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Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley (2005)

439K
(The rebel army id number carved into the bare skin of 8-year-old boy soldier, Citizen’s, back, Moses, Citizen and Me, page 163)

Delia Jarrett-Macauley (Fellow of the Royal Society) is a London-based British writer, academic and broadcaster of Sierra Leonean heritage. Her first and, to date only, novel, Moses, Citizen & Me, won the 2006 Orwell Prize for political writing, the first novel to have been awarded the prize.

Stats

Moses, Citizen and Me is 226 pages long, with 3 pages of acknowledgements. It is divided into a 2-page prologue then 12 chapters of narrative.

It tells the story of a family coping with the aftermath of Sierra Leone’s civil war (1991 to 2002). The book’s protagonist, London-based academic Julia (Julia/Delia, kind of similar sounding names), receives a disturbing phone call from the neighbour of her Uncle Moses back in Sierra Leone. This neighbour, Anita, tells Julia that Moses’ wife, her Auntie Adele, is dead and begs her to return to her homeland.

When Julia arrives in the capital of Sierra Leone, Freetown, she discovers that during the civil war, her Aunt Adele was killed by a child soldier who is none other than Adele’s own grandson Citizen. Now the deeply damaged 8-year-old boy is back from the war living with Uncle Moses – the man whose wife he killed – and Julia finds herself joining this troubled household and trying to help all concerned deal with the terrible situation.

There’s no suspense about it: Julia is on the flight by page 5 and confronting Moses on page 7. The interest or motivation is not in finding out whodunnit but, I think, is meant to be in savouring Jarrett-Macauley’s sensitive emotions and the healing bonds of the women and girls (Julia, Anita and the latter’s two young daughters) who help Moses and Citizen.

Style and attitude

I didn’t like Jarrett-Macauley’s attitude or style. It came over, to me, as self important and entitled. Here are the opening sentences.

It was late November, crisp and chilly, but I was dressed lightly and wore no tights, to avoid discomfort on the flight. I had arrived at the airport in good time, no thanks to the minicab driver who sat in the traffic on Lavender Hill, stubbornly refusing to U-turn. (p.3)

1) ‘Crisp and chilly’ struck me as a cliché, the first of many throughout the book (‘Grandma Sara, a slender gracious woman with vivid eyes…’ p.13)

2) Why does she want to tell me that she was wearing no tights? It establishes that she’s the kind of narrator who thinks the reader needs to know absolutely everything about her, down to the state of her undergarments.

3) Why does she think I need to know about her argument with her taxi driver? She’s the kind of privileged, self-absorbed international traveller who finds drivers and hotel staff annoying. ‘Out of my way riff-raff, don’t you know who I am? I am a writer.’

All this clutter about taxis, planes and tights is hurriedly swept out of the way so that she can arrive in Freetown, take a cab to Uncle Moses’ house, and confront the boy monster.

His colouring was mine. But his spirit was so far removed from anything I had ever met that I nearly wept. Suddenly I felt panic, separate and afraid. (p.7)

I realised I was in for a long haul. The first few pages suggested the book is going to be mostly about its narrator’s rare and precious feelings, subtle perceptions, deep emotions, wonderful insights and so on, with very little factual background or useful analysis.

It is written, at least to begin with, in what I’ve previously called the Numb Style. This is very common in modern novels. It’s where the narrative so completely lacks all colour, warmth, subtlety or sophistication, all distance, detachment, analysis, irony or humour that it’s as if the narrator has had a lobotomy. Instead, like someone with severe brain damage, the text just registers one thing. Then another thing. Then another thing. Then another thing.

Small pink apples lay on the plate and I ate one. I asked Citizen whether he would like one too. He did not answer. I didn’t know if he had heard me. Then I realised I had been whispering. (p.8)

E.M. Foster at the start of Passage To India gives us paragraphs of description which vividly bring to life the Indian setting. Closer to the subject matter here, Graham Greene in Heart of the Matter vividly describes the sights and sounds and smells, the people and buildings and noises of Freetown. Those novels’ descriptions invoke a kind of man-of-the-world knowledgableness, the adult ability to sift and judge, to select certain details and descriptions and order them into well-organised paragraphs in order to build up sophisticated word pictures.

Jarrett-Macauley has none of this. What she describes is herself. In the Numb Style.

It is essential to take this slowly. I don’t know whether other people were standing or watching me. I remember only the squawk that came out of my mouth: animal anguish. (p.8)

As you can see, the all-too-frequent corollary of the Numb Style is the narrator’s claim that they have undergone An Enormous Trauma. The style is so brain dead, flat and affectless because it denotes Huge Pain. It shouts at the reader Look at me! See how much I suffer! The Numb Style generally accompanies a sustained outpouring of self-dramatising self-importance which I always find very tiresome.

My feet were cold, so cold they were dying, and speech had deserted me. (p.8)

The midday sun was grilling the earth but my heart was seized with a terrible coldness indistinguishable from doubt. (p.216)

I was bored by page 10, not by the subject matter so much as by narrator’s self importance, self centredness, the relentless emphasis on self self self, by the narrator’s relishing of her own precious feelings and responses, all told with the dead-eyed numbness of a car crash survivor.

He had looked at his watch. It had stopped. He had shaken it. (p.11)

When Jarrett-Macauley is not doing the Numb Style, she switches to bad poetry. Centuries ago critics talked about the poetaster, ‘a derogatory term applied to bad or inferior poets with implications of unwarranted pretensions to artistic value.’ Same here. When she’s not saying Look at me how I’ve suffered she’s saying Look in awe at my poetic perceptions.

Anita was coming towards me, gliding, her movements liquid. She poured herself into a shape of love and wrapped it around my tense body. (p.8)

There’s a lot of background about how young Julia lived in Brixton and how Uncle Moses came to stay, there were parties at their house on Sunday afternoons, how one day her mum brought Adele home. Moses was instantly attracted to her and everyone knew they’d get married. And then they did get married.

At that moment Adele did not know and Moses did not know but we all knew that Adele would love Moses and Moses would love Adele. (p.29)

Maybe this is intended to recreate the mental impressions of her 7-year-old self. But a lot of the rest of the text is like this and comes over as the thought processes of a simpleton.

Incidentally, I’ve lived in and around Brixton for 20 years and nothing in Jarrett-Macauley’s numerous descriptions of the narrator’s girlhood upbringing there in any way bring it to mind or capture its swarming, polluted, shambling, vibrant, smelly, noisy, threatening aspects (I’ve been mugged there, twice).

Anyway, Julia and Moses go to visit the camp for ex-child soldiers at Doria outside Freetown, where the main thing that happens is she has a bad attack of the Numb Style.

I looked about to see what was familiar. Nothing was. There were no trees and no flowers. I looked up and the sky was without clouds and the sun was hidden from view. I looked down and the ground was solid yellow dirt with no life. I looked ahead and saw no women. (p.31)

This isn’t a description of an actual place but of a state of mind, the brain-damaged mental state of the Numb Style. And then we have passages of the magical lyrical style, particularly associated with women communing, sharing deep feelings as only women can.

Sally and I sat opposite one another and said nothing but exchanged thoughts. (p.33)

But mostly it’s about Julia and her reactions to hearing the stories of the child soldiers.

Inside I felt a hazy dark cloud and guessed I was about to pass out. I made myself concentrate hard (p.37)

I moved closer to him; I moved closer to myself, into a narrow space where every emotion was restored to its full essence. (p.38)

For three hours I lay in my room, my body moist with the apple’s juices, and for three hours life wandered through my limbs slowly and steadily, like nothing I had felt before. (p.39)

There’s a lot of this self-centred, self-important, self-promoting sensitivity on every page. It’s like taking a wrong turning at the gym and finding yourself in a mindfulness class. Everyone is being very sensitive. Everyone is in touch with their inner self. Everyone is fondling their chakras.

Visions

At the narrative progresses Julia starts having visions which leads us into imaginative recreations of what Citizen the child soldiers must have gone through. She imagines a procession of child soldiers marching up her neck, she imagines her head is a map of Sierra Leone, she talks repeatedly about trying to come down to earth, trying to ‘control her mind’ (p.51), as these visions become more powerful and last longer.

She imagines herself joining the band of child soldiers, being with them when Citizen is abducted, seeing what he sees, watching the stolen children being whipped and crying, hallucinatorily entering ‘another world’ (p.54).

Suddenly the narrator is in the rebel camp, at their base, watching the child soldiers cry and fight and beat each other, being terrorised into undertaking another attack. Citizen is 8 years old. He is a member of the Number-One-Burn-House-Unit led by ‘Lieutenant’ Ibrahim. His friend is Abu, recently abducted from a village the unity burned down. Abu cries for his mummy. Ibrahim whips him with a 6-foot whip. When Abu’s brother gets up to go Ibrahim simply shoots him in the head.

Later she finds herself, in sleep, transplanted to Gola Forest where, apparently, the child soldiers had their bases. In her dream she encounters a mathematician, Bemba G, who entrances the boy killers with the delights of maths. She describes the entire visionary experience as a ‘multidimensional event’.

Among women

These kinds of intense visions alternate with passages from the ‘real world’, where Julia has got involved in helping old Uncle Moses with his collection of rare photographs by native Leonean photographers (because, we learn, Moses was himself at one stage a professional photographer), or spends a lot of time with Anita, a single mum her own age (late 30s) with two daughters, Elizabeth who is just discovering boys, and 9-year-old Sara (p.91).

These scenes are consciously very female, dwelling on the restful healing routines of female chores (cooking and washing and hanging out to dry) and female chat (about men and children and school and clothes). Julia sits on a stool in the yard and lets Anita redo her cornrows.

These quiet feminine times are very obviously designed to be at the opposite pole from the pure destruction of the child soldiers sent to burn down entire villages and murder everyone which Julia increasingly hallucinates.

Thus, in ‘homely world’, Julia cooks chicken groundnut for Moses and Citizen, and for Anita, Elizabeth and Sara. It is a recipe taught her by her mother who in turn had it from her mother, Sally. So it is not just a meal, it is an invocation of the matriarchy or, less grandly, female family traditions.

It is also, like all the dishes cooked in all of these books (by Chinua Achebe or Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie) delicious. None of these characters is capable of bad cooking. (Aunt Ida comes to visit and remembers how Auntie Adele’s baking was always ‘perfect’, p.141.; ‘We stopped for lunch. Everyone helped with the preparation, even the children.’ p.221) In much the same way that they are all wonderfully articulate, speak in perfectly rounded sentences, are full of inventive and creative thoughts, are always kind and considerate.

Also, none of them have jobs. Julia the narrator lazes round all day, reading, dozing, day-dreaming, or helping Uncle Moses in his photography studio or chatting to neighbour Anita or cooking up delicious meals.

We sat quietly for most of that afternoon – Moses, Anita, Elizabeth, Olu, Citizen, Sara, and me. Elizabeth began to sing. (p.222)

The book is marketed as a novel about atrocities, but it’s also a depiction of a pretty cushy lifestyle. Made me jealous.

In the perfection of their characters (and their cooking), and the way nobody seems to have a job, the characters are quite unlike most of the people I’ve ever met. There is a novel-ish perfection to every aspect of the book.

Love and peace. The love is in the taste of the food. The peace I took to bed. I undressed and laid my body on the white sheet. Here I am again, black on white, ready to dream tonight. (p.83)

One day Olu came early, before Elizabeth had laid plans for the day. He invited us out to Lumley Beach where we spent several pleasant hours. (p.222)

I appreciate the way Delia Jarrett-Macauley creates this feminist cocoon, this women’s swoon, a calm, undramatic oasis of homeliness, and I know lots of women who live this life and it’s lovely. But it’s not my life or my view of the world. My world is full of hard work and rare breaks and horrifying news. Unlike:

When we had enough prepared vegetables, we put on a pot of rice and retreated into the lounge with our drinks….I leaned my head back on then lounger, balancing my glass on my stomach, and closed my eyes, an interlude before dinner. (p.224)

Aaaah. Sunday supplement perfection. It’s no accident, or it’s entirely apposite, that the novel ends with the narrator imagining herself, Citizen, her friend Chloe and her young daughter going to a burger place in Lavender Hill (not, interestingly, to any of the ethnic restaurants and cafes overflowing Brixton Market) and, after a burger and fries, having rich apple pie, the image of apples one of innocence and wholeness and linking back to the pink Leonean apples she tried to share with the numbstruck boy Citizen right at the start of the story. It’s a happy ending. Citizen has been cured by the love of good women, family and cooking.

The child soldiers’ production of Julius Caesar

Slowly the dream visions take over the text. By three-quarters of the way through Julia is spending nearly all her time in the forest. On page 143 she appears to leave ‘reality’ altogether and magically transport into the bush. Here she rejoins Bemba G and the community of child soldiers at a place called Black Rock, a geographical which changes shape to create various settings (p.169).

Citizen and all the other child soldiers are there and new ones arrive every day. Bemba G organises a daily routine, organises periods for play and sessions of storytelling where they either recount stories of their true experiences or are encouraged to make up stories the others can relate to.

I think this is all in her head. I think these longer and longer ‘visionary’ passages are where the narrator has completely crossed over into an otherworld of fantasy and fulfilment. Here, in this imagined camp, she befriends child victims like Victor with letters carved into his skull or Miriam with her baby, with Hina, KT, Peter, 6-year-old Isata and many others, 35 in all (p.159).

Emerging to dominate this fantasy is Bemba G’s notion of having the children act William Shakespeare’s plan Julius Caesar – which, in some way, overlaps with contemporary African playwright Thomas Dekker’s reworking of it in Krio as Juliohs Siza.

Preparations to perform the play are described at length, as is the way the children feel themselves deep into the roles, practice the assassination and the fighting, meld themselves into this 400-year-old narrative. Whether or not it’s ‘real’ in the same way as Julia’s grumpy taxi driver, flight and hanging out with Moses and Anita are ‘real’ is beside the point. It’s very powerful and develops into the best thing in the book.

In between rehearsals, Julia plays a sometimes central role in organising the children’s playtime, in listening to their individual complaints and nightmares and stories. Her familiarity with the processes involved in addressing, listening to and gently coaching children made me wonder whether Julia/Delia was a social worker. Or a theatre director, maybe. The 60 odd pages from 143 to 200 have more focus and running energy than the previous chapters of the book, which felt more langorous and episodic.

This final third of the text builds up to an actual performance of Julius Caesar for an audience of about 200, including tourists and British peacekeepers. It seems to be staged both out in the depths of the forest beside the shape-shifting Black Rock and in a compound in the capital city, Freetown, at the same time. This doesn’t matter, in fact it’s a positive, lifting the final third of the book into a peculiar dream-fantasy-haze environment which I found more gripping than the first two-thirds.

Did Jarrett-Macauley help produce such a production, of Julius Caesar, in Freetown or here in Brixton? It really feels like it because the text is packed with detail about the Shakespeare play, about particular lines and scenes and moments, and a deep understanding of how the actors approach their parts and different scenes, having sudden insights, matching themselves to their roles, watching the whole thing suddenly crystallise into focus. Right down to the way that, at the end, appreciative journalists throng the ‘green room’ and ask for interviews and photos of the children. Despite being on one level a fantasy, it’s completely gripping.

Futility

When she’s in the ‘real’ world, Julia is helping Uncle Moses sort out his huge collection of photos, many by him, but also snaps by local Leonean photographers, so there are passages about some of these photographers and their work. She’s particularly drawn to (the real life figure of) Alphonso Lisk-Carew who travelled up-country in the 1910s to photograph tribal peoples (pages 105 to 107). At other moments, Moses goes off into long reminiscences about his wooing of wife Adele in the 1960s. In both eras (1910s, 1960s) Julia imagines scenes and conversations, notes records and writings, observes how the people of those times were artlessly optimistic about themselves and the future of their country. How, Julia repeatedly asks herself, did they screw it up so badly? How did they let the country fall into civil war and then collapse into out-and-out barbarism?

In among these reminiscent passages are scenes where, at parties, at dinner, at clubs, Moses and his wife and friends discuss politics and what the country needs. There are extended flashbacks to a period (in the 1960s?) when Moses did some photography work for a politician named Harris (for election brochures and such). At one point this guy tells Moses: ‘We need to make our country a success. You can help.’ (p.115)

Well, here we are in 2024 and Sierra Leone is still one of the poorest countries on earth, ranking 182nd out of 189 countries in the Human Development Index (Action Against Hunger). It is on most measures a basket case, the majority of its population living in abject poverty, still suffering the repercussions from its ruinous civil war, with tens of thousands condemned to live out their lives without hands, arms or legs, chopped off by the rebels.

Set beside such barely comprehensible savagery, the trite vapourings of characters from the 60s and 70s about ‘building a better country’ seem mad.

Summary

This book is useless for factual information or analysis. For Sierra Leone’s civil wars read Martin Meredith, for a deep dive into the reality of child soldiers read The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Wojchiec Jagielski.

What this book is is an immersion in a particular kind of sensitive female consciousness, with lots of emphasis on the strength of women and the beauty of women, the quiet heroism of women doing the household chores and women cooking and women washing, women caring for their sons and daughters and their ageing parents, women healing the sick and rehabilitating the damaged.

I took her hand as a token of female affection: we are safe. (p.188)

A novel about a woman having dreams and visions which open up into an otherworld of alternative values and perceptions.

An invisible thread runs between the hungry empty ghosts and our earthly selves. As time passes, the veil between our worlds thins. I can feel these souls deeply. They are the same as us but without the blood. (p.185)

That’s what you’re getting into if you read it, and I know this kind of writing about strong sensitive woman and the depth of women’s community and the healing power of women is very popular and very successful. As I mentioned at the start, Moses, Citizen & Me won the 2006 Orwell Prize for political writing, the first novel to be awarded the prize. But, I’m afraid, although it gains a lot of power in the final quarter, the book was not, in the end, for me.

Recent news from Sierra Leone

Although the civil war ended in 2002 and the era of child soldiers is over, Sierra Leone continues to be one of so many African countries whose people struggle to rule themselves.

Uncle Moses peeked at me to check if I was ready. ‘This is what you people must do, do not be held back by as many rules as we were. Be free!’ I understood what he meant, yet what had we achieved with our freedom? War. (p.97)

Sierra Leone’s most recent (failed) coup took place on 26 November last year.

Child soldiers today

World’s highest child soldier numbers in West, Central Africa (Al-Jazeera)

Guilty wish

You know that minicab driver the narrator was rude about in the very first paragraph of the book? I’d like to have heard his side of the story.

Credit

Moses, Citizen and Me by Delia Jarrett-Macauley was first published by Granta Books in 2005. References are to this Granta paperback edition.

Related reviews

The Sierra Leone chapters of The State of Africa: A History of the Continent since Independence by Martin Meredith (2005)
The Night Wanderers: Uganda’s Children and the Lord’s Resistance Army by Wojchiec Jagielski (2009)
Africa reviews

2 Comments

by Simon on February 2, 2024 • Permalink

Posted in Africa, Novel, War

Tagged 439K, Abu, Action Against Hunger, Africa, Alphonso Lisk-Carew, Anita, atrocity, Aunt Ida, Auntie Adele, Bemba G, Black Rock, boy soldier, Brixton Market, child soldiers, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Chinua Achebe, Citizen, civil war, cornrows, Delia Jarrett-Macauley, domesticity, drama, E.M. Foster, Elizabeth, Ernest Bai Koroma, femininity, fiction, first person narrative, Freetown, Gola Forest, Graham Greene, Grandma Sara, Granta Books, Harris, Heart of the Matter, Hina, Human Development Index, Ibrahim, Isata, Jarrett-Macauley, Juliohs Siza, Julius Caesar, Krio, KT, Lavender Hill, Lieutenant Ibrahim, Martin Meredith, Miriam, Moses Citizen and Me, multidimensional event, narrative, novel, Numb Style, Number-One-Burn-House-Unit, Orwell Prize, Passage To India, Peter, photography, Play, Politics, Sara, Sierra Leone, Sierra Leone civil war, Sierra Leone coup, The Night Wanderers: Uganda's Children and the Lord's Resistance Army, the Numb Style, theatre, Thomas Dekker, Uncle Moses, Victor, war, William Shakespeare, Wojchiec Jagielski

Posted by Simon on February 2, 2024

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2024/02/02/moses-citizen-and-me-delia-jarrett-macauley/

Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh (1955)

Tommy Blackhouse declared: ‘It’s going to be a long war. The great thing is to spend it among friends.’
(Officers and Gentlemen, page 47)

Officers and Gentleman is the second novel in Evelyn Waugh’s Sword of Honour trilogy. As its predecessor, Men at Arms was divided into three parts with a prologue and epilogue, so Officers and Gentlemen is divided into two halves, ‘Happy Warriors’ (London and Scotland) and ‘In The Picture’ (Egypt and Crete), with a small interlude and an epilogue.

Like Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen is entirely about the army and the adventures in it of the trilogy’s dour, self-conscious, 35-year-old, divorced, Catholic ‘hero’, Guy Crouchback – and yet the majority of the book features no fighting. Instead, like its predecessor, it is overwhelmingly about the absurdities of army bureaucracy, politicking and infighting, with a fair admixture describing the absurdities of civilian life during war.

Indeed, the larger presence of scenes of civilian life, in the form of the social circle of Guy’s former wife, Virginia, in London, and of the legendary Mrs Julia Stitch in Alexandria (when the action moves, in the second half, to Egypt)shifts the style and feel of the book noticeably back towards the more obviously silly social satire of Waugh’s 1930s comedies.

Book One – Happy Warriors

The previous novel ended with Guy aboard a flying boat carrying him back from Sierra Leone to England. Officers and Gentlemen opens on the evening of the same day. Guy arrives in the afternoon and makes his way straight to London in time for a big air raid during the Blitz. The novel opens with Guy standing on the steps of his London club, Bellamy’s, admiring the night sky over London lit up by German bombers, explosions, searchlights and anti-aircraft flak, quite a show of fireworks.

Stiff upper lip

Part of the humour derives from the stiff upper lip detachment of most of the characters and the narrator. This sense of ironic detachment is apparent from the opening scene. For many Londoners the Blitz was a time of terror and tragedy. Waugh completely transmutes it into a festival of fun. It’s there in individual sentences:

Everywhere the shells sparkled like Christmas baubles.

In sardonic satire:

On the pavement opposite Turtle’s a group of progressive novelists in firemen’s uniform were squirting a little jet of water into the morning-room.

Or in the extended comic tone of the opening scene when members of Bellamys watch the rival club, Turtles, down the road, burning merrily, and then confront a bedlam of rumours that wine and brandy are flowing in the gutters, the comic spectacle of the night porter, Job, having drink far too much and attempting to keep a straight face and voice, and the farcical spectacle of Ian Kilbannock’s superior officer, an Air Vice Marshall in the RAF, hiding from German bombs under the club billiard table.

At the end of the Evelyn Waugh Wikipedia article, his lifelong friend Nancy Mitford is quoted as saying: ‘What nobody remembers about Evelyn is that everything with him was jokes. Everything.’

Apthorpe’s last request

A central figure of Men at Arms was the often absurd figure of Apthorpe. In hospital and knowing he was dying, Apthorpe made Guy promise to carry out his dying wish and take his legendary collection of kit and equipment to a chap called ‘Chatty’ Corner (real name, James Pendennis). Apthorpe had brought this chap to a drunken dinner given by the regiment he and Guy are both members of, the Royal Corps of Halberdiers. Waugh expresses it with characteristic levity:

A spirit was to be placated. Apthorpe’s gear must be retrieved and delivered before Guy was free to follow his fortunes in the King’s service. His road lay backward for the next few days, to Southsand and Cornwall. ‘Chatty’ Corner, man of the trees, must be found, somewhere in the trackless forests of wartime England.

This is the rather slender pretext for the first half of the book which is Guy’s quest to track down this ‘Chatty’ fellow and hand over Apthorpe’s huge pile of clobber.

Recurring characters

In the first novel there was quite an array of characters, who kept changing with the changing configuration of Guy’s regiment. In this novel the focus is a bit more on civilian life and so it feels like there’s a smaller number of characters who keep recurring up. These include:

Ian Kilbannock – early in the war wangled himself a job in the RAF and, during the course of this book, gets himself a cosy niche as information officer
Tommy Blackhouse – the man Guy’s wife, Virginia, left him for, but they’ve both gotten over this, Tommy is a member of Guy’s club, Bellamy’s, so they keep bumping into each other and the central event of part one is when Guy finds himself seconded to the commando group Tommy is commanding in Scotland
Virginia aka Mrs Troy, shallow-minded socialite ex-wife of Guy’s (‘It was the present moment and the next five minutes which counted with Virginia’, p.78)
Arthur Box-Bender – Conservative MP married to Guy’s sister, Angela, successful if often obtuse older man in his 50s
Miss Vavasour – the concerned old lady who resides in the same hotel as Guy’s father in the seaside resort of Matchet (his daughter, Angela, has dropped hints that she might be in love with him)

Guy spends that night in a hotel then next day Guy takes a train from Charing Cross and reports at the Royal Halberdier barracks. No one is expecting him or knows what to do with him. Guy explains his quest to find Chatty Corner to the Adjutant who promptly gives him some leave, so Guy turns right round, gets a taxi to the station and back to London.

Guy’s father and the Cuthberts

There is a prolonged storyline concerning Guy’s father. Years ago he had been forced to quit the old family home at Broome, let it to a convent, and settled as a long-term resident in a hotel in the coast town of Matchet. The storyline concerns the narrow-minded, uncharitable and profiteering attempts of the owners of the hotel, the Cuthberts, to eject Mr Crouchback from his room and make a lot more money charging it out by the week at the new higher wartime rates.

The general purpose of this recurring storyline is to emphasise what a jolly decent old buffer Guy’s father is (‘He was a man of regular habit and settled opinion. Doubt was a stranger to him.’) and what a thoroughly mean-spirited and greedy lot the horrid working class Cuthberts are.

His daughter, Guy’s sister, Angela, has three daughters by her husband, Box-Bender. All three have been evacuated to the safety of New England. From there they have sent a package containing American products which Mr Crouchback can’t make head or tail of.

He receives a letter from Angela enclosing a message they’ve had from Tony, her only son, who surrendered along with his regiment at Dunkirk and is now in a German prisoner of war camp.

Meanwhile wheels are moving. The Prime Minister, no less, orders that Brigadier Ritchie-Hook be rehabilitated. Along the complex hierarchy of bureaucracy this urge to find something for him to do spins off to affect Guy. Orders are drawn up for him to attend HOO HQ. These are top secret and must be delivered by hand. Who is there to deliver them? Well, old ‘Jumbo’ Trotter, a superannuated retired Colonel who returned to the barracks as soon as war broke out and has been hanging round under-employed ever since. He’s only too happy to be given something to do, namely sit in a car driven by an army driver all the way to the Marine Hotel Matchet where Guy is known to be taking his leave.

And thus Jumbo Trotter enters the lives of not only Guy but his father. For when he arrives in Matchet it rather inevitably turns out that he knows Mrs Tickeridge, wife of the colonel who resides at the hotel along with Guy’s father and was, in fact the man who wangled him a post in the Halberdiers.

The arrival of Jumbo overlaps with the storyline about the Cuthberts wanting to oust Mr Crouchback from the hotel because they have progressed as far as getting a Quartering Commandant, a Major Grigshawe, to force him to leave so his rooms can be taken by more ‘important’ (and higher paying) guests. But Jumbo knows this man Grigshawe, spots him in the bar, calls his name, Grigshawe jumps to attention, and Jumbo has a few words with him which result in Mr Crouchback’s future at the hotel being assured. All without Mr Crouchback knowing it even happened. Why? Because as soon as Mrs Tickeridge introduces Jumbo to Guy’s father, Jumbo recognises him as ‘a good type’; not only the father of a Halberdier but a man fit to be a Halberdier himself. Contacts.

Anyway, you can see why describing this as a ‘war novel’ would be very misleading. For long stretches it’s more of a comic novel about civilian life during wartime.

Guy’s quest

Meanwhile Guy’s quest takes him to some of the barracks the Halberdiers were posted to in the first book. At Brook Park he collects a stash Apthorpe had left, before moving on to Southsand where the Commodore of the Yacht Club is only too glad to be relieved of three taxis’ worth of clutter Apthorpe had left there. And here Guy finds himself becalmed because military orders had it that no soldier should carry more than a haversack. He had assembled all Apthorpe’s gear alright, but isn’t allowed to move it. All Souls Day, 2 November 1940, comes and goes and, ‘ever prone to despond’, Guy broods.

Finally Jumbo Trotter arrives, having tracked him down, and delivers his secret message ‘by hand’. It is instructions to report to HOO HQ at Marchmain House, London. Now this is a tiny but significant detail because readers of Brideshead Revisited will remember that the family title was Marchmain, that their London house was called Marchmain House, and that old Lord Marchmain had been obliged to sell the house to developers who knocked it down and built a block of modern flats. Well, this is the same place, the top floors having been commandeered by Hazardous Offensive Operations (HOO) Headquarters. It’s not only an example of the way all of Waugh’s fictional oeuvre inhabits the same ‘universe’ with multiple cross-references and recurring characters, but also an indication of the way Officers and Gentlemen is a bit more tied into his pre-war comedies than Men at Arms.

Anyway, here occurs one of the many comic misunderstandings which litter Waugh’s stories. Guy tells him that the secret message instructed him to report to London, but he has a devil of a lot of kit. He takes Jumbo to see the kit and Jumbo is suitably impressed:

Together they visited the baggage store and stood in silence before the heap of steel trunks, leather cases, brass-bound chests, shapeless canvas sacks, buffalo-hide bags. Jumbo was visibly awed. He himself believed in ample provision for the emergencies of travel. Here was something quite beyond his ambition. (p.42)

Because Guy doesn’t explain about Apthorpe, Jumbo thinks all this kit is part of a top secret mission Guy is on. Therefore he pulls strings and secures the services of a five ton truck and driver and next morning all this kit is loaded into it and they are driven to London.

When Guy finally reports to a functionary of HOO HQ in Marchmain House, he is told he is being sent on temporary attachment for training purposes to X Commando on the (fictional) Scottish Isle of Mugg, where he will report to Colonel Tommy Blackhouse who, by huge coincidence, the reader will remember, is the man who took Guy’s wife away from him.

When he hears the news Jumbo is thrilled and offers to come with him, extending the use of the three-ton lorry and RASC driver has found him. So they head north.

The Isle of Mugg

After several overnight stops, they arrive at Inverness, where the ferry for Mugg departs. Jumbo volunteers to stay on the mainland with the lorry and Apthorpe’s gear, while Guy takes the ferry to the island.

Once on the little island, Guy makes his way to the only hotel where he’s told the commando is posted. Here he finds Ivor Claire, the famous international horserider (who won medals with his mount, Thimble). After chat with him, Trimmer enters. We know him from the first book, where he was an unpopular officer. Here again he is much disliked, but is masquerading as a Scotsman and (indicative of his slipperiness) is calling himself McTavish. Trimmer is not actually as part of the commando, his regiment were sent to Iceland but he’d sprained a wrist and stayed on here.

Trimmer tells him it’s a small world because a chap’s there who was at the Halberdiers’ guest night the night Guy sprained his knee and, by a massive and implausible coincidence, Chatty Corner is there. Up here his nickname is Kong, short for King Kong. Trimmer offers to take Guy across to his digs, which turn out to be the ‘Old Castle’ a walk away through freezing night along a sheet ice path. And indeed James Pendennis Corner is inside, nursing a heavy cold, wrapped in blankets, with his feet in a mustard bath. He explains he was an old Africa expert, that’s he got to know Apthorpe, and came back as soon as war broke out and began to give Africa training but after Dunkirk somehow the army got it into its head that he knew about mountaineering so they sent him here to teach it. He’s a big hairy man who likes climbing up things, and that’s the reason for the nickname King Kong.

With delight in his heart, Guy gets Corner/Kong to sign a document officially taking ownership of Apthorpe’s stuff. His legal and moral debt is paid. It is, in the chronology of the novels, 7 December 1940.

Back at the hotel Tommy invites Guy to dinner with the old laird, Mugg, who lives in the new castle. It is a spectacular comic passage as they make their way through to the snow and ice to the impressive pile, where the door is opened to the deafening sound of bagpipes. The laird is obsessed with dynamite, he thinks the way to transform the island’s economy is to blast away the tons of rock covering what was once a lovely sandy beach pipes at dinner (later the laird takes Guy on tour of the island and explains it was he who dynamited the old stables and caused the rockfall which has buried the beach). Over the very tough and indigestible venison, he is introduced to the laird’s great-niece Katie Carmichael who is an ardent Scottish nationalist and so a vehement supporter of Hitler.

Next day Tommy finds the letter sending Guy to Mugg but sadly says he isn’t to become one of them, he is assigned to Brigadier Ben Ritchie-Hook, once he’s better. Meanwhile what Tommy really needs is an old hand who knows his way round the system. Guy describes Jumbo, and Tommy leaps at the opportunity of nabbing him for his commando, and dispatches Guy back to the mainland to fetch him.

Trimmer gets leave and goes to Glasgow. Waugh doesn’t like Trimmer. Here he is among the crowds at the station hotel:

He passed on with all the panache of a mongrel among the dustbins, tail waving, ears cocked, nose a-quiver. (p.73)

In an upmarket place, the Restaurant de Madrid, with another tremendous coincidence, Trimmer bumps into Virginia, Mrs Troy, Guy’s ex-wife. At one point in his career slippery Trimmer was the hairdresser on an ocean liner, the Aquitania, going under the name of Gustave, and used to regularly do her hair and give her a massage. They get talking and Virginia is perfectly prepared to leave behind the crowded, sordid world of the current war in memories of happier times aboard luxury cruise liners. They have dinner then go back to her hotel room.

Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole

There is a comic running thread, which kicked off in the first book and runs through this one, about a top secret intelligence unit based in London, led by this Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole, which gathers intelligence from all over. It gained stray information about Guy and Apthorpe to open a file on him, completely misinterpreting the various events that happen to him, and interpreting them in a sinister light as if Guy is involved in some kind of sinister conspiracy.

In a way it is a distillation or exaggeration of the misinterpreting, distancing effect of gossip which I have identified as a key element in Waugh’s fiction. It is also a satire on the conspiracy theory mindset:

Somewhere in the ultimate curlicues of his mind, there was a Plan. Given time, given enough confidential material, he would succeed in knitting the entire quarrelsome world into a single net of conspiracy in which there were no antagonists, merely millions of men working, unknown to one another, for the same end; and there would be no more war. (p.79)

After four days of sensual bliss, Trimmer runs into the commanding officer he thought was far away in Iceland in the hotel bar. The man is incredulous and inclined to be angry, Trimmer makes up a cock and bull story about having been co-opted into the commando, manages to get away, and tells a not very surprised Virginia that he has to leave straightaway. He hastily writes a letter to Tommy actually requesting to join the commando. Jumbo and Guy see this, and advise against it.

The commando begin training in earnest for a landing on a Mediterranean island. Claire cheats in a night-time exercise to travel to a spot 12 miles distant, by commandeering a civilian bus and getting there before any other squad. This irks all the other officers involved in the exercise and, in his isolation, pushes Claire towards deeper friendship with Guy. They both feel like outsiders.

Trimmer returns and Tommy finds a place for him with a group loosely called ‘Specialists’. The head of this, Major Graves, says Trimmer can have charge of his sappers. A few days later Guy calls in on the laird and realises he’s been chatting to Trimmer. Thinks him an awful fake but he is in charge of the sappers and so has access to the laird’s obsession, explosives, so they are becoming matey. The laird takes him out to the cliffs to show him the spot where he dynamited the old cliffs onto the beach.

Guy has a surreal encounter with a tall, wild hatless man on the beach who turns out to be an expert in dietetics, Dr Glendening-Rees, a forager avant la lettre who’s been sent there by HOO HQ and is going to recommend to the troop that they abandon their usual diet and try to survive on limpets, seaweed and heather roots. It is decided that Trimmer and his little troop of sappers will be the victims of this experiment so they are dispatched into the wilds under the direction of Dr Glendening-Rees.

Improbably, surreally, a luxury yacht appears off the island, the Cleopatra. It used to belong to the famed socialite Mrs Julia Stitch (who played a pivotal role in the earlier novel, Scoop), but she is nowhere in sight. Instead it has been commandeered by a troop of top brass, consisting of Tommy Blackhouse, an admiral, General Whale, Brigadier Ritchie-Hook. Even Ian Kilbannock is included. He comes ashore, Guy takes him for lunch and he explains he finally escaped his dreaded Air Marshall and has got a new job as press liaison.

Navy ships arrive. For several days there is speculation. Tommy is told they are embarking on a ship-borne exercise and makes detailed plans. But this is a decoy. Once all the men from the various troops of the commando are aboard ship it is announced there will be no exercise. Instead they are sailing for real combat. They are to be collectively titled ‘Hookforce’.

Before embarking Tommy had an uncomfortable interview with Jumbo where he told him he wouldn’t be wanted. Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke had specifically said no, too old. Instead he is to report to HOO HQ in London. Ritchie-Hooke has personal command over Guy who has been given a role as Intelligence Officer.

The ships sail before trimmer and his little squad of sappers stagger back into Mugg town, haggard and unshaven after their seven-day experiment living wild in heather.

Interlude in South Africa

February 1941. Nine weeks after embarking, the three ships carrying the commando battalions have docked at Cape Town which, with its blazing lights at night and shops full of nice products is the opposite of blackout rationed Britain. It’s nine weeks since they left Mugg but four of them were spent ashore on Scapa Flow while Brigadier Ritchie-Hooke put them through training, up ‘biffing’ the surrounding hills day and night. The ships are taking the long way round Africa to the Suez Canal and the Middle East.

Guy has become even more friendly and confidential with Ivor Claire. They have a leisurely conversation in the hotel bar, then wandering round the streets, then back at the hotel, and then in the garden under the southern stars, which is actually a stylish way for Waugh to drop in the backstory of what happened in the intervening weeks.

Colonel Tommy turns up with the bad news that Ritchie-Hooke and the Brigade Major took off by plane from Brazzaville and haven’t been heard of since, presumed crashed, presumed dead.

A couple of fellow officers, Eddie and Bertie, spent the afternoon getting drunk, then trying to sober up again in order to take out a couple of young ladies, then they turn up back on the ship at the end of the evening, walking round the deck trying to sober up while, paradoxically, swigging from a bottle of powerful local liquor they’ve bought because it was named ‘Kommando’.

Book Two: In the Picture

Waugh shows how at a meeting of the top brass in Easter 1941, several further incidents involving the commandos (referred to as Special Service Forces) were reviewed, all of them unfortunate, such as the way that a) they lost their brigadier, Ritchie-Hooke b) when they arrived at the Suez Canal it was closed and c) when the canal was cleared their ships were commandeered to ferry Australian troops to Greece.

Major-General Whale, Director of Land Forces and nicknamed ‘Sprat’, defends his boys and manages to avoid getting them broken up. But he returns to his office aware they need to achieve a success of some kind, preferably one which can be promoted by the Ministry of Information in the press. He calls together his senior planners and asks them to recommend something which can achieve a quick win. Someone digs up ‘Operation Popgun’, a small assault on an unmanned island near Jersey.

Sprat approves it and tells Ian Kilbannock (who is now his chief information officer) it will be led by this MacTavish chap (who we also know as Trimmer) who’s in charge of the sappers unit (we saw how casual his appointment was back on Mugg.

Then the narrative cuts back to our hero, Guy, as he wakes in the commando’s temporary base in Sidi Bishr, then in the desert just outside the Egyptian city of Alexandria. Guy is still Intelligence Officer, Tommy Blackhouse is Deputy Commander with the acting rank of full colonel, and a new character is introduced, a small, bald, youngish man named Hound who is the Brigade Major. Major Hound does not like the irregular setup and behaviour of the commandos:

They had no transport, they had no cooks, they had far too many officers and sergeants, they wore a variety of uniforms and followed a multitude of conflicting regimental customs, they bore strange arms, daggers and toggle-ropes and tommy-guns.

Reading this little sequence about official disapproval of the commandos suddenly made me realise why Waugh was drawn to make them central to his big war trilogy – because they are unconventional, because there’s more scope for mischief, anarchy and comedy.

After some business establishing the fractious relations between Guy, Hound (who disapproves of the entire commando), Major Graves (who thinks he ought to be in command of X commando) and a new member of the commando, pale-eyed, journal-keeping Corporal-Major Ludovic, Tommy sends Guy into Alexandria to check up on Ivor Claire who managed to trip over a tent rope and twist his knee and chosen to instal himself in a private nursing home.

En route he drops into a Catholic church to make confession to a French priest who seems to ask rather too many questions about Guy’s brigade. Guy thinks he’s a spy and tries to track him down to the local clergy-house but gets no joy from the Arab doorman.

When he visits Ivor in his private hospital the latter informs him that the egregious Mrs Julia Stitch is in town, a one-woman dynamo of high socialising and bravado behaviour. She once visited the Castello Crouchback on her yacht with some very posh friends. Now, nearly 10 years later, she remembers it perfectly. She remembers everything perfectly. She is a comic prodigy.

Kissing Claire goodbye, she dragoons Guy into her car and for a mad drive across Alexandria, stopping at random moments and blocking all the traffic in order to point out to Guy ancient sites mentioned in the rare copy of E.M. Foster’s guide to Alexandria which she is reading. (Readers of Scoop will remember that, in that book, she drives a kind of baby motor car which she manages to drive into a downstairs men’s public lavatory.) Here she upsets all the local drivers and, in quest of a shoe shop she’s been told about, drives down an alleyway which becomes too narrow her car becomes wedged fast in it.

She obtains the shoes, or rather carpet slippers, she wants then forces Guy to hurry to catch a taxi back to the villa she and her husband have been assigned a little outside of town. It is a typical Stitch luncheon party, featuring a the Commander-in-Chief, a young Maharaja in the uniform of the Red Cross, a roving English cabinet minister, and an urbane pasha, and two little local millionairesses, sisters, who hang on Mrs Julia Stitch’s every word, comically misinterpreting them. They think Guy must be her lover, only reason such a lowly undistinguished officer could be there.

This leads to the comic incident whereby, when lunch is over, the Commander-in-Chief (presumably of the entire army in North Africa) offers Guy a lift back to his base and even directs his driver to go right into the base and drop him at his barracks – to the initial disbelief of captious Major Hound.

It is Holy Saturday, 12 April 1941. We know this because there is a brief description of Guy’s father, venerable old Mr Crouchback, breaking his lenten fast with lunch, a pint of burgundy and a luxurious pipe.

Kerstie Kilbannock

The scene suddenly cuts back to London, to describe the life of Kerstie Kilbannock, dutiful wife of Ian Kilbannock who we’ve met as information officer to Special Service Forces. Kerstie has taken two friends named Brenda and Zita into her house in (very smart) Eaton Terrace as paying guests, and to work alongside her, unpaid, in the canteen at No. 6 Transit Camp, London District. When she meets Virginia Troy at the Dorchester Hotel during an air raid, visibly hard up, she invites her to come and join the female menage.

Kerstie tells Virginia about a regular customer, a quite frightfully awful man they’ve nicknamed ‘Scottie’ and the reader is not altogether surprised when, a week or so later, this ‘Scottie’ saunters into the busy canteen at No. 6 Transit Camp, London District and turns out to be none other than Trimmer. He is momentarily taken aback, but nothing daunts Virginia and she says hello. She is obviously going to keep silent about their four days of passion in a Glasgow hotel in November, but that’s no reason not to be civil.

Trimmer is back in the frame because he is called in by General Whale and told he is to carry out a little operation, which will involve a journey by submarine. He is to take his squad and report to Portsmouth. Ian Kilbannock will be, as we’ve seen, accompanying him. Trimmer is taken as the epitome of a bad officer since he has mislaid his ‘section’, never calls them together, never inspects them, is only really semi-attached to the army at all.

In yet another coincidence, Kilbannock says he’ll need to prepare a bit of a profile for the press about Trimmer and asks him to pop into his place for a drink before going onto Portsmouth and, of course, when Trimmer thus pops in, it is to discover Kerstie and Virginia. There is a passage of social comedy, not least the way Ian Kilbannock realises from Trimmer, Kerstie and Virginia’s conversation that something is going on but can’t work out what.

Back in Egypt the small incident of the priest Guy thought was asking too many questions comes back to haunt him. Tommy calls him in to say the priest has definitely been identified as a spy and he has been reported talking to him. Guy says yes, he thought he was a spy, and he reported it to Major Hound. Major Hound who had, until that moment been quietly gloating in a corner of the room is now put on the spot and has to admit to Tommy that, yes, Guy did mention something about it. Tommy tells Hound to write a formal letter to HQ exonerating Guy. Eventually a copy of this letter finds its way to Colonel Grace-Groundling-Marchpole who adds it to his ever-expanding file on Guy Crouchback.

Operation Popgun

Trimmer and his little squad of eight men is kept hanging around at Portsmouth for weeks. Finally they are sent aboard a submarine, along with Ian Kilbannock and a lot of explosives. His description of a journey by submarine is interesting. Basically, boring with no sense of movement. After quite a few hours they surface at night but can’t find the island which is the objective. It is very foggy. An atmosphere of farcical amateurishness. Ian has had quite a few whiskeys to fortify himself i.e. is tipsy during this military operation.

‘I don’t like this at all,’ said Trimmer. ‘What the hell are we going to do?’
‘You’re in command, old boy. In your place I’d just push on.’
‘Would you?’
‘Certainly.’
‘But you’re drunk.’
‘Exactly. If I was in your place I’d be drunk too.’

They are fired on from her window by an old lady with a shotgun who swears at them in French. Turns out they are not on a little Channel island at all but have landed on mainland France. They run and tumble down a slope into a railway cutting. A slow train passes as they hide. It takes them 25 minutes to make it back to the beach. Trimmer is revealed as a catastrophically bad officer, with no idea what to do, lets the soldiers smoke once they’re ashore, runs away at the first shot etc. What Jumbo Trotter would call a ‘wrong ‘un’.

In his absence his sergeant led the men a little way inland and blew up the railway line then calmly returned to the beach where Trimmer was waiting impatiently, and embarked in the dinghies back to the submarine. The submarine signals ahead that the mission was a great success, and on arriving in Portsmouth McTavish / Trimmer and his men are hailed as heroes by Major Albright, GSO II (Planning), HOO HQ, and the General tells Ian to a) write it up and b) write citations for medals for the sergeant and Trimmer. Farce. Absurdity.

This is then wonderfully embellished by Kilbannock in the press release he gives to the papers (shades of Scoop and its satire on the fabulous lies routinely told by newspapers, shades crystallised when one of the characters mentions the Daily Beast and its proprietor Lord Copper). Then, in a sweet piece of plotting, is read by none other than Mr Crouchback in distant Matchet, who tells his friend Mrs Tickeridge what a fine fellow this Captain McTavish must be. Then it is relayed to the commando in Egypt where the colonel who suggested McTavish be included swanks himself on his ability to spot men and ridicules Guy’s scepticism about Trimmer’s abilities.

In fact the Trimmer affair becomes a stick to beat all Waugh’s enemies with. Head of the commando emphasises that news of the operation must be passed to the Spanish veterans who’ve been assigned to the unit. And the Labour members in the House of Commons get wind of the fact that Trimmer was rejected from the Halberdiers because of his working class background as a hairdresser i.e. snobbery and the old school tie.

He becomes so popular that a very senior meeting is convened to find him an appropriate post and General Whale is appalled to find himself being ordered to give him a senior command, maybe of an entire commando battalion. Ian Kilbannock helps his boss out with a wizard wheeze: Trimmer has a certain confident breezy style: how about sending him to America to promote Anglo-American friendship.

In Waugh’s hands the war is a kind of Engine of Absurdity; it takes ordinary peacetime absurdity and cranks it up to completely new levels.

The fall of Crete

Out in the real world Greece quickly falls to a well planned and executed German invasion 6 to 30 April 1941. 7,000 British and Australian troops are captured. There’s a panic-stricken evacuation of the rest. Guy’s commando is put in charge of defending Alexandria as the war in North Africa turns in the Germans’ favour.

Quite suddenly X commando are told they are to be embarked and sail to the relief of Crete which the Germans, following the total capture of Greece, are now attacking. The complicated business of embarking the entire commando and setting sail, but next morning Guy wakes to find they’re sailing back to Egypt, the ship’s engines have become faulty. Tommy and Guy go for a splendid meal.

Next morning, rather hungover, they embark on a new ship and steam in a heavy swell to the waters round Crete. Here Colonel Tommy slips off a ladder and breaks his leg. Guy finds a haggard senior officer, a Lieutenant-Commander from Crete, in conversation with the captain, saying it’s all a shambles. A motor launch comes alongside their ship, they think it’s for them to embark in but in fact it’s full of walking wounded who painfully come aboard, overfilling the ship. Its skipper says he has another run to make then has orders to scuttle the launch. He tells Guy it’s all over: Crete has fallen.

Nonetheless X commando’s orders are to embark so they climb down and in and are ferried to the wrecked quay which is packed with wounded men clamouring to get on the boat and away. Hound and Guy shout for any representatives of B commando and a battered weary man replies who tells them its commanding officer Prentice is dead, killed during an attack on an airfield. It is 26 May 1941.

The disintegration of Major Hound

In Tommy Blackhouse’s absence Major Hound is in charge of X commando and the core of this long complex account of the collapse and evacuation of Crete is a painful description of the mental and moral collapse of Major Hound. Very early on he tries to cultivate a friendship with Guy by asking if he can address him by his first name (fine) and telling guy his own nickname is Fido. From that first misplaced confidence, it is steadily downhill (p.175).

Under the stress of the chaos and confusion, and huge columns of men marching to the sea, and the constant attacks of Stuka dive bombers, the lack of sleep and, very quickly, the hunger and the thirst, all Major Hound’s book training goes out of the window, he makes foolish decisions, he makes wild decisions, stabbing randomly at a map to indicate where they’ll set up their HQ, then hunger drives him to muck in with the ordinary soldiers and lose all authority.

And then he abandons his post, abandons his men, and begins a wild hallucinatory march to the sea and escape. At one point he slips off a path and falls through the branches of a tree into a deep gully, and I expected him to die. He is thoroughly looted by a huge Cretan peasant and then, to my surprise, is discovered by Corporal-Major Ludovic.

Ludovic has already impressed everyone he meets as an odd fish, a sense confirmed by the philosophical journal he keeps and which Waugh quotes for the reader. When Major Hound insists on driving his men in a lorry up to a location he has almost arbitrarily chosen will be the commando’s HQ, Ludovic begins to display his skills at scrounging and at talking to the common soldiers in their own ‘plebeian’ tongue, or to Australian or New Zealand troops, as easily as talking posh to the officers.

Anyway, Ludovic discovers Major Hound lying bruised in this valley and helps him back to what turns out to be a very cosy cave Ludovic and half the rest of the Major’s troop have assembled up the hill. Seeing which way the land lay, they set about looting and scrounging within a day of arriving and have built up an impressive supply of food. His ulterior motivation emerges when Ludovic frankly tells him that they’ve tried to get aboard one of the launches evacuating men, but there are thousands waiting on the quays and the guards are only letting through troops of men accompanied by an officer. Aha.

Guy among the Halberdiers on Crete

Meanwhile Guy very much does not go to pieces. After Major Hound disappears, Guy makes his own way back towards the sea in the three-ton lorry they’d set out in, having a series of chaotic encounters, for example picking up a venerable old Greek general and giving him and his ADC a lift, running into a German motor cyclist, both sides eyeballing each for a moment before turning round and retreating. He stumbles into an abandoned Greek village and finds two brown-eyed girls guarding the body of a dead soldier. Guy notices he is a Catholic and say a prayer over his body. In some ways he likes travelling alone and travelling light.

But eventually he finds himself at the headquarters of his old regiment, the Halberdiers. Just to be clear, Guy was a proud member of the Halberdiers until he blotted his copybook at the end of Men at Arms, and was then seconded to the commandos, X commando in particular, the one led by Tommy Blackhouse up in the Isle of Mugg. The overall title given the commandos is ‘Hookforce’, even after it becomes known that Ritchie-Hooke has gone missing presumed dead in Africa.

So Guy is delighted to be suddenly among friends again when he discovers the Halberdiers HQ at a place called Babali Hani, men like Colonel Tickeridge and number of the men, including some from his own D company. But when he asks to take part in a forward movement against the enemy he is turned down. He is not part of the regiment any more and the middle of a battle is no place to start swapping units. And he feels the familiar Guy Crouchback of being an outsider, an alien, with no family, that has dogged him all his life:

A few hours earlier he had exulted in his loneliness. Now the case was altered. He was a ‘guest from the higher formation’, a ‘Hookforce body’, without place or function, a spectator. And all the deep sense of desolation which he had sought to cure, which from time to time momentarily seemed to be cured, overwhelmed him as of old. His heart sank. It seemed to him as though literally an organ of his body were displaced, subsiding, falling heavily like a feather in a vacuum jar; Philoctetes set apart from his fellows by an old festering wound; Philoctetes without his bow. (p.210)

At least Tickeridge allows him to accompany him in a visit to the front line, Halberdier units spread across a shallow valley, coming under mortar fire from the Germans opposite. Guy observes the Halberdiers withdraw their line a little. The plan is for the Halberdiers to withdraw through Hookforce who will provide a last line of defence. Guy returns to his own troop to begin to organise them. The absence of Major Hound is not mentioned as he briefs reliable Sergeant Smiley.

Trimmer the PR phenomenon

Cut to London. Ian Kilbannock is touting Trimmer the war hero round the press, and has a date to meet three hard-bitten American journalists at the Savoy. Trimmer has become infatuated with Virginia who says he disgusts her. This is the opportunity for some pretty crude satire of American journalists, who Waugh has named Scab Dunz, Bum Schlum, and Joe Mulligan and who Ian is trying to persuade that Trimmer is the heroic face of a new classless Britain. The ramshackle journalists get drunk and sentimental, a crude caricature of belligerent, ignorant Yanks.

But Trimmer is genuinely haunted by his four days of love with Virginia in Glasgow. He can’t concentrate and Ian is worried because Trimmer is about the only good news propaganda coup he and his department have had all year. All this he explains to Virginia when he gets back to his HOO HQ office in Marchmain House for he has got her a job working as his secretary. She did it precisely to get away from the bloody canteen and avoid Trimmer, but now Ian tells her she has to do her patriotic duty and see him, cheer him up, gee him up to perform better in his visits to munitions factories and so on. the war effort depends on it!

Guy at Sphakia

It is 31 May 1941. Guy has kept in touch with moving HQ and followed orders to march his men down to this hill overlooking the sea. Their task is to hold up the enemy while the last stragglers leave the beach and then surrender.

He has a last chat with Ivor Claire, both speculating what it will be like in a prisoner of war camp, then he falls exhausted, like everyone else, shattered.

Dawn finds Guy in the wrecked harbour with thousands of other abandoned and exhausted soldiers, foraging for food and water, smashing their weapons and any other smashable equipment so the Germans don’t get it, the enormous litter of war.

After gazing at the twinkling Med for a while he decides on a whim to go for a swim, luxuriating in the clear water of a cove round the corner from the filthy harbour, floating on his back looking up at the cloudless blue sky. Beautiful evocative description. Eventually he swims over to a spur of rock sheltering the cove and is just pulling himself out onto a rocky shelf when to his amazement a hand is stretched out to help him and it is…Corporal-Major Ludovic.

Up and out he gets and they talk. The subject of Major Hound is raised and discussed in a sentence, the reader getting the strong impression Ludovic used him to get to the beach and then… dumped him…or murdered him? Guy asks him what the devil he’s doing here and Ludovic, in that unnerving way of his, replies that he was contemplating suicide, diving into the sea and swimming south till he drowns. He asks Tony whether that would count as suicide, theologically speaking.

Tony doesn’t know and moves the conversation onto swapping survival stories, then Guy fills him in on the final orders i.e. surrender to the Germans. They both sit surveying the scene of hundreds of men engaged in various pointless activities, including some soldiers fixing a local fishing boat. After a while he notices they’ve manhandled it down the beach and into the sea and are fiddling with the engine. It kicks into life with a puff of black smoke. The little sapper who’s been leading the team and shouts at the beach that they’re taking the boat to freedom, anyone want to come?

Guy consults his men who all prefer to take their chances on dry land then wades out and hauls himself over the side of the boat. Only then does he realise Ludovic has followed him having heard something, but both men are drowned out by the enormous racket of the diesel outboard motor. They start to chug away from the beach and then Guy sees what suddenly motivated Ludovic. Out of the sky appears a wing of Stukas which proceed to systematically dive bomb the beach and harbour, massacring the men waiting there, mangled bits of body thrown into the air. One Stuka makes a strafe over the little boat but then returns to the richer picking onshore. And so, having narrowly escaped annihilation, the little local fishing boat puts out of the picture, one of the last survivors of the ghastly fiasco and failure which was the defence of Crete.

Hospital in Alexandria

Part two chapter seven opens with an absolutely brilliant description of Guy coming round in the hospital in Egypt, of the world of silence and great distance which he inhabits as he recovers from shock and exposure.

Confused memories drift through his mind – he refuses to talk. Then one day Mrs Stitch breezes into his room, repeating the famous quote from the incident on the Italian island and without thinking Guy replies. It is one of the most wonderful moments in a wonderful book – now he can talk again he pops down the hall to see Tommy Blackhouse who’s still laid up with his broken leg. Tony tells him he was carried ashore by Ludovic when their ship finally reached shore in Egypt. Of the four or five other chaps on the boat there was no sign. In the third book in the trilogy it is darkly hinted that Ludovic did away with them, though we never find out for sure.

The Ivor Claire affair

Tommy and Guy discuss the case of Ivor. There is a great scandal because Ivor’s troop were unambiguously ordered to wait till the last minute and then surrender to the Germans. Mrs Stitch tells Guy that Ivor made his way to the beach for last orders and there found a launch leaving whose captain ordered him to get aboard and be saved, claiming another launch was on its way to collect his men. Of course the second launch never arrived and so Ivor stands accused of disobeying a direct order and abandoning his men.

Guy is appalled and disillusioned. He considered Ivor a flower of English gentlemanliness, but turns out to be a sneak and cad. To be honest, I spent the last pages confused because I couldn’t see the difference between Guy who left his men on the beach (to be bombed to death) and made it back to Alex, and Ivor who left his men in the hills and made it back to Alex. What would Ivor letting himself be captured have done for the war effort? This is the common sense view taken by Mrs Stitch who appears to have been involved in spiriting Ivor away to distant India on some secondment, where he can sit out the war among people who know nothing of the story and don’t care.

Staying with Mrs Stitch

Mrs Stitch insists Guy comes and stays with her at the swish villa assigned to her or, more accurately, her very well connected husband Algernon (Algie). It is a comic conceit that Julia has inherited from her strict Victorian grandparents a belief that bachelors should not be pampered and so awards him a squalid concrete bunker of a room, down at basement level, liberally populated by cockroaches.

But he gets to lie on their chaise longue, be waited on hand and foot and to attend some truly swanky parties. One day Julia returns from town with the staggering news that Germany has invaded Russia, 22 June 1941 (p.239).

Mrs Stitch asks Guy if there’s anyone he’s like to see and he says old Major Tickeredge – so he comes to lunch and is awed by the VIPs around him, but after lunch stuns Guy by saying Ben Ritchie-Hook is alive after all!

With the wiping out of X commando Guy is looking forward to being returned to the Halberdiers so is very upset to receive a letter delivered by motorcycle courier ordering him to join a ship the following morning which is to take him back to Blighty. He drives into town to see the officer who signed the order, who tells him it comes from the very top. He begs Mrs Stitch to fix it but she can’t. Very upset. There is a whiff of implication that Mrs Stitch in fact arranged it in order to get Guy completely out of circulation while she spirited her favourite, Ivor Claire, off to safe obscurity out in India.

Epilogue

It takes eight long weeks sailing in a rusty old hulk, Canary Castle, right round Africa with a long stopover in Durban to be refitted. But eventually Guy arrives back in England, back in London and back in his club, Bellamy’s.

This brief epilogue opens with no narratorial introduction, just dialogue. We have got to know the so well we can identify the speakers. It recalls the liberal use of the same technique in Vile Bodies, the early 1930s novel this shares a surprising amount with.

And of course there is a simpler pattern going on here, which is that Bellamy’s is where the novel opens and where it closes. Symmetry.

Thus the epilogue opens with Guy being accosted by the usual suspects, not least the humorous press man Ian Kilbannock and his earnest MP brother-in-law, Box-Bender. The former wants to know more about the Ivor Claire affair, then informs him Virginia is doing her patriotic duty and accompanying Trimmer on a tour of munitions factories in Scunthorpe, Hull, Huddersfield, Halifax…

Box-Bender informs Guy that his nephew Tony has written from his German prisoner of war camp asking for works of religious devotion, which troubles him. Why should it? asks Guy.

All the conversation is about help for Russia, Tanks for Russia Week, his allying with Russia has, at least, motivated the working classes to work harder in those factories. And bloody good thing, too!

Guy never wanted to come back, he wanted to join the Halberdiers in the Middle East but when he reports at Halberdiers barracks the C-in-C tells him it was the doctors at Alexandria’s hospital who reported that Guy needed a complete change of scene. (Or is that all part of Mrs Stitch’s ruse?)

And so the novel ends with Guy back where he began, practising drill on the barracks parade ground, waiting to find his place in the big world around him. Except that things are now no longer so clear and (childishly) simple as they were two years earlier. The performance of British services have been lamentable, the man he considered ‘the flower of English chivalry’ Ivor Claire, turns out to let the side down; but overarching everything, the alliance with barbaric Bolshevik Russia hugely compromises the claim of the war to be any kind of moral crusade. And so the novel ends with Guy back at square one, looking for a role and repossessed by his characteristic gloom and pessimism:

It was just such a sunny, breezy Mediterranean day two years before when he read of the Russo-German alliance, when a decade of shame seemed to be ending in light and reason, when the Enemy was plain in view, huge and hateful, all disguise cast off; the modern age in arms. Now that hallucination was dissolved, like the whales and turtles on the voyage from Crete, and he was back after less than two years’ pilgrimage in a Holy Land of illusion in the old ambiguous world, where priests were spies and gallant friends proved traitors and his country was led blundering into dishonour.

Themes and images

Public school

As pointed out so many times, when Waugh (or his characters) reach for a comparison, almost always the first ones that come to mind are taken from their experiences at prep school or private school. Thus, for Guy, in the middle of an air raid:

Guy was momentarily reminded of Holy Saturday at Downside; early gusty March mornings of boyhood; the doors wide open in the unfinished butt of the Abbey; half the school coughing; fluttering linen; the glowing brazier and the priest with his hyssop, paradoxically blessing fire with water.

Snobbery

Waugh’s belief in a class system can be deduced from comments he makes about being an officer in the army:

In all his military service Guy never ceased to marvel at the effortless transitions of intercourse between equality and superiority. It was a figure which no temporary officer ever learned to cut. Some of them were better than the regulars with their men. None ever achieved the art of displaying authority over junior officers without self-consciousness and consequent offence. Regular soldiers were survivals of a happy civilization where differences of rank were exactly defined and frankly accepted.

‘Where differences of rank were exactly defined and frankly accepted.’ That is his ideal world, a medieval world of precise rankings, accompanied, ideally, by sumptuary laws.

The working classes rarely appear in his narratives except as servants, waiters, valets, drivers, cooks and so on. They rarely if ever speak, they are nameless serfs at the beck and call of the only people who have agency, Waugh and his class.

If they do speak it is either to reveal they are solid chaps – like some of the brave soldiers Guy meets in Crete whose dialogue is entirely restricted to either ‘Yes, sir’ or ‘No, sir’ – or it is to reveal their coarse, petty money-mindedness, as is the case with the scheming Cuthberts who try and evict nice old Mr Crouchback from their hotel, and are indicted either by their dropped h’s and plebeian idioms or, more subtly, by their complete failure to understand the superior moral standards of their lords and masters:

‘He’s a deep one and no mistake. I never have understood him, not properly. Somehow his mind seems to work different than yours and mine.’

Amateurism

I appreciate from everything I’ve ever read about them that lots of plans and arrangements in times of war are shambolic, but Waugh goes out of his way to emphasise the shambolic nature of pretty much everything his hero encounters, from office politics and rivalries, the loss and misplacement of paperwork, errors over train or shipping times and so on.

These litanies of relatively minor incompetence are then reflected in actual military operations – on a small scale by Operation Popgun, on a massive scale in the fiasco of Crete (which itself followed the fiasco of Norway [described in Put Out More Flags] and the fiasco of Dakar [described in Men at Arms]).

The breezy incompetence displayed by almost every aspect of the military is connected to the cult of upper-class nonchalance, of displaying your upper class credentials by refusing to be seen to be trying too hard, and refusing be fazed or perturbed by anything.

This is exemplified by the elephantine imperturbability of old Jumbo Trotter or, in a different way, by the administrative officer of HOO HQ who gets used to hearing the most preposterous stories. ‘My entire platoon has just been ambushed and massacred.’ ‘Oh, I say, bad show, old boy.’

Drunkenness

At luncheon Mr Crouchback drank a pint of burgundy.

Everyone gets drunk. ‘Have a drink?’ remains the watchword among these people, as it had been in the late 1920s and throughout the 1930s. ‘Tight’ is the word they use for ‘drunk’. The narrative describes what this or that individual is like ‘when they’re tight’ because it is just taken for granted that everyone will gets tight at some point or another, sometimes every night.

These posh characters’ haunt is their London club, where they drink prodigious amounts of booze, indeed the novel opens with the image of fine wine and brandy flowing in the gutters of Blitzed London. Evening drinks and evening dinner are always accompanied by plentiful booze. On Mugg they get drunk and in Cape Town they get drunk and in Alexandria they get drunk.

They ate lobster pilaff and a great dish of quail cooked with Muscat grapes…They ate six birds each and drank a bottle of champagne. Then they had green artichokes and another bottle. (p.163)

The character who dominates the first book, Apthorpe, literally drinks himself to death (and is thus a spiritual cousin of pretty boy Sebastian Flyte who drinks himself into impoverished middle age in Brideshead Revited).

And Waugh venerates this drunkenness, finds it admirable, stylish, amusing. I was really struck by the ending of the short South Africa interlude, where we have witnessed Eddie and Bertie getting drunk all day long before going off to a club to drink some more, while Guy admires Ivor Claire do a kind of sub-Noel Coward impersonation of nonchalance and airy superiority. Guy delivers quite a pompous reflection on these three fellow officers:

Guy thought instead with deep affection of X Commando. ‘The Flower of the Nation’, Ian Kilbannock had ironically called them. He was not far wrong. There was heroic simplicity in Eddie and Bertie. Ivor Claire was another pair of boots entirely, salty, withdrawn, incorrigible. Guy remembered Claire as he first saw him in the Roman spring in the afternoon sunlight amid the embosoming cypresses of the Borghese Gardens, putting his horse faultlessly over the jumps, concentrated as a man in prayer. Ivor Claire, Guy thought, was the fine flower of them all. He was quintessential England, the man Hitler had not taken into account, Guy thought.

This strikes me as a ludicrous thing to write. Hitler had accurately counted on the decadence of the class which ran the British Empire, which had appeased him throughout the mid-1930s and which, for a year or so after the declaration of war, continued to seek some kind of accommodation with him, led in the cabinet by Lord Halifax. Hitler, of course, had many sympathisers among the British upper classes, even among Waugh’s own friends, even the abdicated king.

The thought that two drunks and a camp horserider represented the spirit which defeated Hitler is absurd. The brute fact of the English Channel and the heroic efforts of the RAF during the Battle of Britain stymied Hitler’s ambitions but didn’t defeat him, just led to a stalemate. Where Hitler did badly miscalculate was in thinking Soviet Russia would collapse like a pack of cards in the autumn of 1941 and then thinking he could take on Russia and America after Pearl Harbour (December 1941). Set against the enormity of these vast mistakes, the antics of Guy and his drunken shambolic friends seem risible, almost shameful.

‘What say we all have a drink?’ said Bum. (p.215)

(Then again, I suppose you could argue this pompous passage reflects badly on Guy not his author; that it has an artistic purpose which is to set Guy’s childish patriotism up for the fall it receives when Ivor Claire betrays his high calling and lets the side down. Maybe it’s there to set up this further step in Guy’s slow disillusionment with the war and the values it’s supposedly being fought for.)

Childishness

Arguably the amateurishness and the drunkenness are related to the prep school obsession in that they are all childish. These people live in a state of permanently retarded development. The most praised characters, Mr Crouchback and Jumbo Trotter are, in effect, schoolboys protected by their prep schoolboy innocence. The comedy of a character like Mrs Stitch is that she’s a childish cartoon. Ditto the comic figure who dominates the first book, Apthorpe. Occasionally he writes phrases which bring the implicit childishness of the entire worldview into the open:

Guy set his intelligence section to make a map of the camp, for Major Hound had returned from one of his trips to Cairo with a case labelled ‘intelligence stores’ which proved to contain a kindergarten outfit of coloured inks and drawing materials.

Mental illness

The exception which proves the rule to the dominating sense of childishness is Waugh’s odd fictional relationship with mental illness and states of extremity. They tend to come at the end of the books as a climax to the narrative, hence the description of Tony Last’s delirium then despair at the end of A Handful of Dust.

And so the final passages of this brilliant novel include a) a prolonged passage describing the moral and mental collapse of Major Hound and b) the wonderful, luminous description of Guy’s detached mental state and mutism in the hospital in Alexandria, as he recovers from the terrible effects of prolonged exposure at sea, but for a long time is incapable of responding to anyone, even friends, doctors, nurses.

But there is a wide array of odd mental states throughout the book: for example, the laird of Mugg with his potty obsession with explosives; the laird’s great-niece Katie Carmichael with her outrageous support of the Nazis; remember that Guy’s elder brother, Ivo, went mad and starved himself to death. Guy himself suffers from recurrent feelings of emptiness and depression. Waugh’s books are weirder and deeper than you first realise.

Credit

Officers and Gentlemen by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1955. All references are to the 1984 Penguin paperback edition.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

Industry and Empire: From 1750 to the Present Day by Eric Hobsbawm (1968)

Eric Hobsbawm (1917 to 2012) was one of Britain’s leading Marxist historians. Of Jewish parentage he spent his boyhood in Vienna and Berlin during the rise of the Nazis. With Hitler’s accession to power in 1933, the family moved to Britain in 1933, although his Wikipedia page is at pains to point out that, because his father was originally from London’s East End, he had always had British citizenship. Hobsbawm excelled at school and went to Cambridge where he joined the communist party in 1936.

Twenty-two when the Second World War broke out, Hobsbawm served in the Royal Engineers and the Army Educational Corps, though he was prevented from serving overseas due to his communist beliefs. In 1947 he got his first job as a lecturer in history at Birkbeck College, University of London, the start of a long and very successful career as a historian, which included stints teaching in America at Stanford and MIT.

As a Marxist Hobsbawm had a special interest in what he called the ‘dual revolutions’ i.e. the political revolution in France in 1789 and the parallel industrial revolution in Britain. His most famous books are the trilogy describing what he himself termed ‘the long 19th century’, i.e. from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789 to the Great War in 1914. These three books are:

The Age of Revolution: Europe 1789 to 1848 (1962)
The Age of Capital: 1848 to 1875 (1975)
The Age of Empire: 1875 to 1914 (1987)

A series he completed with a fourth volume, his account of the ‘short’ 20th century, The Age of Extremes (1994).

Industry and Empire was commissioned by the high-minded Pelican books back in the mid-1960s, as the third and concluding volume in a series about economic history (part 1 being The Medieval Economy and Society by M.M. Postan, part 2 Reformation to Industrial Revolution by Hobsbawm’s fellow Marxist historian, Christopher Hill).

I read it as a student and had a vague memory of finding it rather boring, but on rereading I found it riveting. Setting out to cover such a huge period of just over 200 years means that individual chapters are relatively brief at around 20 pages long and highly focused on their subjects.

State of England 1750

Arguably the most interesting section is the opening 50 pages where Hobsbawm sets the scene for the industrial revolution which is to come, describing the state of England (the book focuses overwhelmingly on England with only occasional remarks about the other three nations of the UK) around 1750, and making a number of interesting observations.

The most interesting is that, although England was ruled by an oligarchy of a relatively small number of mighty families – maybe as few as 200 – who owned most of the land, the key thing about them was that they were a post-revolutionary elite (p.32). Their equivalents in France or the German or Italian states were genuinely hidebound reactionaries obsessed with aping the accoutrements and etiquette of kings and princes. By sharp contrast England’s elite had survived not one but two revolutions (the execution of Charles I in 1649, then the Glorious Revolution of 1688). As a result they did not submit to their monarch but had reached a position of constitutional ascendancy over their king in the form of a dominating Parliament. They were powerful and independent.

Above all, England’s elite were devoted to commerce and profit. One of the motive forces of the civil war of the 1640s had been King Charles’s insistence on granting monopolies of trade to favoured courtiers and spurning genuine entrepreneurs who came to form a powerful bloc against him. But all that had been sorted out a century ago. Now this politically independent oligarchy was interested in trade and profit of all sorts.

But these were only one of the many differences which distinguished 1750s England from the continent. Foreign visitors also remarked on the well-tended, well-organised state of the land and the thoroughness of its agriculture. They commented on the flourishing of trade: England was noted as a very business-like nation, with well-developed markets for domestic goods of all kinds.

Multiple origins of the Industrial Revolution

Hobsbawm points out that the industrial revolution is one of the most over-determined and over-explained events in history. He amusingly rattles off a list of reasons which have been given by countless historians over the years for why the industrial revolution first occurred in Britain, for why Britain was for several generations the unique workshop of the world and pioneer of revolutionary new ways of working, new industrial machinery, new ways of producing and distributing goods. Historians have attributed it to:

Protestantism and the Protestant work ethic
the ‘scientific revolution’ of the 1660s
Britain’s political maturity compared with Europe (i.e. the Glorious Revolution)
the availability of large sources of coal
the presence of numerous fast-flowing streams to provide water power
a run of good harvests in mid-18th century
Britain’s better road and canal infrastructure

And many more. The full list is on page 37.

Hobsbawm’s explanation: colonies and colonial trade

Hobsbawm lists all these putative causes in order to dismiss them and attribute Britain’s primariness to one reason. The first wave of the industrial revolution was based on the mass processing of raw cotton into textiles. 100% of Britain’s cotton was imported from the slave plantations of the American South and a huge percentage of it was then exported to foreign markets, in Africa and then to India where, in time, the authorities found it necessary to stifle the native cloth-making trade in order to preserve the profits of Lancashire factory owners. The facts are astonishing: Between 1750 and 1770 Britain’s cotton exports multiplied ten times over (p.57). In the post-Napoleonic decades something like one half of the value of all British exports consisted or cotton products, and at their peak (in the 1830s), raw cotton made up twenty per cent of total net imports (p.69). So the industrial revolution in Britain was driven by innovations in textile manufacturing and these utterly relied on the web of international trade, on importing raw materials from America and then exporting them in huge quantities to captive markets in British colonies.

Cotton manufacture, the first to be industrialised, was essentially tied to overseas trade. (p.48)

If Britain had had to rely on a) domestic sources of raw materials and b) its domestic market to sell the finished product to, although the native population was growing during the 1700s it wasn’t growing that fast. What provided the crucial incentive to the cloth manufacturers of Lancashire to invest and innovate was the certainty of a vast overseas market for manufactured cloth in the British Empire, which was finally made safe for British control after the Seven Years War (1756 to 1763).

Britain had established itself as master of the world’s seas as a result of the Seven Years War and already had a thriving trade infrastructure at ports like Glasgow, Liverpool, Bristol and London. What kick-started things, in Hobsbawm’s view, was the opening up of overseas markets. It was the ability to send ships full of cloth products to India and other colonial markets, to make large profits and then reinvest the profits in further innovations that led a generation of Lancashire entrepreneurs to experiment with new devices and machines and ways of working.

So, Hobsbawm’s thesis rests on a set of linked propositions, that:

Britain had a uniquely warlike series of governments through the 18th century (pp.49 to 50)
Britain was able to rely on a far more advanced and sizeable navy than its nearest rival, France, which was always distracted by wars on the continent and so preferred to spend resources on its army, thus, in effect, handing rule of the oceans over to Britain
in the mid-1700s a series of foreign wars conquered all of north America, most of the Caribbean and India for Britain
and it was the complex web of international trading thus established by its a) warlike government and b) its world-dominating navy which provided the economic framework which motivated the technological and business innovations which led to the Industrial Revolution (pages 48 to 51)

This vast and growing circulation of goods…provided a limitless horizon of sales and profit for merchant and manufacturer. And it was the British – who by their policy and force as much as by their enterprise and inventive skill – captured these markets. (p.54)

And again:

Behind our industrial revolution there lies this concentration on the colonial and underdeveloped markets overseas, the successful battle to deny them to anyone else…the exchange of overseas primary products for British manufactures was to be the foundation of our international economy. (p.54)

And:

The Industrial Revolution was generated in these decades – after the 1740s, when this massive but slow growth in the domestic economies combined with the rapid – after 1750 extremely rapid – expansion of the international economy; and it occurred in the country which seized its international opportunities to corner a major share of the overseas market. (p.54)

1. Manufacturers in a pre-industrial country, in agriculture and artisans in trade, have to wait fairly passively on market requirements. But an aggressive foreign policy which seizes territory overseas creates new markets, potentially huge markets with massive opportunities for rapid and massive expansion (p.42).

2. Hobsbawm makes the interesting point that it wasn’t the inventions per se that accelerated and automated cotton manufacture. The level of engineering skill required to start the industrial revolution was very low. Most of the technology and ideas already existed or had been lying around for decades (pages 59 to 60). It was the guarantee of tasty profits by exporting finished goods to captive colonial markets which gave individual entrepreneurs the certainty of profit and so the incentive to experiment and innovate. One factory owner’s innovation was copied by all his rivals, and so an ever-accelerating cycle of innovation was created.

All the other conditions historians have suggested (listed above) were present and many were important contributors. But it was the spur of guaranteed profits abroad which, in Hobsbawm’s opinion, provided the vital spark.

Is British industrialisation a model for the developing world?

It is an odd feature of the book that Hobsbawm has barely articulated his thesis before he is worrying about the plight of the developing world. He keeps asking, particularly in the opening ‘Origins’ chapters, whether Britain’s experience of industrialisation could be a model for the newly industrialising and newly independent post-colonial nations of the 1960s to emulate?

The short answer is an emphatic No and in answering it, Hobsbawm makes clearer than ever the uniqueness of Britain’s history. Britain was unique in being able to fumble its way towards industrialisation slowly and piecemeal and on a very small scale, one factory owner here trying out a new machine, another, there, devising a more efficient way of organising his factory hands and so on.

There was no ‘barrier to entry’ into the industrialised state for Britain because it was the first nation ever to do so, and so had the luxury of making it up as it went along. It started from 0. A little bit of tinkering could produce surprising rewards. There were no leaps but a series of pragmatic steps. And there was no competition and no pressure from anyone else.

Obviously, 150 years later, any nation trying to industrialise in the 1960s (or now) is in a totally different situation in at least two obvious ways: the shift from non-industrial to modern industrial production now represents an enormous leap. The technology and scale and infrastructure required for industrialisation is huge and can only begin to be achieved by dint of enormous planning (to create a co-ordinated energy and transport and distribution infrastructure) and huge investment, money which by definition a non-industrialised country does not have, and so has to go cap-in-hand to international banks which themselves dictate all kinds of terms and conditions.

Above all, a newly industrialising nation will be entering a very crowded marketplace where over a hundred nations are already fighting tooth and claw to maintain competitive advantage in a multitude of areas and practices, not least trade and tariff and tax and financial arrangements which a country with few financial resources will find difficult to match.

At first I found Hobsbawm’s adversions to this question of whether Britain’s history and example could be useful to developing nations a modish digression (it occurs on pages 38, 39, 61 to 62 and many more). But in fact placing British history in this contemporary frame turns out to be very thought-provoking. It not only sheds light on the challenges developing nations face, still, today – but also highlights the huge advantage Britain enjoyed back in the later 18th century by virtue of being the pioneer.

Because it industrialised and developed a transport infrastructure and financial systems first, Britain could afford to do them pretty badly and still triumph. Nobody, nowadays, could industrialise as amateurishly as Britain did.

To contemporaries who didn’t understand economics (pretty much everyone) the transformation and inexorable rise of Britain seemed inexplicable, miraculous, and it was this that gave rise to the simplistic, non-economic, cultural explanations for Britain’s success – all those explanations which foreground the anti-authoritarian, Protestant spirit of free enquiry, the independence of thought and action guaranteed by the Glorious Revolution, the nonconformist values of thrift and discipline and hard work espoused by dissenting tradesmen and factory owners excluded from politics or the professions by the Test Acts and so forced to make their way in the world through business, innovation and investment. And so on.

All these are aspects of the truth but are, ultimately, non-economists’ ways of trying to explain economics. And Hobsbawm is first and foremost an economic historian and proposing a Marxist thesis – Britain’s industrial primacy was based on a) her aggressive control of the seas and b) the huge and complex web of transoceanic trading arrangements which linked foreign suppliers with endless marketing opportunities in her foreign colonies.

The second industrial revolution

The second industrial revolution is the term commonly applied to the second wave of industrialisation associated with the rise of the new capital goods industries of coal, iron and steel, generally credited with starting in the 1840s.

Hobsbawm pauses to consider the teasing counter-factual notion that the industrial revolution based on textiles alone might conceivably have fizzled out in the 1830s, for the 15 years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars saw a catastrophic depression with much rural poverty. If nothing new had come along, it is conceivable that industrial development might have stalled or even stopped and the world remained at the level of having highly efficient machines to turn out cloth and no more.

But the railways came along. Hobsbawm explains that the great railway ‘mania’ of the 1840s was the result of the huge accumulation of capital derived from textiles looking for something to invest in (p.112). This explains the hysterical tone of wild investment and speculative mania which surrounded the early railways, and the irrationality of many of the lines which were opened with great fanfare only to go bust within years. To quote Wikipedia:

The mania reached its zenith in 1846, when 263 Acts of Parliament setting up new railway companies were passed, with the proposed routes totalling 9,500 miles (15,300 km). About a third of the railways authorised were never built — the companies either collapsed due to poor financial planning, were bought out by larger competitors before they could build their line, or turned out to be fraudulent enterprises to channel investors’ money into other businesses.

Between 1830 and 1850 6,000 miles of railways were opened in Britain (p.110) soaking up an investment of £240 million of capital (p.112), most of them during the intensest period of railway mania in between 1844 and 1846. By way of comparison, the total mileage of the modern UK railway network is around 11,000 miles.

Social historians dwell on the immense cultural changes the coming of the railways created. I remember being struck as a student when I learned that the standardisation of time and clocks across the UK required for railway timetables to work, was a huge innovation which dragged even the remotest locations into a modern, synchronised timeframe. If you visit any of the seaside towns of Britain you’ll discover their fortunes were transformed with the coming of the railways which allowed large numbers of visitors to travel cheaply to the coast, causing a building boom in hotels. And so on.

But as an economic historian, Hobsbawm makes the more obvious point that the building of all these railways required a vast expansion in the production of iron and then, quickly, of the more durable material, steel.

The railways acted as an immense spur to technical innovations in all aspects of metal manufacture, which in turn created a huge increase in demand for the coal to fuel all this industrial production, which in its turn created a need for quicker, more cost-effective bulk transportation, and so commercial motivation for yet more railways, and for trains which were more powerful, more cost effective, and so on. Innovation in one field spurred innovation all down the line.

British investors were able to invest because the act of investing in business speculations was itself a fast-growing area of business activity, creating cadres of stockbrokers and financial lawyers, jobs which didn’t exist 50 years earlier.

And this matrix of industries and professions spread abroad, with a huge growth of British investment in foreign companies, especially in the USA and South America. Profits from these foreign holdings gave rise to an entirely new class of rentiers, people able to afford a moneyed middle-class lifestyle without doing a day’s work, solely off the profit of shrewd investments.

By 1870 Britain had about 170,000 people of rank and property, living lives of luxury without any visible occupation. Hobsbawm emphasises that most of them were women (p.119). These were the ladies of independent means swanning off to spa resorts in Switzerland or villas in Italy who festoon the pages of late Victorian and Edwardian novels, like the Italophiles of E.M. Foster, like the continent-trotting Aunt Mary in Somerset Maugham’s novel Mrs Craddock. These comfortably-off parasites were still living a wonderful life between the wars, floating around Tuscany vapouring about Art and Life, as documented in the early novels of Aldous Huxley, living lives of luxury off the sweat and labour of working men in three continents.

Competitors and the long decline

The scale and speed of development, particularly of the second wave of the industrial revolution, with entire cities mushrooming into existence stuffed with factories, and a country swiftly criss-crossed by the loud, noisy new technology of the railways, awed contemporaries and again and again gave rise to essays and books and speeches extolling the miraculous qualities of the British nation.

It was only when competitor nations such as America and Germany began to harness the new technologies of the second industrial revolution, the ones which rotated around the production of coal, iron and the new material of steel, taking and improving techniques in the area of metal and machine production which rotated around the great boom in railways from the 1840s onwards, that the shortcomings of British production methods and efficiency began, very slowly, to be revealed.

The entire developed world entered a prolonged agricultural depression in the 1870s which lasted a decade or more (different historians give different start and end points but contemporaries thought it lasted from about 1873 into the 1890s) and when Britain emerged from this depression in the 1890s, she had been decisively overtaken in all measures of industrial production by Germany and America.

Between 1890 and 1895 both the USA and Germany passed Britain in the production of steel. During the ‘Great Depression’ Britain ceased to be ‘the workshop of the world’ and became merely one if its three greatest industrial powers; and, in some crucial respects, the weakest of them. (p.127)

The wealth pouring in from protected imperial trade with an empire was now vastly bigger than it had been in 1750 and so hid our industrial shortcomings from the unintelligent (which included most of the ruling class) and the Daily Mail-reading middle classes. But even the rousing jingoism of Kipling the imperialist poet and Joseph Chamberlain the imperialist politician during the 1890s couldn’t conceal Britain’s relative decline. The pomp and circumstance of the turn of the century was a fool’s paradise.

After the middle of the nineteenth century [the British cotton trade] found its staple outlet in India and the Far East. The British cotton industry was certainly in its time the best in the world, but it ended as it had begun by relying not on its competitive superiority but on a monopoly of the colonial, and underdeveloped markets which the British Empire, the British Navy and British commercial supremacy gave it. (p.58)

While the Germans and Americans developed new ways of organising industrial concerns, with huge cartels and monopolies, developed ever-better methods of mass production, invested heavily in technical education and pioneered new ways of selling high quality products to their domestic markets, Britain was still expending its time and energy expanding its already huge empire and trying to create a global imperial market with preferential treatment of what slowly came to be seen as inferior British goods. This remained the case into the period between the wars and even into the 1940s and 50s.

Imperialism, which reached its peak of rivalry and competition in the 1890s and 1900s, concealed the deep structural reasons for Britain’s long decline, which were already well established by 1900 (p.131).

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The Chronicles of Clovis by Saki (1911)

The spirit of mirthfulness which one associates with the name certainly ran riot in the boy, but it was a twisted wayward sort of mirth… (The Unbearable Bassington)

In 1908, Hector Hugh Munro gave up foreign reporting and returned to London. Throughout his career as a foreign correspondent he had also been publishing short fictional squibs under the pen-name Saki, sometimes rising to the level of ‘short stories’, often little more than humorous anecdotes or dialogues set among London’s upper classes. From time to time they were brought together in book form.

The Chronicles of Clovis was Saki’s third such collection of very short stories and scenes. As the title suggests, most (though not all) of the stories feature the character of Clovis Sangrail, a world-weary, spoiled, selfish and cynical upper-class young man with a malicious sense of humour.

Clovis rearranged several cushions to his personal solace and satisfaction; he knew that the Baroness liked her guests to be comfortable, and he thought it right to respect her wishes in that particular.

Clovis, and his friend Reginald, who we know from Saki’s previous stories, are young men-about-town who take mischievous delight in shocking their conventional, stuffy elders. In fact the pair are interchangeable and Clovis performs precisely the same role of sardonic chorus or witty interlocutor to an older, conventional lady, easily shocked by his cynical quips, that Reginald did in the earlier texts. Clovis’s favourite interlocutor is named ‘the Baroness’. Another recurring character is a minor foil or confidante named Bertie van Tahn.

Clovis and Reginald take the upper-class arrogance, privilege and entitlement which has drummed into them at expensive public schools and to turn it against the older generation which had put them through the ordeal, delighting in shocking them not so much with deeds – for our heroes rarely lower themselves to actually doing anything – but with outré and unconventional attitudes, with their extreme cynicism or modish insouciance.

The stories portray a society which put a premium on decorum and good manners, on ‘good breeding’, but which bridled at too much intelligence or cleverness – all of whose boundaries and borders Saki relished driving a coach and horses through.

Mind you, it is inaccurate to say that it’s only Clovis and Reginald who bait their straightlaced peers, because the narrator does too. In fact Clovis appears in fewer than half the stories and it is the narrator who most of the time makes the cruellest jibes and weaves the most extended insults:

Lady Isobel was seen everywhere with a fawn-coloured collie at a time when everyone else kept nothing but Pekinese, and she had once eaten four green apples at an afternoon tea in the Botanical Gardens, so she was widely credited with a rather unpleasant wit. The censorious said she slept in a hammock and understood Yeats’s poems, but her family denied both stories.

The joke is not so much at Lady Isobel’s expense but at that of her family and, more generally, at the kind of society she moves in. It is partly the implication that ‘understanding’ Yeats’s poems is as eccentric as sleeping in a hammock. It is partly the comic notion that it is so exceptional that a denial has to be issued by the family. There are multiple levels of mockery in just that one sentence.

(In the story The Quest Clovis himself is portrayed as lazing in a hammock and it’s worth pausing a moment to reflect what an utterly suitable piece of household furniture a hammock is for Clovis and his character of drawling, ironic inactivity.)

Some people think that satire changes things, in which case you might say that Saki’s stories were designed to ‘satirise’ and ‘scandalise’ Edwardian high society. But I think it’s nearer the mark to start from the opposite premise – that satire changes nothing but merely amuses those being satirised. Compare and contrast the immensely popular Alex cartoon strip which started in 1987 and mocks the greed and heartlessness of City bankers and is… immensely popular with City bankers. In the same way Saki’s stories have been immensely popular from his day to ours because people enjoy recognising themselves, or a part of themselves, or a part of themselves they wish they had. Everyone always thinks it’s someone else who is being mocked.

Saki’s attitude as revealed in ‘Wratislaw’

In the story Wratislaw, two very upper-class European ladies, the shrewd Gräfin and the rather dim Baroness Sophie, are in conversation, exchanging the expected bon mots and cynical witticisms:

‘Haven’t you noticed that women with a really perfect profile like mine are seldom even moderately agreeable?’

The Gräfin is trying to marry off her objectionable son, Wratlislav, to the Baroness’s dim daughter, Elsa, a proposal to which the Baroness says:

‘I don’t want Wratislav. My poor Elsa would be miserable with him.’
‘A little misery wouldn’t matter very much with her; it would go so well with the way she does her hair, and if she couldn’t get on with Wratislav she could always go and do good among the poor.’

From this little exchange we can extract several of the premises which underlie Saki’s humour:

1. Nobody in this pampered upper class is ‘miserable’; or if they are, nobody else understands the concept because everyone is basically sorted for all their earthly needs. Extremes of want or emotion are unheard of and so are little more than conversational toys, empty words.

2. In any case, one of the key markers of being an aristocrat is not to take anything seriously: remember the general sitting astride a horse close to the Duke of Wellington during the Battle of Waterloo? There was an approaching rumble, a loud bang and the general remarked: ‘By Jove, Sir, I believe they’ve shot my leg orf.’ The Duke of Wellington looks over and remarks: ‘By Jove, Sir, so they have.’ This was the attitude of sublime and lofty nonchalance which characterised the English upper classes from the 18th century through to the public schoolboys I met at university.

3. And the extremest way of demonstrating one’s aristocratic nonchalance (like insouciance, a French word) is to take what servants and earnest middle-class types think of as ‘serious’ emotions, conditions and attitudes and to pointedly equate them with the lightest, most frivolous subjects imaginable, generally ‘female’ subjects such as fashion, clothes and, in this instance, hairdo. The utter inability to take anything seriously is demonstrated by the deliberately casual, mocking equation of lifelong emotional misery with someone’s hair colour. Exactly the same attitude recurs in The Story of St. Vespaluus:

Vespaluus…was the best looking, and the best horseman and javelin- thrower, and had that priceless princely gift of being able to walk past a supplicant with an air of not having seen him, but would certainly have given something if he had. My mother has that gift to a certain extent; she can go smilingly and financially unscathed through a charity bazaar, and meet the organisers next day with a solicitous ‘had I but known you were in need of funds’ air that is really rather a triumph in audacity.

‘The poor? Oh, I didn’t notice them.’

4. So the central aspect of the lofty insouciance which Saki both epitomises and satirises is to mock anyone who is ever serious about anything. This attitude had been brought to a pitch of perfection by Oscar Wilde a generation earlier:

‘Life is far too important a thing ever to talk seriously about.’ (Lord Darlington in The Importance of Being Earnest)
‘We should treat all the trivial things of life seriously, and all the serious things of life with sincere and studied triviality.’ (Letter to Robert Ross)

Therefore, the notion that an unhappy Elsa might compensate for her unhappy marriage by ‘doing good among the poor’ is a) designed to show how absurd the very notion of someone from her class ‘doing good among the poor’ is; and therefore b) how charity can can only possibly be explained as a harmless diversion for unhappy, upper-class women.

Camp and homosexuality

This extravagantly, ostentatiously, teasingly and mockingly anti-serious attitude, the valorising of the trivial, the mocking dismissal of anything earnest or serious, would evolve, by the 1960s, into the quality known as ‘camp’, heavily associated with a certain type of homosexuality. (See Susan Sontag’s Notes on Camp).

In this regard, it might be worth noting, here, the series of descriptions of improbably beautiful young men, all svelte and soignés, who trail through these stories. Here’s Vespaluus:

‘He was quite the best-looking boy at Court; he had an elegant, well-knit figure, a healthy complexion, eyes the colour of very ripe mulberries, and dark hair, smooth and very well cared for.’
‘It sounds like a description of what you imagine yourself to have been like at the age of sixteen,’ said the Baroness.

And Pan:

Across a thick tangle of undergrowth a boy’s face was scowling at her, brown and beautiful, with unutterably evil eyes.

Here’s the werewolf in Gabriel-Ernest:

On a shelf of smooth stone overhanging a deep pool in the hollow of an oak coppice a boy of about sixteen lay asprawl, drying his wet brown limbs luxuriously in the sun. His wet hair, parted by a recent dive, lay close to his head, and his light-brown eyes, so light that there was an almost tigerish gleam in them, were turned towards Van Cheele with a certain lazy watchfulness.

Naked and wet, asprawl in the sun. Pretty sexy, eh? Critics from Saki’s day to ours have wondered whether not only the male sensuality but also the extra element of malice, and the occasional turn to the macabre in Saki’s stories, in some way derives from Munro’s (necessarily repressed) homosexuality.

All that said, this stylised mockery of anything serious was also, of course, celebrated by many entirely ‘straight’ authors, from P.G. Wodehouse to Evelyn Waugh, in the name alone of Lord Peter Wimsy, in the tone of detached ironic humour which characterises the books of Jerome K Jerome. Is it, I wonder, a particularly English quality?

Childhood unhappiness

Personally, I don’t think Saki’s sexuality is that important. Personally, I think the key fact in Munro’s biography is that he was sent away from his parents at a young age, sent from a warm and loving home in British Burma all the way back to cold and miserable England where he was looked after by strict and stern guardians while he attended a series of miserable boarding schools.

Kipling underwent a similarly miserable childhood and the result was a lifetime of works marked by often very unpleasant sadism. (On one level, Kipling’s notorious ‘racism’ is merely a sub-set of his larger, more out-of-control anger against all kinds of people.)

Same here. I think the grimmer and more macabre Saki stories are Munro’s revenge on the cruel world which gave him such a miserable childhood. Hence the air of malice around ‘aunts’, all of them avatars of the strict, Bible-thumping governess who looked after young Hector. The same repressed anger, arguably comes out, in a displaced kind of way, in the misfortunes of the children in so many of the stories, who are routinely eaten or blown up.

The atmosphere of lonely, solitary childhood tyrannised by a punitive guardian portrayed in the story Sredni Vashtar seems to me the clue to all his works (that is, if you look for clues, if you are interested in biographical keys). Or you could just enjoy the stories’ sly elegance and outrageous storylines.

The stories

1. Esmé (features Clovis)

The Baroness tells Clovis about the time she was out hunting to hounds with Constance Broddle when they got lost but, hearing some hounds barking, discovered they’d got separated from the main pack and were now surrounding a creature at bay which, when the women held the hounds back, turned out to be a hyena! A hyena? Yes, it has escaped from the menagerie of Lord Pabham, whose grounds are nearby.

The Baroness liberates it from the hounds and they ride off to try and find the road home, with the hyena trotting faithfully behind. On an upper-class whim the Baroness names the hyena Esmé. They come across a gypsy waif playing in the path, pass by, the hyena drops back, then they hear a cry and see the hyena has the child in its jaws. They scold and shout and try to whip it and the Baroness throws her sandwich box, to no avail. The hyena drops behind the trotting women, there’s a crescendo and screaming and then an ominous silence and the hyena reappears with a satisfied smile on its face. The Baroness’s companion is horrified as they emerge into a road and make their way home.

It is dark and there is the sound of a motor car roaring up, a thud and a yell and when they catch up, a motorist has hit and killed the hyena. He is a jolly pukka young chap and he apologises most sincerely to the ladies and calls his chauffeur to fetch a spade and they bury the beast, under the impression it is a dog. With admirable sang-froid, the Baroness claims it is indeed a prize pedigree hound. She gives the driver her address. Some time later he sends her a brooch with the name of the ‘dog’ engraved on it.

What then clinches the utter heartlessness and amoral insouciance of the character, is that she sells the brooch for a tidy profit. Nothing means anything to these people except the game of ‘appearances’ and ‘manners’.

2. The Match-Maker (Clovis)

Not a story, more a meandering scene with Clovis arriving at the supper table, polishing off some oysters while waxing lyrical about their selflessness to his host, then segueing into a discussion of his mother’s two previous marriages and how he rustled up an old Empire Johnny to be her third husband.

3. Tobermory (C)

At Lady Blemley’s house-party at ‘the Towers’, rather boring Mr. Cornelius Appin turns out to have made the stupefying achievement of teaching the house cat, Tobermory, how to talk. Not only that but Tobermory drawls, with the exaggerated languid tones of the effete upper classes. That’s satire 1.

Satire 2 is that the cat immediately starts spilling the beans about the ‘goings on’ among the humans and, more viciously, repeating exactly what they say about each other behind each others’ backs which is, of course, often malicious and wounding. General panic.

Tobermory spots the neighbours’ cat out the window and scarpers after it. Sir Wilfred and Lady Blemley agree the cat must immediately be put down. Dinner is a tense affair, as is breakfast, but spirits lift when Tobermory’s corpse is found in a flowerbed. As to Mr Cornelius Appin, some weeks later he is reported gored to death by an elephant at Dresden Zoo which he had been teaching German irregular verbs.

4. Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger (C)

Mrs Packletide’s life is dominated by rivalry with Loona Bimberton. Loona Bimberton had recently been carried eleven miles in an aeroplane by an Algerian aviator, so Mrs Packletide decides she is going to bag herself a tiger!

I think she must already be in India because she pays the headman of a local village to tether a goat in order to lure a rather elderly and ailing tiger for her to shoot. Mrs P hides in a tree with her paid companion, Miss Mebbin, and soon enough the tiger shows up. A single gunshot rings out and the tiger rolls over dead but, on closer inspection, it appears it was the harmless the goat which was shot and the tiger simply died of a heart attack at the loud noise!

The natives take their 1,000 rupees and swear to silence and thus Mrs Packletide returns to London in triumph, makes the tigerskin the centre of her Curzon Street apartment, gives endless parties where it is the centre of conversation, sends a tiger claw brooch to her rival, Loona Bimberton, even has a wild animal fancy dress party, where Clovis makes a fleeting appearance.

Until, that is, her ‘companion’, penny-conscious Miss Mebbin, blackmails her, threatening to reveal the truth (the old tiger died of a heart attack) unless Mrs Packletide buys her a nice little cottage near Dorking.

Mrs. Packletide indulges in no more big-game shooting. ‘The incidental expenses are so heavy,’ she confides to inquiring friends.

Saki is full of sly details. The thing that made me smile most in this story was that Miss Mebbin names her country cottage ‘Les Fauves’, a jokey reference to the recent French art movement which was given that name in 1905, so quite a modish reference at that.

5. The Stampeding of Lady Bastable (C)

Clovis and his mother, Mrs Sangrail, are staying with Lady Bastaple. Mrs S asks Lady Bastaple if she can keep Clovis on for a further 6 days while she, Mrs S, travels north to stay with the MacGregors. She offers to let Mrs Bastaple off her bridge debt of 49 shillings.

6. The Background (C)

A delirious and bizarre story about a modest commercial traveller, Henri Deplis, who comes into a legacy and decides to spend 600 francs on having a massive picture of the Fall of Icarus tattooed on his back by the premier tattooist in Italy, Andreas Pincini. Pincini dies and Deplis thinks he is let off payment but Pincini’s widow pursues him by which point Deplis no longer has 600 francs left to pay her. After some bad-tempered haggling, the widow donates the picture to the municipality of Bergamo, thus making Deplis’ back into state property. The result is that he is unable, as a state property, to leave Italy, an unusual legal situation which is worked through in delirious detail.

7. Hermann the Irascible — A Story of the Great Weep

A satire on the Suffragettes. It is set in a hypothetical future, in the second decade of the twentieth century after a Great Plague has devastated England, and Hermann the Irascible, nicknamed the Wise, sits on the British throne. One of the recurrent problems he faces is the vociferous and violent Votes For Women movement. Hermann comes up with a comic solution. He suggests a bill to make voting for women compulsory with a £10 fine for failing to vote, and then adds a long list of elections and elected officials which women are now compelled to vote in:

Every woman between the ages of twenty-one and seventy will be obliged to vote, not only at elections for Parliament, county councils, district boards, parish councils, and municipalities, but for coroners, school inspectors, churchwardens, curators of museums, sanitary authorities, police-court interpreters, swimming-bath instructors, contractors, choir-masters, market superintendents, art-school teachers, cathedral vergers, and other local functionaries whose names I will add as they occur to me. All these offices will become elective, and failure to vote at any election falling within her area of residence will involve the female elector in a penalty of £10. Absence, unsupported by an adequate medical certificate, will not be accepted as an excuse.

Of course this transforms voting into an intolerable burden for most women: working women are spending half the week traipsing to and from voting booths, while rich women find their holiday plans wrecked as they are continually being called back to vote for their local cathedral verger or what not, and quickly run up fines of multiples of £10.

Eventually the burden of voting becomes so extreme that it gives rise to a No-Votes-For-Women League to which Saki maliciously and hilariously attributes all the self-righteousness, inflammatory rhetoric and violence of the original Suffragette Movement. The No-Votes-For-Women League goes one better and invents ‘the Great Weep’ being the systematic crying by women at gatherings large and small.

Eventually, making a great show of making a great concession, Hermann the Wise signs into law a bill depriving women of the right to vote and everyone is happy. And greatly amused.

8. The Unrest-Cure (C)

This is one of Saki’s most famous stories because it is so compact and fluent and beautifully designed. On the train down to be guest at a house party, Clovis overhears two friends chatting, one lamenting that he has got very set in his ways, the other recommending that he shake his life up a bit and have what he calls ‘an unrest-cure’. Clovis’s ears prick up, he makes a note of the conventional man’s name and address (J. P. Huddle, The Warren, Tilfield, near Slowborough.”

He then sends this man a telegram saying ‘the bishop’ is coming to stay, preceded by his private secretary – this is of course Clovis, who proceeds to shock and amaze timid Mr Huffle by announcing that the bishop and a general who will be joining him are planning to round up all the Jews in the neighbourhood and massacre them! Mr Huddle is speechless, his sister responds with a migraine:

It was not her day for having a headache, but she felt that the circumstances excused her, and retired to her room to have as much headache as was possible before the Bishop’s arrival.

The ‘plan’ which Clovis unfolds becomes steadily more outrageous. He explains they are going to invite all the Jews from the neighbourhood and murder them one by one. He explains the house is now surrounded by a hidden ring of boy scouts who will shoot anyone who leaves! Indeed an eminent Jew arrives soon after in his motor car and is hustled quickly upstairs by the terrified brother and sister. Things go on like this for a bit while Clovis lounges in Huddle’s library smoking one of his excellent cigars, before quietly slipping away. None of it was true. It was an entire fiction.

9. The Jesting of Arlington Stringham (C)

Stringham is a politician. He makes a joke in Parliament which enlivens a boring debate. His wife disapproves. He’s never made a joke before. She comments to her mother. Stringham makes another joke, which his wife doesn’t get. Over the next few weeks Stringham makes several more. Then a catty ‘friend’, Gertrude Upton, points out that these are all well-known quips by Lady Isobel, the implication being that Stringham is seeing quite a lot of Lady Isobel.

So far so gently mocking the boringness of politicians, the straightlacedness of their families and so on. So it comes as a shock when the last few lines tell us that Eleanor Stringham killed herself with an overdose of chloral. Does he… does Saki mean that she killed herself because the jokes implied her husband was having an affair?

10. Sredni Vashtar

Conradin is a sickly boy looked after by his disapproving cousin and guardian in a strict and tedious house which has driven him mad with resentment and frustration, which makes him sick ‘under her pestering and domineering and superior wisdom’.

Mrs. de Ropp was the ground-plan on which he based and detested all respectability.

One day the local butcher boy brings him a large polecat-ferret in return for all the silver Conradin has saved up and he hides his cage in the garden shed and develops a private religion based round the fierce animal which he gives the made-up name of Sredni Vashtar.

More and more mystified by Conradin’s regular visits to the shed, Mrs de Ropp one day ransacks his bedroom for the key, orders Conradin to stay in his bedroom, from whose window he watches her go to the shed, unlock it, and enter in. He fervently prays to his god, prays for death and destruction. The minutes pass and the dread witch doesn’t return. Then, with wonder, he sees his god slink out of the shed with dark red strains round its jaws, undulate down to the stream, take a drink, and disappear into the undergrowth. Conradin’s dream has come true. His god has answered his prayers. No more repressive aunt.

11. Adrian (C)

Adrian is a working class lad from Bethnal Green where his mum is a laundress.

One can discourage too much history in one’s family, but one cannot always prevent geography.

He is taken up by the hugely posh Lucas who treats him to dinner at places like the Ritz or Carlton. His aunt Mrs Mebberley hears about this protege and decides to take him off on a tour of Europe.

‘I love Americans, but not when they try to talk French. What a blessing it is that they never try to talk English.’

She takes him to an Alpine resort. Here he flourishes but not in the way expected. He turns out to be quite a wild youth. Where he grew up breaking any cutlery was a crime. Among posh people he discovers that, done at the right time and place, it wins kudos.

Lucas hears about Adrian’s increasingly outrageous exploits via the pen of Clovis who is ‘moving as a satellite in the Mebberley constellation.’ One is that Adrian abducts the ugly Grobmayer child and dressed it as a pig in an evening’s drama performance till it wailed, revealed its identity and the parents were furious. But his masterpiece was swapping all the room numbers on an entire landing and especially affixing the ‘Bathroom’ sign to the door of old Frau Hofrath Schilling who was thereupon terrified out of her wits by a succession of half-dressed visitors.

12. The Chaplet (C)

It was a gala evening at the Grand Sybaris Hotel, and a special dinner was being served in the Amethyst dining-hall. The great chef Monsieur Aristide Saucourt has slaved over his masterpiece dish, Canetons à la mode d’Amblève. But just as it is served to the foreign philistine guests, the very average orchestra strikes up the strains of the dull and obvious tune, The Chaplet and, in their relief at recognising a tune amid a lot of other rather more ‘modern’ music, many of the diners stop to listen, to applaud, tinkering with the famous dish or letting it grow cold! So M. Saucourt in a fury seizes the conductor and plunges him head first into a large tureen of boiling soup!

13. The Quest (C)

Clovis is staying at the Villa Elsinore when there is a disaster: Mrs Momeby misplaces little diddums baby Erik. The household is in an uproar. Only Clovis lazing in a hammock is more concerned about which sauce cook is preparing to accompany the asparagus while outraging everyone with his calm suggestion that maybe the little darling has been eaten by an escaped hyena.

A neighbour calls, Rose-Marie Gilpet who is a devout Christian Scientist and therefore believes there is no such thing as illness and also that we all think positively the lost child will appear. She goes to search the road again and lo and behold finds an abandoned baby there who she restores to the bosom of her family amid tears and celebrations. Which makes it embarrassing when the real Erik is discovered hiding in the garden roller. So who is the imposter? Then arrives the nursemaid from the Villa Charlottenburg across the way to reclaim darling little Percy who had gone missing. Mystery solved and Clovis is off to see the cook about the asparagus sauce.

14. Wratislav (C)

(Described above.)

15. The Easter Egg

What you might call a ‘grim’ story, like the apparent suicide of Eleanor Stringham. In this one Lady Barbara has a son who is a pusillanimous coward, Lester Slaggby. They go to say in a small Germanic resort, learn from the local Burgomeister that the Prince is paying a visit, a local couple suggest that a touching gesture would be for their little 4-year-old to be dressed up and give the Prince the gift of an Easter egg filled with his favourite food, plovers’ eggs. Lester helps to train the little mite and on the big day is gesturing the child towards the Prince sat on his dais when, looking round for the proud parents, he sees them stepping hastily into a cab and, in a flash, realises the egg is filled with a bomb. Lester does the one great brave deed of his life and runs to catch up with the child, grabs the egg planning to throw it far, yells to everyone the one word ‘Bomb!’ but is astonished when the little brat holds onto it with obsessive grip. Then it blows up. The story cuts to some time later and makes the simple point that Lady Barbara is now blind.

So it had been sort of funny up till that point and then becomes bitterly tragic. The note of languid insouciance I mentioned earlier, the Oscar Wilde tone of whimsical detachment, doesn’t apply here. Possibly a conductor being drowned in a tureen of soup is sort of funny. But a woman committing suicide from profound misery or being blinded… not so funny.

16. Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse that Helped (C)

Mark Spayley is a commercial artist, he creates advertising posters and is on a piddling £200 per annum. He nervously asks for the hand in marriage of Leonore, the daughter of the vastly successful businessman, Duncan Dullamy, ‘the great company inflator’. What neither he nor anyone else knows is Dullamy’s business empire is about to crash, which is why he accepts Spayley’s offer and suggests a surprisingly quick wedding. Dullamy doesn’t reveal about the looming crash but does lament that his new product, Pipenta, has been a failure. Now he’s his son-in-law to be, Mark offers to help out. In short order he has changed the product’s name to Filboid Studge and created a vast poster showing lost souls in hell clamouring for an opportunity to eat the delicious food, with a big strapline: a single grim statement ran in bold letters along its base: “They cannot buy it now.”

This campaign is surprisingly successful and Filboid Studge becomes a runaway success, which the narrator describes with a few waspish asides about the power of advertising (this was 1908). Dullamy’s fortune is restored and he, of course, breaks off his daughter’s engagement to Spayley and sells her to a much more appropriate beau.

17. The Music on the Hill

Clever Sylvia Seltoun has not only inveigled Mortimer Seltoun into marriage, but to abandon ‘Town’ with its delights and friends, a relocate to his country seat, Yessney.

She looked on the country as something excellent and wholesome in its way, which was apt to become troublesome if you encouraged it overmuch

Here she becomes aware of some kind of presence in the woods, a fleeting golden thing, and is oppressed by a feeling of being watched in among the desolate farm buildings. Boring Mortimer astonishes her by revealing that he believes in the great god Pan and for warning her when she takes some grapes which had been left to a beautiful statuette of the god in a remote clearing. In revenge, the laughing, malicious youth diverts a hunted stag so that it gores Sylvia to death. Maybe a life in Town wouldn’t have been so bad after all.

The title refers to the several occasions on which Sylvia heard remote and eerie music, ‘a low, fitful piping, as of some reedy flute’, coming from somewhere on the hills around her husband’s manor house.

This story takes its place alongside other Edwardian invocations of Pan, to be found in Peter Pan, the Piper at the gates of dawn chapter in Wind In The Willows and The Story of a Panic by E.M. Foster to name only the most obvious. (Pan in popular culture.) Why? The end of the 19th century saw a kind of rarefied, aestheticised classicism, the paintings of the Olympians, and this seems to have overlapped with the florescence of the children’s story during the Edwardian decade. Pan represents a melding of the two.

18. The Story of St. Vespaluus (C)

Clovis tells ‘the Baroness’ a long cock and bull story set in the early Middle Ages when ‘when a third of the people were Pagan, and a third Christian, and the biggest third of all just followed whichever religion the Court happened to profess’.

Bad-tempered King Hkrikros has no children but a number of nephews among whom his favourite is elegant, sporty young Vespaluus. The king wants to nominate him as his heir but then discovers that Vespaluus is a Christian. Damn. The king is a fervent pagan who devotedly maintains ‘the sacred serpents, who lived in a hallowed grove on a hill near the royal palace.’

The king hires the Royal Librarian, who has time on his hands, to go cut branches and switches from the woods and give young Vespaluus a sound thrashing. Doesn’t change his mind. Then he has the boy locked up in a tower without food and water though the guards take pity on him and sneak in grub.

But when he’s released in time for the great summer games Vespaluus refuses to take part in the ritual worship of the sacred snakes and the king’s patience snaps. He arranges him to be stung to death by the royal bees. However, the bee-keeper loves Vespaluus (everyone does) and so spends a laboursome night before the scheduled punishment pulling out all the bee stings. So that when crowds of pagans assemble to watch the ritual stinging-to-death of Vespaluus everyone is astonished to see him covered in bees and writhing yet emerging unscathed. It is a miracle! He must be a saint!

The furious king berates his librarian but before he can do any more harm himself dies of an apoplectic fit. At which point Vespaluus is crowned king and, assuming his Christian faith, the entire Court sets about getting itself baptised, neighbouring Christian powers make approaches, the pagan rites begin to be deprecated.

But the punchline is that Vespaluus isn’t a Christian at all. He is a devout pagan and worships the same sacred snakes as the king. Then why on earth, the Chamberlain asks him, did he pose as a Christian and cause himself and everyone else so much bother?

‘I used to pretend to be a Christian convert just to annoy Hkrikros. He used to fly into such delicious tempers. And it was rather fun being whipped and scolded and shut up in a tower all for nothing.’

He is a classic Wildean fop, loving pranks and mocking the earnest.

19. The Way to the Dairy (C)

The Baroness and Clovis again. As usual Clovis tells her a bitchy or spiteful or droll anecdote. This time it’s about an aunt who unexpectedly comes into some money, at which point she is drooled over by her nieces, the Brimley Bomefields, namely Christine, Veronique and another. The nieces are horrified when they learn that the aunt, getting on in years, proposes to leave her fortune to a nephew of hers, named Roger. So Veronique comes up with a cunning plan which is to catch Roger out, gambling or somehow frittering his money away. Every year he goes on holiday to northern France so the nieces persuade the aunt to go on holiday to Dieppe. But, in a comic reversal, while they’re waiting to catch Roger at the tables it is the aunt who has a casual flutter (on the old mechanical game named Les Petits Chevaux) gets bitten by the gambling bug, and turns into a gambling addict, while Roger bumps into them from time to time says, knowingly, that he realises the aunt is just a front for the nieces, who are running a gambling syndicate. Infuriatingly, they eventually give up and straggle home with a reputation for headaches and a permanently depressed look. Which is how Clovis and the Baroness saw them in ‘the Park’ and which prompted the anecdote in the first place.

20. The Peace Offering (C)

Clovis and the Baroness again. She asks him to help with a theatrical production to soothe her local county society who have been rather ruptured by a bitterly contested election. As satire, Clovis suggests they write a Greek tragedy on the theme of the Return of Agamemnon and then proceeds to explain who all the characters are to the Baroness who is cheerfully ignorant and philistine.

They then cast the play with local worthies, each stupider than the next. But the crux is the rivalry which breaks out between the Baroness, playing Clytemnestra and Clovis, who gives himself the minor but beautifully costumed role of the charioteer. When the Baroness pinches some of his best lines, Clovis plots his revenge. He coaches the dimwit playing Cassandra in a special speech and, on the grand night, with all of local county society assembled, when Clytemnestra goes off to make a costume change, Cassandra steps forward and delivers the speech Clovis has written for her… denouncing the great and the good in the audience as ‘corrupt, self-seeking, unscrupulous, unprincipled politicians[who] continue to infest and poison our local council…’ By the time the Baroness returns onstage it is to find everyone calling for their coach and leaving.

In a way the Baroness did succeed in healing local divisions… by uniting everyone who was anyone in condemning her ‘outrageously bad taste and tactlessness’.

21. The Peace of Mowsle Barton

Crefton Lockyer has gone for a rest cure and break from hectic city life by renting a room in an isolated farm. Little does he expect to discover that is the epicentre of a bitter rival between two local witches who cast spells on each other. These aren’t the florid witches of Hollywood, but uncanny and ancient crones and the spells in question amount to little more than preventing the kettle in the farm from boiling and rendering the ducks which in the hated rival’s little pool from being able to swim.

So, small stakes but this is one of the longer of the stories in the collection and the interest is in the spooky and threatening atmosphere which Saki conjures. It’s interesting because Rudyard Kipling, in his Sussex phase, wrote similar stories about village crones.

22. The Talking-Out of Tarrington (C)

Clovis is with his aunt when the latter spots a tiresome young man approaching who she is at pains to avoid because he’s probably heard she’s arranging a luncheon with ‘the Princess’ and will cling leechlike till he’s invited. The aunt makes a run for it leaving Clovis to deal with the young man who introduces himself as Tarrington. Unfortunately Clovis has determined to reply to every question and conversation gambit with irrelevancies and supercilious twitting, until the poor young man, defeated, beats a hasty retreat.

23. The Hounds of Fate

A tragedy, something like a ghost story or a rural tragedy slightly in the manner of Thomas Hardy. Martin Stoner has failed in everything and is down to his last few coins, tramping through muddy country lanes towards the sea with the vague purpose of throwing himself in, as night draws in and it starts to rain and he sees the lights of a farmhouse, he finds himself walking up the path and knocking on the door.

To his amazement the door opens and he is welcomed in by the old retained as ‘Master Tom’, back from Australia. He is given food and then shelter for the night, and given his old room, and his horse is saddled for him, all the time Stoner carries on the masquerade of impersonating this ‘Master Tom’. Slowly it emerges that Tom fled to Australia after some local scandal but try as he might, he can’t get the old retainer (named George) to spell it out.

Then one day old George hurries to find him and tells Stoner that Michael Ley is back in the village and bound on taking his revenge. At a guess, I speculate that Tom ravished Ley’s sister, who killed herself and that’s why he fled and Ley is now determined to take revenge. Old George gives Stoner three sovereigns and tells him to go hide out in the nearest town till Ley has gone away, when he’ll be able to return.

Three sovereigns is a lot of money for a former beggar, and Stoner goes his way rejoicing to have brass in pocket, reconciling himself to moving on from the Tom persona as easily as he adopted it. Easy come, easy go. But at that point Michael Ley steps out from the shadow of an old oak tree, a shotgun in his hand and implacable hatred in his eyes.

24. The Recessional (C)

Clovis is in a Turkish bath with his buddy, Bertie van Tahn, but equipped with a fountain pen and notebook. What is he doing? Well, Mrs. Packletide’s great enemy and rival Loona Bimberton has just had a Coronation Ode accepted by the ‘New Infancy’ magazine and Mrs P is spitting blood. Since she has helped him out so many times, financially, Clovis offers to compose a rival poem, and here he is, composing away like mad. The result is dire:

‘The tawny tigress ‘mid the tangled teak
Drags to her purring cubs’ enraptured ears
The harsh death-rattle in the pea-fowl’s beak,
A jungle lullaby of blood and tears.'”

25. A Matter of Sentiment (C)

Lady Susan is holding a house party and the guests are betting on the big race. Trouble is Lady Susan sternly disapproves of everything, especially horse racing. The guests have to retreat to the far end of the garden where they discovery that Motkin, Lady Susan’s butler, has a second cousin who was head stable-lad at a neighbouring racing establishment, and usually gifted with much inside information as to private form and possibilities. The butler goes off to see this relation and that evening, over dinner, secretively passes on the name of the top tip to each of the guests as he circulates with the sherry.

However, the hot favourite loses, as all the guests assembled in the hall the next morning discover when a telegram arrives, and Lady Susan is delighted because, for the first time in her life she has bet on a race, and her bet won!

26. The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope (C)

Mrs Riversedge is hosting guests including Clovis and his aunt, Mrs Troyle. Mrs Troyle announces that another guest, meek and shy Septimus Brope, appears to be wooing her maid, Florinda. She has overheard him chanting her name (‘I love you Florrie’) and the other day picked up a piece of paper he had dropped with a note to meet him down by the old yew tree. Mrs Troyle wouldn’t mind but her maid is the only person on earth who understands her hair.

The other ladies are scandalised and also surprised, as mild-mannered Mr Brope scratches a living editing the ‘Cathedral Monthly and being enormously learned about memorial brasses and transepts and the influence of Byzantine worship on modern liturgy.

Clovis is the one who solves the mystery when the two men are left alone in the smoking room after dinner. He discovers that Brope makes money on the side by writing the lyrics for trashy popular songs, and is struggling to write one for a hypothetical subject named Florrie. Nothing whatsoever to do with Mrs Troyle’s maid (who is actually named Florinda).

Clovis promises to not only keep his secret but help him writing his ditties. In fact he proposes a characteristically Clovisian twist: why not try lyrics which slam the woman in question. And sure enough a month later a new song is taking the music halls by storm in which the singer threatens to throw his Florrie into a quarry!

All Clovis requires in return is to accompany Brope on an all-expenses-paid trip to the Continent.

27. ‘Ministers of Grace’

The Duke of Scaw is religious but not quite in the traditional sense. He is discussing politics and social reform with his friend, Belturbet, speculating how easy it would be to replace the existing bunch of disappointing politicians with something more malleable. Why not with angels? Don’t be silly, says his friend. Piqued, the Duke replies:

‘I shall summon angelic forces to take over some of the more troublesome personalities of our public life, and I shall send the ousted originals into temporary retirement in suitable animal organisms.’

And this he does. The rest of the story describes how he converts various leading politicians, the archbishop of Canterbury and top industrialists into various animals and creates their doppelgangers from angels. Suddenly politicians agree and businessmen adopt caring policies. Imagine the confusion of the country, but that is as nothing to the confusion of their wives!

The conceit is developed at some length with very thinly veiled, jokey references to contemporary politicians including David Lloyd-George, Lord Rosebery and so on. Eventually one of the animals the Duke of Scaw has consigned the soul of one of these politicians to, a bad-tempered black swan, grabs Scaw as he is walking through St James Park, drags him into the lake and drowns him. Whereupon the angel-politicians disappear, replaced by their human counterparts, and business resumes as usual.

28. The Remoulding of Groby Lington

This is an eerie story about a man whose personality changes to reflect that of his pets. It opens with him being beaky-nosed and repetitive as his parrot. His brother brings him a pet monkey and he swiftly becomes as malicious and disruptive as his pet. When that dies, his brother buys him a tortoise and now Groby Lington potters slowly around his garden in slow motion. It has many comic details but the overall impression is of the tale’s strangeness.

Themes

Mocking the British Empire

Remember that Hector Hugh Munro was born in Akyab (now Sittwe), British Burma, which was then part of British India, and that Saki was the son of Charles Augustus Munro, an Inspector General for the Indian Imperial Police, and his wife, Mary Frances Mercer (1843–1872), the daughter of a Rear Admiral – and that he then himself went on to serve in the Indian Police Force. He was steeped, in other words, in the traditions and discourse of the British Empire. So what must his parents have made of his determined ridiculing of it and its stiff-upper-lipped maintainers?

He’d spent most of his life on the Indian frontier, building roads and relieving famines and minimising earthquakes, and all that sort of thing that one does do on frontiers. He could talk sense to a peevish cobra in fifteen native languages, and probably knew what to do if you found a rogue elephant on your croquet-lawn; but he was shy and diffident with women.

The Recessional sounds as if it’s going to be a parody or skit on Kipling’s famous poem of the same name but is nothing of the sort. Saki cannot write verse. Still, the thought was there.

Studied heartlessness

Specially regarding children who are either revealed as heartless brutes (The Strategist) or discussed with utter heartlessness by their parents (The Baker’s Dozen) or are eaten (Ernest-Gabriel and Esmé) or blown to smithereens (The Easter Egg).

Eleanor hated boys, and she would have liked to have whipped this one long and often.

It is not the attitudes as such which are reprehensible, they are fictional, they can be taken in the reader’s stride. It is the shallowness and lack of feeling which Saki is mocking.

Christianity

It almost goes without saying that everyone in these stories has been brought up to treat Christianity as the accepted ‘thing’. Saki’s satire aims at the way none of these conventional Christians show any understanding or putting into practice of its moral teachings. Wherever possible members of the cloth are mocked (as they were in so many 18th century novels, through Trollope, Waugh, every chaplain in every public school in fiction).

More than that, Christianity offers a massive opportunity for satire whereby the manners of the gentleman can be contrasted with Christian morality, with the satirical intention that, in Victorian and Edwardian society, manners and appearance were more important than conventional Christian morality. It is a central part of the macabre comedy of The Unrest Cure that the person said to be panning the massacre of the Jews is the local bishop, whose character Saki then delights in twisting into his own style of gruesome amorality.

‘The Bishop is sorry to hear that Miss Huddle has a headache. He is issuing orders that as far as possible no firearms shall be used near the house; any killing that is necessary on the premises will be done with cold steel. The Bishop does not see why a man should not be a gentleman as well as a Christian.’ (The Unrest Cure)

Culture

Rather like Christianity, most of these upper-class types profess an interest in culture without actually understanding it at all. Painting and music are the two areas Saki picks on, with Reginald making the standard joke that the purpose of the Royal Academy is not to look at the pictures but to look at, and mingle with, other high society types. It is a recurring joke that the English understand a work of art so long as there is a good descriptive title to aid their understanding.

In the same spirit the British upper classes are portrayed as nervously philistine when it comes to music.

Thither [to the Amethyst dining-hall] came in shoals the intensely musical and the almost intensely musical, who are very many, and in still greater numbers the merely musical, who know how Tchaikowsky’s name is pronounced and can recognise several of Chopin’s nocturnes if you give them due warning; these eat in the nervous, detached manner of roebuck feeding in the open, and keep anxious ears cocked towards the orchestra for the first hint of a recognisable melody.

‘Ah, yes, Pagliacci,’ they murmur, as the opening strains follow hot upon the soup, and if no contradiction is forthcoming from any better-informed quarter they break forth into subdued humming by way of supplementing the efforts of the musicians. Sometimes the melody starts on level terms with the soup, in which case the banqueters contrive somehow to hum between the spoonfuls; the facial expression of enthusiasts who are punctuating potage St. Germain with Pagliacci is not beautiful, but it should be seen by those who are bent on observing all sides of life. One cannot discount the unpleasant things of this world merely by looking the other way.

And:

‘Hark!’ said most of the diners, ‘he is playing “The Chaplet.”‘ They knew it was “The Chaplet” because they had heard it played at luncheon and afternoon tea, and at supper the night before, and had not had time to forget.

Money / greed

Saki is funny about the miserly such as Laploshka or the paid companion, Miss Mebbin, in Mrs. Packletide’s Tiger, who resents even centimes unnecessarily spent, or Lady Bastaple (‘Lady Bastable loved shillings with a great, strong love.’)

Aunts

Tell me about the Brimley Bomefields.’
‘Well,’ said Clovis, ‘the beginning of their tragedy was that they found an aunt.’

Saki’s works

Reginald (1904)
Reginald in Russia, and other sketches (1910)
The Chronicles of Clovis (1911)
The Unbearable Bassington (novel) (1912)
When William Came (novel) (1913)
Beasts and Super-Beasts (1914)
The Toys of Peace (1919)
The Square Egg and Other Sketches (1924)

2 Comments

by Simon on June 25, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in Comedy, Short stories

Tagged 1911, A Matter of Sentiment, Adrian, Andreas Pincini, anecdote, Baroness Sophie, Belturbet, Bertie van Tahn, British Empire, Burma, Camp, Christianity, Clovis Sangrail, Conradin, Constance Broddle, Crefton Lockyer, Duncan Dullamy, E.M. Foster, Edwardian age, Edwardian society, Eleanor Stringham, Esmé, fiction, Filboid Studge, Frau Hofrath Schilling, Gertrude Upton, Hector Hugh Munro, Henri Deplis, Hermann the Irascible — A Story of the Great Weep, homosexuality, imperialism, irony, J. P. Huddle, King Hkrikros, Kipling, Lady Barbara, Lady Blemley, Lady Isobel, Lester Slaggby, Loona Bimberton, Mark Spayley, Martin Stoner, Michael Ley, Ministers of Grace, Miss Mebbin, Monsieur Aristide Saucourt, Mortimer Seltoun, Mr. Cornelius Appin, Mrs Momeby, Mrs Riversedge, Mrs Troyle, Mrs. de Ropp, Mrs. Packletide's Tiger, Oscar Wilde, Pan, Pipenta, Recessional, Reginald, Robert Ross, Rose-Marie Gilpet, Saki, satire, short stories, short story, Sredni Vashtar, Suffragettes, Susan Sontag, Sylvia Seltoun, The Background, the Baroness, The Chaplet, The Chronicles of Clovis, The Duke of Scaw, The Easter Egg, The Hounds of Fate, The Importance of Being Earnest, The Jesting of Arlington Stringham, The Match-Maker, The Music on the Hill, The Peace of Mowsle Barton, The Peace Offering, the Quest, The Recessional, The Remoulding of Groby Lington, The Secret Sin of Septimus Brope, The Stampeding of Lady Bastable, the Story of a Mouse that Helped, The Story of St. Vespaluus, The Talking-Out of Tarrington, The Unrest-Cure, The Way to the Dairy, Tobermory, Vespaluus, Votes For Women, witches, Wratislav

Posted by Simon on June 25, 2021

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2021/06/25/the-chronicles-of-clovis-saki/

The Soul of the Marionette by John Gray (2015)

Everywhere , the self-assured confidence of priests, scribes and intellectuals has been mocked by unexpected events…
(The Soul of the Marionette, page 143)

‘Humanity’ is only a name for a ragtag animal with no capacity to take charge of anything. (p.145)

The Soul of the Marionette

The Soul of the Marionette is a short, easy and very stimulating read. Its brevity is indicated by the way it’s set in a larger-than-usual typeface for a Penguin paperback in order to pad the text out to 170 or so pages. In reality, it’s two extended magazine essays linked by a common theme.

John Gray (b.1948)

Gray is a retired political philosopher. He mainly taught at the London School of Economics with spells at Yale etc, so he’s an academic by trade. For the past thirty years or more he’s been writing non-technical and accessible books, as well as numerous articles and reviews, and from time to time popping up with thought pieces on Radio 4. All of them bang on about the same handful of themes over and over again:

1. Modern liberals are wrong

Modern progressive thought is wrong. Modern secular thinkers are wrong. How so? In several connected ways.

a) ‘Modern liberals’ think history is progressing towards a good end, think that there is some purpose or end-point of evolution, think that human societies are heading onward and upward, becoming more enlightened, liberal, permissive and diverse.

The belief that evolution is advancing towards some desirable end is ubiquitous… (p.61)

BUT

Evolution has no attachment to the attributes modern thinkers imagine are essentially human… (p.143)

There is no purpose, there is no end goal, there is absolutely no assurance that things are moving forward, it is perfectly possible that societies might regress, become less liberal, permissive, and more authoritarian, vide the USA and UK of our time.

Above all, modern liberals think human nature can be changed whereas all of Gray’s work represents a barrage of arguments designed to annihilate this position:

2. The survival of violence and barbarism disproves the idea that humans are ‘improving’

Evolution has no goal or plan or design or intention. Stuff is just changing and humans are mad if they think they can alter it very much. Progressives like to think that we ‘learn from history’ or that liberal values are succeeding around the world – but terrible, crude, sadistic violence, is still practiced all round the globe.

There may be no repeats of the two epic world wars, but violence and brutality haven’t gone away; they have merely been scattered and diffused into the form of asymmetrical conflicts in a variety of failed states such as Syria and Libya, or sudden eruptions of barbarism as in Myanmar, or the ongoing horrors of the war in the Congo.

Or else many states find themselves in a permanent state of civil unrest, where violent protests teeter on the brink of uprisings and armed conflict, Sudan. This is the new normal.

Verisk Maplecroft report about civil unrest around the world

In a scathing passage, Gray describes how violence has been internalised in the West. He points to the ways that America, for example, the supposed ‘land of the free’, imprisons more of its citizens than any other country in the world, and experiences almost daily mass shootings, with the result that its entire police force is now a warzone militia armed with machine guns and bullet-proof vests.

About 40,000 people were killed by guns in America in 2017, compared to the 2,500 who died on D-Day. Gray’s point is that homicidal violence hasn’t gone away because world wars have ceased; it’s just become normalised in other ways.

The normalisation of amoral hyper-violence in American culture. This movie is a ‘comedy’.

3. The popularity of dictators demonstrates that human societies aren’t particularly progressing

On a purely political level, the elections of Donald Trump, Boris Johnson, Bolsonaro in Brazil, Erdoğan in Turkey, Modi in India, the endless rule of Putin in Russia, and the increasing authoritarianism of Xi Jinping in China – all show conclusively that human political or cultural history is emphatically not moving steadily upwards towards some progressive, liberal nirvana.

Even more disillusioning for progressives is that most of these leaders were democratically elected. This is because of the primal fact, so often overlooked by well-heeled progressives, that most people, in most societies, more than anything else want meaning, order and security in their lives. People prefer meaning, order and security to uncertainty and chaos.

4. We aren’t in control

You and I, being enlightened progressives, may think that the leaders I’ve listed above are not going to provide the meaning and security which they promised their electorates, but that only proves another of Gray’s points which is that none of us are really in control of our lives: we choose one thing, we get something completely different.

Most people’s lives are demonstrably in the grip of various impersonal, suprahuman forces – but almost all of us desperately want to feel that we’re in control. Electing strong leaders with assertive agendas gives us electors the illusion of control, a) both in the big bad world – that we’re taking part in a fightback against them, the nameless forces which seem to be ruining the world; but just as importantly, b) in our own lives. Identifying with strong decisive leaders helps us overlook the fact that we so often feel powerless and helpless in our own day to day existences.

5. Technology changes, but people don’t change

Above all (to repeat the point, as Gray does again and again), modern liberals think human nature can be changed and improved – but it can’t. The amazing technologies we have developed over the past 200 years or so have given over-educated and under-experienced Westerners the deluded sense that we can change human nature. But, repeat after me: Technologies may change, but people don’t change.

One of the book’s central strands is a brief and sketchy history of human attempts to create super-humans, from Frankenstein in 1816 to all the hype about artificial intelligence in 2020.

Gray makes the simple point: How can we hope to make better, superior versions of human beings, when we don’t even understand ourselves? Scientists still don’t actually understand how minds work, how consciousness arises from matter, how flashing synapses produce the strange thing called consciousness.

Eradicating evil may produce a new species, but not the one its innocent creators have in mind. Humans have too little self-knowledge to be able to fashion a higher version of themselves. (p.43)

And:

We think we have some kind of privileged access to our own motives and intentions. In fact we have no clear insight into what moves us to live as we do. The stories that we tell ourselves are like messages which appear on Ouija boards. If we are authors of our lives, it is only in retrospect. (p.137)

Freud would have approved, and I entirely agree: we are lived by forces we never fully understand.

6. Artificial intelligence is doomed to fail

For the simple reason that we don’t understand human intelligence. This is why the exhibitions I’ve been to recently showcasing artificial intelligence seemed so pathetic and inadequate. (And it’s not just me saying that: the BBC journalist sent to review the Barbican’s exhibition about artificial intelligence thought the best examples of artificial intelligence the curators could assemble from all around the world were, to quote him, ‘pathetic’.)

It’s because any ordinary person knows that machines which can climb up a flight of stairs on their own or a computer which can beat the world chess champion or one which does cumulative facial recognition, are trivial and irrelevant compared to what it is like to be a person – a confused, sleepy, fantasy-driven human consciousness making endless mistakes about bus times or shopping lists or homework or the countless other chores we struggle with every day, as well as trying to manage personal relations with family, friends and work colleagues.

Compared to the complexity of being human, beating this or that chess champion is so very, very narrow an achievement on the part of the programmers who have been slaving away perfecting chess programs for fifty years or more, as to be almost sublimely, hilariously irrelevant.

In fact the most telling thing about artificial intelligence – which comes over very strongly when you read interviews with the scientists developing it – is how keen they are to rush towards a post-human future. But why? Because, Gray says, they cannot cope with the human present.

Struggling to escape from the world that science has revealed, humanity has taken refuge in the illusion that science enables them to remake the world in their own image. (p.30)

7. Communism and other failed utopias

Gray reserves some of his most scathing criticism for communists, the followers of Lenin and Stalin, who – in effect – thought that it was worth murdering millions of people in the here and now in order to secure a remote future in which everyone will live in peace. And then in the Cold War era to foment small wars around the world (Africa, South America, South-East Asia) in order to bring an end to war.

Same with the Nazis, who thought they could create a better world by first of all exterminating all the Jews and then all the Slavs.

In the twentieth century the worst episodes of mass killing were perpetrated with the aim of remaking the species. (p.88)

All the atrocities of the 20th century were carried out in the name of building a better world. Gray mocks modern liberals who carry on the same mantra (obviously without the holocausts) because they are basing it on the same basic delusions – that you can remodel human nature. You can’t.

8. Humans are, at bottom, incapable

In fact, the reality is that humans barely understand themselves, and are laughably unable to ‘take control of their own destinies’:

Today’s Darwinists will tell you that the task of humanity is to take charge of evolution. But ‘humanity’ is only a name for a ragtag animal with no capacity to take charge of anything. (p.145)

Thus the comedy of climate change is that these pathetic people, this pathetic species, having created a global catastrophe, thinks it can change or fix anything. Oh no it can’t. Watch and learn.

9. The fundamental basis of all modern liberal thought – that things will get better i.e. history has a direction and an end goal – is based on Christian theology

If you go back to the ancient Greeks or sideways to read the surviving works of the Aztecs, you find societies which were under no illusion that things – society of human nature – would ever change. Their religions and rituals were not linear and progressive but cyclical, based on the circular rhythm of the seasons plus the recurring astrological cycles.

Aztecs did not share the modern conceit that mass killing can bring about universal peace. They did not envision any future when humans ceased to be violent. (p.86)

The notion that history has a purpose and is heading for a Grand End-Point is a Christian idea (in fact it may be a Zoroastrian or Eastern idea originally, but it was picked up and incorporated in Christianity from its earliest days and thus spread throughout all Christian and post-Christian societies).

It is Christian theology which declares that history is heading to a Glorious End-Point when the Son of Man will return in glory and wind up history as we know it, at which point the dead will be raised and everyone will be judged and dispatched to heaven or hell.

Modern liberals unwittingly base their concept of history as a steady improvement towards some kind of nirvana or utopia on this very Christian theology, but without the subtle and complex insights into human nature developed by Christian thinkers over 2,000 years. Progressives have been:

reared on a curdled brew of Socratism and scraps of decayed Christianity… (p.160)

This is why progressive liberalism feels so shallow. It is piggy-backing on the back of Christian theology, but without the deep and penetrating insights into all aspects of the human psyche which tens of thousands of Christian theologians and writers carried out.

Secular thinking follows a pattern dictated by religion while suppressing religion’s most valuable insights. (p.19)

Instead, modern liberals join hands, sing Things Can Only Get Better and are shocked and amazed when they don’t. Their conviction that everyone is a progressive liberal at heart, if only they had enough education and the opportunity to read the right newspapers, cannot cope with the actual world in its often violent and even evil reality.

This basic naivety explains, in Gray’s opinion, the fact that ‘liberals’ are continually surprised at renewed outbreaks of human atrocity. ‘Liberals’ and ‘modern thinkers’ thought we had learned from the Holocaust and had ‘progressed’, and so they were unable to compute modern horrors like the wars in Yugoslavia, the Rwanda genocide or 9/11 or the Syrian civil war or the Rohynga massacres… and on and on it goes, the roll call of never-ending atrocities.

Events like that just don’t fit into the narrative that every day, in very way, we are becoming more tolerant and free and fair-minded and equal and ‘woke’ and aware. Oh no, Gray says, we aren’t.

Cherry picking from literature

The book’s strength is also its weakness. This is that it takes the form less of a sustained argument than of a kind of daisy chain of potted analyses of authors who Gray likes or whose works provide useful ammunition for his position.

It is very much not a work of political philosophy, in fact it references hardly any philosophers of any kind (apart from two or three pages about Thomas Hobbes and the same about Jeremy Bentham) and certainly no contemporary philosophers.

Instead, Gray takes us on a hugely entertaining and colourful journey through the thought of a bright and shiny array of creative writers through the ages, cherry-picking authors whose mordant and gloomy points of view echo, support or anticipate his own.

This is exactly what Christians do with the Bible. The Bible is so vast, varied and contradictory, that you can find quotes to support almost any point of view, from the most socially conservative (Honour your father and mother) to radical revolutionary (Blessed are the meek) to wacky science fiction fantasies (Ezekiel), if you search hard enough.

So, as a literature graduate, I know exactly the same is true for the corpus of secular literature, especially if you broaden it out to include all European literature, and extend it back in time to the Renaissance, the Middle Ages or, as Gray does, back to the ancient Greeks. There are now so many points of view, expressed by so many hundreds of thousands of authors, that – if you adopt Gray’s approach – it is easy to cherry pick ‘proofs’ and ‘evidence’ for any point of view imaginable.

But of course none of this is proof of any kind about human nature or human existence or consciousness or history or anything. Literature is just opinion – colourful, creative and beautifully expressed and plausible, but still only one person’s opinion.

Proof of the kinds of things Gray is claiming would require an engagement with the latest scientific literature in areas of consciousness, AI, sociology and so on, with properly carried out studies, and with a world of data and statistics.

Gray skips lightly away from any such engagement and instead gives us an entertaining stroll through some of his favourite authors. Each of these gets a thumbnail biography and then four or five pages summarising their thoughts and musings about human nature, history and so on.

So it comes as no surprise that all of the thinkers he’s carefully cherry picked, plus his interpretations of various historical cultural events (his scepticism about the so-called ‘scientific revolution’, his dazzling reinterpretation of Aztec culture), all go to reinforce his anti-liberal, anti-modern secular bias.

A daisy chain of authors

For my own amusement I made a complete list of the authors and works referenced in The Soul of the Marionette:

Heinrich von Kleist (1777 to 1811)’s essay The Puppet Theatre (1810) paradoxically suggests that it is the puppet who is free because he is not conflicted by a torn and agonised self-consciousness.

Novelist and poet Lawrence Durrell (1912 to 1990) in The Avignon Quartet describes a modern-day Gnostic.

Communist crystallographer J.D. Bernal (1901 to 1971) speculated that human society would be replaced by a Utopia of post-human cyborgs.

Director of Engineering at Google Ray Kurzweil (b.1948) published a book with the sub-title When Humans Transcend Biology.

Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz (1892 to 1942) wrote short stories on the theme of Gnosticism i.e that the world wasn’t created by a benevolent all-powerful God but by a blind or malevolent Demiurge, which explains why it is so botched and chaotic. Only those who come to know this (gnosis is Greek for knowledge) can, through an arduous apprenticeship and reading many mystical books, arrive at true knowledge of their place as souls trapped in fallen bodies in a badly made world, and break out towards the light of the True God.

Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi (1798 to 1837) is famous for his sensuously melancholy verse but also wrote a long work of thoughts about human nature, the Zibaldone, which is bitingly pessimistic about human nature and ridicules the idea that science will improve humanity. He is particularly savage about Christianity which, he thinks (with plenty of evidence to back him up) promotes a universalist claim, Christ’s injunction to his disciples to convert the whole world, which – in practice – gave carte blanche to force everyone in the world to convert, at the point of a sword or under threat of being burned at the stake. This, in Leopardi’s view, explains why the barbarity of the Middle Ages far eclipsed anything known or comprehensible in the ancient, pre-Christian world.

American poet and short story writer Edgar Allen Poe (1809 to 1849) wrote some fictions which touch on the Gnostic theme in which characters have dreams which come true, or dream a better world into existence.

Mary Shelley (1797 to 1851) wrote Frankenstein, always predictably dragged out on these occasions as the forerunner of all ‘modern’ debate about creating artificial life or intelligence.

The Symbolist poet Villiers de L’Isle-Adam (1838 to 1889) coined the word ‘android’.

Gustav Meyrink (1868 to to 1932) wrote The Golem (1915) another novel about people creating new uber-humans.

Jorge Luis Borges (1899 to 1986) in his story The Circular Ruins imagines a magician whose dreams come true before he realises that he himself is someone else’s dream.

Polish science fiction author Stanislav Lem (1921 to 2006) in his novel Solaris (1961) imagines a planet whose surface seems to be alive and conscious in ways we cannot conceive, and which communicates with the humans in the space station orbiting it by creating people from their past or creatures from their dreams.

American science fiction author Philip K. Dick (1928 to 1982) wrote a whole series of novels exploring the possibility of alternative consciousness, and how individual consciousnesses might be able to bend and warp reality. Gray devotes an unusually prolonged passage to Dick and his works.

H.G. Wells (1866 to 1946) wrote The War of the Worlds suggesting other intelligences have no concern about us.

Michel Faber (b.1960) wrote Under The Skin in which aliens come to earth purely to capture and eat humans, whose meat is tasty!

Boris and Arkady Strugasky‘s novel Roadside Picnic is about people who venture into the forbidden zones where alien spaceships landed, settled, then took off again. The thrust of all three of these stories is why should we think artificial intelligences we create (if we ever do) will give a damn about us.

T.F. Powys (1875 to 1953) wrote a series of novels in the 1920s and 30s which featured God or Devil or Demiurge characters appearing as normal people, giving rise to a lot of discussion about creation and reality.

Thomas Hobbes (1588 to 1679) masterpiece Leviathan is based on the idea that people will do anything, and submit to a strong central authority to avoid violence. But Gray thinks this is a chimera, a far too rational view of human nature. All the evidence suggests that people can initiate and put up with a quite staggering degree of violence i.e. human nature isn’t as one-dimensional as Hobbes paints it.

John Dee (1527 to 1608) was Elizabeth I’s astrologer and magician and an epitome of Gray’s view that what modern secular thinkers like to think of as ‘the scientific revolution’ was in fact deeply intertwined with all kinds of magical and voodoo beliefs, the prime example being Sir Isaac Newton who formulated the laws which underpinned the new scientific view of the universe but was also a mystic and heretical Christian who devoted an enormous amount of energy trying to decipher the prophecies contained in the Book of Revelation.

Norbert Wiener (1894 to 1964), mathematician and philosopher, helped the Manhattan Project, is acknowledged as the father of cybernetics, and envisaged a future where man makes machines which outdo man.

John von Neumann (1903 to 1957), mathematician, physicist and computer scientist, also helped with the Manhattan Project and founded game theory. The ideas of both men underpin futurists’ confidence that man can remake man, or make a super-man machine, or machines which can help people achieve super-lives.

Guy Debord (1931 to 1994) is popular with students of the humanities and the arts because of his book Society of the Spectacle which expands on Marxist ideas that governments control us by getting us to buy into the mindless entertainments of the mass media. More than that, even political protests or extreme events like terrorist attacks, are all part of The Spectacle. Gray is, as you might expect, bitingly sceptical about Debord, concentrating on his career after the 1968 revolution failed to materialise, wandering the French provinces, slowly expelling all the members of his organisation, the Situationist International, drinking heavily, coming to the despairing conclusion that there can be no revolution because The Spectacle can assimilate anything and eventually committing suicide in 1994.

Jeremy Bentham (1748 to 1832) the ultimate in rationalist philosophers who formulated the ideas of Utilitarianism and said social policy should be judged on whether it promotes the greatest happiness of the greatest number. Gray describes Bentham’s idea for the Panopticon, a prison built in a circle so guards at the centre could monitor all the prisoners, and then goes on to claim that we live in a surveillance society infinitely more thorough and extensive than anything Bentham could have imagined.

E.M. Foster (1879 to 1970) famous for his novels of Edwardian upper class life, wrote a striking science fiction story, The Machine Stops (which I happen to have read and reviewed). Gray criticises the story for giving no indication of how the bubble world entirely controlled by some vast central machine came into existence. But he mentions it in order to speculate about how our societies might collapse and fall.

Samuel Butler (1835 to 1902) wrote his satirical vision of the future, Erewhon which predicted there would be labour-saving machines and robots in the future. Well, half of that was correct.

So you see what I mean by literary dilettantism, picking and choosing from the endless flowerbed of imaginative literature, with no attempt whatsoever to engage with the professional, philosophical or scientific literature on the subjects he discusses.

Straw men

Most debaters set up straw men i.e. simplify the arguments of their opponents in order to caricature and counter them. I was struck by the way Gray does just this – establishing an entity or group or party or movement of ‘modern secular thinkers’ which he then proceeds to hammer from all directions – and in particular by the way that he doesn’t mention a single specific name. Instead, he rings the changes on a set of generic terms for ‘the Enemy’, which I began to find interesting in themselves:

many people today…
modern secular thinkers believe mankind can be recreated in a higher form…
it does not occur to these sublime moralists that in human beings the good and the bad may be intermixed…
those who aim to fashion a higher humanity with science…
… Gnostic themes that unnoticed or repressed, shape much of modern thinking…
this view of things is nowadays close to being incomprehensible…
The modern world inherits the Christian view…
… human impulses that modern thinking denies..
… how tenuous are the assumptions on which western thinkers base their hopes of peace…
… modern humanity insists that violence is inhuman…
… believers in reason, lacking any deeper faith and too feeble to tolerate doubt…
modern individualism tends…
Today there are some who expect such machines to be among us within a few decades…
…this modern catechism is mistaken…
modern thinkers have imagined that humans can achieve a state of freedom…

You can see how the repetition of the central terms builds up an image of a straw man (or straw liberal) who is particularly dim and uninsightful – but without troubling to name names or quote any texts.

Mentioning specific named writers would, of course, instantly complicate the situation, because it is unlikely that any ‘modern secular liberal’ would be quite as dim as Gray likes to make out.

As with the cherry picking of authors, this approach allows him to unfurl his favourite themes and hobby horses with no fear of resistance or critique.

Sick writers

There are many ways to be entertained, amused and informed by this lovely jumble sale of a book. IN among the amusing stories and hobby horse diatribes against ‘modern liberals’ I began to notice another strand which unintentionally confirms one of my own bête noirs or obsessions: which is that imaginative writers – poets and novelist and playwrights and philosophers – are, on the whole, among the very last people whose advice you would want to take about life and living, seeing as almost all of them have been sick misfits suffering from a variety of mental illnesses and substance addictions. Thus:

Kleist was forced to join the civil service which he hated, wanted to be a writer but struggled to produce anything which satisfied him, tried and failed to join up to Napoleon’s army and ended up committing suicide in 1811.

Schulz was forced to become a school teacher in order to support ailing relatives, hated his job, struggled to write, had a failed engagement to a woman, and, as a Jew, was murdered by the Nazis.

Leopardi was a hunchback with poor sight, who was frail and sickly all his life, having a long but unsuccessful involvement with a married woman, living most of his life in poverty, before moving to Naples and dying of TB aged 38.

Edgar Allen Poe was a disastrous shambles of a man, who never secured a regular income despite starting umpteen magazines and journals, living hand to mouth in poverty, a chronic alcoholic, before being discovered roaming the streets of Baltimore out of his mind and wearing someone else’s clothes, dying in a pauper’s hospital aged 40.

Philip K. Dick was mentally ill for most of his life, dosing himself with alcohol and amphetamines to fuel his prodigious output of disturbing novels until he suffered a full-blown mental collapse in 1974, during which he claimed to have a had a great Revelation about life which he spent the rest of his life struggling to understand. Psychosis, five marriages, heavy drug addiction, repeated suicide attempts.

Guy Debord heavy drinker, despair, suicide aged 63.

Not exactly role models, are they? More to the point, where are all the people of their times who lived healthy, happy, fulfilled and productive lives? Well, they were too busy living life to the full, to write anything.

In other words, writers, on the whole, are a self-selecting and self-reinforcing, self-supporting, self-promoting group of the sick, the mentally ill, the addicted, impoverished, failed and frustrated.

To put it another way, imaginative writers in their writings tend to give a wildly inaccurate picture of human nature and human society. The works and thoughts of any ‘creative’ writer should, therefore, be taken with a large pinch of salt and not treated as any kind of ‘truth’, let alone as lessons by which to live life. And definitely not as evidence about what the ‘society’ of their time ‘thought’.

Gray’s prescription – withdrawal

Seeing all around him chaos, resurgent barbarism, and an array of misguided beliefs in meliorism, social improvement and scientific advances, Gray recommends withdrawal. He recommends withdrawing into yourself and seeking to achieve harmony and mental peace through acceptance of the fact that you are an irrational, conflicted being which doesn’t understand itself, let alone the world it lives in – and by this acceptance, cultivating an inner freedom.

It’s worth quoting the book’s final passage in full as this turns out to be a surprisingly frank and candid piece of advice about how to live.

We do not know how matter came to dream our world into being; we do not know what, if anything, comes when the dream ends for us and we die. We yearn for a type of knowledge that would make us other than we are – though what we would like to be, we cannot say.

Why try to escape from yourself? Accepting the fact of unknowing makes possible an inner freedom very different from that pursued by the Gnostics. If you have this negative capability, you will not want a higher form of consciousness; your ordinary mind will give you all that you need. Rather than trying to impose sense on your life, you will be content to let meaning come and go. (p.165)

My thoughts

I agree with him.

I too believe human nature is unchangeable, that Western progressive liberals make up a minority of the human population which they arrogantly and ignorantly claim to speak for, that their view of human nature is insultingly shallow (amounting to little more that shouting ‘racist’ or ‘sexist’ at anyone who doesn’t fit their narrow parameters) and that their shallow ideology:

fails to grasp, understand or prevent the failure of their political movements – as graphically represented by the election of Trump, Johnson, Brexit
fails to understand why populations would democratically elect right-wing populists such as Bolsonaro or Erdogan – and above all:
fails to understand or explain why people continue to be barbaric, violent and sadistic in terrible conflicts all around the world

It’s not that progressive liberalism is morally wrong. It is that it is factually inadequate, biologically illiterate, philosophically impoverished, and so politically and socially misleading.

It is doomed to fail because it is based on a false model of human nature.

As to Gray’s prescription, that we abandon the effort to understand either ourselves or the world around us, I think this is a nice idea to read about, here or in Ursula Le Guin, or in a thousand Christian or Eastern mystics. It is a nice fictional place to inhabit, a discursive possibility, in the same way that I – and billions of other readers – inhabit novels or plays or works of art for a while.

But then I am forced to return to the workaday world where I must earn a living and look after my family, and where simply ‘letting meaning come and go’ is not an adequate guide to life.

To thinking about life, maybe. But not to actually living it.

The Good Soldier Švejk, Part One: Behind the Lines by Jaroslav Hašek (1921)

Švejk or Schweik, Shveyk or Schwejk (pronounced sh-vague) is a cultural icon in his native Czechoslovakia. His name is a byword and forms the basis of an adjective – Švejkian – which describes the insouciance and devil-may-care attitude of the common man in the face of hostile officialdom.

Švejk is a survivor, an amiably simple-minded, middle-aged man who never takes offence or gets angry, who walks through life with a sweet smile on his face, who faces down the various jumped-up officials and army officers who try to break him with a calm, imperturbable gaze, a survivor with a ready fund of cheerful stories about friends and acquaintances, which are appropriate for every situation he finds himself in, no matter how challenging, happy as long as he has a pint in one hand and his pipe in the other.

The Good Soldier Švejk as drawn by Joseph Lada

The Good Soldier Švejk is a very long book at 750 pages in the Penguin paperback translation by Cecil Parrott. But, unlike many supposedly ‘comic classics’, it is actually genuinely funny, in the way that Švejk’s imperturbable good humour either disarms or drives mad the endless stream of policemen, coppers’ narks, prison warders, lunatic asylum officials, army officers, chaplains and so on who confront and try to break him.

Švejk just doesn’t care. He lives in a shabby boarding house, frets about his rheumatism, and trades in mongrel dogs which he blithely tells everyone are thoroughbreds and pedigrees although they’re nothing of the sort. Some years earlier he had done military service in the 91st regiment but been kicked out for idiocy. He has a certificate to prove it – a certificate of imbecility – which he is liable to bring out and present to perplexed officials in the spirit of being helpful, ‘Yes, your worship, I am a certified idiot, your worship’.

Plot summary, part one

The story begins in Prague with Švejk’s landlady Mrs Müller, giving Švejk news of the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand in Sarajevo that precipitates World War I. Švejk sets the tone by not grasping the importance of any of this, and mixing the archduke up with several other Ferdinands of his acquaintance.

He goes to the local pub, the Chalice, landlord Mr Pavilec, where a police spy, Bretschneider, is encouraging the drinkers to speak their minds about the news, and then promptly arresting them for treasonous talk.

Švejk is arrested and taken off to police headquarters where he discovers numerous other innocents are filling the cells. He hears their stories which reflect the absurdity and randomness of police and official procedures, one of the guiding themes of the book. (Later he learns that the completely harmless landlord Pavilec was arrested at the same time as him but convicted and given ten years.)

But it is also where Švejk first demonstrates his uncanny ability to stay calm and reasonable in the face of ranting officials, like the police inspector shouting abuse at him for being a dirty traitor.

Švejk being yelled at by ‘a gentleman with a cold official face and features of bestial cruelty’

Švejk is taken before an examining magistrate, then back to the cells, and is then paraded before medical experts who have to decide whether he really is such an idiot as he appears.

They refer him to a lunatic asylum, which he enjoys a lot despite being forced to wear a white gown and where he is inspected by another set of experts, this time psychiatrists.

Eventually Švejk is kicked out and taken by the police back to another police station. Here he’s put in a cell with an anxious middle-class man who’s been locked up for doing something disreputable and is pacing up and down cursing the impact it will have on his wife and children. Švejk tries to calm him by telling some of his endless fund of stories about people he’s met or known or heard of, though some of the stories are comically inappropriate like the tale of the man who hanged himself in a police cell.

Švejk is then released from custody but is being accompanied through the streets by a policeman when they see a small crowd around a poster of the Emperor on the wall and Švejk gives vent to a patriotic cheer, which prompts his rearrest and return to the police station (for stirring up crowds, causing civil unrest).

Švejk is brought before yet another police official who listens to his excuses and, in an unusually piercing scene, looks into his wide-foolish, baby blue eyes for a long moment and… decides to release him. Švejk walks forward, kisses his hand, and then exits the police station and makes his way back to the Chalice pub where this whole sequence began.

Commentary

All this happens in the first 50 or so pages, the first quarter of volume one – and you can see straightaway that the ‘plot’, such as it is, consists almost entirely of Švejk the little man being dragged before an apparently unending sequence of police, warders, investigators, magistrates, doctors, and psychiatrists.

It is, essentially, the same scene of the little man facing down officialdom, repeated again and again.

Plot summary, part two

Švejk discovers that Mrs Müller has taken lodgers into his room while he was away. Švejk kicks them out and life returns to its easy-going normality for a week or so. But then Švejk receives his call-up papers to report to the nearest army barracks.

Incongruously, and memorably, he gets Mrs Müller to wheel him to the recruitment offices in Prague in a wheelchair, while he clutches his crutches, teporarily unable to walk because of his rheumatism.

Švejk is transferred to a hospital for malingerers because of his rheumatism, where he discovers the inhumane and brutal treatment the poor and sick are subjected to (and which some die of). He attends a compulsory church service for the malingerers, where they are given a sweary drunken sermon from the disreputable chaplain, Otto Katz.

Švejk bursts into tears at the constant swearing and emotional battering of Katz’s sermon. Surprised, Katz asks to see him, then takes him on as his assistant.

Švejk is inspected by the learned doctors

This pair have various adventures containing broad satire at the church’s expense – bluffing their way through Catholic services they don’t understand, being too drunk to remember the words, losing various bits of holy equipment (particularly the scene where Švejk is sent to buy Holy Oil and ends up in an art shop where he is sold painters’ oil).

Then Katz drunkenly loses Švejk at cards to Lieutenant Lukáš, an army officer much given to drinking, womanising and gambling.

Lieutenant Lukáš and Švejk proceed to have a series of adventures of their own, the most memorable being:

when one of the lieutenant’s innumerable lovers and mistresses turns up unexpectedly and demands to move into the lieutenant’s rooms, until Švejk has the simple idea of telegraphing her husband to come and collect her, which all goes off with surprising civility
and when Švejk obtains a pet dog for the Lieutenant by the simple expedient of getting one of his mates in the dog-catching underworld to steal one for him

Lieutenant Lukáš is delighted with his new dog until he bumps in the street into its former owner, one Colonel Friedrich Kraus von Zilllergut, to whom the dog, of course, goes running, and who – alas – turns out to be Lukáš’s senior officer.

Furious, Colonel Friedrich promises to get Lukáš moved up to the front immediately. Lukáš returns to confront Švejk with the fact he concealed that the dog was stolen, and has gotten him (Lukáš ) turfed out of his cushy life and sent into danger. But when Švejk looks at him with his mild clear eyes Lukáš, like everyone else who tries to get angry with him, feels his fury fizzle out in the face of such stolid, good-tempered imbecility.

And so volume one ends with the promise that volume two will follow the adventures of Švejk and Lukáš to war!

Religion

Hašek’s attitude towards religion is unremittingly satirical. All religion is an empty con, as far as he’s concerned, and if it had any meaning or content that was all finished off in the Great War.

Preparations for the slaughter of mankind have always been made in the name of God or some supposed higher being which men have devised and created in their own imagination… The great shambles of the world war did not take place without the blessing of priests… Throughout all Europe people went to the slaughter like cattle, driven there not only by butcher emperors, kings and other potentates and generals, but also by priests of all confessions… (p.125)

A central character in this first volume is the alcoholic, womanising, sceptical army chaplain Otto Katz who takes Švejk as his assistant and stars in a number of comic scenes:

the first one is when he gives a rambling drunk sermon to a congregation of prisoners from the punishment barracks, who all nudge each other in anticipation of the chaplain’s regular drunken ranting
in another he and Švejk get a visiting chaplain (who actually seems to believe in God and all that nonsense) blind, rolling drunk, until it’s safe for Katz to explain to him (the drunk chaplain) that he (Katz) only masquerades as a chaplain because it’s a well-paid, safe way of avoiding being sent to the front.

Satirical contempt is Hašek’s attitude to religion, and he yokes in the religions of the Incas or primitive tribesmen or Mongols to show how the same con has been pulled time and time again, marauding killers inventing some God in whose name they can commit whatever atrocities they like.

Švejk and the two drunken priests, the sincere one on the lft, Otto Katz on the right

Brutality

As I said, The Good Soldier Švejk is genuinely funny and yet, at the same time, it is surprisingly brutal. If I think of Edwardian comedy I tend to think of H.G. Wells’s comic novels featuring bumptious counter-jumpers like Mr Polly who are sort of comparable to Švejk, or the lighter moments of E.M. Foster, or the first novels of Aldous Huxley (1921, exactly same year as Švejk) – light comedy about vicars or chaps falling off bicycles.

By contrast Hašek’s book describes a world which, even in its civilian incarnation, is astonishingly harsh and brutal. Anyone in even the slightest position of authority seems to think it acceptable to shout and scream at anyone junior to them. All the characters find it acceptable to punch others across the mouth or box their ears or kick them downstairs. There are continual references to flogging as a casual form of punishment.

Švejk kicks the moneylender out of the house of Chaplain Katz

There is a generalised atmosphere of physical abuse which becomes a bit oppressive. On more or less every page people are kicked or hit or flogged:

p.163 Švejk tells the story of the trial of an army captain who was tried in 1912 for kicking his batman to death
p.165 the narrator describes informers who delight in watching fellow soldiers be arrested and tied up
p.167 Lieutenant Lukáš is described as routinely hitting his batmen across the jaw and boxing their ears

And the brutality applies not just to humans. When Švejk enters the employ of Lieutenant Lukáš we are told that all the Lieutenant’s previous servants tortured the his pets, starving the canary, kicking one of the cat’s eyes out, and beating his dog. Soon after starting work for him, Švejk even offers to flay the lieutenant’s cat alive, or crush it to death in a doorway, if he wants (p.167).

Or take Hašek’s detailed description of the physical assaults and torments to which supposed malingerers are subjected to by the medical authorities, described in chapter 8, page 62.

cup of tea plus aspirin to induce sweating
quinine in powder
stomach pumped twice a day
enemas with soapy water
wrapped up in a sheet of cold water

More than one patient is described as having died from this treatment.

Maybe it’s a prejudice in me, but I can’t really recall this kind of thing, this level of violence and personal physical abuse, in any English novels of this era, certainly not in the comic novels – or when they do occur it is to highlight the psychopathic savagery of the exponents.

But here everyone behaves like this.

And this permanent background hum of punches and kickings and floggings occasionally rises to scenes of real horror. For example, in the barracks prison Švejk can hear other prisoners being beaten and tortured. He can hear the long, drawn-out screams of a prisoner whose ribs are being systematically broken (p.95).

And in the office of Judge Advocate Bernis are photos of the ‘justice’ recently meted out by Austrian soldiers in the provinces of Galicia and Serbia.

They were artistic photographs of charred cottages and trees with branches sagging under the weight of bodies strung up on them. Particularly fine was a photograph from Serbia of a whole family strung up – a small boy and his father and mother. Two soldiers with bayonets were guarding the tree, and an officer stood victoriously in the foreground smoking a cigarette. (p.93)

Goya’s drawings of the Horrors of war described all this a century earlier. What changed, maybe, was that the First World War was fought by civilian armies and so entire populations were subjected to horrors and atrocities with large numbers of soldiers either actively ordered to torture and murder civilians, or forced to stand by while it took place. Did anything like this happen in the West, I mean did the English army systematically torture and hang civilians in Flanders?

Kafka compared with Hašek – people

Bertolt Brecht pointed out that Josef Švejk is the identical twin but polar opposite of Kafka’s Joseph K.

Mulling over this remark, I realised this is because, for Kafka, other people barely exist: they are are sort of mirrors, or maybe extensions of the central protagonist’s own terror and anxiety, shadows dancing through the central figure’s endless nightmare.

Whereas Švejk’s life is full of other people – a steady stream of officials, doctors, police and army officers who try to break him, as well as the endless list of people he knows about or has met or heard or read about and who provide the subjects of the huge fund of stories, gossip and cheery anecdotes which he can produce at the drop of a hat to suit any situation.

So, at first sight they are indeed polar opposites – Kafka describes a haunted terrain of ghost figures, Hašek’s book is thronged with real substantial people, and can, up to a point, be taken as presenting a panoramic view of Austro-Hungarian society.

Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy

In chapter seven of The Castle the village mayor explains to K. how mistakes in the vast and complex bureaucracy up at the Castle have led to him being summoned to work as a Land Surveyor even though another department of the Castle had specifically cancelled this same request – but news of the cancellation didn’t come through in time. Now K is floating in limbo because the badly-run bureaucracy has both requested and not requested him, employed and not employed him: there is a reason for him being there, and no reason; hence his feeling of being a non-person, stuck in limbo.

Well, I was very struck when something almost identical happens in Chapter Nine of The Good Soldier Švejk. Here the narrator describes how Švejk comes up before Judge Advocate Bernis, and then proceeds to describe how, despite being ‘the most important element in military justice’, this Bernis is a masterpiece of ineptitude and incompetence.

Bernis keeps a vast pile of muddled documents which he continually loses and misplaces, and so simply makes up new ones. He mixes up names and causes and invents new ones as they come into his head. He tries deserters for theft and thieves for desertion. He invents all kinds of hocus pocus to convict men of crimes they haven’t even dreamed of. He presides over ‘an unending chaos of documents and official correspondence.’

But not only this. We learn that Bernis has a fierce rival and enemy in the department named Captain Linhart. Whenever Bernis gets his hands on any paperwork belonging to Linhart, he deliberately removes papers, swaps them with others, scrambles it up in the most destructive ways possible. And Linhart does the same to Bernis’s papers.

Thus their individual incompetence is compounded by active malevolence. And these are just two of the hundreds of thousands of incompetent fools who staffed the vast Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy. (In a satirical parenthesis we learn that the papers on Švejk’s case weren’t found till after the war, and had been wrongly filed in a folder belonging to JOSEF KOUDELA, and marked ‘Action Completed’.) (pp.91-92)

The Bernis-Linhart passage isn’t the only place in the novel where the bureaucracy of the police, legal system, medical authorities or army is described as being rotten and inept. In a sense, this vision of bureaucratic incompetence underlies the entire novel, with Švejk being an everyman figure sent on an endless picaresque journey through a landscape of muddle and confusion, which builds up into a powerful overview of a society in the grip of stasis and decay.

Indeed, even a casual search online turns up articles which paint a breath-taking portrait of the huge scale, byzantine complexity, and elephantine inefficiency of the Austro-Hungarian Empire:

The bureaucracy of the Austro-Hungarian Empire

Kafka compared with Hašek – bureaucracy

Anyway, the recurring presence of various wings of the state bureaucracy in The Good Soldier Švejk has two big impacts on our reading of Kafka.

1. Many critics praise Kafka for his ‘unique achievement’ in describing a vast, spookily endless and all-powerful bureaucracy. But Švejk is teaching me that such an enormous, omnipresent and incompetent bureaucracy really did exist in the late Austro-Hungarian Empire; that it is less a product of Kafka’s mind than we at first thought, that the general sense of decay which Kafka conveys was the actual state of the Austro-Hungarian bureaucracy in its dying days, even down to the details of the absurdity caused when different sections of the bureaucracy failed to communicate with each other.

2. Insofar as they are both dealing with more or less the same entity – this vast bureaucracy – then it makes us reflect on the differences between the ways Kafka and Hašek describe it, which can summed up as the inside and the outside:

Kafka describes the personal and psychological impact of a huge faceless bureaucracy on its victims (Joseph K and K) – we see it from inside their minds and we experience along with them the nightmareish sense of helplessness, anxiety and stress it causes them.

Whereas nothing at all upsets Švejk. The Good Soldier Švejk is, to a surprising extent, just as much of an indictment of the stupid, all-encompassing, vicious and inefficient Habsburg bureaucracy, but it is described entirely from the outside, in objective and comical terms. The effect on the reader is like reading a journalistic report in a satirical magazine. The continual atmosphere of blundering officialdom, cruelty and sometimes really horrible violence, is kept entirely under control, remote and detached by the tone of brisk satire, and above all by the burbling presence of the indefatigable, unflappable, undefeatable figure of Švejk. Without Švejk it would be a horror show.

Conclusion

I need to read a) other novels of the period b) some actual history of the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to discover just how true this was.

The Good Soldier Švejk

1 Comment

by Simon on October 11, 2019 • Permalink

Posted in Books, Comedy, Literature, Novel

Posted by Simon on October 11, 2019

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/10/11/the-good-soldier-svejk-jaroslav-hasek/

The Machine Stops by EM Foster (1909)

E.M. Foster isn’t a name you associate with science fiction, his line being more stories about middle-class young ladies in Florence or Surrey. And yet his short story, The Machine Stops (1909), regularly appears in lists of top sci-fi stories.

In the preface to his Collected Short Stories, Forster sardonically commented that ‘The Machine Stops is a reaction to one of the earlier heavens of H. G. Wells.’ Maybe he’s referring to Wells’s A Modern Utopia, published in 1905, though it’s an odd to speak of it being a ‘reaction’ because Wells was just as capable of portraying dystopias as utopias, The Time Machine (1895) being the first in a long line which portray the future as not at all idyllic.

I was surprised by how little I was surprised by the sci-fi future depicted in The Machine Stops. In the future all humanity lives in cells under the ground, cocooned in complete isolation from each other and content to communicate via telescreens. Every need and want is provided by The Machine.

Imagine, if you can, a small room, hexagonal in shape, like the cell of a bee. It is lighted neither by window nor by lamp, yet it is filled with a soft radiance. There are no apertures for ventilation, yet the air is fresh. There are no musical instruments, and yet, at the moment that my meditation opens, this room is throbbing with melodious sounds. An armchair is in the centre, by its side a reading-desk-that is all the furniture. And in the armchair there sits a swaddled lump of flesh-a woman, about five feet high, with a face as white as a fungus. It is to her that the little room belongs.

Now, what would you expect to happen next? I would expect someone to realise how unnatural this life is and want to rebel, to escape, just as in Brave New World or 1984 or The Matrix.

I’d expect this revolt to highlight the depths of pitiful dependency into which humanity has fallen, to assert some deep, spiritual need for people to feel the sun on their faces and the fresh air in their lungs etc.

I’d expect their nearest and dearest to be scandalised, to try and protect them from themselves, I’d expect there to be set-piece debates with defenders of The Machine emphasising how it has ended war and conflict and brought ‘peace’, and the young rebel to spit, ‘Peace? You call this life without colour and passion, peace?’

I’d expect the act of rebellion to lead to the sudden collapse of the whole System, the end of The Machine, the death of the old life, but the narrative to conclude with a consoling sense that the future belongs to the new dwellers on the earth’s surface, to the ‘real’ people, the ‘authentic’ humans, who will have to start again, to build a new, truer civilisation.

And guess what? That’s exactly what happens.

‘But Kuno, is it true ? Are there still men on the surface of the earth ? Is this – tunnel, this poisoned darkness – really not the end?’
He replied:
‘I have seen them, spoken to them, loved them. They are hiding in the mist and the ferns until our civilization stops. Today they are the Homeless – tomorrow ——‘
‘Oh, tomorrow – some fool will start the Machine again, tomorrow.’
‘Never,’ said Kuno, ‘Never. Humanity has learnt its lesson.’

As he spoke, the whole city was broken like a honeycomb. An air-ship had sailed in through the vomitory into a ruined wharf. It crashed downwards, exploding as it went, rending gallery after gallery with its wings of steel. For a moment they saw the nations of the dead, and, before they joined them, scraps of the untainted sky.

For some readers these may come as completely new and startling ideas and, wherever you meet them for the first time, I guess that’s where you’ll always associate their biggest impact, that book or film will always have power for you.

But at my age and having read hundreds of sci-fi books and seen hundreds of sci-fi films and TV shows, these feel like platitudes and clichés. I didn’t find the story remotely interesting, but I was interested in how Foster handled it, in his prose style, and in the sidelight it cast on the ideas of his time.

TV adaptation

There’s a fabulous 1966 black and white TV adaptation. Surprisingly faithful, with wonderful early Dr Who sets, and hand-made special effects, complete with mechanical worms!

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2. The Match-Maker (Clovis)

3. Tobermory (C)

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16. Filboid Studge, the Story of a Mouse that Helped (C)

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