a simple squaddy he is soon promoted to lance-corporal. Among other things he confirms that, in the Army, almost every other word is the F word which he demonstrates by quoting conversations or orders with the offending word bleeped out (pages 184 to 186).

Desert War

After two years of training and exercises he is, as you might expect, in 1941 commissioned as an officer and receives orders to fly to Cairo (p.189). After the retreat from Dunkirk, apart from a few abortive expeditions (a failed attack on Norway or on the French coast) North Africa was the main area of British overseas military activity.

Because I myself am not too clear about this and Maclean’s book refers only to some aspects, I’m going to cheat and quote Wikipedia’s summary of the entire Desert War:

Military operations began in June 1940 with the Italian declaration of war and the Italian invasion of Egypt from Libya in September. Operation Compass, a five-day raid by the British in December 1940, was so successful that it led to the destruction of the Italian 10th Army (10ª Armata) over the following two months. Benito Mussolini sought help from Adolf Hitler, who sent a small German force to Tripoli under Directive 22 (11 January). The Afrika Korps (Generalleutnant Erwin Rommel) was formally under Italian command, as Italy was the main Axis power in the Mediterranean and North Africa.

In the spring of 1941, Rommel led Operation Sonnenblume, which pushed the Allies back to Egypt except for the siege of Tobruk at the port. At the end of 1941, Axis forces were defeated in Operation Crusader and retired again to El Agheila. In early 1942 Axis forces drove the Allies back again, then captured Tobruk after the Battle of Gazala but failed to destroy their opponents. The Axis invaded Egypt and the Allies retreated to El Alamein, where the Eighth Army fought two defensive battles, then defeated the Axis forces in the Second Battle of El Alamein in October 1942. The Eighth Army drove Axis forces out of Libya to Tunisia, which was invaded from the west by the Allied First Army in Operation Torch. In the Tunisian campaign the remaining Axis forces surrendered to the combined Allied forces in May 1943.

North Africa was so important because of the Suez Canal in the heart of Egypt. If the Germans captured Cairo it would have at least three results: 1) they would cut off easy communications with India (a huge source of manpower) and with the entire theatre of war in the Far East (Burma). More importantly 2) the Germans would be able to push on through Palestine to Iraq and Persia, source of much of the oil which was fuelling the British war effort. 3) This oil would be sent to support the German war effort in Russia and German troops coming up from Persia through the Caucasus would open a new front against Russia leading, perhaps, to the decisive defeat of Russia and to Germany, in effect winning the war.

Those were the ultimate stakes behind the Desert War and explains the genuine concern and even panic when the Afrika Corps, at its furthest extent, got within 80 miles of Cairo, and that explains why the (second) Battle of El Alamein was so important, signalling the definitive end of German advances, the beginning of German defeats, and the widespread sense that the tide of the war was changing.

Chapter 1. Special Air Service

Maclean had been invited to join some sort of commando but this fell through. Instead he literally bumps into David Stirling (who he knows vaguely because he’s good friends with Stirling’s brother, Peter, and they’re both from another grand, ancient, noble Scottish family) who invites him to join the SAS.

Stirling explains that the idea is to parachute small numbers of men behind enemy lines in North Africa and cause as much mayhem as possible, thus drawing vital resources away from the front line. After various experiments they’ve discovered that attacking lightly defended airfields is the most destructive thing they can do. They use the Lewis Bomb, a clump of explosive with a pencil fuse developed by SAS founder member Jock Lewis (p.194). Profile of the dedicated fighting machine, Paddy Mayne (p.195).

Maclean describes the Free French who were part of the unit almost from the start. The physical training i.e. long hikes in the desert and practice parachuting. He has to make six jumps and hates it. All a bit futile seeing as by the time he joined, the unit had settled down to being taken and collected from missions by the Long Range Desert Group (p.196).

Chapters 3 and 4. Raid on Benghazi

May 1942: Detailed description of the build up to, and execution of a ‘daring’ raid against Benghazi led by Stirling, accompanied by Randolph Churchill (compare and contrast the account of the same farcical raid given in Ben Macintyre’s SAS: Rogue Heroes).

I have always found that in dealing with foreigners whose language one does not speak, it is best to shout. (p.221)

They manage to penetrate into the highly defended city and find a safe (bomb-damaged) house to hole up in but that evening both the inflatable dinghies they’ve brought to paddle out to enemy ships and attach limpet mines to them, turn out to have leaks and simply won’t inflate. Disheartened, they spend a tense day hiding out in this damaged house, petrified of discovery, before exiting the city in the same clanking car they’d entered by, bluffing their way past the Italian guards thanks to Maclean’s fluent demotic Italian and everyone’s (Maclean, Stirling, Randolph Churchill’s) aristocratic confidence.

Chapters 5 and 6

Having extricated themselves from this failed and farcical attempt, they withdraw to Cairo. He mentions the dinner he and Stirling were invited to which was given by Winston Churchill, Chief of the General Staff General Smuts and General Alexander, the first time he meets Churchill.

The strategic situation has deteriorated and Rommel is now at El Alamein just 90 miles from Alexandria. So the SAS’s plans for a second go at Benghazi escalate into a full-blown raid by some 200 men backed by aerial bombing. Trouble is so many people are involved that security is breached and word gets around. Thus, after a very long and painful 800 mile drive of a lengthy convoy across the desert, with many mishaps, our boys finally get to the very edge of Benghazi but are greeted by a hail of machine guns and mortars, are forced to make a hasty retreat, and are pursued up into the Gebel mountains by squads of Italian warplanes who strafe and bomb them. Several trucks full of explosives and stores are blown up and it’s a miracle they weren’t all killed.

There then follows the very long account of their perilous escape across the desert, driving by night, by day being seriously bombed and strafed by Italian planes, running so low on food that eventually the entire day’s ration was one spoonful of bully beef.

A number of good men are killed on this mission. Maclean initially thought it had been a futile waste of time but GHQ assured them that it had kept a lot of enemy resources tied up, extra men to guard Benghazi and then squadrons of airplanes to search for them which were, therefore, not at the front i.e. it had been useful (p.256).

Chapter 7. Persia

Maclean explains that the British now faced the threat of an enormous pincer movement, with German forces trying to take Stalingrad up in southern Russia and pushing forward in north Africa towards Cairo and, ultimately, the Suez Canal (p.263). If you look at a large-scale map you can see how, if the Germans were victorious, they would not only take the Suez Canal, lifeline to British India, but push on through Palestine to take Iraq and Iran, meeting up with their comrades who would have pushed on south through the Caucasus. And the point of Iran was the oil. Command of Persia, and to a lesser extent Iraq, would give the Nazi empire all the oil it ever needed to maintain its war industry.

Which is why Maclean found himself posted to the Middle East and Persia service. Here, conferring with the commanding officer, General Maitland Wilson, he discovered the problems facing the British occupation of the country, most obviously that there were very few British soldiers involved. He had been summoned to discuss with Wilson the possibility of setting up an SAS-style outfit to operate behind enemy lines if the worst came to the worst and the Germans conquered Persia (p.264).

Kidnapping the general

Out of this conference comes the specific idea of kidnapping a man named General Zahidi, an unpleasant type who had sway over the tribes of south Persia, was known to be hoarding grain to inflate the price but, most importantly, was thought to be in communication with the Germans and helping them make plans to conquer Persia.

This chapter describes in great detail the preparation and execution of ‘Operation Pongo’ which, despite all the hoopla, boils down to parking a lorryload of British soldiers out the front and back of the General’s house in Isfahan, and then Maclean accompanied by a few other officers walking in, insisting to see the General, then holding him up at gunpoint, walking him out to a waiting car, and driving him off to the nearest military airport where he was flown out of the country and interned under British custody in Palestine.

On searching Zahedi’s bedroom Maclean confirms British suspicions, discovering ‘a collection of automatic weapons of German manufacture, a good deal of silk underwear, some opium, an illustrated register of the prostitutes of Isfahan and correspondence from a local German agent’ (p.274).

Incidentally, remember how I suggested part of the appeal of the mysterious cities of Central Asia was the sense of stepping back in time into the Middle Ages or beyond, well the same goes for the Persian city of Isfahan, one of the few cities Maclean has been to which lives up to its reputation, and of which he writes:

Despite the hideous modern statue of the late Shah still standing there and despite his misguided attempts, fortunately abandoned by his successor, to bludgeon Persia into giving a half-hearted and entirely superficial imitation of a modern Western industrial state, Isfahan recalls the great capital city of the Middle Ages. (p.270)

And the whole notion of kidnapping an enemy general recalls the comparable exploit, the kidnapping of General Heinrich Kreipe, the German commander of Crete, by a group of super-pukka chaps, as described in Ill Met by Moonlight by William Stanley Moss (1950), albeit it considerably more fraught and dangerous for being carried out in enemy territory.

Chapter 8

The strategic situation changes. The Germans are checked in North Africa and at Stalingrad. The immediate threat to Persia has abated. After the capture of David Stirling in January 1943 the SAS had split up into different units (including a Special Boat Service run by George Jellicoe).

Maclean is summoned back to Cairo and told that, with North Africa on the verge of being secure, the Allied focus is turning to Italy. He is ordered to plan for SAS-style raids on Sicily but the mission is called off at the last moment. He’s at a bit of a loose end when he is summoned back to London where he meets Churchill for a weekend conference at Chequers (p.280). Here he is told he is going to be dropped into Yugoslavia (spelled ‘Jugoslavia’ throughout the book) to find out more about the partisans who have been fighting against the Germans and to contact their supposed leader, ‘Tito’. Nobody’s sure, at this point, whether Tito exists, whether he’s a man (or even a woman) or maybe the name of a committee of some kind?

Churchill tells him to establish the situation on the ground, find out whichever partisan group is killing most Germans, and help them to kill more. Churchill wrote that he wanted: ‘a daring Ambassador-leader to these hardy and hunted people’ (p.294).

What we knew for sure was that the partisans were communists and so likely to be in thrall to Soviet central control so Maclean asks Churchill directly, should he be worried about the political aspects of the situation. The straight answer is No. His mission is to find out who is killing the most Germans and help them to kill more (p.281), a point reiterated when he meets Churchill in Cairo (p.403).

He gives a detailed and very useful summary of the origins of Yugoslavia, going back to the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Turks, and the long struggle of the Balkan Christian nations to free themselves, leading into a detailed description of the region before, during and after the Great War and leading up to the Nazi invasion (pages 279 to 293). He’s especially good on the deeply embedded enmity between Serbs (Orthodox Christians who fought hard against the occupying Turks i.e. have a paranoid embattled mindset) and the Croats (Catholic Christians who were part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and so considered themselves civilised and superior to their barbarian neighbours) still a good read for anyone interested in the background to the ruinous civil wars of the 1990s. Right at the end of the Yugoslavia section he comments:

In the Balkans the tradition of violence is old-established and deep-rooted. (p.524)

Part 3. Yugoslavia

Zivio Tito. Smrt Fašismu. Sloboda narodu.
(‘Long live Tito. Death to Fascism. Liberty to the People.’ Partisan slogans, page 345)

Maclean is now aged 32. He selects a team of a dozen or so men who are trained, equipped and parachuted into Yugoslavia a week after the Italian capitulation i.e. early September 1943. They are met by Partisans and efficiently taken to Tito’s headquarters in an old castle. Maclean introduces himself and his team and makes it plain he is here on an investigation into the overall situation.

His description and analysis of the situation in Yugoslavia is fascinating and spread over many pages as new facts come in and shift his understanding. It contains many insights into the situation in Yugoslavia and of partisan fighting in general.

– Occupation mentality Nobody who hasn’t lived under enemy occupation, specially Nazi occupation, can understand the bitter enmities, rivalries and retaliations it triggers.

For anyone who was not himself in German-occupied Europe during the war it is hard to imagine the savage intensity of the passions which were aroused or the extremes of bitterness which they engendered. In Jugoslavia the old racial, religious and political feuds were, as it were, magnified and revitalized by the war, the occupation and the resistance, the latent tradition of violence revived. The lesson which we were having was an object-lesson, illustrated by burnt villages, desecrated churches, massacred hostages and mutilated corpses. (p.338)

– Tito’s intelligence and independence What makes Tito so impressive is his readiness to argue any point out with a completely open mind then make a decision, which is generally the right one.

– Tito’s name derives from this quickness to make decisions. He so regularly said to his men ‘You will do this, and you will do that’ which, in Serbo-Croatian, is ‘Ti to; ti to’, hence his nickname (p.311).

– Maclean concludes that the partisans are so numerous (at least 100,000 under arms) and well organised that they will probably emerge as the major element in post-war Yugoslav politics. At which point the big question will be: Will Tito, a dedicated communist, fall into line behind Moscow as all other communist parties have? (p.339) But Maclean quotes a conversation he had with him where Tito emphasises that so many Yugoslavs have been killed or tortured that they won’t willingly throw away their hard-earned independence (p.316) and Tito himself has undergone the experience of building up and leading a national resistance movement from scratch, a position, Maclean thinks, he will be reluctant to surrender (p.340).

– The Četniks The other resistance fighting organisation is the Četniks led by Draža Mihailović. Two points: 1) they were Royalists who took their orders from the king who was in exile in Italy and so fundamentally detached from the realities on the ground. 2) They were demoralised by the Nazis brutal reprisals for their activities (p.336). This contrasted with the Partisans who ignored Nazi reprisals and won a grudging admiration for fighting on regardless of how many men, women and children were murdered, tortured or burnt alive by the blonde beasts from Germany.

– The Ustaše (also called Ustashas or Ustashi) was a Croatian racist, terrorist, and Nazi-like movement, active from before the war (1929) which during the war was allowed to implement a reign of terror. Their genocide of the Orthodox, murdering priests, locking villages in churches and burning them down (p.334). Events which shed light on or explained the brutality of the Bosnian war of the 1990s:

This kaleidoscope of heroism and treachery, rivalry and intrigue had become the background to our daily life. Bosnia, where we had our first sight of enemy-occupied Jugoslavia, was in a sense a microcosm of the country as a whole. In the past it had been fought over repeatedly by Turks, Austrians and Serbs, and most of the national trends and tendencies were represented there, all at their most violent. The population was made up of violently Catholic Croats and no less violently Orthodox Serbs, with a strong admixture of equally fanatical local Moslems. The mountainous, heavily wooded country was admirably suited to guerrilla warfare, and it had long been one of the principal Partisan strongholds, while there was also a considerable sprinkling of Cetnik bands. It had been the scene of the worst of the atrocities committed by the Ustase, of the not unnaturally drastic reprisals of the Cetniks and Partisans. (p.337)

– The power of communism In guerrilla warfare ideas matter more than material resources (p.331). This is where the devoted belief of the communists comes in and Maclean’s analysis suggests a very profound historical point that he doesn’t quite articulate: that communism flourished in countries all round the world, and particularly among guerrillas, partisans and militias all across the Third World after the war, not because it was right, but because it was the most effective ideology for binding together and motivating those kinds of liberation fighters. Communism triumphed in the Darwinian struggle of ideologies for a number of obvious reasons:

  • it promises a better fairer world; if you care for humanity, you must be a communist
  • it is based on scientific principles and a teleological view of history which means it is inevitable, unstoppable
  • it transcends ethnic or national rivalries, purports to unite all people, races and creeds, in a transnational crusade for justice and equality
  • these and other considerations bred a fanatical adherence

(Seen from this strictly utilitarian point of view, communism’s modern equivalent would be militant Islam, extreme Islamic groups across the Middle East and North Africa being shown to create not only fanatical devotees but to unite fighters from all backgrounds and races (a theme mentioned in The World’s Most Dangerous Place: Inside the Outlaw State of Somalia by James Fergusson, 2013).)

He gives a good potted biography of Tito, son of a Croatian peasant (pages 310 to 313).

The epic trek to the Adriatic

The army engineer he’s brought with him supervises the flattening of a likely looking field to make a runway for the RAF to fly in much-needed supplies to the Partisans, but HQ back in Cairo make it clear the RAF aren’t keen on entrusting their pilots’ lives to amateur airfield builders. A new plan is suggested: that the Royal Navy brings supplies to a port on the coast of Dalmatia, until recently held by the Italians and not yet annexed by the Germans. In fact the Navy are wary, too, and prefer to drop supplies at an island off the coast.

Anyway, Maclean agrees a plan with Tito (impatient to get supplies anyway he can) who gives him Partisans to escort Maclean and a few of his team (Street, Henniker-Major and Sergeant Duncan) across country to the Adriatic coast, there to assess the situation and suggest the best island. Thus commences a long and arduous trek across mountains, through woods, crossing a German-patrolled road, fording a river, meeting all kinds of eccentric characters along the way and seeing for themselves the carnage meted out by the once-occupying Italians.

The itinerary is: Jajce (Tito’s base in Bosnia). Bugojno. Kupres. Livno (recently recovered from the Germans amid much fighting). Arzano (‘a few tiny white-washed houses, clinging to the side of a hill’). Zadvaije.

Then, at last, we heard the dogs barking in Baska Voda, were challenged once more, and, between high white-washed walls, found ourselves on a narrow jetty, looking out over a tiny harbour.

Then by local fishing boat out to the island of Korcula. They are treated royally, swim in the sea, taken round all the villages on the coast and greeted with acclaim. Trouble is, the bloody radio has stopped working so he can’t radio his whereabouts back to Cairo HQ. In the event a Navy motorboat turns up with, of course, an old chum of his from the navy and some tons of equipment.

Summary

An enormous amount happens in the next year and a half, described in 120 closely-written pages. Here are some highlights in note form:

The Germans consolidate their hold on the Dalmatian coast thus slowly squeezing off possible places for the Allies to land munitions for the partisans.

He is collected by Royal Navy motor boat and taken across the Adriatic to Allied HQ in southern Italy for orders. He is flown to Malta, then on across Libya to Cairo. Preparations are underway for a Big Three conference in the Middle East. Maclean submits his report, conclusion so far about the situation in Yugoslavia and the central importance of the partisans.

On return to Bari he finds the situation has deteriorated the Germans have seized more of the coastline. Repeated attempts to fly him back in are defeated by fog and snow. A captured German airplane is filled with top envoys from Tito to fly to Allied HQ but it has just loaded up when a German plane appears out of nowhere, attacking it with bombs and machine gun fire, killing some of Tito’s top lieutenants and some of Maclean’s British friends.

Finally he gets to land, drops some equipment and British officers, takes on board a new selection of Tito representatives, and flies back to Bari with a view to taking them on to Allied HQ in Egypt. Churchill and staff have returned from the Tehran conference with Stalin and Roosevelt (28 November to 1 December).

The central problem is that Britain has, up until now, been giving official support to the Royal Yugoslav Government in exile, appointed by King Peter, and sending arms to the Royalist Cetniks led by by Draža Mihailović. Now Maclean has to tell Churchill and other bigwigs that the Cetniks are not only not very effective on the ground but strongly suspected of acquiescing or even helping the Germans. Meanwhile, the real anti-German force is the partisans. So Maclean’s meetings with Churchill are designed to make him switch official British government support from the Cetniks to the partisans. But this leaves the  big problem that Maclean is reporting that Tito’s partisans will not only be the biggest force in post-war Yugoslavia but will probably form the government. Therefore British support for the King and the royal government in exile is increasingly irrelevant and backing the wrong horse. But how to switch British support without alienating the king, the Cetniks and the large proportion of the Yugoslav population which remains royalist? (Later on Maclean says that even the communists conceded that over half the population of Serbia was monarchist, p.490.)

This tricky diplomatic challenge runs throughout the rest of the Yugoslav part of the book and negotiations, between so many different parties, moving through so many different stages, are impossible to summarise. In a nutshell, young King Peter acquiesces in the decision but, as so often, it is his older advisors and other members of the royal family, who prove intractable and complicate the situation.

Maclean is flown back to Bari and then makes the dicey crossing back to an unoccupied Yugoslav port in a RN motor-torpedo boat. He reunites with his small staff and Tito’s staff and, after studying maps and latest German troop movements, they all agree the only viable island base for operations is the island of Vis. He then travels back to Bari to meet the Commander in Chief, General Alexander, to persuade him to assign the resources and troops required to convert Vis into a stronghold, for example building a large airfield and barracks for a permanent British force.

Yet another flight, from Bari to Marrakesh in Morocco where Churchill is recovering from flu, to persuade the great man to sign off on the Vis plan. they learn that Tito’s old headquarters in Jajce has fallen to the Germans and so, thinking they need some bucking up, Churchill writes a personal letter to Tito for Maclean to deliver by hand (p.413).

He is flown back to Bari and then parachuted into Bosnia to find and report the decision to Tito.

(Chapter 10) He is taken to meet Tito at temporary headquarters and discovers a Yugoslav Anti-Fascist Council has bestowed in Tito the rank of Marshall. Tito is delighted by the letter in which Churchill flatters him and readily agrees with the plan to make Vis a major support base for his partisans. They move about a lot and finally make a new HQ in caves overlooking a valley.

Chapter 11. New deal

Increasing air drops from the RAF and USAAF. Maclean is responsible for assigning officers to work with partisan units throughout the country.

Despite occasional stoppages, air-supplies were now arriving on a far larger scale. Air-support, too, was increasing by leaps and bounds….It was now possible, owing to the presence of my officers with Partisan formations throughout the country, to co-ordinate their operations with those of the Allied Armies in Italy. (p.429)

A Russian Mission arrives led by a Red Army general. This is the thin end of the wedge as East and West start to compete for the allegiance of Tito and his partisans.

A passage giving the decision, context and implications of the British government decision to stop supplying the Cetniks and diplomatic negotiations with King Peter (in exile in London) to see if he’s prepared to form a government of national unity i.e. let communist partisans enter his government in exile (pages 438 to 441). This would be best achieved if Maclean flies back to London to give advice, preferably accompanied by a representative of Tito.

Chapter 12. Change of scene

So he’s picked up by Dakota and flies to Algiers to meet with the new Supreme Allied Commander, General Wilson. Here, among many other decisions, it is decided to set up a Balkan Air Force which would train partisan volunteers and be responsible ‘for the planning, co-ordination and, to a large extent, execution of air operations in the Balkans’ (p.444). Long-distance phone call to Churchill with comedy because neither of them know how to use the newfangled scrambling equipment.

Next day he flies to London with the Tito delegate, Major Vlatko Velebit. It’s the spring of 1944 and England is overflowing with Americans and rumours of D-Day. He is summoned to a meeting with General Eisenhower, then to another one at Number 10. the military side – more supplies to the partisans – is easily agreed. The political negotiations with King Peter and the Royalists much more challenging. Peter has by now made an important public announcement telling his people to drop the Cetniks and support the partisans but this only has the effect of weakening his own support among disgruntled royalists without much increasing support for the partisans which was already strong.

Maclean receives a call from Buckingham Palace to go and brief the king who he finds to be surprisingly well-informed about the situation in Yugoslavia (p.449).

Then they get a radio message from Vivian Street, British officer with Tito HQ, that the cave hideout came under heavy attack from a co-ordinated German attack, many partisans were killed through Tito and senior officers made their escape. (Maclean gives a sustained description of the attack and gripping escape, pages 450 to 452.)

The HQ had been near the village of Drvar. In retaliation for supporting the partisans the Germans exterminate every man, woman and child in the village. That level of barbarism is what we were fighting to liberate Europe from.

The Germans pursue and harass Tito’s team who eventually radio for help. A date is made for a US Dakota to land at a cleared strip and Tito and key staff (and his dog Tigger) are loaded aboard and evacuated to Bari, the first time he’s been forced to leave Yugoslav soil since the conflict began (p.454).

Everyone agrees that, in order to continue functioning and provide a figurehead he must be returned to Yugoslav soil as soon as possible and the island of Vis, so long pondered as a new HQ, is agreed. Tito and his staff are taken there by Royal Navy destroyer, HMS Blackmore.

Chapter 13. Island base and brief encounter

Maclean drily observes that Tito likes caves. He makes his base on the island of Vis three-quarters up the side of Mount Hum. Since he was last there the island has been transformed with a huge Allied airfield built with as many as a dozen huge American bombers parked up.

The narrow roads were crammed with Army trucks and jeeps, stirring up clouds of red dust as they rushed along. Every few hundred yards dumps of stores and ammunition, surrounded by barbed wire and by brightly painted direction posts, advertised the presence of R.E.M.E., of N.A.A.F.I., of D.A.D.O.S., and of the hundred and one other services and organizations… Down by the harbour at Komisa was the Naval Headquarters, presided over by Commander Morgan Giles, R.N., who had what was practically an independent command over a considerable force of M.T.B.s and other light naval craft, with which he engaged in piratical activities against enemy shipping up and down the whole length of the Jugoslav coast… (p.458)

Also the establishment of the Balkan School of Artillery, set up on Vis as part of Maclean’s Mission under the command of Lieutenant-Colonel Geoffrey Kup:

whose life-work it became to instruct the Partisans in the use of the American 75-mm. Pack Howitzer. This was a light mountain gun, transportable on mule-back, if there happened to be any mules, and in general ideally suited to the type of warfare in which we were engaged. (p.459)

Also a partisan tank squadron being trained up in North Africa (p.464).

The Germans undertake another offensive, called the Seventh Offensive, against the partisans which starts with fierce fighting but then, like all the others, peters out.

The tide of the war is really turning. On 5 June 1944 Rome fell to the Allies. The following day saw the D-Day landings in Normandy. The Allies need to co-ordinate attacks on the Germans with the partisans; there needs to be discussion of the parts of northern Italy Tito wants to claim for Yugoslavia; plus the ever-intractable problem of the king and royalists. So it is that Supreme Allied Command in Italy ask for him to visit and Maclean organises the trip, accompanied by senior advisers, bodyguards and the faithful dog, Tigger.

It had been kept secret from Maclean, Tito and others that Churchill himself intended to fly in and meet Tito for the first time, and so the so-called Naples Conference came about. Churchill is fulsome in his praise, Maclean thinks Tito is amazed and pleased, the one-time peasant and revolutionary now sitting at the same table as one of the big three world leaders.

The high political problem is still how to reconcile with communist partisans with the royal government in exile, which has now crystallised round its prime minister, Dr Ivan Subasic. After ten days the Naples Conference ends and Subasic flies with Tito, his staff, Maclean etc back to Vis where the two Yugoslav parties hold a series of negotiations while the Brits sunbathe and swim in the beautiful aquamarine sea.

In the end a deal of sorts is agreed and Subasic flies back to London to put it to the king and his government.

Chapter 14. Ratweek plan

June 1944. Rumours that the Germans might retreat, withdrawing to a line they could better defend to the north of Yugoslavia. To do this they will need the central railway line from Belgrade to Salonika. Therefore it is the Allied aim to blow up the line and trap German forces in Yugoslavia.

The scheme was called ‘Operation Ratweek’. My proposal was that, for the space of one week, timed to coincide as closely as possible with the estimated beginning of the German withdrawal, the Partisans on land and the Allies on the sea and in the air, should make a series of carefully planned, carefully co-ordinated attacks on enemy lines of communication throughout Jugoslavia. This would throw the retiring forces into confusion and gravely hamper further withdrawal.

In drawing up these plans, we had recourse to all available sources of information concerning the enemy’s order of battle and the disposition of his troops, while at every stage we consulted by signal the British officers and the Partisan Commanders on the spot. Thus, the whole of the German line of withdrawal would be covered and every possible target accounted for. In the light of what we guessed the enemy’s plans to be the attack was fixed for the first week of September. (p.471)

Maclean decides to go from Bosnia to see for himself the situation in Serbia. Flies in and rendezvous with John Henniker-Major who’s been with the Serb Partisans since April. The Serb Partisans the Cinderellas of the movement, with less support from the local population, fewer rough mountains to hide in (unlike Bosnia), less successful against the Germans and so seizing fewer arms and so less well supplied than elsewhere. Lucky they have a good leader in Stambolic.

In April/May had come a change. The King announced his rapprochement with Tito and that led many to switch from supporting the passive Cetniks. Tito sent some of his best commanders to shake up the Serbian operation, notably Koca Popovic. And the Allies made a decision to stop supplying the Cetniks and supply the Partisans. As a result the latter began undertaking more operations and having greater success. Those who wanted to fight the invader went over to them, more successes, more seized arms and more prestige and respect, created a snowball effect. But still the deadly civil war between Partisans and Cetniks persisted.

So Maclean has been flown in to liaise with the Serb partisans. He is introduced to Koca, they pull out maps and have a comprehensive review of the situation, with Koca explaining where his forces can attack by themselves and where they’ll need air support, and what supplies.

Chapter 15. Ratweek fulfilment

He marches with partisans to Bojnik then onto the village where the Commander of the 24th Partisan Division, the formation responsible for the attack on the railway in the Leskovac area, had set up his Headquarters and where he finds Johnny Tregida, his liaison officer with the 24th Division. He kips in a courtyard full of Bulgarian prisoners. Next day they ride horses to Leskovac, where the attack on the railway is to take place. Information has found the town packed with German armour and motor transport and so HQ back in Bari had decided to send an unusually heavy fleet of bombers, some 50 Flying Fortresses. Maclean and his partisans watch from a nearby hill as these silver planes from high in the sky unload a huge payload on Leskovac and flatten it.

That night he observes the partisan attacks on the railway line, tackling enemy pillboxes while they set charges to blow up bridges and culverts, then tear up the railway itself and burn the sleepers. The idea is to delay or even trap the German forces in Greece and Yugoslavia, to prevent them being transferred to north Italy and Austria, to make the Allies job in those places easier.

All over occupied Yugoslavia similar attacks take place to destroy communications and bottle up the German forces. They notice enemy planes flying north and suspect they are carrying senior staff officers, communicate this to HQ who undertake attacks of these little convoys which promptly cease.

Maclean rides north to reunite with Boca, and is struck by the lush fertility of the Serb countryside and its rural prosperity, compared to rockier, poorer Bosnia. It’s a long journey over many days and Maclean gives a wonderful impressionistic account of the small villages of whitewashed houses, the locals bringing food, waking up in an orchard of plum trees, and so on. What experiences he had!

News comes through that the Bulgarians are negotiating an armistice and then that they have come in on the Allied side, with the result that Bulgarian forces throughout Yugoslavia switch sides. He meets up with Boca and Partisan headquarters which is itself riding north, now making a convoy.

They enter Prokuplje as liberators and are feted and feasted. He has just rigged up a bath and is having locals boil water when news comes of a German counter-attack, they have to quickly load their belongings and ride out.

He really enjoys life on the move in Serbia, the lush countryside and friendly villagers and wonderful food and so is annoyed when he receives a direct order from General Wilson. Tito has disappeared from Vis and Maclean is to report to the nearest partisan airstrip in order to be flown out of Serbia and find him.

Chapter 16. Grand finale

Tito has disappeared from Vis and his unexplained absence causes quite a bit of resentment among the British who had been entirely funding the partisans and lost good men among their liaison officers. After confirming his absence Maclean returns to Serbia, to hook up with the troops of Peko Dapcevic at Valjevo in time to see it fall to the partisans, helped by British Beaufighters. He finally locates Tito who’s in the Vojvodina and replies equably enough to a letter he sends him.

The second half of the chapter, pages 504 to 514, is devoted to Maclean being in at the liberation of Belgrade, the notable aspects of which are: 1) that the advance and battle are dominated by the Red Army which has crossed the Danube into Serbia – there’s lots of fraternising with Russians so lucky that Maclean speaks fluent Russian and also has received a Russian military medal which he dusts off and pins prominently to his uniform; and 2) the Germans put up a fierce resistance as they retreat, some of which Maclean witnesses at close quarters.

Chapter 17. Who goes home?

A few days after the conquest of Belgrade, Tito flies in and holds a victory march where Maclean is much moved by the ramshackle, dirty, patched-up appearance of the partisans, indicative of years of struggle, living off the land, guerrilla warfare. Now the partisans set about consolidating their grip on power. Tito negotiates a power-sharing deal with Royalists but it is plain this is only a temporary agreement.

On 27 October Maclean has his first meeting with Tito and conveys British irritation at his unexplained disappearance. In fact by this time the mystery has been cleared up because Stalin, at their most recent meeting, had told Churchill that Tito was visiting him in Moscow.

Maclean’s team of officers who had each been assigned to various partisan groups, now assemble in Belgrade and quickly convert themselves to a working British embassy. The last few pages describe this transition of the partisans from wartime guerrillas to peacetime administration. There is still fighting in the north but Tito has settled into the White Palace, Prince Paul’s former residence on the outskirts of the city (p.523). Maclean is still involved in negotiations with the king and royal government in exile, featuring Dr Subasic (who flies to Moscow to get Stalin’s blessing, p.520) which are detailed and complex but ultimately futile, for the partisans are solidly in power, with the numbers, the arms and the organisation to enforce it.

There is a lot of detail about the negotiations which dragged on until early March 1945 (p.530). But for Maclean the glory days of guerrilla warfare and living in the field were over and he asks to be transferred away from Yugoslavia. In mid-March he flies out after 18 months’ very intensive engagement, before the geopolitics and diplomacy get complex and messy. The book ends with his description of getting into the plane, taking off and watching the coastline disappear behind him. He had just turned 34. What an amazing series of adventures to have had by such a young age!

It’s very striking that the book ends with no summary, no conclusions, no Final Thoughts, no analysis of the political situation, let alone a retrospective description of how the war ended, how relations with Russia deteriorated, the start of the Cold War, Yugoslavia’s evolution under Tito’s rule or any of that – nothing, nada.

Maclean restricts himself very consciously to a first-person account of the immediate, of what he saw and thought and said and experienced. He gets on the plane and flies West and it’s over. It’s a very abrupt but totally appropriate ending.

In his father’s footsteps

Very slightly and subtly, Maclean’s father hovers in the background. Once or twice he casually mentions that some of the places he visits in Central Asia were visited by his father 30 years earlier. He enlists in the same regiment as his father. His father fought in the North African desert in the First World War and at some points MacLean passes through some of the same places e.g. Matruh (p.204). Living up to his father’s achievements.

Private school

Maclean’s aristocratic upbringing and bearing are present throughout, in his confidence and savoir vivre, in his practical skills (skiing, camping, hunting and shooting), in his urbane easiness in the company of filthy partisans or prime ministers and kings. Only once or twice does he explicitly refer to his privileged upbringing, but then in the same kind of way that all his generation and class did (the tones collected and defined by Cyril Connolly for so influencing the mindset and writing of the 1930s generations of poets and novelists):

The M.L. arrived that night and I went on board, as excited as a schoolboy going home for his first holidays.

Upper-class chums

A central characteristic of the posh, of aristocrats, of the landed gentry, reinforced by the network of private schools they attend, is that they all know each other, they are all ‘old friends’. Not only that but it only suffices to work with someone for a bit – in the Foreign Office or the Army, say – for them to be recruited into your cohort of ‘old friends’. And so these people move in a kind of gilded world filled with old friends and bonhomie.

And so, leaving them in the able and experienced hands of Jim Thomas, an old friend from Foreign Office days, I went…

In Mrs. Fraser-Tytler I found a fellow clanswoman with whom my friendship dated back to the days of my childhood in Inverness…

It was in this frame of mind that I went to see Rex Leeper, an old friend from Foreign Office days, and now His Majesty’s Ambassador to the Greek Government then in exile in Cairo… (p.278)

One of the sailors I recognized as Sandy Glenn, an old friend with a number of adventurous exploits to his credit… (p.373)

I recognized the work of my old friends Mark Chapman Walker and Hermione Ranfurly, the Commander-in-Chief’s highly efficient Military Assistant and Private Secretary… (p.401)

John Clarke and Andrew Maxwell were both old friends of mine… (p.432)

The problem which had been exercising me for some time, namely, how to get my old friend Sergeant (now Sergeant-Major) Charlie Button into Jugoslavia… (p.435)

Ralph Stevenson…British Ambassador to the Royal Jugoslav Government…was an old friend from Foreign Office days… (p.468)

The example of a partisan they worked with closely – ‘Brko, by now an old friend…’ (p.491) – indicates how it’s not length of time that makes someone an ‘old friend’, but depth of experience and closeness of companionship. Old friends need not, in fact, be old friends at all, just people you’ve gotten to know and trust, sometimes over comparably short periods of time.

This is a quality I commented on in my reviews of John Buchan, whose fabulously posh protagonists are continually bumping into ‘old friends’ whenever they need help. Not being plugged into a network of successful, well-connected ‘old friends’ in commanding positions across politics, business, the forces, the arts, I can only marvel at the ease and confidence with which these privileged creatures lived out their charmed lives. For example, take this profile of David Stirling’s Intelligence Officer, Gordon Alston:

By the time he reached the age of twenty-five Gordon had managed to have a remarkably full life. Having got off to a flying start when he left Eton at seventeen to become a racing motorist in Italy, he had later tried his hand at journalism in France and brewing beer in Germany. Since early in the war he had served in Commandos or Commando-type units. This varied experience had left him with a taste for adventure, a knowledge of foreign languages, and, most conveniently for us, an altogether remarkable flair for military intelligence.

How ripping! A big part of the pleasure of reading books like this is not only all the operational war stuff, but simply marvelling at the wonderfully varied, adventurous lives these privileged people seemed to live.

(And, as a digression, it crosses my mind that it’s the quality whose degraded, shabby, poor relation – a seedy, fake bonhomie – is satirised and ripped to shreds in William Boyd’s comic novel A Good Man in Africa.)

Upper-class manners

Being phenomenally posh, being a polished specimen of the British upper class, gives him the impeccable manners, savoir faire and confidence to meet and socialise with all ranks, from peasants to monarchs. The book invites us into this world, lends us the cloak of his manners and politesse, so that we are not as surprised as we maybe should be when Maclean calmly records being sent to meet the future leader of Yugoslavia, invited to spend the weekend with Churchill or to dine with exiled King Peter. Other countries will continue to have kings and emperors and aristocrats and leaders who reek authority and stickle for etiquette and procedure, so it makes sense that we should have a cohort of impeccably turned-out sophisticates who can match them at their game.

It is a symbol of how far Britain has fallen that the shambling liar Boris Johnson was Foreign Secretary from 2016 to 2018, embarrassing Britain at international events around the globe purely because Theresa May needed to keep a potential usurper and his faction in the ever-fractious Conservative Party onside. Shaming.

Roughing it

Aristocrats aren’t all floppy haircuts and parties in Chelsea, especially the Scottish variety. Instead, Maclean really loves roughing it, and takes to life on the road in Central Asia or on the run with partisans in the forests of Bosnia with equal alacrity. He likes the simple life.

Having eaten my breakfast, I cleaned out my mess tin and used it for boiling some snow-water on the stove, to shave in. It was an agreeably compact mode of life, with no time, space or energy wasted on unnecessary frills. (p.420)

Time after time he tells us that sleeping rough, bunking down in an orchard wrapped only in his greatcoat and with his backpack for a pillow, eating primitive food in a cave in Bosnia or bully beef in the Libyan Desert, this is what he wants, this is how he likes it, pure and clean and simple.

Lols

Maclean has a dry, understated sense of humour, the true aristocratic drollness, an unflappable ability to put up with discomfort and find the amusing in every situation. The book is studded with a number of comic setpieces.

Our short train journey had an improbable, dreamlike quality, which even while it was actually in progress, made it hard to believe that it was really happening. From the inside, Tito’s special coach was even more like a hut than from the outside, with an open stove in the middle and benches round the wall. The stifling heat of the stove induced sleep. The benches on the other hand were just too narrow to sleep on with any security. On the floor lay Tigger, in a bad temper and snapping at everyone’s ankles. At last, after a great deal of fussing and settling down, he went to sleep, only to be woken again almost immediately by a Cabinet Minister falling off one of the benches on top of him, whereupon pandemonium broke loose. It was not a restful journey… (p.421)

Also the story of the British officer, living and working with the partisans who, wherever he puts his sleeping bag and goes to sleep, always fidgets and ends up rolling yards, sometimes quite a distance away, one time being found wrapped round a tree stump, another time on the edge of a precipice, each time fast asleep and snoring his head off.

An eye for the ladies

There’s no mention of a girlfriend, lovers, no romance and certainly no sex of any kind. It’s part of the book’s tact and discretion. But Maclean does have what we used to call ‘an eye for the ladies’ and permits himself regular mention of particularly toothsome young women whenever he encounters them:

[In Korcula] a small crowd had soon collected to look at us. It included, I noticed with pleasure, one extremely pretty girl., (p.366)

From now onwards [Charlie Button] took charge of the Mission’s administrative arrangements, and ‘Gospodin Charlie’, as he was known, could be seen planning moves, negotiating for pack-horses, bartering strips of parachute silk for honey or eggs with buxom peasant girls… (p.435)

The technicalities involved were explained to me by an officer of the United States Army Signal Corps, while a pretty W.A.C. Sergeant prepared to take a recording of what was said. (p.444)

The Americans furnished me, in case of need, with a stenographer, a blonde young lady of considerable personal attractions wearing a closely fitting tropical uniform… (p.466)

Most of them [the population of the little Serbian town of Dobrovo] were rosy-cheeked, stolid-looking creatures, broad in the beam, with thick arms and legs, but amongst them, I noticed, was one exceptionally pretty girl, slim and dark, with classical features and a clear, pale skin, holding a little curly-haired child by the hand. (p.492)

And many more.

Upper-class tact

A crucial aspect of good manners, as of diplomacy, is tact. As the book progressed I became increasingly aware of the narrative’s tact. What I mean is that he is very discreet and polite about the many individuals named in it. About his army colleagues, first in the SAS then on location in Yugoslavia, he is uniformly full of praise, especially praising those who won medals. He has to use tact when dealing with all manner of Soviet officials and local peasants and brigands in Central Asia. He has to be tactful in his dealings with Tito, and in Yugoslavia has to train his officers in how to interact with the partisans tactfully i.e. show them how to use equipment without insulting their manhood or achievements. (Maclean has some comic stories about illiterate partisans eating various supplies such as plastic explosive, stories echoed in Ben Macintyre’s stories about the French Resistance.)

This quality comes out into the open, as it were, in the various descriptions of Winston Churchill, where Maclean allows himself to mention Churchill’s eccentricities:

  • at Chequers insisting on spending the evening with senior military staff watching Mickey Mouse cartoons in his private cinema
  • meeting underlings at his Cairo villa lying in bed in a silk dressing gown smoking a cigar (p.401)

But he only goes exactly to the same point as the common myth of Churchill’s whimsical personal style and no further. He tells humorous anecdotes about people but is never indiscreet. That would be bad form.

Once this had occurred to me I realised you could regard the abrupt ending of the book as itself an act of tactfulness. If he’d gone on to describe events after his departure from Yugoslavia in March 1945 (the final months of the war, conflict with Russia, the Cold War and scores of other issues such as the election defeat of Churchill) it would have stained and muddied the purity of the kind of narrative he wants to tell. Ending his text so abruptly is an aesthetic statement – less is more – and supreme act of tactfulness.

H.G. Wells

Happening to be reading a lot about H.G. Wells at the moment, I was struck when Maclean makes a reference to him, describing the American Lightning aircraft, with their twin tails and bristling cannon, as ‘like something out of H.G. Wells’ (p.393) – presumably he’s referring to Wells’s Edwardian novels about the war in the air, although also, maybe, to his description of apocalyptic war in ‘The Shape of Things To Come’ (1933) – either way, testimony to the grip on the popular imagination, about the future and disastrous wars, that Wells continued to exert.

Penguin are pants

I’m reluctant to buy new paperback books because they’re generally such poor quality. This book is a case in point. The typeface was degraded and poor quality on every page. Random words appear in lighter typeface than their neighbours. Random letters within words are partly effaced. Entire lines have either the upper or lower part of the letters distorted. You know when you make a photocopy of a document and position the original badly so that the photocopy misses off one side of the page? Like that, the final parts of letters are cut off all down the right hand side of the text. Some pages are in a different font from the main text (pages 152 to 153).

Precisely 24 hours after it arrived I noticed that, looked at side-on, the middle pages of this brand new book had ceased to lie flat but had become wavy. When I opened to these pages I discovered they were the ones containing half a dozen or so very very very bad quality reproductions of photographs, and something about reproducing these photos in plain ink on normal paper must have somehow made them absorb moisture from the atmosphere and become wrinkled and creased. They look like they’ve been dropped in the bath.

Only occasionally did all this make it impossible to actually read, but these marks of poor quality appeared on every one of the book’s 543 pages and were a constant distraction. They made me think what a mug I was to spend £12.99 on such a shoddy production. Never buy new Penguin books. Very poor print standards.

Credit

Eastern Approaches by Fitzroy MacLean was published by Jonathan Cape in 1949. All references are to the 2019 Penguin paperback edition – printed to a very poor standard.

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Posted by Simon on April 29, 2024

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First Light: The Story of the Boy Who Became a Man in the War-Torn Skies Above Britain by Geoffrey Wellum (2002)

Elementary rule one: never relax vigilance.
(First Light, page 152)

This is a charming, very readable and high-spirited memoir of Wellum’s career as a Battle of Britain pilot and beyond. He was just 17 when he applied to join the RAF at the start of 1939, still a schoolboy excited at being appointed captain of the cricket first XI at his public school, still in awe of the headmaster – and he carries that schoolboy zest and excitement into his training and combat experiences, and into this account, which brims with candid, innocent enthusiasm.

In fact the RAF wouldn’t let young Geoff join till he was the legal age of 17 and a half, so that’s how old he was when he commenced the training in the summer of 1939, achieving his first solo flight just 2 days before Britain went to war on 3 September 1939 (p.19).

Present tense and short sentences

Wellum’s style contributes to the text’s pace and impact, and has several distinguishing features. The most obvious is his use of the historic present tense throughout.

And so this sunny morning finds me walking down Kingsway.

I’ve never been into a pub on my own before, so I stride into the saloon bar as if I own the place and ask for a pint of bitter.

Another trait is the use of clipped phrasing, as in the third sentence here:

Do I really want to join the RAF and become a pilot? I suppose I’m doing the right thing? Still time to turn round and go home.

This is achieved by dispensing with verbs, at least the main, active verb. Thus ‘There’s’ has been dropped from the third sentence above and any main verb from this sentence:

Down below, a cluster of cottages; smoke from their chimneys rising vertically into the still air. (p.77)

There are many sentences like this, with the main active verb removed. The result is a series of static pictures, like a slideshow.

  • A large crowd all chattering away around the notice board in the ground training block.
  • A final day with ‘C’ flight before a spot of leave.

He especially uses it in the first sentence of a chapter, painting a picture, setting the scene:

  • A cool afternoon, rather dull and lifeless with rain in the air. (p.199)
  • January 1941. Deep winter: mist, that horribly thick, drizzly sea mist, fog, frost, low cloud. (p.248)

Learnings

Generally speaking you should take your first solo flight after about ten hours’ tuition. If it drags on longer than that there’s a problem.

Usually every trainee pilot has a blank spot, a recurrent problem they have to overcome. For Geoff it was taking off.

The training course was very competitive. As the ten-hour deadline passed people on the course slowly dropped out or, more precisely, stopped appearing for breakfast. The slang expression is being handed a ‘bowler hat’ i.e. turfed back into Civvy Street.

Training and then deployment to an active squadron involved a surprising amount of moving about from one airfield to another. We follow Wellum from:

  • Tiger Moths at Desford
  • Kidlington
  • Little Rissington
  • Warmwell
  • Kenley
  • Northolt
  • Pembrey Wales – failure to engage bomber over Bristol
  • Biggin Hill
  • Manston, 92 Squadron

The joy of flight (p.73)

Halcyon day, warm sunshine, blue skies and light Indian-summer breezes. Flying as God meant it to be. Open cockpits, helmets and goggles, heads in the slipstream, biplanes, wood, canvas and vibration, quivering bracing wires and the eternal drumming of the engine. I am master over machine. Pride and confidence flow into me. (p.23)

First light

At first glance the title of the book seems a bit cryptic or mystical but slowly we realise that, once he’s posted for wartime duty, day after day the pilots are woken just before dawn, and the sights and sounds and smells and feel of dawn breaking over an airfield just coming to life, with the pilots staggering into the mess and pouring themselves coffee while the ground crews start servicing and firing up the Spitfires, all this acquires a deep and evocative beauty.

My impressions of the last two months or so revolve around dawns. Pink dawns, grey dawns, misty, rainy and windy dawns, but always dawns: first light. (p.127)

No surprise that by the time we’re half way through the narrative, an entire chapter, Chapter 4, which drops us straight into the middle of the Battle of Britain in September 1940, is titled ‘First Light’ and, by virtue of its constant repetition, the phrase beings to build up a charge and force.

It is first light and still and rather beautiful; the birth of a new day. (p.137)

First light, high noon, evening, dusk and then the quiet hours until the next dawn and first light again. It is a relentless ritual which will continue until this bloody war is over (p.162)

What a truly bloody day it’s been. Everybody is fed up with it, packing up for the time being. It will all start tomorrow at first light. (p.244)

The joy of flying

Up here the air is pure and clean. The sheer joy of flight infiltrates the very soul and from above the earth, alone, where the mere thought in one’s mind seems to transmit itself to the aeroplane, there is no longer any doubt that some omniscient force understands what life is all about. There are times when the feeling of being near to an unknown presence is strong and real and comforting. It is far beyond human comprehension. We only know that it’s beautiful. (p.23)

Wellum is excellent at capturing the joy and wonder of flying, and in particular the deep joy of flying a Spitfire which is regularly described as a wonder of engineering, fitting like a glove, responding almost to the pilot’s thoughts rather than hands, his second home and eventually the only place he wants to be.

With an agility that never ceases to amaze me my fitter is out of the cockpit in a flash and putting his hand under my arm, almost lifting me into the aircraft. At once I feel better. The vibration humming through the Spitfire, here we are, home again. (p.143)

They are alive these Spitfires. They live, just like the rest of us, they understand. (p.145)

God

The text is littered with references to the deity but all of a fairly superficial schoolboy level, for example, his repeated wondering why the God who made the beauty of the world permits war and death.

Dear God, fancy allowing this sort of thing to happen. What are You up to? It’s ghastly. They’ll probably tell me it’s not You, it’s the Devil. (p.169)

What a strange life we pilots lead. This is the sort of moment that only those who can fly can fully understand. I wonder how this compares with the Peace of God. How does the blessing go? ‘The Peace of God that passeth all understanding.’ Surely, at moments like this, alone and lonely, one must be very close to Him even though there is a war raging and I don’t understand why He allows it to happen. (p.184)

It’s all bloody wrong somehow, that twentieth-century civilisation should have been allowed to come to this. Just total war, I suppose. What’s it all about, for God’s sake? (p.207)

Presumably God favoured us during last summer; or did He – with the glorious weather that must have suited the purpose of the Hun? In any case, why does He allow this sort of thing to happen? Whatever he decides, many thousands of people, ‘His children’ we are all taught to believe, are going to be slaughtered before it’s all over. (p.210)

In a similar completely superficial vein are his frequent requests for God to be with him during that day’s battle and so on, not very much more sophisticated than asking God to help you score the winning try in the school rugby competition.

Come on then God, get it over with or I’ll go over to the other side, you see if I don’t.

Listen God, you’re not only difficult to find you’re also a hard task master.

Or a hearty blessing:

I am, thank goodness, totally reconciled to death. No doubt my turn will come one day and there is nothing I can do about it. I can only trust that God is with me when I go; something quick perhaps. Let Him be with all pilots who catch it, friend or foe. (p.264)

He lacks any intellectual depth whatsoever but it doesn’t matter. He was, after all, only turning 19 during the Battle of Britain, hadn’t been to university, had come fresh from the cricket pitch at the age of 17 and a half. They are the thoughts of a bright, optimistic, entirely unintellectual schoolboy.

I wonder what on earth I would have done if I had been turned down [when he applied to the RAF]? Wasn’t all that long ago, really. Now look at me; a Spitfire pilot. Whoever would have thought it? I’m a lucky bloke! (p.177 cf p.221)

Here he is thinking about the origins of the war as he accompanies a squad of Blenheim airplanes to bomb Abbeville:

Down there someone is going to get hurt and, presumably, it doesn’t matter who. What a funny war. Don’t like the idea of bombing much. At least the role of fighter pilot seems cleaner somehow. Makes you wonder what life is all about. It must be a lousy way to get yourself killed, to have a bloody great bomb dropped on you. In any case, the Huns started it all, so it serves them right. (p.259)

First Light is, in this sense, quite a superficial account, but in a positive way (if that makes sense). The lack of ‘depth’, the fifth form reflections, don’t matter at all, what matters is the vividness with which he describes his sensations, the intense engagement with all the different types of weather he has to fly in and above all the bounding joy of flying a Spitfire.

Looking out of the tiny cockpit as we flow about the cloud-dappled sky I experience an exhilaration that I cannot recall ever having felt before. (p.105)

(Compare the description of flying the new Spitfire Mark VB, taking it higher than ever before, and being able to see the breath-taking panorama of the whole of South East England, p.250)

The schoolboy shallowness of his occasional reflections about God or the war or so on only emphasise the powerful immediacy of the nervous anticipation, then the phone call telling the squadron to scramble, the hurried take-off and then the numerous nailbitingly exciting descriptions of aerial combat, wonderfully vivid, visceral and immediate.

At several places Wellum himself goes out of his way to emphasise how dim he is. He, at different times, makes two friends, both nicknamed Tommy, and is at pains to describe them as intellectuals, chaps who have big discussions about books etc (‘Both Tommys are obviously intelligent’, p.175). Whereas Geoff knows himself, not a deep thinker, instead a chap who loves playing cricket, salmon fishing and flying Spits. It’s noticeable that he fairly frequent attempts to think about the war or God or the meaning of it all generally end with him admitting to being hopelessly confused.

On another occasion he expresses a dismissal of ‘intellectuals’ which really only serves to bring out his own anxieties on the subject.

What a sight! The colour, the different shades of green of fields and woods, the bright roundels on the Spitfires; this is something very close to my ideal of beauty. No doubt I would incur the derision of the self-styled intellectuals and pacifists but I bet they have never felt as totally happy and wonderful as I do now. (p.108)

Or take his feelings when various friends and colleagues get killed.

Poor Butch. Wonder where he ended up. He may be OK, of course, but it’s doubtful. It’s all rather ghastly when someone you know well gets the chop. (p.164)

Not a profound eulogy, is it? But that’s the point. Schoolboy Geoff notices all the lovely surfaces of the world, of the huge blue sky, the dappled countryside, his friends, the beautiful planes, the exciting fights, without ever letting any of it go in very deep. Callow youth with boundless determination and unthinking patriotism. Thank God we had them.

Patriotism

Like everything else about the book, Wellum’s patriotism is not exactly deep and considered, rather the opposite, light and boyish, but nonetheless real for that:

Closing steadily we drop down into a thin layer of haze sitting on the sea and the 109s are just in the top of it. Four lethal determined-looking Spitfires are closing in behind them looking for the kill. Pilots hunched forward in their cockpits, concentrating and intense. The roundels on the Spits standing out clearly as if to say: ‘We’re British and we’re going to clobber you for coming over here to kill our people uninvited.’ (p.205)

Pass the test, be a man

The rather long and clunky sub-title is ‘The Story of the Boy Who Became a Man in the War-Torn Skies Above Britain’ and, at various points, in fact on a steady series of occasions, Wellum is very aware of the fact that he is undergoing a series of tests. First off to see if he can even be accepted for the RAF training course, then seeing if he can actually learn to fly (quite a struggle), to see if he can past the basic flying tests, then the tests to become an advanced flyer and gain his wings. And all of these pale in comparison with the ultimate test which is finding out whether he is a coward or not. He, like all the pilots, will have to fight the ultimate battle with himself in order to conquer exhaustion and fear. And in the process, he hopes he will become a man.

As he says of the pilots of the first squadron he joins, at Hornchurch, most of them had been over Dunkirk several times on just one day.

These chaps have won their private battles and these are battles they will have to go on winning , for there is another day tomorrow. As of now, however, they have proved themselves men. (p.100)

And:

Throughout the squadron there is the feeling of girding one’s loins for a sustained, supreme, almost superhuman effort in the near future. Everything we have been taught, how we react and respond to intense pressure, will be tested to the utmost. Private thoughts are ever with me. Will I have the courage needed?… There will be only one way to go and that will be forward into the approaching hordes of German aeroplanes. Except for Wimpey [his best friend] and I, the others know the form. They have won their private battles although, of course, they will now have to start again. I’ve got to start from the beginning. I’ve got all that to come and only when my own private battle is over and won will I be able to join ranks with the others and be a true fighter pilot. (p.127)

And:

I am down on the order of battle for tomorrow morning at first light: readiness at dawn. So be it. Soon I shall know what the others already know. I shall be either a man or a coward. I’m afraid of being a coward. (p.131)

This may all be true on its own terms but it’s also a reminder that Wellum has only just stopped being a schoolboy whose life consisted of preparing for exams and tests and, at the kind of well-provided private school he went to, regular sporting competitions. In a sense everything was still a test and competition for him.

Battles

And he does pass the test and he does become a man, via a series of aerial battles described with extraordinary intensity and immediacy: such as the sorties described in detail on pages 143 to 158 and 177 to 185; and the extended passage describing the nail-biting patrol he undertakes in pouring rain and thick cloud, getting hopelessly lost in the North Sea before eventually finding his way back to the aerodrome with extraordinary persistence and luck, pages 212 to 241.

Taking the battle to the enemy

The last 50 pages or so describe the change in strategy which took place at the start of 1941. Having won the Battle of Britain, having denied the Germans the supremacy of the skies which they needed in order to mount an amphibious invasion of Britain, at the very beginning of 1941 the RAF began to fly into France to attack strategic targets i.e. bombing. And the role of squadrons like Wellum’s shifted from defending against bombing raids on Britain, to accompanying and protecting allied bombing raids on France.

Acceptance of death

In the last 50 pages, also, he describes how he has come to a state of accepting the possibility of death, stopping being afraid of death.

The main reason for my relaxed frame of mind and my great content is because, among other things, I have overcome the fear of dying. It no longer concerns me. (p.263)

A shiver runs through me as I sit strapped in my cockpit waiting for the exact time to start the engines. I bet the Channel is cold this morning. Suppose some poor bloke from some wing or other will go plop into it before this operation is over. Don’t mind the waiting these days as much as I used to. No butterflies, just total acceptance. I figure out you’ve got to go and that’s all there is to it. (p.275)

It is a judgement call, though, whether this is the result of careful philosophical reflection (unlikely, given the boyish superficiality I’ve highlighted) or more the peace of exhaustion. In September 1941 he realises that he has had only one week off in the entire year (p.286). The aerodrome commander has a quiet word and for the first time he can remember, he is left off the flight roster. Like all overworked people he is, at first, bereft. The daily routine of preparing, scrambling, flying, fighting, returning and recovering is all he knows. After a break he’s back into it for months.

But then comes the moment he knew would have to come: he’s stood down. He’s told as he strolls towards the dispersal hut that his active service days are over, he’s flown his last sortie, he’s being sent off to do training. No black mark, no reflection on him, but he’s done his time and he’s worn out and he serves a rest (p.291).

I turn my little £5 car out of the gates for the last time. A has-been. No further use to anybody. Merely a survivor, my name no longer on the Order of Battle in the dispersal hut. A worn-out bloody fighter pilot at twenty years of age, merely left to live, or rather exist, on memories, reduced to watching from the wings. (p.293)

Training

In my ignorance, and in my close reading of the letter of the text, I thought this meant his days of combat flying were over but they weren’t at all. He is packed off to join 65 squadron as a Flight Commander where, sure enough, he gives lessons in dual trainers and then supervising pilots going solo.

During this period he is invited to Buckingham Palace to receive the Distinguished Flying Cross. He’s posted to RAF Debden and then, to my confusion, is back in action, leading his flights in fighter sweeps and bomber escorts over France, Holland and Belgium, where they have to contend with a new German plane, the Focke-Wulf FW 190 (p.299).

Something’s broken inside him. He is gripped by fear and anxiety, partly about whether he is up to it any more, whether he’s as good a pilot as he was in first, fearless months. He lies awake worrying at night. He drinks a lot in the bar after sorties. ‘I’m not what I used to be,’ (p.303). He is getting increasingly bad headaches behind his forehead.

Malta

At short notice he is posted abroad. With two hours notice he is sent by train from Euston to Glasgow. Here he is welcomed abroad a Royal Navy ship. He is one of a contingent of Spitfire pilots aboard an aircraft carrier. Trouble is the carrier deck isn’t long enough for Spits to get up to flying speed so he discusses the various bodges and hacks the engineers come up with.

They’re part of Operation Pedestal, the assembly of a huge number of merchant ships carrying oil and munitions, accompanied by aircraft carriers and destroyers, which is sailing for Malta. (It was in support of Operation Pedestal that author Eric Newby took part in an ill-fated attempt to sabotage German Ju 88s at an aerodrome in Sicily, as described in the opening chapter of his war memoir, ‘Love and Death in the Apennines’.)

Malta is vital because it acts as a staging supplies onto Egypt to supply the Desert War, Egypt itself being key to control of the Suez Canal, through which comes all the Allies’ oil supplies, and to the oil fields of Persia and the Middle East.

Long story short, Wellum is tasked with leading a squad of 8 Spitfires from the deck of his aircraft carrier, over Tunisia and on to Malta. The whole thing goes off like clockwork, although he struggles with the glare of the Mediterranean sun and has more of his headaches. During the operation Wellum suddenly remembers that it’s his 21st birthday.

Soon after his squad have landed and are immediately taken over by RAF ground personnel, they witness the arrival of what remains of the huge convoy. Of the 14 merchant ships, nine were sunk and the navy lost an aircraft carrier and two cruisers (p.329).

Last orders

There’s plenty more fighter flying, sweeps for enemy planes and flying cover for bombers attacking Sicily but his headaches are getting worse and one several occasions he loses his peripheral vision. Eventually the squadron medical officer sees him, diagnosed inflamed sinuses, he’s admitted to hospital where they cut into them and discover a cyst/abscess. This leads to the diagnosis that he is exhausted, run down and needs a complete break. He is put on the next flight to Gibraltar and from there on to England. Before he goes he apologises to the squadron leader, Tony Lovell, for letting everyone down and, when the man is kind to him, almost breaks down in tears. He is at the end of his tether.

Flight to Gibraltar where he’s astonished at the lack of rationing, then a plane onto Plymouth, then a train to London. He has done two tours of duty and spent three years as a fighter pilot defending his country in its hour of greatest need. He is exhausted.

Restoration

There’s a two-page epilogue which made me cry. He goes home, back to his parents’ house, back to his old bedroom, where he lies in his bed and cries his eyes out for all the good friends he’s lost, three years of strain and nervous exhaustion and grief gushing out of him.

The weeks pass in peaceful walks and fishing. After 6 weeks he goes for a medical and is passed and goes to see one of his old instructors about getting a posting and ends up being sent to the Gloster Aircraft Company as a production test pilot. The narrative ends with him climbing into the cockpit of the new Typhoon, pressing Contact and preparing to return to the skies. I found it immensely moving.

Dispensable pilots

[Instructor]; ‘You may be a little overconfident which in its way is no bad thing, but just watch it, accidents can happen and aeroplanes cost money.’
[Geoff]: ‘What about me?’
[Instructor]: ‘There are plenty like you.’ (p.25)

Thanks

Lastly, thanks. I’ve taken to pieces various aspects of the text which interest me but it shouldn’t detract from what I think should be our fundamental attitude, which is one of profound gratitude. Thank you, Geoff, our thanks to you and to all the young men who fought alongside you and to the many who had their young lives cut short, fighting to defend this country and, by extension, all of Europe, from the nightmare of Nazi tyranny. Thank you.

Credit

First Light: The Story of the Boy Who Became a Man in the War-Torn Skies Above Britain by Geoffrey Wellum was first published by Viking Books in 2002. Page references are to the 2020 Penguin Centenary Collection edition.

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Orientalism by Edward Said (1978) part 2

Orientalism is the generic term that I have been employing to describe the Western approach to the Orient; Orientalism is the discipline by which the Orient was (and is) approached systematically, as a topic of learning, discovery and practice.
(Orientalism, page 73)

Said’s fundamental premise is that knowledge is power – and so the entire discipline of Orientalism, along with all related types of scholarship such as the sociology and anthropology of the East, the study of Oriental languages, culture, religions, history, customs, economies, geography, ethnic groups and so on, all of them contribute to a vast interlocking system of self-reinforcing ideas about the ineradicable difference between the West and the East, and the ineradicable inferiority of the latter:

The essence of Orientalism is the ineradicable distinction between Western superiority and Oriental inferiority (p.42)

Ideas which, obviously enough, were designed to bolster, justify and explain the inevitability of imperial rule. It all circles back to the fundamental premise that Knowledge is power:

To have knowledge of a thing is to dominate it, to have authority over it. (p.32)

Knowledge of subject races or Orientals is what makes their management easy and profitable; knowledge gives power, more power requires more knowledge, and so on in an increasingly profitable dialectic of information and control. (p.36)

Straightaway you can see how Said’s thesis is premised on a basically Marxist interpretation of the compromised, parti pris nature of bourgeois culture. The naive bourgeois thinks that their culture and their scholarship is objective and truthful, beacons of rationality and self-evident truths. Whereas Marxists from the 1850s onwards developed the idea that bourgeois culture was no such thing, but in every aspect a justification for the political control of their class.

Antonio Gramsci in the 1930s extended the idea that the bourgeoisie held power by extending their values through every aspect of capitalist culture to achieve what he termed hegemony.

Michel Foucault, in a series of studies in the 1960s and 70s, gave really practical examples of how this power or hegemony extended into the furthest recesses of hospitals, lunatic asylums, prisons and other state institutions.

And Said took these ideas, very current and fashionable in the mid-1970s when he was writing, and applied them to the subject closest to his heart, to imperial rule in the Middle East or Arab world.

But the idea that so-called scholarship and academic knowledge is never pure but always tainted by the power structures of the society it is generated by, is a straight Marxist idea.

Chapter 1. The Scope of Orientalism

[Chapter 1] draws a large circle around all the dimensions of the subject, both in terms of historical time and experiences and in terms of philosophical and political themes.

1. Knowing the Oriental

In western discourse the Oriental is an object to be studied, recorded, measured and ruled. He is always in a subordinate position vis-avis the Westerner. All this scholarship doesn’t depict the Oriental as they actually are: it creates an avatar of the Oriental as inferior in every way to the Westerner, and places this image within numerous ‘frameworks of power’. So study of the Orient produces a kind of ‘intellectual power’ (p.41).

Given its enormous impact and reputation it’s a surprise to discover that Orientalism is poorly conceived and poorly written. Said really struggles to develop an argument or present evidence. Instead he asserts the same core idea over and over again. In this section he opens with a speech by Arthur Balfour to the House of Commons in 1910, then goes onto some passages from the writings of Lord Cromer, consul-general in Egypt from 1883 to 1907.

Despite his repeated lists of big categories and ideas Said is decidedly poor at placing either speech in its historical context or at performing even basic practical criticism on them. He says both demonstrate the assumption of Western superiority over the East, but I thought that was the thing he was going to analyse, and whose history and development he was going to explain. Instead he just redescribes it in much the same terms he used in the Introduction. Repetition is going to be a central tactic of the book.

It’s surprising and disappointing that, having not got very far with what ought on the face of it to be two exemplars of the heyday of Orientalising imperialism he then, abruptly, jumps to an essay by Henry Kissinger (!?), ‘Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy’, published in 1966. Said says that when Kissinger, in this essay, discusses foreign policy he divides the nations of the world into the developed world and the developing world and then claims this is the same kind of binary opposition which he, Said, sees as the basis of Orientalism (West superior, East inferior). Kissinger adds the idea that the West is superior because it went through the Newtonian scientific revolution whereas the rest of the world is inferior (less developed politically and economically) because it didn’t. I see what he’s doing but it feels like a thin and predictable interpretation.

Moreover, at this early stage, it confirms the suspicion you have from the Introduction that, in one sense, Said’s deep aim in researching and writing the book is simply to attack American foreign policy, in particular US policy regarding Israel and Palestine. He doesn’t artfully combine his personal situation and history in a subtle way with objective history and scholarship, rather the reverse; his supposed scholarship keeps collapsing to reveal the pretty straightforward political agenda lurking underneath.

Lastly he comes to another contemporary essay, ‘The Arab World’ by one Harold W. Glidden published in the American Journal of Psychiatry in 1972. By now we recognise that the title alone would be enough to get Said’s goat and, sure enough, he extracts from the article a whole load of clichés about ‘the Arab world’ (based on its patriarchy, its ‘shame culture’, the way it’s structured through patron-client relationships,  the importance given to personal honour and revenge) which, predictably enough, set Said’s teeth on edge.

We’re only at part one of the first chapter and the book is in danger of turning into little more than ‘grumpy middle aged Palestinian reads the news and is outraged by anti-Arab stereotypes’.

2. Imaginative Geography and its Representations: Orientalising the Oriental [in fact this section is about historic Western attitudes to Islam]

The academic discipline of Orientalism dates its origin to the decision of the Church Council of Vienne in 1312 to establish a series of university chairs in Arabic, Greek, Hebrew and Syriac (p.50). Until the 18th century Orientalism meant chiefly study of the Biblical languages. Then in the later 18th century the field exploded and by the mid-19th century was vast.

Modern Orientalism can be said to have started with Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt, 1798 to 1801. He took scores of scholars who explored, excavated, measured, sketched and recorded every scrap of ancient Egyptian relics they could find. The result was the vast Description de l’Égypte (‘that great collective appropriation of one country by another’, p.84), the work of 160 scholars and scientists, requiring some 2,000 artists and technicians including 400 engravers. Published in 37 volumes from 1809 to 1829, at the time of its publication it was the largest known published work in the world.

In a way the sudden fashion for all things Oriental was a transposition further East of the great awakening of interest in ancient Greece and Rome which we call the Renaissance (p.51). In 1820 Victor Huge wrote: ‘In the time of Louis XIV one was a Hellenist; now one is an Orientalist.’ There was an explosion of Asiatic and Oriental and Eastern Societies devoted to studying ‘the Orient’.

But whereas the Renaissance was based on plastic relics i.e. buildings and statues, Orientalism, indicating its origins in Bible scholarship, was overwhelmingly textual. It concerned languages and belief systems. Orientalists went to the area looking to bolster and confirm what they had in ancient texts from the region.

Said’s structuring of the material is poor. In one paragraph he says there was an Oriental school of writers i.e. Western writers who were captured by its mystique, from Goethe to Flaubert. This is an interesting idea to explore, but in the very next paragraph he is discussing whether it’s valuable for university departments which study this region to retain the name ‘Oriental’. These feel like completely different topics, each would merit a page or two of thorough investigation. Instead he plonks them haphazardly side by side and doesn’t explore either of them properly. Frustrating.

He cites the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss on the fundamental human tendency to give ‘poetic’ or emotional meaning to our immediate surroundings and the people who inhabit them, and define them by contrast with the land beyond our ‘borders’ and the strange people who live there. Good. But in my opinion this has always seemed a weak point in Said’s argument, because he admits that ‘othering’ ‘the Other’, far from being some wicked Western vice, is in fact a universal trait and all peoples and cultures do it.

He says he wants to investigate the geographical basis of Orientalism but, characteristically, kicks this off by summarising two classic Greek plays, The Persians by Aeschylus and The Bacchae by Euripides. It’s sort of relevant as the first one is one of the earliest Greek dramas to survive and depicts ‘the East’ as a military threat in the form of the Persian Empire. The second is one of the final ancient Greek plays which has come down to us and is also about ‘the East’ which it associates with frenzied religious cults – but discussing history via literature (and therefore ignoring the evidence of archaeology and history) is always a shaky procedure.

Next thing we know Said is talking about the rise of Islam. His account is inferior to every other account I’ve ever read, lacking detail, interest or insight. Compare it, for example, with the final illuminating chapter of Peter Brown’s wonderful book, ‘The World of Late Antiquity’ (1971).

Said is blinkered by his need to twist every aspect of history to suit his thesis, to make out the West to always be blinkered, limiting, constraining, ignorant, creating the East in its own negative image. Hence he underplays the completely real threat which militant Islam actually posed to Christendom for nearly a thousand years. He refers to the West’s ‘anxiety’ as if it is an over-nervous neurotic, whereas Islamic armies captured and colonised half of Christendom, seizing all of North Africa, Spain and the entire Middle East from what had been Christian rule, then capturing the great Christian city of Constantinople and then pressing on through the Balkans into central Europe until Ottoman conquest was only finally halted just outside Vienna. See the quote from Edward Gibbon, below. Of course the West was terrified of these unstoppably conquering armies. Of course we were scared shitless of these plundering hordes. He himself admits this in a sentence thrown away while he’s discussing something else:

During its political and military heyday from the eighth to the sixteenth century, Islam dominated both East and West. (p.205)

Only someone with a poor grasp of deep history can dismiss eight centuries of Islam’s military, cultural and economic domination as if it’s nothing, a speck, a detail which we can quickly hurry past in order to get to the juicy part, the West’s wicked wicked domination of the Muslim world for, what, all of 300 years.

Having broached the topic of Islam, Said goes on to describe the way medieval authors vilified Mohammed as a kind of failed impersonator of Christ. He emphasises the West’s ‘ignorance’ and ‘narcissism’. On the next page he is claiming that this kind of ignorance created the Orient as a kind of theatre attached to Europe on whose stage were presented a whole series of Oriental types and stereotypes, from Cleopatra onwards. His text moves fast and deals with a confusing variety of topics, all of them very superficially. The only constant is his relentless criticism of every aspect of ‘the West’.

He introduces us to the Bibliothegue oriental of Barthelemy d’Herbelot (1697), which was to remain the standard reference work on the subject for over a hundred years, before going on to explain how this kind of encyclopedic work narrows and constrains its subject matter until readers could only approach this knowledge of the Orient via ‘the learned grids and codes’ provided by the Orientalist.

Said makes this sound like some awful conspiracy, as if the worst thing anybody could ever do would be to write a book on a factual subject, because that would involve imposing ‘grids and codes’ on it and so preventing any reader ever struggling through to a ‘true’ understanding of it.

In fact Said frequently uses these scare tactics, as if he’s letting you in on the shocking truth! The text as a whole has the obsessively repetitive feel of a conspiracy theorist letting you in on a secret which is even worse than the fake moon landings, who killed JFK and what really happened at Roswell, yes, this previously covered-up, hush-hush secret is that…a lot of Western literature and culture stereotypes the so-called ‘Orient’ and ‘the Arab world’ and ‘Islam’.

Next Said has a couple of pages revealing that Dante, in his great masterpiece The Divine Comedy, put Mohamed right in the lowermost pit of hell, next to Satan, for the sin of being a sensualist and religious impostor. He takes this as an epitome of the West’s fundamental Islamophobia.

Said broadens his critique out to describe how conquering Islam came to be seen in Christendom as the vital ‘Other’ against which European Christendom defined itself. Far from being some kind of revelation, this just strikes me as being obvious, really bleeding obvious, particularly to anyone who’s ever read any medieval history. Of course European Christendom defined the Islamic Arab world as ‘the Other’ because it was the Other. India let alone China were just rumours. Nobody had ever been to sub-Saharan Africa. Nobody knew North or South America or Australia existed. To anyone living in medieval Europe, in a society drenched at every single level at every single moment in Christian belief and practice, all there was was Christendom and facing it the enemy at the gates who threatened to overthrow and destroy everything they knew and cared for. Of course the Orient was depicted as alien, because it was alien. Of course it was depicted as threatening, because it had overrun and conquered half of Christendom. Even Said at one point admits this:

From the end of the seventh century until the battle of Lepanto in 1571, Islam in either its Arab, Ottoman or North African and Spanish form dominated or effectively threatened European Christianity. (p.74)

Said goes on to quote Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire without, apparently, realising the full implications of what he’s citing:

In the ten years of the administration of Omar, the Saracens reduced to his obedience thirty-six thousand cities or castles, destroyed four thousand churches or temples of the unbelievers, and edified fourteen hundred mosques for the exercise of the religion of Mahomet. One hundred years after his flight from Mecca, the arms and the reign of his successors extended from India to the Atlantic Ocean.

‘Destroyed four thousand churches.’ How do you think that struck a society completely dominated by Christian belief? With horror and terror.

3. Projects [turns into a list of French Orientalists]

Starts with more stuff about the rivalry between Christianity and Islam. Yawn. By page 75 I was remembering my impression on first reading this book 40 years ago, that Said just doesn’t have the intellectual chops to manage such a huge subject, with all its vast conceptual ramifications, that he is trying to address. He’s bitten off far more than he can chew and the symptoms of this are his repetitiveness, his superficial analyses, his raising complex issue only to move swiftly on. And his superficial and often wrong versions of history.

The Ottoman Empire had long since settled into a (for Europe) comfortable senescence, to be inscribed in the nineteenth century as the ‘Eastern Question’. (p.76)

1) The Ottoman Empire did not settle into a ‘comfortable senescence’ in the later 18th and 19th centuries. There was a good deal of upheaval and violence in the palace of the Sultan, not to mention endless uprisings and rebellions by national groups around the empire.

2) Said’s tone is unpleasantly patronising, condescending to the both the contemporary politicians who had to deal with and the modern historians who write about the Eastern Question. The use of the modish, pretentious, would-be Parisian intellectual verb ‘inscribed’ tries to hide the fact that Said doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The ‘Eastern Question’ is the term given to the series of geopolitical tensions and international crises brought about by the obvious decline and fall of the Ottoman Empire, crises which included, for example, the Crimean War and a stream of military and diplomatic crises in the Balkans in the 1870s and 1880s which threatened to drag all Europe into war. See my review of Andrew Roberts’s life of Lord Salisbury. That book was extremely well researched, intelligently analytical and beautifully written. Next to Roberts, Said looks like a blustering frog puffing up his throat to try and persuade everyone how important he is.

The next orientalist book of note after Barthelemy d’Herbelot‘s Bibliothegue oriental, was Simon Ockley‘s History of the Saracens (1708). Ockley shocked contemporaries by recording how much of the ancient world only survived because the Muslims saved it.

Next major Orientalist was Abraham Hyacinthe Anquetil-Duperron (1731 to 1805), the first professional French Indologist, whose work on Avestan texts prompted him, unlike previous scholars, to actually go to India. (The Avesta is the primary collection of religious texts of Zoroastrianism, composed in the Avestan language.) Anquetil’s publications (including a translation of the Upanishads), opened up huge new vistas of Indian literature to European readers.

Next major Orientalist was Sir William Jones (1746 to 1794), British philologist, orientalist and scholar of ancient India. It was Jones who first suggested the relationship between European and Indo-Aryan languages which is now widely accepted. Said doesn’t like him. Jones was a polymath who embarked on a deep immersion in the languages and texts of India. He founded the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784. According to some he was ‘the undisputed founder of Orientalism’ (p.78).

As Said went on about Jones, and the other Brits who gathered round him, studying and translating Sanskrit texts (e.g. Charles Wilkins, first translator of the Bhagavad-Gita, in 1785), I suddenly realised we had made a huge leap away from Islam, Mohammed and the Arab world to India, a completely different civilisation.

That is the primary problem with Said’s use of the word and concept ‘Oriental’, that it can refer to the Near East, Middle East, Far East, India, China, Japan you name it – and Said doesn’t help. He offers no conceptual or lexical clarification, no way of making the term more geographically or conceptually precise. In fact you realise that it suits his political agenda to keep it as open and slippery as possible. This allows him to jump from one criticism to another of ‘the West’ and its awful Oriental scholars all the more easily, to shift his ground, to continually move the goalposts.

His narrative moves on to Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt which, you will remember, was described just 40 pages ago. He repeats some of the key facts from the earlier passage, but adds new details. This, you feel, is how Said’s mind works, going round in circles, covering the same ground albeit with new wrinkles, making the same points again and again – Western Orientalism was (and is) an artificial construct, a self-referential system, built on self-serving stereotypes of Oriental backwardness, laziness, corruption and sensuality, which paved the way for and justified Western (French and British) imperialism.

The most interesting new bit is a (typically brief) account of Constantin François de Chassebœuf, comte de Volney (1757 to 1820) who wrote an extremely practical record, Voyage en Egypte et en Syrie (1787), which detailed the obstacles an invader would face in conquering Egypt, and was consulted and used by Napoleon. Many of Napoleon’s Orientalist scholars had trained under de Sacy and Said tells us his pupils dominated the field of Orientalism for the next 75 years.

de Sacy was the first Frenchman to attempt to read the Rosetta stone (discovered by some of Napoleon’s soldiers in 1799) and he was a teacher of Jean-François Champollion who went on to play a key role in deciphering it and Egyptian hieroglyphics.

The introduction to the vast Description of Egypt was written by Jean-Baptiste Joseph Fourier (1768 to 1830) known to history as a mathematician but who accompanied Napoleon’s expedition as scientific adviser. Fourier was appointed secretary of the Institut d’Égypte and contributed papers to the Egyptian Institute (also called the Cairo Institute) which Napoleon founded with the aim of weakening British influence in the East.

Said, characteristically, sees these institutes devoted to study of the Orient (and the others founded around Europe at the same time) as ‘agencies of domination and dissemination’ (alliteration is an important element of critical theory; sounds impressive) (p.87).

Said gives a handy half-page list (God, he loves lists) of the aims of Napoleon’s project, as summarised by Fourier himself, which amounts to a shopping list of Orientalism, namely:

  • to restore Egypt from its present fallen state to its former glory
  • to instruct the Orient in the ways of the modern West
  • to promote ‘knowledge’ of the East
  • to define ‘the East’ in such a way as to make it seem a natural appendage or annex of the West
  • to situate European scholars as on control of Oriental history, texts, geography
  • to establish new disciplines with which to control even more ‘knowledge’ about the Orient
  • to convert every observation into a ‘law’ about the eternal unchanging essence of ‘the Orient’
  • to bring ‘the obscurity’ of the Orient into the light and clarity of Western science

Above all, to convert the 3D ‘reality’ of the multivariant Orient into texts, the fundamental sources of power and control in Western ideology, sources written by Westerners, edited by Westerners, updated by Westerners, for the minds and imaginations of Western politicians and public. Fourier goes on to confirm all Said’s ideas when he writes that Egypt will provide ‘a theatre’ for Napoleon’s ‘gloire’ (p.86).

The Orient as stage for Western glory. Out of this matrix of dominating discourses come classics of Orientalising literature such as:

  • François-René de Chateaubriand’s Itinéraire de Paris à Jérusalem (1811)
  • Alphonse de Lamartine’s Voyage en Orient (1835)
  • E.W. Lane’s Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians (1836)
  • Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to El-Medinah and Meccah (1856)
  • Gustave Flaubert’s Salammbô (1862)

In the world of scholarship the next milestone was Ernest Renan’s Histoire générale et système comparé des langues sémitiques (1855).

Said’s text progresses not logically and chronologically, but crabwise, digressively, one thing leading to another. It’s fairly well known that the Suez Canal was conceived, designed and supervised by Ferdinand de Lesseps. Less well known that his father Mathieu de Lesseps went to Egypt as part of Napoleon’s huge expedition and stayed on after the Napoleonic forces withdrew in 1801.

It’s a mental tic of Said’s that he often writes a sentence or paragraph or topic about a subject, then shoehorns in a sentence in parentheses because it’s in his notes and it’s relevant but he can’t think of a way of including it in a logical exposition. An example is the way he ends his discussion of the Suez Canal’s symbolic significance (uniting East and West, ‘opening’ Egypt to the modern world etc) with a really throwaway reference to the Suez Crisis of 1956. He should either have given the Suez Crisis a paragraph of its own, where its significance could have been properly developed, or not mentioned it all. A brief throwaway reference is the worst of all worlds, but very typical of his scatter-gun, repetitive and badly structured approach.

For Said the Suez Canal finally dispelled the notion of the Orient as somehow remote and barely reachable. The Suez Canal dragged ‘the Orient’ into the fast-growing global imagination, made it imaginatively reachable (he doesn’t mention the establishment of the first Cook’s tours to Egypt at around the time of the canal’s opening, the 1860s). At the same time made it more of an annex and dependency.

4. Crisis

He repeats one his basic ideas which is that Orientalism amounted to the transformation of messy reality into tidied-up texts.

It seems a common human failing to prefer the schematic authority of a text to the disorientations of direct encounters with the human. (p.93)

He calls this the textual attitude. Travel books are an epitome of this attitude, assuring readers of a kind of Platonic ideal of a place which all-too-often fails to live up to the book’s idealised portrait.

Suddenly he’s giving a page-long quote from Egyptian social scientist Anwar Abdel Malek (1924 to 2012), from his 1963 essay ‘Orientalism in crisis’.

This is a not particularly relevant preliminary to ‘a history of Orientalism’. Said says all the pioneering Orientalists were philologists. Almost all the great discoveries in philology of the nineteenth century were based on study of texts brought back from the Orient. The central idea was that European languages were descended from two great families of Oriental languages, Indo-European and Semitic. Said gives a political interpretation of this, saying it proves 1) the linguistic importance of the Orient (its languages and scripts) to the achievements of Western research/knowledge, and 2) the Western tendency to divide and categorise Oriental materials to suit its own interests.

Orientalism is inextricably bound up with the study of language and texts; and therefore had a huge tendency to look far back into the past, to a golden age when Orientals lived the idealised lives depicted in the Upanishads or the Koran. In other words, a field of study entirely based on romantic images of an ideal past was always going to regard the messy realities of modern life in India or the Middle East as ‘degraded’ and fallen. Orientalists travelled to the East with their heads full of Romantic ideals and were horrified by the poverty and backwardness of what they saw, leading to a universal agreement that inhabitants of the modern Orient were degraded, debased and vulgarised – ‘an upsetting demystification of images culled from texts’ (p.101).

He’s barely told us he’s going to do a history of Orientalism before he tells us he’s not, and instead going to rattle off lists of eminent Orientalists ‘to mention a few famous names almost at random’ (p.99). Scholars, philosophers, imaginative writers, novelists, poets, travel writers, and explorers and archaeologists, they all contributed to the vast hegemony of Orientalism.

Suddenly it’s 1955, the year of the Bandung Conference, by which date all the nations of the former Orient were independent, presenting Orientalists with conceptual problems. This undermined (destroyed) one whole trope about Oriental peoples, of them being passive and fatalistic.

(This itself is obviously a gross simplification since movements for independence began to stir as early as the 1880s [the Indian National Congress was founded in 1885)], were loud and powerful enough to worry Kipling in the 1890s, and gained new momentum after the Great War. I.e. it’s plain wrong to say the trope of passive Orientals was overthrown by 1955, the contrary evidence was highly visible 50 years earlier.)

Suddenly Said is quoting from the first of a series of lectures given by the ‘great’ Oriental scholar H.A.R. Gibb in 1945, ‘Modern Trends in Islam’, a passage which beautifully illustrates the kind of tropes Said is on about, in that Gibb pontificates about ‘the Arab mind’ being utterly different from the Western mind, specifically in its inability to generalise from individual instances out to general laws and so their inability to have the rationalist thought and utilitarian practices which characterise the West.

This slips somehow into critiquing modern-day Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis (1916 to 2018) who set themselves up as experts on ‘Islam’, ‘the Arab mind’ and so on but just repeat the same old slanders about the Orient’s ineradicable backwardness but also – and suddenly the political Said steps forward into the limelight – uses all these tropes and prejudices to defend Israeli policy in Palestine.

And this turns quickly into polemic as he accuses Orientalists of ignoring ‘the revolutionary turmoil’ gripping the Islamic Orient, the ‘anticolonialism’ sweeping the Orient, as the world faces various disasters (nuclear, environmental) Said accuses politicians of ‘exploiting popular caricatures’ of the Orient.

These contemporary Orientalist attitudes flood the press and the popular mind. (p.108)

And his anger at white people:

A white middle-class Westerner believes it is his human prerogative not only to manage the nonwhite world but also to own it. (p,108)

Who’s making sweeping generalisations now? Who’s invoking racial stereotypes now?

You can’t help thinking that the tiger of passionate political polemic is constantly straining at the leash just below the surface of Said’s text, ready at any moment to break free and unleash a torrent of righteous indignation, genuine anger not only at Western Orientalists but the greedy white societies which host them. Pages 105 to 110 display his real anger at the way academic, cultural and political Orientalists deploy a whole armoury of demeaning tropes and stereotypes to maintain the lie of the Oriental as a passive, backward degenerate, even up to the time of writing (1976 to 1977).

It might also explain why the book is so poor as scholarly exposition, why he promises some kind of history of Orientalism on page 96 but a few pages later apologises for giving us only a very superficial sketch, skipping over names and dates, citing essays and speeches almost at random. It’s because what is really motivating him is to get to the Polemical Outburst.

(I got to the end of this section without really understanding why it was titled ‘crisis’.)

Chapter 2. Orientalist Structures and Restructures

[Chapter 2] attempts to trace the development of modern Orientalism by a broadly chronological description, and also by the description of a set of devices common to the work of important poets, artists and scholars.

In this chapter my concern is to show how in the nineteenth century a modern professional terminology and practice were created whose existence dominated discourse about the Orient, whether by Orientalists or non-Orientalists. (p.156)

1. Redrawn Frontiers, Redefined Issues, Secularised Religion

Like the literary critic he started out as, Said opens with a 2-page summary of the plot of Flaubert’s last novel, Bouvard and Pecuchet, two clerks who come into an inheritance, resign, buy a house in the country and proceed to systematically study every subject then known to modern man, with a view to mastering all the arts and crafts. Inevitably, the turn out to bodge every single one. Said’s quoting the novel because in Flaubert’s notes for the ending (he died before completing it) the pair talk about the future and hope for a great regeneration of the West by the East.

Said takes this as his theme and shows how it derived from the Enlightenment achievement of rejecting Christianity but incorporating many of its mental structures, such as a millennial transformation of society, and how, in a central thread of the Romantic tradition, this transformation and redemption was expected to come from the East, or from the reintegration of Eastern and Western thought.

Modern Orientalism derives from secularising elements in eighteenth century European culture (p.120)

This triggers a rash of name-dropping – Schlegel, Novalis, Wordsworth, Chateaubriand, Comte, Schopenhauer.

Said is, of course, sharply critical of this whole way of thinking, saying it’s yet another example of Western intellectuals thinking they own the world and that ‘Asia’ or ‘the Orient’ will be happy to play this redemptive role for the benefit of the West.

During the eighteenth century the way for modern Orientalist structures was laid down in four major developments:

  1. Expansion The East was opened up far beyond the Islamic lands, by a range of explorers he lists
  2. Historical confrontation History benefited from an anthropology which conceived of cultures as self-contained systems and began to think more sympathetically about them e.g. George Sales’s translation of the Koran which also translated Muslim commentators
  3. Sympathy Leading to ‘sympathetic identification’ by which some writers, artists, and Mozart (his opera, ‘The Abduction from the Seraglio’) imaginatively identified with the East, he briefly sketches the rise of the Gothic and exotic in writers like Beckford, Byron, Thomas Moore et al
  4. Classification The Western impulse to categorise everything into types, Linnaeus, Buffon, Kant, Diderot, Johnson, Montesqieu, Blumenbach, Soemmerring, Vico, Rousseau, it’s difficult to make out the scanty ideas through the blizzard of impressive names

In this chapter:

My thesis is that the essential aspects of modern Orientalist theory and praxis (from which present-day Orientalism derives) can be understood, not as a sudden access of objective knowledge about the Orient, but as a set of structures inherited from the past, secularised, redisposed, and reformed by such disciplines as philology, which in turn were naturalised, modernised and laicised substitutes for (or versions of) Christian supernaturalism. (p.122)

2. Silvestre de Sacy and Ernest Renan: Rational Anthropology and Philological Laboratory

An extended discussion of the lives and works of these two founding Orientalists or, as he puts it, Orientalism’s:

inaugural heroes, builders of the field, creators of a tradition, progenitors of the orientalist brotherhood (p.122)

In Said’s usual manner this starts out reasonably clearly but soon gets bogged down in his characteristically elliptical, digressive, list-heavy and oddly expressed style. It is a struggle to read. Sacy was interested in fragments of texts and knowledge (a mindset very typical of the Romantic generation).

Renan is tougher-minded. Said’s passage on Renan brings out the importance of philology, considered as a leading discipline. He brings in Nietzsche, who was also a philologist, to describe how the discipline means bringing to light the meanings latent in words and language. Renan wrote in 1848: ‘the founders of the modern mind are philologists.’ The ‘new’ philology of the start of the nineteenth century was to score major successes:

  • the creation of comparative grammar
  • the reclassification of languages into families
  • the final rejection of the divine origins of language

Prior to this scholars thought that God gave Adam the first language in the Garden of Eden. The systematic discoveries of philologists in Semitic then Sanskrit languages, along with the texts newly discovered and translated from India, was to make the story of one divine origin for language untenable, and also to call into question the previously accepted timelines of the Book of Genesis.

Thus it was his philological studies which led Renan to lose his Christian faith and then to go on to write the secular Life of Jesus, published in 1863, the first account to portray Jesus as a purely human figure, which had a dramatic impact on intellectual life all across Europe.

In my opinion, Said misses a big point here, a massive point, which is that European Christendom (and latterly American Christian churches) have a weird, strange, distorted interest in the Middle East because that is where their religion comes from.

Islam has a kind of geographical integrity, because the key locations of the religion are in the ongoing heartlands of Islamic territory i.e. Saudi Arabia and to a lesser extent Jerusalem. By contrast the faith and ideology on which ‘the West’ based itself until very recently, along with all its holy texts, derive from a geographical location outside itself, completely detached from itself by the Muslim conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries.

This accident of history and geography explains why ‘the West’ has had such an intrusive, interfering interest in the Middle East, from the Crusades to Russia claiming control of the Holy Places which triggered the Crimean War, the mandates over Palestine and Syria between the wars – and always will have, for the region is the ground zero of its religious and ideological underpinnings.

The Orientalists Said describes were so obsessed with the Middle East because they sought, through their philological enquiries, to get closer to the heart of and seek out deeper secrets, of their faith and religion. Hence the recovery of all the texts they could get their hands on, the immense effort put into the archaeology of the region, setting up umpteen Institutes and learned societies.

Said mentions the minuscule number of ‘Orientals’ who came to Europe during the nineteenth century compared to the tidal wave of Europeans who went to the Orient and this is a major reason. Not many Arabs or Indians are interested in visiting, for example, Stonehenge, which has a purely tourist interest for them. But potentially every Christian had a profound vested interest in the stream of archaeological and philological discoveries which poured out the Middle East and Egypt throughout the nineteenth and on into the early twentieth century (for example, the discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen) because each new discovery shed light on their faith, and the sum total of the discoveries tended to undermine Christian faith altogether, as it did in the high profile case of Renan.

Said brings out how Renan came to prefer the Sanskrit family of languages origin of the idea of an Indo-European language i.e. ancestors of European languages, over the Semitic family, which is the parent of Hebrew and Arabic. His dislike of the latter hardened into an antisemitic attitude which he expressed with growing virulence and became part of the anti-Arab, anti-Islamic discourse of Orientalism.

Said very briefly refers to the post-Prussian haste among the imperial powers to draw up maps, to mark boundaries of power and control over the colonial possessions. Hence (he doesn’t say this) the notorious Berlin Conference of 1885, called to allow all the European powers to peacefully agree who controlled which parts of Africa, through to the post-Great War division of the Middle East between Britain and France and the equally notorious maps of new states drawn up by Mark Sykes and Georges Picot.

The aim of all this map making activity was never the interest of the native inhabitants, but solely the need to avert conflict arising between the powers, above all between France and Britain.

3. Oriental Residence and Scholarship: The Requirements of Lexicography and Imagination

The profession of Orientalist is based on multiple inequalities, of wealth and power and intellectual control (of the West over the East).

This section carries on from the previous section, dwelling on Renan’s contempt for Semitic languages and peoples and asserting that philology, by reducing a language to its roots, has a similar reductive effect on views about its speakers and peoples. He comments on the tendency of Orientalists of the Romantic generation to project grand romantic feelings onto the Orient, then experience an adverse reaction when they learned more about the reality of the actual contemporary Orient, accusing it of being ‘backward’ and ‘barbaric’.

So many Orientalists ended up hating their subject, not just Renan but William Muir, Reinhart Dozy, Alfred Lyall, Caussin de Perceval. Each of these pieced together and constructed versions of ‘the Orient’ from fragments, creating imaginary models for other Orientalists to debate.

Popular stereotypes about the Orient were perpetrated by mainstream authors such as Thomas Carlyle and Lord Macaulay. Orientalist tropes were used by eminent men in unrelated fields as diverse as Cardinal Newman or French naturalist and zoologist Georges Cuvier.

Marx and abstraction

Even Karl Marx, usually friend of the poor and downtrodden, gives in to Orientalist tropes in his 1850s writings about India, where he says that although British rule is harsh and stupid, it may be historically necessary to waken India from its backward, barbaric stupor.

Said quotes a bit of Marx on India where the latter himself quotes Goethe, and this, for Said, shows the origins of Marx’s Orientalism in classic Romantic worldview, wherein peoples and races need redemption from suffering through pain.

The idea of regenerating a fundamentally lifeless Asia is a piece of pure Romantic Orientalism. (p.154)

Said says these are all examples of Western knowledge’s tendency to group everything into high-level categories and groups and ignore the multiplicity, diversity and specificity of individual lives on the ground. He makes the fairly crude accusation that:

Orientalists are neither interested in nor capable of discussing individuals. (p.154)

 I have a big problem with this whole angle of Said’s attack, because the tendency to categorise and group entities under abstract terms is, of course, fundamental to the management of all knowledge and of all modern societies. The field of medicine I work in is only possible by virtue of general categories, starting with the notion of ‘patients’ or ‘cases’. Take epidemiology, ‘the study of the determinants, occurrence, and distribution of health and disease in a defined population’, which played a central role in the management of COVID-19 around the world – this is only possible by converting individual cases into numbers and groups and categories.

Accusing just the one academic discipline of Orientalism of doing this – turning the specificity of individual people into abstract categories and numbers – seems to me 1) factually incorrect; almost all academic or professional specialisms do just this; and 2) this approach is the basis of our entire civilisation, the entirety of Western science, medicine, public health provision and so on rests on this approach.

I take the point that, in his opinion, the conversion of teeming cities full of all kinds of races, religious groups, ethnicities, sexualities and so on into one big dumb category, the Orient, is a kind of abuse of the procedure, and was designed to justify imperial conquest and rule. Yes yes. But to attack the intellectual approach of gathering large numbers of people together under particular headings or categories as somehow inherently wicked and abusive seems to me plain wrong.

Anyway Said spends a page guessing that what happened is Marx’s initial sympathy for suffering individuals in the East met, in his mind, the censorship and ‘the lexicographical police action of Orientalist science’, of the accumulated playbook of orientalist metaphors prevalent in his Romantic sources, and shut down his human sympathies in favour of Orientalist stereotypes.

What Said’s devoting a couple of pages to Marx really indicates is how important Marx still was to his audience in the academy back in 1978, that he has to perform such mental gymnastics to reconcile what he wrote about India with what he takes for granted was ‘Marx’s humanity, his sympathy for the misery of people’ (p.154).

As so often Said is blinkered or partial because the whole point of Marx is that he was a kind of acme of converting individual people into vast historical abstractions; his whole deal was about mentally converting the teeming masses of capitalist countries into vast abstracts named the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. In doing so he notoriously dismissed vast numbers of people who would be trodden on and be victims of the historical process, namely the industrial bourgeoisie which would have to be eliminated in a violent revolution. And all of this needed to be carried out in the cause of the biggest Romantic redemptive project every conceived i.e. the creation of the utopian classless society.

But Said ignores the fact that Marx’s central procedure was to apply huge dehumanising categories to all Western societies, and instead somehow wants imply that he only did it to India; that this was somehow unique to his thought, a uniquely dehumanising and uniquely Orientalising manoeuvre to make, whereas, as I’ve just shown, the very same procedure was of course fundamental to Marx’s entire approach.

Travelling to the Orient

Moving on, Said says you can draw a distinction between Orientalists who stayed in Europe and worked from texts, and those who actually went to the Orient, some of them settling and living there. Here they had the exciting experience of living like kings, the life of the privileged imperial conqueror, waited on hand and foot, free to travel anywhere.

Goes on to say that an interesting process can be observed, which is they start off writing about specific experiences but sooner or later come up against Orientalist tropes, rather like the buffers in a railway station. Some Western writing became official while other texts remained personal, such as tourist and travel writing (Flaubert, Kinglake, Mark Twain). He attempts a little categorisation of motives for travelling to the Orient at this period (mid-nineteenth century):

  1. The writer aiming to gather information for scientific purposes
  2. The writer intending to gain evidence but happy to mix this with personal observation and style – e.g. Richard Burton’s Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Madinah and Mecca (1857)
  3. The writer who travels to fulfil a personal (often literary) project – e.g. Gérard de Nerval’s Voyage en Orient (1851)

He calls the intentions of the different writers, their ‘author-function’ (p.159). I looked this up and a) it’s a term coined by Foucault who, as we’ve seen, Said is very indebted to throughout; and b) Foucault uses the term author-function as: ‘a concept that replaces the idea of the author as a person, and instead refers to the ‘discourse’ that surrounds an author or body of work’ (Open University)

He cashes this out with an extended discussion of the career of Orientalist Edward Lane (1801 to 1876), showing how the quirky personal asides he included in his monumental 1836 work, ‘Manners and Customs of the Modern Egyptians’, were expunged in his subsequent works – an entirely functional Arabic-English Lexicon and an ‘uninspired’ translation of the Arabian Nights (p.164).

4. Pilgrims and Pilgrimages, British and French

Pursuing the same line, Said categorises the many writers who went on journeys to the Orient as ‘pilgrims’.

(In my opinion the chapter title and concept just highlight the huge holes in his account, which include a proper discussion of actual Christian pilgrimage, a proper consideration of medieval literature, which would include a proper account of the Crusades and, indeed the vast and generally unread libraries of devotional Christian literature. Seen in this wider perspective, Said’s account pretty much solely focuses on the nineteenth century, taking its start from writers he would have taught in his comparative literature course, such as Victor Hugo, Gérard de Nerval, Flaubert and going a bit beyond them into the actual literature of Orientalists such as Sacy, Renan, Burton, Lane and so on. But of the vast hinterland of medieval and Christian accounts of the Orient, almost nothing [excepting the passage about Dante]. Not his specialism, not his area.)

He compares and contrasts British and French visitors to the region and makes the simple point that the British had strong or defining presence on the ground and the French didn’t: the British beat the French to seize India during the eighteenth century and slowly ramped up their presence in the Middle East till they established an unofficial protectorate over Egypt in 1882.

The Mediterranean echoed with the sounds of French defeats, from the Crusades to Napoleon. What was to become known as ‘la mission civilisatrice’ began in the nineteenth century as a political second-best to Britain’s presence. (p.169)

The (partly) explains why (some) British writing feels practical and administrative while some much French writing is more imaginative, projective, wistful, dwelling in ruins and lost hopes etc.

He spends some time summarising François-René, vicomte de Chateaubriand’s ‘Itinerary from Paris to Jerusalem of 1811’. Said shows how, besides Chateaubriand’s obsessive narcissism the book reeks of Orientalist tropes, despising Islam, regarding the Arab as degraded, saying the whole region needs to be redeemed by the West. Said talks about his ‘Christian vindictiveness’ (p.174).

He moves on to discuss Alphonse de Lamartine’s ‘Voyage en Orient’ of a generation later, 1835. He, too, ends up disliking the reality of the terrain and people (thinking it was painted better by Poussin, p.178) and saying it is ripe for conquest and development by the West.

Then on to Nerval (visited 1842-3) and Flaubert (1849-50). Nerval writes of an eerily empty Orient, disappointing the Romantic fantasies he had learned from (earlier Orientalist) books. He copies large blocs from Edward Lane’s account and passes them off as his own.

Flaubert, much the greater writer, vividly describes what he sees before him in notes and his wonderful letters. The Orient was to bulk large in two of his six novels, Salammbô (1862) and The Temptation of Saint Anthony (1874). Said takes an excerpt from Flaubert’s notes on visiting a hospital to highlight the way morality and revulsion are completely excise; all that matters is the correct rendering of exact detail (p.186).

The most famous episode in Flaubert’s journey to the Orient was the time he spent with Kuchuk Hanem, an Egyptian sex worker. This is a peg for Said to talk a little about the sexual stereotypes of the East and to make the fairly obvious point that not only for nineteenth century writers but for many readers ‘the Orient’ became associated with sensuality, guilt free and available sex, much more available than back in Victorian strictly regimented Europe.

But the main impact this had on me was to realise how little he talks about sex, desire, gender, feminism, themes which massively saturate modern academic studies. In fact he raises the issue, why the Orient then (and now) suggests ‘not only fecundity but sexual promise (and threat), untiring sensuality, unlimited desire, deep generative energies’, before going on to say (in his typically not quite correct English) ‘it is not the province of my analysis here.’ A little later (p.208) he refers to the use of Orientalist stereotypes of ‘exotic’ sex in semi-pornographic novels but, by and large, it’s not his thing, his aim, his subject.

Then he returns to his main theme, ‘the sense of layer upon layer of interests, official learning, institutional pressure, that covered the Orient as a subject matter and as a territory during the second half of the nineteenth century’ (p.192).

British visitors and writers had a harder more realistic sense of what pilgrimages to the Orient entailed. The French didn’t own any territory and so were, in a sense, more imaginatively free. The British were always anchored in the reality by the vast responsibility of India, later on of Egypt, both of which meant that tough questions about administration and Realpolitik lurked behind even the most carefree travelogue. In a word, they are less imaginative. He has harsh words for Alexander Kinglake (1809 to 1891, Eton and Cambridge), English travel writer and historian, whose ‘Eothen’ or Traces of travel brought home from the East’ (1844) was wildly popular. Kinglake didn’t let his ignorance of any Oriental language and poor grasp of its culture stop him from making sweeping xenophobic, antisemitic and racist generalisations about the culture, mentality and society of ‘the Orient’.

This contrasts with the splendid achievements of Richard Burton, always an imperialist at heart, but a rebel against the establishment who took great delight in pointing out to the Orientalists that he knew more languages, had travelled more, seen more and understood more of the Arab mind than they ever would. Of all the writers of the classic Orientalist period Burton is the one who knew most about the actual specificities of Arab and Muslim life which Said values. He is maybe the last compromised of all these writers. And yet throughout his work is the assumption that the Orient is there to be taken, to be ruled by the West, by Britain, leading Said to another restatement of his core theme, that in Burton’s writings:

Orientalism, which is the system of European or Western knowledge about the Orient, thus becomes synonymous with European domination of the Orient… (p.199)

Chapter 3. Orientalism Now

Begins where its predecessor left off at around 1870. This is the period of greatest colonial expansion into the Orient…the very last section characterises the shift from British and French to American hegemony. I attempt to sketch the present intellectual and social realities of Orientalism in the United States.

1. Latent and Manifest Orientalism

The phrase is obviously derived from Freud’s notion, first expressed in The Interpretation of Dreams, that dreams have both a manifest or obvious content, and then a latent or secret meaning (also latent in the sense that it required work by patient and therapist to bring it out). Said applies Freud’s metaphor to his topic of study.

The idea is simple: the details or surface or manifest Orientalism have changed and varied over the past 250 years but the latent or bedrock attitudes behind it remain as fixed as ever, namely that the Orient is backward, poor, lazy, undisciplined and passive, in need of endless help (p.206).

Actually his argument is not helped by the way that he continually shuffles the attributes he claims that Orientalism attributes to the Orient. In the space of a few pages he says there are the Orient’s:

  • sensuality, tendency to despotism, aberrant mentality, habits of inaccuracy, backwardness (p.205)
  • eccentricity, backwardness, silent indifference, female penetrability, supine malleability (p.206)
  • backward, degenerate, uncivilised, retarded (p.207)

I take the point that each list shuffles from a pack of negative stereotypes, but, like his repeated attempts to give a precise definition of Orientalism, none of which really nail it, there’s a constant sense of blurriness and slippage.

Helplessness

I read his criticism of this idea of Oriental ‘helplessness’ on a day (23 September 2023) when, on the radio, I heard that Morocco needs Western help because of the massive earthquake which just struck it, that Libya needs Western help because of the unprecedented floods which have devastated it, that Lebanon still needs help rebuilding itself three years on from the devastating explosion of 4 August 2020, and saw a charity appeal to help the victims of the civil war in Yemen.

It’s all very well to read Said’s repeated claim that seeing the Orient as helplessly needing Western intervention is an Orientalist trope, a demeaning stereotype entirely created by the institutions he describes, and yet…it also appears to be a real-world fact.

SOAS

Anyway, Said continues to describe (yet again) the process whereby a set of intellectual interests and disciplines based in study of the Biblical languages slowly transformed into a series of postulates which justified and enabled the colonial occupation of ‘the Orient’. He quotes Lord Cromer’s paternalistic speeches, specifically the one calling for the establishment of an institute to study the region, which was a trigger point for the establishment of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

The importance of geography

If the section about Renan dwelled on the importance of the discipline of philology, this section dwells on the academic discipline of geography for the colonial enterprise. As Said puts it in his foggy, unclear prose:

Geography was essentially the material underpinning for knowledge about the Orient. All the latent and unchanging characteristics of the Orient stood upon, were rooted in, its geography. (p.216)

France bounced back from its humiliating defeat in the Franco-Prussian War (1870 to 71) with a renewed determination to expand its empire and this led, among other things, to ‘a tremendous efflorescence of geographical societies’ (p.217). There was even a thing called the geographical movement.

Scientific geography gave rise to commercial geography and an explosion of utopian schemes to interfere and alter geography. The opening of the Suez Canal had changed the world of commerce and profoundly affected geopolitics. Dreamers dreamed of similar huge projects, including flooding the Sahara to make the desert bloom, and tying together France’s scattered African colonies by ambitious railway networks.

Some French commentators blamed their defeat by Prussia on lack of imperial ambition; falling behind British imperial aggrandisement was blamed for France’s economic woes. The solution to every problem was to more aggressively conquer and control. This lay behind France’s drive to conquer the territories of what became French Indochina (Laos, Cambodia, Vietnam), clinched in a series of battles in 1885.

But the French throughout the period continually lamented coming second best to the British who had secured all the plum territories (India, Egypt). French envy and resentment knew no bounds. Said ties this to the way the British produced remarkable characters who flourished in the Oriental purview, such as Gertrude Bell and TE Lawrence.

2. Style, Expertise, Vision: Orientalism’s Wordliness

Starts with a discussion of the concept of The White Man, the controller at the centre of Orientalism who defined unwhites, blacks, coloureds and Orientals as ‘others’, lacking the attributes of whiteness, who therefore had to be schooled and trained up to ‘our’ standard. To demonstrate he gives (more) quotes from Gertrude Bell and T.E. Lawrence.

In the late nineteenth century bastardised theories of evolution, the survival of the fittest and race theories lent malevolent force to pre-existing Orientalist discourse.

Said introduces us to William Robertson Smith (1846 to 1894) a Scottish orientalist, Old Testament scholar and minister of the Free Church of Scotland, best known for his book ‘Religion of the Semites’ which became a foundational text in the comparative study of religion.

Said moves on to his most extended consideration of T.E. Lawrence who he sees following a recognisable career arc, from Romantic adventurer, to imperial agent (in the Arab Uprising), to disillusioned failure. He quotes passages from the Seven Pillars of Wisdom to show how Lawrence not only identified himself totally with the Arab Uprising but, more typically, identified the Arab Uprising with himself, another white man assuming the natives couldn’t have done it on their own.

I like his idea (maybe pretty obvious) that the mid and late nineteenth century figure of the adventurer-eccentric was replaced around the time of the Great War by the Orientalist-imperial agent, citing Lawrence, Gertrude Bell, St John Philby (a small checklist which he refers to countless times). This marked a shift from an academic to an instrumentalist mode.

Between the wars

Between the wars imperial rule throughout the Orient became problematic for the simple reason that the natives formed more and more strident nationalist movements, flanked by increasing acts of violence, while a growing minority in Western countries began to question or turn against colonialism and in favour of home independence.

Said quotes French Orientalists (Sylvain Lévi) who (like all academics) insist the answer is more study, more research, better understanding etc. He quotes the poet Paul Valéry whose contribution amounts (with comic French intellectualism) to analysing the problem away (p.250). And goes on to cite Valentine Chirol, Elie Faure, Fernand Baldensperger, all of whom reiterated the now crystallised Orientalist lines: ‘they’ are unlike us, lack the ability for rational knowledge, are economically and culturally backward, Islam is an imprisoning limiting religion, all the usual slurs.

At the end of this section he gives yet another summary of what he’s trying to do, to investigate:

the metamorphosis of a relatively innocuous philological subspeciality into a capacity for managing political movements, administering colonies, and making apocalyptic statements about the White Man’s difficult civilising mission (p.254)

3. Modern Anglo-French Orientalism in Fullest Flower

During the 1930s and 40s Orientalism had hardened into an extensive field of knowledge in which, like a spider’s web, reference to the most trivial fact tended to jangle the entire system and immediately invoke a whole gang of presuppositions, biases and bigotries.

There’s a long passage on the development, between the wars, of ‘types’ in the social sciences, which I think he contrasts with the cosmopolitan pluralism of the philological (in the wide sense) approach taken by one of his heroes, Auerbach. Narrowing versus widening.

So this section invokes the profound collapse of European economy and political consensus and in an obscure, round the back kind of way, describes how this impacted on national Orientalisms. For example, Snouck Hutgonje, Dutch scholar of Oriental cultures and languages and advisor on native affairs to the colonial government of the Dutch East Indies.

Then 20 pages contrasting the work of the most eminent Orientalists of their generations in France and Britain, Louis Massignon (1883 to 1962), French Catholic scholar of Islam and a pioneer of Catholic-Muslim mutual understanding, and Sir Hamilton Gibb (1895 to 1971), Scottish historian and Orientalist.

Massignon is depicted as an outsider of great genius and insight who devoted a lot of time to the biography of a Muslim Sufi saint, al-Hallaj. Gibb was the opposite, an insider, an institution man.

Inevitably Said depicts both of them, in subtle and sometimes impenetrable style, while citing Foucault and Barthes, as nonetheless continuers and purveyors of fundamental Orientalist stereotypes. His detailed look at the careers, professional subjects and styles of these two giants takes us from after the Great War up to the early 1960s.

4. The Latest Phase

To date the book has amounted to a brief consideration of the origin of Orientalist tropes and prejudices among the ancient Greeks, a brief sketch of the Middle Ages in the form of Dante, skipping past the Renaissance altogether and then settling down to a detailed examination of Orientalism from the late eighteenth and through the long nineteenth century.

In this last section he finally brings all his findings on home to the colossus which dominated the post-war settlement, culturally, economically and militarily, the US of A. It is completely unlike the rest of the book in that it is clear, accessible, magazine style rage against the unchecked proliferation of anti-Arab and Islamophobic caricatures across American culture.

The traditional Orientalism he has chronicled was broken up in 1960s America into a proliferation of academic subspecies. The European focus on philology, itself deriving from study of the Biblical languages, disappeared and was replaced by an American focus on the social sciences. American academics didn’t study the languages of the Middle East, they studied their ‘societies’ and on this basis set themselves up as experts and advisers.

Part of this was the abandonment of the study of literature. The long philological and literary approach he’s been praising and enjoying came to a grinding halt. In American hands it was all about preparing oil executives for their stints in the Arab world and advising the State Department.

He categorises ways in which ‘the Arab’ or ‘the Arab Muslim’ appear in ‘modern’ (i.e. 1960s and 70s) culture:

  1. Popular images and social science representations
  2. Cultural relations policy
  3. Merely Islam
  4. Orientals Orientals Orientals

Said becomes more and more angry, outraged at the barrage of anti-Arab and Islamophobic imagery to be found all across American culture. Images of humiliatingly defeated Arabs after the 1967 war. Images of hook-nosed Arab sheikhs at petrol pumps after the 1973 war and the oil price hike. These latter have all the Nazi antisemitic stereotypes born again.

He is appalled at the new tone of American Orientalism. He mounts a sustained attack on the 1970 Cambridge History of Islam, spotting stereotypes everywhere and accusing it of being bereft of ‘ideas and methodological intelligence’ (p.302).

He quotes from magazine articles, from Commentary magazine, from scholarly papers, interviews in which academics, politicians, commentators, repeat ad nauseam the same anti-Arab tropes he has enumerated throughout the book, the backwardness of Arabs, the stupidity of Arabs, the bombastic nature of Arabic which prevents Arabs from having rational thought, and so on.

He attacks 3 or 4 essays before alighting on a 1972 volume called ‘Revolution in the Middle East and other case studies’. He attacks the introductory essay by the volume’s editor P.J. Vatikiotis, before making a sustained attack on the essay by notable modern Orientalist, Bernard Lewis, giving numerous quotations in a vitriolic attack on what he takes to be Lewis at the same time setting himself up as an oracle on all things Arab while at the same time comprehensively despising and belittling his subject matter. Sounds weird, sounds counter-intuitive, unless you’ve read Said’s book in which he identifies it as a recurring characteristic of all Orientalists.

It’s in the Lewis passage that Said finally opens up about the Zionist movement and the foundation of the state of Israel, pointing out that Lewis nowhere (apparently) mentions Zionism or the Jewish appropriation of Palestinian land and, at last you feel, the cat is out of the bag. it feels as if the previous 300 pages have been a long, slow, laboursome foreplay leading up to this, the money shot.

What particularly gets his is Lewis’s pride in being an objective historian when Said claims to have shown he is in fact a ludicrously biased, anti-Arab, anti-Islamic bigot.

This is the culmination of Orientalism as a dogma that not only degrades its subject matter but also blinds its practitioners. (p.319)

The final pages describe the way Orientalism has infected the Orient in the sense that students and lecturers from the region come to the United States to train, are inculcated with Orientalism biases against their own people and culture and return to propagate these biases. There were, at the time of writing, hardly any institutes of higher education devoted to studying the Orient in the Orient. Academically, it is backward.

Worse, America has made the entire Middle East, economically, into a client region. America consumes a select number of products from it (mostly oil) but in return exports a huge number of goods, from blue jeans to Coca Cola. And TV and Hollywood movies, which often feature Arabs as the bad guys.

The modern Orient, in short, participates in its own Orientalising. (p.325)

Finally he hopes that his work has made a small contribution to encouraging scholars to critically scrutinise the premises of their disciplines, to be attentive to the realities on the ground and try to avoid the artificial and cramping conventions which constrict so many fields of study in the humanities. And, writing at a time of increasing nationalism in the developing world, he hopes it will help those peoples and movements get free of the mind-forg’d manacles (a quote from William Blake) which their oppressors created to judge, demean and control them.

Critique

Mind opening

Books like this are mostly for students because, if you hadn’t yet come across the notion that academic disciplines are not the clean objective collections of facts you were led to believe at school, then Said’s full frontal demolition of an entire area of academic study, and his association of it with one of modern woke ideology’s great bogeymen, Western imperialism, is liable to have a dynamite impact, opening your mind to whole new ways of thinking about scholarship, the academy, the humanities, history, geography, languages, religion, all of it.

And, given the extent to which Said ties his history of nineteenth century Orientalism directly to the perennial hot button issue of the Arab-Israeli conflict, the impressionable student is likely to have not only their intellectual interests, but their sense of justice fired up. When I used to visit my son at Bristol University I was struck by the number of posters around the town burning with indignation for the cause of oppressed Palestine.

But, unfortunately, it’s nearly 40 years since I read Orientalism, so none of this is new to me although rereading it made me realise I’d forgotten almost all the detail.

Repetitive

And forgotten how bad it is. It really doesn’t read very well. Reread in the cold light of day it feels extremely repetitive and confused. Too often Said asserts his case rather than proving it, in particular repeating the fundamental ideas like the created nature of Orientalist discourse, the premise of an unchangingly inferior Orient and so on, scores and scores of times till I felt like screaming.

Weak definitions

A surprisingly central problem is his failure to really define what his central term i.e. the Orient, actually means. When I began to explain the book to a friend she expected it to be about the Far East, China and Japan, which are the places she associates with the word ‘Orient’. She was very surprised when I told her it focuses almost entirely on the Middle East and Egypt, with some digressions about India. China and Japan are mentioned once or twice in passing, but not part of his hard core message. Here’s one of his not particularly useful definitions of the great subject, Orientalism:

What I shall be calling Orientalism, a way of coming to terms with the Orient that is based on the Orient’s special place in European Western experience. (p.1)

Or:

Orientalism is the habit for dealing with questions, objects, qualities, and regions deemed Oriental. (p.72)

You can see the air of tautology hanging over a sentence like this, as there are so many of his other formulations.

The Orient that appears in Orientalism is a system of representations framed by a whole set of forces that brought the Orient into Western learning, Western consciousness and, later, Western empire. (p.203)

Or this one, that Orientalism:

is an attempt to describe a whole region of the world as an accompaniment to that region’s colonial conquest. (p.343)

It’s peculiar that every time he mentions the concept, he feels the need to redefine it, and every time it comes out slightly different. This adds to the general difficulty of reading the book.

Relation to the contemporary world

The second point is one I made in part 1, which is that so much has happened in the world since it was published – chiefly the collapse of communism, the end of the Cold War, the rise of Islamic terrorism, the Western invasions of Middle Eastern countries, the Arab Spring and its failures – that, to anyone keeping up with events, the book doesn’t feel like a guide to the modern world but a dated dead end.

No doubt Western academics, commentators, ‘experts’ and journalists continue to use Orientalising stereotypes, and for much the same motives Said describes, to define, control and contain the complex realities of this troubled part of the world, to assert Western superiority over ‘barbaric’ Arabs. But this is, in the end, a very easy concept to understand and what would be useful would be a guide to the contemporary forms of Orientalising stereotyping which we in the West, no doubt, still labour under.

Ending the binary

Quite a few times Said says he laments the simplistic binary opposition between East and West which he says is at the heart of Orientalism. Does he? No. In my opinion he reinforces the binary on every page of the book, in fact he deepens and entrenches it by repeating its binary terms – the Orient and the West – on every page.

By not including a single Oriental, Arab or Muslim voice, while featuring scores and scores of European writers, I thought the book has the effect of making ‘the Orient’ even more invisible, disappearing it, while filling the mind to overflowing with Western European ideas. He angrily rejects those ideas. but those are the ideas I’ve just spent a week reading a 350-page book about, and so those are the ideas I remember.

Epistemology

Said’s thesis is based on the idea that knowledge is power, and that the way ‘knowledge’ about ‘the Orient’ was created and curated was always biased, bigoted, negative, critical and disempowering. Fine. But what this boils down to is an argument about epistemology, which is defined as ‘the theory of knowledge, especially with regard to its methods, validity, and scope, and the distinction between justified belief and opinion.’ This is the heart of his book and his thesis. It is an argument about the production of knowledge. And yet Said nowhere explains his own theory of epistemology. Just as he is slippery about what ‘the orient’ actually means, and gives ten or so differing definitions of ‘Orientalism’, in the same way he never gives an adequate definition of the central concept he’s arguing about.

In my opinion it’s this lack of really deep, thought-through clarity and consistency about his key concepts which explains why, instead, he lumps lots of disparate topics together, rarely explores them in any depth, and continually resorts to asserting his thesis instead of proving it.

Fake urgency

Said writes that, when Orientalists codified their knowledge into encyclopedias under alphabetical entries, they modelled and shaped knowledge, created constraints so that readers could only approach this knowledge of the Orient via ‘the learned grids and codes’ provided by the Orientalist, and this is made to sound like some wicked conspiracy. And yet the same is true of any other subject whatsoever. Take woodwork. You want to learn a bit about woodwork so you Google or buy a book on the subject, written by experts.

But in Said’s eyes, this knowledge about woodwork has been modelled and shaped knowledge by so-called ‘woodwork experts’ who have created constraints so that readers can only approach this knowledge of woodwork via ‘the learned grids and codes’ provided by the woodwork expert! Scary, eh? Or utterly banal.

Reading these kinds of scare tactics on every single page gets boring. Again and again and again he makes the same simple point which is a critique of the way knowledge is produced and curated by academics with, he claims, an anti-Eastern, anti-Arab, anti-Muslim prejudice – all so that he can lead the reader, in the Introduction and then in the third section, right back to the modern world and to the iniquity of US policy in the Middle East.

It’s this, Said’s obsession with the Arab-Israeli policy, which really gives the book its energy. The rise of ‘Orientalism’ as an academic discipline would be of solely academic interest, a very niche concern, if it weren’t for the fact that the same kind of anti-Eastern, anti-Arab and anti-Muslim tropes are at work, in the world, today, guiding American’s slavishly pro-Israeli and ruinously anti-Arab policy.

Last word

When we were students a friend of mine, who went on to become a professor of poetry, described it as ‘a bad book in a good cause’.

Practical criticism

See if you can identify the kind of essentialising Orientalist stereotypes about the Middle East, Arabs and Islam which Said describes, in Western (British) coverage of the recent Hamas attack on Israel (I’m just giving the BBC as a starting point):

Credit

Orientalism by Edward Said was first published by Routledge and Kegan Paul in 1978. References are to the 2003 Penguin paperback edition (with new Afterword and Preface).

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Posted by Simon on September 22, 2023

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 31: Africa (1885 to 1892)

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

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

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

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

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

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

African issues:

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

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

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

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

Chapter 33: Alliance Politics (January to October 1891)

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

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

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

Chapter 35: Opposition (August 1892 to June 1895)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 39: Apogee of Empire (June 1897)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chapter 44: Resolution (May to October 1900)

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

Chapter 45: Reconstruction (October 1900 to January 1901)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The cost of the Boer War

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

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

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

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

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

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

The legacy

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

The nature of the Conservative Party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

No policies

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

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

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

Foreign policy

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

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

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

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

Salisbury sayings

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

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

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

Salisbury cynicism

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

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

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

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

Imperialism

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

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

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

Manipulating the legal system

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

The rotten ‘honours’ system

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

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

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

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

The Duke of Beaufort, an important Tory magnate:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Credit

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

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