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Spain and the Hispanic World @ the Royal Academy

Historical scope

This is a vast exhibition, almost intimidatingly, almost bewilderingly so. Not so much because of the number of objects – although the 150 artifacts it contains must be at the top end of anybody’s ability to really process and appreciate. No, it’s the scale of the subject matter. The poster and promotional material gives the impression that it’s largely an art exhibition but this is way wrong. In fact it’s more of a historical exhibition which aims to give an overview of Spanish cultural history from the earliest times, from around 2,500 BC, to the time of the Great War. Imagine an exhibition which set out to give an overview of British culture starting with the earliest finds at Stonehenge and going century by century through to the War.

But more than that, it also aims to cover the cultural history of Spain’s colonies in the New World i.e. central and South America. Imagine one exhibition which set out to cover the complete cultural history of Britain and its empire! That’s what I mean by the scale and scope of the thing being challenging.

So there are paintings, yes, lots of paintings, quite a few by masters of the Spanish tradition – but there is a lot, lot more besides, lots of other types of object and artifact. At places across the website the RA use the strapline ‘Take a journey through 4,000 years of art-making across Spain and Latin America’ and that’s closer to the mark.

The Hispanic Society

The key fact to understanding the exhibition is given in its sub-title, ‘Treasures from the Hispanic Society Museum and Library’. The Hispanic Society Museum and Library in New York was founded in 1904 by philanthropist Archer M. Huntington in a set of buildings commissioned specially for the collection and which remain its home to this day. It is home to the most extensive collection of Spanish art outside of Spain.

So this exhibition is by way of presenting the greatest hits of the HSM&L’s collection. It contains some 150 works, including:

masterpieces by Zurbarán, El Greco, Goya and Velázquez
objects from Latin America including stunning decorative lacquerware
sculptures, paintings, silk textiles, ceramics, lustreware, silverwork, precious jewellery, maps, drawings, illuminated manuscripts

The exhibition is divided into 9 rooms and because each one makes such huge leaps in place and time and culture this seems the most manageable way of summarising it.

Room 1. The Iberian Peninsula in the Ancient World

A glass case of fine silver torcs and bracelets and suchlike made 2400 to 1900 BC by the so-called Bell Beaker people. By the third century BC the peninsula was inhabited by the people the Romans called the Celts.

The Palencia Hoard by unknown artists (172 to 50 BC)

Quite quickly we’re on to the Roman colonisation, consolidated in the first century BC. The room contains a floor mosaic of Medusa and a breath-taking marble statue of the goddess Diana.

I was surprised there was no mention of the Carthaginians who colonised eastern Spain and exploited its famous silver mines, something I read about in Carthage Must Be Destroyed by Richard Miles (2010) among other sources.

Moving swiftly we beam forwards to the collapse of Roman rule in the 5th century AD and the arrival of the Visigothic tribes. There’s a case with a lovely cloisonne belt buckle from the 6th century, reminiscent of the much better one from the Sutton Hoo horde.

Room 2. Al-Andalus

In 711 Arab and Berber invaders overran the Visigothic kingdom and installed their own Islamic governments. The territory came to be known as al-Andalus. In 756 Abd al Rahman I named himself Caliph and established a celebrated court in Córdoba. The peninsula remained under Muslim rule for the next 700 years with power moving between different dynasties and power centres. The room contains some stunning fabrics.

Alhambra silk from Nasrid, Granada (about 1400)

Among the most prized works by Muslim artisans from the thirteenth to the fifteenth centuries were ceramics and this room contains a lot of plates and bowls.

Deep Plate by an unknown artist (1370s)

This plate is made of tin-glazed earthenware and has been given an iridescent finish by applying a very thin layer of metal oxide. Potters would glaze with tin, lead, copper, silver, gold, or platinum, depending on availability and the desired outcome. For added extravagance, some of the dynamic patterns have been painted in vibrant (and very expensive) cobalt blue. In the centre is a coat of arms of one of the oldest aristocratic families in Catalonia, the Despujol. Designs like this were ostentatious showpieces for Europe’s rich and powerful. The two small holes at the top of this plate indicate that it was designed to be hung as art on a wall rather than piled with food on a table.

Locks and knockers

My favourite case in this room displayed eight or so fine metalwork door knockers and chest locks. The Hispanic Society’s collection of ironwork comprises some 300 pieces, including door knockers, pulls, locks and lock plates. I liked their medieval feel and especially the way they incorporate animals and imaginary beasts, such as a lizard, a wolf and a dragon, with intricate geometric designs influenced by Islamic tradition.

Two metal door knockers, on the left in the shape of a crab’s claw, on the right a bird with a long dropping neck (both around 1500)

The Reconquista

Throughout the Middle Ages Christian kings from the north fought the Muslim invaders, without much luck. The pace of military campaigning picked up from the 11th century onwards. This came to be known as the Reconquista and was the west Mediterranean equivalent of what, in the East, came to be known as the Crusades. Unlike the Crusades it was successful and in 1492 the last Muslim state, of Granada, was overthrown under forces led by the joint monarchs, Queen Isabella I of Castile and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, whose marriage and joint rule marked the de facto unification of Spain.

Slavery

The Spanish pioneered the European slave trade from Africa. The ruthless and forceful displacement of Africans to the Iberian Peninsula began as early as the 1440s. Following the discovery of the Americas the majority of enslaved Africans were trafficked directly across the Atlantic where, throughout the American continent, they were forced to work on plantation and in the notorious silver mining industry. By the sixteenth century, it is thought that Spain had the largest population of enslaved Africans in Europe.

Room 3. Medieval and Early Modern Spain

Room 3 is the biggest in the exhibition and the overwhelming impression in entering is the arrival of painting. There are works by Spanish masters such as El Greco, Velasquez and Zubaran. But, as with the exhibition generally, there’s much more to it than painting. The room covers the period from the triumph of Ferdinand II of Aragon and Isabella I of Castile over the Moors in 1492. They began a programme of forced conversion and violent expulsion of Muslim and Jewish communities as they bid to unite their realms under the Catholic faith. The Catholic Monarchs were followed by Charles V (1500 to 1558) and Philip II (1527 to 1598).

The sixteenth and seventeenth centuries were known as the Age of Gold. This was funded by slave labour in the New World, and especially the gold and silver mined by forced labourers working in terrible conditions in Spain’s Central American colonies.

It was also the Age of the Counter-Reformation when first Charles V then Philip II took it upon themselves to reinforce the Catholic Church at its most fierce and repressive (these were the glory years of the Spanish Inquisition which became notorious across Europe). Spanish rulers commissioned art which emphasised a sickly, sentimental, reactionary form of Catholicism or produced lickspittle portraits of terrifying, brutish kings, politicians and generals.

The Penitent St Jerome by El Greco (1600)

The most prominent painters of the period included artists such as El Greco, who moved to Toledo in 1577, and Diego Velázquez, who was appointed court painter to Philip IV in 1623. I appreciate that El Greco (1541 to 1614) is a classic of European art but I have never liked him. The milky eyes of his sickly saints and martyrs staring up into Catholic heaven have always revolted me.

The room is packed with lots of other nauseating Catholic imagery including an ascension, an altarpiece, images of Mary and Martha, a Mater Dolorosa, crucifixions, mothers and babies, a Pieta, images of the Immaculate Conception. There’s a big painting of St Emerentiana by Francisco de Zurbarán which is dire. The depiction of the fabric is impressive in a stiff late medieval way, but the face is awful.

Revolting in a different way are the power-worshipping portraits by the likes of Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (1599 to 1660). There’s a huge portrait of Gaspar de Guzmán, Count-Duke of Olivares, who carried out negotiations with the young Prince Charles who came to Spain to sue for the hand of the Infanta in 1623. With characteristic arrogance Olivares insisted that Charles could only marry her if he promised to convert to Catholicism along with all the British court. This was a non-starter and explains why Charles went onto the court of France and won the hand of Henrietta Maria from the much more pragmatic Henry IV.

Spanish wars of repression

The huge wealth Spain creamed from its black slaves and the enslaved Aztecs and Incas in the New World paid not only for a re-energised and harshly reactionary Catholic Church, but for its wars of conquest designed to undo the Reformation and reimpose Catholicism on Protestant countries. It was with this aim that King Philip II launched the Armada in 1588 which was designed to defeat the English, overthrow their queen, Elizabeth I, who, along with most of the aristocracy would have been treated as heretics and executed, and then a foreign ideology (Catholicism) imposed on the entire population, anyone complaining being subjected to summary execution.

Luckily the English navy disrupted the Spanish fleet and the ‘Protestant wind’ did the rest. But the Netherlands was not so lucky. Originally under the control of the Dukes of Burgundy, with the end of their line the Netherlands fell to the house of Hapsburg, which itself inherited the Spanish throne. Largely Protestant the Netherlands rebelled against Catholic rule in the 1570s starting the prolonged period of rebellion which is known as the Eighty Years War. In 1567 Fernando Álvarez de Toledo, 3rd Duke of Alba arrived with an army of 10,000 Spanish and Italian soldiers and proceeded to institute a reign of terror. As Wikipedia puts it:

Acting on orders of Philip II of Spain, Alba sought to exterminate all manifestations of Protestantism and disobedience through inquisition and public executions.

There was not a lot of difference between this and the Nazi conquest of the Low Countries 400 years later. None of this is mentioned in any of the wall labels. Spain’s role as arch enemy of free Protestant countries in the 16th and 17th centuries simply goes unmentioned.

The Duke of Alba in 1549 by Anthonis Mor, the man who ‘sought to exterminate all manifestations of Protestantism and disobedience through inquisition and public executions.’

Besides paintings testifying to the lachrymose religiosity of the Counter Reformation and the genocidal macho-ness of Spain’s generals, the room also includes:

many early maps of the Mediterranean, the Atlantic coast and the New World
a baptismal font, a pilgrim flask, a chalice, a reliquary cross, a pendant, a huge bishop’s brocade
a set of illuminated manuscripts including a Book of Hours
glazed earthenware, goblets and suchlike

My favourite piece was much earlier, a medieval wooden carving of St Martin on a horse from the late 15th century before the Reformation split Europe, before Columbus discovered the New World, before art became really professionalised – from a simpler time.

St Martin 1450 to 1475 by unknown artist

Room 4. Colonial Latin America I: People and place

A huge modern map on the gallery wall gives a sense of the breath-taking amount of territory Spain arrogated to itself after Christopher Columbus stumbled across the New World on his failed attempt to find a western passage to India. He had, in fact, landed on Guanahani, an island in the Caribbean which he renamed San Salvador (in modern-day Bahamas).

His mistaken belief that the natives were Indians condemned indigenous peoples in north, central and south America to be known as ‘Indians’ for centuries afterwards, despite belonging to a huge range of peoples, languages and conditions and explains why the Caribbean islands are erroneously referred to as the West Indies to this day.

The Spanish conquistadors promptly conquered the empires of the Mexica (Aztecs) and Inca, massacring them where necessary, setting the survivors to work as forced labour on huge plantations or in the silver mines which they discovered in 1547 at Potosí in the southern highlands of Bolivia.

Spain divided its vast territories in the Americas into two viceroyalties: Nueva España (New Spain, modern-day Mexico and Guatemala), and Peru (which included Peru, Bolivia and Ecuador). Later, additional viceroyalties were created: Nueva Granada (made up of Colombia and Venezuela) and Mar de la Plata (Argentina, Chile, Uruguay and Paraguay).

Spain was to rule over this huge colonial empire until independence movements in the 1820s forced them to relinquish these territories allowing for the emergence of modern nation states.

Race rules – apartheid

The conquering Spanish implemented a strictly hierarchical society based on purity of bloodlines and skin tone denominating ‘casta’ (caste). Close ties to Spain and white skin elevated the status of the individual: ‘peninsulares’ (literally those from peninsular Spain) dominated the colonial administration; followed by ‘criollos’ (creoles), those of Spanish (or European) descent born in the Americas; ‘mestizos’, those of mixed parentage; and finally ‘indígenas’, those of indigenous descent. At the bottom of the pile were the hundreds of thousands black African slaves.

This room contains a lot of surveys and maps, for example several surveys of the new settlement of Mexico City, and including the famous World Map of 1526 by Giovanni Vespucci. This map was a copy of the padrón real, Spain’s master nautical chart which was kept in a secret location in Seville. It’s thought this ornate version was a gift for King Charles V. It includes decorative details such as ships in the ocean, camels and elephants across Africa, a collapsing Tower of Babel, and a Red Sea coloured vivid scarlet.

Detail of Giovanni Vespucci’s World Map (1526)

Room 5. Colonial Latin America II: Decorative Arts

In the decades after the conquest there was, surprisingly enough, a flourishing of the arts. Indigenous artists who were skilled with local materials, techniques and iconography adapted their work to satisfy European tastes and religious beliefs. As it was prohibitively expensive to import domestic objects from Spain there was significant demand for locally produced decorative arts. This gallery contains 20 or so examples of this hybrid art including a number of bateas or trays, vases, caskets, bowls and jars, and an impressive shawl.

Shawl (1775 to 1800) by unknown artist

A large rectangular shawl with fringed ends, the rebozo, is perhaps the most enduring of all traditional Mexican garments. It was first recorded in the 1580s, and is still worn by women across the country today.

Room 6. Colonial Latin America III: Religious Art

A room devoted to art and artifacts created for the Spanish Catholic church which moved quickly to lay out a network of ecclesiastical districts or dioceses under the jurisdiction of bishops alongside a far-reaching programme of church and convent building – all designed, of course, to convert the entire native population.

Not many Spanish artists volunteered to go and live in the New World so the religious authorities had to rely on converting and then training indigenous artists. These created fresco cycles, paintings and polychrome sculptures which were made in vast quantities, likewise fine ornamented silver and gold objects, and fabrics.

This gallery contains a range of religious paintings, sculpture and other objects from across the Americas that reveal how local artists used local materials and adapted traditional techniques, incorporating pre-Columbian symbols or other
local references such as flora and fauna in their work.

The room contains a number of dubious paintings of varying levels of amateurishness and kitsch, one incorporating fish scales into its surface. The objects, such as lamps, are more persuasive. But the standout item, and one of the highlights of the exhibition, is the set of four small sculptures of figures demonstrating the four states of people after death, namely a rotted skeleton covered in maggots, a flame-red soul burning in hell, a pale white naked person undergoing the torments of purgatory, and a dressed and serene personage enjoying the bliss of heaven.

The Four Fates of Man: Death, Soul in Hell, Soul in Purgatory, Soul in Heaven attributed to Manuel Chili, called Caspicara (around 1775)

Room 7. Goya

The Spanish are everso proud of Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (1746 to 1828) but visiting the National Gallery’s exhibition Goya Portraits back in 2015 destroyed my respect for him. That exhibition revealed Goya to be a shockingly bad painter, particularly of portraits. He looks like a bad caricaturist. At one point in that exhibition they had hung Goya’s portrait of the Duke of Wellington alongside one British painter Sir Thomas Lawrence and there was no comparison. The Lawrence portrait is a brilliantly penetrating, superbly finished and completely convincing portrait. The Goya portrait is far more muddy, murky and unfinished.

In this room there are only six or so works, three big paintings and three small sketches. To my astonishment the Spanish curator of the exhibition, Guillaume Kientz, makes the wild claim that Goya’s portrait of the Duchess of Alba is Spain’s equivalent of the Mona Lisa, a lodestone, a high water mark of the art of painting. Really? I think it’s dire.

Francisco de Goya The Duchess of Alba (1797) © Courtesy of The Hispanic Society of America, New York

The Duchess of Alba by Francisco de Goya (1797)

The background is drab and dead, her posture is stiff, and her face! And yet the curators are so confident that this is a great European masterpiece that they made it the poster for this exhibition. The fact that she is pointing with her right hand to the words ‘Solo Goya’ (‘Only Goya’) written in the sand only make it seem more clumsy, gauche and amateurishness.

Luckily, the room has a redeeming feature, which is a display of three small drawings from what came to be called Albums A and B. These small-scale sketches were to culminate in the better known series of sketches known as Los Caprichos. Goya’s depiction of faces in these is still dire, but the sketches aren’t about the faces, they are about striking and often unusual physical postures and positions, capturing the activities of everyday life of people and peasants with swift, vivid strokes.

This smudgy reproduction doesn’t do justice to the dynamic energy of the original sketch, the excellence of composition, the straining man’s calf muscles, the woman’s hauntingly blank face sketched in with ink. Million times better than the silly duchess standing on a beach.

Peasant Carrying a Woman by Francisco de Goya (1810)

Room 8. Sorolla, Zuloaga and the Hispanic Society

Now, at long last, after what seems like an immensely long and exhausting journey, we finally enter ‘recent’ history i.e. the twentieth century. This is the last proper room of the exhibition and it contains a dozen or so huge paintings, 3 or 4 of them by ‘the Spanish Impressionist’, the master of light, Joaquín Sorolla.

The wall label gives an account of Archer Huntington’s founding of the ‘Spanish Museum’ in New York which opened its doors to the public in 1908. Soon after, Huntington visited Europe, where he saw works by the contemporary Spanish painters Ignacio Zuloaga in Paris and Joaquín Sorolla in London. Archer immediately planned to exhibit their work at
the Hispanic Society the following year as well as setting about buying works by other contemporary Spanish artists including Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa, Isidre Nonell and José Gutiérrez Solana.

Sorolla and Zuloaga can be seen as presenting differing views of Spain, from the lovely sunlit world of Sorolla to the darker vision of Zuloaga which is why the curators have hung them on opposite walls.

After the Bath by Joaquín Sorolla (1908)

Sorolla is less like an impressionist than the Spanish equivalent of John Singer Sargent, but painting in a Mediterranean setting drenched with light. His paintings look best from the other side of the room where the details of the composition fade a bit and the main impact comes from the drama of light and shade.

Possibly my favourite painting in the whole exhibition was Ignacio Zuloaga’s ‘Lucienne Bréval as Carmen’ from 1908. Why? Because I think I’m right in saying that she is the only human being in the exhibition’s 60 or so paintings of people who is happy, who is laughing. After scores of black-clothed clerics, members of the Inquisition and brutal, exterminating generals on the one hand, and countless Immaculate Conceptions of the Holy Virgin Mary and El Greco saints looking milky-eyed up to a heaven pullulating with baby angels, how lovely to come across an actual human being looking like they’re enjoying being alive.

Lucienne Bréval as Carmen by Ignacio Zuloaga y Zabaleta (1908)

As usual this internet copy isn’t a patch on the size and vibrancy of the original. The more I looked the more relaxed and happy I felt and so so relieved to have escaped the centuries of bleak Catholic oppression.

Room 9. Vision of Spain

More Sorolla. Following the success of the Hispanic Society’s exhibition in 1909, Huntington and Sorolla embarked on an ambitious project that would dominate the rest of the artist’s career. Huntington wanted him to paint a series of murals for the Hispanic Society’s main building. Originally he wanted scenes from Spain’s long colourful history but Sorolla demurred – he wasn’t that kind of painting. The project evolved into the idea for a series of fourteen monumental canvases depicting the peoples, costumes and traditions of different regions of the country and to be titled ‘Vision of Spain’.

Painted between 1911 and 1919, the panoramic series was opened in a purpose-built gallery at the Hispanic Society in 1926, three years after the artist’s death.

Now it would have been very impressive to end the exhibition with one of these finished panels but, for whatever reason, the curators haven’t. Instead, the final room is a long narrow gallery in which is hung a preparatory sketch for the panels.

The wall label tells us that Sorolla produced around 80 of these preparatory studies, painted in gouache. They display a more sketchy, expressionist approach than the final work along, with modern processes such as the collaging technique papier collé.

This is sort of interesting but not as impressive as the final thing would have been. In fact it’s an odd, parochial, anti-climactic way to end an exhibition which, in its central rooms, encompassed the military and religious history of one of the greatest empires the world has ever known.

Sketch for the Provinces of Spain: Castile by Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1912 to 1913)

In-depth video

Thoughts

Two thoughts:

1. The end of the exhibition – and so, presumably, the Society’s collection – is strangely incomplete. What I mean is, they have Goya, in 1797 and 1810 and then…Sorolla from 1908: what happened in between? What happened in Spanish art between Goya and Sorolla? There appears to be a big hole in the collection. In France we got reams of Salon art but also Courbet and then the amazing achievement of the impressionists and post-impressionists. Even in unartistic England we had lots of anecdotal and social art and then the pre-Raphaelites morphing into the ‘Olympians’ and then atmospheric fin-de-siècle art with outstanding individuals such as Aubrey Beardsley. Did Huntingdon not buy anything of 19th century Spanish art because he wasn’t interested, because there was nothing worth buying? It’s a big gap.

And then the 20th century. I appreciate Huntingdon was buying in the Edwardian period but…did the trustees of the collection agree not to purchase anything after his commissioning of Sorolla’s ‘Vision of Spain’, nothing from 20th century Spanish culture? For example, by Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dali? And, as I understand it, the Spanish Civil War of 1936 to 1938 was central to Spain’s modern history leading, as it did, to the fascist dictatorship of General Franco which only ended in 1975.

I don’t know what exactly you’d include in the collection or exhibition to cover this period – I’m just saying that the omission of artifacts from almost the entire 19th and 20th centuries feels very strange and surely undermine the collection’s claim to represent ‘Spanish culture’. The last two hundred years are, arguably, the most important part of any modern nation’s history and culture. Which brings me to a bigger question:

2. What is a nation’s culture? I know that the curators at the British Museum or Tate Britain would agree with the curators of this exhibition that a national culture is somehow captured or conveyed by rooms full of medieval ceramics, ancient maps, old paintings and church accessories. But is it? Would you say that the ‘culture’ of Britain would be adequately conveyed by Roman mosaics, medieval church artifacts, Jacobean paintings and some works by John Singer Sargent (the rough equivalent of Sorolla)? Pretty obviously, no. That would just be a collection of miscellaneous historical objects masquerading as a portrait of a culture.

Surely you’d turn to sociologists to learn what a real culture consists of – its language and religion, its human and physical geography, the climate, the agriculture and the traditional foods arising from it (beef and beer in England, tapas, paella and wine inn Spain), its laws and customs and traditions, the things that make it unique, and then how it survived the storms and disasters of the 20th century and has fared in the post-industrial, multicultural world of the last 30 years or so.

I understand the aims of this collection and this exhibition, I see its strong points, I marvel at its breadth and detail. But in a sense, isn’t a living, breathing culture, as lived by a nation’s people, precisely everything which is missing from this exhibition?

Related reviews

Sorolla: Spanish Master of Light @ the National Gallery (April 2019)
Peru: a journey in time @ the British Museum (December 2021)
Goya: The Portraits @ the National Gallery (November 2015)
Goya: The Witches and Old Women Album @ The Courtauld Gallery (March 2015)

The Penguin History of Latin America by Edwin Williamson (revised edition 2009)

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by Simon on April 3, 2023 • Permalink

Posted in Art, Exhibition, Painting, Slavery

Tagged Abd al Rahman I, Al-Andalus, Anthonis Mor, Arabs, Aragon, Archer M. Huntingto, Argentina, Aztecs, batea, Berber, Bolivia, Carthage, casta, Castile, Catalonia, Catholicism, Celts, ceramics, Charles V, Chile, Christopher Columbus, Colombia, Colonial Latin America, Cordoba, Count-Duke of Olivares, Counter-Reformation, criollos, death, Diana, Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez, Diego Velázquez, drawings, Duke of Alba, Duke of Wellington, Dukes of Burgundy, Early Modern Spain, Ecuador, El Greco, Elizabeth I, exhibition, Francisco de Zurbarán, Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes, Gaspar de Guzmán, Giovanni Vespucci, Goya, Granada, Guanahani, Guillaume Kientz, Heaven, Hell, Henrietta Maria, Hermenegildo Anglada Camarasa, history, Iberian peninsula, Ignacio Zuloaga, illuminated manuscripts, Incas, indígenas, India, Isidre Nonell, jewellery, Joaquín Sorolla, José Gutiérrez Solana, King Ferdinand II, knockers, Latin America, Los Caprichos, Lucienne Bréval as Carmen, Manuel Chili, maps, Mar de la Plata, medieval Spain, Medusa, mestizos, Mona Lisa, Nueva España, Nueva Granada, Painting, Palencia Hoard, Paraguay, peninsulares, Peru, Philip II, Protestant wind, Purgatory, Queen Isabella I, rebozo, Richard Miles, Roman Catholicism, Roman Empire, San Salvador, sculpture, silverwork, Sir Thomas Lawrence, slave trade, Slavery, Sorolla, South America, Spain colonies, Spanish Armada, Spanish conquistadors, Spanish cultural history, Spanish empire, St Emerentiana, St Martin, Sutton Hoo, textiles, the Age of Gold, the Bell Beaker people, the Caribbean, the Carthaginians, The Catholic Monarchs, the Crusades, the Despujol, The Duchess of Alba, the Eighty Years War, The Hispanic Society, the Hispanic Society Museum and Library, the Mexica, the Moors, the Netherlands, the New World, the padrón real, the Reconquista, the Reformation, the West Indies, Uruguay, Velázquez, Venezuela, Visigothic kingdom, Visigothics, Vision of Spain, Zuloaga, Zurbarán

Posted by Simon on April 3, 2023

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2023/04/03/spain-and-the-hispanic-world-royal-academy/

Metamorphoses by Ovid – 1

My design leads me to speak of forms changed into new bodies.
Ye Gods (for you it was who changed them) favour my attempts,
And bring my narrative from the very beginning of the world, even to my own times.
(Opening lines of the Metamorphoses in 1851 translation)

My purpose is to tell of bodies which have been transformed into shapes of a different kind. You heavenly powers, since you are responsible for those changes, as for all else, look favourably on my attempts, and spin an unbroken thread of verse, from the earliest beginnings of the world, down to my own times.
(First sentence, in Mary M. Inne’s 1955 prose translation)

I want to speak about bodies changed into new forms. You, gods, since you are the ones who alter these, and all other things, inspire my attempt, and spin out a continuous thread of words, from the world’s first origins to my own time.
(A.S. Kline’s 2000 translation)

(This is the first of two summaries and reviews of Ovid’s Metamorphoses.)

Ovid’s other books are good but the Metamorphoses stands head and shoulders above them. It is the length of an epic poem but instead of telling one story is a vast compendium of Greek myths and legends, starting at the creation of the universe and continuing all the way through to the deification of Julius Caesar, and all the stories in between are linked by one underlying theme – the physical change and transformation of their protagonists. It brings together myths and legends which describe the transformation of human beings into all kinds of other forms including animals, trees, rocks, birds, constellations, flowers, springs and so on.

Thus in book 1 the mischievous god of love, Cupid, shoots Apollo with a golden dart to inflame him with uncontrollable love for the maiden Daphne, who Cupid shoots with one of his arrows tipped with lead, which have the opposite effect, making the victim shun and flee love. Thus Apollo chases Daphne who does everything to evade him and finally, in pity of her distress, Jupiter transforms her into a laurel tree. In a very moving line Apollo places his hand on the bark of the tree and feels her heart beating through it.

The Metamorphoses consists of 15 books and retells over 250 myths. At 11,995 lines it is significantly longer than the 9,896 lines and twelve books of Virgil’s Aeneid, though not nearly matching the 24 books and 15,693 lines of the Iliad. It is composed in dactylic hexameter, the heroic meter of both the ancient Iliad and Odyssey, and the more contemporary epic Aeneid.

The Metamorphoses are important because, as other sources of information were lost in the Dark Ages, it preserved detailed versions of classic myths in one handy repository. It acted as a sort of handbook of myths and was a huge influence on Western culture as a whole, inspiring writers such as Dante, Boccaccio, Chaucer and Shakespeare (the story of Venus and Adonis becoming the subject of one of his two long narrative poems, the tragedy of Pyramus and Thisbe burlesqued in A Midsummer Night’s Dream and a thousand other references). Numerous episodes from the poem have been depicted in countless works of sculpture, painting, and music.

The poem itself metamorphoses

The text is not only about gods tormented by love and humans changing into animals or objects, the text itself works by changes and transformations. What I mean is the text isn’t as clear and logical as you might expect but one tale leads on to another in a semi-random way, some tales are suspended while others are completed, many take the shape of tales within tales i.e. one story is part-way through being told when a character embarks on telling a completely different story and you have to wait for this second one to finish before you go back to hearing the end of the first one (for example the story within a story about the Muses’ competition in book 5).

Although it’s as long as an epic poem, the Metamorphoses not only has no unity of narrative – hopping all over the place from story to story – it also is very uneven in genre and tone. It handles a range of themes which you might expect to find in numerous ancient genres of literature, from descriptions of fighting you would expect in epic; to passages of profound lament such as you’d find in elegy; to scenes of profound and searing tragedy; and then plenty of scenes which start out as idyllic pastoral. At some points a lengthy speech sounds like the kind of rhetorical argumentation you might find being made in a court of law.

As if reflecting the ever-changing, transforming narrative, which describes endless transformations, the tone and genre of the poem are themselves continually changing as they move among these different genres and ranges.

Three types of metamorphosis

I’d suggest three types of transformation in what follows, using the two vectors of mortal/immortal and temporary/permanent:

a god disguises themself – a god temporarily disguises themselves as someone or something else, remaining essentially the same beneath, male gods generally for the purposes of seduction, female goddesses generally for the purpose of revenge (the story of Philemon and Baucis in book 8 is a rare instance of benevolent, charitable disguising) – it is a temporary change
a god transforms themself – a god transforms themselves into something else completely: Jupiter transforming himself into a bull to abduct Europa or a shower of gold to inseminate Danae, and so on – it is temporary; some lower divinities can also transform themselves, for example Proteus or the river Acheloüs (book 9)
a god transforms a mortal – by far the most numerous category, where a god or the fates or some higher power transforms a mortal (or a lower divinity like a nymph or dryad) permanently, unalterably, often tragically

Book 1

The Creation of the universe by the orderly transformation of chaotic elements into the world we see around us. The evolution of human society through the four Ages of Mankind, Gold, Silver, Bronze, Iron.

The great flood exterminates most of mankind. Animated beings are produced by heat and moisture out of the resulting mud. Among them is the serpent Python. Phoebus kills the Python and institutes the Pythian games as a memorial.

Survivors of the flood, Deucalion and Pyrrha, throw stones behind them which, to their amazement, turn into humans to repopulate the earth.

Cupid punishes Apollo for mocking him, by making him fall madly in love with Daphne and pursuing her through the woods till Daphne is turned into a laurel tree. Henceforward, laurels are Apollo’s symbol.

Jupiter seduces Io then hides her from his jealous wife, Juno, by changing her into a cow. Juno admires the white heifer so Jupiter finds himself giving her as a present to Juno. Juno entrusts the cow to the care of Argus, who has a hundred eyes and never sleeps. Io wanders pastures as a cow, miserably unhappy, till she is reunited with her father Peneus who laments her fate, till Argus arrives and drives her on. Jupiter takes pity and has Mercury rescue her. First Mercury tells Argus the story about the transformation of the nymph Syrinx into reeds to lull him to sleep; then chops his head off and rescues Io. Juno takes Argus’s eyes and embeds them in the tail feather of her favourite bird, the peacock. Enraged, Juno sends a Fury to torment Io, who adopts the shape of a gadfly, driving her madly through Europe and into Egypt. Here Jupiter begs Juno to forgive her rival, the latter relents, and Io is finally reverted back to a woman.

A long account of how Phaëton, son of Phoebus god of the sun, persuades his father to let him drive the great chariot of the sun, which he proves unable to control, veering the sun all over the sky and causing catastrophic damage on earth.

Book 2

The story of Phaëton continued, ending with him being zapped with a thunderbolt by Jupiter. His four sisters – Phaethusa, Lampetie plus two unnamed ones – mourn him and are turned into trees. Cygnus, a relative of Phaëton’s, mourns him and is turned into a swan.

Jupiter repairs the walls of heaven, spots Callisto, woos her and when she resists, rapes her. Callisto’s ‘shame’ is revealed when she bathes with Diana and her nymphs. She gives birth to a son, Arcas. Juno tracks her down and attacks her but she turns into a bear. Fifteen years later Arcas has grown into a lusty lad who loves hunting and one day encounters his own mother as a bear and is about to kill her when Jupiter stays his hand. Jupiter whirls both son and mother into the sky and makes them constellations.

How the crow was made, namely she was a beautiful maiden, the god of the sea fell in love and pursued her, she threw up her hands in entreaty to heaven and was turned into crow.

The maid Nyctimene is raped by her father, Epopeus, a king of Lesbos. She flees into the woods in shame, refusing to let herself be seen. The goddess of wisdom, Minerva, takes pity on her and turns her into an owl, the bird which famously only comes out at night and becomes Minerva’s companion and symbol.

The raven had been a sleek, silvery bird but when Phoebus fell in love with the maid Coronis of Larissa, the raven spied her being unfaithful to the god with a young Thessalian mortal. In a moment of fury Phoebus shot Coronis dead with an arrow, then immediately repented his folly as she died in his arms: a) he took revenge on the snitching crow by turning it black b) he took their unborn child, Aesculapius, from Coronis’s womb and entrusted him to the care of Chiron the centaur.

Chiron has a daughter named Ocyrhoe. She starts to prophesy Chiron’s terrible death to him but the fates forestall her and turn her into a mare.

Mercury steals the cattle of Apollo but their location is noticed by the cowherd Battus. Mercury makes Battus swear not to reveal their location but then returns in disguise and offers him a reward for the secret and Battus promptly reveals their location, breaking his promise, and so Mercury turns his heart to hard flint, the kind called ‘touchstone’.

Aglauros had crossed the goddess Minerva by revealing secrets about her. Minerva visits the wretched hovel of the slimy goddess Envy and tells her to poison Aglauros’s heart, which she does, making her tormented with envy that her sister, Herse, has caught the heart of Mercury. When Mercury comes to the sister’s house to visit Herse, Aglauros refuses to budge out the doorway so Mercury turns her into a statue.

Jupiter transforms himself into a bull in order to mingle with the herd of cattle which regularly browse near Sidon. He orders Mercury to gently drive the cattle down to the shore where the beautiful maiden, Europa, daughter of king Agenor, daily plays with her attendants. The maidens play with this new bull (i.e. Jupiter in disguise), garland his horns, he lies down, tempts Europa to climb on his back, and then makes off into the sea, carrying her, terrified, away from the shore and her friends and over the sea to Crete.

Book 3

King Agenor commands his son Cadmus to seek his lost sister Europa. In Boeotia Cadmus slays a dragon (‘the serpent of Mars’) and is told to plant its teeth in the soil which he is then astonished to see sprout and grow into warriors. These tooth warriors then fight each other to the death, leaving just five who become Cadmus’s companions in founding the new city of Thebes.

The young mortal, Actaeon, stumbles across the goddess Diana bathing naked with her nymphs and she punishes him by transforming him into a stag which is then torn to shreds by his own hounds.

Juno discovers Jupiter is sleeping with Semele. She disguises herself as Semele’s old nurse, pops down to see her and they get chatting. Juno plants a seed of doubt in the girl’s mind by saying many a man claims to be a god to bed a girl; she (Semele) should insist to Jupiter, the next time she sees him, that he reveal himself in all his glory. So next time Jupiter calls, Semele makes him promise to give her anything she wants and, when he agrees, says she wants to see his true nature. Jupiter is now constrained to keep his word and so sorrowfully gathers his entire might together and, revealing himself to Semele in his blistering glory, incinerates her to ashes. Sad Jupiter takes the child in her womb and sows it in his own calf for 9 months and, when it is born, hands it over to nymphs for safekeeping. This will be Bacchus who is known as ‘the twice-born’.

Jupiter and Juno argue over who enjoys sex most, men or women. They agree to the arbitration of Tiresias who was born a man but lived 7 years as a woman before being restored to maleness i.e. has experienced sex as a man and a woman. Tiresias confirms that women get more pleasure from sex. Juno is so furious at losing the argument that she strikes him blind. Jupiter gives him the gift of prophecy as compensation.

Narcissus and Echo. The river-god Cephisus ‘ravishes’ Liriope, the Naiad, taking her by force under his waves and impregnating her. She gives birth to a beautiful boy, Narcissus. By age 16 he is a beautiful youth but cares nothing for suitors, male or female. One day the nymph Echo saw him, driving frightened deer into his nets. Juno had already punished Echo: for on many occasions when Jupiter was having sex with this or that nymph, Echo kept Juno chatting interminably to cover for him. When Juno realised this she struck her with two afflictions ) reducing her speech to the minimum b) giving her no power over it but making her merely ‘echo’ what others said to her.

So when Echo sees the beautiful Narcissus she is struck with love and adoration and follows him round everywhere, but can never initiate a conversation, having to wait for him to say something and then feebly echoing the last phrases. When she comes forward to face him she can only echo his words of astonishment and then of repulsion, for Narcissus loves no-one and runs off, abandoning her. Since then Echo haunts caves and dells and lonely places and slowly her body wasted away till she became an invisible voice, wanly repeating what anyone who wanders into places like that happen to say.

Meanwhile Narcissus continues to scorn all lovers, male or female and one of them lifts their hands to the gods, asking for him to suffer the same unrequited passion he causes in others. The goddess Nemesis hears and makes it so. Narcissus comes to a pool and rests and looks into it and falls in love with his own reflection. He is struck by fierce unrequitable love and beats his own chest drawing blood, laments, droops and is turned into a flower, the narcissus, with white petals (his ivory skin) surrounding a yellow heart (his blonde hair) with flecks of red (the blood he drew when he struck his own chest in the agony of love).

Pentheus mocks Bacchus and is torn to pieces by the god’s devotees including his own mother.

Book 4

While the festival of Bacchus goes on outside, the daughters of Minyas high-mindedly refuse to join in but sit inside spinning and telling stories. The story of Pyramus and Thisbe whose parents forbade their love so they made a midnight rendezvous at an old tomb but Thisbe, arriving first, saw a lioness fresh from a kill coming to the pool to drink. She safely hid but the lioness found her veil and tore it to shreds before leaving. Pyramus arriving a little later found the blood-stained veil, concluded his beloved had been killed and dragged away and so stabbed himself with his sword. At which point Thisbe came out of hiding to discover her beloved dying and, in turn, fell on his sword. The gods took pity and turned the berries of the mulberry tree under which the lovers took their lives, the colours of their blood.

Venus is unfaithful to her husband, Vulcan, with Mars. Helios the sun god sees this and tells Vulcan. Vulcan makes a new of metal and catches Venus and Mars in the act, then invites all the gods to come and see them, caught in this humiliating position.

As revenge, Venus makes Helios fall in love with Leucothoe and ignore another young woman, Clyties, who is desperately in love with him. Helios disguises himself as Leucothoe’s mother, Eurynome, to gain entrance to her chambers and reveals himself to Leucothoe, seduces and has sex with her.

But Clytie, consumed with jealousy, reports Leucothoe’s affair to her father Orchamus, who punishes his daughter by burying her alive. Helios sees this and comes to her rescue but Leucothoe is dead before he can save her. Helios sprinkles her body with fragrant nectar and turns her into a frankincense tree.

Clytie meanwhile, scorned by Helios for her involvement in Leucothoe’s death, sat pining away, constantly turning her face to the sun until she turns into the heliotrope, whose flowers follow the sun.

Salmacis falls in love with Hermaphroditus and their bodies are combined.

All these stories have been told by the daughters of Minyas as night fell and they worked their looms, ignoring the festival of Bacchus outside. Now Bacchus takes magic revenge, turns their looms into trees and the three daughters are transformed into gibbering bats.

Juno drives Athamas and Ino mad. Athamas dashes out the brains of his son, Ino jumps into the sea clutching her baby daughter, but they are transformed into gods out of pity. Ino’s attendants on the clifftop hold out their hands in lamentation, but are themselves turned to stone.

Cadmus and his wife flee the city where their children have come to such bad ends, and he is transformed into a snake and she entwines with him. Bacchus triumphs everywhere and is worshiped as a god in India

Cut to the adventures of Perseus. Alongside Cadmus and Bellerophon, Perseus was the greatest Greek hero and slayer of monsters before the days of Heracles. He was the son of Jupiter and the mortal woman Danaë who Jupiter came to as a shower of gold (she had been locked up in a tower by her parents).

The Gorgon was a snake-headed monster and anything that looked at her directly was turned into stone. Perseus kills the Gorgon by fighting the reflection of it he sees in his shield. Then he flies back to Europe. As he passes over Libya, drops of blood fall on the desert and change into snakes, which is why Libya is notoriously infested with snakes.

He encounters Atlas, who holds the whole sky on his shoulders, and asks if he can rest for a bit in his gardens. But Atlas is paranoid about his golden tree with golden leaves and golden fruit so he refuses Perseus rest. They get into an argument, then a fight, which Perseus is starting to lose so he pulls out the Gorgon’s head and Atlas is transformed into the huge Atlas mountain.

Perseus rescues Andromeda who has been chained to a rock by the coast, from a sea monster. Before he fights, Perseus places the Gorgon’s head on a bed of leaves and the head’s stone-making influence spreads into the sea where it creates coral.

Book 5

Perseus is attacked by Andromeda’s fiance and his followers, which turns into an epic fight described in the manner of Homer or Virgil. Perseus turns most of the attackers into stone.

The nine daughters of Pierus challenge the Muses to a singing competition. For their impiety they are turned into chattering magpies, ‘the scandalmongers of the woods’. There follows a story within a story within a story; for (level 1) Ovid tells us that (level 2) one of the Muses relates to Ceres how they engaged in a singing competition with the daughters of Pierus, and (level 3) chose Calliope to sing for them: so what follows are the stories which Calliope sang in that competition:

“In Sicily, the abduction of Proserpina by Pluto, who takes her to his kingdom in the Underworld and makes her his queen. (Her mother, Ceres, searches the earth for her; when a boy taunts her, she changes him into a ladybird.) Ceres goes up to heaven to plead with Jupiter (who is both her father, and had sex with her – incest – to sire Proserpina). Jupiter says Proserpina can return to earth so long as she hasn’t eaten anything. Alas she had eaten seven seeds from a pomegranate, an act witnessed by Ascalaphus who tells Pluto, thus sealing Proserpina’s fate. For this treachery Ceres transforms him into a screech owl.

“The daughters of Achelous, Proserpina’s companions, wanted to search the earth for her, so the gods turn them into birds, but with human faces so they can continue singing sweetly.

“Arethusa was in the retinue of Diana, goddess of the hunt. She stripped off to bathe in a poo, and was promptly assaulted by the river god Alpheus who pursues her over hill and dale till she is changed into a spring which plunges into the earth to resurface on Orygia.

(I wonder if someone somewhere has created a map of where all the incidents in the Metamorphoses took place, all around the Mediterranean and North Africa.)

“Ceres hands her chariot and seeds to Triptolemus, telling him to fly across the land and sow them. He seeks accommodation with king Lyncus of Scythia, who treacherously attacks him in the night but is turned into a lynx.”

Only at this point does the narrative of the Muse to Ceres end.

Book 6

Arachne unwisely takes on Minerva in a weaving competition. The idea of tapestries gives Ovid yet another opportunity to show off his inventiveness and showcase the many different ways he can frame a narrative; in that each of the tapestries the two women weaves themselves display classical stories. Minerva’s tapestry shows permanent transformations of mortals:

Haemon and Rhodope transformed into snowy mountains
the queen of the Pygmies transformed into a crane
Antigone changes into a shining white stork
Cinyras’s daughter turned into a temple

For a summary of the incidents depicted on Arachne’s tapestry, see the section on ‘Rape culture’, below.

Furious, Minerva tears Arachne’s tapestry to shreds, the miserable woman tries to hang herself, at which pint Minerva condemns her to permanently dangling and changes her into a spider.

Niobe boasts to everyone in her city how blessed and happy she is, perfect husband, huge palace, 14 perfect children and calls on her people to worship her and not these ‘gods’ who nobody’s ever seen, specifically to drop the foolish worship of the god they all call Leto. She says the most foolish thing anyone can say in the ancient world: ‘ I am beyond the reach of Fortune’s blows’. Leto complains to her twin children, Phoebus Apollo and Diana, and Apollo promptly kills all seven of the sons by bow and arrow. Niobe still boats she has more children than Leto, so Apollo proceeds to kill all seven of her daughters. Niobe’s husband hangs himself form grief and she is turned to stone but which still weeps ceaselessly.

Then the people of Thebes tell among themselves other stories of similar transformations. For example, the peasants of Lycia who refused a drink from their lake for Leto when she was wandering thirsty carrying Phoebus and Diana as suckling babes. As punishment for refusing her water, Leto turned them into bickering, croaking animals condemned to live in their wretched lake i.e. frogs.

A very truncated version of the story of Marsyas who challenged Apollo to a competition playing the reed pipes. For his presumption, Apollo flays the poor man, stripping him of his skin but leaving him alive.

The harrowing story of Tereus king of Thrace, who marries fair Procne and takes her back to his kingdom. After a few years she asks if she can see her sister, Philomela, so Tereus sails back to her kingdom, greets her father, and makes the case for Philomela coming with him to visit Procne. Unfortunately Philomela is stunningly beautiful and the second Tereus sees her, he begins to lust after her. He makes pious promises to her father, Pandion, that he’ll look after the girl and Pandion waves her farewell at the harbour amid many tears. Once the ship docks back in Thrace, Tereus abducts a horrified Philomela and locks her up in a remote keep. Here he rapes her. When she reproaches him, he ties her up and cuts out her tongue. He then goes home and tells Procris her sister died on the trip back and pretends grief. Procris erects an empty tomb to her sister.

Tereus frequently returns to rape Philomela over a one-year period. Finally Philomela makes a tapestry depicting the events, folds it and gets a servant to deliver it to Procris. Reading it Procris is consumed with rage. The festival of Bacchus comes and Procris uses it as a pretext to find out the keep where Philomela is hidden, break into it along with a drunken mob, disguise her sister in reveller’s costume and bring her safe back to the castle.

When she sees her sister’s state and that her tongue has been cut out her rage knows no limits and she and Philomela murder her little son, Itys, cook him and serve him to Tereus at a grand feast. At the climax, after he’s eaten his fill of his own son, Procris tells Tereus what they’ve done and brings in mute Philomela holding Itys’s head. Tereus pushes the table away and goes to attack the women but all three are magically transformed into birds, Tereus became a hoopoe, Procne became the swallow who sings a mourning song for her child and Philomela became the nightingale.

The story of Boreas, the cold north wind, carrying off Orithyia against her will, to become his wife.

Book 7

A tenuous link carries us into the heart of the Jason and the Argonauts story, specifically when they arrive at the court of King Aeëtes of Colchis, and the king’s daughter, Medea, falls passionately in love with Jason. There follows a two-page soliloquy in which Medea argues with herself whether she should betray her father and homeland in order to aid Jason. Does love justify filial betrayal? This is very reminiscent of the closely-argued reasoning which fills Ovid’s early work, the verse letters from legendary figures, known as the Heroides.

It’s an unusually extended passage, for Ovid, which describes her seduction of Jason, then great detail about the magic medicine she creates to restore Jason’s father, Aeson, to youthfulness. Then she tricks the daughters of Jason’s father’s rival, Pelias, into cutting their own father’s throat, the idea being you drain the old blood from the person you intend to rejuvenate and replace it with magic potion: it worked for Aeson because Medea infused his veins with potion, but once his daughters have mercilessly slashed and drained Pelias of his lifeblood, Medea simply leaves them with the father they’ve murdered, flying off in a chariot pulled by dragons (she is a powerful witch).

Her flight over Greece allows Ovid to make quick passing references to half a dozen other stories about strange legendary transformations – Cerambus given wings, the woman of Coa growing horns, Cygnus hanging into a swan, the lamenting of his mother Hyrie who is turned into a pool, the transformation of the king and queen of Calaurea into birds, Cephisus’s grandson changed by Apollo into a seal, the transformation of Eumelus’s son into a bird, Alcyone changed into a bird.

Her arrival in Corinth allows Ovid the brief aside about an ancient legend that mortals were first created from fungi. But the super-striking thing about the Medea passage is that Ovid only refers in a sentence, in quite a cryptic and obscure throwaway, to the central fact about Medea that, after Jason abandoned her for a new bride she a) murdered her own children by Jason b) cast a curse on the new bride. This is thrown away in just half a sentence.

Was this because Ovid had already written one of the Heroides about Medea? Or because she was the subject of his only full-length play (widely praised by ancient critics but now, unhappily, lost)?

Anyway, on to Theseus. The people of Athens sing him a song of praise which allows Ovid to cram in all the hero’s great achievements. The narrative focuses in on King Minos of Crete’s aim to wage war against Athens. Minos sails to Oenopia to recruit the young men of king Aeacus, who refuses, saying he has ancient ties of alliance with Athens.

Then a deputation from Athens arrives and the king tells them about the plague which has devastated his land. Juno sent it because the island was named after one of Jupiter’s many lovers. (She is an awesome agent of destruction, Juno; the entire narrative of the Aeneid is driven by her venomous hatred of the Trojans.)

Ovid describes this at surprising length, evoking memories of the description of the plague in Thucydides, which was copied by Lucretius to end his long poem, De Rerum Natura, and also echoes Virgil’s description of the great cattle plague in Noricum, in the finale to the third Eclogue (3.478–566).

‘Wherever I turned my eyes, bodies lay strewn on the ground, like overripe apples that fall from the trees when the boughs are shaken, or like acorns beneath a storm-tossed oak. (7.580, page 171)

So king Aeacus tells his guests at length about the devastation of the plague but then goes on to describe a strange dream in which he saw a file of ants heading for an old oak said to date from Jupiter’s time, and how they transformed into big strong, dogged men and then he woke and his people came running into his bedchamber to tell him it was true: and this is the origin of the race of men he named Myrmidons. This is a so-called ‘etiological myth’ based on an (incorrect) interpretation of the name, because the name Myrmidon is close to the ancient Greek for ant, murmekes.

One of the envoys from Athens, Cephalus, bears a wooden javelin. He tells its story: Cephalus married Procris, daughter of Erechtheus but is then abducted by Aurora goddess of the dawn. He complains so much that Aurora lets him return to his wife. But he is soured, adopts a disguise, returns to his home in disguise and tries to woo and seduce his sad wife. When she finally hesitates in face of his barrage of offers, he throws his clothes and bitterly accuses her of betrayal. Distraught at his trick, Procris runs off into the hills and becomes a devotee of the huntress god Diana. He pleaded and begged and eventually she returned, bearing a special magic gift, a javelin which never misses its mark.

Part two of the story is Cephalus loved to go a-hunting every day, throwing the javelin which never missed its prey. As the day got hot he’d lie under a tree and ask for a light breeze to refresh him, addressing ‘zephyr’ as the generic name for refreshing breezes. Someone overheard him and snitched back to his wife, accusing him of having taken a nymph or suchlike as a lover. So next day he goes hunting, Procris tailed him. He killed a load of wild animals then lay in the shade, as was his wont, idly calling on a zephyr to cool his brow, but Procris, hidden nearby, overheard, groaned a little and tremored some bushes. Thinking it a wild animal, Cephalus lets fly with the magic javelin which never misses its mark and pierces Procris through. He runs over and cradles her in his arms as she dies, explaining her mistake i.e. there was no nymph Zephyr, it was all a misunderstanding. Too late.

By the time he has finished telling his tale, Cephalus and his listeners are in tears. No transformation, just reinforcement of the ancient Greek tragic view of life.

The psychology of metamorphoses

In two senses:

1. It is a fundamental fact of human nature that we anthropomorphise everything; we attribute agency and intent to all aspects of the world around us, starting, of course, with other people, but often extending it to animals and other life forms (trees and plants and crops), to the weather, to everything. Our language reflects the way our minds place us at the centre of a world of meaning and intention. People routinely think their pets are saying this or that to them, that the weather is against them, that their car won’t start on purpose, that their pen won’t work in order to irritate them, and so on. It takes a high degree of intelligent scepticism to fully, emotionally accept the fact that the universe and all it contains is sublimely indifferent to our lives and moods and opinions. Stuff happens all the time and humans have evolved to attribute it a wild array of meanings when, in fact, it has none.

These marvellous transformation stories in a sense give in to the instinct to humanise nature, dramatises and takes to the max this inborn tendency in all of us. I’ve always felt that trees are people. In an earlier, more poetic iteration, I developed the notion that the trees are talking to us but are speaking veeeeeery veeeeeeeeery slowly, so slowly that we can’t perceive what they are saying. It is terribly important, the message of the trees, but, alas, we are all in too much of a hurry, zooming round in thrall to our petty human concerns, to hear it.

2. Ovid’s sources in ancient literature, and his later, medieval and Renaissance imitators, tend to allegorise the myths they inherited and give them moralising meaning, but Ovid is more sophisticated than that. Rather than draw neat moral lessons from the fates of his protagonists, Ovid is far more interested in putting us directly in the shoes (or claws or hooves) of his poor unfortunate mortals. Again and again, he vividly conveys the distress of people as they are being changed into something else, or the terror or anger which drives them towards the change. Forget moralising or allegory: what makes the poem so memorable is the power with which Ovid makes you feel the experience of changing into a tree or a bird.

‘We took the cup offered by Circe’s sacred hand. As soon as we had drained it, thirstily, with parched lips, the dread goddess touched the top of our hair with her wand, and then (I am ashamed, but I will tell you) I began to bristle with hair, unable to speak now, giving out hoarse grunts instead of words, and to fall forward, completely facing the ground. I felt my mouth stiffening into a long snout, my neck swelling with brawn, and I made tracks on the ground, with the parts that had just now lifted the cup to my mouth.’
(Macareus describing what it feels like to be turned into a pig, book 14)

Storytelling skill

The Metamorphoses are, above all, an awesome feat of storytelling. Some passages of the Penguin prose translation by Mary M. Innes read like a modern children’s book, a modern retelling of these stories; you have to keep reminding yourself that this is not some modern retelling by Alan Garner or Michael Morpurgo but the original version from two thousand years ago. Again and again Ovid comes to a new story and sets the scene with the swift skill of a seasoned storyteller:

There was a valley thickly overgrown with pitchpine and with sharp-needled cypress trees. It was called Gargaphie and was sacred to Diana, the goddess of the hunt. Far in its depths lay a woodland cave which no hand of man had wrought… (Book 3, page 78)

God, I’m hooked! Tell me more! Where Ovid notably differs from a modern storyteller is in (maybe) three distinctive features of ancient literature, namely the length of the speeches, the lists of names and the epic similes.

1. Length of the speeches

I won’t quote one because, by definition, they’re long but the ancients liked to hear people speak and were educated about and so savoured the art of oratory in a way nobody nowadays is capable of. Schools of oratory divided the subject into the ability to find the right topic and then the ability to deploy any number of carefully named and defined rhetorical techniques. This applied to poetry – which in the ancient world was often performed and read aloud to appreciative audiences – as much as to speeches in law courts or political speeches in the Senate or at electoral hustings.

We enjoy the descriptive passages in the poem and the psychological description of the characters’ emotions but we’ve lost the taste for extended speeches showing off rhetorical skills, which were an important part of the literary experience for its original author and audience.

2. Lists of names

In Tristram Shandy Laurence Sterne says: ‘There is nothing so lovely as a list’. We have largely lost this taste for lists of exotic names, especially place-names, but the ancients obviously loved them.

As he hesitated his hounds caught sight of him. Melampus and the wise Ichnobates were the first to give tongue, Ichnobates of the Cretan breed and Melampus of the Spartan. Then fhe others rushed to the chase, swifter than the wind, Pamphagus and Dorceus and Oribasus, all Arcadians, and strong Nebrophonus, fierce Theron and Laelaps too. Pteralas, the swift runner, was there, and keen-scented Agre, Hylaeus who had lately been gored by a wild boar, Nape, offspring of a wolf, Poemenis, the shepherd dog, Harpyia with her two pups, Ladon from Sicyon, slender-flanked, and Dromas and Canace, Sticte and Tigris, Alce, white-coated Leucon, and black-haired Asbolus; with them was Lacon, a dog of outstanding strength, Aello the stout runner, Thous and swift Lycisce with her brother Cyprius, Harpalus, who had a white spot in the middle of his black forehead, and Melaneus and shaggy Lachne, Lebros and Agriodus, both cross-bred of a Cretan mother and a Spartan father, shrill-barking Hylactor, and others whom it would take long to name… (p.79)

I suppose the length of this list indicates the wealth or status of Actaeon, but it also indicates a society which has a strong interest in hunting dogs and their pedigree which none of us moderns share. There is something relentless or excessive about these lists, which go on for a reasonable length of time, then a bit too much, then a lot too much, but just keep on going. It adds lustre to any story but in a way alien to our sensibilities. Take this list of the heroes involved in the Great Calydonian Boar Hunt:

At last Meleager and a handpicked group of men gather, longing for glory: Castor and Polydeuces, the Dioscuri, twin sons of Tyndareus and Leda, one son famous for boxing, the other for horsemanship: Jason who built the first ship: Theseus and Pirithoüs, fortunate in friendship: Plexippus and Toxeus, the two sons of Thestius, uncles of Meleager: Lynceus and swift Idas, sons of Aphareus: Caeneus, once a woman: warlike Leucippus: Acastus, famed for his javelin: Hippothoüs: Dryas: Phoenix, Amyntor’s son: Eurytus and Cleatus, the sons of Actor: and Phyleus, sent by Elis. Telamon was there, and Peleus, father of the great Achilles: with Admetus, the son of Pheres, and Iolaüs from Boeotia were Eurytion, energetic in action, and Echion unbeaten at running: and Lelex from Locria, Panopeus, Hyleus, and daring Hippasus: Nestor, still in the prime of life: and those that Hippocoön sent, with Enaesimus, from ancient Amyclae: Laërtes, Penelope’s father-in-law with Ancaeus of Arcady: Mopsus, the shrewd son of Ampyx: and Amphiaraüs, son of Oecleus, not yet betrayed by his wife, Eriphyle. (Book 8)

More than that, maybe this fondness for very long lists indicates a kind of earlier stage of writing when just naming something – a person or place, heroes or hounds – was a kind of magical act which conjured them into existence. First there is nothing, then I say a name and lo! I have conjured up an image and a memory; that the act of naming something evoked a far more powerful psychological effect in the minds of people 2,000 years ago than it possibly can in our over-media-saturated modern minds, an incantatory effect more akin to reciting a religious liturgy or spell.

3. Epic similes

Ovid’s similes are not as long as Homer’s similes, but it’s part of the epic style to use extended similes and Ovid frequently does. Thus the figures of warriors sprouting from the soil where Cadmus sowed them.

Then Pallas…told [Cadmus] to plough up the earth and to sow the serpent’s teeth, as seeds from which his people would spring. He obeyed and, after opening up the furrows with his deep-cutting plough, scattered the teeth on the ground as he had been bidden, seeds to produce men. What followed was beyond belief: the sods began to stir; then, first of all a crop of spearheads pushed up from the furrows, and after them came helmets with plumes nodding on their painted crests. Then shoulders and breasts and arms appeared, weighed down with weapons, and the crop of armoured heroes rose into the air. Even so, when the curtains are pulled up at the end of a show in the theatre, the figures embroidered on them rise into view, drawn smoothly upwards to reveal first their faces, and then the rest of their bodies, bit by bit, till finally they are seen complete and stand with their feet resting on the bottom hem. (3.110, p.77)

Or the insatiable hunger of Erysichthon’:

As the sea receives the rivers from all over the earth and yet has always room for more and drinks up the waters from distant lands, or as greedy flames never refuse nourishment but burn up countless faggots, made hungrier by the very abundance of supplies and requiring more, the more they are given, so the jaws of the scoundrel Erysichthon welcomed all the provisions that were offered and at the same time asked for more. (8.840, page 201)

Love and sex

Ovid is often depicted as mocking the earnest attempts to reform and rebuild Roman society carried out by the first emperor, Augustus – indeed, the immoral tendency of his handbook of seduction, The Art of Love, was cited by Augustus as one reason for the poet’s abrupt exile in 8 AD to the remotest borders of the Roman Empire.

And it’s true that many of the Greek myths turn out to be overwhelmingly about love and sex and Ovid tells them in the same swashbuckling, full-on style we became familiar with in the Amores and Art of Love. The king of the gods, Jupiter, in particular, is portrayed as a shameless philanderer, to the eternal fury of his exasperated wife, Juno, who is destined to endlessly discover more mortal women her husband has had an affair or one-night stand with, condemned to endless acts of furious vengeance.

But Ovid can’t be blamed for any of this; it’s in his source material, it’s intrinsic to the source material. The Greeks were obsessed with the terrible, mad behaviour which love and lust led both gods and mortals into.

Sex is central. Men chase women and want to have sex with them; women resist and don’t want to have sex. Men pursue women, trap them, have sex with them, then dump them, abandoning them to their fates. Human nature doesn’t change, at least not in the blink of an evolutionary eye which is 2,000 years.

Sex is made to mirror, reflect, rhyme or match the metaphor of the hunt. Hunting was a peculiarly aristocratic activity (as it has been through most of history right up to modern fox hunting) and it seemed natural to Ovid, as for generations afterwards, to compare chasing reluctant women for sex with hunting animals. Again and again the same set of hunting similes is deployed.

On the male side, Jupiter is portrayed as an insatiable pursuer of women, a fantastically susceptible male who falls in love with every pretty woman he sees and will go to any lengths to have sex with them, prepared to transform himself into the most outlandish animals or shapes to get his end away – triggering the wrath of his long-suffering wife, Juno, again and again.

However, in story after story it is the relatively innocent mortal woman who falls victim to Jupiter’s attentions who ends up being punished. A classic early example is poor Io who Jupiter transforms into a cow in order to hide her from Juno, but the latter sees through the disguise and relentlessly pursues Io, sending a gadfly to torment her half way across Europe and on into Africa.

In other words, in myth after myth, it’s the victim who gets blamed.

Jupiter’s narrative function

To some extent I realised the ‘character’ of Jupiter is a kind of functional product. Reading about Perseus and the generation of heroes, and how they were followed by Hercules, I realised that if your aim is to maximise the glory of a hero, giving him maximum kudos, then you will, of course, want him to have been fathered by the king of the gods.

If you have a large number of heroes fathered by Jupiter then, by definition, you must have a large number of mortal women who Jupiter inseminated. So the ‘character’ of Jupiter as sex machine is really more of a kind of narrative function of the fact that the Greeks had so many Great Heroes and they all needed to have been fathered by the top god. QED.

Juno’s narrative function

In the same way, reading this narrative led me to think of Juno as a kind of principle of opposition.

At a narrative or manifest level, she is a kind of spirit of revenge, seeking out and punishing the women who’ve had sex with her husband. But at a deeper, structural level, she is a principle of blockage and opposition which, in a sense, enables the narratives.

I hadn’t quite grasped that Juno had a lifelong enmity against Hercules. It was Juno who induced a madness in him that made him kill his wife and children, for which he was ordered to serve Eurystheus, king of Mycenae, for ten years. It was during this time that he performed the famous 12 labours. So no opposition from Juno, no labours, no myth.

Ditto Aeneas. At a basic level the Aeneid only exists because of Juno’s endless implacable opposition to Aeneas which, as far as I could tell, stemmed purely from anger at the way Paris, prince of Troy, rejected her in favour of Venus during the famous Judgement of the three goddesses to see which was most beautiful. But the motive doesn’t really matter, what matters for the narrative structure of the Aeneid is that every time Aeneas gets close to fulfilling her destiny, Juno throws a spanner in the works. In fact the entire second half of the Aeneid only exists because Juno sends a Fury to stir up Turnus’s anger at the way King Latinus takes his fiancée, Lavinia, away from him and gives her to the newcomer, Aeneas, and to enrage Lavinia’s mother for the same reason – and it is their allied anger which triggers the war which fill the last six books of the poem. No angry resentful Juno, no Aeneid.

Rape culture

Apparently the term ‘rape culture’ was coined as long ago as 1975. My impression is it’s only become reasonably common usage in the last five years or so, especially since the #metoo movement of 2017. Looking it up online, I find this definition:

Rape culture is a culture where sexual violence and abuse is normalised and played down. Where it is accepted, excused, laughed off or not challenged enough by society as a whole. (Rape Crisis)

Ovid’s Metamorphoses without a shadow of a doubt portrays a rape culture, a culture in which the forcible rape of women is a) widespread and b) accepted as the norm. It does not go unremarked; the narrator occasionally laments and disapproves this or that act of rape, as do the relatives of the woman who’s been raped. Rape is judged by most mortals in the poem to be a crime. But there is no denying its widespread presence as the central event in scores of these stories. All you have to do is translate the weasel word ‘ravish’ into ‘rape’ to get a sense of its ubiquity.

One of the Muses, the daughters of Mnemosyne, makes this theme completely explicit:

‘There is no limit to what wicked men may do, and so unprotected women have all manner of cause for fear.’ (5.270, page 123)

Example rape stories i.e. where aggressive men force sex on unwilling women, or try to:

Apollo’s pursuit of Daphne
Jupiter rapes Callisto
Jupiter’s abduction of Europa
Nyctimene is raped by her father, Epopeus,
Pluto’s abduction of Proserpina
Alpheus’s pursuit of Arethusa
Dryope is raped by Apollo (book 9)
Priapus pursues the nymph Lotis who is changed into a flower (book 9)

In book 6 Arachne weaves a tapestry depicting a rather staggering list of the lengths male gods have gone to in order to abduct and ‘ravish’ mortal women:

Jupiter turned into a bull to seduce Europa
Jupiter turned into an eagle to abduct Asterie
Jupiter turned into a swan in order to seduce Leda
Jupiter turned into a satyr to impregnate Antiope
Jupiter impersonating Amphitryon in order to have sex with his wife
Jupiter turned into a shower of gold to impregnate Danae
Jupiter turned into flame in order to seduce Asopus’s daughter
Neptune turned into a bull to seduce Aeolus’ daughter
Neptune deceiving Bisaltis as a ram
Neptune becoming a stallion to seduce Ceres
Neptune becoming a dolphin to seduce Melantho
Phoebus disguised as a shepherd to seduce Isse
Bacchus tricking Erigone in the guise of a bunch of grapes
Saturn in the shape of a horse fathering the centaur Chiron on Philyra

Quite a stunning list. You’d be forgiven for concluding that using every trick in the book to finagle women into sex was the main activity of the male Greek gods, leaving the female ones to actually get on with running things, like agriculture, justice, childbirth and rearing, and wisdom.

Rape culture might have been ‘normative’ in the world of the legends themselves, but is not entirely so in the narrative. It’s worth noting that Ovid rounds off this Arachne passage by describing all of these events as ‘crimes’ (bottom of p.137).

‘Crimes’. Ovid is perfectly clear that this is not good or acceptable behaviour and can be criticised. If it is ‘accepted’ it is because it is the way of these myths and legends, it is the often brutal tragic way of the world; but it is not quite ‘normalised’ i.e. passing uncriticised.

Possibly, purely in terms of categorising events and attitudes within the poem, a distinction can be made between a mortal and an immortal rapist: mortal men tend to be criticised for rape, whereas when it comes to gods, the narrator shrugs his shoulders and says, ‘What can you do?’ It is accepted as a fact of life, along with all the other violent injustices that mortal life is prey to.

‘The gods have their own laws: what is the use of trying to relate human conduct to the ways of heaven, when they are governed by different rules?’
(Byblis, book 9)

Tragic worldview

The gross unfairness of the rape culture aspect of the stories merges into the general unfairness of life which runs through the poem. You might start out by criticising or judging some of the characters’ behaviour, but after a while trying to regard the stories from a ‘moral’ point of view comes to feel inadequate. It’s more accurate to say all its protagonists are caught in a tragic world. Terrible, inhuman suffering is described on every page.

Ovid goes out of his way to say it wasn’t Actaeon’s fault that curiosity led him to stumble across the cave where Diana was bathing naked with her attendant nymphs. When she splashes pond water into his face and transforms him into a deer it’s not clear she does this to prompt his terrible fate, but more to silence his human ability to tell tales, to tell anyone else what Diana naked looks like. But this sequence of events then has the horrible outcome that Actaeon is torn to shreds by his own hunting hounds.

It is as if humans, with their petty system of morality, are continually blundering into the higher order of the gods which is (paradoxically) dominated by gross injustice and horrifying violence, a place where there’s no point complaining about Juno or Apollo or Diana’s horrifying violence; that’s just the gods for you.

The healing power of stories

There’s not very much of conventional ‘morality’ about the Actaeon story or most of the other tales but it obviously says a lot about the terror of the world – that our lives are prey, at any moment, to powerful forces way beyond our control which lead to terrible violence and howling injustice. Like a family in Kiev who have led worthy, blameless lives until one of Vladimir Putin’s missiles lands on their house and tears them to shreds. There is no justice. The world is prey to random acts of unspeakable violence. And the purpose of these myths is to shape that anxious apprehension into narratives we can accept and assimilate and which, in the act of being shaped, acquire a terrible kind of beauty and grim consolation. Just about…

This is why the stories, weird and wonderful though they almost all are, at the same time seem to be telling us something important about the world and human existence. To describe a beautiful girl turning into a tree with a beating heart may seem fantastically irrelevant to modern citizens of the UK in 2022. But modern people have strokes, car accidents, catastrophic injuries which put them into comas, render them paraplegic, incapable of movement, wired up to life support. But if you put your hand against their chest, just as Apollo puts his hand against Daphne’s bark, you can still hear the human heart beating within.

After the extreme suffering, terror or anguish of the humans caught in terrible events, the metamorphoses offer a weird kind of redemption or consolation. Nothing redeems Philomela’s terrible ordeal (being kidnapped, having her tongue cut out, and repeatedly raped); but her transformation into a nightingale suggests the remote possibility that in some unfathomable, surreal, barely graspable kind of way, such experiences and, by extension, the miserable human condition, may, just about, be capable of some kind of redemption – a terrible kind of wonder.

Mary Innes’s translation

Innes’s prose translation is clear and plain, eschewing fancy effects and, dating as it does from the 1950s, avoids slang or any modern locutions. It feels clear and effective. However, comparing it to the online translation by A.S. Kline, one very important fact comes out.

Ovid employs circumlocution. Very, very often Ovid does not directly name a character but indicates who they are via their family relationships, most often via their parents. Thus we read about ‘the son of Mars’, ‘Ixion’s son’, ‘the son of great Peleus’ and so on. Or, characters, especially the gods, are referred to by alternative names: for example, I had no idea that Juno could be referred to as ‘Saturnia’. Or they’re referred to by the place of their birth, for example ‘the Idalian god’.

Often an entire story goes by in a welter of periphrases, without the character ever being directly named and this makes it difficult for the modern reader to know what’s going on or who’s being talked about.

Innes reproduces this periphrasis with complete fidelity with the result that it is often very difficult to make out who is being talked about, and this is the one big flaw with her translation. By contrast, Kline does the sensible thing and names names. Instead of saying ‘Ixion’s son’ he comes right out and says ‘Pirithous’. This is ten thousand types of helpful. In addition Kline’s version has a super-useful online glossary, with precisely these kinds of periphrases, secondary names and so on all boldened and hyperlinked to it. So even where he retains a periphrastic phrase, you only have to click to get to a clear and useful explanation of who’s who.

Innes’s translation is readable and definitive but her fidelity to the original on this one point is a big flaw and meant that, to begin with, I kept having to look the stories up on Wikipedia to be completely clear who was who. All it needed was to insert the names of the people so often referred to as ‘son of…’, as Kline does, and the reading experience would have been immeasurably improved. About half way through I abandoned Innes and switched over to reading Kline solely for this reason.

(For summary and notes on the second half of the Metamorphoses, see my next blog post.)

Credit

Mary M. Innes’ prose translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses was published by Penguin books in 1955.

Roman reviews

Complete list of my Roman reviews

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by Simon on November 16, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Literature, Mythology, Poetry, Translation

Tagged #metoo, A.S. Kline, Actaeon, Admetus, Aeolus, Aesculapius, Aeson, Aglauros, Alan Garner, Alcyone, Alpheus, Amores, Amphiaraüs, Amphitryon, Ampyx, ancient poetry, Andromeda, anthropomorphism, Antigone, Antiope, Apollo, Arachne, Arcas, Arethusa, Argus, Ascalaphus, Asopus, Asterie, Athamas, Atlas, Atlas mountains, Augustus, Aurora, Æneid, Bacchus, Battus, Bellerophon, Bisaltis, Boccaccio, Boeotia, Boreas, Byblis, Cadmus, Calaurea, Calliope, Callisto, Castor and Polydeuces, Cephalus, Cephisus, Cerambus, Ceres, Chaucer, Chiron, Chiron the centaur, Cinyras, circumlocution, classics, Clyties, Colchis, constellations, Corinth, Coronis, Coronis of Larissa, Crete, Cupid, Cygnus, Danaë, Dante, Daphne, De rerum natura, Deucalion, Diana, dryad, Dryope, Echo, Egypt, elegy, epic poem, epic similes, Epopeus, Erechtheus, Erigone, Eriphyle, Erysichthon, Eumelus, Europa, Eurynome, Eurystheus, exile, four ages of Mankind, Fury, Gargaphie, Greek myths and legends, Haemon, Helios, Heracles, Hermaphroditus, Heroides, Herse, Hippothoüs, Hyrie, Iö, Iliad, India, Ino, Isse, Itys, Jason, Jason and the Argonauts, Julius Caesar, Juno, Jupiter, king Aeacus, King Aeëtes, king Agenor, King Latinus, king Lyncus, King Minos, king of Mycenae, Laërtes, Lampetie, Latin poetry, Laurence Sterne, Lavinia, Leda, Leto, Leucothoe, Libya, Liriope, Lotis, love, Lucretius, Macareus, Mars, Mary M. Inne, Medea, Melampus, Melantho, Meleager, Mercury, Metamorphoses, Michael Morpurgo, Minerva, Minyas, Mnemosyne, Mopsus, murmekes, Muses, Myrmidons, mythology, naiad, Narcissus, Narcissus and Echo, Nestor, Niobe, Nyctimene, Ocyrhoe, Odyssey, Oenopia, Orchamus, Orithyia, Orygia, Ovid, Pandion, pastoral, Peleus, Pelias, Penelope, Peneus, Pentheus, periphrasis, Perseus, Phaëton, Phaethusa, Philemon and Baucis, Philomela, Philyra, Phœbus, Pierus, Pluto, poem, poetry, Priapus, Procne, Procris, Proserpina, Proteus, Pyramus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pyrrha, Pythian games, Python, rape, Rape culture, Rhodope, river Acheloüs, Roman poetry, Salmacis, Scythia, Semele, sex, Shakespeare, Sicily, Syrinx, Telamon, Tereus, The Art of Love, the Dioscuri, the Gorgon, the Great Calydonian Boar Hunt, the queen of the Pygmies, the underworld, the woman of Coa, Thebes, Theseus, third Eclogue, Thisbe, Thrace, Thucydides, Tragedy, Tragic worldview, transformation, Translation, Triptolemus, Tristram Shandy, Trunus, Tyndareus, Venus, Virgil, Vulcan

Posted by Simon on November 16, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/16/metamorphoses-ovid-1/

Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt @ the British Museum

This is a major exhibition held to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the year 1822 when French Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion cracked the code of Egyptian hieroglyphs which had been puzzling scholars for the best part of 1,500 years.

Temple lintel of King Amenemhat III, Hawara, Egypt, 12th Dynasty (1855 to 1808 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

At its heart is the eerily beautiful and hugely important Rosetta Stone, discovered by French troops in Egypt in 1799. The central part of the exhibition summarises the genuinely exciting narrative of the great Race To Decipher hieroglyphics, as it developed into a rivalry between Great Britain – represented by antiquarian Thomas Young (1773 to 1829) – and France – represented by the ambitious young scholar Jean-François Champollion (1790 to 1832).

The exhibition brings together a rather staggering 250 artefacts, many (as usual) on loan from foreign museums. As such it provides a unique opportunity to see so much high quality Egyptiana in one place – all presented in a beautifully designed and laid out exhibition space. If the sheer scale sounds daunting, maybe the crucial thing to grasp is that the exhibition is divided into three main areas or parts.

Part one: the end of hieroglyphics, then the revival of interest

Part one briefly covers the end of the millennia-long tradition of writing and reading hieroglyphs in the years after the Greek conquest of Egypt in 320 BC. The Greek dynasty of the Ptolemy family kept up all the Egyptian traditions, but it was the advent of Roman rule from 30 BC (when the last of the Ptolemies, Cleopatra VII, committed suicide) which signalled the slow decline of hieroglyphic writing. It was the imposition of Christianity as the official religion of the Roman Empire by the emperor Theodosius in 391, and the order to close down all pagan temples, which spelled the end of the tradition of writing and reading hieroglyphs. The last known hieroglyphic inscription dates from 394. Byzantine rule of the province continued for centuries until swept away by the great Arab Conquest of the 640s AD.

Intellectual energy in the centuries following the Muslim conquest went into elaborating aspects of Islamic religion and philosophy, as well as preserving and commenting on survivals from antiquity, especially Greek texts. There was only scattered interest in the pictorial language carved into the huge stone monuments all across Egypt.

Some Muslim scholars are namechecked, but for us in Europe it was only the revival of learning from the 1400s onwards, the period which came to be called the Renaissance, which saw sustained scholarly activity to decipher the hieroglyphs. A negative key factor was that there had been some scholarly enquiry during ancient times, with Roman scholars writing books about the hieroglyphs – but that these were often seriously wrong and misleading but were considered indisputable evidence throughout the Renaissance.

Interestingly, study of ancient Egyptian artifacts centred on Rome itself for the simple reason that victorious generals from Julius Caesar onwards had a fondness for stealing and shipping back to Rome impressive numbers of obelisks, stelae, statues, inscriptions and so on (a stela is an inscribed stone or wooden slab) – many of which were still standing 1,400 years later when the revival of interest in old texts (be they ancient Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, Syrian, Egyptian and so on) gathered pace.

The most significant figure was a German Jesuit and polymath, Athanasius Kircher (1602 to 1680). Working with Arabic grammars and dictionaries of Coptic acquired in Egypt by an Italian traveller, Kircher produced flawed but pioneering translations and grammars of the language in the 1640s and 1650s, leading up to his masterwork, the ‘Oedipus Aegyptiacus’ of 1652.

Unfortunately, Kircher brought to his studies a deep belief in mystic practices and magic. As a Jesuit he believed Egyptian religion must have foreshadowed the One True Religion i.e. Christianity, and so all his interpretations were coloured by a wish to find mystical meanings in even brief sets of symbols. In his hands even short texts of only a few hieroglyphic characters were translated into lengthy sentences describing mystical religious ideas.

But Kircher was only one of hundreds of scholars and commentators, including many of the early Muslim scholars, who were convinced the hieroglyphs represented ancient magic or the secrets of ‘alchemy’, and that true knowledge would allow modern practitioners to revive magical spells and incantations.

The enchanted basin

This belief that the hieroglyphs contained ancient magic is represented here by ‘the enchanted basin’, a large black granite sarcophagus from about 600 BC, covered with hieroglyphs and images of gods. Devotees believed that bathing in the basin (accompanied by the appropriate rituals and spells) could offer relief from the torments of love.

‘The Enchanted Basin’ aka the sarcophagus of Hapmen, Egypt, 26th Dynasty (600 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

The ritual bath was discovered near a mosque in Cairo, in an area still known as al-Hawd al-Marsud – ‘the enchanted basin’ – and has been identified as simply a sarcophagus – for Hapmen, a nobleman of the 26th Dynasty.

Exhibition design 1

This first part of the exhibition is presented in the usual glass cases etc but against a backdrop of jet black walls themselves covered in silver hieroglyphic scripts which shimmer and capture the eye as you walk through them – evoking a world of black magic and mystery. Most wall panels relate to specific exhibits but the curators have also had the bright idea of creating standalone panels devoted to specific glyphs, explaining what they are and what they mean. This is one of several aspects designed, I think to appeal to children and school visits, and a charming idea.

One of the panels for schoolchildren in ‘Hieroglyphs: unlocking ancient Egypt’

Part two: the rivalry

The second section declares its change of focus with a complete change of design, layout and atmosphere. No longer black, the gallery walls are lighter and the room is dominated by three long wooden benches, with wooden chairs set in front of them (which I think visitors are encouraged to sit at so as to study the artifacts on offer).

The dominance of stained wood reminds me of the British Museum’s extensive Enlightenment Gallery on the ground floor and is, I assume, intended to convey a sense of 18th and 19th century scholarship taking place in the civilised, wood-panelled rooms of Royal Societies and the private collections of rich European travellers across Enlightenment Europe.

This woody, benchy room is the setting for the gripping story of The Race To Decipher Hieroglyphs between the two men who are presented as rivals in scholarship and representatives of their respective nations, Thomas Young of Great Britain and Jean-François Champollion of France.

The Rosetta Stone

In fact the transition from part 1 to part 2 of the exhibition takes you past the famous Rosetta Stone itself, which was the clue to the whole thing and is a story, or several stories, in itself.

The Rosetta Stone, Rasid, Egypt (Ptolemaic, 196 BC) © The Trustees of the British Museum

History of the discovery

In 1798 Napoleon Bonaparte led an invasion of Egypt with 40,000 troops. By this stage revolutionary France had been at war with Great Britain for five years and the Egyptian strategy was designed to cut off Britain’s lucrative trade with her greatest colony, India. But, being French and priding himself on being a man of the Enlightenment, Napoleon took with him 200 scholars, engineers, antiquarians and so on. Over the next few years these experts made numerous drawings, descriptions and maps of the antiquities of Egypt which were later published in the multi-volume Description de l’Égypte (1809 to 1829).

The following year, in 1799, French forces were rebuilding an old fort in the coastal town of Rashid, when they dug up this large fragment of stone covered in writing. Realising its importance the officer in charge sent it to Napoleon’s headquarters. It was taken into possession of the lead scientist in Napoleon’s force but events were about to take a significant twist. In August 1798 the Royal Navy defeated the French navy at the Battle of the Nile.

A treaty (the Capitulation of Alexandria) was then negotiated (in 1801) between the victorious British and the French by which the victors took possession of most of the artefacts, findings and notes created by the French antiquarians. Discussions were detailed and became heated, but to cut a long story short, the British seized the Rosetta Stone and shipped it back to London, where it was presented to the king who in turn passed it onto the fledgling British Museum. It went on public display in 1802, has been on public display at the British Museum almost continuously and is its most visited object.

Almost immediately the British Society of Antiquarians made plaster copies of the stone and printed reproductions of the text and distributed them to other institutions across Europe.

It is called the Rosetta Stone because Rosette was the name Europeans gave to the town Arabs called Rashid and the name stuck.

What I took from all this was that this breakthrough in Egyptology and understanding of the ancient world came about almost entirely because of war between the great powers.

All down the line, from the first officer to see it, through the experts on Napoleon’s staff, through to the British officers in charge of the peace negotiation, through to the king’s advisors and officials at the British Museum, everyone recognised the stone’s immense importance.

Why is the Rosetta Stone important?

Because it was the first artifact found anywhere in Egypt which contained several languages or scripts in parallel. At a glance you can see that the top part of the stone contains rows of hieroglyphics, the next section contains lines of text in another script, and the lower third of the stone contains text in yet another script, which scholars quickly recognised as Greek.

To be precise, from top to bottom, the top two scripts are in Ancient Egyptian, the top one using hieroglyphic and the second one ‘Demotic’ script, while the bottom one is in Ancient Greek.

What is ‘Demotic’? We now know that the ancient Egyptians used hieroglyphs on their official monuments, but on administrative and religious life used a form of cursive script which was easier to write and read. This cursive script changed and evolved over the thousands of years of Egyptian history:

the oldest form is called ‘hieratic’ from its development in the third millennium BC until the rise of Demotic in the mid-first millennium BC
the so-called Demotic form of the language developed and then held sway from about 650 BC to the 5th century AD
and was replaced by the third major form, Coptic, the final development of the Egyptian language, spoken by the common people from around the third-century AD through till the Muslim conquest in the 7th century AD. Coptic has no native speakers today, although it is preserved and still recited by priests of the Coptic church

So what the Rosetta stone presents is a text in classical hieroglyphs, a text in ‘Demotic’ i.e. the common form of written Egyptian of the day, and then a text in ancient Greek.

Scholars immediately realised that, if the three sets of script represented the same text in three different languages, then they should be able to use the Greek at the bottom to read the hieroglyphs at the top and, in so doing, identify what words or sounds individual hieroglyphs stand for and so crack the code, decipher the language of hieroglyphs.

The Rosetta Stone as it appears in the exhibition. Note the animated timeline of the Race To Decipher in the right background, and blown-up reproductions of scholarly texts hanging from the ceiling

Unexpected delay

In my ignorance I thought the discovery of the stone meant we had the key to the door, the job was done, and we could start deciphering hieroglyphs immediately.

Not at all. Turns out there was still a lot of work to be done, not least because there was disagreement on fundamental facts. For example, not all scholars agreed the three scripts contained the same text. And the stone at first presented more puzzles than solutions because antiquarians could no more read demotic than hieroglyphs. So at first sight the stone presented double the problem, two challenges – of aligning the ancient Greek (readable) with the demotic and hieroglyphs (unreadable).

It took a surprising amount of scholarly guesswork, trial and error, devising and testing different theories for knowledge to inch forward. This room – the wooden table room- presents a year-by-year account of the 20 or so years between the stone going on public display and Champollion’s breakthrough in 1822. You might think all this is a fairly niche subject, but think again; there’s an impressive number of books on the subject:

Major landmarks in the decoding included recognition that:

1799: the stone shows three versions of the same text
1802: the demotic text uses phonetic characters to spell foreign names
1814: the hieroglyphic text uses phonetic characters as well, and so has numerous similarities to the demotic
1822: phonetic characters were used to spell not just foreign names but native Egyptian words

The breakthrough 1822

Scripts for languages can be either:

ideographic – symbols are used for words or concepts
syllabic – symbols are used to convey the sounds of syllables which make up words
alphabetic – a symbol is assigned to individual elements out of which words are built

The latter two are examples of phonetic languages i.e:

You can look at a written word and know how to pronounce it. Or you can hear a word and know how to spell it. With phonetic languages, there is a direct relationship between the spelling and the sound.

The ancient Romans had queered the pitch and misled centuries of scholars by claiming that all hieroglyphs were symbols, one glyph directly standing for one idea or concept. Hundreds of scholars wasted their lives trying to figure out what each hieroglyph ‘stood for’.

As I understand it, Champollion’s big breakthrough was realising that Demotic and hieroglyphic i.e. ancient Egyptian language as a whole, was a combination of ideographic and phonetic. He realised this after seeing another scholar’s decipherment of foreign names as phonetic sounds in the hieroglyphs. This was the actual key – that the names of foreign (generally Greek) rulers, were spelled phonetically.

Rather than try to explain further, I’ll quote Wikipedia:

In 1822, Champollion saw copies of brief hieroglyphic and Greek inscriptions taken from an obelisk found at Philae, on which William John Bankes had tentatively noted the names ‘Ptolemaios’ and ‘Kleopatra’ in both languages. From this, Champollion identified the phonetic characters ‘k l e o p a t r a’. On the basis of this and the foreign names on the Rosetta Stone, he quickly constructed an alphabet of phonetic hieroglyphic characters, completing his work on 14 September and announcing it publicly on 27 September in a lecture to the Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres. On the same day he wrote the famous ‘Lettre à M. Dacier’ to Bon-Joseph Dacier, secretary of the Académie, detailing his discovery. In the postscript Champollion notes that similar phonetic characters seemed to occur in both Greek and Egyptian names, a hypothesis confirmed in 1823, when he identified the names of pharaohs Ramesses and Thutmose written in cartouches at Abu Simbel.

1824 Champollion published a Précis in which he detailed a decipherment of the hieroglyphic script demonstrating the values of its phonetic and ideographic signs.

In 1829, he travelled to Egypt where he was able to read many hieroglyphic texts that had never before been studied, and brought home a large body of new drawings of hieroglyphic inscriptions.

In 1832 Champollion died from illnesses brought on by travel in Egypt.

1838 his Grammar and Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian was published posthumously. But if you thought that was the end of the affair, you’d be wrong, for Champollion erroneously assumed that the hieroglyphs could be read directly in Coptic script, whereas in fact they represented a much older stage of the language which differs in many ways from Coptic.

It took scholars the rest of the century to work through all the details of ancient Egyptian and work is still ongoing because it turns out to have developed in more forms and variations and dialects than initially thought.

What does the Rosetta Stone actually say?

At the end of all that, what does the Rosetta Stone text actually say? Each of the 3 languages records a priestly decree of 196 BC issued by a council of Egyptian priests from the city of Memphis during the reign of Ptolemy V Epiphanes (i.e. ironically, it’s a text about a Greek ruler and not one of the classic ancient Egyptian pharaohs). The text praises the righteous acts of the king and lists the honours bestowed on him by the priests.

So no magic spells or alchemical procedures, much more banal than that. Interestingly, this kind of decree wasn’t even an Egyptian tradition, but hailed from Greece, a type of inscription imported along with the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty.

Part three: modern Egyptology

Design 3: airy design and huge videos

Struggling to process the complexities of this story, the visitor walks from wood-lined part two of the exhibition through an Egyptian archway into a completely different space.

Here the walls are white and the ceiling is high, creating a sense of light and clarity. On the wall on the right is a video projection of part of an ancient wall with birds flying by – but this is dwarfed by the end wall onto which is projected a huge landscape video of the River Nile itself, a long band of rippling blue water, above which sits the fabulously fertile green riverbank – all reeds, grasses and palm trees – and then the deep blue of the Egyptian sky.

So, in terms of design, the visitor has progressed from pitch black walls at the start, though the gentlemen’s-club brown wood panelling of the second part, and now arrives in the kind of bright light space typical of modern art galleries. I guess this is also symbolic of passing from ignorance, through purblind scholarship and study, into the modern age of research and understanding.

Egyptian social history

This final part of the exhibition could almost be staged in its own right, for it is a fascinating overview of Egyptian social history, social life, in all its many aspects.

If you want the history of ancient Egypt – the political history of all those pharaohs, their wars, their dynasties, maps of their territory etc – that is already available in the vast series of rooms which, as it happens, you exit into after the exhibition space, the long gallery called Room 4. This isn’t that.

Instead this third part of the exhibition presents a careful selection of objects which illustrate the modern understanding of all aspects of Egyptian society, which Champollion’s discovery (much elaborated and built on by later scholars) allowed. It is a collection of choice artifacts which shed unparalleled insight into the lives, not of kings and pharaohs, but of ordinary people – their lives, loves, marriages, divorces, financial affairs, loans and mortgages, the stories they told each other, the poems and hymns they recited, their religious beliefs and practices, maths textbooks, guides to the interpretation of dreams, their calendar and how they structured the year, the months, the weeks, the days, even shopping lists and tax returns.

For example, a papyrus from about 1200 BC explains that the Egyptian year was divided into 12 months of 30 days. Their week lasted 10 days, and the year had three seasons – Akhet (flooding), Peret (growing) and Shemu (harvest).

Or take the richly illustrated Book of the Dead papyrus of Queen Nedjmet is over 3,000 years old and more than four metres long. A recitation of the texts demonstrates the power of the spoken word and includes ritual spells. The papyrus features alongside a set of four canopic vessels that preserved the organs of the deceased. These were dispersed over French and British collections after discovery, and this is the first time this set of jars has been reunited since the mid-1700s.

Detail of The Book of the Dead of Queen Nedjmet (papyrus, Egypt, 1070 BC, 21st Dynasty) © The Trustees of the British Museum

The mummy bandage of Aberuait from the Musée du Louvre, Paris has never been shown in the UK. It was a souvenir from one of the earliest ‘mummy unwrapping events’ in the 1600s where attendees received a piece of the linen, preferably inscribed with hieroglyphs.

A 3,000-year-old measuring rod from the Museo Egizio in Turin was an essential clue for Champollion to unravel Egyptian mathematics, discovering that the Egyptians used units inspired by the human body.

Royal cubit rod of Amenemope (18th Dynasty) Torino, Museo Egizio

The cartonnage and mummy of the lady Baketenhor, on loan from the Natural History Society of Northumbria, was studied by Champollion in the 1820s. In correspondence with colleagues in Newcastle, Champollion correctly identified the inscription on the mummy cover as a prayer addressed to several deities for the soul of the deceased only a few years after he cracked the hieroglyphic writing system. Baketenhor lived to about 25 to 30 years of age, sometime between 945 and 715 BCE.

Cartonnage of the lady Baketenhor (late 22nd Dynasty, between 945 and 715 BC) Courtesy of the Natural History Society of Northumbria. Image © Tyne & Wear Archives and Museums

Prayers to Hathor, the goddess of love and music, were often accompanied by the sistrum, a musical instrument used in dances and religious ceremonies. When shaken, the sistrum produced a soft clink or a loud jangle which had power to appease the gods. Note the face at the top of the handle.

Ancient Egyptian sistrum (747 to 332 BC)

(There are references to a sistrum – ‘the sacred rattle… the jingling bronze of the sistrum…’ – being used in worship of Isis, book 9 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses and it’s also referred to in the thirteenth satire of Juvenal.)

On a much more humble level, a papyrus from 1100 BC records the separation of Hessunebef from his wife Hener and tells us that he supported her for three years after the divorce. The reasons for the divorce aren’t stated but we know from other sources that the wife probably kept the possessions she brought to the marriage.

Papyrus from 1100 BC recording the separation of Hessunebef from his wife Hener

We now know the ancient Egyptians had over 90 recipes for the treatment of eye problems. Black and green kohl had antibacterial properties and could be carried around in pots to be used as eye liner.

There’s a book helping with the interpretation of dreams, a perennial topic in the ancient world. This one belonged to a certain Qenherkhepshef and contains the following useful advice:

If a man sees himself in a dream looking after monkeys: bad – a change awaits him!

And hundreds more.

I also noticed the way a number of wall labels featured quotes all attributed to ‘Voices from Rashid’. What is this? The British Museum interviewed schoolchildren from the town of Rashid (modern day Rosetta) about the stone and ancient Egyptian life and these quotes are the opinions of the schoolchildren on aspects of Egyptian history, the hieroglyphics, the stone and so on, sprinkled on panels throughout the exhibition.

Statue of a scribe (6th Dynasty) Photo © Musée du Louvre, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / Georges Poncet

This exhibition is fascinating, inspiring, beautifully designed and laid out. In the section about the Race To Decipher, it is surprisingly gripping. And the wide-ranging final section brings you closer to the concerns of ordinary ancient Egyptian men and women than you would have thought possible.

Other British Museum exhibitions

More British Museum reviews on my Art and Exhibitions page

3 Comments

by Simon on October 17, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Archaeology, Exhibition

Tagged 1822, Abu Simbel, Académie royale des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, Akhet, alchemy, alphabetic, Amenemhat III, ancient Egypt, Ancient Greek, Arab Conquest, Athanasius Kircher, Battle of the Nile, Bon-Joseph Dacier, Book of the Dead, Book of the Dead of Queen Nedjmet, British Museum, British Society of Antiquarians, Byzantine Empire, Cairo, Capitulation of Alexandria, Christianity, Cleopatra VII, Coptic, Coptic church, cubit rod of Amenemope, Demotic, Description de l'Égypte, Egypt, egyptology, Enlightenment Gallery, exhibition, France, gallery, Grammar and Dictionary of Ancient Egyptian, Great Britain, Hathor, Hawara, Hener, Hessunebef, hieratic, hieroglyphs, ideographic, India, inscriptions, Jean-François Champollion, Julius Caesar, Kleopatra, Lady Baketenhor, Lettre à M. Dacier, linguistics, magic, Memphis, Modern Egyptology, Musée du Louvre, Muslim conquest, Napoleon Bonaparte, obelisks, Oedipus Aegyptiacus, papyrus, Peret, Philae, phonetic languages, Ptolemaic dynasty, Ptolemaios, Ptolemy, Ptolemy V Epiphanes, Qenherkhepshef, Queen Nedjmet, Ramesses, Rasid, religion, revolutionary France, River Nile, Roman Empire, Rosetta Stone, Royal Society, sarcophagus, Shemu, sistrum, social history, spelling, statues, stela, stelae, syllabic, symbols, The Enchanted Basin, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, Theodosius, Thomas Young, Thutmose, Voices from Rashid, William John Bankes, writing

Posted by Simon on October 17, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/10/17/hieroglyphs-unlocking-ancient-egypt-british-museum/

Feminine power: the divine to the demonic @ the British Museum

This is the first major exhibition ever held at the British Museum focusing solely on goddesses – on female spiritual beings from mythological traditions from around the world – and it is absolutely fabulous!

Queen of the night relief, c. 1750 BCE, Iraq, painted clay © The Trustees of the British Museum

Questions about women and femininity

The exhibition sets out to ask questions about images and ideas of the divine: How do different traditions view femininity? How has female authority been perceived in ancient cultures? Are sex and desire the foundations of civilisation or their disruptors? To what extent do female deities reinforce patriarchal social systems or subvert them? What relevance to goddess from ancient or remote cultures have for us, here, today?

To ‘answer and explore’ these questions the exhibition brings together female divine and demonic figures feared and revered for over 5,000 years from traditions all round the world. It includes painted scrolls from Tibet, Roman sculpture, intricate personal amulets from Egypt, Japanese prints, Indian relief carvings, statuettes and figurines, alongside contemporary sculptures.

Ancient and modern

It’s important to realise that the exhibition combines ancient and modern. It brings together historical artifacts – ancient sculptures and sacred objects relating to female goddesses from all around the world – but also includes modern and recent works of art by contemporary female artists such as the renowned American feminist artist Judy Chicago, and the creations of less well-known woman artists from various cultures, such as this fearsome headpiece from India.

Dance mask of Taraka, workshop of Sri Kajal Datta (1994) India, papier mâché © The Trustees of the British Museum

The aim is to explore the multitude of ways in which femininity has been perceived, conceived, created and depicted across the globe, from the ancient world to today. The exhibition explores the embodiment of feminine power in deities, goddesses, demons, saints and other spiritual beings, associated with the widest possible range of human experiences and attributes, from sex and fertility, through wisdom, passion and nature, to war, mercy and justice.

18th century Chinese porcelain of Guanyin, the Chinese translation of Avalokiteshvara, the bodhisattva of compassion, with child and attendants © The Trustees of the British Museum

Treasures

What makes the exhibition so enjoyable is not necessarily its feminist aims (although many visitors will, of course, identify with these) but a much simpler factor. Recent British Museum exhibitions about Nero or Stonehenge featured fabulous objects but also a lot of run-of-the-mill coins or skeletons or shards of pottery. These were important because they tell us about the subject’s archaeology and history, but sometimes they can get a bit, well, boring.

Here, by contrast, having selected 50 or so of the most interesting, relevant or thought-provoking goddesses from traditions around the world, the curators were free to pick only the very best objects to represent them. Almost all of the objects are from the museum’s own collection and they showcase its extraordinary breadth and range. But more importantly, lots and lots of them are really beautiful or, if not beautiful, then striking and fascinating.

Statue of Venus, 1st to 2nd century Rome © The Trustees of the British Museum

I studied the labels and read the extensive feminist commentary but then I have read the same kind of thing thousands of times, and read it every day in the papers and hear it every day on the radio and TV. Discussions of gender and sexuality and gender stereotyping and #metoo and the gender pay gap and female empowerment and strong independent women and women pioneers in culture and science and sport are now part of the permanent background hum of modern life.

What is not an everyday experience is to be able to take a walk through the mythologies of the world, to savour the beauty and force of a carefully curated selection of exquisite and surprising and fascinating historical and cultural artifacts.

Not all the objects on display are masterpieces, but many of them are really, really beautiful, and all of them have fascinating stories to tell and many of them shed lights on countries and cultures I knew little or nothing about. The exhibition amounts to a kind of David Attenborough odyssey through the weird and wonderful products of the human imagination.

Mami Wata headpiece, Nigeria, early 1900s, painted wood and metal © The Trustees of the British Museum

Five themes

One of the curators explained that they went out of their way to consult far and wide, with heads of departments across the museum, with stakeholders and members, in order to draw up a long list of themes and subjects relating to female power. Alongside this they drew up a long list of objects to illustrate the themes, at the same time drafting a list of feminist commentators who might be interested in commenting on them.

The outcome of this long process of consultation and consideration has been to divide the exhibition into five themes, each of which is introduced and explained by the curators – and then a leading contemporary feminist was invited to contribute thoughts on the theme and reflections on the objects.

The five themes are:

Passion and Desire, introduced and analysed by Classics Professor Mary Beard
Magic and Malice, commented on by writer and podcaster Elizabeth Day
Forces of Nature, commented on by psychotherapist and campaigner against violence against women, Dr Leyla Hussein
Justice and Defence commented on by human rights lawyer Rabia Siddique
Compassion and Salvation commented on by writer, comedian and podcaster Deborah Frances-White

Thus each section each of the individual exhibits has two panels, one a factual description by the curators and one a subjective and thoughtful comment by the contributors. There are also some standalone video ‘thought-pieces’ of the five commentators giving their thoughts about women and power.

Creation and nature

To give an idea of the sheer number and range of goddesses and deities involved, this is a list of some of the exhibits in just the first section, devoted to ‘Creation and nature’.

Pele, the Hawaiian goddess of volcanoes with flaming red hair and a fiery temper
Sedna, the Inuit mistress of the sea
Lashmi, the Hindu goddess of abundance
Oshun, the Yoruba orisha of water, coolness and healing
Mami Wata, the mother water of African spiritual traditions
Izarami-no-mikoto, a creator deity of both creation and death in Japanese Shinto mythology
sheela-na-gigs, the primitive stone figures found in the Middle Ages across Britain, France and Spain
Papatūānuku, the mother earth figure of In Māori tradition, who gives birth to all things, including people

You get the idea. Not so much about the goddesses as such, but the impressive range and diversity of cultures represented.

Kali

The exhibition includes a newly acquired icon of the Hindu goddess Kali by contemporary Bengali artist, Kaushik Ghosh, the first contemporary 3D representation of Kali in the collection.

As one of the most prominent and widely venerated goddesses in India, this devotional image of Kali reflects the living tradition of her worship, important for millions of Hindus around the world today.

The statuette was commissioned especially for the exhibition, together with the London Durgotsav Committee, who run the annual Kali Puja festival in Camden, in Kali’s honour.

According to the curators: ‘Loved and feared for her formidable power and aggression, Kali is the goddess of destruction and salvation, who transcends time and death, destroys ignorance and guides her followers to enlightenment. Although superficially terrifying, the bloodied heads that she wears and carries represent her power to destroy the ego, setting her followers free from worldly concerns, and the belt of severed arms signifies that she liberates them from the cycle of death and rebirth, by the many weapons she wields.’

Kali Murti, Kaushik Ghosh, India, 2022. Image © The Trustees of the British Museum

Ancient and modern

There’s a kind of doubled or paired approach to everything. I’ve mentioned the way many of the exhibits feature a panel giving the historical and cultural facts, as written by the curators, and next to it a panel giving the more subjective view and reflections of the guest commentator. Doubling. Two perspectives.

But I mean it in another way as well, which is the curators’ deliberate juxtaposition of the very old and the very contemporary. This is announced right at the beginning of the exhibition (although it was only when the curator pointed it out that I understood it).

Right at the beginning of the ‘Creation and nature’ section they have two exhibits, not quite next to each other, a bit more subtly placed than that. One is a trio of Cycladic figurines of women, those primitive, flat faced half-abstract figures which date from as long ago as 3,000 BC.

A figurine of a woman, from the Cyclades, over 4,000 years old.

These are so beautiful as objects and shapes that I could look at them all day. Anyway, just round the corner from them the curators have hung a print titled ‘The Creation’ by the American feminist artist, Judy Chicago (born in 1939 and still going strong).

I needee a bit of help deciphering this but it is an image of a woman giving birth, taken from between her parted thighs, with her two breasts as hills on the horizon, one a volcano exploding. Obviously it’s heavily stylised, and features strata of creation on the right including sea life and, above them, lizards and apes and humans.

The Creation, Judy Chicago, USA, 1985, coloured screen print in 45 colours on black paper. Image © The Trustees of the British Museum

In other words, it’s a stylised image of the creation of life on earth. An interview with Chicago is quoted in which she jokes that Michelangelo’s famous image of the ‘Creation’ depicts a man (Adam) lying lazily on his back while a complacent God reaches out and touches his finger. Chicago wanted to counterpoint this patriarchal fantasy with a depiction of the more effortful, bloody and seismic moment of creation in a woman giving birth, but at the same time give it modern mythic overtones, reflecting our knowledge of geology and evolution.

So far so interesting and both works are examples of what I meant by saying that all of the exhibition’s artefacts are powerful and beautiful. It also exemplifies the juxtaposition of ancient and modern I was talking about.

History and art

But it is a dichotomy or duality on another level, as well, which is that the Cycladic figures are conventionally thought of as being of predominantly archaeological and historical interest whereas the Chicago piece is clearly a modern ‘work of art’.

So the curators are enacting another form of doubling: they have deliberately mixed together works which come from the staid academic world of history and anthropology with living works of art.

So there are, arguably, three sets of pairing or doubling going on throughout the exhibition: ancient and modern, curator and commentator, history and art.

These juxtapositions set up forcefields of energy between ancient objects of worship and veneration whose purpose was clearly ‘religious’ and modern works of art whose purpose is, well, what?

In her speech the curator said she was explaining the difference between the consciously ‘sacred’ objects (depicting goddesses and ritual) and the modern ‘profane’ art works to an exhibition sponsor, and the sponsor asked: ‘Is there a difference?’

Good question, and the exhibition provides a fascinating field of study for similar questions and reflections, either prompted by our own impressions as we stroll among these weird and wonderful objects, or by the factual summaries of the curators, or by the reflections of the feminist commentators, or by the vibrant juxtaposition of objects from such different times, places and cultures.

The visitor strolls not only between beautiful objects but amidst a complex matrix of factual information, aesthetic experiences, and intellectual discourses, jangling and buzzing, prompting all manner of thoughts and feelings.

Lilith

Take the figure of Lilith. Since the late first millennium AD, Lilith has been known in Jewish demonology as the first wife of Adam and the consort of Satan. Her origins are thought to lie in Mesopotamian demons. The exhibition includes several representations of this talismanic figure, including a ceramic incantation bowl from Iraq (500 to 800 AD), featuring a rare early image of Lilith in female form. Buried upside down under the thresholds of houses these bowls were inscribed with charms to protect the owners (who are named in the text) from demonic forces. They regularly name Lilith as a demon to be warded off, sometimes as grammatically singular and feminine, but also masculine or plural, one among many indications of the gender fluidity found in many mythologies.

Ceramic incantation bowl from Iraq (500 to 800 AD) © The Trustees of the British Museum

So far, so historical or archaeological. But the exhibition also includes a very striking sculpture of Lilith by American artist Kiki Smith, made in 1994. Smith’s sculpture is cast from the body of a real woman and the striking thing is that this life-size black metal sculpture is attached half way up the gallery wall. This would be a striking installation in a gallery of contemporary art but in the staid world of the British Museum with its glass cases carefully spotlighting tiny coins and bits of pottery, it makes a huge statement, visually and physically. The artist herself writes of her work:

Lilith becomes this disembodied spirit that goes off and wreaks havoc and doesn’t want to be subjugated. Here she is transcending gravity and the constraints of her body.

Yes, the legends about Lilith and the havoc she wrought we may or may not be familiar with. But it’s the fact that she is a life-size sculpture hanging upside down on the gallery wall which makes the statement.

Lilith by Kiki Smith (1994) image © Pace Gallery

The exhibition poster

Of all the objects in the exhibition, the Lilith sculpture is the one the curators chose to go on the poster and promotional material. Personally, I think that was a mistake. I think it would have been better, more accurate, to use a montage of 3 or 4 of the most striking objects to give a true sense of the exhibition’s breadth and diversity. It’s also a bit boring that out of all the cultures of the big wide world, the curators have chosen an artist from America. Disappointing. As if we don’t hear enough about American artists already. Would have been more genuinely diverse to promote a work by a Hindu or Nigerian or Inuit artist.

But then again, it is a strange and disturbing object. Maybe it recaptures, in our blasé culture, some of the shock and mystery and weirdness that many of the more obviously ‘religious’ objects on display conveyed to their contemporaries, long ago and far away.

Lots of goddesses

If nothing else, the exhibition shows that there have been lots of goddesses and female spirits, in all societies, at all times. In the second half of the show I noted a fourth kind of doubling, which is where the curators have a panel describing an important goddess in a general sense, and then introduce a specific instance of the goddess, drawn from their vast collection.

So there’s a curator panel describing the figure of Eve, explaining her provenance and significance in Christian theology; the curators then give an example of the iconography of Eve in the form of a striking woodcut by Renaissance artist Cranach the Elder. Then one of the feminist commentators gives a more subjective assessment of the importance of Eve in shaping and projecting ideas of femininity in the Christian tradition.

A similar two-panel treatment (general explanation, then specific artifact) was meted out to (to name just the ones that really struck me):

Radha (Hindu)
Ishtar (Babylonia and Assyria)
Aphrodite (Greece)
Lilith (Jewish-Christian)
Tlazo Iteotl (Aztec)
Hekate (Greek)
Circe (Greek)
Cihuateteo (Aztec)
Rangda (Bali)
Taraka (Hindu)
Sekhmet (Egypt)
Athena (Greece)
Luba (Congo)
Mahadevi (Hindu)
Kali (Hindu) Isis (Egypt)
Maryam (Islam)
Mary (Christian)
Guanyin (China)
Tara (Tibet)
Medusa (Greece)
witches (Christendom)

Women and gender identity

The curators assert that the representation of feminine power in world belief and mythology has played – and continues to play – an important role in shaping global cultural attitudes towards women and gender identity.

I suppose this is true of many places, still, but…. there’s something not quite right with that statement. On reflection I think it’s that the curators are pushing it a bit far when they say the exhibition explores or investigates the role religion, and female deities, goddesses and spirits have played in representing, defining, limiting and empowering women through the ages. To really properly do that would require a library full of books and studies of religious sociology and anthropology. To be blunt the exhibition, big and broad though it is, only scratches the surface of a vast, global, pan-historical subject.

As an example, the exhibition includes a section devoted to the Virgin Mary who is (obviously) the most prominent female figure in Christianity, itself the most widespread religion on earth. This section contains five artefacts connected with her veneration, which is more than most of the other goddesses get, but, still… It would obviously need quite considerably more than that to amount to a proper ‘investigation’ or ‘exploration’ of the role of Mary in defining and limiting women’s roles in Western society over the past 2,000 years. Vastly more. Thousands of books and objects. A huge exhibition could be devoted to Mary alone. And that’s just one among the 50 or 60 female deities on display here.

And that thought brings out the exhibition’s weakness, which is that a lot of the very broad (and very familiar) generalisations which the feminist commentators make about gender and identity are not really supported by the exhibits.

The curators tell you the facts about Rangda (Bali) or Taraka (Hindu) or Sekhmet (ancient Egypt) and then the commentators shoehorn onto them one of the handful of familiar feminist concerns about gender stereotyping or gender fluidity or the power of desire or women as strong independent figures and so on. Sometimes it works, sometimes it’s spot on. But sometimes it feels…contrived. You feel the unknowable weirdness of some of these objects, the strange worlds they inhabit and the fearsome spirits they represent are being hijacked to pad out a Guardian editorial.

A friend of mine, a designer, goes to lots of exhibitions and makes a point of never reading the labels. She likes to engage directly with the objects on display, unmediated by the curators’ editorialising. The commentators opinions are over familiar and tend to drag you into the squabbling world of the modern media and culture wars and twitter and so on.

Whereas the exhibition’s great strength is the way the objects themselves open doors in your head to weird and wonderful otherplaces and otherminds, leading you through the looking glass, through the back of the wardrobe, into a huge range of times and places and cultures.

And the way these beautiful or fascinating objects have been carefully juxtaposed with notable works of contemporary art to set up all kinds of resonances and vibrations. This – the often strange, haunting beauty of the objects themselves, and resonances set off by their artful positioning – is what I responded to, what I found very stimulating and rewarding.

(To be fair, the exhibition is accompanied by a big heavy catalogue packed with essays by feminist academics, and this does go into considerably more detail about the issues around women and gender and sexuality which the exhibition references. Read the catalogue blurb to get the publishers’ summary of it. ‘The publication concludes with a discussion of contemporary feminism…’)

The curators speak

Here are the voices of two women closely involved with the exhibition. Belinda Crerar, curator, British Museum, writes:

This exhibition is a tour through history and around the world to see the different ways that female power and authority have been perceived in spiritual belief. The diversity of these goddesses, spirits, enlightened beings and saints, and their profound influence in people’s lives today and in the past, gives us pause to reflect on how femininity – and indeed masculinity – are defined and valued now and in the future.

Muriel Gray, Deputy Chair of Trustees of the British Museum, writes:

The Citi exhibition Feminine power: the divine to the demonic is brimming with magic, wisdom, fury and passion. I am very proud that through the breadth and depth of the British Museum’s collection, alongside special loans, we can tell such powerful and universal stories of faith and femininity from the most ancient cultures to living traditions around the world. I would like to thank Citi, whose ongoing support has allowed the Museum to realise this ground-breaking exhibition.

A word from our sponsor

The exhibition is sponsored by Citi. Citi is the swish new name of what used to be Citigroup Inc, an American multinational investment bank and financial services corporation headquartered in New York (where Kiki Smith lives and works). A spokesman for the bank writes:

As a global bank, our mission is to serve as a trusted partner to our clients by responsibly providing financial services that enable growth and economic progress. Success in our mission is only possible if we can continue to foster a culture of equality and inclusion that enables and encourages diversity of thinking. To drive that message of equality and the power and influence of women over time, we are delighted to see the Museum use its collection, along with some spectacular loans, to create a thought-provoking look at the diversity of representations and complex meanings of the divine female over time.

So the exhibition, which the curators and contributors like to see as ‘subverting’ the patriarchy and ‘questioning’ masculinity and ‘interrogating’ gender stereotypes etc – is wholeheartedly aligned with the values of American multinational investment banks and financial services corporations.

Whether you like it or not, ‘equality’ and ‘inclusion’ and ‘diversity’ are now fully integrated into the lexicon of international capitalism, and it is money from American capitalism which makes possible exhibitions like this, makes possible the curators’ good intentions and the feminist commentators’ ‘subversive’ comments. What do you think of that, O goddesses of fire and flood and fury?

Tiare Wahine, Tom Pico, Hawai’i, 2001, Ohi’a wood © The Trustees of the British Museum

I’m not especially singling out this exhibition. It’s the same kind of irony which meant that the huge sculpture lamenting the transatlantic slave trade made by the American artist Kara Walker (also based in New York) was hosted at Tate Modern, a gallery founded by sugar plantation owner Henry Tate who, although he never owned slaves, made a fortune out of black labourers descended from slave in the Caribbean, whose name the Tate organisation insists on retaining despite protests.

Or that until recently Tate, whose exhibitions routinely campaign for a better world, was funded by BP, the oil corporation, which is actively engaged in destroying the world.

Ditto the National Portrait Gallery, which is only ending its funding by BP this year, having only just noticed global warming and oil companies’ role in creating it.

Or that the Serpentine Gallery in London has only just (2021) dropped ‘Sackler’ from its name because of the Sackler family’s involvement in selling the opioid painkillers which have made large numbers of Americans into addicts, wrecking hundreds of thousands of lives. (A link I was making two and a half years ago, Patrick Staff: On Venus @ Serpentine Sackler Gallery.)

In fact I attended a press launch of an exhibition at the Serpentine Sackler Gallery which was addressed by its Chief Executive, Yana Peel, and I squirmed a bit as she imperiously lectured us about sexism and racism (it was the exhibition by African-American female artist Faith Ringgold). So I was all the more surprised and amused when Peel was then forced to step down from her post after the Guardian revealed her involvement in ‘the NSO Group, an Israeli cyber intelligence company whose software has allegedly been used by authoritarian regimes to spy on dissidents’.

And then, of course, there are the many, many art galleries and cultural institutions which have spent the last 30 years deeply entwining themselves with the money or support of Russian oligarchs. Russia. Oligarchs. Putin. Nice company to keep.

So I’m just adding this exhibition to the many which promote high-minded values about gender and race, and advocate for sweeping social change, while being funded by money from harmful or immoral or deeply reactionary sources. You’d have to have a heart of stone not to find this kind of irony hilarious. There’s no point getting upset, it’s the way of the modern world. But you are allowed to smile at the ironies.

For young readers

There is, of course, a sumptuous catalogue accompanying the exhibition, but a book has also been written for younger readers, what the press release describes as a ‘fascinating and empowering introduction to 50 female figures from around the globe’, entitled Goddess: 50 Goddesses, Spirits, Saints and Other Female Figures Who Have Shaped Belief, written by Janina Ramirez and illustrated by Sarah Walsh.

Other British Museum exhibitions

More British Museum reviews on my Art and Exhibitions page

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by Simon on May 25, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Ancient history, Art, Exhibition, Mythology

Tagged Adam, African, amulets, ancient Egypt, ancient Greece, ancient Rome, Aphrodite, art, Assyria, Athena, Avalokiteshvara, Aztecm, Babylonia, Bali, Belinda Crerar, bodhisattva, British Museum, capitalism, China, Christianity, Cihuateteo, Circe, Citi, Citigroup Inc, classics, Compassion and Salvation, Congo, contemporary art, Cranach the Elder, David Attenborough, Deborah Frances-White, Dr Leyla Hussein, Elizabeth Day, exhibition, female spiritual beings, Feminine power: the divine to the demonic, Feminism, figurines, Forces of Nature, gender fluidity, gender identity, goddesses, Guanyin, Hawaii, Hekate, India, Indian carvings, Ishtar, ISIS, Islam, Izarami-no-mikoto, Janina Ramirez, Japan, Japanese prints, Judaism, Judy Chicago, Justice and Defence, Kali, Kali Puja, Kaushik Ghosh, Kiki Smith, Lashmi, Lilith, Luba, magic, Magic and Malice, Mahadevi, Mami Wata, Maori, Mary, Mary Beard, Maryam, Medusa, Michelangelo, Muriel Gray, mythology, Nigeria, orisha, Oshun, Papatūānuku, Passion and Desire, Pele, Queen of the night, Rabia Siddique, Radha, Rangda, Roman sculpture, Sarah Walsh, Satan, sculpture, Sedna, Sekhmet, sheela-na-gig, Shinto, Sri Kajal Datta, statuettes, Tara, Taraka, Theology, Tiare Wahine, Tibet, Tlazo Iteotl, Tom Pico, Venus, Wicca, witches, Yoruba

Posted by Simon on May 25, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/05/25/feminine-power-the-divine-to-the-demonic-british-museum/

What is Waugh satirising in ‘Love Among The Ruins’?

Maybe it’s worth taking a moment to explain what Waugh was targeting in his 1953 satirical novella Love Among The Ruins. This essay is in three parts:

Waugh’s conservative values
The state of Britain after the war i.e. Labour represent everything Waugh detests
Specific topics satirised in Long Among the Ruins

1. Waugh’s conservative values

Elitist

Waugh was an elitist in the literal sense of believing that Britain should be run by its hereditary elite, the landed gentry and aristocracy. He thought they were the best educated, the most responsible and, because of their ties to the land and to grand houses, mansions and parishes across the country, were the most representative of a kind of mystical ideal of the English population and English values.

Snob

Waugh was a snob. It is well-documented that he liked to hobnob with the aristocracy and namedrop and social climb as much as possible. His father was ‘only’ the managing director of a medium-sized publishing company, so Waugh was a long way lower on the social ladder than the lords and viscounts and earls that he liked to litter his novels with.

Catholic elitism

Waugh was a Christian who showed an unusual interest in church architecture and ritual as a boy, even before he was sent to one of the country’s most High Church public schools (Lancing). A number of his friends converted to Catholicism in the late 1920s so there was a certain inevitability about his Christian traditionalism eventually manifesting itself in his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 1930.

Waugh’s Catholicism was linked with his other values in a multi-faceted belief in old, traditions, the values of country living, the natural innate superiority of the landowner to his tenants and farmers. He valued luxurious good living, grand country houses, fine wines, the best food, the impeccable manners of the highest in society, and the aristocratic values of nonchalance and superiority.

Catholic belief

Beyond that, however, Catholicism was based on certain inflexible, timeless values. To start with, on the sanctity of human life. This meant no abortion or euthenasia. It is not for man to determine the start or end of human life. All human life is sacred. God is at the centre of all systems of value, underpinning all morality. Removing God, declaring an overtly atheist ideology, begins the process of undermining human life and all morality. Various forms of state-approved murder soon follow, abortion and assisted suicide being the two most obvious.

Individual responsibility and expression

Connected with all this is Waugh’s conservative idea of individualism. In the kind of society Waugh liked, one that implemented a low-tax, laissez-fair regime which allowed the aristocracy and upper middle class to flourish, there was lots of scope for the privileged in society, for the grand old families in their country houses and the bright young things they sent to public school and on into London’s party and cocktail bar circuit, to develop charming idiosyncracies and eccentricities.

In a sense, Waugh’s fiction is devoted to the oddballs, eccentrics and chancers who are able to flourish in the wealthy, blessed, privileged, over-educated and under-worked circles which he described. Take the outrageous practical joker Basil Seal in Put Out More Flags or the eccentric Apthorpe in Men at Arms, or, in a slightly different vein, the camp aesthetes Anthony Blanche (Brideshead) and Everard Spruce (Flags).

For Waugh, it is only his idealised conservative society that true individualism, individual tastes, aestheticism and connoisseurship are able to flourish.

The British Empire

On the global stage i.e. in international politics, Waugh saw Britain and the British Empire as embodying the finest values of civilisation, gentlemanly democracy and individual freedom. In his travel book Remote People it is very striking that Waugh unequivocally supports the right of the white settlers in Kenya to live the life of Riley at the expense of the native African population. He mocks the British Empire as everyone of his generation did, confident in the knowledge that it was here to stay forever. Its actual dismantling after the war came as a great shock.

The international alternatives

In Waugh’s fiction English gentlemanliness is contrasted with:

the irritating, bubble-gum and Coca Cola trashiness of American soldiery (in Sword of Honour) and of superficial, vacuous American consumer culture (in The Loved One)
the terrifying totalitarianism of the post-war communist states, with their utterly amoral commitment to seizing complete power and reducing entire populations to modern slavery (embodied in the Yugoslav communists in Unconditional Surrender)

So that’s a brisk run through Waugh’s conservative Catholic values. Now let’s set these values against the reality of Britain in 1950, when he wrote the first draft of Love Among The Ruins.

2. The state of Britain after the war i.e. the Labour government represented everything Waugh detested

The impact of the Second World War

The Second World War was a disaster for all Waugh’s values. Britain went bankrupt, was only kept afloat by ruinous loans from America, and emerged from the war with her role greatly diminished, a diminution symbolised by the relinquishing of India (and Pakistan) in 1947.

Not only the country but large numbers of landed families were financially ruined, first by the collapse in the economy, in particular the agricultural sector many relied on, and also by the collapse in value of the stocks and shares in British companies whose dividends they’d lived on between the wars and whose value now plummeted.

The Labour Party’s socialist policies

But the greatest cataclysm was the coming to power of the Labour Party in the 1945 general election. The Labour Party embodied everything Waugh despised, disliked and even hated about the modern world. It was the antithesis of everything he valued. In those days the Labour Party contained real socialists who genuinely wanted to nationalise everything, to impose state control of huge sectors of industry (coal, steel, shipbuilding) and the professions (doctors).

Nationalisation

In its first five years in power the Labour government enacted a broad swathe of socialist policies. It nationalised the coalmining industry and the trains. More was promised in a government which pledged to take over ‘the commanding heights’ of the economy. Owners of private companies the length of the land were forcibly bought out.

The theft of private property

Conservatives like Waugh saw this not as contributing to some vague notion of social justice but the very real confiscation of people’s property and businesses.

The faceless bureaucracy

The new ministries set up to run the economy were stuffed with bureaucrats and ideologues. Quite quickly the bureaucracy of the nationalised industries became a joke. ‘The man from the ministry’ came to symbolise the interfering, know-nothing, centralised bureaucracy which conservatives like Waugh contrasted with the personalised relations between landed gentry and local tenants and populations whose names and faces and traditions and values they knew and shared, which Waugh depicted in his idealised version of rural patriarchy. Human interaction was replaced with uncaring forms and procedures.

The NHS

The Labour government’s most famous achievement was the creation of the National Health Service but people tend to forget the immense amount of pressure, which could easily be seen as state intimidation, which was brought to bear on the medical profession. Again, to a conservative like Waugh this meant that a personal relationship with a local doctor who had individual responsibility to run his own practice and, for example, to carry out works of charity, to moderate his fees according to patients’ ability to pay, was replaced by outsiders parachuted into a large, faceless bureaucratic system.

This attitude – the preference for individual and established relationships over modern bureaucratic arrangements – is typified in a passage from The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold where the narrator describes Pinfold’s relationship with his local doctor:

Mr. Pinfold seldom consulted his doctor. When he did so it was as a ‘private patient’. His children availed themselves of the National Health Act but Mr. Pinfold was reluctant to disturb a relationship which had been formed in his first years at Lychpole. Dr. Drake, Mr. Pinfold’s medical attendant, had inherited the practice from his father and had been there before the Pinfolds came to Lychpole. Lean, horsy and weather-beaten in appearance, he had deep roots and wide ramifications in the countryside, being brother of the local auctioneer, brother-in-law of the solicitor, and cousin of three neighbouring rectors. His recreations were sporting. He was not a man of high technical pretensions but he suited Mr. Pinfold well. (Chapter one)

The way the local doctor has deep roots is obviously described, but let us dwell on the phrase ‘his medical attendant’. The implication is that Pinfold prefers Dr Drake because he is more like a servant than a bossy, hurried NHS doctor would be.

To summarise: in a broad swathe of Labour Party policies a conservative like Waugh saw nothing of ‘social justice’ being implemented but only that individual relationships, individual responsibilities and individual freedom of action were being taken away by an overbearing state and replaced by surly, bad-mannered state interference.

Rationing

Rationing had been introduced under Winston Churchill’s wartime government and, of course, destroyed at a stroke the wonderful world of fine wines and expensive meals depicted in Waugh’s 1930s novels. As Waugh himself points out, one aspect of his nostalgia fest Brideshead Revisited, is the description of sumptuous meals and fine vintages which the author, writing in tightly rationed, blacked out Britain of 1943, could only fantasise about.

Waugh like many Britons hoped that rationing would end with the end of the war but it didn’t. In fact it intensified as Britain’s ruined economy struggled to rebuild itself in a world which was also ruined. Rationing was extended to more foods and services, in a world which began to seem like it was going to be grey and shabby forever.

Shabby housing

The most visible sign of the war was the ruins to be found in every British city. The Labour government came to power promising a huge programme of housebuilding and this overlapped with ambitious plans by developers and architects to implement new continental ideas of town planning and design. A series of new towns was conceived, designed and built. Every town and village in the land acquired a penumbra of council houses built on council estates.

Unfortunately many of these developments quickly developed bad reputations, council estates for poverty and chavvy behaviour, the new town towns for being soulless concrete jungles. Tower blocks which looked gleaming symbols of modernity in the architecture magazines turned out to be badly designed, badly built, quickly stained. The windows leaked and the lifts broke.

In his post-war correspondence Waugh summed up all these changes with the satirical notion that Britain was being changed into a new state named ‘Welfaria’.

3. Specific topics satirised in Long Among the Ruins

The name of the new state, ‘New Britain’, has a suitably Orwellian, totalitarian overtone.

The replacement of traditional oaths with ones using ‘State’ instead of God indicate how the genuine source of morality and meaning in Waugh’s Catholicism has been replaced by the corrupt, fallible, pretentious and doomed-to-fail worship of the State (in oaths such as ‘Great State!’, ‘State be with you’ and ‘State help me’).

But the state has usurped not just God but all kinds of relationships, large and small. It is symptomatic that Miles Plastic is an orphan because parents interfere with the upbringing of children, do it well or badly, introduce an element of personal duty and responsibility, and also introduce that human variety and individuality which Waugh values.

The abolition of individualism

In his satirical New Britain, the State interferes everywhere to abolish individualism. So instead of individuals the State’s aim is to produce millions of identikit citizens. Hence the throwaway reference to the way everyone in New Britain speaks with the same ‘flat conventional accent of the age’.

For Waugh, this is a nightmare vision, the death of colourful individualism and the soul-destroying reduction of all human beings to the same, dull, identikit lowest common denominator.

And not just people. Where there had been a plethora and range of goods and services now there is only one brand of everything, the State brand (exactly as in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four with its Victory brand of goods). Thus the State wines and State sausages and State clothes of Waugh’s fantasy.

The abolition of personal responsibility

The abolition of individual responsibility is, of course, the target satirised in the long opening passage about Mountjoy Prison, in which Waugh satirises the belief that criminals are not responsible for their actions, society is, so that any given crime is not the fault of the criminal but indicates a failure of the welfare system. And hence the satirical details, which flow from it, such as prisoners who are clearly old lags now living in the lap of luxury with prisons replaced by lovely houses in beautiful grounds and nothing more taxing than sessions of ‘Remedial Repose’ to attend and the governor isn’t called a prison governor but ‘Chief Guide’.

(The State confiscation of private property is included in the satire of Mountjoy prison when we learn that Mountjoy Castle had been the ancestral seat of a maimed V.C. of the Second World War, who had been sent to a Home for the Handicapped when the place was converted into a gaol. Obviously the fact that the former owner was a war hero is designed to maximise the reader’s outrage at this typical act of State theft.)

The abolition of personal responsibility is further demonstrated by the way Miles’s criminal act of burning down the RAF barracks where he was stationed and burning to death half the inhabitants is dismissed by the State’s psychologist as perfectly natural adolescent behaviour.

The failure of modern architecture and town planning

It typifies the socialist removal of individuality and character and texture and colour and interest that once Miles is rehabilitated, he is not sent to a named specific town but to ‘the nearest Population Centre’ which has the generically futuristic name of ‘Satellite City’

It is also symptomatic that all the architects’ grand plans have resulted in a shoddy, half-built reality. The so-called ‘Dome of Security’ has blacked out windows, broken lifts and shabby rooms. All around it the rest of the gleaming modern town has failed to be built at all and instead the Dome is surrounded by slums made of huts, the use of the word ‘huts’ suggesting not even English habitations but African shanties.

There were no workers’ flats, no officials’ garden suburb, no parks, no playgrounds yet. These were all on the drawing boards in the surveyor’s office, tattered at the edges, ringed by tea cups; their designer long since cremated. (p.441)

It is similarly symptomatic that when Miles moves in with Clara they share a cramped compartment of a world war Nissen Hut. More than a decade after the war the coalition government has miserably failed to build adequate homes for the population.

The rise of State murder

It is no surprise that the busiest part of the local authority is the Euthenasia Department. In other words, the socialist regime has created a society which people would rather die than live in. For a Catholic like Waugh euthenasia is a sin. Only God decides when people should die. The State offering people the service of assisted suicide is not only repugnant to secular liberal values, but a sin.

State sterilisation

Same goes for sterilisation. A good Catholic believes in using no form of contraceptive device and abortion is a sin. From the same point of view, seeking to permanently sterilise people, or yourself, is a crime against nature and against God.

The irreligious amorality of modern science

The entire idea that the ‘heroine’ of the story should be beautiful but with a lush curly beard caused by the side effects of an operation to be sterilised combines at least two elements: disgust at the notion that women should sterilise themselves in order to further their career (Clara is sterilised in order to become a better ballet dancer); and the beard idea is a ludicrous satire on the unintended side-effects of modern science, in this case the fictional ‘Klugmann’s Operation’.

After the war there was a boom in the idea that ‘modern science’ would solve our social problems. As a Catholic Waugh takes a pessimistic view of human nature and of humanity’s ability to change or cure itself. Only God can do that via divine grace.

On this view there is something both blasphemous and pathetic about modern science’s hubristic claims to be able to cure the modern world. Much the same critical worldview underpins and informs C.S. Lewis’s post-war satire and fable That Hideous Strength (1945).

For Christians like Waugh and Lewis almost all the ills of the modern world stem from man’s foolish attempts to deny the reality of God and try to set up mankind in God’s place.

On a more mundane level, the inevitable failure of modern science is embodied in a) the side effects of the Klugmann Operation i.e. Clara growing a beard; and then b) the grotesque results of the ‘plastic surgery’ carried out to remedy this, which replaces Clara’s soft and beautiful face with an inflexible mask of tough, salmon-coloured rubber. Yuk.

The feeble replacement of Christmas

It’s a small detail but indicative of the whole situation that the State thinks it can simply ‘replace’ the word Christmas and Christmas trees with ‘Santa-Claus-tide’ ‘Goodwill Trees’. It’s pathetically unimaginative in itself but also indicates a deeper failure to understand the nature of human society, the way traditions and beliefs are handed down through the generations. It is exactly as shallow and doomed to fail as the French revolutionaries’ trying to replace the Catholic Church with the cult of the Supreme Being or Lenin and Stalin’s attempts to replace the Russian Orthodox Church faith in The Soviet or the Great Leader. Abolishing the church and Christian festivals masquerades as liberal and progressive but is the precise opposite: destroying history, destroying tradition, destroying diversity, destroying people’s freedom to choose their beliefs and ideas, all swept away in the name of one, centralised, totalising ideology of Unity and Progress.

Summary

Some of Waugh’s points are still relevant today. Even people on the progressive wing of politics lament the depersonalising affect of bureaucracy and form-filling which came in with the welfare state and has never gone away. None of us remember the profound poverty and immiseration of the 1930s which the nationalisation of key industries, the establishing of a welfare state and a national health service were designed to address.

It’s possible, therefore, to profoundly disagree with Waugh’s politics (such as they are) but sympathise with this or that detail of his complaint. Then again, like any satire on a dystopian future, even when it’s intended to be biting we can distinguish the political point (which we might disagree with) from the satirical humour (which we still find funny).

In some ways, then, the text is a handy checklist of issues or topics which a Christian conservative like Waugh objected to in the post-war world and post-war politics. It’s a useful primer on the conservative point of view which was, of course, to triumph in the 1951 general election, when Labour were thrown out and Winston Churchill’s Conservatives returned with a majority. And a primer on the perennial concerns of the conservative frame of mind.

And to return to its literary effects – although, in the end, Love Among The Ruins fails as a story, it is entertaining enough, especially in the dense opening passages, for the vigour of its attack and satirical vehemence.

Credit

Love Among the Ruins by Evelyn Waugh was published by Chapman and Hall in 1953. All references are to its place in the 2018 Penguin paperback edition of the Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh.

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on January 12, 2022 • Permalink

Posted in Literary criticism, Literature

Tagged Abortion, Anthony Blanche, Apthorpe, assisted suicide, Basil Seal, Brideshead Revisited, Bright Young Things, British Empire, bureaucracy, C.S. Lewis, Catholicism, Christians, Clara, Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh, conservative values, Dome of Security, dystopia, elitism, euthanasia, Euthenasia Department, Evelyn Waugh, Everard Spruce, George Orwell, God, Goodwill Trees, India, individualism, Kenya, Klugmann’s Operation, Labour Party, Lancing, Long Among the Ruins, Love Among The Ruins, Men at Arms, Miles Plastic, morality, Mountjoy Castle, Mountjoy prison, National Health Service, nationalisation, New Britain, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Novella, Pakistan, personal responsibility, Politics, Put Out More Flags, rationing, religion, Remote People, Roman Catholicism, Santa-Claus-tide, Satellite City, satire, science fiction, Second World War, snobbery, sterilisation, Sword of Honour, That Hideous Strength, The Loved One, Theology, Unconditional Surrender, Winston Churchill

Posted by Simon on January 12, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/12/what-is-waugh-satirising-in-love-among-the-ruins/

Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff (2003)

Nobody likes empires but there are some problems for which there are only imperial solutions.
(Empire Lite, page 11)

Nations sometimes fail, and when they do only outside help – imperial help – can get them back on their feet. (p.106)

A bit of biography

In the 1990s Ignatieff managed to combine being a tenured academic, a journalist making extensive foreign trips, and a TV presenter. Without planning it, Ignatieff fell into a rhythm of publishing every 2 or 3 years short books chronicling the unfolding of the failed states he visited, and the chaos which engulfed some countries after the end of the Cold War.

These short but engaging studies build up into a series of snapshots of the new world disorder unfolding through the 1990s and into the post 9/11 era, mixed with profound meditations on the morality of international affairs and of humanitarian intervention:

Blood and Belonging: Journeys Into the New Nationalism (1994)
Warrior’s Honour: Ethnic War and the Modern Conscience (1997)
Virtual War: Kosovo and Beyond (2000)
Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan (2003)
The Lesser Evil: Political Ethics in an Age of Terror (2004)
The Ordinary Virtues: Moral Order in a Divided World (2017)

Ignatieff’s disappearance from British TV and radio around 2000 is explained by the fact that he moved from London to America to take up a post at Harvard. The gap in the sequence of books listed above is explained by the fact that in 2005 he was persuaded to stand as an MP in the Canadian parliament, that in 2006 was made deputy leader of the Canadian Liberal Party and in 2009 became Liberal Party leader. Under his leadership the Liberals lost badly in the election of 2011 and Ignatieff quit as party leader. He went back to teaching at university, in between-times undertaking extended trips to eight non-Western nations which form the basis of his most recent book, The Ordinary Virtues published in 2017.

Empire Lite: Introduction

Three of the four chapters in this book started out as magazine articles published in 2002, so very soon after the seismic shock of 9/11. The premise of the book as a whole is that America is an empire which refuses to acknowledge the fact.

The Americans have had an empire since Teddy Roosevelt, yet persist in believing they do not. (p.1)

But America is not like any previous empire, it doesn’t have direct control of colonies, it is an ’empire lite’, which Ignatieff defines as:

hegemony without colonies, a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risk of daily policing. (p.2)

Nonetheless, America is the only global superpower, spends a fortune on an awesome array of military weapons and resources, and uses these ‘to permanently order the world of states and markets according to its national interests’ (p.2) which is what he considers to be imperial activities.

In this book Ignatieff sets out to look at the power, reach and, in particular, the limits of America’s informal empire by looking at three locations he knows well and has covered in previous books, Bosnia and Kosovo in former Yugoslavia, and Afghanistan. In his previous books he has covered states which were collapsing into anarchy and attempts to bring peace to them. Now he is moving on. This book:

deals with the imperial struggle to impose order once intervention has taken place. (p.vii)

It focuses on the problem that, although many states in the modern world have failed or are failing and although some kind of humanitarian intervention is emphatically called for, yet intervention is dogged with problems. Two of the biggest are:

the practical limitations of what can be achieved
the tension between what the intervening power (almost always America) wants to achieve, and the wishes of the local population

After 9/11

The chapters of this book were written during the 18 months following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on America, after George Bush had declared a ‘War on Terror’ in a speech 2 weeks later (20 September 2001), and just as America was limbering up to invade Iraq and overthrow Saddam Hussein on the controversial pretext of confiscating his weapons of mass destruction. The book was completed and sent to the publishers in January 2003 and the invasion of Iraq began on 20 March 2003.

In other words it was conceived and written in a very different climate of opinion than his pre-9/11 works and 9/11 dominates its thinking. Ignatieff says ‘the barbarians’ have attacked the imperial capital and now they are being punished.

And yet he warns that the ‘War on Terror’ may turn into a campaign without end. He quotes Edward Gibbon who, in his history of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, attributes the fall of Rome to what is nowadays called ‘imperial overstretch’, to the effort of trying to extend imperial control to regions beyond the empire’s natural borders. The Americans cannot control outcomes everywhere. This book sets out to examine the ragged edges where American hegemony reaches its limits.

Ignatieff says the terrorists who attacked on 9/11 co-opted grievances and the rhetoric of Islam into an unabashed act of violence. Violence first, cause later. What is worrying is the huge wave of support they garnered in parts of the Islamic world which feels it has been oppressed and humiliated for generations. It’s not just the obvious example of the Palestinians, oppressed by America’s client state Israel (Ignatieff mentions the pitiful inadequacy of the 1990 ‘peace treaty’ which set up the Palestinian Authority) but of dissident voices all across the Arab world.

9/11 highlighted the limitations of American influence in Islamic states. America has poured billions of dollars into Saudi Arabia and Pakistan and yet Osama bin Laden was a Saudi citizen and the Pakistanis founded, trained and supervised the Taliban which was giving Al Qaeda hospitality at the time of the attacks. And, as we have seen just a month ago (August 2021), the Taliban were to prove impossible to extirpate and have just retaken Afghanistan after 20 years of supposed ‘nation building’. So:

America may have unrivalled power but it has not been able to build stability wherever it wants on its own terms. (p.10)

Problems of empire

Ignatieff bubbles over with ideas and insights, too many to summarise. I was struck by his notion that the central problem of empires is deciding which of the many demands made on them that the imperial authorities should respond to. This is a fascinating insight to apply to the history of the British Empire, which never had enough resources to properly deal with the endless flare-ups and problems in the numerous countries it claimed to manage. Eventually it became too expensive and too complicated for a country brought to its knees by two world wars, and we just walked away. The mystery is how we managed to hang on for so long.

And now the Americans face the same problem. Ignatieff interprets the crisis in Afghanistan as a result of the way the Americans spent ten years lavishly funding and supporting the anti-Soviet resistance (in reality, a congeries of regional tribal groupings to which we gave the blanket name ‘the mujihadeen’). Then, when the Soviets withdrew in 1989, so did the Americans; walking away and letting the highly-armed tribal groups collapse into prolonged civil war, out of which emerged the extremist Taliban who were to give shelter and succour to al-Qaeda ten years later.

Another way of putting this is that America hoped, with the end of the Cold War, to benefit from a ‘peace dividend’: to reduce its armed forces, to withdraw from various strategic parts of the world, job done. On the contrary, as Ignatieff’s previous books have shown, imperial withdrawal from countries around the world did not lead to an outburst of peace, love and understanding but to the complete or partial collapse of many states and the emergence of new kinds of conflict, of ethnic wars, ‘ragged wars’, chaotic wars, and widespread destabilisation.

In these zones of chaos (Afghanistan, Iraq, Sudan, Somalia) the enemies of the West, and of America in particular, have flourished and now, in 2002, as Ignatieff was writing these pieces, American rulers had to make some very difficult decisions about where to intervene and how much to intervene, and for how long.

Chapter 1. The Bridge Builder

The bridge in question is the bridge over the River Neretva in the centre of the town of Mostar in southern Bosnia. The town actually takes its name from the bridge, which is called the Stari Most (Old Bridge) in Serbo-Croat, and from the bridge-keepers, known as mostari, who guarded it.

The Stari Most was built by the Ottomans in the 16th century, was one of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s most visited landmarks, and was considered an exemplary piece of Islamic architecture. It was erected in 1566 on the orders of Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and designed by the Ottoman architect Mimar Hayruddin.

During the Yugoslav civil wars Mostar suffered two distinct conflicts: after Bosnia-Herzogovina declared independence in April 1992 the (mostly Serb) Yugoslav Army went in to try and crush its independence. They were opposed by an army quickly assembled from both the Croat and Bosnian Muslim (or Bosniak) population (which both made up about a third of the city’s population). In June 1992 the Croat-Bosniak forces successfully attacked the besieging Yugoslav Army and forced them to withdraw from Mostar. Lots of shelling and shooting resulted in the town’s historic buildings getting badly knocked about, but not the bridge.

The bridge was destroyed as part of the second conflict, for after jointly seeing off the Serbs, tension then grew between the former allies, the Croats and Bosniaks. In October Croats declared the independence of a small enclave which they called ‘the Croatian Republic of Herzeg-Bosnia’, supported by the government of neighbouring Croatia and this triggered the Croat–Bosniak War which lasted from 18 October 1992 to 23 February 1994.

The Old Bridge was destroyed by Croatian forces on November 9, 1993 during a stand-off between opposing forces on each side of the river. It’s said that more than 60 shells hit the bridge before it collapsed. The collapse of the bridge consolidated the complete ethnic division of the city into Croat west bank and Muslim east bank.

What’s amazing is the enmity that lingered on after the ‘end’ of this small war. The town actually had six bridges and some of the others survived but adult men were forbidden from crossing over to the ‘enemy’ side. Ignatieff tells the story of a Muslim lad who drove over one of the surviving bridges to visit a Croatian girl he’d known before the division. On the way back he was shot in the back of the head by the Croat checkpoint guards and his car slowed to a halt half way across the bridge as he died (p.33). To understand the Yugoslav catastrophe you have to get inside the minds of the soldiers who did that.

While UN peacekeepers eventually moved in to supervise the fragile peace, the European Union considered how to repair the devastated infrastructure all across the former Yugoslav states. Ignatieff meets the man charged with rebuilding the famous Mostar bridge, a French architect named Gille Pequeux. Ignatieff spends time with him, learning how the Frenchman is doggedly studying whatever architects’ plans still survive from the original bridge, analysing the ancient techniques the Ottomans used to cut the stone and carve runnels along the inward-facing sides of it, which were then filled with molten lead to tie them together. In every way Pequeux is trying to make the reconstruction as authentic as possible.

Ignatieff drolly points out that the president of Turkey offered to fund the rebuilding the bridge as a symbol of Turkey’s long-term presence/contribution/imperial occupation of this part of Europe. The EU politely turned down the offer and insisted it was done by one of their own. So it is drily ironic that the much-lauded rebirth of this ‘symbol of multiculturalism’ entailed a diplomatic rebuff of an actual gesture of multiculturalism (p.36).

But rebuilding bridges and houses and hospitals and mosques is easy. Reconciling the people who live and work in them is much harder. Ignatieff is blunt. The EU and America have spent over $6 billion ‘reconstructing’ Bosnia but it is still ruled by the crooks who rose to power during the wars and a big part of the aid money, like aid money everywhere, is routinely creamed off by corrupt leaders and gangsters.

Now the leaders of the rival communities never meet and rarely talk. They only get together for the photo opportunities required to make a show of unity for the press and EU officials to ensure the all-important foreign aid cash keeps flowing. As soon as the lights are turned off they turn away from each other.

For our part, the West is disillusioned. Real reconciliation has not taken place. Corruption is endemic. Some of the refugees have returned to their homes but for many, ethnic cleansing achieved its goals. They will never return. And many of the locals still hate each other.

And so Ignatieff points out that rebuilding the bridge is as important for the morale of the interventionist West as for the locals. We need it to prop up our delusions that opposite sides in a civil war can be reconciled. That our costly interventions are worthwhile.

This lovely essay rises to a poetic peroration:

The Western need for noble victims and happy endings suggests that we are more interested in ourselves than we are in the places, like Bosnia, that we take up as causes. This may be the imperial kernel at the heart of the humanitarian enterprise. For what is empire but the desire to imprint our values, civilisation and achievements on the souls, bodies and institutions of another people? Imperialism is a narcissistic enterprise, and narcissism is doomed to disillusion. Whatever other people want to be, they do not want to be forced to be us. It is an imperial mistake to suppose that we can change their hearts and minds. It is their memory, their trauma, not ours, and our intervention is not therapy. We can help them to rebuild the bridge. Whether they actually use it to heal their city is up to them. (p.43)

Beautiful rhythm to it, isn’t there? Lovely cadences. The flow of the prose beautifully embodies the flow of the thought, which is both clear and logical but also emotive and compelling. Ignatieff writes like this everywhere: he is lucid and logical, but also stylish and evocative. He’s the complete package.

Chapter 2. The Humanitarian as Imperialist

This essay opens in 2000 with Ignatieff attending a press photo shoot given by the UN representative in Kosovo, Bernard Kouchner, and a Spanish general, who have persuaded two local Kosovar politicians, one of them a former commander of the Kosovo Liberation Army nicknamed ‘the snake’, to accompany them to the site of an atrocity. In the night someone laid a landmine. This morning a van driving between two Serb villages ran over it, it detonated, killing two outright and blowing the legs off the one survivor. The two Kosovar politicians say the required words about the need to change hearts and minds. Kouchner delivers his patter. The photographers snap, the new crews record, then it is over and everyone jumps into their cars and speeds off.

Ignatieff accompanies Kouchner to a Serbian monastery. Father Sava, the head of the monastery, has been chosen as a ‘moderate’ leader of the minority Serbian community left in Kosovo when the war ended in 1999. Attacks on Serbs are continuing on a daily basis. Kouchner and the Spanish general assure Father Sava that they are doing everything they can to protect his community. It doesn’t much matter since the simmering Serb community doesn’t believe either Sava or the UN. Not when members of their families are getting blown up or shot every day.

The international community is having to rebuild Kosovo from the ground up, rebuilding its entire infrastructure, economy, everything, making it ‘the most ambitious project the UN has ever undertaken’ (p.51).

Once again Ignatieff repeats that the West wants ‘noble victims’ and doesn’t know how to cope when the victims (the Kosovo Albanians) turn on their former oppressors (the Serbs).

Bernard Kouchner

All this is by way of introduction to a long profile of Bernard Kouchner. Being Ignatieff, he sees Kouchner not so much as a person but as a walking embodiment of an idea, in this case the way the entire doctrine of ‘humanitarian intervention’ has changed and evolved over the past thirty years.

Ignatieff says Kouchner came of age during the heady revolutionary days of Paris 1968. In a change-the-world spirit he volunteered to go serve as a doctor with the Red Cross in Biafra. However, he drastically disagreed with the Red Cross ideology of neutrality, non-intervention and non-reporting, removed his Red Cross armband and was among the founder members of the French organisation Médecins Sans Frontières or Doctors Without Borders. These guys are more prepared to call out the aggressors and killers in the war zones where they operate. Ignatieff considers the pros and cons of the two positions, the Red Cross’s studied neutrality, Médecins’ political engagement.

Ignatieff claims Kouchner also pioneered the involvement of the media in humanitarian aid, realising that people need to be shocked out of their complacency by images of horror and starving children on their TVs. He has been involved in various publicity stunts which drew down a world of mockery from liberal commentators but do, in fact, help to publicise his causes.

It is Kouchner, more than anyone else, who created the modern European relationship between civic compassion, humanitarian action and the media. (p.61)

Kouchner parted from Médecins when the latter won the Nobel Prize in 1999. This is because Kouchner had moved on from thinking aid organisations should speak out about evil, murder, massacre, human-engineered famine and so on, and had progressed to a more assertive position – that humanitarian organisations needed to get involved in political attempts to combat evil.

Aid organisations talk about ‘civil society’ and the ‘humanitarian space’ but Ignatieff says Kouchner thought this was an illusion. Aid agencies are supported and enabled by nation states. More than that, some crises aren’t humanitarian crises at all, they are crimes. Thus Saddam Hussein attacking his Kurdish population, trying to exterminate it and driving it up into the mountains to starve to death wasn’t a ‘humanitarian crisis’, it was a crime against humanity. Situations like this don’t call for the discreet, neutral aid providing of the Red Cross; they must be opposed by force.

This led Kouchner to become deeply involved in French and then UN politics. In 1988 he became Secrétaire d’état for Humanitarian Action in 1988 in the Michel Rocard cabinet, then Minister of Health during Mitterrand’s presidency. He served in the European Parliament 1994 to 1997, chairing the Committee on Development and Cooperation. He became French Minister of Health 1997 to 1999 in Lionel Jospin’s government, and then served as Minister of Health for a third time, 2001 to 2002.

Ignatieff says Kouchner’s positions, then, aren’t just interesting conversation pieces, but have directly influenced French government action. Thus his position influenced the French decision to back the UN resolution to send a peace-keeping force into Bosnia, part of which was meant to protect Sarajevo and Srebrenica. This failed miserably, with the Serbs bombing Sarajevo for years, and rounding up and exterminating 8,000 Muslim boys and men in Srebrenica under the noses of the 300-strong UN peacekeeping force.

The logic of this sequence of events is that only force can work against evil aggressors, and it was this thinking which finally led the Americans to intervene, when they ordered air strikes against Serbian positions in defence of a Croat advance; and then onto the sustained bombing of Belgrade from March to June 1999 to persuade the government of Slobodan Milošević to stop the massacring of Albanian Kosovars.

So the appointment of Kouchner as UN Representative to Kosovo in 1999 was full of historical ironies and meanings. This was the man who had led humanitarian intervention away from the studied neutrality of the 1960s, through active calling-out of the bad guys, towards evermore aggressive intervention against the wrongdoers. So it is the evolution of Kouchner’s theoretical positions which interests Ignatieff.

In this chapter he reiterates what are, by now, becoming familiar points. One is that modern-day ‘humanitarian’ intervention is ‘imperial’ in a number of ways. First and foremost, imperialism means powerful states compelling populations in weaker ones to behave how the powerful ones want them to. But all this talk about reconciliation is far from disinterested altruism: the European nations want to sort out the Balkan issue and impose peace and reconciliation so as to remove a source of political instability which could (in an admittedly remote scenario) draw in either Russia or Turkey. More immediately, restoring some kind of peace is designed to cut off the influx of the Balkans’ most successful exports to Europe, which Ignatieff drily lists as organised crime, drugs and sex slaves (p.60).

Secondly, as in his concluding essay about Bosnia and Afghanistan and in The Warrior’s Honour, Ignatieff is very, very sceptical about the chances of anything like genuine reconciliation. The same ethnic groups are now at daggers’ drawn and will do everything they can to harm or kill members of the opposing groups. He claims that Kouchner was taken aback by the ferocity of the tribal hatred he encountered when he first arrived (p.63), and depicts Kouchner, when he’s not performing for the cameras, as an exhausted and disillusioned man.

As in the essay on Mostar, Ignatieff asks why the victims should be obliged to conform to the Western stereotype of the noble-minded victim? In reality, the second they had the chance, the ‘victims’ have turned the tables and are carrying out a campaign of revenge killings and terrorist atrocities against the Serbs still stuck in north Kosovo who haven’t been able to flee to the safety of Serbia, every bit as brutal as the violence which eventually prompted NATO to start bombing Belgrade.

Ignatieff sees Kouchner as an imperial viceroy who has been parachuted in to try and rebuild the country and prepare it for ‘autonomy’. He calls Kouchner’s power a ‘protectorate’ with a pretence of local autonomy but where rule actually stops with the imperial viceroy, as in the Raj, as in the British and French mandates in the Middle East between the wars. If that was ‘imperialism’, surely this is, too.

Once again, Ignatieff makes the point that maybe what Kosovo needs is not a moderately independent-minded Kouchner, but an utterly independent-minded General MacArthur, the American general who was given a free hand to rule Japan as he saw fit for six whole years after the Second World War. Maybe what the Balkans need is not less imperialism, but a more naked, out-and-out, assertive imperialism. Do this, or else.

(In the event Kosovo declared independence from Serbia on 17 February 2008. As of 4 September 2020, 112 UN states recognised its independence, with the notable exceptions of Russia and China.)

Chapter 3. Nation-building Lite

Max Weber said a state is an institution which exerts a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence over a given territory. Generally, this monopoly is channeled via the institutions of a professional police service and an army. In a Western nation the police are subject to elected politicians and their work feeds into an independent judiciary, while the army is trained and led by professionals.

In a failed state, weapons are everywhere and the use of violence is widely dispersed. Usually, after a period of anarchy, warlords emerge who control the application of violence, at least in their territories, but often only up to a point, and sometimes cannot control permanently embedded, low-level street violence.

The essence of nation-building is to get weapons out of circulation – out of the hands of warlords, paramilitaries, criminal gangs and punks on the street – and restore that monopoly of violence which is one definition of a functioning state; and in so doing to create a space in which non-violent politics – negotiation, discussion and compromise – can be encouraged. It may still be a violent and corrupt state but it is, at least, a starting point.

Ignatieff pointed out in The Warrior’s Honour that, in quite a few failed states round the world, this is now harder to do than ever before, because modern weapons are so cheap and easily available. Some societies have become so soaked in guns that it’s hard to see a way back to unarmed civility.

Afghanistan

And so on to the specific country in question, Afghanistan. Ignatieff recapitulates the modern history of Afghanistan, the Soviet invasion of 1979, the West’s backing of the mujahideen who, once the Soviets left and the West walked away in the early 1990s, degenerated into a civil war of regional warlords. But Ignatieff’s interest in the story is, as always, in the principles and theory behind it.

Reconstruction

He repeats one of his central ideas which is that nation-building takes a long, long time, and then gives a striking example. America’s own nation-building, starting with the Reconstruction Period after the civil war, arguably took an entire century, right up until the civil rights legislation of 1964 finally abolished discrimination against Afro-Americans (p.85).

Reconstruction in Germany and Japan took about a decade, but in both countries the nation-builders were starting off with states with well-defined borders, established (albeit corrupted) institutions, and ethnic homogeneity. The populations of both countries wanted to be reconstructed.

Don’t say when you’ll leave

Igantieff makes the point that one of the secrets of success for an empire is the illusion of permanence, of longevity. As soon as you announce that you’re leaving at some fixed moment in the future, all the vested interests rise up and jockey for power. This is vividly demonstrated by the absolute chaos triggered when the Belgian imperial authorities abruptly withdrew from the Congo at independence, as provinces seceded and new parties jockeyed for power using extra-political means i.e. guns and coups. Same thing happened in Angola where the abrupt announcement of the imperial power, Portugal, that it would completely withdraw its forces in a matter of months led to civil war between the various independence paramilitaries, a civil war which dragged on for 27 years and wrecked the country.

Ignatieff says the Americans have a poor track record on this matter, and a bad reputation for walking away from chaotic states as soon as it suits them. This means local warlords realise they just have to mind their manners and bide their time.

The American withdrawal from Afghanistan, 2021

What Ignatieff didn’t know in 2002 was that the Americans would stay for an epic 20 years nor that the same rule of permanence was to apply: that as soon as Joe Biden announced the US were leaving, people all across the country realised the Taliban would swarm back into power and began making arrangements accordingly, i.e. Afghan police, army and local governors defected to the Taliban within days o fthe last Yanks leaving, so that the entire Afghan security apparatus melted away and the Taliban were in Kabul within a week.

Not so easy, running an empire, is it? Maybe the thousands of American academics who loftily criticise Britain’s chaotic withdrawal from Palestine or India will reflect on the cracking job their boys did in Afghanistan. With 70 more years of academic theorising and practical experience than the Brits, the Yanks still made a complete shambles of it.

Europe and America: division of roles

Ignatieff makes another snappy point: how can American Republican administrations, who are fanatically opposed to Big Government, find themselves spending tens of billions of dollars creating huge administrations in foreign countries? Easy. They get the Europeans to do it. The Americans are good at fighting (Ignatieff says that, in a sense, America is the last truly warlike nation in the West) so they handle the bombs and drones and special forces. Then the Europeans then move in with the peacekeeping police forces and the droves of humanitarian aid agencies, building schools, hospitals etc. Yin and yang.

Chapter 4. Conclusion: Empire and its Nemesis

Ignatieff describes modern Western nation-building as ‘imperial’ because:

its main purpose is to create stability in border zones essential to the security of the great powers
the entire project rests on the superior armed might of the West
no matter how much ‘autonomy’ is given to local rulers, real power always remains in Washington

In addition, he repeats the point that all empires have to ration their interventions. You have limited resources: which of the world’s endless trouble spots can you afford to address? Ignatieff points out the basic hypocrisy of ‘humanitarian intervention’ which is that it is only carried out in places which are convenient or important to the West. The West is never going to intervene in Chechnya or Crimea or Xinjiang because they are the preserves of other empires.

And the new imperialism is not only lite it is impatient. The British gave themselves generations to prepare the populations of India for independence. The UN gives places like Kosovo or Afghanistan 3 years before they have to hold their first elections. Hurry up! This is costing us money!

No imperialists have ever been so impatient for quicker results. (p.115)

Why? Partly the short attention span of the modern media, always hurrying on to the next story. (It took, by my calculation, about ten days from the American departure from Afghanistan being the biggest story in the whole world to being completely ignored and forgotten about.)

And then the short election cycles in democracies. Whatever plans you put in place now, at the next election in a few years’ time the leader of the opposition party will be promising to bring our boys home and save everyone a shedload of money. Western democracies, by their very nature, struggle to make long-term commitments to anything.

This concluding essay takes its title from a reflection on the enduring force of nationalism which empires find so difficult to counter. In the end, the European empires were defeated by the indomitable resilience of their colonies’ nationalist movements. This was the lesson the Americans should have learned from Vietnam. It wasn’t their weapons which won the Viet Cong victory, it was their nationalist convictions. Nationalism always trumps empire.

Nationalism will always prove to be the nemesis of any imperial nation-building project. (p.117)

Ignatieff didn’t know this when he wrote these lines, but they were to apply to the American invasion of Iraq which commenced just as his book was being published. The Americans overthrew a dictator and promised to bring peace and plenty but were utterly unprepared for the violence of the forces that then attacked them from all sides.

Thoughts

1. So Ignatieff’s message is that if liberal humanitarians really want to do good, they should really intervene: go in hard, defeat the bad guys, disarm them, force parties to the negotiating table, and run things themselves, setting up strong national institutions and teaching squabbling factions what democracy looks like in practice. And they have to do this for years, decades maybe, until the institutions and mindsets of civic society have been thoroughly inculcated. And only leave when everything is completely in place for the transition. In other words – imperialism. Not the kind of imperialism which exploits the native populations and rips off their raw materials. An altruistic imperialism, a humanitarian imperialism. But imperialism all the same.

2. When Ignatieff devotes a chapter of The Warrior’s Honour to the West’s growing sense of weariness and disillusion with humanitarian intervention, I suspected he was mainly talking about himself. This book shows a further deterioration in his attitude. I simply mean he has become markedly more cynical.

Across-the-board hopes have been crushed, ideals have been compromised, ambitions have been stymied. Much of this may reflect the appalling history of the 1990s, but I also think some of it may be a projection of Ignatieff’s own growing disillusion.

You feel this downward trajectory when he says that Bernard Kouchner arrived in Kosovo in July ‘talking about European values, tolerance and multiculturalism’ but by Christmas this had been revised down to hopes for ‘coexistence’ (p.63). Kouchner simply hadn’t anticipated the hatred and the intransigence which he found in Kosovo. So many aid workers and proponents of humanitarian intervention don’t. In Blood and Belonging Ignatieff refers fairly respectfully to ‘the international community’. Eight years later he refers to it as:

what is laughingly referred to as the ‘international community’. (p.97)

His journey his taught him that the international institutes he used to respect are, in fact, a sham.

He is particularly disillusioned with the international aid industry, which he sees as almost a scam, a locust swarm of very well-paid white Western graduates, who fly in, can’t speak the language, pay over the odds for everything thus pricing the locals out of accommodation and food, stay hunkered down in their armoured enclaves, drive everywhere in arrogant white 4-by-4s, and cook up huge impractical ‘aid’ projects without consulting any of the locals. All the Afghans he talks to complain to Ignatieff about the NGOs’ arrogance and condescension. It is the old colonialist attitude but now with emails and shades. During the course of this book he takes to referring to the aid organisation community dismissively as ‘the internationals’, by contrast with the poor, often ignored ‘locals’, the people who actually live there.

In this book Ignatieff is as clever and incisive and thought-provoking as ever. But sometimes he sounds really tired.

Credit

Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan by Michael Ignatieff was published by Vintage in 2003. All references are to the 2003 Vintage paperback edition.

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Age of Terror: Art since 9/11 @ Imperial War Museum London (March 2018)

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by Simon on October 29, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in America, Islamic terrorism, Politics, War

Tagged 9/11, Afghanistan, aid organisations, Al Qaeda, America, Arab world, Balkans, Bernard Kouchner, Biafra, Bosnia, Bosniak, British Empire, Chechnya, civil society, Cold War, Congo, contemporary history, Crimea, Croat, current affairs, Doctors Without Borders, Edward Gibbon, empire, Empire Lite, Empire Lite: Nation-Building in Bosnia, failed state, Father Sava, Francois Mitterrand, General MacArthur, geopolitics, George Bush, Germany, Gille Pequeux, global superpower, Harvard, humanitarian crisis, humanitarian space, imperialism, India, international community, Iraq, Japan, Kosovo, Kosovo and Afghanistan, Kosovo Liberation Army, Kurds, Liberal Party, Lionel Jospin, Max Weber, Médecins Sans Frontières, Michael Ignatieff, Mimar Hayruddin, Mostar, mostari, mujihadeen, multiculturalism, nationalism, Nato, NGO, Nobel Prize, Osama bin Laden, Ottoman Empire, Pakistan, Palestine, Palestinian Authority, Raj, Reconstruction, Red Cross, River Neretva, Saddam Hussein, Sarajevo, Saudi Arabia, Slobodan Milošević, Srebrenica, Stari Most, Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent, Taliban, Teddy Roosevelt, Turkey, Viet Cong, Vietnam, war, war on terror, weapons of mass destruction, Xinjiang, Yugoslavia

Posted by Simon on October 29, 2021

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Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane (1995)

‘It should be an interesting few weeks, old boy.’
(The words of David, Fergal Keane’s tall, elegant, 60-year-old BBC producer, as they arrive at the border of Rwanda, page 42)

Fergal Keane, reporter and moral superstar

Keane is an award-winning BBC foreign correspondent and writer. This is a short 190-page book which recounts the journey undertaken by him, his 3-man BBC TV news crew, with a couple of South African security guys (Glen and Tony) and two African drivers (Edward and Moses), as they crossed into north Rwanda from Uganda. It follows this team as they drove through the devastated countryside only weeks after it had been pacified by the invading Rwandan Patriotic Front (RPF), and saw for themselves the corpses produced by the Rwandan genocide (April to July 1994). They saw hundreds and then thousands of dead bodies, clogging rivers, littered across the countryside and packed into buildings, houses and churches in villages and towns.

However, although the book contains many descriptions of bodies hacked to pieces, of mothers trying to protect their children who had their skulls cleaved open by machetes, children’s bodies cut clean in two, and so on – a kind of Pompeii of corpses caught in all manner of strange, poignant and horrifying postures as the murderers did their work – the horror is mixed with another element which I couldn’t help finding irritating at first and then broadly comic, which is Keane’s humourless self-importance.

Keane the sensitive reporter is front and centre of the entire account, which opens not with any African or Rwandan voices, stories, facts or history or events, but with pages and pages of Keane impressing on the reader how he is such a sensitive man that even now, a year after his journey, as he writes his book, he is still haunted by dreams and nightmares of what he saw; how he struggles to put it into words, how he struggles to make sense of the horror of mass killing and so on.

My dreams are the fruit of my journey down the dirt road to Nyarubuye. How do I write this, how do I do justice to what lies at the end of this road? As simply as possible. This is not a moment for fine words. (p.76)

But the fact that he even has to tell us that he is agonising about how to write it, how to describe the scene, and shares with us his heroic decision not to use ‘fine words’, this is all grandstanding, showboating, foregrounding his wonderful scrupulousness as a Man and as a Writer. He may claim not to use ‘fine words’ (although, in fact, he often does) but he certainly uses fine feelings.

He could have just described what he saw and been a simple, factual, objective observer. But Keane is incapable of keeping himself out of the picture and swamps everything with his first-hand impressions, all recounted in a lulling Irish brogue.

This self-promotion extends beyond himself to encompass his BBC news crew (producer, cameraman, soundman) and fixers (the two SA security men), describing them as the best in the world, top of their trade, ace professionals – sensitive (very sensitive), creative, reliable, hard working – a great bunch of guys!

These passages dwelling at length on what a caring, sensitive fellow Keane is, and what a fantastically hard-working but sensitive crew he was privileged to work with – made me smile and occasionally burst out laughing at their self-importance, their lack of self-awareness, their complete inappropriateness in what purports to be a record of one of the worst mass murders of the 20th century.

So Season of Blood can be broken down into three elements:

The syrup-thick self-congratulation and oh-so-sensitive descriptions of how Keane felt, at the time and for months after the journey was over, which start and end the text and feature liberally throughout.
The series of incidents which made up his actual journey across Rwanda: names of the people they met (generally from the RPF, sometimes the UN) who showed them sites of numerous atrocities where the bodies were still piled up in streets and fields, houses and churches, and interviews with (often very badly injured) survivors, and the genocidal Hutu authorities who dismissed it all as exaggeration and the inevitable casualties of war.
Historical background – Keane’s solid reworking of the standard history I’ve read in all the other accounts.

1. A song for the sensitive

On the 1974 album ‘Monty Python Live at Drury Lane’, Neil Innes introduces his song ‘How sweet to be an idiot’ by whispering, ‘And now…a song for the sensitive’, to much laughter from those with a sense of humour. This phrase kept echoing round my head as I read the confessional parts of Keane’s text.

I thought New York journalist Philip Gourevitch had done a good job of showing off how sensitive and deep he was in his 1998 book about the Rwandan Genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, but he is blown clean out of the water by BBC journalist-superstar and softly-spoken Irishman, Fergal Keane. Here is the opening paragraph of Keane’s Rwandan Journey, for best effect to be intoned in a mellifluous Irish accent, very quietly and very sensitively:

I do not know what dreams ask of us, what they come to collect. But they have come again and again recently, and I have no answers. I thought that after the bad nights of last summer the dead had abandoned me, had mouldered into memory. But the brothers and sisters, the mothers and fathers and children, all the great wailing families of the night are back, holding fast with their withering hands, demanding my attention. Understand first that I do not want your sympathy. The dreams are part of the baggage on this journey. I understood that from the outset. After all, four years in the South African townships had shown me something of the dark side, and I made the choice to go to Rwanda. Nobody forced or pressurised me. So when I tell you about the nights of dread, understand that they are only part of the big picture, the first step backward into the story of a journey that happened a year ago. (page 1)

Personally, I think it was very considerate of the Rwandan people to stage an epic bloodbath in order to provide Mr Keane with a splendid backdrop against which to display his sensitive soul, his simple but poetic prose, his knowledge of ‘the dark side’ (guffaw) and his fine moral scruples. Just recently I notice the arrival in the language of the phrase ‘humble-bragging’, which means:

the action of making an ostensibly modest or self-deprecating statement with the actual intention of drawing attention to something of which one is proud.

So when Fergal says he doesn’t want our sympathy, it was hell but he’ll be OK, no, no, he really doesn’t want our sympathy, not at all, really he doesn’t, the dreams, the dreams are sometimes hard to bear, but, shucks, he was just doing his job, no, no sympathy thank you — it’s hard not to burst out laughing at his self-important humble-bragging.

And not just him. He says there were many of ‘us’ who went there, many tip-top international journalists like Fergal. Some claim they don’t have bad dreams, but Fergal knows better. They, all of them, this band of brothers, this close-knit community of sensitive reporters, according to Fergal, they still ‘mourn the dead of Rwanda’. They still suffer at nights from that special feeling. What special feeling? Well:

How can I best describe it? It is a mixture of dread fascination, sorrow for what we learned and lost in the short few weeks of chaos, a mind weariness that feeds itself by replaying the old tapes over and over. We reach for the off switch but in the darkness cannot find it. (p.3)

Portentous and pretentious, humourless self-importance. Note the deliberately ‘poetic’ language. Given the choice between the ordinary functional word and the archaic, poetic equivalent, Fergal always plumps for the latter. He and his crew don’t get up at the start of the day; they ‘rise to start another day’ (p.44). The crooks they meet with in Nairobi are ‘rogues’ (p.48). The rains don’t prompt new growth, they ‘bring forth’ great tangles of vegetation, as if touched by the staff of Moses (p.49). David doesn’t start crying when he thinks about his daughter back home; he is ‘in the thrall of this fatherly emotion’ (p.35). Every page is blessed with a gem of pretentious and high-sounding diction.

And the journey itself is not just any hack’s trip to cover another grim African tragedy: it is a knight of the round table on a quest, it is a pilgrim’s progress, it is the odyssey of a Great Spirit, greater, finer, more sensitive than the humble likes of you and I.

My journey into Rwanda was about following the lines of blood and history; about sleeping with the smell of death, fear and hatred; about exhaustion and loss and tears and in some strange ways even love. For me to make sense of that journey, however, I cannot write in terms of facts alone. So bear with me when the road runs down into the valleys of the heart and mind and soul… (p.3)

What a wanker. And the Rwandans? The genocide? You want to know about them? Hang on, first there’s another fifty pages while we follow the road down into the valleys of Fergal’s heart and mind and soul…

Padding

So Keane comes over, fairly regularly, as a self-important so-and-so. But the emphasis on the personal nature of his text and the amount of time he spends describing his travelling companions may have a more banal cause. For he tells us early on that he only spent a few weeks in Rwanda (p.4) and, later on, that his brief trip started in early June 1994 (p.123).

So there may be an embarrassingly simple reason why so much of the text describes his fine feelings, his doughty companions and the details of their itinerary rather than the history or politics of Rwanda – this preening might simply be padding, padding out a book which, even with all this bumf, barely stretches to 190 pages.

In fact it’s only on page 48 of the 190 pages that Keane and his team actually cross into Rwanda and the journey proper begins. So the actual travelogue of Rwanda is barely 140 pages long. It’s an often intense but, ultimately, quite thin and superficial account.

Top chaps

Fergal went to Rwanda with a BBC team to make a film for Panorama and what a team he took with him! He is accompanied by one of the BBC’s most respected producers ‘whose bravery in dangerous situations was remarkable’; by a soundman who is also a novelist; by a cameraman who ‘mixed rugged good sense with extraordinary sensitivity’. Goodness! What special people Fergal surrounds himself with! What heroes! What legends!

And it takes one top chap to know another top chap. Thirty seconds on Fergal’s Wikipedia page tells us that Keane attended the Presentation Brothers College in Cork, a private, fee-paying Catholic school which is ranked the number one boys’ secondary school in Ireland. Maybe this is where his overweening sense of superiority comes from, his indestructible confidence in what are, in the end, pretty banal observations written in humble-bragging prose.

Rather snipingly, Fergal points out that most other TV journalists and crews are, unfortunately, just mercenary hacks who fly wherever the bodies piling up, knock out superficial stories about a situation they barely understand and then, as soon as the fighting stops, move on.

Where television is concerned, African news is generally only big news when it involves lots of dead bodies. The higher the mound, the greater the possibility that the world will, however briefly, send its camera teams and correspondents. Once the story has gone ‘stale’ i.e. there are no new bodies and the refugees are down to a trickle, the circus moves on. (p.7)

TV news is sensationalist and superficial!? Who knew? This must be why the BBC pays its top correspondents the big bucks, for coming up with wonderful insights like this.

But Saint Fergal goes out of his way to emphasise that he is not like all those other TV correspondents and his crew are not like all those other horrible mercenary crews. No, his crew includes a sound man who is also a novelist; and a cameraman who ‘mixed rugged good sense with extraordinary sensitivity’; and a producer ‘whose bravery in dangerous situations was remarkable’.

And they work for the BBC so they must be the best! And they are fronted by a sensitive soul who still has dreams, all these months later, of the terrible things he saw but no, thank you, no, he doesn’t need your sympathy. Very kind, but he’s man enough to take it.

Admittedly, this band of heroes only flew into Rwanda when the story began to involve lots of bodies – exactly like the other crews he criticises. Admittedly, they only stayed for a few weeks – exactly like those other crews he criticises. Admittedly, his team also moved on once the story had gone stale –exactly like those other crews he criticises. But his crew did it in a specially sensitive and rugged and heroic way, in a noble BBC way, which completely separates them from all the other media riff-raff. This isn’t just any old reporter and his camera crew; this is an M&S reporter and his camera crew.

David the producer is tall, silver haired and works harder than anyone Fergal has ever met! He is steady as a rock, ‘not given to exaggeration or panic’! Whatever situation they find themselves in David can always fix it, with a few discreet words and a shrewd wink. What a top chap!

David never reveals his feelings because he’s that kind of steady, dignified, old-fashioned type of fellow. Right up until, one day, barrelling along in their Land Rover, Fergal shares the Yeats poem, ‘Prayer For My Daughter,’ with him, at which point a quiet tear comes to David’s eye, as he thinks of his own dear beloved daughter back home in Blighty (p.35). Poetry! Yeats! A quiet tear! Yes, what a fine and sensitive chaps he is, they all are!

Perhaps more than anything I admired his old-fashioned journalistic honesty. David believed in going to places and finding out what was happening, talking to as many sides as possible, and only then making up his mind. In this he was different from many producers who arrived with their own predetermined ideas of what the story should be and then sought out the voices to support their theories. He wasn’t a glamorous media figure, nor was he political in the sense of fighting internal battles within the BBC. Although it is hard to guess at the true motives of a colleague, I liked to think that David Harrison was moved ultimately by the oldest and most noble journalistic aspiration of all: to seek the truth and report it whatever the consequences. (p.67)

Shucks. Saint Fergal and noble David are travelling with old Africa hands Tony and Glenn. Tony is a short story writer and novelist who went to ‘one of Johannesburg’s top public schools’. Need Fergal say any more. I’m sure we are all prepared to bow down before this great achievement and, what’s more, Tony was his college rowing champion!

Glenn, by contrast, worked his way up from a tough, deprived and petty criminal background, via a spell in the South Africa Defence Force, on to become ‘one of the best news cameramen in the country’ and ‘the most sensitive cameraman I have ever worked with’ (p.40). The sensitivity and camaraderie ooze out of this book like ectoplasm. I washed my hands after reading it but I couldn’t wash my brain.

Carlsberg doesn’t make world-beating TV news crews, but if they did…

Basically, Saint Fergal is trying to write a novel, except it is a novel full of hilariously portentous and symbolic moments (before they leave Kenya for Rwanda, Keane gets drunk with a fellow journalist in a hotel bar in Nairobi who ominously warns Keane that he is heading towards a realm of ‘spiritual damage’, p.43).

This novel manqué features a cast of noble, high-minded chaps (top public school, best cameraman in the country, champion rower, noble producer etc) and is written in a pretentious mash-up of late Victorian diction (‘we rose to begin our journey’ – that’s actually what he writes on page 44) and the Bible (‘The rains had brought forth a great tangle of vegetation’). The prose reads like the stained glass windows in the chapel of his elite Catholic boarding school – simple, over-coloured, larger than life, sentimental and repellently high-minded.

Buried in this short book is some excellent reportage, some vivid encounters and some stomach-churning scenes – but all swamped by a kind of rehashing of a Victorian, boys own adventure novel.

2. Rwandan history

Fergal tells the same outline history I’ve read in David van Reybrouck, Philip Gourevitch and Jason Stearns. Nobody really knows their origins, but eventually Rwandan society came to be split between three ethnic groups, the Hutu from the west (85%), the Tutsi from the north (15%) and smattering of the Twa, descendants of the pygmies who probably lived in the Rwanda-Burundi region first but are now marginalised.

In the mid-nineteenth century, when Europeans first arrived, they discovered a society where the Tutsi formed a cattle-rearing elite, ruled by a Tutsi king, who lorded it over the four-fifths of the population who were Hutu peasant farmers. The stereotype has it that the Tutsi are tall and thin, with thin lips, long noses and lighter skins, while the Hutu are shorter, stockier with more classical ‘Negro’ features – although, like all the other writers on the subject, Fergal emphasises that, after centuries of intermarriage, plenty of the population was impossible to assign to one group or the other.

The German colonisers in the 1890s, and then the Belgians who were allotted Rwanda after Germany lost World War One, both these European colonisers sided with the aristocratic Tutsi. In the 1930s the previously fluid demarcation between the ethnic groups was destroyed when the Belgians issued identity cards which required you to specify which racial group you belonged to.

At this point Fergal does what Gourevitch does: he speeds over the history of ethnic tension between the two groups because he is concerned to make the genocide seem unique, unprecedented, a freak, impossible to understand. In its scale it certainly was, and in the way it was very deliberately planned, managed and organised by Hutu extremists it certainly was, and in its aim at total extermination of the enemy, it was. And yet the insistence of both Gourevitch and Keane on making it sound exceptional is a serious distortion of the facts. Because, as both writers concede, there had been a long history of inter-communal violence before 1994, which continued well after 1994.

Thus when the Tutsi monarch Mwaami Rudahigwa died in 1959, the Hutus rose in rebellion against Tutsi rule and between ten and one hundred thousand Tutsis were massacred. The rivers were full of bodies. That’s a lot of people. It begins to undermine the claim of the genocide to complete uniqueness.

In neighbouring Burundi the Tutsi held on to power through the 1960s and, to forestall a Hutu revolt, in 1973 the Burundi army murdered nearly a quarter of a million Hutus. A quarter of a million. That’s a lot of people, isn’t it? Once you start reading Rwandan history you realise the genocide may have been unique in conception and ambition, but it is, at the same time, part of a continuum of Hutu-Tutsi massacres and pogroms, both in Rwanda and Burundi, which go back at least as far as independence if not before.

Gourevitch and Keane both come on as if the 1994 genocide was a one-off, uniquely wicked and evil event, and it is its perceived uniqueness which prompts in both writers a great deal of hand-wringing and virtue signalling. Why oh why did they…? What oh what made them…? How could anybody behave like this…? and so on.

But hang on – isn’t massacring 100,000 Tutsis in 1959 also a bit, you know, evil? And what about the murder of nearly a quarter of a million Hutus? Also, pretty violent and pretty evil, too.

Why aren’t there books about those massacres? Does a hundred thousand not register? Is quarter of a million not enough? Is it as simple as the fact that back then, in the 60s and 70s, there was less TV coverage, less satellite technology to flash footage round the worlds, that it was harder to travel to these remote countries, so the massacres didn’t get covered and so…all those dead Africans don’t count?

Keane goes on to explain that by 1990 the kleptocratic crony regime of Rwandan dictator Juvénal Habyarimana was so corrupt that it found it very convenient to use the century-old bogeyman of the Tutsi oppressor to stir up the Hutu masses in order to stay in power, so that top figures in the regime could carry on happily creaming off aid money and World Bank loans into their personal Swiss bank accounts.

Keane supports the mainstream theory the Hutu president Habyarimana’s plane wasn’t shot down, killing all on board, by Tutsi wrong-doers but by extremists within his own Hutu government. Habyarimana’s sudden death allowed Hutu supremacists to seize power and, within just one hour of the president’s death, to start issuing orders to implement the plan for the total extermination of the entire Tutsi population of Rwanda (maybe 1.5 million people) which senior members of Hutu Power had been carefully working on for years.

I take the point that what sets the 1994 massacres apart was the entirely political nature of the genocide, and the existence of a detailed plan, and the use of all the levers of the state to mobilise people to the killing, and the fact that the stated ambition was total annihilation of the Tutsis…

But I felt uneasy that Keane, like Gourevitch, devotes two hundred pages and a lot of hand-wringing to the killing of 800,000 people, but skims over the murder of 250,000 people or of 100,000 people in a sentence – as if their murders don’t matter so much because they weren’t massacred in such an organised way.

Are some campaigns of mass murder more important, more meaningful than others? Are the dead in one mass murder campaign less important than the dead in another one? The short answer, on the evidence of these books, appears to be yes.

3. What Fergal saw

Keane and his crew cross the border and are met with polite and intelligent RPF soldiers, part of the well-disciplined force which has driven the Hutu army from the country. David the noble producer had contacted the RPF from Belgium and so an army liaison officer, Lieutenant Frank Ndore, is waiting for them at the first checkpoint inside Rwanda. From here onwards, Frank will be their polite and helpful guide.

Frank takes them to meet Rose Kayitesi who’s switched from being a rebel fighter to setting up a refuge for 50 or so orphaned children aged 6 to 8 in an abandoned hotel (p.68). Some of them tell their stories, like the young girl who describes seeing her entire family hacked to death by the Interahamwe, herself is badly injured but left under a pile of corpses where she remains still till the attackers have left. Their guide, Frank explains why the Interahamwe were so keen to exterminate all children and hid in wait for them or silently listened out for whimpers and crying before moving in for the kill (p.71). Which has resulted in some of the child survivors in his care withdrawing, refusing to eat and, literally, dying of grief (p.72).

Fergal sees the river clogged with corpses (p.74). Many rivers were clogged with bodies. Lake Victoria became so polluted with corpses that Ugandan fishermen dragged them out and buried them to stop them killing off the fish (p.75).

Frank takes them to the town of Nyarubuye where some 3,000 people were hacked to pieces in and around the parish church (p.76). Keane describes lots of human bodies which have been hacked to death from every possible angle, displaying every possible wound.

They meet small groups of refugees on the road, clustering together for safety, each one generally the sole survivor of the massacre of their family, their village, their entire community.

The offices of the mayor of Rusomo have been converted into a makeshift hospital for survivors with terrible wounds. There is no medicine, no painkillers. The mayor or bourgmestre was Sylvestre Gacumbitsi and many of the poor Tutsis of the town turned to him for help as the atmosphere became tense on the buildup to the genocide. Not only did he turn them away, but a few days later he led Hutu death squads round the homes of Tutsis and directed the mass murder, using the identity cards he had in the filing cabinets in the office. Flora Mukampore only survived, badly cut and bleeding, because she hid under a pile of fresh corpses (p.89).

On the spur of the moment Keane and is producer decide to try and track down this génocidaire and mass murderer, Sylvestre Gacumbitsi, and so drive east, across the border into nearby Tanzania, and to Benaco, one of the biggest refugee camps which sprang up as hundreds of thousands of terrified Hutus fled the advancing RPF.

Bencao camp turns out to be a vast mudbath, organised into ‘roads’ between groups of tents made from tarpaulin supplied by the UN and aid agencies. They spend the night and then, next morning, assiduous questioning does in fact lead them to Sylvestre Gacumbitsi. He is surrounded by young men with machetes who are carrying out his orders as he manages the distribution of rice to refugees from his canton. Keane questions him as hard as possible, putting to him the accusations of eye witness who saw him (Sylvestre Gacumbitsi) directing the killing. But the big man denies it, dismisses it all as Tutsi propaganda, and his surly followers mutter agreement.

In a flash Keane realises the génocidaires have brought their entire social system into the camps, recreated their networks of clientilism and patronage and intimidation. And the international community is going along with it, funding them, feeding them, allowing them to recreate their murderous Hutu militias (p.107).

Keane realises the international community which did sweet FA to prevent the genocide has been only too happy to jump into action when confronted with a huge refugee crisis. Setting up camps, flying in vast amounts of food, publicity photos of the faces of happy aid workers helping happy refugees, this is what everyone wanted. Keane thinks well-armed Western soldiers could have easily identified leading génocidaires and arrested them. Their failure to do so was a complete moral failure. The international community was ‘giving comfort to butchers’ (p.110).

That same night the team drive back over the bridge by the Rusomo Falls into Rwanda. They see soldiers looting refugees. Reading this, it occurs to me that most of the world is like this, and most of history has been like this: bullies preying on smaller bullies who prey on the absolutely helpless.

Drunk Tanzanian soldiers try to stop them crossing the bridge and then to confiscate their video camera, but, like their fairy godmother, Lieutenant Frank appears and gets the RPF soldiers his side of the river to pay the drunk Tanzanian soldiery a few hundred dollars and a tricky situation is defused (p.113). Really makes me want to go to Africa. Sounds like a wonderful place.

Lieutenant Frank organises a tour of the abandoned and ransacked presidential palace. (This is reminiscent of Michela Wrong touring the abandoned and ransacked palace of Joseph Mobutu or Philip Gourevitch in the abandoned and ransacked palace ditto. It’s a kind of standard element or trope of ‘the overthrow of dictators’ journalism.)

Then the team are staying at the UN offices along with all the other correspondents, journalists and news crews. (They do tend to stick together, journos and news teams.) Keane is in Kigali when half the city was still in the Hutu government hands and the RPF was shelling and mortaring its way into the government half.

At short notice the team is invited to visit a Red Cross hospital. To nobody’s surprise a hospital in a war zone is packed with terribly injured soldiers and civilians. He sees a small Tutsi boy whose arm has been cut off. Details like that, snapshots, say more than all Keane’s editorialising.

When they leave to drive back through roadblocks to the rebel side of Kigali, they are hustled into smuggling with them two European missionaries who have escaped from a mission up country because Brother Otto’s arm was wounded and he needs treatment. Nerve-racking moments as they smuggle the two missionaries out of the Hutu side and into the RPF side. If the Hutus stop them, maybe they’ll arrest the missionaries, maybe the whole team, or maybe just shoot them all.

Later, Keane hears the missionaries’ story. To seek out help they left behind a mission full of Tutsi children they had been protecting. The children knew it was coming. They asked to be locked in a room. A week later the militia came and slaughtered all 50 of them. Brother Henri tells Keane all this though tears.

That night the team get drunk with their faithful guide Lieutenant Ndore who insists, like all the RPF they’ve met, that it’s not about ethnicity, it’s about power and politics. A political cabal and their clients had made personal fortunes creaming off the nation’s wealth and turning the civil service into a party machine (p.20). They wanted to carry on doing so under the dictatorship and didn’t want to be forced to accept a multi-party, multi-ethnic constitution which the ‘international community’ was forcing Habyarimana to accept.

Without political power the whole system of patronage and clientelism would collapse. (p.23)

The politics of ethnicity

Throughout the book Keane repeats the same notion, which is that the genocide may have been defined in terms of ethnicity but it was at bottom politically motivated. It took expression in ethnic cleansing but it was about one group, one party, the extreme wing of the president’s MRND party and its extended clients, clinging on to power and consolidating its power for ever.

Keane’s insistence can be interpreted several different ways: one is that he is sticking to a humanistic conviction that ethnicity isn’t the be-all and end-all because this optimistic conviction allows him to hope that ethnicity can be overcome and so that the genuinely multi-ethnic state which the RFP promises can be brought into existence.

But it is possible to devise a kind of reverse interpretation of the same set of facts, which is: what if, in many countries, ethnicity is politics? In the 25 years since Keane wrote this book ethnicity hasn’t disappeared as a defining factor in political cultures around the world, it has grown, particularly in the last decade. All round the world we have seen the rise of nationalist leaders waving their national flag and liable to attack minorities: the BJP demonising Muslims in India; the military junta in Myanmar ethnically cleansing the Rohingya; China brutally clamping down on the Xinjiang Muslims. And anti-immigrant rhetoric becoming widespread across the West.

Keane’s book was written before any of this happened but, at various points, it emphasises that these kinds of divisions between ethnicities are not inevitable but are always stirred up by politicians with essentially political motivations i.e. using ethnic differences in order to stir up their base and remain in power. And in the money.

Back to the journey

Anyway, back in the narrative, it’s time to say goodbye to the helpful, intelligent Lieutenant Ndore and so Fergal gives him the edition of Yeats’s poetry which he’s been carrying round, as a thank you present (p.141).

He writes a half-page note about visiting the Amohoro stadium in Kigali, which the UN forces managed to secure during the genocide and where they protected thousands of terrified refugees.

And the second half of the same page records a visit to the Milles Collines Hotel, also guarded by a small contingent of UN soldiers, where hundreds of refugees were still living in terror that the Interahamwe lounging at the roadblocked entrance would one day simply walk in and hack everyone to pieces, the hotel which was to become famous because of the movie, Hotel Rwanda (p.142).

Keane and his crew are assigned a new RPF minder named Ernest to replace Lieutenant Frank, but he is a kid, unreliable and always wants to sleep. He is meant to guide them on the route south into Burundi. They get into their Land Rovers and drive to the town of Kabuga, which saw heavy fighting. Every building is damaged, bodies, not just of humans. A dead cow is wedged into a doorway (p.145).

Ernest then tells them he knows the route to the border with Burundi and sets them off down a road which gets smaller and more jungley until they pass two wrecked vehicles and realise the road is landmined. As this is sinking in, they see two figures ahead burying something and, in a sweaty panic, hurriedly turn the jeep round and drive all the way back to Kabuga.

After recovering from this stressful experience back in Kabuga, they set off south again, this time by a different route. Hours of nervous tension driving through jungle with one of the crew’s two Land Rovers making bad sounds as if it’s about to break down. They arrive at the village of Zaza, held by the RPF, who are guarding several hundred Hutu prisoners. Keane quotes an African Rights report which estimates that 800 people were murdered in the commune of Zaza, and quotes one woman survivor who watched the children being hacked to death and was, again, buried under a pile of bodies, covered in blood and so thought dead by the attackers (p.154).

They spend a nerve-racking night in this village, given a few rooms in an abandoned house by the RPF officer, who commands just 15 men to hold a remote village filled with 300 or more Hutu prisoners, while everyone knows the Interahamwe are out there in the jungle.

Next day, 12 June 1994, they finally make it to the Burundi border and are checked through by drunk Tutsi Burundi soldiers. They say goodbye to the two Ugandan drivers, Edward and Moses, who have to turn round and drive right the way across Rwanda and back across the northern border, into Uganda, before it gets dark.

They are met in Burundi by Rizu Hamid, a South African-born Asian who’s worked as Fergal’s fixer before, during his time in South Africa. She is, of course, ‘tough and dedicated’. He is awestruck by her ability to smooth talk even the most difficult, dangerous soldiers at roadblocks (p.167). But then we long ago learned that everyone Fergus works with is an epitome, world beating, top of their profession, and so on.

Rizu has arranged for a young government soldier named Sergeant Patrice to be their minder as they penetrate back north into the government-held areas of west Rwanda to meet and interview, well, murderers.

After a series of nerve-wracking encounters at no fewer than 30 roadblocks, the crew finally arrive in Butare and put up in a basic hotel. David and Fergal interview the Rector and Vice-Rector of Butare University. Like other Hutus they’ve already met, this couple are far from stupid, but believe the government’s line entirely: that the nation was under threat from the RPF’s 1990 invasion, that war was the only way to defend themselves, that the RPF only seek to reassert Tutsi paramountcy and restore the Hutu serfdom of pre-1959.

Next day they go to interview the town prefect, Sylvan Nsabimana. They ask him about the fate of the last few hundred Tutsi left alive in the whole region who are being held in a camp right outside the prefect’s office. Nsabimana is all reassurance and tells them that, in fact, he is planning to evacuate the children to nearby Burundi, the following day.

Keane presses him on the murders, on the genocide but, like every government official they meet, Nsabimana repeats the government line that there was no genocide, that the government was protecting the country against attack by the RPF, who are wickedly planning to restore their oppressive rule. If confronted with examples of actual killings, Nsabimana gives the stock answer that, alas and alack, casualties happen in time of war.

The next day Fergal, Rizu, David and the rest attach themselves to the convoy of lorries carrying Tutsi children to freedom in Burundi. they pass through a series of nerve-racking roadblocks, which Nsabimana himself negotiates their way through and then, finally, they cross the border into Burundi for good and Keane’s Rwandan journey is at an end.

Thoughts

How long did Fergal’s Journey last in total, then? Two weeks? Three weeks? Less than two weeks? He doesn’t say, but it certainly wasn’t long and he didn’t really get to talk to that many people, 20 to 30 maximum. Compare and contrast with Philip Gourevitch who visited Rwanda for a total of something like nine months and gives the impression of having spoken to hundreds of people.

Keane’s book is shorter but it is much more intense. The descriptions of his anxiety in long trips through the jungle and his terror at roadblocks manned by drunken soldiery are very vivid. And his first-hand account of seeing the actual bodies piled up in streets and fields and offices and churches is powerful. Almost powerful enough to make you forget the preening opening of the book.

For all his feeble inability to really grasp the scale and depth and meaning of the genocide, Philip Gourevitch’s book is a lot better. It has far more history and context than Keane’s and he includes testimony and interviews from far more people, including lots of UN officials and, crucially, the brains behind the RPF, Paul Kagame.

And Gourevitch also continues the story on past the genocide itself, for quite a few years, up till 1998, so he gives a far better sense of the ongoing political importance of the huge refugee camps in Zaire, and how they came to trigger the first Congo War – a depth of perspective which is necessarily missing from Keane’s account which, in essence, boils down to vivid reportage of a hurried, stressful 2-week visit to the country in June 1994, smack bang in the middle of its combined civil war and genocide.

He didn’t have to go

The very force of Keane’s candidly described terror keeps prompting the same thought. He undergoes ordeals of tension and stress, bursts out swearing at the drivers, has to get drunk at night to obliterate the sights he’s seen or take pills to get to sleep. He thinks forlornly of his family. He wishes he were back home. The rector of Butare university invites him to his house to watch Ireland play in the World Cup, in New York, and Keane desperately, desperately wishes he was there.

Well, OK, the reader thinks: so go on, then – leave. Hire a taxi, get driven clean out of the danger zone, catch a plane home, be with your family. Tell the BBC you’d like to be the Westminster correspondent. Or work on Strictly Come Dancing. If you hate your job so much, if it means you end up seeing too many corpses, meeting too many evil people, having too many nightmares, here’s an idea – quit being a foreign correspondent and go home.

No-one is forcing Keane to repeatedly travel into war zones and risk getting casually murdered by drunk soldiers at a roadblock in the middle of nowhere. This is a choice he has made.

When he keeps telling us how wretched and awful and terrifying and lonely and damaging it is to be in such horrific zones and see so many corpses and confront so much evil, the reader thinks: well, don’t do it, then. But don’t willingly and voluntarily choose this line of work, hustle for the job, undertake the assignments – then bleat about how horrible it all is and expect my sympathy.

The shameful record of the Americans

The US administration of Bill Clinton did its best to ignore the genocide. America (and Belgium) insisted on reducing the UN presence from 2,500 to 250 on the eve of the genocide, guaranteeing that the UN could not intervene, and reinforcing them with a mandate which stipulated no military intervention. Even when they could see Tutsis being hacked down from their offices, they were unambiguously instructed not to intervene to save anyone.

‘Never again must we…. All it requires for evil to flourish is good men to do nothing…We must never forget the victims of the Holocaust… blah blah blah.’ Whenever you hear public figures spouting that kind of feel-good cant, remember it’s bullshit.

Once alerted to the killings, the Americans deliberately delayed sending what UN troops remained in Rwanda a consignment of arms and armoured cars to help them. America insisted on charging full market rate for the vehicles and their delivery, which the UN couldn’t afford (p.123).

On President Bill Clinton’s orders the Americans refused at every level of government to use the word ‘genocide’ for, if they did, America would have been legally obligated to intervene and America did not want to intervene.

When the victims of a genocide were being murdered in front of their eyes, the Americans did everything in their power to avoid giving any help. Beyond shameful. Complicit.

French support for the genocidal regime

The French continued to support the genocidal Hutu regime after the genocide was well under way and opposed the Tutsi RPF which ended the genocide, because partly because the génocidaires spoke French, and the PDF (hailing from the former British colony Uganda) spoke English. Seriously.

The French had long supported Habyarimana and had no wish to see him driven from power by the rebels. The pro-Habyarimana faction in Paris was led by François Mitterand’s son Jean-Christophe, who saw Rwanda as part of a Francophone Africa under threat from the encroachments of the English-speaking nations to the north and east i.e. Uganda and Tanzania. Among Jean-Christophe’s gifts to the Rwandan president was the personal jet which was shot out of the sky on 6 April. The implication of this friendship was clear: if the price for maintaining some degree of French influence was the preservation of despots and kleptocrats, then Paris was always more than willing to pay.

In contrast to Habyarimana, the leaders of the RPF were largely English-speaking. The long years of exile in Uganda had forced them to abandon the French language. For their part the French maintained a military mission and a sizeable detachment of intelligence officers in Rwanda. With their contacts inside the army and at every level of government and the state media, Paris could not have been ignorant of the genocidal intentions of many of the senior officers and officials. For the French to suggest otherwise would be a lamentable comment on the abilities of their own intelligence services and diplomats. (p.26)

As part of a sustained effort to discredit the invading RPF and continue support for the genocidal Hutu Power regime, a French security agent claimed he had the black box from Habyarimana’s shot-down jet which proves it was the RPF who fired the missiles. But he provided no actual evidence and soon disappeared from view (p.117).

[President Habyarimana’s] brother-in-law Protais Zigiranyirazo was up to his neck in the trade in endangered species. Protais was a founder member of the Zero Network and an original shareholder in Radio Milles Collines. A book David has brought with him on our journey, Murder in the Mist, alleges that Protais was involved in the murder of American naturalist Dian Fossey because of her attempts to save the gorillas of the Rwandan rain forest. To date he has not even issued a rebuttal, much less attempted to sue the author. Protais is currently enjoying the sanctuary provided by the government of France, along with his sister Agathe and several other family members. It is not likely that they will see the [presidential] palace again, but they have the security of foreign bank accounts and the sympathy of the Quai d’Orsay (French Foreign Ministry) to console them in exile. I can see what sickens Frank. (pages 119 to 120)

That last sentence refers to the way the entire RFP up to its leader Paul Kagame were sickened at the absolute inaction of the ‘international community’ to prevent the genocide. The inaction was led by America which blocked every attempt to intervene, and by France, which energetically supported the genocidal regime, gave it arms and weapons even as the genocide was taking place and set up safe havens in the west of the country for genocidal Hutus fleeing the advancing RPF.

As the RPF rolled through the country and brought the genocide to an end, the French government flew the genocidal regime’s leaders to safety in Paris, where they’ve been leading lives of luxury ever since, right up to the present day, 2021. What’s not to despise and loathe about the despicable French government and security apparatus?

Mistaking genres

Lastly, maybe my negative reaction to Keane’s book is my fault. Maybe I’m being dim. Maybe I’m getting my genres mixed up. Maybe I’m expecting the objectivity of a history from a text which, right from the start, declares it is going to be an entirely subjective account. Only right at the end of the book did it occur to me that this kind of subjective journalism is maybe a variety of confessional literature.

When Keane writes at length about the nightmares he’s suffered ever since his Rwanda trip, about his drinking, about how scared he was at numerous points, about how he lost his temper with the driver and came to loathe their irresponsible RPF guide Albert, how much he missed his wife and how much he wished he could just go home – I found all this tediously subjective, but maybe I’m being an idiot for expecting anything else. It is titled a journey and clearly states right from the start that it is going to be a highly subjective account of one man’s experiences of a nightmare situation.

And, after all, maybe Keane’s prolonged descriptions of his feelings and psychological struggles are a deliberate strategy to take you with him right into the belly of the beast, to make you feel the fear and see the bodies, designed to be an immersive experience which combines historical background and political analysis with stomach-churning descriptions of what it was like.

I still didn’t like this book, but maybe my allergic reaction is my fault because I was continually judging it by the wrong criteria, assessing a work of confessional journalism as if it was a factual history. Anyway, I’ve given you enough evidence to make up your own mind.

Credit

Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey by Fergal Keane was published in 1995 by Viking. All references are to the 1996 Penguin paperback edition.

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by Simon on October 18, 2021 • Permalink

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Tagged Africa, Agathe Habyarimana, Amohoro stadium, BBC, Belgium, Benaco, Bill Clinton, BJP, Burma, Burundi, Butare University, China, crimes against humanity, David Harrison, David Van Reybrouck, Diane Fossey, Fergal Keane, Flora Mukampore, foreign aid, France, Francois Mitterand, Francophone, Frank Ndore, génocidaires, genocide, history, Hotel Rwanda, Hutu, India, Jason Stearns, Jean-Christophe Mitterand, Joseph Mobutu, Juvenal Habyarimana, Kabuga, Kenya, la Francophonie, Lake Victoria, Milles Collines Hotel, Monty Python Live at Drury Lane, MRND, Mwaami Rudahigwa, Nairobi, Neil Innes, news, Nyarubuye, Panorama, Paul Kagame, Philip Gourevitch, Presentation Brothers College, Protais Zigiranyirazo, Quai d'Orsay, Red Cross, Rizu Hamid, Rohingya, Rose Kayitesi Interahamwe, RPF, Rusomo, Rusomo Falls, Rwanda, Rwandan genocide, Rwandan Patriotic Front, Season of Blood: A Rwandan Journey, South Africa, South Africa Defence Force, Sylvan Nsabimana, Sylvestre Gacumbitsi, Tanzania, Tutsi, TV, TV news, Twa, Uganda, United Nations, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda, Xinjiang, Yeats, Zaza

Posted by Simon on October 18, 2021

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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 1789–1848 (1962)
The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (1975)
The Age of Empire: 1875–1914 (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 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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by Simon on August 11, 2021 • Permalink

Posted in British Empire, History, Slavery

Posted by Simon on August 11, 2021

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A Monarchy Transformed: Britain 1603-1714 by Mark Kishlansky (1996)

Mark Kishlansky (1948 – 2015) was an American historian of seventeenth-century British politics. He was the Frank Baird, Jr. Professor of History at Harvard University, editor of the Journal of British Studies from 1984 to 1991, and editor-in-chief of History Compass from 2003 to 2009.

Kishlansky wrote half a dozen or so books and lots of articles about Stuart Britain and so was invited to write Volume Six of the Penguin History of England covering that period, under the general editorship of historian David Cannadine.

I think of the history of Britain in the 17th century as consisting of four parts:

The first two Stuarts (Kings James I & Charles I) 1603 – 1642
The Civil Wars and Protectorate (Oliver Cromwell) 1642 – 1660
The Restoration (Kings Charles II & James II) 1660 – 1688
The Glorious Revolution and Whig monarchs (William & Mary, then Queen Anne) 1688 – 1714

Although obviously you can go by monarch:

James I (1603-25)
Charles I (1625-42)
Wars of the three kingdoms (1637-53)
Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1653-1660)
Charles II (1660-1685)
James II and the Glorious Revolution (1685-88)
William & Mary (1688-1702)

I appreciate that this is an English perspective, and Kishlansky is the first to acknowledge his history tends to focus on England, by far the largest and most powerful of the three kingdoms of Britain. The histories of Scotland and Ireland over the same period shadowed the English timeline but – obviously – had significant events, personnel and continuities of their own. From the start Kishlansky acknowledges he doesn’t have space to give these separate histories the space they deserve.

Why is the history of seventeenth century Britain so attractive and exciting?

The seventeenth century has a good claim to being the most important, the most interesting and maybe the most exciting century in English history because of the sweeping changes that affected every level of society. In 1600 England was still a late-medieval society; in 1700 it was an early modern society and in many ways the most advanced country on earth.

Social changes

business the modern business world was created, with the founding of the Bank of England and Lloyds insurance, cheques, banknotes and milled coins were invented; the Stock Exchange was founded and the National Debt, a financial device which allowed the British government to raise large sums for wars and colonial settlement; excise and land taxes provided reliable sources of revenue for the government
empire the British Empire was defined with the growth of colonies in North America and India
feudal forms of government withered and medieval practices such as torture and the demonisation of witchcraft and heresy died out
media newspapers were invented and went from weekly to daily editions
new consumer products domestic consumption was transformed by the arrival of new products including tobacco, sugar, rum, gin, port, champagne, tea, coffee and Cheddar cheese
the scientific revolution biology, chemistry and physics trace their origins to discoveries made in the 1600s – Francis Bacon laid the intellectual foundations for the scientific method; William Harvey discovered the circulation of the blood; Robert Boyle posited the existence of chemical elements, invented perfected the air pump and created the first vacuum; Isaac Newton discovered his laws of thermodynamics, the composition of light, the laws of gravity; William Napier invented logarithms; William Oughtred invented the multiplication sign in maths; Edmund Halley identified the comet which bears his name, Robert Hooke invented the microscope, the quadrant, and the marine barometer; the Royal College of Physicians published the first pharmacopeia listing the properties of drugs; Peter Chamberlen invented the forceps; the Royal Society (for the sciences) was founded in 1660
sport the first cricket and gold clubs were founded; Izaak Walton codified knowledge about fishing in The Compleat Angler; Charles II inaugurated yacht racing at Cowes and Queen Anne founded Royal Ascot
architecture Inigo Jones, Sir Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor and John Vanbrugh created wonderful stately homes and public buildings e.g. Jones laid out the Covent Garden piazza which remains an attraction in London to this day and Wren designed the new St Paul’s cathedral which became a symbol of London
philosophy the political upheavals produced two masterworks of political philosophy, the Leviathan of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, which are still studied and applied in a way most previous philosophy isn’t
non conformists despite repeated attempts to ban them, Puritan sects who refused to ‘conform’ to the Restoration settlement of the Church of England were grudgingly accepted and went on to become a permanent and fertile element of British society – the Quakers, Baptists and Presbyterians

Political upheaval

At the centre of the century sits the great 20-year upheaval, the civil wars or British wars or Great Rebellion or the Wars of Three Kingdoms, fought between the armies of parliament and the armies of King Charles I, with significant interventions by armies of Scotland and Ireland, which eventually led to the execution of the king, the abolition of the House of Lords and the disestablishment of the Church of England – achievements which still form a core of the radical agenda to this day. These revolutionary changes were- followed by a series of constitutional experiments under the aegis of the military dictator Oliver Cromwell, which radicalised and politicised an entire generation.

Soon after Cromwell’s death in 1658, his regime began to collapse and elements of it arranged for the Restoration of King Charles II, who returned but under a new, more constitutional monarchy, restrained by laws and conventions guaranteeing the liberties of British subjects and well aware of the mistakes which led to the overthrow of his father.

But none of this stopped his overtly Roman Catholic brother, who succeeded him as James II in 1685, making a string of mistakes which collectively alienated the Protestant grandees of the land who conspired to overthrow him and replace him with the reliably Protestant Prince William of Orange. James was forced to flee, William was invited to become King of England and to rule according to a new, clearly defined constitution or Bill of Rights, which guaranteed all kinds of liberties including of speech and assembly.

All of these upheavals meant that by 1700 England had the most advanced, liberal and open society in Europe, maybe in the world, had experimented with a wide variety of political reforms and constitutions, and developed one which seemed most practical and workable – which was to become the envy of liberals in neighbouring France, and the basis of the more thoroughly worked-out Constitution devised by the founders of the American republic in the 1780s.

Studying the 17th century combines the intellectual excitement of watching these constitutional and political developments unfold, alongside the more visceral excitement of following the dramatic twists and turns in the long civil wars – and then following the slow-burning problems which led to the second great upheaval, the overthrow of James II. There is tremendous pleasure to be had from getting to know the lead characters in both stories and understanding their motives and psychologies.

Key features of 17th century England

The first two chapters of Mark Kishlansky’s book set out the social and political situation in Britain in 1600. These include:

Britain was a comprehensively patriarchal society. The king ruled the country and his word meant life or death. Le Roy le veult – the King wishes it – was the medieval French phrase still used to ratify statutes into law. The monarch made all political, legal, administrative and religious appointments – lords, ministers, bishops, judges and magistrates owed their position to him. In every locality, knights of the shires, justices of the peace administered the king’s laws. The peerage was very finely gradated and jealously policed. Status was everything.

And this hierarchy was echoed in families which were run by the male head of the household who had complete power over his wife and children, a patriarchal household structure endorsed by the examples in the Bible. Women might have as many as 9 pregnancies, of which 6 went to term and three died in infancy, with a further three children dying in infancy.

The family was primarily a unit of production, with all family members down to small children having specified tasks in the often backbreaking toil involved in agricultural work, caring for livestock, foraging for edibles in woods and fields, producing clothes and shoes. Hard physical labour was the unavoidable lot of almost the entire population.

Marriages were a vital way of passing on land and thus wealth, as well as family names and lineages. Most marriages were arranged to achieve these ends. The top responsibility of both spouses were the rights and responsibilities of marriage i.e. a wife obeyed her husband and a husband cherished and supported his wife. It was thought that ‘love’ would grow as a result of carrying out these duties, but wasn’t a necessary component.

Geography 80% of the population in 1600 worked on the land. Britain can be divided into two geographical zones:

1. The North and West The uplands of the north-west, including Scotland and Wales, whose thin soils encouraged livestock supplemented by a thin diet of oats and barley. Settlements here were scattered and people arranged themselves by kin, in Scotland by clans. Lords owned vast estates and preserved an old-fashioned medieval idea of hospitality and patronage.

Poor harvests had a catastrophic impact. A run of bad harvests in the 1690s led to mass emigration from Scotland to America, and also to the closer ‘plantations’ in Ulster.

It was at this point that Scottish Presbyterians became the majority community in the province. Whereas in the 1660s, they made up some 20% of Ulster’s population… by 1720 they were an absolute majority in Ulster, with up to 50,000 having arrived during the period 1690-1710. (Wikipedia)

2. The south and east of Britain was more densely populated, with villages and towns instead of scattered homesteads. Agriculture was more diverse and productive. Where you have more people – in towns and cities – ties of kinship become weaker and people assess each other less by ‘family’ than by achievements, social standing and wealth.

The North prided itself on its older, more traditional values. The South prided itself on being more productive and competitive.

Population The population of England rose from 4 million in 1600 to 5 million in 1700. There were maybe 600 ‘towns’ with populations of around 1,000. Big provincial capitals like Norwich, Exeter or Bristol (with pops from 10,000 to 30,000) were exceptions.

London was unlike anywhere else in Britain, with a population of 200,000 in 1600 growing to around 600,000 by 1700. It was home to the Court, government with its Houses of Lords and Commons, all the main law courts, and the financial and mercantile hub of the nation (Royal Exchange, Royal Mint, later the Bank of England and Stock Exchange). The centre of publishing and the new science, literature, the arts and theatre. By 1700 London was the largest city in the Western world. Edinburgh, the second largest city in Britain, had a paltry 40,000 population.

Inflation Rising population led to a squeeze on food since agricultural production couldn’t keep pace. This resulted in continuous inflation with foodstuffs becoming more expensive throughout the century, which reduced living standards in the countryside and contributed to periods of near famine. On the other hand, the gentry who managed to hang onto or increase their landholdings saw an unprecedented rise in their income. The rise of this class led to the development of local and regional markets and to the marketisation of agriculture. Those who did well spent lavishly, building manors and grand houses, cutting a fine figure in their coaches, sending the sons to university or the army, educating their daughters in order to attract wealthy husbands.

Vagrancy The change in working patterns on the land, plus the rising population, led to a big increase in vagrancy, which the authorities tackled with varying degrees of savagery, including branding on the face with a V for Vagrant. Contemporary theorists blamed overpopulation for poverty, vagrancy and rising crime. One solution was to encourage the excess population to settle plantations in sparsely populated Ireland or emigrate to New England. There were moral panics about rising alcoholism, and sex outside marriage.

Puritans Leading the charge to control immoral behaviour were the Puritans, a negative word applied to a range of people who believed that the Church of England needed to be further reformed in order to reach the state of purity achieved by Calvinists on the continent. Their aims included:

abolition of the 26 bishops (who were appointed by the king) and their replacement by Elders elected by congregations
reforms of theology and practice – getting rid of images, candles, carvings etc inside churches, getting rid of elaborate ceremonies, bells and incense and other ‘Roman’ superstitions
reducing the number of sacraments to the only two practiced by Jesus in the New Testament
adult baptism replacing infant baptism

Banning Closely connected was the impulse to crack down on all ungodly behaviour e.g. alcohol (close pubs), immorality (close theatres), licentiousness (ban most books except the Bible), lewd behaviour (force women to wear modest outfits, keep their eyes on the ground), ban festivals, ban Christmas, and so on.

Trans-shipping The key driver of Britain’s economic wealth was shipping and more precisely trans-shipping – where goods were brought in from one source before being transhipped on elsewhere. The size of Britain’s merchant fleet more than tripled and the sized of the cargo ships increased tenfold. London’s wealth was based on the trans-shipping trade.

The end of consensus politics

The second of Kishlansky’s introductory chapters describes in detail the political and administrative system in early 17th century Britain. It is fascinating about a) the complexity of the system b) its highly personal orientation about the person the monarch. It’s far too complicated to summarise here but a few key themes emerge:

Consensus Decisions at every level were reached by consensus. To give an example, when a new Parliament was called by the king, the justices of the peace in a county met at a session where, usually, two candidates put themselves forward and the assembled JPs discussed and chose one. Only very rarely were they forced back on the expedient of consulting local householders i.e. actually having a vote on the matter.

Kishlansky explains how this principle of consensus applied in lots of other areas of administration and politics, for example in discussions in Parliament about acts proposed by the king and which needed to be agreed by both Commons and Lords.

He then goes on to launch what is – for me at any rate – a new and massive idea: that the entire 17th century can be seen as the slow and very painful progression from a political model of consensus to an adversarial model.

The entire sequence of civil war, dictatorship, restoration and overthrow can be interpreted as a series of attempts to reach a consensus by excluding your opponents. King Charles prorogued Parliament to get his way, then tried to arrest its leading members. Cromwell, notoriously, was forced to continually remodel and eventually handpick a Parliament which would agree to do his bidding. After the Restoration Charles II tried to exclude both Catholics and non-conforming Protestants from the body politic, imposing an oath of allegiance in order to preserve the model of consensus sought by his grandfather and father.

the point is that all these attempts to purify the body politic in order to achieve consensus failed.

The advent of William of Orange and the Bill of Rights in 1689 can be seen as not so much defining liberties and freedoms but as finally accepting the new reality, that political consensus was no longer possible and only a well-managed adversarial system could work in a modern mixed society.

Religion What made consensus increasingly impossible? Religion. The reformation of Roman Catholicism which began in 1517, and continued throughout the 16th century meant that, by the 1620s, British society was no longer one culturally and religiously unified community, but included irreducible minorities of Catholics and new-style Calvinist Puritans. Both sides in what became the civil wars tried to preserve the old-fashioned consensus by excluding what they saw as disruptive elements who prevented consensus agreements being reached i.e. the Royalists tried to exclude the Parliamentarians, the Parliamentarians tried to exclude the Royalists, both of them tried to exclude Catholics, the Puritans once in power tried to exclude the Anglicans and so on.

But the consensus model was based on the notion that, deep down, all participants shared the same religious, cultural and social values. Once they had ceased to do that the model was doomed.

Seen from this point of view the entire history of the 17th century was the slow, bloody, and very reluctant acceptance that the old model was dead and that an entirely new model was required in which political elites simply had to accept the long-term existence of sincere and loyal but completely different opinions from their own.

Political parties It is no accident that it was after the Glorious Revolution that the seeds of what became political parties first began to emerge. Under the consensus model they weren’t needed; grandees and royal ministers and so on managed affairs so that most of them agreed or acquiesced on the big decisions. Political parties only become necessary or possible once it had become widely accepted that consensus was no longer possible and that one side or another in a debate over policy would simply lose and would have to put up with losing.

So Kishlansky’s long and fascinating introduction leads up to this insight – that the succession of rebellions and civil wars across the three kingdoms, the instability of the Restoration and then the overthrow of James II were all necessary to utterly and finally discredit the old late-medieval notion of political decision-making by consensus, and to usher in the new world of political decision-making by votes, by parties, by lobbying, by organising, by arguing and taking your arguments to a broader political nation i.e. the electorate.

In large part the English Revolution resulted from the inability of the consensual political system to accommodate principled dissension. (p.63)

At a deep level, the adoption of democracy means the abandonment of attempts to repress a society into agreement. On this view, the core meaning of democracy isn’t the paraphernalia about voting, that’s secondary. In its essence democracy means accepting other people’s right to disagree, sincerely and deeply, with what you hold to be profoundly true. Crafting a system which allows people to think differently and speak differently and live differently, without fear or intimidation.

Alliance: The Inside Story of How Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill Won One War and Began Another by Jonathan Fenby (2006)

‘In politics one should be guided by the calculation of forces.’ (Stalin at Potsdam)

Alliance is a thorough, insightful and gripping account of the wartime meetings between ‘the Big Three’ Allied leaders – Roosevelt and Churchill and Stalin – which determined the course of the Second World War and set the stage for the Cold War which followed it.

In actual fact the three leaders in question only met face to face on two occasions:

Tehran 28 November-1 December 1943
Yalta, 4-11 February 1945

The third great power conference, Potsdam July 1945, took place after Roosevelt’s death (12 April 1945) and with his successor, former vice-president Harry Truman

There were quite a few meetings between just Roosevelt and Churchill:

Placentia Bay, Canada – 8 to 11 August 1941 – resulting in the Atlantic Charter
First Washington Conference (codename: Arcadia), Washington DC, 22 December 1941 to 14 January 1942
Second Washington Conference, 19 to 25 June 1942
Casablanca, 14 to 24 January 1943 – Roosevelt’s first mention of the policy of ‘unconditional surrender’
First Quebec Conference – 17 to 24 August 1943 (codename: Quadrant)
Third Washington Conference (codename: Trident), 12 to 25 May 1943
First Cairo Conference (codename: Sextant) November 22 to 26, 1943, outlined the Allied position against Japan during World War II and made decisions about postwar Asia
Second Cairo Conference, December 4 to 6, 1943
Second Quebec Conference (codename: Octagon) September 12 to 16, 1944 – Churchill strongly disapproved of the Morgenthau Plan, but had to support it in exchange for $6 billion of Lend-Lease aid to Britain

I hadn’t realised that Churchill flew to Moscow not once, but twice, for one-on-one meetings with Stalin – which had some very rocky moments.

Second Moscow Conference (codename: Bracelet) 12 to 17 August 1942 – Churchill stayed in State Villa No. 7 and, when he told Stalin Britain would not be launching a second front any time soon, Stalin became insulting, asking why the British were so frightened of the Germans. Churchill responded with details of Operation Torch – Anglo-American landings in North Africa designed to open up the Mediterranean, and increased bombing of German cities.
Fourth Moscow Conference (codename: Tolstoy) 9 to 19 October 1944 – this was the meeting where Churchill and Stalin discussed percentages of influence in post-war European nations: Russia 90% in Romania, UK 90% in Greece, Yugoslavia 50/50, and so on.

(The First and Third Moscow conferences were meetings of foreign ministers only i.e. not directly including Churchill or Stalin.)

These top-level meetings are colourful and interesting, and Fenby covers them in minute detail, giving a blow-by-blow account of what was discussed at each of the conference sessions, on each of the days, but nonetheless, the actual conferences are like the tips of the iceberg. Nine-tenths of the book is about the exchanges of messages between the Big Three leaders, by cable and telegram and phone calls, the texts of various speeches and declarations, and the complex matrix of diplomatic missions and exchanges which took place at a lower level, with special envoys shuttling between the three countries, meeting their opposite numbers or conveying messages from one to the other.

Since almost everyone concerned seems to have left diaries of these meetings, plus the vast official record and countless press announcements, Fenby is able to quote liberally from all these sources in order to recreate the complex web of communications which defined the ever-shifting diplomatic relations between the three powers.

The book sticks closely to a chronological account of all the meetings and messages and slowly I began to realise it might more accurately described as a diplomatic history of the alliance. Or a History of Allied Diplomacy During World War Two. And I came to realise the book can be enjoyed on a number of levels:

Character studies of the Big Three

The opening chapter is a kind of prelude, giving vivid pen portraits of the Big Three leaders:

Winston Spencer Churchill, Prime Minister of Great Britain

The stories about Churchill are often funny and loveable. We learn that he liked to go to bed in silk pyjamas. If he had no meetings he stayed in bed till noon, reading all the papers. Time and again eye-witnesses describe him as an over-grown schoolboy, insisting on swimming naked off the coast on a trip to visit Roosevelt, on another occasion arriving at an American military display dressed in a romper suit with his topee brim turned up so that one reporter thought he looked like a small boy going down to the beach to dig a hole in the sand. En route to Yalta, Churchill’s daughter, Sarah, described him as looking like ‘a poor hot pink baby about to cry’ (p.351). After the Yalta conference ended, he ‘walked from room to room, genial and sprightly, like a boy let out of school’ (p.380). Unlike the two other leaders he appeared to have no sex drive whatsoever.

Spot the baby

Churchill drank like a fish – sherry for breakfast, wine with lunch, champagne, wine and brandy with dinner.

On a striking number of occasions he was naked – swimming in pools naked, on one occasion padding round the bomber flying him back from Moscow naked from the waist down, appearing half-naked in front of the Moscow ambassador (who, memorably, drew a sketch of the naked British PM), and once – allegedly – when staying at the White House, being caught by Roosevelt emerging naked from the bath and, unabashed, declaring, ‘The Prime Minister of Great Britain has nothing to conceal from the President of the United States.’

Driven to the newly liberated area around Remagen, Churchill, surrounded by photographers, was caught short and unzipped to have a pee, telling the gentleman of the press that this particular moment of their great victory was not to be recorded. In his diary Brooke records that he will never forget ‘the childish grin of intense satisfaction that spread over his face’ (quoted page 388). He comes across as the ultimate naughty schoolboy.

Churchill was also given to flights of schoolboy sentimentality; he easily broke into tears, especially about loyal and trusty servants.

‘I love that man’, he told his daughter Sarah, about Roosevelt, with tears in his eyes. (p.224)
Telling Moran that night of the [Polish diplomatic leader’s] request to be dropped into his homeland [to die fighting the Nazis rather than acquiesce in a diplomatic sell-out to the Russians], Churchill had tears in his eyes. (p.330)

And, of course, reams of magniloquent speech emerged effortlessly from his well-stocked mind. All us Brits have been brought up on the key moments from his wartime speeches. But as the book goes on, you come to realise this could also be a weakness. I watched his ‘historic’ address to both Houses of Congress on YouTube and realised that, if the spell drops for a moment, it is possible to see Churchill as a pompous old windbag. During the Tehran Conference, at the end of 1943, Roosevelt is reported as tiring of Churchill’s relentless verbosity (p.236).

And old and tired – one eye-witness memorably described him as a tired old man who kept going by sheer will power alone. But the windbag element opens the door to understanding the strong anti-British feeling which was present at all levels of the American administration and society, and steadily increased as the war progressed. In a telling phrase, Fenby says that by the time of Yalta, Britain was much the most junior partner of the alliance and Churchill knew it. ‘Britain had lost its aura of 1940’ (p.353).

Franklin Delaware Roosevelt, President of the United States

It is quite a surprise to read so many of the senior staff who worked with Roosevelt describing him as a heartless SOB – that’s not at all how he comes over in the Pathé newsreels where he’s always laughing and joshing, but the eye-witnesses are 100% consistent.

The laughing and joshing is connected to another of Roosevelt’s characteristics, which was his conviction that he could talk round anyone with banter and good humour. This partly explains his relationship with Stalin. a) Roosevelt, being an optimistic, can-do American, couldn’t really conceive the depths of evil which Stalin represented. b) Roosevelt believed he could manage Stalin as he had managed so many apparently tough opponents in his long political career.

‘I know you will not mind my being brutally frank with you when I tell you that I think I can personally handle Stalin better than your Foreign Office or my State Department.’ (Roosevelt to Churchill)

What he thought he could do was to outwit Stalin as he had done with so many interlocutors. (Walter Lippmann, political commentator)

During the course of 1943 Roosevelt and Hopkins and their entourage became steadily more pro-Stalin and inclined to cold shoulder Churchill. Fenby records that some, more realistic, American diplomats resigned in protest at their boss’s wishful thinking about Soviet intentions and readiness to brush the show trials, gulags and famines under the carpet.

Franklin D. Roosevelt smiling from a car with cigarette holder in handf

Roosevelt trusted Stalin more than Churchill

Josef Stalin

It’s sometimes difficult to believe that a man as monstrous as Stalin ever lived and breathed and walked, let alone shook hands with the other two, made jokes and delivered gracious toasts. All the eye-witness accounts confirm that he was extremely practical and factual. He had three demands and he made them right from the start:

for Britain and America to send more arms and munitions to help the Red Army fighting the Germans
for Britain and America to open a second front as soon as possible i.e. invade France
after the war to have a guaranteed security zone or buffer comprising Poland and the Baltic states in Europe (the situation in China/Manchuria was more complicated but Stalin’s basic principle was easily applied here, too: he supported whichever solution gave Russia maximum security)

Uncle Joe often had a twinkle in his eye and charmed most of his guests. Only occasionally did the psychopath emerge. At one of the many drinks receptions and dinners accompanying the meetings, a Russian general was showing Kerr how to handle one of their tommy guns, when Stalin seized it and said, ‘Let me show you how a real politician behaves’, and made a mock gesture of machine gunning everyone else in the room. At Yalta, Roosevelt asked Stalin who the quiet man with the pince-nez was. Stalin saw the president was gesturing towards Beria and laughed, ‘Oh that’s our Himmler’ (p.369). When Churchill explained to Stalin that he might lose the upcoming British general election, as he was only the leader of a particular party, Stalin replied, ‘One party is much better’ (p.377).

Joseph Stalin sitting at a desk writing on documents, pipe in mouth

How many people was Stalin responsible for killing?

Character studies of their many subordinates

But the book is by no means only about the Big Three. There’s a also a huge amount of highly enjoyable gossip about the cohorts of advisers and diplomats and military men the Big Leaders were surrounded by. Here are quick sketches of some of them:

The Brits

Major Arthur Birse – Churchill’s Russian translator
Field Marshal Alan Brooke – Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) and, as chairman of the Chiefs of Staff Committee, was the foremost military advisor to Winston Churchill. He was nicknamed ‘Shrapnel’. In the 1950s his diaries were published which contained scathing criticisms of senior figures of the war, including Churchill. Brooke admired Stalin for his quick grasp of strategy and military reality – but still thought him a cold-hearted, mass murderer. He was a keen birdwatcher.
Sir Alexander Montagu George Cadogan, Permanent Under-Secretary for Foreign Affairs from 1938 to 1946, kept extensive diaries which were later published.
Field Marshal Sir John Dill, May 1940 to December 1941 Chief of the Imperial General Staff (CIGS) and in Washington, Senior British Representative on the Combined Chiefs of Staff. Though much admired by Americans as senior as George Marshall, Churchill did not like him, nicknamed him Dilly-Dally, and replaced him with Alan Brooke.
Anthony Eden, Foreign Secretary from 1940 to 1945 – Churchill’s loyal lieutenant, principled, vain, self-centred
Edward Wood, Lord Halifax from 1941 to 1946 British Ambassador in Washington
Sir Archibald Clark Kerr – ambassador to China from 1938 to 1942, where he won the respect of Chiang Kai-shek; then ambassador to the Soviet Union from 1942 to 1946 where his tough approach and broken nose earned him the nickname, ‘the Partisan’.

The Americans

Averell Harriman – inherited $100 million from his father and was chosen to manage the massive Lend-Lease programme. US ambassador to the Soviet Union from October 1943 to January 1944. Had an affair with Winston Churchill’s son’s wife.
Harry Hopkins – gangling son of an Iowa saddle-maker who ended up becoming instrumental in Roosevelt’s New Deal scheme, and moved into the White House to become Roosevelt’s adviser throughout the war.
George Marshall – supremely capable Chief of Staff of the US Army, September 1939 to November 1945.
Cordell Hull – the longest-serving U.S. Secretary of State, 1933 to 1944, at daggers drawn with his junior, Sumner Welles, who he eventually got fired in 1943. Hull was the underlying architect of the United Nations. Eden described him as ‘the old man’. Cadogan referred to him as ‘the old lunatic’.
Sumner Welles – Under secretary of state 1937 to 1943: ‘the age of imperialism is ended’. Hull hated Welles and got him sacked when stories of his gay lifestyle began to leak to the press.
Henry L. Stimson – Secretary of War (1940 to 1945), principled grand old man in his 70s, he vehemently opposed the Morgenthau Plan, and kept a diary full of insights.

Americans in China

General Joseph Stilwell – in charge of some Chinese Nationalist forces, adviser to Chiang Kai-shek, supervisor of American lend-Lease to the Nationalists. Known as ‘Vinegar Joe’ he despised the British in India and Burma from the start, but came to loathe Chiang as he came to understand how Chiang’s policies ignored ideas like efficiency and were entirely based on paying bribes to, and keeping in place, administrators and senior soldiers who supported him. This explained the Nationalists’ woeful record at fighting. Stilwell took to referring to him as the Peanut (because of the shape of Chiang’s shaven skull).
Claire Chennault – retired from the US Air Force in 1937, Chennault went to China to work as freelance adviser to the Chinese Air Force. After Japan invaded Manchuria Chennault found himself becoming Chiang Kai-shek’s chief air adviser, training Chinese Air Force pilots, and setting up the so-called Flying Tigers.

Roosevelt wanted to replace Stilwell who, by 1943, hated the Chinese with a passion. But his Chief of Staff refused to accept the obvious replacement, Chennault, because he was outside the formal command structure and was far too close to Chiang. So nothing was done, one of several reasons why American policy in China was allowed to drift…

The Russians

Vyacheslav Molotov– USSR Foreign Minister. Molotov is a pseudonym like Stalin, it means ‘hammer’. According to witnesses Molotov was completely inflexible, unbending, unyielding.
Ivan Maisky – USSR Ambassador to Britain 1932 to 1943.
Maxim Litvinov – Soviet ambassador to Washington 1941 to 1943.

The French

Charles de Gaulle – leader of the Free French. A relatively junior officer in the French Army, de Gaulle escaped the German invasion and on 18 June made a radio appeal from London to the French to resist the occupiers. He was a legend in his own mind, remplis with a particularly Gallic form of arrogance and hauteur, and eventually managed to convince the French nation of his historic uniqueness. But it is very funny to read how powerless he was in the context of the Great Powers, and how he was routinely ignored by all sides as irrelevant. Churchill was, in fact, generally respectful – we had fought side by side the French during the German invasion of 1940. I’d forgotten that Roosevelt hated de Gaulle with a passion. He was convinced de Gaulle was a dictator-in-waiting in exactly the same mould as Mussolini.

The Americans dislike the Free French

Even after the United States declared war on Germany (11 December 1941), it was only the beginning of what turned into a very long haul. Fenby quotes Charles de Gaulle who, on hearing the news of Pearl Harbour, declared (with typically French brio/arrogance) that the war was won, it was only a matter of time. Obviously almost everyone who was going to die over that matter of time was going to be Russian, American and British. It is heart-warming to read how much Roosevelt and the Americans disliked the Free French under de Gaulle. At Yalta, Roosevelt said the Americans would only give the French a sector of Germany to run ‘out of kindness’. Stalin concurred. Both men obeyed the well-known dictum:

Bad-mouthing the French always has its appeal. (p.358)

De Gaulle was furious at not being invited to the Yalta Conference – despite the fact that the three participants gifted France control of a sector of post-war Germany which they had done nothing to ear. In a typically high-handed gesture, de Gaulle cancelled a post-conference meeting that had been arranged with Roosevelt. The president really lost his temper and drafted a flaming reply criticising not only de Gaulle but the entire French nation until his translator, career diplomat Charles ‘Chip’ Bohlen agreed that de Gaulle was ‘one of the biggest sons of bitches who ever straddled a pot’. This amused Roosevelt who calmed down and set his diplomats to working on a much toned-down reply.

Like a novel

So this 400-page book is a bit like a 19th century novel. You are formally introduced to each new character, with pen portraits, other people’s descriptions, titbits about their private lives and professional achievements. Then settle in to watch the cast assemble, disperse, meet, take notes, observe each other and generally interact. By half-way through, when Fenby describes a meeting involving Eden, Hopkins, you have a good idea of what they all looked like, where they were coming from, and what to expect.

Big ideas

So much for the gossip, but there’s also plenty of through-provoking stuff about the geopolitics.

I find it fascinating, reading about any war, to learn how war aims change and evolve during a prolonged conflict. History – the passage of time – simplifies everything to black and white, whereas at the time, the leaders of the allied powers were working amid a blizzard of conflicting aims and goals, on at least four levels:

the leaders of the big three nations (USA, Britain, USSR) disagreed among themselves, and as the war progressed, frequently changed their minds
their advisers often strongly disagreed with their leaders, and also amongst themselves
in the democracies, the opposition political parties and voices in the press and other commentators often strongly disagreed with government policy
and underlying all this human froth was the deep, enduring reality of geography and the geopolitical priorities which that entails

It makes for a fascinating maze, a kind of four-dimensional chess, which Fenby confidently steers us through, often with a wry smile on his face.

Stalin wanted arms and Russian security

To take the last one first, Stalin knew what he wanted and he largely got it. It is bracing to read the eye-witness accounts of the western diplomats who met and admired him. They knew he was a dictator, some were repelled by his history of brutality, but all admired the clarity and conviction of his thinking. When the war was over, Stalin wanted to ensure he had SECURITY in the West and the East. From the get-go he wanted to ensure a geographical buffer to protect Russia from any further attack from East or West. His methods were brutal and disregarded all humanitarian values, but he had the advantage of being absolutely clear about his aims. And he achieved them. In 1942 he asked for control of the Baltic states and Poland to provide his buffer, and this request caused quite a serious rift between Britain (who wanted to agree in order to pen Russia in) and America (who rejected all plans, pacts and alliances, and was committed to giving every nation its ‘freedom’). In the event, Stalin extended his buffer zone half-way across Europe to take half of Germany.

And in the Far East, as I’ve just read in Fenby’s excellent history of China, this simple priority – security – explains why Stalin initially allied with the right-wing Kuomintang against Mao’s communists. Stalin would deal with whoever seemed able to provide security to the USSR, and the Kuomintang were, in 1945 anyway, the strongest power in China, once the Japanese had surrendered.

But Stalin had two more-immediate concerns which he hammered away at repeatedly:

More arms – he wanted the allies to send him much, much more arms and munitions to help the Red Army fight the Germans who – be it remembered – advanced up to the outskirts of Moscow, up to the river Don and deep into the Caucasus.
Second Front – he wanted Britain and America to invade France as soon as possible, a demand he kept up in every conversation and exchange throughout all of 1942 and 1943 and into 1944.

Winston Churchill wanted to preserve the British Empire

This threw up all kinds of problems around the current and future economic and political organisation of the British Empire which took up a lot of Churchill’s time and energy and that of the other conservative politicians around him – concerns about the preferential trading system within the Empire and Commonwealth, which now seems as remote as the Corn Laws – as well as the responsibility of trying to secure and police an extremely farflung set of territories, which beset the British chiefs of staff.

In the end, it was a failure. Fresh in my mind is J.G. Ballard’s eye-witness account in his three autobiographies of the seismic impact the loss of Singapore (15 February 1942) had on the British Empire in the East. It lost face forever. It was seen as defeatable. Everyone realised its days were numbered. In the event, Britain gave independence to India in 1947 just two years after the war ended, and over the next fifteen years the rest of the British Empire unravelled.

And all this – the collapse of the British Empire – comes to seem increasingly obvious when you read this book and see how utterly, helplessly dependent the British government and empire and, Churchill personally, were on the Americans – and then to read in detail, with extended quotes, Roosevelt’s cast-iron opposition to the British Empire.

Arguably, Churchill deluded himself about American intentions. Rather like Kipling, he deludedly saw the young United States coming under the tutelage of the wise and mature British Empire to organise a post-war world in which both would exercise the White Man’s Burden to tutor the native peoples of the world to democracy and statecraft.

Churchill thought the Anglo nations would need to be united in order to contain a Soviet Union which he early on realised would try to extend its influence deep into Europe. Whereas Churchill was rudely dismissive of China, which had displayed nothing but weakness under its despotic but inefficient Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek. (Stalin, it is interesting to note, was just as dismissive of Chiang’s regime and insisted he not be invited to the Big Three meeting at Tehran.)

Roosevelt wanted a post-imperial world of free nations

If Stalin’s central and inflexible obsession was about gaining SECURITY for Russia, America’s was the idealistic notion that, when the war ended, all the old empires and old alliances and old European ideas about ‘balances of power’ – the kind of complex alliances which had triggered the First World War and failed to avoid the Second – would be abandoned for all time and be replaced by a comity of free nations engaged in free trade under the aegis of global governing bodies (the United Nations, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund). In this world order about four major states would be the top players – US, Britain, USSR, China – and Britain would be one, but only one, among many.

Churchill thought the Brits and the Americans were fighting to overthrow the tyrannies of Germany and Japan, and hoped that afterwards extended American power would mesh with a rejuvenated British Empire to promote Anglo-Saxon ideas of law and justice. But the Americans disagreed: they saw themselves as overthrowing all the European empires and establishing principles of democracy and free trade throughout the world. Roosevelt is repeatedly quoted telling trusted advisers (specially Harry Hopkins, and also Roosevelt’s son, Elliott) that Churchill was wilfully misunderstanding him.

‘I can’t believe that we can fight a war against fascist slavery, and at the same time not work to free people all over the world from a backward colonial policy? The peace cannot include any continued despotism… Equality of peoples involves the utmost freedom of competitive trade.’ (Roosevelt to Churchill)

‘I’ve tried to make it clear to Winston – and the others – that, while we’re their allies and in it to victory by their side, they must never get the idea that we’re in it just to help them hang on to the archaic, medieval Empire ideas… Great Britain signed [sic] the Atlantic Charter. I hope they realise the United States Government means to make them live up to it.’ (Roosevelt to his son, Elliott)

The Morgenthau Plan

One of the key issues to emerge during 1944 was how to treat Germany after the war. Fenby goes into great detail about the Morgenthau Plan named after Henry Morgenthau, US Secretary of the Treasury, which planned to hammer Germany, permanently dividing it into smaller states and stripping it of all industrial capacity, denuding the Ruhr industrial heartland, and returning it to a pastoral, agricultural society for the foreseeable future.

Fenby brings out how some of the vengefulness of the plan stemmed from the Jewish ethnicity of Morgenthau and his even more extreme deputy, Harry Dexter White, who was also Jewish. (This was widely recognised at the time: Secretary of State Henry Stimson described the Morgenthau Plan as ‘Semitism gone wild for vengeance’ and ‘a crime against civilisation’.) As both men learned more about the Holocaust (initially a top secret known only to the administration) it didn’t soften their determination to destroy Germany. Morgenthau estimated his model of a deindustrialised Germany would support about 60% of the current population; the other 40% would starve to death. Roosevelt told his cabinet that Germany should only be allowed only a ‘subsistence level’ of food. If a lot of Germans starved to death – tough.

By contrast, Churchill, when he was presented with the Morgenthau Plan at the Second Quebec Conference in September 1944, was extremely reluctant to agree with it and fought to water down its provisions. This was because Churchill could already see, with a clarity the Morgenthau backers (including Roosevelt) lacked, that the immediate post-war problem would not be Germany but Russia, which was gearing up to conquer half of Europe.

Completely contrary to the Morgenthau Plan, Churchill correctly predicted that a revitalised and economically strong Germany would be vital a) to resist Russian encroachment b) to revive the European economy as a whole.

There was another, more pressing aspect to the Morgenthau Plan. When details were leaked to the press in September 1944, it had a damaging impact on the war effort.

Goebbels leapt on it, making much of the Jewish heritage of its author, and was able to depict it as evidence of the global Jewish conspiracy against Germany which he and Hitler had been warning about for a generation (p.319).
More significantly, US military figures as senior as George Marshall claimed the plan significantly stiffened German opposition, and directly led to the deaths of American soldiers. Roosevelt’s son-in-law Lieutenant-Colonel John Boettiger worked in the War Department and claimed the Morgenthau Plan was ‘worth thirty divisions to the Germans’.

In the longer term, the Morgenthau ideas of reducing German industrial output and deliberately impoverishing the German population turned out to be impractical and counter-productive. During the years of the Occupation, from summer 1945 onwards, it became clear that Germany was the economic and industrial heartland of Europe and that impeding its recovery would condemn the entire continent to poverty. Plus, preventing the Germans from producing their own goods threw the burden of supplying even the basic necessities of life onto the American forces on the ground, who quickly realised how impractical this was.

Just a year after the war, the Morgenthau Policy was comprehensively overthrown in a famous speech titled Restatement of Policy on Germany delivered by James F. Byrnes, US Secretary of State, in Stuttgart on September 6, 1946, which became known as the ‘Speech of Hope’.

After the war it became known that Harry Dexter White, although never himself a communist, had been passing classified information to the Soviet Union, enough for him to be given a codename by his Soviet ‘handlers’. Called before the House Unamerican Activities committee in 1948, White denied being a communist. Shortly after testifying he had a heart attack and a few days later died, aged just 55, apparently of an overdose.

And so White’s enthusiastic support of the Morgenthau Plan could be reinterpreted as aiding the Soviets by ensuring Germany was rendered utterly powerless after the war. A great deal of debate still surrounds White’s role. Stepping back, you can see how the story of the Morgenthau Plan crystallises the complex, overlapping nexuses of geopolitics, economics, ethnicity and conflicts between the supposed Allies, and the conflicts within the administration of the most powerful of the three powers, the United States.

Sick men

All three were sick men. Several eye-witnesses testify how sick Churchill was and how he only kept himself going by sheer willpower. But the facade crumbled after the Tehran Conference. Churchill was exhausted when he flew back from Persia to Cairo, and by the time he’d taken an onward flight to Tunis to meet General Eisenhower, he was almost too weak to walk, and, upon arrival, was confined to a villa where doctors discovered he had pneumonia. Churchill’s fever worsened and then he had a heart attack. His personal physician thought he was going to die.

It is amazing that, with rest and injections of the new-fangled drug penicillin, he not only made a full recovery, but after a week was full of energy, firing off messages to the Cabinet in London, to Stalin and Roosevelt and worrying about the next stage of the military campaign to take Italy. And little short of mind-boggling that he went on to live for another 21 years.

And of course Roosevelt also was a very ill man. In March 1944, shortly after his 62nd birthday, he underwent testing at Bethesda Hospital and was found to have high blood pressure, atherosclerosis, coronary artery disease causing angina pectoris, and congestive heart failure. Fenby explains Roosevelt had a cluster of symptoms nowadays referred to as post-polio syndrome (p.280). He went to the estate of a rich friend in South Carolina and ended up staying four weeks, sleeping a lot, cutting down on his chain-smoking and trying to drink less booze. But he never regained his former ‘pep’.

The most revealing symptom of this – and typical of Fenby’s semi-humorous, gossipy touch – was that the President stopped tinkering with his beloved stamp collection, up till then his favourite way of unwinding last thing at night. His personal physician, Admiral Ross McIntire, created a daily schedule that banned business guests for lunch and incorporated two hours of rest each day. But when he returned to Washington, witnesses testify that from that point onwards he was a good deal more flippant and ill-informed. At meetings he lacked focus, increasingly telling rambling anecdotes about his forebears. Churchill thought him no longer the man he had been.

Choosing the vice-president

It beggars belief that this crippled and deeply ill man determined to run for president a record-breaking fourth time and spent a lot of 1944 criss-crossing his huge nation making election speeches. The election was held on 7 November 1944 and Roosevelt won 53.4% of the popular vote and 432 out of the 531 electoral votes. He had campaigned in favour of a strong United Nations, so his victory symbolised support for the nation’s future participation in the international community (unlike the isolationism which swept America at the end of the First World War).

Roosevelt wanted to retain his vice-president, Henry Wallace. A contingent of the Democratic party wanted the Southern Democrat Harry Byrd. Roosevelt was persuaded to nominate a compromise candidate, Harry S Truman from Missouri. Did many people at the time realise what a momentous choice this would turn out to be?

And am I the only person who noticed that all three contenders for the vice-presidency were named Harry?

One way of thinking about the Yalta Conference in February 1945, is that Stalin dragged a very ill man half-way round the world and then, backed by his henchman Molotov, was able to run rings round him. Roosevelt no longer seemed to take in information, or push for solid agreements. His doctor thought his brain was going and gave him only months to live.

Roosevelt clings to Stalin till the last moment

I hadn’t realised the extent to which the Roosevelt administration became so utterly pro-Soviet, and increasingly anti-British. All discussions about helping Britain after the war with loans were tempered by concern that Britain would rise to become a major economic rival of the US. It came as a big surprise to Roosevelt and his economic advisers when Churchill bluntly told them that Britain was broke, and would go bankrupt without major economic assistance (p.305)

In the last hundred pages Roosevelt’s administration starts gearing up for the presidential campaign of 1944, and for the first time you really hear about his Republican opponents, and suddenly realise that there was a great deal of domestic opposition throughout Roosevelt’s presidency to everything he stood for – from Republicans who opposed the state socialism of the New Deal, to isolationists who fought tooth and nail to keep America out of the war, and then to an array of political figures and commentators who accused Roosevelt’s Democrats of being far too supportive to the Communist mass-murderer, Stalin, and not supportive enough of the right-wing Nationalist government of China under Chiang Kai-shek. Reading this book, it’s easy to sympathise with these last two points.

In this context Fenby goes into detail of the diplomatic toing and froing surrounding the Warsaw Rising – not the fighting itself, but the increasingly desperate attempts of the Polish government in exile to get the Allies to support the rising, the repeated requests made by Roosevelt and Churchill to Stalin to get the Red Army – which had halted its advance only 50 kilometres from the Polish capital – to intervene, or to get permission to land and fly Western planes from Ukrainian airfields to drop supplies to the Polish resistance.

All of which Stalin refused and stonewalled. It suited him to have the entire Free Polish Resistance massacred by the Germans, clearing the way for the puppet communist government which he planned to put in place. Afterwards the Americans and Churchill fell in with Stalin’s obvious lies that it was military shortages which prevented the Red Army from intervening. Only the tough-minded George Kennan felt the West should have had a full-fledged showdown with Russia about it.

Same with the Katyn Massacre – in which some 22,000 Polish military officers and intelligentsia were executed by the Soviet Union, specifically the NKVD (the Soviet secret police) in April and May 1940. The Nazis discovered the burial site and publicised it in 1943, but Stalin resolutely denied all responsibility and claimed it was a Nazi atrocity – and Britain and America, once again, went along with his lies, for the sake of alliance unity.

The Cold War

Maybe it was appropriate that Roosevelt died just as the war ended. Every day made it plainer that the Soviets were going to ignore all promises and do whatever it took to impose communist governments across Eastern Europe, most notably in Poland whose governance was a running sore between the three ‘allies’ from the start of 1945. Right to the end Roosevelt hoped that, if he ignored this or that broken promise or atrocity by Stalin, the dictator would adhere to the main agreements.

Maybe it was appropriate that Roosevelt died and a new, simpler but arguably tougher man took over, Harry Truman, who was plunged into managing the future of the world as the greatest war in history came to a close. Truman had no idea relations with Moscow had become so rocky. And he hadn’t been told about the atom bomb. Can you imagine the awesome burden which suddenly landed on his shoulders!

In some ways the last 20 pages of the book are the most interesting: with the war in Europe over, Churchill – as Roosevelt predicted – became yesterday’s man. An exhausted Britain looked to the future and elected the Labour government with a landslide in July 1945. Roosevelt was dead and Truman replaced him as president with a completely new remit, sacking former advisers (for example, briskly dismissing Morgenthau while Roosevelt’s most loyal adviser, Harry Hopkins, retired), very much his own man from the start. The Labour Party leader Clement Attlee replaced Churchill. And on August 6 the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. On 14 August Japan surrendered, bringing the world war to an end.

A new era had dawned – but Fenby’s highly detailed, fascinating and gripping account helps the reader understand how the outlines of what became known as the Cold War had been established long before the shooting stopped.

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by Simon on March 30, 2020 • Permalink

Posted in America, History, Russia, Second World War

Tagged Alan Brooke, Alexander Cadogan, Alliance, Allies, Anthony Eden, Archibald Clark Kerr, Arthur Birse, atom bomb, Averell Harriman, Beria, Big Three, British Empire, Casablanca, Charles de Gaulle, Chiang Kai-shek, China, Churchill, Claire Chennault, Communism, Cordell Hull, Democrats, Elliott Roosevelt, First Cairo Conference, First Quebec Conference, First Washington Conference, Franklin D. Roosevelt, geopolitics, George Marshall, Goebbels, Harry Byrd, Harry Dexter White, Harry Hopkins, Harry Truman, Henry L. Stimson, Henry Stimson, Henry Wallace, Hiroshima, House Unamerican Activities committee, India, international politics, Ivan Maisky, J.G. Ballard, James F. Byrnes, Japan, John Dill, Jonathan Fenby, Josef Stalin, Joseph Stilwell, leadership, Lend-Lease, Lord Halifax, Maxim Litvinov, Moscow Conference, NKVD, Operation Torch, Placentia Bay, Poland, Politics, post-polio syndrome, Potsdam, Republicans, Roosevelt, Sarah Churchill, Second Cairo Conference, Second Quebec Conference, Second Washington Conference, Second World War, Stalin, Sumner Welles, Tehran, the Atlantic Charter, the Baltic states, the Cold War, the Flying Tigers, the Free French, the Katyn Massacre, the Morgenthau Plan, the Red Army, the Soviet Union, the Warsaw Rising, the West, Third Washington Conference, Vinegar Joe, Vyacheslav Molotov, Walter Lippmann, Winston Churchill, World War Two, Yalta

Posted by Simon on March 30, 2020

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/03/30/alliance-jonathan-fenby/

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