All posts tagged diary

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan (1978)

I was determined to pursue the matter to its illogical conclusion.
(Spike summarises his methodology in Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall, page 8)

I was getting twitchy, doing nothing positive for so long. I had started talking to myself and I wasn’t satisfied with the answers.
(Spike beginning to lose it, page 60)

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall is the fourth of Spike Milligan’s seven (!) volumes of war memoirs. It covers the period from his regiment’s landing in Salerno, Italy, on 23 September 1943 to the date he was invalided out of the front line with nervous exhaustion in March 1944.

Longer, seriouser

Although covering a period of just under six months, the text, at 288 pages, is longer than the two previous volumes put together. Although the relentless gags and wisecracking are similar, the Hitlergams have, mercifully, ended (actually, he sneaks a few through, e.g. p.139) and there are far fewer visual elements i.e. photos, sketches, cartoons and so on, than in previous volumes.

There are still quite a few photos but they are documentary and factual, in the sense that they show members of his brigade, tanks, lorries crossing Bailey Bridges and so on. Mind you, although of military subjects, Spike still comes up with some funny captions. I laughed at the photo of squaddies working on setting up a Bailey bridge across a river where the caption tells us that ‘the ugly soldiers’ were told to face away from the camera.

But overall the tone is quite a bit more serious than in the previous volumes and quite a few passages are entirely serious in intent such as the description of: air attacks, of devastated Italian villages, of the fury of Allied attacks on German positions, the terrible scenes after a direct hit on a neighbouring battery, and so on. It has a permanent edge, a barely suppressed anger which I didn’t feel in the previous volumes (see final section, below, for examples) all building up to the intense and unhappy final passages of him being wounded and psychologically traumatised, returned to the front too soon, bullied for being a coward and then his final collapse.

Spike is peeved

The more earnest tone is set by the surprisingly cross preface or author’s note preceding the text. Spike had been really nettled by a review by Clive James of one of the previous books which jovially referred to it as ‘an unreliable history of the war’. This upset Spike who, in this preface, goes to great lengths to insist that, on the contrary, the text is very heavily researched and completely factual.

All that I wrote did happen, it happened on the days I mention, the people I mention are real people and the places are real…I wish the reader to know that he is not reading a tissue of lies and fancies, it all really happened…I’ve spent a fortune on beer and dinners interviewing my old Battery mates, and phone calls to those overseas ran into over a hundred pounds…Likewise I included a large number of photographs actually taken in situ…

He goes on to mention 18 former colleagues by name for their help with documents, maps, photos and recollections. There are lots of photos but, as I mentioned, most of them are documentary i.e. factual photos of individuals in his battery or contemporary scenes – the silly Edwardian photos with humorous captions which littered the earlier volumes have disappeared.

He also gives excerpts from Alf Fildes’s diary and regularly includes written anecdotes from his best mate Harry Edgington (e.g. pages 120, 142, 234). In fact he mentions ringing up Harry (who had emigrated to New Zealand) and also calling Ken Carter (p.232), to confirm specific facts and memories.

This irritated preface ends with another (i.e. they also appeared in the previous volumes) tribute to his mates and their ongoing closeness, mentioning their twice-a-year reunions, and the text is sprinkled with references to meeting old comrades at reunions or at other events, decades later. These links to old comrades matters a lot to Spike and their importance comes over with far more urgency, and need, than in the previous volumes.

Day-by-day diary format

As with the previous three, it’s done in diary form. But in line with his irritation Spike’s diary entries are given in capitals and preceded by MY DIARY just to ram home the message that it all actually happened.

So what we read is the daily account of how Spike and the boys lived, day to day, with very little analysis, little overview of the campaigns he took part in, no detachment or distance. Instead this happens, and they take the mickey out of it – then that happens, and they make gags about it – then this happens and they all have a larf about it, and so on, for a surprisingly long 288 pages in the Penguin paperback edition.

Gags

Kidgell looks pensively out towards Italy. ‘I was worried about the landing.’
‘Don’t worry about the landing. I’ll hoover it in the morning.’ (p.9)

‘I thought you were a champion swimmer.’
‘Yes, but you can’t swim in army boots.’
‘You’re right, there isn’t enough room.’ (p.9)

Lunch was a mangled stew, lumps of gristle floating on the surface. Edgington said if you held your ear to it you could hear an old lady calling ‘Helpppp.’ (p.13)

Budden tells us, ‘We’ll walk to HQ and get fresh orders.’
I tell him I don’t need fresh orders. I’m perfectly satisfied with the ones I’ve got. (p.29)

Edgington is speaking heatedly. It’s the only way to keep warm. (p.68)

Ernie Hart was a nice lad with a quiet sense of humour, so quiet no one ever heard it. (p.123)

Outside I rubbed my hands with glee. (I always kept a tin handy.) (p.245)

Incidentally the boys themselves are aware that many of these gags are corny or stretched. He often recalls the bit of repartee then writes ‘(groans)’ afterwards (pages 102, 218).

‘I’m too bloody tired to smoke,’ he said.
‘Try steaming,’ I said. ‘It’s easier.’ (p.253)

They were joking on the battlefield, whistling to keep their spirits up, trying to encourage and cheer each other up and fairly often it seems stretched and contrived. I’ve pointed out in some of my reviews of thrillers that many of the classic thriller writers of the 50s and 60s carried the intense atmosphere of the war, its threat and peril, into civilian life; their protagonists carry it around with them. In the same way, maybe, we can say that Spike carried the rather desperate gagging which kept him and his mates going through the war into his civilian career, to great effect in the Goon Show but with diminishing returns after that.

(Incidentally, more, if very casual, information is thrown on the origin of the term when Spike tells us that it was a common nickname for Gunners like himself to be referred to as Gooners or just Goons. And at one point he parodies someone referred to as Florence Nightingale, saying they were more like Florence Nightingoon, the Lady of the Lump, p.135.)

(A few days after reading Spike I was reading Fitzroy Maclean’s war classic, Eastern Approaches’, and came across references to him and fellow members of the SAS listening to Tommy Handley and It’s That Man Again on the wireless and went to listen to some on YouTube. It’s immediately obvious that Handley’s humour uses the same kind of bad puns and deliberate misunderstandings as Spike – ‘I’ve been taking a walk, and if anybody else wants to take it, they can have it. I’ve finished with it’ – making me realise that Spike was peddling the same kinds of gags into the late 1970s that he’d grown up listening to in the 1930s. A proper appreciation of where he was new or innovative would have to start with a really thorough understanding of the British comedy landscape of the 1930s, something which is way beyond my scope.)

(Deliberately?) bad proofreading

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall is written in a deliberately flaky style. Lots of the sentences contain three or four or five clauses just separated by commas which would be better broken up into shorter sentences by full stops. There are unnecessarily hyphenated words, unnecessarily capitalised words:

He stayed for launch, a lovely Stew (p.108)
Bentley has diagnosed his own illness as Malaria only to have another doctor diagnose it correctly as Jaundice. (p.136)

Both together:

In the dark night the war went on, being able to sleep peacefully, dry, snug and warm was I suppose, Luxury. (p.144)

There are occasional grammar errors (‘This bloody army were food mad!’, p.98) and erratic typographical gaps or breaks between main text and quotations (from other people’s diaries or letters etc). And the multiple exclamation or punctuation marks:

An OP has been established on Monte Croce. Not again! Rain!!! Where does the stuff come from?? (p.104)

The overall effect is of deliberate scrappiness, like a scrapbook, like a kind of student mag or fanzine, as if this adds to the spontaneousness and wackiness of the text, as if breathless sentences and random capitals make it all more wacky and humorous.

Same goes for the misspellings. He talks about ‘the Scotts’ (p.47) or a ‘recoco chair’ (p.67), describes his Major playing the clarionet (although that one’s debatable, p.82), refers to ‘the Bosche’ (p.94), writes ‘Above us the battle was going on full belt’ (p.278). My point being some of these are such egregious errors no professional proofreader would have missed them, so it must have been a conscious editorial choice – all of it, the caps, the misspellings, the bad punctuation, the random caps…

Maybe the manuscript arrived like this from Spike and the editors decided to leave them in to increase the sense of wackiness and improvisation. But then the whole thing was supposedly ‘edited’ by Jack Hobbs, so it was clearly a high-level decision to let it be like this.

Sex

They’re young, fit, healthy men so they think about sex all the time, a great deal of the banter is about sex and, being men, this means rude observations about the size, shape and state of each other’s penises. Any woman – our nurses or Italian civilians – will be mercilessly ogled.

‘Buon giorno, Maria.’
She smiled and blushed, the innocence of Italian country girls was something to see. Something else to see was the top of her stocking tops when she bent over. (p.171)

Travelling on the back of a lorry, the sight of a pretty girl immediately erupted into mass drooling until she was out of sight. (p.194)

There were loads of pretty girls who came under fire from the tailboard. The cries ranged from ‘I can do you a power of good, my dear’ to the less poetic ‘Me give you ten inches of pork sword, darlin”. (p.218)

Not just unacceptable but illegal, these days.

There are the usual half-disguised references to masturbation, which must have been rife (and again I refer the reader to Eric Newby’s mention of men masturbating every night in his prisoner of war camp) (pages 154, 265).

There’s a running joke that Edgington doesn’t join in chatting up every ‘bird’ they see and certainly doesn’t go to the two brothels described in the text; instead he writes long letters to his sweetheart back home, Peg, the joke being that the more he writes the more he remembers having sex with her, the more aroused and frustrated he becomes, for example pages 86 and 87:

At the mention of Peg his eyes went soft and his trousers boiled.

Some of the sex slang was new to me. A simple-minded soldier refers to squeezing liquid mud through the holes in a hessian sack so as to create little worms of mud spaghetti as ‘sexy’. To which:

‘Sexy?’ said Bombardier Fuller. ‘You must be bloody hard up for it if you get the Colin’ watchin’ that.’ (p.130)

‘Get the Colin?’ Later he refers to vaseline by its navy nickname ‘starters’, as in ‘a pot of starters’ and goes on to explain that if the reader doesn’t understand this they should contact Royal Navy PR, as ’70 per cent of the officers are Gay up there’ (p.137). So he is aware of homosexuals, I had been wondering (and p.158).

Race

Spike refers to Indians as wogs (pp. 16, 133) and to Black people using the n word (pages 133, 195) and ‘coon’ (as in ‘Coon-type singing’, p.265) – though not all the time, he also refers to Blacks as ‘negroes’ (p.182) or ‘coloured’. In other words he used (or was depicting) the idiom of the time. It feels done without malice, because (re. ‘wogs’) he was raised in India and liked the culture and people and (re. the n word) he was a massive fan of Black jazz music. Still, the modern woke reader should be warned.

The politically correct would also be incensed by the three or four times the lads do cartoon impersonations of imagined Black servants on a southern plantation from a Hollywood movie (‘Gone with the Wind’ had been released just four years earlier, 1939). Thus, when his mate Edgington turns up at a new billet:

‘Welcome home, young massa,’ I said. ‘De plantation ain’t been de same widout you.’ (p.254)

It’s the idiom of the day and it’s spoofing a popular movie (1943) but it does, admittedly, have an extra edge of satire or sarcasm or needle. Given a choice Spike always prefers the slangy or disrespectful term for anything (the Germans, the army, officers, soldiers as a whole, the Brits, himself, anything if it’ll raise a laugh). It was part of the humour of the day, but double edged. He can never mention Gunner Kidgell without called him ‘short-arse Kidgell’. And he refers to the Italians throughout as ‘Itis’.

Spike is also very aware when people are Jewish and, again, invokes stock stereotypes of Jews i.e. being tight with money or being in the rag trade in the East End (pages 160). I think I remember from the 70s that calling someone a ‘Jew’ was an insult indicating that they were tight (with money). Unacceptable these days, and has been for some time. He mentions someone being Jewish or Jews in general, often emphasising their alleged tightness with money, on pages 160, 193, 198, 202, 223, 258, 271, 274.

At one point an attack by German Messerschmitts forces him and comrades to run naked from showers and jump into nearby slit trenches for protection. But what bothers him is not the risk of getting killed but that he left all his money in his battledress hanging up outside the shower. The second the danger’s over, he goes running back.

Thank God! Money was safe! I just have Jewish blood. (p.258)

Events

The journey aboard ship from North Africa to Italy. Landing on Salerno beach, unopposed because it’s secure, but with the wreckage of fierce fighting all around. Journey up into the hills and then a long slog of positions taken up by his artillery battery, Battery D.

Almost immediately he comes down with sand fly fever and is taken off to hospital for a week long interlude of clean sheets, decent food and pretty nurses. But he starts to go round the bend with boredom and is relieved to be one day collected by a truck and taken back to his mates on the battery. Here, as in every memoir I’ve ever read about war, it’s about friendship, mateship and camaraderie rather than any grand cause.

The new-found seriousness extends as far as an argument he gets into with a northerner who sings the praises of Gracie Fields and George Formby who Spike cordially loathes, explaining that he is a devotee of the Marx Brothers and Bing Crosby (p.54). (Regarding styles of humour, later he hears a broadcast by ITMA and thinks ‘corny bastards’, p.256).

There’s still quite a lot about music, they hear the kind of big band jazz they like on the radio, in an Italian church they discover a piano and play Cole Porter (in fact they perform and sing some Cole Porter but then the Italian priest sings plays and sings some Verdi opera thus trumping them). Othertimes they perform with what they have, including one night they have a little performance with an ocarina, guitar and shaken matchbox, with the others joining in banging mugs (p.138).

He visits the ruins of Pompeii (pages 51 to 53).

Spike’s job

I’d read his descriptions of his duties in volume 2 but it was only in this one that it was made unmistakably clear that Spike’s job was ‘wireless operator’ for an artillery battery (p.46) i.e. laying (or retrieving) phone cables, then using radio sets to co-ordinate with other observation posts to target artillery fire accurately at enemy positions, as described pages 76 to 77.

His battery constantly move to new positions as the front line advances, and enemy planes fly over and occasional shells land nearby but he is repeatedly grateful that he’s not in the poor infantry, sent forward into withering machinegun fire.

The Germans slowly retreat into the mountains which the poor bloody infantry have to storm while Spike’s battery and many others lob shells up into the mountains. The main event is the rain: it rains incessantly, the tents, the men, their uniforms and equipment become sodden. The artillery stands become so sodden that the guns slip backwards or sideways when they fire. All their efforts become devoted to trying to find somewhere dry to shelter and sleep.

Maybe the most vivid scene, possibly the longest lasting all of three pages, is his vivid recreation of a concert he and his mates organised and staged on Christmas Day 1943, giving us the full list of acts, an impressive series of farcical performances and musical interludes.

Just days later they’re given four days’ leave in Amalfi which seems like Disneyland after the muddy farms they’ve been staying in. Memorable evening, standing on the garden terrace watching night fall over the bay, and then onto a cafe kept by a Cockney-speaking Italian momma who lays on an unprecedented feast.

In Amalfi he’s invited into a brothel and initially refuses all offers, preferring to sit relaxed, drink and get pissed, until – according to his account – the lady of the house dragged him into a bedroom and not only screwed him but paid him.

On 5 January they are moved to a new forward position just outside the village of Lauro.

15 January a direct hit on a gun emplacement, exploding munitions and burning four gunners he knows to death, with many other burns casualties. Happens in the middle of the night, Spike is up and running round helping as best he can.

He develops piles (‘the curse of the Milligans’), goes see the medical officer (MO) but there doesn’t seem to be any treatment short of having them operated on and removed. They go from painful to actively bleeding. Normally irrepressibly chirpy, this throws him into a depression (p.271).

The climax, Spike is wounded

On 20 January 1944 Spike is in pain from bleeding piles, depressed, and hasn’t had much sleep for two nights when a lieutenant asks for a volunteer to go and replace a signalman up at Tac HQ, which is near the front lines, also where their commanding officer, now regularly referred to as ‘Looney’ Jenkins, is based. Very reluctantly Spike volunteers and sets in train the sequence of events which will see him wounded and invalided out.

Alf Fildes drives him to Tac HQ which entails crossing the makeshift bridge across the river Garigliano, shrouded in camouflage smoke because the Jerries are throwing over lots of artillery. They pull up outside a cluster of farmhouse buildings which is Tac HQ. All round are dead German bodies no-one’s had time to bury.

the moment Spike arrives Major Jenkins puts him on the headphones and keeps him at it for 17 hours without a break (‘the bastard’), monitoring and sending radio signals, he even has to argue for permission to go for a piss. Machinegun bullets whine over the roof and shells land, some scarily close, shaking the buildings. His piles start to bleed and he feels at the end of his tether.

Then Jenkins orders him and three colleagues to go forward, under fire, to the observation post (OP) carrying batteries and a new 22 wireless set. They cross a field containing a recently hit Sherman tank, scramble up a gully full of cowering infantry and emerge into the open to climb up the hillside, tiered for agriculture, as machine gun bullets and mortars land all around.

They all throw themselves to the ground then Spike remembers lying on his front, then a terrific explosion and he’s lying on his back, regaining consciousness, seeing red, strangely dazed (p.278).

He knows if they stay there they’ll be sitting ducks and turns and scrambles back down the mountain. Next thing he knows he’s talking to Major Jenkins crying his eyes out – the major tells him to get his wound dressed and he realises he’s wounded in the right thigh, couple of inches long quarter of an inch deep, but it’s not the wound, it’s the shaking and the crying – he’s put into an ambulance, given pills, in a gesture of kindness he’ll never forget, comforted by another wounded man – then he’s on a stretcher, loaded into a Red Cross truck – arrives at a camp and tent and bunk…

Next morning he’s woken up by an American band playing reveille – an orderly tells him he’s at camp 144 CS and has been categorised as suffering from Battle Fatigue – bereft of any kit he goes to the American camp where, true to form, the Yanks are fantastically generous, giving him a towel, razor soap etc and Spike starts crying Thanks – it’s not the wound that bothers him it’s the way he can’t stop crying…

He’s taken to see a psychiatrist who’s an army captain who tells him, rather threateningly, that he will get better, understand? He’s given a hot dinner and more tranquilisers –

On 27 January, just a week later, far from rested and recuperated, Spike finds himself back with his battery, still in the same position outside Lauro but he feels broken…

I was not really me any more

The spring that made me Spike Milligan was gone (p.284)

He has stopped crying but can’t stop stammering – Major Jenkins gives him a dressing down for being a coward and he is stripped of his one stripe i.e. demoted from Lance Bombardier back to Gunner. He is taking the pills prescribed him at the hospital which deprive him of his old personality.

I am by now completely demoralised. All the laughing had stopped. (p.284)

In retrospect, Spike thinks that if they’d given him a couple of weeks rest he might have bounced back, but being sent straight back and then shouted at by the martinet Major finished him off. After a couple of days he can’t take it any more and is driven away from the Battery, no longer to serve, never to see his mates again…

I felt as though I were being taken across the river Styx. I’ve never got over that feeling. (p.285)

Psychiatric hospital

10 February 1944. He is sent to a proper hospital, bright, light, clean, airy, miles behind the lines. Psychiatric ward. About 50 patients, most doped to the gills. Silence.

He is seen by a Major Palmer, a tough former boxer who suffers no malingerers but who accepts he is in shock. He is sent to a rehabilitation camp north of Naples.

Final collapse

Cut to a month later, 9 March 1944. Spike is now out of his unit and far from the front. He is taken to a terrible muddy camp outside a suburb of Naples called Afrigola. He is given a job in ‘reception’ i.e. in a tent at the gateway to the camp where he asks the same questions of new arrivals, fills in and files their paperwork. The last paragraph of the book tries to put a brave face on it:

Will Milligan recover? Will he get back to the big time among the Lance-Bombardier set? Above all, will he lose the stammer that makes him take four hours to say good morning? All this and more in Vol. 5, Goodbye Soldier, to be serialised in Gay News. (p.288)

So he ends the narrative by trying restore the cheeky chappy, zany character of the preceding text but, well, it doesn’t work.

(Incidentally the last gag isn’t homophobia, I think, just surrealism. It’s an off-the-cuff gag citing just about the last place the memoirs of girl-mad shagger Milligan were likely to be serialised.)

Shall I read volume 5? Volume 4 is not as funny as its predecessors and, at 288 pages, turned into quite a grind. Plus I always knew it was heading for this sad denouement. According to the blurbs volume 5 is just as long at 280 pages, and devoted to Spike’s personal battle with depression and psychiatric problems… Not a thrilling prospect, is it?

Class animus

Spike really hates their new commanding officer, the over-officious unbending Major Jenkins, ‘Fuck him’ (p.128) and this dislike curdles into outright hatred, citing everyone under Jenkins’ command who gave him the nickname ‘Loony’ for his impenetrably stupid orders.

He enjoys retailing stories of officers making wallies of themselves, like the officer who very grandly swanked into view of the battery, took out a shooting stick, unfolded it, sat squarely on it, and then it sank slowly into the quagmire till he fell on his back in the mud. How they laughed (p.76).

He is also thrilled to bits when the officers’ mess catches fire and gleefully describes how hated Major Jenkins runs into the flames to retrieve his belongings into a pile which some of the men (who all hate him), as soon as his back is turned, promptly throw back into the fire (p.152).

He contrasts Churchill meeting Roosevelt in the warmth and Cairo in some luxury hotel with the plight of him and his mates, living for weeks in soaking tents, wearing sodden clothes which start to fall apart and riddled with lice.

(Anti-officer stories or reflections on pages 164, 165, 202)

Spike doesn’t need to comment when he and a few comrades, who are billeted in farm outbuildings covered in centuries or ordure lay a phone line up to headquarters and open the door to the officers mess to find it a cosy clean billet with a warm fire and the officers all swigging whisky and laughing (p.195). The class resentment bubbles off the page.

Seriouser

I mentioned that, although Spike continues to blitz us with gags, he also shares quite serious opinions, much more so than in the previous three volumes:

We drive through Sparanise, badly shelled and bombed, some buildings still smouldering. The inhabitants are in a state of shock, women and children are crying, men are searching amid the ruins for belongings or worse, their relatives. It was the little children that depressed me the most, that such innocence should be put to such suffering. The adult world should forever hang its head in shame at the terrible, unforgivable things done to the young… (p.80)

This reminded me of the description in ‘SAS: Rogue Heroes’ of a German artillery attack on the Italian town of Termoli which wiped out a civilian family except for the little boy who was running round screaming with his intestines hanging out of a terrible stomach wound, till SAS hard man Reg Seekings grabbed him and shot him dead on the spot.

Any leader who declares war, whether in Congo, Sudan, Yemen, Syria, Gaza, Ukraine, Myanmar, is committing to blowing up little children and should be damned forever.

Half a dozen times he refers to coming from an Irish family and having been raised a Catholic but, in the face of the suffering he’s seen, he has suffered a fairly predictable loss of faith:

A Catholic priest visited us this evening and asked if anyone wanted Confession and Holy Communion. I nearly went but since the war started my belief in God had suffered a reverse. I couldn’t reconcile all the killing by two sides who both claimed to be Christian societies… (p.83)

Undertones of madness

Because I know this is the volume which ends with him getting invalided out with shell shock or PTSD, I noticed the increased number of references to madness littered throughout the text. If he’d been a literary author i.e. one who carefully planned his narrative and effects, I’d say he had carefully seeded the notion, or references to different types of madness, in a cunning preparation for his eventual collapse. In practice, the text is so chaotically assembled I doubt there was that much calculation. Conscious or not, they’re there.

At one point there’s a shortage of fags and Spike goes four days without a puff. The pupils of his eyes dilate and ‘I spoke in a high strained voice on the edge of a scream’ (p.48).

‘There’s a bloke in a truck waiting for you.’
‘Is he wearing a white coat.’ (p.60)

Inside the farm an Italian an Italian baby was crying and the mother was trying to calm it in a hysterical high-pitched shriek. (p.63)

From the distant hill we hear the dreadful sound of Spandaus and Schmeisers that are spraying the early morning with bullets, and I can’t but wonder at the courage of these lads in the Guards brigade going forward into it. What a terrible, unexplainable lunacy. (p.75)

‘How?’ said Gunner White looking down at the brown sea of mud, ‘how can we get out of this before we all go stark ravin’ bloody mad?’ (p.82)

And on pages 200, 204, 228, 229, 265, 272…

‘See?, we’re not the only ones who’ve lost our marbles,’ said Edgington. (p.228)

‘Your power to bend words will one day end you in the nick, nuthouse or graveyard.’ (p.229)

On page 193 the boys discuss the random theory that Hitler was driven mad due to piles. In which case a tube of Anusol would have prevented the whole war.

There are also rumbling references to suicide. They are kept so long at a position on the hill in the endless rain that Milligan wonders if some of the men will commit suicide to escape and, in fact, a soldier at HQ does (p.178).

Part of it is the cognitive dissonance of war. He and his mates enjoy a hot meal, stew and potatoes, huddled round a fire in their freezing dugout. Down in the plain they hear a sudden outbreak of machinegun fire, first theirs, then ours (they can recognise the different makes of machinegun by the sound). Down there, two patrols have clashed and are murdering each other.

I slide another spoonful of dinner in. I really can’t get it all together, us dining, them dying… (p.257)

You can hear the mental strain, the same insanity of war which Kurt Vonnegut struggled to manhandle into the fantastical storyline of Slaughterhouse Five and Joseph Heller transformed into the masterpiece of bureaucratic craziness, Catch-22.

Il Duce

Volume 3 is named after Montgomery who is never actually mentioned in the text (just in one picture caption). Mussolini, by contrast is, I think, mentioned three times, pages 55, 63 and 197.

Evelyn Waugh

Why has he got it in for Evelyn Waugh? There was a fantasy scene depicting Waugh getting drunk and buggering Randolph Churchill in the previous book. In this one he envisions Waugh, pissed off his face, standing up during an air raid in Yugoslavia shouting abuse at Randolph Churchill (p.175). Are they symbols, for Spike of upper class privilege.

Angry or grumpy?

When does justifiable anger against the world morph into sounding like a grumpy old man? At what point do you cross the line from righteous indignation to sounding like a tirade in the Daily Mail or Daily Telegraph, homes for people who can’t adapt to a changing world? Spike and this book are a kind of test bed for that question.

Pity the children

One morning after roll-call I was exploring the environs of the camp when I discovered the remains of what had been a big bonfire. The surviving pieces were interesting: Fascist uniforms worn by schoolchildren during indoctrination training, Bambini della Lupa (Children of the Wolf) and along with them were little wooden rifles and kindergarten books praising Mussolini, Il Duce nostra Buona Padre … etc etc. How in God’s name can adults do this to children? To pervert their minds… (p.56)

And the passage quote above, from page 80.

General misanthropy

During the brief R&R in Amalfi they watch fishermen kill octopuses they’ve captured by turning them inside out.

It was obscenely cruel, but then Man is. (p.238)

Reunions

The reunions with his old army pals were obviously important to Spike. He goes out of his way to mention, in his irritated preface, that he and his comrades have not one but two reunions a year ‘something no other British Army unit have’, before spelling out that he’s referring to D Battery, 56th Heavy Regiment, Royal Artillery. And he repeats this again at the very end when he’s spelling out what esprit de corps means, how his mates had it and their hated CO, Major Jenkins, absolutely didn’t (p.285).

He tells us that in December 1976 he organised a reunion at the Medusa Restaurant of those involved in the fighting in and around Steam Roller Farm, 26 February 1943. Strikingly, they invited one of the Germans who’d been fighting opposite them to the meal (p.63).

On a particularly freezing wet night one of the lads. Gunner Trew, asked for a sip of Spike’s tea and ended up draining it.

Now, whenever there’s a reunion, I walk straight up to him and say ‘Gi’s a sip’, take his beer and drain it to the bottom and say ‘Remember Italy’. (p.89)

Vindictiveness

This points to another aspect of the text which feels new, which is that Spike never forgets a grudge. The Trew story is, if you read it briskly, funny – but it chimes with other places which aren’t funny and where resentment smoulders on after 35 years. For example, he doesn’t let up in his criticism of their unbearable commanding officer, Major Evans.

In another, surprising, passage he has it in for his Dad. He says that his Dad’s letters from home become an increasing pain in the arse. This is because his Dad relentlessly nags him to reply to his Mum’s letters. But Spike insists to the reader that he does answer all his Mum’s letters. He goes on to tell us that, after the war, he sent every letter to his Mum registered post and kept the receipts and pasted them into a book and showed his Dad the book – at which he claims his Dad said the book could be a fake! It reveals Spike’s inability to let it go.

And he also emphasises to the reader that it cost him a ‘fortune’ in registered letters, an indication of his own ‘tightness’ with money which, as we’ve seen, he tends to attribute to Jewish people. (Compare the phrase in the preface which emphasises that calling up old comrades who live abroad, to check the facts, ‘ran into over a hundred pounds’. Money was obviously an issue for Spike who never really made it big, not ‘big’ like his frenemy Peter Sellers.)

Post-war sadness

A number of remarks are more redolent of 1970s Britain than 1940s Italy, especially the references to Britain going down the tubes, no longer being ‘Great’ and so on. Daily Mail territory.

…even today the indoctrination goes on. China. Russia. Out own democracies corrupt with pornography and Media Violence… (p.56)

Combined with the sense, which comes over in the references to contemporary reunions, that they will never recover that carefree esprit de corps, they will never be so young or so free again, which takes shape as quiet despair at the dullness of suburban life. For example, they bunk down in an abandoned farmhouse and Spike records the graffitti including ‘The Tebourba Tigers’.

The latter refers to the name they conferred on themselves after a savage action at Tebourba in Tunisia. Where are those tigers now? Watching telly? Washing up?… (p.67)

At moments like this the book reflects the general sense of frustrated malaise widespread across the Britain of the 1970s, see the Reginald Perrin novels, or the exasperated frustration at the start of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy or any number of 70s sitcoms like Rising Damp. ‘Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English way,’ as Pink Floyd sang in 1973.

And then throw Spike’s own, personal, depression into the mix. It doesn’t explicitly appear that often in this long text, but it’s a strong, depressive tone which flavours the whole thing.

The ugly English

Related to the sense of Britain going down the tubes and the dullness of suburban life goes a passage about the sheer crapness of English ‘cuisine’.

the Anglo-Saxon will devour stale bread, bully beef, hard rolls, food boiled to death and obliterated with artificial seasoning – yet delightfully cooked octopus in garlic? No! You are what you eat, that’s why we all look so bloody ugly. (p.238)

Similarly, tea. I, personally, hate tea but the soldiers lived for mugs of the sweet brown dishwater. But even so:

As I walk I sip the life-giving tea – why do we dote on tea? It tastes bloody awful, it’s only the sugar and milk that make it drinkable. It’s like fags – we’ve got hooked… (p.261)

Emigration

All this explains why he sympathises with the idea of emigrating away from poor old Britain…

His brother Desmond is 17 and has a crappy job. No wonder he emigrated to Australia p.263

The Russian threat

It’s not untrue but Spike’s warnings against Russian threat reminded me of another radical turned grumpy old man, Kingsley Amis, who wrote several novels warning against a Russian conquest of Britain p.249

Other complaints

He complains that in a village they came to, the British were allowing suspect collaborators to be kept packed in the tiny local police station in inhumane conditions.

Why this situation was allowed to exist can only be put down to the wonderful ‘I’m alright, Jack’ attitude of the British. We are not cruel but, by Christ, sometimes we come very close to it. (p.251)

He describes a local woman cook, Portence, who helps out in the cookhouse, working from dawn till one in the morning and then compares her with:

some of the soppy females of today who get a charlady to clean their flat of three rooms while they phone their friends and eat chocolates. (p.252)

These examples go to show, I hope, that although there are still loads and loads of quickfire gags, there is also a lot more moaning and complaining about the modern (1970s) world. That’s what I meant by the way his anger against a world which started a world war and destroyed entire cities and killed so many civilians and good blokes and damaged little kids forever morphs and mutates into general ranting against the modern world, modern women, modern TV and porn and video nasties etc etc, into a general rant.

Some of the rants can be funny. Many are interesting as examples of social history. But between the rants and the grim descriptions of (distant) battles and death, it feels like we have travelled a long way from the relative innocence of the first volume, Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971).

Credit

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1978. References are to the 1978 Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971)
‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’: A Confrontation in the Desert (1974)
Monty: His Part in My Victory (1976)

Second World War reviews

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by Simon on May 10, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Autobiography, Second World War, War

Tagged 56th Heavy Regiment, Alf Fildes, Amalfi, antisemitism, Anusol, Bailey Bridge, Bambini della Lupa, Battle Fatigue, Bing Crosby, Cairo, Catch-22, Children of the Wolf, Christianity, Churchill, class consciousness, Class War, Clive James, Cole Porter, Daily Mail, diary, Disney, Eric Newby, Ernie Hart, Evelyn Waugh, Fitzroy Maclean, Florence Nightingale, George Formby, Gone With The Wind, Gracie Fields, Gunner Kidgell, Harry Edgington, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Hitler, Hitlergams, homosexuals, Il Duce, It's That Man Again, Italy, Jack Hobbs, Jazz, Jews, Joseph Heller, Ken Carter, Kingsley Amis, Kurt Vonnegut, Lauro, Looney Jenkins, Major Jenkins, Marx Brothers, masturbation, Messerschmitts, Monte Croce, Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall, North Africa, Peter Sellers, Pink Floyd, Pompeii, Psychiatric hospital, psychiatry, race, racism, Randolph Churchill, Reg Seekings, Reginald Perrin, Rising Damp, river Garigliano, River Styx, Roosevelt, Royal Artillery, Salerno, Second World War, sex, Slaughterhouse-Five, Sparanise, Spike Milligan, Steam Roller Farm, Tac HQ, Tebourba, Termoli, The Goon Show, The Tebourba Tigers, Tommy Handley, Tunisia, VERDI, war, war memoirs, Yugoslavia

Posted by Simon on May 10, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/05/10/mussolini-his-part-in-my-downfall-spike-milligan/

Monty: His Part in My Victory by Spike Milligan (1976)

‘Hurry up, shouted Bombardier Fuller, ‘We’re keeping Adolf waiting.’
(Monty: His Part in My Victory, page 118)

In my reviews of the previous volumes of Spike’s war memoirs I’ve pointed out that the humour relies mostly on quickfire gags based on terrible puns and verbal quibbles.

Edgington squeezed in.
‘Anything on the wireless?’ he said.
‘No, the batteries are flat.’
‘I thought they were square,’ he said. (p.14)

In this short 127-page book there are:

about 73 photos, usually with facetious and comic captions added
Spike’s own cartoons (which I find very poor)
some sketches of the scenery
photocopies of official documents
a copy of the running order at a musical review his jazz band took part in

I.e. a lot of the space is taken up with visuals, so that maybe only half the space is actual text. Here’s a typical photo-plus-comic caption:

‘A British soldier with an incredible weapon’

Then there are the bloody awful Hitlergrams, a potentially great idea which he invented in the first book – spoof conversations involving Hitler which punctuate the text – but which are consistently unfunny:

Hitlergram No. 96133a

HITLER: Mein Gott, zey are smoking our fags! Zat is terrible.
EVA BRAUN: I know. I’ve smoked them.
HITLER: To get our fags to Tunis ve have to go through Allied Air Raids on zer Factories! bombs on zer Railways! zer boats to Africa are torpedoed and zer fags end up being smoked by zat Huddersfield Schit Gunner White!
EVA BRAUN: It’s not right and it’s not fair.
HITLER: Vot isn’t.
EVA BRAUN: Zer left leg of Joe Louis.
HITLER: I don’t vish to know zat, kindly leave the stage. (p.41)

There’s an almost complete absence of the genuinely comic, of entire scenes or comic threads cleverly worked out over an extended length. Comedy is something to do with the overall arc or structure of a narrative: good comic stories build up tension, including details which add to this, before the big comic punchline or reveal. The great comic novels are comic in structure and form as well as details (I’m thinking of the brilliantly humorous war novels of Evelyn Waugh – ironically, as Spike for some reason hated Waugh and singled him out for scathing abuse).

Anyway, there’s almost none of that careful structuring here, no extended comic scenes; instead it’s a daily diary packed with a rat-a-tat barrage of thin puns and verbal gags.

The cookhouse waggon was missing. ‘I don’t miss it at all,’ said Gunner White. (p.71)

Diary format and sources

The memoirs are based on authentic sources: on the diaries of Spike, some of his friends (notably Driver Alf Fildes), the official war diary of the regiment he served with, and of the specific battery, and letters and journals of some of his mates in the regiment (‘wonderful comrades who made life worthwhile’). These have been compiled into a fairly basic chronological, day-by-day account, enlivened by as many cheap gags as Spike can cram in, with no attempt at perspective or analysis such as you’d get in a proper history. Instead gags gags gags.

I picked up a faint German broadcast of a very corny band playing old Jack Hylton arrangements. The singer, could I ever forget his name! – Ernst Strainz! His vibrato sounded like he was driving a tractor over ploughed fields with weights tied to his scrotum. (p.21)

Its predecessor, the Rommel book, featured short inserted passages utterly bereft of humour, in which Spike the victim of nervous breakdown and mental illness, looks back on those wartimes from the time of writing (i.e. the mid-70s), unhappy, lonely, afflicted by his memories, especially of the men he loved who died. Nothing funny at all about them, sad and lowering. There’s none of those here, but the bad taste lingers.

Here’s a typical Spike cartoon, illustrating the notion that you could identify the men from their distinctive boots. It’s a vaguely OK idea, a sort of OK execution, maybe raises a smile, but…

Timeline

Volume 3 covers from the fall of Tunis until Spike’s regiment embarked for the Salerno landings in Italy, from 7 May 1943 to 22 September 1943 = 5 months. The fighting – described in sometimes hair-raising detail in the Rommel book – is over, and the boys are mostly bored or very bored.

Just a reminder that Spike is a Bombardier in 19 or D Battery, the 56th Heavy Regiment, the Royal Artillery.

As they drive through the new camp Spike and his mates are amazed at the number of Italian and German prisoners of war, often stopping to cadge fags and, on one occasion, whiskey off them.

As in the previous books, the ordinary soldiers are obsessed with getting pissed and getting laid. ‘Plunger’ Bailey (named after his big willy) sets up a shagging scoreboard.

We learn that Spike’s dad was obsessed with Westerns, owned a number of old pistols and liked to kick open doors and duck behind tables as if in a shootout in the movies. One of the two things that made me laugh in the entire book was Spike describing watching from his bedroom window Crystal Palace burn down in a great inferno (30 November 1936) his dad, next to him, watched it through binoculars, eventually putting it down and saying, expressively: ‘Navajo!’

Spike’s Catholic mum sends him packages containing holy medals, rosaries etc. His commanding officer, Major Chater Jack, asks if she can send one of her yummy fruit cakes. When there’s spotted dick for pudding at the canteen, it’s hard to tell the flies from the raisins.

They find a Stuka standing alone in a piece of scrub, one of them accidentally starts the engine and propellor and none of them know how to turn it off.

They take part in army exercises and training. They go into Tunis to try out the bars and brothels. They climb a ruined Roman aqueduct and get stuck half way up (cue a Spike cartoon).

There’s a victory parade in Tunis, with generals galore taking the salute including Eisenhower (cue a couple of photos).

They’re ordered to move to a new camp, at Hammam Lif, a seaside town just outside Tunis. Cue as many excursions for beach swimming as they can manage…

With three mates Spike takes several days to drive into the desert to see the ruins of Carthage, with moderately soulful stuff about sitting out under the stars, boiling tins of rations in a billy over a fire, laughing and joking, it’s all a long way from Bromley. In fact sleeping out under the stars at night, and stopping driving along some coast road to simply strip off and run into the sea and try to stand on each others’ shoulders, you can see why these are lovely, bittersweet memories. ‘We were as free as we’d ever be in our lives…’ (p.62)

They’re ordered to move camp to a place called Ain Abessa (p.71).

2 to 6 June 1943. They drive to the beautiful Kerrata Gorge, camp, explore, spend a day climbing up the mountainside, another going on a fruitless pig hunt, led by local Arabs, notable for their prodigious farting (‘Christ, no wonder the Crusaders lost!’ said Jordy Dawson, p.76), before gorging on sausages and wine by a camp fire. Memorable days. On the last day they go swimming in a mountain stream, giving rise to the typically tinny piece of doggerel:

It’s chilly
On your willy
In the water
At Kerrata

Their CO suggests that Spike’s jazz band, such as it is, plays a concert for the mayor of Setif, a dire occasion held at the Salle de Fête. His mate, Gunner Edgington, ‘called it a Fête worse than death’ (p.82). Thin stuff, eh?

The other thing that made me laugh was when Spike and his band are ordered to play in an ENSA (Entertainments National Service Association) concert at the camp of the 74 Mediums (presumably a regiment) and arrive to be greeted a captain who explains that he’d like them to play in the miggle of the show.

The miggle of the show? He definitely said miggle – so he couldn’t pronounce his d’s. ‘How woulg you like to be announeg?’
I paused. ‘D Battery Dance Duo and Doug on Drums.’ (p.83)

Another member of the troupe is an enormous opera singer, Mlle Beth Villion, with an enormous bust.

We listened spellbound as she sang the Habanera from Carmen, her voice was pure silver. In the war, African night it was an unforgettable experience, with the moon shining down on those lovely white boobs. She stopped the show but then she would have stopped anything. (p.85)

As in the previous two books, it’s music which provides solace and escape, not only from the war and the rough philistine squaddies but even, you suspect, from himself and the demons inside his head. Warmed up by Mlle Villion I also laughed at his description of a dire audition he attended, years earlier, back in Blighty, when he watched in disbelief a series of soldiers trying to impress by: playing the spoons whistling Rhapsody in Blue, walking on their hands, doing cartwheels, somersaults, and one soldier who thought he’d get a slot falling on his back.

‘Is that all?’ said the officer.
‘Yes sir, it takes it out of you.’ (p.87)

It’s amazing that England had any entertainment industry at all, and made me think that even then, most of the best stuff was all imported from America: the jazz Spike loves to pieces is entirely American and his squaddie mates talk only of American movies and their stars.

22 June 1943. They’ve joined a large Navy, Army and Air Force Institutes (NAAFI) camp on the beautiful Ziama Bay and have a lovely day swimming, sunbathing and eating but that night a sirocco hits the camp with 100 mph winds blowing sand in everyone’s faces, blowing tents and equipment out to sea, sending the men running to hole up in the cabs of the trucks.

Some of the men are fishing using hand grenades and a dead 7-foot hammerhead shark comes to the surface. Spike is curious and barters a slice of it with Major Chater Jack in exchange for a promise of his mum’s fruitcake. But in the event:

To duplicate the taste of a hammerhead shark, boil old newspapers on Sloan’s Liniment. (p.91)

Their CO, Major Chater Jack, who understood what they’d been through and organised holidays and R&R to keep them out of mischief, is promoted away from the unit. He is replaced by Major Evan Jenkins who Spike loathes, calling ‘a real bastard’ and ‘a mean sod’ (p.91). He insisted on giving cultural lectures, as announced by an officious sergeant:

‘H’eyes front! Today the major will be talking about’ – here he consulted a piece of paper – ‘Keats, and I don’t suppose one of you higgerant bastards knows what a Keat is.’ (p.93)

Everyone hates his officious insistence on the rules. He makes them take their bootlaces out and iron them so they’re nice and flat. The cook gets revenge by mixing goat shit in with potatoes and flour to produce shit rissoles which the Major loves and asks for more. ‘Now he really is full of shit,’ says cook May (p.93).

Spike and his best friend, Edgington, have the bright idea of improving on the idea of a tent by rigging canvas over a wadi, more floor space, well ventilated…until there’s a flash flood in which they discover the dictionary definition of wadi and most of their gear is washed away.

Spike’s band was talent spotted at the ENSA show and is invited to play a bigger concert. He includes a photocopy of the running order or playbill and waxes lyrical about the joy of performing live.

You can’t describe a show, you have to be there at that time with that audience, that’s what makes it come alive and come alive it did… (p.98)

To his surprise his band is ordered to join the concert party on a tour of towns, all along the coast, so there is plenty of swimming during the day. At one place they find in the theatre props room a selection of plaster arms and legs which they take into the sea to fool around with, lots of silliness to impress a party of WRENS (Women’s Royal Naval Service) who are sunbathing nearby. Boys will be boys and puns will be puns:

Carter was a stickler for perfection so it was midnight before we finished. We were all dog tired and barked ourselves to sleep. (p.101)

When his mate gets knocked off a diving board and, as he falls, curls up protectively, he enters the water ‘foetus firstus’ (p.101). They sunbathe and get badly sunburned (I suppose this was before any kind of sun creams existed).

‘Cor, that sun’s hot,’ said Kidgell.
‘Well, you shouldn’t touch it,’ I said. (p.102)

See what I mean by snappy wordplay. Maybe, for the generation which saw Groucho Marx, this was wit:

From out of the sea came the sound of heavy guns.
‘Sounds like a naval engagement.’
‘I hope they’re both very happy,’ I said. (p.103 )

Mind you, Spike refers to the (very British) Crazy Gang in the text. I think you’d have to be familiar with the Crazy Gang and other popular comic acts of the 1930s to really understand the context of Spike’s humour. Read cold, now, 80 years after the event, is, I suppose, unfair. This becomes increasingly obvious as the final 30 or so pages dwell on this travelling revue, describing each night’s performance, analysing improvements, the evolution of the gags and turns, and so on.

Something sets him thinking about Christmas back in Blighty, at Bewhill (does he mean Bexhill? the text is full of typos and dubious punctuation) and the time a nice local lady’s dog ran into a minefield on the cliffs and got blown to smithereens.

The Concert Party that had toured Tunisian seaside towns during July is so popular it is revived for a few last shows in August. But then the good times come to an end and there’s a sudden blizzard of training and route marches. A week on artillery ranges revising their skills, they’re issued with a new type of wireless, taught new signal codes, had to adopt the American phonetics (A for Able instead of Ack, B for Baker instead of Beer etc).

8 September the amazing news that Italy has surrendered. Compare how this affected Eric Newby in his Apennine prisoner of war building and the Italians on Cephallonia in Captain Corelli’s Mandolin. Next day the Allies landed at Salerno but encountered stiff opposition from the Germans. Apparently it was Churchill’s idea to attack Germany via ‘the soft underbelly of Europe’ and it turned out to be nearly as disastrous as his idea of attacking Germany via Turkey in the previous war (p.120).

Spike makes the point that none of them realised how brutal the fighting at Salerno was; he only really found out when he read General Alexander’s biography in 1973, which was about 30 years too late! (p.117)

Spike and his battery are ordered to load up and proceed in convoy with their guns to an embarkation point back in Tunisia (this was a bit unclear to me; have they been in neighbouring Libya for the last sections?). Anyway, it means driving through the scenes of the brutal fighting back at the start of 1943, when artillery regiments like his suffered heavy losses. Burned out tanks and cemeteries.

They arrive at a vast American base, ranks of vehicles and munitions, outside Bizerta. They are issued Italian money and a booklet on the customs and language of Italy. Finally they realise they’re departing when they see the officers running round like blue-arsed flies, and line up in their vehicles to embark on ‘landing ships, tank’ or LSTs.

And the narrative ends with him lying atop a huge Scammell lorry overnight, with the ship still anchored, smoking fags and laughing with his mates about his last will and testament, joking about the ‘birds’ back home he’ll leave to them, and teeing us up for volume 4.

Monty

Despite being named in the title of the book, I don’t think there’s a single reference to Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery (1887 to 1976) anywhere in the actual text. There’s just one photo of him with four Chinese soldiers (?) with a typically ‘humorous’ caption reading: ‘General Montgomery wondering why he is surrounded by Chinese generals – as he neither drinks nor smokes’ (p.111).

Nature

Apart from music, the other thing which lights his soul is nature, which brings out a surprisingly poetic streak in the gag-meister:

22 May 1943. That evening, excited as schoolboys, we drove off along the Tunis-Bezerta road, it was as though the war didn’t exist, eventually we pull up on a sandy beach for the night.
There was no moon but the sky was a pin cushion of stars. Great swathes of astral light blinked at us across space. We made a fire, glowing scarlet in cobalt black darkness, showers of popping sparks jettisoning into the night air. (p.58)

This is so unlike Spike the joker that you wonder how much of these kinds of passages was written by his editor and collaborator Jack Hobbs, although even passages like this have the Spike clumsiness (‘jettisoning’). Or:

The beach was copper coloured, sunlight reflecting from the bottom gave the water a shimmering Caesar’s royal purple colour. (p.88)

Thoughts

Apparently Spike was needled that reviewers of the first in the series, ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’, thought most of it was made up. This motivated him to emphasise the rock-solid truthfulness of his accounts in all the subsequent books, especially of the actual fighting in the Rommel book. Thus, I would say, over the course of the three books, there’s a tendency to rely more and more on these half dozen diaries, journals and other sources and the net effect of that is … to make it more boring. Despite the blizzard of gags the basic underlying structure is a simple day-to-day diary and this, accurate enough in its own terms, lacks any depth, any sense of a deeper narrative, any sense of the opening of themes at the beginning and their crafted resolution at the end.

Credit

Monty: His Part in My Victory by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1976. References are to the 1978 Penguin paperback edition.

Related reviews

Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall (1971)
‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’: A Confrontation in the Desert (1974)
Second World War reviews

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by Simon on May 8, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Autobiography, Comedy, Second World War, War

Tagged 56th Heavy Regiment, Adolf Hitler, Ain Abessa, Alf Fildes, American movies, American phonetics, Army and Air Force Institutes, autobiography, Beth Villion, Bexhill, Bizerta, Bromley, Carthage, comedy, Crazy Gang, Crystal Palace, D Battery, diary, ENSA, Entertainments National Service Association, Eric Newby, Ernst Strainz, Eva Braun, Evelyn Waugh, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, gags, General Alexander, Groucho Marx, Gunner Edgington, Gunner White, Hammam Lif, Harry Edgington, Hitlergrams, Italy, Jack Hobbs, Jack Hylton, Jordy Dawson, Keats, Kerrata Gorge, Kidgell, Libya, LST, Major Chater Jack, Major Evan Jenkins, Monty: His Part in My Victory, NAAFI, Navajo, Navy, Plunger Bailey, Rhapsody in Blue, Rommel, Royal Artillery, Salerno, Salerno landings, Setif, sex, Sloan's Liniment, Spike Milligan, Tunis, war memoir, war memoirs, Women's Royal Naval Service, WRENS, Ziama Bay

Posted by Simon on May 8, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/05/08/monty-his-part-in-my-victory-spike-milligan/

‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’ A Confrontation in the Desert by Spike Milligan (1974)

‘Halt! Who goes there?’ came the midnight challenge.
‘Hitler!’
‘Can’t be. He came in ten minutes ago.’
(Squaddie repartee in ‘”Rommel?” “Gunner Who?”: A Confrontation in the Desert’, page 31)

I didn’t know Spike Milligan’s dad was a sergeant-major in the Indian army, which explains why he had an informed view of army life long before he was conscripted into the service in 1939. I also didn’t know Spike Milligan’s actual name was Terry. We learn this on page 27. Full of autobiographical facts, it is.

‘”Rommel?” “Gunner Who?”: A Confrontation in the Desert’ was Milligan’s second volume of war autobiography, published in 1974. In these early volumes he says they will form a trilogy but in the event he ended up writing seven volumes of memoirs of the Second World War (!).

Typical example of a serious Edwardian illustration with Milligan’s comic caption

Period covered

Its predecessor, ‘Adolf Hitler: My Part in his Downfall’, covered from the outbreak of war in September 1939 through to January 1943 – from Milligan’s call-up to the 56th Heavy Regiment Royal Artillery, and then time spent training at bases all round the south of England, before posting to Bexhill on the south coast, from which they often watched German bombers flying north to bomb London. It concludes with his regiment’s embarkation to travel by ship to North Africa in January 1943.

‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’ picks up exactly where its predecessor left off, in January 1943 and covers a relatively short period, just until May 1943, describing increasingly intense fighting (in which Milligan’s artillery regiment was directly involved) leading up to the capture of Tunis by the Allies and the end of the Desert War on 7 May.

So whereas the Hitler book took 140 pages to cover nearly 3-and-a-half years, this one takes longer (208 pages) to cover a much shorter period (23 January to 12 May 1943, four-and-a-half months).

Sources

This is explained by the fact that Milligan uses a number of diaries as sources for the text and these give him a wealth of detailed day-by-day information to draw on (or just plain copy).

Thus the book, beneath the blizzard of gags, cartoons and silly pictures, is laid out in a basic diary form, with one or more entries for most of the days in the January to May period.

An introductory note tells us he used not only his own diary but the official regimental diary, and also the diaries of the regiment’s CO Lieutenant Colonel Chater Jack and of one Al Fildes. In addition, Milligan cites letters and photos and various other memorabilia supplied by his mates so, taken altogether, this wealth of source material explains why the entries for each individual day are so surprisingly detailed and factual, and why the whole book is longer than the first one, despite covering only a tenth of the period of time. Here’s a typical entry, combining solid factual information with a bit of humour.

April 8 1943: This way to another battle. At sunset we drove to a rendezvous with Captain Rand, Bombardier Edwards, Gunner Maunders in a Bren driven by Bombardier Sherwood, it was dark when we met. ‘We’ll sleep here tonight,’ said diminutive Captain Rand in a voice like Minnie Mouse. We slept fitfully by the roadside as trucks, tanks etc rumbled back and forth but inches from our heads. (p.157)

Broad overview

The narrative follows Spike and his fellow bombardiers in the 19th Battery as they arrive in North Africa and are posted, to begin with, at Camp X, not far from Algiers. This is staggering distance from the sea, which our boys sit in up to the waist, naked, sobering up after a heavy night, sometimes watching Algiers getting bombed by Jerry.

After 50 pages they are sent forward to a real observation post (OP) in the front line where they for the first time come under fire. Here Spike is sent on a dangerous mission to lay phone cable from the rear headquarters up to the OP. Later, during daylight, Spike watches our boys trying to hit German Tiger tanks in the plain below, comes under artillery fire and is part of a sudden retreat back to their starting position and then on to a new base.

The narrative has the feel of military action in that it is confused and the movements of his little unit generally incomprehensible. He is at the level where you just obey orders, no matter how contradictory, confusing and abrupt they seem.

There aren’t many dead bodies but his unit is attacked by Stukas, comes across burned out buildings, he talks about this or that regiment on their flanks ‘catching it’. On 8 April they stop at Djbel Mahdi before driving along the route of a Jerry retreat, past burning vehicles, some containing carbonised bodies. He and his mates keep up a stream of non-stop banter, but it’s a war book, alright. They stop to consult a map and Spike notices an Italian corpse nearby, not long dead, still oozing blood. He helps himself to his wristwatch and a not tells us he later gave it to his dad as a gift (p.158).

In the final 50 or so pages his unit is at the front, directing artillery fire and coming under repeated attack, from mortar, artillery and German planes. Right at the end his favourite officer, Lieutenant Goldsmith, is killed. Milligan remembers crying his eyes out, the text includes a crudely cut and pasted newspaper tribute from Goldsmith’s friend, playwright Terence Rattigan.

He and his mates keep up a stream of non-stop, cheeky chap banter but it’s a war book, alright.

Format

As with its predecessor, ‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’ is a deliberately disjointed, scrapbook-style book, with the (surprisingly coherent chronological) narrative constantly being interrupted by:

sections of spoof communications between Rommel, Hitler and other senior Germans (so-called ‘Hitlergrams’)
Edwardian illustrations from the peak of the empire in the 1890s with silly captions scrawled on them
Milligan’s own sketches and cartoons
photos of his mates in the battalion
letters home
selections from the ‘zany’ battery newsletter and poems he wrote
and any other stuff he can cram in

The deliberate scrapbook effect reminded me of the series of Monty Python scrapbook-style books from the 1970s (especially using pictures of stiff-upper-lipped Edwardians and adding silly captions) which were also laid out like surreal pastiches of schoolboy comics, only not as funny or as imaginative. Spike’s efforts always seemed somehow tight and clumsy. Take the Hitlergrams. These are a promising idea but woeful in practice.

Hitlergram number number 27

ADOLPH HITLER: You realise soon zer Englishers people will be crushed!
ME: It must be rush hour!
ADOLPH HITLER: Zere is no need to rush!! Soon it will be all over.
ME: Hooray! Back to civvy street!
ADOLPH HITLER: Civvy Street is no more! It was destroyed by zer bombs of mine Luftwaffe. (p.57)

Vulgar, crude, puerile, sometimes very funny

It is deliberately vulgar, crude, puerile and sometimes very funny. But often just vulgar and crude.

Suddenly, without warning, ‘Strainer’ Jones lets off with a thunderous postern blast, he had us all out of that tent in ten seconds flat. (p.22)

Farting, wanking, pissing, shitting, the subject matter of satirists and comedians since the advent of literature (see Greek and Roman comedy, Chaucer, Rabelais). There’s quite liberal use of the c word, not so much by Spike as by the very working class lads around him.

Driver Cyril puts on his boots. ”Ere, my feet ‘ave swelled.’
‘No they ‘aven’t, cunt, they’re my boots.’ (p.180)

Hoggins

But it’s hard not to feel a bit oppressed by the constant references to shagging. The book is an account of healthy young heterosexual men in their sexual prime, absolutely boiling over with hormones and randiness and talking about it all day and all night:

‘A man can never have enough hoggins. A good shag clears the custard,’ said Gunner Balfour as he wrote a tender letter home to his wife. (p.29)

Hardly a page goes by without reference to erections and groins, lads boasting about the sexual conquests, jokes about the shapes of some lads’ knobs, references to the (many) men who masturbate every night in the shared dormitories (a subject, incidentally, mentioned by Eric Newby as a common nightly occurrence at his POW camp in Love and War in the Apennines). The lads eye up every woman in sight, reminisce fondly about shagging huge numbers of birds and barmaids back in Blighty, or about more recent escapades with the Arab whores in Algiers. Here they are setting out from the base on an evening’s R&R.

A three tonner full of sexual tension rattled us towards Algiers docks. Most others were looking for women and booze. not Gunner Milligan, I was a good Catholic boy, I didn’t frequent brothels. No, all I did was walk around with a permanent erection shouting, ‘Mercy!’ (p.32)

Shagging and going on the piss and scrounging extra grub, those are these men’s central interests. Oh, and the footie.

The lazy sods! That’s all they ever think of. Booze, football and sex. (p.66)

I suppose sex is more present than in real life a) because (as mentioned) we are reading about an unnatural concentration of fit young men, and b) because it’s all they can talk about, far from home and work and hobbies and all the other things young men divert their energies into – it’s something they all have in common: it’s a unifying subject. Also c) because sex is not only a theme which occurs in real life, but is also the subject of so many jokes, subject and punchline of an infinity of gags.

The view from the observation post was magnificent. Below lay the vast Goubelat Plain, to our right, about five miles on, were two magnificent adjoining rocky peaks that rose sheer 500 feet above the plain, Garra el Kibira and Garra el Hamada, christened ‘Queen Sheba’s tits’ (p.87)

But sometimes it’s just sex. When he’s sent to hospital for a few days with a swollen knee:

There was one magnificent nurse, Sheila Frances. She had red hair, deep blue eyes and was very pretty, but that didn’t matter! because! she had big tits! Everyone was after he and I didn’t think I stood a chance but she fancied me. I got lots of extra, like helping me get her knickers off in her tent and she eased my pain no end. (p.194)

If you can take, or even enjoy, this kind of thing, this book is for you.

Class war

Spike is very much a man of the people. He constantly refers to his family’s address in the lower class suburb of Brockley, to his ma and da and brother, identifies very strongly with ‘the lads’, and misses no opportunity to take the mickey out of the upper-class officers and their general air of bewilderment.

Officers tried to occupy us with things like ‘Do that top button up’. They were then hard put to it to think of something to do next, they settled for ‘Undo that top button’. (p.61)

The officers were grouped round a map and appeared more excited than is good for English gentlemen. (p.67)

In the dim light of the OP Chater Jack and the three officers were sipping tea. I saluted. To a man they ignored me…Gunner Woods, slaving over a hot primus, filled my mug. The officers were talking. ‘I don’t like hybrid strains,’ one was saying. ‘Too much like having a queer in the garden. Ha ha ha.’ ‘What a crowd of bloody fools,’ I thought. ‘You should have come earlier,’ whispered Woods. ‘They were on about the price of tennis shoes.’ (p.155)

If you read Milligan’s account alone you’d be amazed that the British Army ever won anything.

Types of humour

I tried to categorise aspects of Milligan’s humour in my review of the Hitler book. The commonest feature is gags, quickfire puns and comic misunderstandings. Because these are not extended sketches, don’t rely on character of clever setups, but are just bad puns, they a) are not very deep or satisfying and b) can easily become irritating. Here’s a successful little bit of repartee.

We were driven at speed to a massive French Colonial Opera House where at one time, massive French colonials sang. A sweating sergeant was waiting.
‘I’m the compere. You are the Royal Artillery Orchestra?’
‘Yes,’ I said.
‘Where’s the rest of you?’
‘This is all there is of me. I’m considered complete by the medical officer.’
‘We had been expecting a full orchestra.’
‘We are full – we just had dinner.’ (p.36)

I spent a lot of it thinking the humour is very puerile, literally for boys, maybe 11 year-old boys would find it funny. But then you turn a page and find material radically inappropriate for an 11 year-old.

An hour later we settled in our beds listening to the lurid exploits of Driver ‘Plunger’ Bailey because he had a prick the size and shape of a sink pump. (p.35)

So the continual flow of sex references mean it’s not really appropriate for children. Is it? I first read these when I was 10 or 11, I loved the humour, can’t remember what I made of the knob jokes.

Some gags feel very stock and routine – such as describing almost any bad aspect of the war, and then tacking on a homely cockney sentiment for comic incongruity:

About 1 o’clock we arrived at the GP. Our guns were firing. What a bloody noise. What in heaven’s name did they think they were doing – it was past midnight. What would the neighbours say? (p.73)

It’s a common tactic, not only of Spike’s but of all the men around him, to make humour by taking a dangerous or exotic aspect of the war and deflating it with homely references to tea and buns or buses or family.

Somewhere a donkey was braying into the darkness. ‘Coming mother,’ said Gunner White. (p.48)

But most of it consists of comic routines arising naturally from the situation:

Wilson was a dour Scot sporting pebble glasses (only the British Army would make him a driver). I think he drove in Braille. In peacetime he’d been a shepherd. He rarely spoke, but sometimes in his sleep, he bleated. (p.132)

Or:

‘Milligan, this dog is half wild.’
‘Well, only stroke the other half, then.’ (p.139)

Or:

‘Who’s there?’ said a voice.
‘A band of Highly Trained Nymphomaniacs.’
The tent flap flew open and an unshaven face that appeared to belong to Bombardier Deans appeared. ‘Ah, you must be the one that goes around frightening little children,’ I said. (p.140)

Or:

A bath! Ten minutes later I stood naked by the thermal spring soaping myself, singing, and waving my plonker at anyone who made rude remarks. ‘With one as big as that you ought to be back home on Essential War Work.’ It was nice to have these little unsolicited testimonials. (p.164)

Or:

There was a silence. ‘I wonder what Jerry’s up to?’ said Deans. ‘He must be up to chapter 2, they’re slow readers, it’s all them big German words like Trockenbeerauslese that slows them down.’ (p.189)

Or:

A swelling had started on my knee. I said so to Lt Budden.
‘A swelling has started on my knee.’
‘It’s got to start somewhere,’ he said. (p.192)

Actually reading them out of context makes me laugh. Maybe it’s best to dip in and out of or have someone read out aloud the funniest bits.

Some facts

He is promoted from Gunner to Lance Bombardier and acquires one stripe on his arm.

On 16 April 1943, at the front, helping to direct his artillery and coming under periodic enemy fire, he turns 25 (p.178).

First mention of encountering Gunner Harry Secombe, and then namechecking Peter Sellers, serving in the RAF in faraway Ceylon (p.200).

Moments

Just occasionally, through the blizzard of gags, there are rare moments of sensibility. Some of his descriptions of the landscape peep out like shy children from a hiding place and you wonder whether this is the real Spike, buried under a) all the info from the diaries and b) avalanches of quickfire gags.

At the foot of El Kourzia, a great salt lagoon two to three miles in circumference. Around the main lagoon were dotted smaller lagoons and around the fringe, what appeared to be a pink scum. In fact it was hundreds of flamingoes. This vision, the name of Sheba, the sun, the crystal white and silver shimmer of the salt lagoon made boyhood readings of Rider Haggard come alive. It was a sight I can never forget, so engraved was it that I was able to dash it down straight into the typewriter after a gap of thirty years. (p.87)

In particular I was struck by his unexpected knowledge of flowers:

We were walking over wheatfields now flattened by war machines. It was magnificent country, spring was at hand, the wild flowers were beginning to sprout, the wheat crops were about a foot high, and lush broad beans were about to flower. Compared with the English variety, these were giants, and there were acres and acres of them around El Aroussa flat lands … Another plant, borage, was growing freely in the ditches as were little blue and ed anemones that grew among the wheat stalks. Broom was about to bud… (p.84)

Traumas

In fact, suddenly and without warning, on page 156, there is a completely candid, joke-free passage, describing him sitting in a hotel room in Madrid, describing how powerful the emotions experienced at that time still remain, eclipsing everything that came after, and how little things, a smell a snatch of jazz melody, transport him right back to the battlefield and the bases and the most intense friendships of his life. They aren’t really happy memories and yet they’re addictive, like a drug. Poor Spike.

This turns out to be the first of a new thing in these books, short sections titled ‘Traumas’, which are printed in smaller font than the main text and describe nightmares. He dreams he’s blown to pieces by a direct hit from a mortar and hears the stretcher bearer saying ‘this one’s dead’ (p.161). There’s a really grisly nightmare about being slowly crushed to death by the tracks of a Panzer tank (p.173). Another of taking a direct hit from a shell but being conscious enough to turn round and see his entrails spread out like a fan behind him (p.194).

According to this (and every other war book you read) there’s a lot of banter and humour among squaddies but Spike’s goes leagues beyond that, to border on mania and he knows it.

I went raving on, I was mad I know, under these conditions it was advisable. (p.162)

The same kind of conditions being endured by soldiers on the front line in Ukraine right now.

Credit

‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’ A Confrontation in the Desert by Spike Milligan was published by Michael Joseph in 1974. References are to the 1976 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on May 6, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Autobiography, Comedy, Second World War

Posted by Simon on May 6, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/05/06/rommel-gunner-who-a-confrontation-in-the-desert-spike-milligan/

Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington @ the Imperial War Museum

This is a small-ish (five rooms) but excellent, vivid, thought-provoking and FREE exhibition about the work and legacy of the legendary British photojournalist, filmmaker and humanitarian, Tim Hetherington (1970 to 2011).

It brings together 65 of his striking photos taken from warzones but also a lot more too, including: four large films projected onto wall-sized screens, half a dozen or so short interviews watchable on video screens with headphones, four or five of the cameras he actually used and one of his smartphones, plus documentary artefacts like his diary and notes, and examples of his half dozen or so photobooks.

Installation view of the Liberia room in ‘Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington’ at IWM London. Photo by the author

The exhibition makes several key points:

1. Hetherington was uncomfortable with being just a war photographer. He felt a greater responsibility to the stories and to the people he met than that. And so he spent longer than is usual for traditional war snappers with the communities and fighters he was covering, and often returned months or years later. So while he continued to work as a photographer on assignment from the likes of the Vanity Fair magazine, he also developed the notion of ‘projects’, generally leading up to photobooks (see list below).

2. Hetherington was tremendously reflective and fluent. He appears not only in the four films (detailed below) and in the half dozen or so video interviews, but also via his own words – there are short pithy quotes printed around the walls. As to the content, it tends to be variations on the same basic idea which is the responsibility he felt to the people he photographed, the obligation he felt to dig beneath the stereotyped images of, for example, Catastrophe in Africa, to try to give his subjects more agency and dignity.

3. Hetherington also broke with convention in his use of vintage cameras through the early 2000s – a time of major advances in digital photography – and the display cases contain some of his actual cameras, such as his Rolleiflex 2.8 FX camera where he had to manually wind the film on with a side handle and manually set the focus. (Elsewhere we can see his Mamiya 7 film camera and Vivitar flash gun.)

The idea was that slowing the photographing process down him gave more freedom to interact with people, while challenging him to take more carefully considered photographs.

Installation view of the Libya room in ‘Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington’ at IWM London. Note the display case containing one of Tim’s cameras and flash attachments next to a contact sheet and notebook.

Projects

1. Healing Sport

In 1999, Hetherington began work on his first large-scale project, ‘Healing Sport’. The idea was to look at the role of sport in ‘healing’ or creating spaces for reconciliation after conflict in war-torn countries like Liberia, Sierra Leone and Angola.

An amputee about to take to the field for a friendly football match at a war veterans camp situated on the outskirts of Luanda, Angola. June 2002, by Tim Hetherington © IWM (DC 63058)

2. Liberia (2003 to 2007)

The second Liberian Civil War (1999 to 2003) was Hetherington’s first experience of an active frontline. He joined up with journalist James Brabazon to capture the story of the Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) as they marched on the capital, Monrovia, to overthrow Liberian president Charles Taylor.

For his initial assignment Hetherington photographed and filmed LURD combatants over a period of five weeks, but later returned to work, and at times live in Liberia as it transitioned from civil war to democracy. The result was the photobook ‘Long Story: Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold‘, a combination of photography, oral testimony and personal memoir, along with video footage which was incorporated into a documentary film.

A Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy (LURD) combatant in Liberia, June 2003 by Tim Hetherington at IWM London © IWM (DC 64010)

3. Afghanistan (2007 to 2008)

In 2007 Hetherington travelled with journalist Sebastian Junger to cover the front line of the war in Afghanistan. They were embedded in a platoon of the 173rd Airborne Brigade based at an isolated outpost called Restrepo in the Korengal Valley.

Initially it was an assignment for Vanity Fair magazine and Hetherington and Junger took turns to embed with the platoon for periods during its 15-month deployment, eating, sleeping and going on operations with the soldiers.

The idea is that the photos here avoid the clichés of battle and instead show these young Americans at work and play, off-duty, rough-housing and larking about and, in a famous sequence, sleeping. So evocative was the image of these tough young men shown in the vulnerable state of sleep that it gave rise to one of his films (see below).

A sleeping soldier from the United States Army’s 173rd Airborne Brigade in Afghanistan’s Korengal Valley by Tim Hetherington © IWM (DC 66144)

In fact the boys got a lot of material from this deployment, resulting in news items and magazine features, several books, a video installation and ‘the multi-award winning and Oscar-nominated documentary film, Restrepo‘. A lot of product, in other words.

The wall caption optimistically says that spending this much time with the soldiers, building up a high level of trust so that they let him capture them in all kinds of moods – all this ‘led him to ask questions through his work about the nature of masculinity’. The nature of masculinity. Really? This is the kind of modish boilerplate that curators write when they haven’t got anything to say. I don’t think the photos ask any questions whatsoever about masculinity, to any male it looks like a lot of male soldiers hanging out, training, play-fighting, smoking, and sleeping. Being soldiers, in other words.

4. Libya (2011)

This was his final project, left unfinished at his death. During the Arab Spring (see my review of The New Middle East: The World After The Arab Spring by Paul Danahar) a wave of anti-government protests across North Africa and the Middle East starting in January 2011, Hetherington embarked on a new project to document the battle to overthrow Colonel Gaddafi’s regime in Libya.

Apparently, Hetherington left notes saying he wanted his photographs to bring out the ‘staged’ and ‘theatrical’ aspect of modern conflict, how a lot of it is performed by combatants who were raised on Vietnam or Rambo movies.

Installation view of the Libya room in ‘Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington’ at IWM London. Photo by the author

It was here, on 20 April 2011, that Hetherington was killed while covering the front lines in the besieged city of Misrata. It’s unclear whether he was wounded by shrapnel from a mortar shell or a rocket-propelled grenade. He was badly wounded but still alive when he was loaded into a van to be driven to hospital but bled to death on the journey. The same attack killed photographer Chris Hondros, badly wounded photographer Guy Martin and wounded photographer Michael Christopher Brown.

Four films

Two of the rooms are dark spaces set aside for video presentations. One of them contains three short films on a loop which have been created for three screens i.e. split-screen films, being:

Healing Sport (6 minutes 24 seconds)
Sleeping Soldiers (4 minutes 34 seconds)
Liberian Graffiti (1 minute 22 seconds)

As you can see, they each relate directly to the three main zones of his reporting and the projects.

The cinema room at ‘Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington’ at IWM London showing the three screens showing different images, part of ‘Sleeping soldiers’ (photo by the author)

At the other end of the series of rooms – in effect the exhibition’s climax – is a dark room dedicated to showing the standalone film, ‘Diary’.

Diary (19 minutes 8 seconds)

All the films are to an extent experimental, more like art films than news or reportage. They are OK but I’ve seen better. They feel almost like student works. Hetherington might have been an inspired photographer but producing a film, even of only a few minutes duration, is a completely different business. Our movie-saturated culture demands very high standards. And speaking as the series producer of various TV magazine shows, there’s a lot of craft involved, especially in counterpointing images and sound, an often overlooked but absolutely crucial aspect of film-making.

Thus, sorry to burst anyone’s bubble, but I felt Diary was poor. I especially disliked the use of the voice of what is presumably his girlfriend, recorded from phone messages: on a trivial level a) because it is, with horrible inevitability, American (Vanity Fair; US troops; based in New York; American girlfriend); but, more seriously, b) because it’s a pretty primitive concept to cut scenes of lonely sad hotel rooms, showers and beds, splice these with a few hairy moments out on patrol with troops or driving in a car which comes under attack, and then splice in the voice of girlfriend. It conveys quite a teenage aesthetic. Is he saying the life of a foreign correspondent/photographer can be lonely and isolating? Not a very interesting insight. And purely in terms of technique, hardly any of the shots are particularly good, and the sad girlfriend’s voice strategy feels corny. A student effort.

Self-absorption

This brings me to a thought which won’t make me any friends, which is that there’s an awful lot about him in the exhibition.

The wall labels make the same point over and over that he stayed far longer than usual among the communities and got to know people really well in order to tell their stories blah blah blah but the funny thing is we don’t hear any of their stories.

The LURD fighters in Liberia, the grunts in Afghanistan, I don’t think a single one of them is named. Instead, what we do get a lot of is how this or that project helped Tim grow as a person. In the interviews he explains that this project or that moment or the other photo represented a turning point, when he came to realise x, y or z, had a new insight, helped his evolution as a photographer. An overwhelming amount of it is about Tim, Tim, Tim and I was disappointed with the thinness of analysis of the actual conflicts he covered, Liberia, Afghanistan, Libya.

Thus in the ‘Healing Sport’ film, number 1) he is interviewed throughout the film, in fact the spine of the film is an extended interview with Tim Hetherington. 2) None of the sporting figures he photographed is interviewed or even mentioned by name. 3) He doesn’t talk about the sports so much as what the sports meant for him, about how the thing developed into one of his projects and dovetailed his interest in going behind the scenes of a story along with his concept of the Trojan Horse i.e. shedding light on conflict via a more acceptable subject i.e. sport. The core of the film is Hetherington telling us how he conceived and evolved the project and what it meant for him. It is, once again, all about him.

This self-absorption comes over in the captions scattered around the walls. Of the Afghanistan photos he wrote:

I didn’t want to pretend this was about the war in Afghanistan. It was a conscious decision. It comments on the experience of the soldier. It’s about brotherhood.

Not particularly offensive, you might think, but it’s about him and his decision-making. It’s a bit more obvious in another quote:

I became much more interested in the interrelationships between the soldiers and my own relationship to the soldiers than I was in the fighting.

In the Liberia section:

I have no desire to be a kind of war firefighter flying from war zone to war zone.

I do not set out to make a work of journalism but rather a visual novel that draws upon real people and places.

The attitude is best epitomised in this one:

My examination of young men and violence or of young men…it’s as much a journey about my own identity as it is about those young soldiers.

The wall captions tell us that he took many portraits of himself and that he was a prolific diarist, capturing his moods and thoughts and ideas. There’s an electronic version of his last journal which we can read via a touch screen. No surprise, maybe, that a man who was a prolific diarist made a film titled ‘Diary’ of which he wrote:

Diary is a highly personal and experimental film that expresses the subjective experience of my work, and was made as an attempt to locate myself after ten years of reporting.

Even the exhibition curator, Greg Brockett, agrees:

‘In the process of curating this exhibition, and the years I have spent cataloguing and researching Tim Hetherington’s archive, I have discovered just how driven Hetherington was to explore his own fascination with the world through the lens of conflict. I’ve uncovered a depth of personal insight to Hetherington’s character and his thoughtful approach to his work.’

I, I, I – the exhibition overflows with Hetherington’s sense of himself as an artist and maker gifted with particularly fine feelings and a special commitment to the people he photographed and yet … we get almost no sense of the personhood of any of the people he photographed, no names, no sustained engagement with them and little or no analysis of the conflicts he covered.

The amazingly vivid photo of the Liberian fighter looking at us with a hand grenade by his side, it would have been so much more powerful if we’d learned something about his story, his hopes, how he ended up where he is, rather than another sugary quote from Hetherington about his aims as an artist and his never-ending attempts to ‘locate himself’…

The Tim Hetherington cottage industry

A lot of people have taken Hetherington at his word as a mighty photographer and film-maker because, following on from all the self-centred quotes, I was amazed to learn of the small cottage industry which has grown up around him.

A year after his death, in 2013, Hetherington’s parents set up the Tim Hetherington Trust.

In 2013 his buddy Sebastian Junger made a documentary film about him, ‘Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington’ (2013).

In 2016 a Tim Hetherington Fellowship was set up by World Press Photo and Human Rights Watch.

In 2016 the Tim Hetherington Photobook Library was set up in the Bronx, New York which appears to simply be all the books he owned when he died, as if they are the sacred relics of a saint.

And in 2017 the Imperial War Museum received the complete Tim Hetherington Archive from the Tim Hetherington Trust and set about ordering and cataloguing them, one result of which was their setting up a Tim Hetherington and Conflict Imagery Research Network.

So Hetherington is not only a famous war photographer and Oscar-nominated film-maker but this exhibition obviously represents the museum’s first opportunity to showcase their (relatively) newly-acquired archive and give it a real splash.

Inevitably, the IWM has also produced a book to accompany the exhibition, Tim Hetherington: IWM Photography Collection on Amazon. One more piece of Hetherington merch to join the photobooks, magazine articles, interviews and documentaries.

After a while I felt positively overloaded with Hetheringtonia, with Hetherington-mania. What will be next? A musical based on his life? Nomination as a saint?

He was a great photographer. He made a vivid war documentary. He talked a very good game in his pukka private school tones (Stonyhurst College and Oxford) and this exhibition is a scholarly, thorough and imaginative (the interactive journal, the cameras) act of respect by the new holders of his archive. But if you want to understand more about the actual conflicts he covered (Liberia, Afghanistan, Libya) and the people affected by them, I don’t think this is the place to do it.

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by Simon on April 27, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Photography, War

Tagged 173rd Airborne Brigade, Afghanistan, Angola, Arab Spring, cameras, Charles Taylor, Chris Hondros, Colonel Gaddafi, diary, documentary film, Greg Brockett, Guy Martin, Healing Sport, Imperial War Museum, James Brabazon, Korengal Valley, Liberia, Liberian Graffiti, Liberians United for Reconciliation and Democracy, Libya, Long Story: Bit by Bit: Liberia Retold, Luanda, LURD, Mamiya 7 film camera, Michael Christopher Brown, Monrovia, New York, Oxford, Paul Danahar, photography, photojournalism, Restrepo, Rolleiflex 2.8 FX, Sebastian Junger, second Liberian Civil War, Sierra Leone, Sleeping Soldiers, Stonyhurst College, Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington, The New Middle East: The World After The Arab Spring, Tim Hetherington, Tim Hetherington and Conflict Imagery Research Network, Tim Hetherington Archive, Tim Hetherington Fellowship, Tim Hetherington Photobook Library, Tim Hetherington Trust, Tim Hetherington: IWM Photography Collection, US army, Vanity Fair, vintage cameras, Vivitar flash gun, war, war photography, war reporting, Which Way Is the Front Line From Here? The Life and Time of Tim Hetherington, World Press Photo and Human Rights Watch

Posted by Simon on April 27, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/04/27/storyteller-tim-hetherington-the-imperial-war-museum/

Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (1939)

In the introduction to the 1954 edition which combines Goodbye to Berlin with Mr Norris Changes Trains, Isherwood describes the background to his Berlin stories. He lived almost continuously from 1929 to 1933 in Berlin, scraping a living as an English tutor and trying to fit in his writing. Realising that the social crisis he saw around him and the colourful characters he was meeting were solid gold material, Isherwood kept a detailed diary of everyone he met and everything he saw.

Initially he planned to create a huge sprawling masterpiece of interconnected stories in the manner of Balzac, but found it impossible to manage. So in 1934 he had the brainwave of writing solely about the larger-than-life crook and con-man he called Mr Norris and wrote that novel quite quickly, from May to August 1934, in the garden of a pension at Orotava in Tenerife. The other extended stories were published in magazines over the next few years, and then he drew them together into one volume, Goodbye to Berlin, published in 1939

Goodbye to Berlin

Goodbye To Berlin immediately signals its differences from Mr Norris Changes Trains. The main one is that the first-person narrator is not named William Bradshaw but Christopher Isherwood. Partly this is because the ‘novel’ seems much closer to being an actual diary. It gives rise to his landlady, Fraulein Schroeder’s, famous mispronunciation of his name, Herr Issyvoo.

The most famous lines in Goodbye To Berlin are the often-quote statement the narrator makes about being as blank and affectless as a camera.

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair. Some day, all this will have to be developed, carefully printed, fixed.

This has been interpreted and reinterpreted as the basis for an entire aesthetic, of the 1930s combination of man and technology, and so on. On a simpler interpretation, it flags up that the book will basically be a diary of things that happen, with little attempt to shape them into narratives. This became clear to me after reading the very long prose text of Journey To A War by Isherwood which really is a long, detailed transcription of a diary. Reading that made me see the diary just beneath the skin of this book. Hence it is not one sutained narrative but four or five sections, each of which chronicles his relationship with a particular group of people, namely the demi-mondaine Sally Bowles, the dirt poor Nowak family, the rich Landauer family, and his gay buddies Peter and Otto on holiday in the Baltic.

In other words, the famous ‘I am a camera’ lines can be read, not as a manifesto, but as an excuse.

The most important difference, though, between Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye To Berlin is that this book is a lot less funny than its predecessor. In fact it opens on a note of gloom and melancholy which I found it hard to shake off thereafter. Thus Fraulein S loves telling Herr Issyvoo about all his predecessors in the rented rooms, about their foibles and habits. This makes the narrator see himself as just another in an endless procession of meaningless lives.

How much food must I gradually, wearily consume on my way? How many pairs of shoes shall I wear out? How many thousands of cigarettes shall I smoke? How many cups of tea shall I drink and how many glasses of beer? What an awful tasteless prospect! And yet – to have to die… A sudden vague pang of apprehension grips my bowels and I have to excuse myself in order to go to the lavatory.

Not very cheerful, is it? Anyway, the other tenants of Fraulein Schroeder’s boarding house are:

Bobby, the barman at the Troika
Fraulein Mayr, ‘a music-hall jodlerin’ past her prime, with ‘a bull-dog jaw, enormous arms and coarse string-coloured hair’ who is addicted to tea and tarot cards, she is a Nazi
Fraulein Kost, ‘a blonde florid girl with large silly blue eyes’, a prostitute

The first chapter is very bitty. We are introduced to these characters, the narrator swings by the Troika bar and discovers how empty and sad it is until a small group walks in at which point it comes to life with the band suddenly playing and the cigarette boy hurrying over to their table. Or he comes across Frauleins Mayr and Schroeder lying on their tummies with their ears to the floor listening to the woman in the flat downstairs having a furious row with a man she’s contacted via a dating agency.

Sally Bowles

Things perk up in chapter two where we meet Sally Bowles

She was dark enough to be Fritz’s sister. Her face was long and thin, powdered dead white. She had very large brown eyes which should have been darker, to match her hair and the pencil she used for her eyebrows… She was really beautiful, with her little dark head, big eyes and finely arched nose – and so absurdly conscious of all these features.

She is nineteen, been in Berlin two months, came out with a friend who promptly found a rich man who swept her off to Paris. Now Sally sings (badly) in a seedy bar, where Christopher’s friend, Franz Wendel, takes him to see her. She invited Chris for tea. She tells her life story, mother was the Lancashire heiress to a mill fortune, married a feisty businessman, so her real name is double-barrelled, Jackson-Bowles, she got herself expelled from her posh school and Daddy encouraged her to go to London to learn acting. She likes telling him all about this and flows straight into telling him about her numerous love affairs and the man she spent the night with last night.

I had posh women friends like that at university and for a while afterwards. Once it’s clear that you’re not going to make a pass at them – that you are neuter – they treat you like a pet and enjoy seeing if they can shock you – letting you stay while they get dressed and made up for a party for example – and you enjoy finding out whether you are shocked by what they say or do.

Now, about a hundred years since those days, and as the father of a teenage daughter the same age as Sally, I can see her behaviour as nerves and self-consciousness and an endless fishing for compliments and reassurance. I see her as pathetic and in need of help.

It initially seems as if Berlin is going to really focus on this one central figure in the same was Norris focused on Norris, but Sally Bowles is a lot less interesting or funny as a character. There is something sad about her from the start, and she’s just not funny. She mistakes flirting and talking about her lovers for having something interesting to say.

In other ways the book feels secondary. For example, he describes a little New Year’s Eve party at Fraulein Schroeder’s which includes Sally (who’s now moved in) then they move on to a big dance hall with phones on the tables, then he gets really drunk and wakes up in a bed full of paper streamers. The point is this is a pale echo or repetition of the far more vividly written and funnier New Year’s Eve party which occurs early in Norris and which climaxes with the narrator discovering Mr Norris on his hands and knees polishing the knee-length boots of his Mistress who is brandishing a whip!

Now that was something, that was surprising, impressive and very funny. Here the characters just get drunk and Sally ends up sleeping with her piano accompanist, Klaus, and then bragging about it next day to Chris, as she brags about all her conquests to her pet.

Then Klaus decamps to London where he’s got a good job orchestrating music for the movies and a few weeks later Sally gets the inevitable letter from him saying they must part because he’s fallen in love with the most marvellous English society lady and Fraulein Schroeder is scandalised, and Christopher listens loyally while Sally whines and smokes and the reader is bored.

They meet Clive, a big, fabulously rich American, who drinks half a bottle of scotch before breakfast and is full of grand plans. (This event is tied to a specific date when they watch the big state funeral of Weimar politician Hermann Müller, which took place in March 1931.)

If this is 1931, that new year’s even party must have been seeing in 1931. In which case Christopher is not the same character as William Bradshaw, because we saw William attend a completely different new year’s even 1931 party with Mr Norris. Just saying.

After getting their hopes up that he could take them on a round the world fantasmagoria of a travel, Clive does a bunk, Still he leaves some money and he bought Chris some nice shirts.

Sally discovers she’s pregnant. Fraulein Schroeder knows someone who knows an abortionist. It’s a fairly up-class deal, she’s signed into a rest home with a medical notes that she’s too ill to have a baby. Chris visits every day. The couple of days after the operation she’s very low. Bit depressing.

Chris goes to the Baltic, stays a month of more to write. When he comes back Sally has moved out of Frl Schroeder’s and into quite a swanky flat in a modernist block she shares with a girlfriend. She’s more distant, and vague about men. She is, basically, a prostitute, makes money by having sex with men, all the time telling herself she’s going to get her big break and be an actress. They argue. They aren’t friends any more, or not in the same way.

A con-man visits Chris and tries to extract money from him. When Chris says no, the con tells him he does a sideline in face cream for actresses, and out of malice Chris gives him Sally’s address. A few days later she phones to say she was wined and dined and then screwed out of all her money by a beastly conman. Oh dear. Chris goes round and hears the full story, and admits he sent her. They call the police who find the whole thing hilarious. But to their surprise they’re asked to come and identify the conman a week or so later, they’ve spotted him in a restaurant. Christopher instantly sees him and, after a moment’s hesitation, points him out to the cops. Then goes away feeling disgusted and swears he’ll never do anything like that again.

A few days later Sally pops round to tell him the end of the story. She had to identify him and he was terribly upset, said: ‘I thought you were my friend’. Amazingly, he turned out to be just 16 years old, so would have had to be tried in Juvenile Court but instead the doctors certified him and he was sent to a home.

Christopher never saw Sally again. A little later he gets a postcard from Paris, then a brief one-liner from Rome, then that was that. This ‘story’ is his tribute to her and their friendship. But it’s not a story, is it? It’s a series of diary entries written up a bit.

On Rügen Island (May 1931)

According to Wikipedia:

Rügen is Germany’s largest island by area. It is located off the Pomeranian coast in the Baltic Sea. Rügen is 31.9 miles from north to south and 26.6 miles east to west. Its coast is characterized by numerous sandy beaches, lagoons (Bodden) and open bays (Wieke), as well as peninsulas and headlands. In June 2011 UNESCO awarded the status of a World Heritage Site to the Jasmund National Park, famous for its vast stands of beeches and chalk cliffs.

It is to this idyllic and beautiful island that Christopher comes in the summer of 1931 to work on his novel. He’s sharing a holiday house with two others, an Englishman named Peter Wilkinson, about his own age and a German working-class boy from Berlin named Otto Nowak, aged sixteen or seventeen years old.

Peter is the fourth child of an immensely rich Englishman with a big house in Mayfair and a country seat. His sisters are marrying aristocracy while his brother is a successful explorer. Peter is the neurotic failure of the family, who went to Oxford but dropped out, had several nervous breakdowns. He’s been through several expensive psychoanalysts in England and then decided to try one in Berlin, which brings him here.

Peter appears to be in a gay relationship with Otto who, however, torments him by going out by himself every night to flirt with girls in the nearby small town and reeling back drunk to another argument. This long section or short story appears to be a diary recording of the day-by-day activities, sunbathing during the day, Otto and Peter arguing and occasionally having actual fights every night, while Christopher stays out of it and gets his work done.

Creeping in at various points are the Nazis. They meet a ferret-faced Nazi enthusiast who says types like Otto can’t be reformed but should be sent to a labour camp. He points out that one of the beaches (Hoddensee) is full of Jews. It is good to be back among ‘real Nordic types’. Christopher and Peter like going in the evenings to the nearby town of Baabe, although it is full of Nazi youths.

Peter and Christopher go for a row on the sea. Peter asks Christopher what should he do. Only at this point does it emerge that Peter is paying Otto to stay, to be with them, to be his partner. Anyway, it’s hypothetical, when they get back to the house the landlord tells them Otto’s caught the train. He’s ransacked Peter’s room, nicked a couple of ties, three shirts and two hundred marks.

Peter tells Christopher he’ll go back to England, not that he gets on with any of his family. Christopher sees him off then feels lonely in the holiday chalet without the two bickering lovers. He packs up and returns to Berlin.

The Nowaks

Not only does Christopher meet Otto again back in Berlin, he ends up renting a ‘room’ in the cramped, squalid, noisy, smelly apartment of this very working class Berlin family, not unlike George Orwell staying with working folk in the north of England. Herr Nowak the furniture remover, Frau Nowak the worn harassed mother who chars, Otto who thinks he’s a communist, 20-year-old Lothar who’s started going round with Nazis and pudgy 12-year-old Greta.

They live in a cramped, draughty, smelly two-roomed attic five flights up a block in a warren of slums in Wassertorsrasse. It’s never quiet, harassed Frau Nowak makes a dinner of mashed lung, boiled potatoes and brown bread. In the evenings he hangs around the Alexander Casino with rough trade like Piep or Gerhardt. Slowly the smell and the poverty and the arguments, especially between Otto and his poor mother, wear him down. He tells them he’s leaving. On his last afternoon Otto and mother have such a shouting match that Otto retires to his room and tries to cut his wrists.

Some time later, around Christmas, Christopher pays a visit. He can’t believe how squalid, dirty and noisy the street is. Frau Nowak is so ill she’s been sent to a sanatorium. They haven’t paid the bill so the electricity’s been cut off. Lothar and Otto don’t go home very much.

Otto persuades Christoph – they all call him Christoph – to accompany him out to the sanatorium to see his mother. This is a genuinely weird and hallucinatory sequence for Frau Nowak shares a room with three other women, one of whom is a skinny bright-eyed wreck who takes a shine to Christoph, the other is a plump 18-year-old who takes a shine to Otto, and the six of them spend a surreal deranged day together, walking in the grounds, then back to the room to dance to a gramophone and then sit listening to Frau Nowak’s reminiscences as it gets dark and nobody turns on the light and black-eyed skinny trembling Erna puts her wasted arm round Christoph and draws his mouth down for a feverish kiss. Like a horror story. Eventually the nurse comes to say visiting hours are over and Otto and Christoph get back to the coach which is take them back into town.

The Landauers

It is October 1930. In other words, before the events of the Sally Bowles section. In other words Goodbye to Berlin isn’t a continuous narrative but a collection of stories or reminiscences in non-chronological order.

Christopher had been given in England a letter of introduction to the rich, Jewish Landauer family. He takes it up and meets 18-year-old Natalia Landauer, dining several times with her and her mother, before going out to the cinema etc. They are a wealthy, happy, civilised family. On one occasion he has dinner with the father and a cousin as well as Frau and Natalia. The father is intelligent, stayed in London 35 years earlier and did what we’d call sociological research on London slums (so that would be about 1896, year of the bleak novel A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison).

The cousin, Bernhard, is incredibly polite, formal, correct, civilised, intelligent, speaks fluent English. Christoph calls on him at his luxury apartment, exquisitely furnished, immaculate luncheon. A few days later calls on him at the vast department store the Landauers own in the centre of Berlin. Bernhard is a beguiling character, one of several in this character-led book.

Christopher makes the experiment of introducing fastidious and tightly-disciplined Natalia Landauer to Sally Bowles at a restaurant. It goes wrong immediately as Sally apologises for being late because

‘I’ve been making love to a dirty old Jew producer. I’m hoping he’ll give me a contract–but no go, so far….’

Christopher kicks her under the table but it is too late, Natalia has gone rigid. Sally breezes on, nattering about the film business but all her stories involve adultery, sex or drugs (funny how little changes in that business) for an excruciating further 20 minutes before the date breaks up. Natalia walks briskly away. From that moment dates the decline in his friendship with her.

Bernhard rings up Christopher and asks if he wants to come to a secret destination. He calls round in his chauffeur-driven car and they drive along a stretch of motorway out to the Wannsee to an astonishingly luxurious built right by the shore, built by Bernhard’s father in 1904. His mother was English, Jewish, she became more interested in Jewish culture and studied Hebrew even as her cancer got worse until the pain was so severe she killed herself. All this and more Bernhard tells him over dinner and as they walk out to the shore in the darkness. The conversation gets bad-tempered when Bernhard explains he is experimenting with himself, he hasn’t had a private conversation with anyone about anything for ten years, he wanted to try it out. Christopher doesn’t enjoy being a guinea pig.

Next day Christopher is driven back into Berlin and dropped off by the chauffeur. He doesn’t speak to Bernhard for six months. Then Bernhard phones him up and invited him out there again. Christopher has cut his foot on some tin at the beach and it has got infected. He imagines it will be a little convalescence so doesn’t bother to dress and so is cross when the car arrives at the house and he discovers it is a posh party like something from The Great Gatsby.

They are waiting for the results of a referendum about the government. Christopher looks around at all these people and thinks they’re doomed.

It’s nine months before he sees Bernhard again. He’s been in effect hiding because he became really hard-up, that’s why he was forced to move in with the Nowaks and live in poverty. They banter in that detached way. Bernhard looks dreadful, overworked. Christopher recommends a holiday in Italy. Bernhard jokes about a trip to China, would he like to come with him to China, now, tonight? Christopher thinks this is a joke and makes a joke about having to wait for his clean linen to be returned from the laundry, but later he comes to think it was a totally serious proposal.

Christopher returns to England for a while, returns to Berlin in Autumn 1932, tries to contact Bernhard a couple of times, but is told he is away on business. Then Hitler is elected, the Reichstag burns down, the Jewish boycott includes the Landauer department store. Christopher leaves Germany for good in May 1933, for Prague. At a restaurant he overhears two fat German business men gossiping and one of them mentions Bernhard is dead. ‘Heart failure’, the kind of heart failure you get with a bullet through it, the kind of heart failure lots of Jews are getting in Nazi Germany.

Christopher’s thoughts and reactions are not recorded, we are left to imagine them and it is a complex imagining because theirs was a complex and strange relationship.

Berlin diary (winter 1932-3)

The text finally comes clean and turns into pure diary, the format which underlay it all the time.

His diary records miscellaneous memories as the political crisis deepens, as Christopher meets up with friends, sits in restaurants, the climate of fear intensifies.

One of his pupils, Herr Krampf, a young engineer, recalls the starvation at the end of the last war. Another, a police chief, announces he is taking up a post in America but worries about his wife who is too ill to make the trip. He goes to the funfair at the end of Potsdamerstrasse and watches the utterly fake, staged matches. Even though they know they’re staged the crowd still bets and argues about the outcome. These people will believe anything. He sees three SA men viciously attack a stranger in the street, beating him to the ground and poking out his eye with their spiked flagpoles. Another time he sees a Nazi fighting with two Jews who’d been kerb-crawling.

Fritz Wendel takes him on a tour of ‘debauched’ bars including one with performers dressed up as women. Christopher finds it tawdry and tacky but this, ironically, is precisely the subject matter people think of when they think of his Berlin stories even though they’re not about that kind of cabaret-nightclub decadence at all. Some American college boys are plucking up the courage to go in. When Fritz tells them the entertainment consists of men dressing as women, they say, ‘What? You mean queer?’

‘Eventually we’re all queer,’ drawled Fritz solemnly, in lugubrious tones. The young man looked us over slowly. He had been running and was still out of breath. The others grouped themselves awkwardly behind him, ready for anything – though their callow, open-mouthed faces in the greenish lamp-light looked a bit scared.
‘You queer, too, hey?’ demanded the little American, turning suddenly on me.
‘Yes,’ I said, ‘very queer indeed.’

In fact the really queer thing about Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin is how very, very unqueer they are.

The Nazis come to power, people are beaten up in the streets, publishers are closed down, Jews in all walks of life are arrested and dragged off. When Fritz takes Christopher to a ‘communist’ bar in a cellar, they all pretend to be confident of the future, assuring him this Nazi period in power is just a flash in the pan, but the reader knows they are doomed to lose and lose badly.

The book ends with these scattered, ominous fragments and Christopher’s final confession that, a few short years later (as he wrote), he can barely believe any of it actually happened.

The jarring image

Isherwood’s got a gift for the sudden, startling image, described crisply and clearly. Maybe he got it from Auden:

Birds call with sudden uncanny violence, like alarm-clocks going off.

Yesterday morning I saw a roe being chased by a Borzoi dog, right across the fields and in amongst the trees. The dog couldn’t catch the roe, although it seemed to be going much the faster of the two, moving in long graceful bounds, while the roe went bucketing over the earth with wild rigid jerks, like a grand piano bewitched.

‘It’s only a short time…’ sobbed Frau Nowak; the tears running down over her hideous frog-like smile. And suddenly she started coughing – her body seemed to break in half like a hinged doll.

Old Muttchen had a cold, they said. She wore a bandage round her throat, tight under the high collar of her old-fashioned black dress. She seemed a nice old lady, but somehow slightly obscene, like an old dog with sores. She sat on the edge of her bed with the photographs of her children and grandchildren on the table beside her, like prizes she had won.

Herr Landauer was a small lively man, with dark leathery wrinkled skin, like an old well-polished boot.

When Herr Nowak’s 12-year-old daughter runs to greet him:

Bending, he picked her up, carefully and expertly, with a certain admiring curiosity, like a large valuable vase.

Erna is in the sanatorium:

She had immense, dark, hungry eyes. The wedding-ring was loose on her bony finger. When she talked and became excited her hands flitted tirelessly about in sequences of aimless gestures, like two shrivelled moths.

Weimar Germany

Novels from or about the 1930s

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by Simon on June 12, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in English literature, Germany, Novel

Posted by Simon on June 12, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/06/12/goodbye-to-berlin-christopher-isherwood/

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Books & Boots

All posts tagged diary

Mussolini: His Part in My Downfall by Spike Milligan (1978)

Longer, seriouser

Spike is peeved

Day-by-day diary format

Gags

(Deliberately?) bad proofreading

Sex

Race

Events

Spike’s job

The climax, Spike is wounded

Psychiatric hospital

Final collapse

Class animus

Seriouser

Undertones of madness

Il Duce

Evelyn Waugh

Angry or grumpy?

Pity the children

General misanthropy

Reunions

Vindictiveness

Post-war sadness

The ugly English

Emigration

The Russian threat

Other complaints

Credit

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Monty: His Part in My Victory by Spike Milligan (1976)

Diary format and sources

Timeline

Monty

Nature

Thoughts

Credit

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‘Rommel?’ ‘Gunner Who?’ A Confrontation in the Desert by Spike Milligan (1974)

Period covered

Sources

Broad overview

Format

Vulgar, crude, puerile, sometimes very funny

Hoggins

Class war

Types of humour

Some facts

Moments

Traumas

Credit

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Storyteller: Photography by Tim Hetherington @ the Imperial War Museum

Projects

1. Healing Sport

2. Liberia (2003 to 2007)

3. Afghanistan (2007 to 2008)

4. Libya (2011)

Four films

Self-absorption

The Tim Hetherington cottage industry

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Imperial War Museum reviews

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Goodbye to Berlin by Christopher Isherwood (1939)

Goodbye to Berlin

Sally Bowles

On Rügen Island (May 1931)

The Nowaks

The Landauers

Berlin diary (winter 1932-3)

The jarring image

Related links

Weimar Germany