All posts tagged T.S. Eliot

The Last Enemy by Richard Hillary (1942)

They would say, ‘I hope someone got the swine who got you: how you must hate those devils!’ and I would say weakly, ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ and leave it at that. I could not explain that I had not been injured in their war, that no thoughts of ‘our island fortress’ or of ‘making the world safe for democracy’ had bolstered me up when going into combat. I could not explain that what I had suffered I in no way regretted; that I had welcomed it; and that now that it was over I was in a sense grateful for it and certain that in time it would help me along the road of my own private development.
(The Last Enemy, page 166)

Potted biography (from Wikipedia)

Born in April 1919, Richard Hillary was 20 when the Second World War broke out. He was the son of an Australian government official and his wife, and attended one of the UK’s top public schools, Shrewsbury School, before going on to Trinity College, Oxford (‘a typical incubator of the English ruling classes before the war’).

At Oxford he was a fit, handsome man who devoted all his energy to rowing, hoping to achieve a ‘Blue’ (‘Unfortunately, rowing was the only accomplishment in which I could get credit for being slightly better than average.’) His memoir contains some very funny rowing stories, particularly the tour of German and Hungarian regattas he went on with seven fellow rowers who wangled free tickets and hotel rooms on false promise that they were the ‘official’ Oxford Eight, which they very much weren’t.

But at the same time as rowing, he joined the Oxford University Air Squadron and the Royal Air Force Volunteer Reserve. The undergraduates all knew war was coming.

Hillary was called up to the Royal Air Force in October 1939. He was sent for training in Scotland then, in July 1940, was posted to B Flight, No. 603 Squadron RAF, located at RAF Montrose, still in Scotland but, for the first time, flying Spitfires.

On 27 August the Squadron was moved south to RAF Hornchurch, in Essex, and immediately saw combat in the Battle of Britain (10 July 1940 to 31 October 1940). In one week of combat Hillary personally claimed five Bf 109s shot down, claimed two more probably destroyed and one damaged.

On 3 September 1940 i.e. seven days into his new posting, Hillary had just made his fifth ‘kill’ when he was shot down by a Messerschmitt Bf 109. He describes vividly the key mistake he made. After getting an enemy plane in his sights he let off a 2 second burst of machinegun fire which he saw hit the machine. But instead of breaking off and wheeling away, he let off another 3 second burst to make sure and that was long enough for another Messerschmitt to get on his tail and hit him.

Trapped in his cockpit while the Spitfire burst into flames Hillary was badly burned, then passed out, then literally fell out of the plane as it tumbled down towards the sea. The cold air revived him, he deployed his parachute and landed in the North Sea, where he was rescued by a lifeboat from the Margate Station.

If school and university were part 1 and combat flying was part 2, now began the third part of Hillary’s short life, an extended period of medical treatment for his appalling burns.

Hillary was first treated at the Royal Masonic Hospital, Hammersmith and then at the Queen Victoria Hospital in Sussex. Here he came under the direction of the plastic surgeon Archibald McIndoe and endured three months of repeated surgery in an attempt to repair the damage to his hands and face. Pioneer patients were known as McIndoe’s ‘Guinea Pig Club’. It was a painful and psychologically devastating period.

The Last Enemy

The Last Enemy is a carefully crafted text. I’ve copied the outline of Hillary’s life from Wikipedia in order to show how he treats it in The Last Enemy. The Last Enemy is in three parts:

  1. The proem (‘a preface or preamble to a book or speech’)
  2. Book One – his life up to the shooting down, focusing on Oxford then his RAF training
  3. Book Two – medical treatment, plastic surgery, return to a semblance of civilian life

1. Proem

A short 6-page Proem, an intense description of the day he took off with the rest of his squadron, engaged in a dogfight, was hit and his cockpit immediately burst into flames, how he struggled to open the hatch, tumbled through the air, and then the long, long time (four hours) he spent in the cold North Sea, entangled in the straps and ropes of his parachute, the tortured thoughts that went through his head, his feeble attempts to deflate his life jacket and drown himself, which turns out to be harder than he expected. It is told with the winning, upper-class sang-froid of his class.

There can be few more futile pastimes than yelling for help alone in the North Sea, with a solitary seagull for company, yet it gave me a certain melancholy satisfaction, for I had once written a short story in which the hero (falling from a liner) had done just this. It was rejected.

Then willing arms are pulling him up, his parachute is cut free, brandy, a blanket and the long chug back to Margate, ambulance, hospital, anaesthetic. Blimey. It’s harrowing stuff. But what led up to this fatal moment? How did we get here?

2. Book One

Book one contains five chapters. He skips past his parents and childhood and boyhood and school, and the text opens with young Richard a bright young undergraduate at Oxford University, and this is where we get introduced to the book’s style and purpose.

There’s a lot of facts about Oxford and undergraduate life, as there will later be a lot of facts about the different planes he trained and flew in. It is all told in the bright and breezy style of the confident English upper class, with lashings of self-deprecation and irony.

The press referred to us as the Lost Generation and we were not displeased. Superficially we were selfish and egocentric without any Holy Grail in which we could lose ourselves. The war provided it, and in a delightfully palatable form. (p.24)

But what sets it apart from other memoirs of bright young things is Hillary’s earnest, if rather immature, young mannish attempts to make sense of it all, to make sense of his life, how it fit into his generation’s attitudes and experiences.

On the face of it this gives rise to a number of descriptions of how he and his generation felt about, say, international politics, English society, the British Empire or the writers of the 1930s, the poets of the generation just before them, all of which give rise to quotable soundbites (which are often included in social histories of the period).

On politicians

We were convinced that we had been needlessly led into the present world crisis, not by unscrupulous rogues, but worse, by the bungling of a crowd of incompetent old fools.

Class consciousness and the 1930s poets

Despising the middle-class society to which they owed their education and position, they attacked it, not with vigour but with an adolescent petulance. They were encouraged in this by their literary idols, by their unquestioning allegiance to Auden, Isherwood, Spender, and Day Lewis. With them they affected a dilettante political leaning to the left. Thus, while refusing to be confined by the limited outlook of their own class, they were regarded with suspicion by the practical exponents of labour as bourgeois, idealistic, pink in their politics and pale-grey in their effectiveness. They balanced precariously and with irritability between a despised world they had come out of and a despising world they couldn’t get into… (p.13)

The post-war future

Was there perhaps a new race of Englishmen arising out of this war, a race of men bred by the war, a harmonious synthesis of the governing class and the great rest of England; that synthesis of disparate backgrounds and upbringings to be seen at its most obvious best in R.A.F. Squadrons? While they were now possessed of no other thought than to win the war, yet having won it, would they this time refuse to step aside and remain indifferent to the peace-time fate of the country, once again leave government to the old governing class?…Would they see to it that there arose from their fusion representatives, not of the old gang, deciding at Lady Cufuffle’s that Henry should have the Foreign Office and George the Ministry of Food, nor figureheads for an angry but ineffectual Labour Party, but true representatives of the new England that should emerge from this struggle?

(Partly this passage stood out for me because of his use of the phrase ‘the old gang’ referring to the corrupt old aristocrats and public school johnnies who run everything, because it copies the phrase from an Auden poem:

We know it, we know that love
Needs more than the admiring excitement of union,
More than the abrupt self-confident farewell,
The heel on the finishing blade of grass,
The self-confidence of the falling root,
Needs death, death of the grain, our death.
Death of the old gang…

From The Destruction of Error by W.H. Auden, 1929)

There’s a lot of stuff pitched at this level, undergraduate generalisations about society and it’s very readable and interesting, as far as it goes. It took me a while to realise that Hillary has a deeper, sometimes quite buried, purpose to all this. And this is to describe how the narrator matures and grows up, so that the book could have been titled The Socialisation of an Egotist. Or maybe, How The Egotist Grew Up.

I read a commenter on Amazon saying they disliked Hillary because of his sense of entitlement and arrogance, but I take that as being precisely the point of the book, to show the reader that that’s how he started off and to take you on his journey of maturing. It is a Bildingsroman. It is a coming-of-age story. The whole point is to start with the hero being immature, rootless, drifting and fantastically self-absorbed. He lives for the moment. He lives to express himself and fulfil himself. Rowing’s what he’s good at and partying and being handsome and witty with other gilded, witty, athletic posh types, and so this is how he spends his time.

And so this is the attitude he brings to fighting the war: he laughs at all the ‘rot’ about the Empire and patriotism and the great this, that or the other. He doesn’t give a stuff for any of that grand talk. Keith Douglas, in Alamein to Zem Zem, sees the advent of war as a personal challenge, and that’s just how Hillary sees it:

For myself, I was glad for purely selfish reasons. The war solved all problems of a career, and promised a chance of self-realisation that would normally take years to achieve. As a fighter pilot I hoped for a concentration of amusement, fear, and exaltation which it would be impossible to experience in any other form of existence. (p.24)

It’s a point he rams home with repetition, convinced most of his peers feel the same:

We continued to refuse to consider the war in the light of a crusade for humanity, or a life-and-death struggle for civilization, and concerned ourselves merely with what there was in it for us… (p.46)

He gives us good pen portraits of his undergraduate friends and then he enlists and is whisked off to Scotland for training. Here we are introduced, once again, to quite a large number of chaps, some of whom are really very well off: a son of Lord Beaverbrook, several landed gentry who invite them to go grouse shooting on their vast estates. (It’s notable that Hillary positions himself as very much not part of the huntin’, shootin’ and fishin’ set; he describes at least two separate shooting invitations at length and each time makes it clear he hates stomping through wet heather and mud in order to stand around on a windswept hillside shooting at a few wretched pheasants. He dips into that world, but he is not of it.)

But the point I’m making about the fairly large cast of other characters (for example, all the pilots he trains with and then in his squadron – I counted 32 named individuals in all) is that although we get their height and hair colour and university background and everything, there’s a persistent thread of Hillary considering them as psychological types, and measuring them against his own, very well expressed egocentricity. Take what he says about his fellow pilot Peter Howes:

The change in Peter Howes was perhaps the most interesting, for he was not unaware of what was happening. From an almost morbid introspection, an unhappy preoccupation with the psychological labyrinths of his own mind, his personality blossomed, like some plant long untouched by the sun, into an at first unwilling but soon open acceptance of the ideas and habits of the others. (p.45)

He sees in others the maturation process which the book ends up being about. This comes into focus in the character of one of the young flyers he meets, a chap named Peter Pease, who is a devout Christian.

Peter was, I think, the best-looking man I have ever seen. He stood six-foot-three and was of a deceptive slightness for he weighed close on 13 stone. He had an outward reserve which protected him from any surface friendships, but for those who troubled to get to know him it was
apparent that this reserve masked a deep shyness and a profound integrity of character. Soft-spoken, and with an innate habit of understatement, I never knew him to lose his temper. He never spoke of himself and it was only through Colin that I learned how well he had done at Eton before his two reflective years at Cambridge, where he had watched events in Europe and made up his mind what part he must play when the exponents of everything he most abhorred began to sweep all before them.

Many, many things happen. They train, they fly, they fight, they go dancing and drinking. There is an interlude where we discover some of the pilots have been using their spare time to entertain small children who have been evacuated from urban centres to the small hamlet of Tarfside (pages 78 to 79). There is a lot of detail and incident and character, all described in a winningly confident pukka style.

But at the core of Book One is the longest chapter in the book (26 pages in the Penguin edition) titled ‘The World of Peter Pease’ for it contains a prolonged debate between Richard the selfish atheist and Peter the quietly spoken, selfless Christian. Richard volunteered for the RAF because he selfishly wants the experience of flying a Spitfire and shooting down enemy fighters. Peter is serving because has observed events across Europe and come to the conclusion that the Nazis represent real Evil, Biblical Evil, created by the Devil. What they are doing is Devilish and must be combated by all good Christians.

Hillary isn’t Dostoyevsky or Sartre. Their debate isn’t pitched in sophisticated theological or philosophical terminology. And it doesn’t last that long, pages 82 to 91. But you have the sense, the dramatic literary sense, that although he’s writing the account, Hillary himself knows he’s on quicksand. There’s an old saying that you know you’re losing the argument when you resort to insults, as Hillary finds himself doing:

‘You are going to concern yourself with politics and mankind when the war is over: I am going to
concern myself with the individual and Richard Hillary. I may or may not be exactly a man of my time: I don’t know. But I know that you are an anachronism. In an age when to love one’s country is vulgar, to love God archaic, and to love mankind sentimental, you do all three.’

But the more fiercely Hillary argues that nothing matters except the self, that he’s only fighting for the experience, that life is about self expression and getting as much out of it as you can, the more you can feel him beginning to doubt himself:

I’m not concerned with genius. I’m concerned with my own potentialities. I say that I am fighting this war because I believe that, in war, one can swiftly develop all one’s faculties to a degree it would normally take half a lifetime to achieve. And to do this, you must be as free from outside interference as possible. That’s why I’m in the Air Force. For in a Spitfire we’re back to war as it ought to be–if you can talk about war as it ought to be. Back to individual combat, to self–reliance, total responsibility for one’s own fate. One either kills or is killed; and it’s damned exciting. (p.85)

‘Exciting’, the same word Keith Douglas uses in Alamein to Zem Zem:

It is exciting and amazing to see thousands of men, very few of whom have much idea why they are fighting, all enduring hardships, living in an unnatural, dangerous, but not wholly terrible world, having to kill and to be killed… (Alamein to Zem Zem)

Interesting coincidence as this may be, it doesn’t strengthen Hillary’s case. A close reading suggests the quietly spoken Christian, Peter Pease, is on the solider ground. I couldn’t say whether Hillary intends the reader to take his side, but I think he intends it to be a close-run thing.

(It might be worth mentioning in passing that Auden felt the same. After he had emigrated to America in 1939 her came to realise that all the so-called ‘political’ poetry he wrote in the 1930s was, deep down, motivated by personal needs and urgencies and that, if it came right down to it, why were we fighting the Germans? If everything is personal and psychological, then maybe it’s possible to change your personality, or in a different mood, support the Nazis. Where was the solid, objective basis on which to found your belief that the Nazis were wrong, not a matter of taste or scruple, but the conviction that what they were doing was simply wrong and anti-human? Arguments like this were part of Auden’s process towards readopting the lapsed Anglican Christianity of his boyhood. You cannot allow the fight against the Nazis to depend on your vacillating mood, on personal preference. There must be an objective truth outside yourself. There must be a God who underpins a universal moral order, who underpins Human Morality. This is the conviction expressed in different styles by Auden, T.S. Eliot, C.S. Lewis and many other writers of the age, and explains why the Second World War saw an upsurge in Christian faith, from a wide range of people asking themselves this question: ‘Why am I so sure the Nazis are wrong? Because there are universal moral standards external to me, there is a Moral Law, there is a timeless Creator who underpins them.’)

In the moral or philosophical terrain (i.e. not the fighter pilot or medical parts) of the narrative, Peter Pease is triangulated with another character, David Rutter, a convinced pacifist. It is worth quoting Hillary’s description of Rutter at length for what it tells about the ideas floating around in 1939:

‘Modern patriotism,’ he would say, ‘is a false emotion. In the Middle Ages they had the right idea. All that a man cared about was his family and his own home on the village green. It was immaterial to him who was ruling the country and what political opinions held sway. Wars were no concern of his.’ His favourite quotation was the remark of Joan’s father in Schiller’s drama on the Maid of Orleans, ‘Lasst uns still gehorchend harren wem uns Gott zum Köng gibt,’ which he would translate for me as, ‘Let us trust obediently in the king God sends us.’

‘Then,’ he would go on, ‘came the industrial revolution. People had to move to the cities. They ceased to live on the land. Meanwhile our country, by being slightly more unscrupulous than anyone else, was obtaining colonies all over the world. Later came the popular press, and we have been exhorted ever since to love not only our own country, but vast tracts of land and people in the Empire whom we have never seen and never wish to see.’

So he’s not just a pacifist but has clearly thought-out views about the meretricious role of the popular press and the bogusness of the British Empire (something Hillary isn’t very impressed by, either). Rutter is only one among many named characters in the book, but Hillary explicitly links him to Pease by virtue of his thought-through, principled stance.

3. Book Three

As mentioned above, book three starts with Hillary recovering in hospital and follows the long, gruelling process of the treatment for his burns and then the plastic surgery designed to give him a semblance of a face and of hands (at one point the surgeon taps the shiny white part of his knuckle – which Hillary can’t feel – and points out it’s raw bone; he was burned to the bone).

This is very gruelling for the reader because in each of his hospitals Hillary, of course, meets and finds out about patients in much worse plight than himself. Worst of all is the burns hospital in Sussex which includes a 15-year-old girl who was totally burned by molten sugar on her first day in a factor, and who screams in agony all the time. God.

He has umpteen hallucinations under the influence of heavy painkillers for months. In one he is in the cockpit with his friend Peter Pease when he is shot down and killed. (This chimes eerily with the Roald Dahl short stories of close relatives, mothers or wives or friends, witnessing at first hand the deaths of their loved ones miles away in bombers or fighters. Was it a very common hallucination or intuition, one wonders.) The nurses are almost universally excellent and there are many little examples of their kindness and tact when dealing with the devastatingly injured, and the towering example of Sister Hall, who is a firm but compassionate ruler of the burns ward at the Queen Victoria Hospital, Sussex.

Peter’s wife, Denise, comes to visit and, when he is well enough to leave hospital, Richard often goes to stay at her house in Eaton Place. In fact it’s one of the mild surprises of the book that he is allowed to leave hospital and travel to London, to meet old friends for drinks etc, even while his treatment continues. It’s because each of the skin grafts to give him new eyelids or new lips, takes months to ‘take’.

The climax of the book comes quickly and I found overwhelmingly moving, if for reasons I don’t fully understand. It is in two parts. One day Hillary accepts an invitation from his old friend David Rutter, the pacifist, and takes the train out to his cottage in Norfolk. The door is opened by David’s wife, Mary, who is visibly shocked at Hillary’s appearance. They shake hands, make a pot of tea, sit down to chat but Hillary finds Mary quite aggressive. After a while Rutter intervenes to explain that she is over-compensating, because so many of their friends in the Forces end up berating Rutter for being a pacifist. OK, Hillary processes this fact, but senses there is a deeper reason for Mary’s unhappiness.

Then it comes out. David has lost his pacifism. As the war has continued he has come to doubt his stance. The Nazis have emerged as not just another enemy in another war, but the most evil force history has ever thrown up and this is a war to preserve not just democracy but all human decency. And so David has come to doubt his contented pacifism.

As country after country had fallen to Hitler his carefully reasoned arguments had been split wide open: it was as much the war of the unemployed labourer as of the Duke of Westminster. Never in the course of history had there been a struggle in which the issues were so clearly defined. Although our peculiar form of education would never allow him to admit it, he knew well enough that it had become a crusade. All this he could have borne. It was the painful death of his passionate fundamental belief that he should raise his hand against no man which finally brought his world crumbling about his ears. (p.168)

And so his wife Mary is distraught. She thought she knew where they stood. She thought they shared common values and now she doesn’t know any more. I thought this was all beautifully sense, imagined and described.

In the climax of their conversation, David asks Richard what he should do and Richard suddenly feels like a fraud, a fake. He has no principles of his own beyond seeking self-fulfilment and adventure. He has no moral ground on which to stand, from which to give David the certainty he has lost and wants to find again. They shake hands and Richard catches the train back to London feeling like a fraud.

This is what I mean by Bildungsroman. Remember the Amazon commenter who said they disliked Hillary’s arrogance and elitism. Well, this scene exemplifies my point that the initial arrogance is calculated; it is part of a calculated literary strategy, to follow the journey of cocky, handsome, privileged young public schoolboy on his journey to shame and humility. And the interesting thing is that it is not the shooting down, the burning or the terrible pain which does it; it is the example of the other people around him, it is Peter Pease and Denise and David and Mary.

Psychological climax

All this prepares us for the climactic last few pages of the book. His train from Norfolk pulls in to Liverpool Street Station during a German air raid. A taxi picks him up but then the driver says they’d better take cover, so Richard tells him to pull over at the nearest pub and they both duck inside. Here the atmosphere is febrile as the bombs fall all around. Then they hear a series of bombs coming closer and closer and everyone throws themselves to the ground. Is this it? the reader wonders.

No. There’s an almighty explosion, the floor jumps up, the windows shatter and so on, but they stagger to their feet alive. The bomb fell next door. An air raid warden opens the door and asks for help digging through the rubble, Richard volunteers. After a while of removing rubble they come to a bed, and slowly disinter a little girl who is stone dead. She was being held and protected by her mother, pinned by rubble to the bed, her leg broken under her. Richard has a flask of brandy and pours a little into the woman’s mouth and she opens her eyes to weakly thank him and then, seeing his melted face, says ‘I see they got you too’, and then she died.

I’m crying all over again as I write this. Richard struggles to screw the lid of the flask back on, gets to his feet and pushes past the other rescuers on the rubble, into the street and struggles with all his strength not to start screaming, to start running as fast as he can and screaming at the top of his voice. Something inside him has finally, totally, utterly snapped. Forgive me for quoting it at length, but its power lies in the thoroughness and cumulativeness of the horror;

Someone caught me by the arm, I think it was the soldier with the girl, and said: ‘You’d better take some of that brandy yourself. You don’t look too good’; but I shook him off. With difficulty I kept my pace to a walk, forcing myself not to run. For I wanted to run, to run anywhere away from that scene, from myself, from the terror that was inside me, the terror of something that was about to happen and which I had not the power to stop.

It started small, small but insistent deep inside of me, sharp as a needle, then welling up uncontrollable, spurting, flowing over, choking me. I was drowning, helpless in a rage that caught and twisted and hurled me on, mouthing in a blind unthinking frenzy. I heard myself cursing, the words pouring out, shrill, meaningless, and as my mind cleared a little I knew that it was the woman I cursed. Yes, the woman that I reviled, hating her that she should die like that for me to see, loathing that silly bloody twisted face that had said those words: ‘I see they got you too.’ That she should have spoken to me, why, oh Christ, to me? Could she not have died the next night, ten minutes later, or in the next street? Could she not have died without speaking, without raising those cow eyes to mine?

‘I see they got you too.’ All humanity had been in those few words, and I had cursed her. Slowly the frenzy died in me, the rage oozed out of me, leaving me cold, shivering, and bitterly ashamed. I had cursed her, cursed her, I realised as I grew calmer, for she had been the one thing that my rage surging uncontrollably had had to fasten on, the one thing to which my mind, overwhelmed by the sense of something so huge and beyond the range of thought, could cling. Her death was unjust, a crime, an outrage, a sin against mankind — weak inadequate words which even as they passed through my mind mocked me with their futility.

That that woman should so die was an enormity so great that it was terrifying in its implications, in its lifting of the veil on possibilities of thought so far beyond the grasp of the human mind. It was not just the German bombs, or the German Air Force, or even the German mentality, but a feeling of the very essence of anti-life that no words could convey. This was what I had been cursing — in part, for I had recognised in that moment what it was that Peter and the others had instantly recognised as evil and to be destroyed utterly. I saw now that it was not crime; it was Evil itself — something of which until then I had not even sensed the existence.

And it was in the end, at bottom, myself against which I had raged, myself I had cursed. With awful clarity I saw myself suddenly as I was. Great God, that I could have been so arrogant!

In the final pages Hillary reviews the entire narrative in a new light, his cocksure self-centredness destroyed for good. Why did he enjoy bating Peter Pease, so obviously right about the moral aspect of the war? Why had he quietly mocked the selfless determination of Peter’s widow, Denise? Why had he failed to acknowledge the deaths, the sacrifices of all his flying colleagues, ‘the Berrys, the Stapletons, the Carburys’ who instinctively honoured the dead? And all the people with terrible burns and amputations who he met in hospital, in his self-centredness, he had seen them only as objects of interest and then irritation.

Even David who he had gone to see earlier the same day, when he needed help, advice, some kind of guidance, Hillary had recoiled into his smart and aloof self-centredness, because his philosophy of life – that life is entirely and only about Self Fulfilment – could provide no guidance, no basis for helping anyone else.

Again memory dragged me back. It had been this very day who had sat back smoking cigarettes while David had poured out his heart, while his wife had watched me, taut, hoping. But I had failed. I had been disturbed a little, yes, but when he was finished I had said nothing, given no sign, offered no assurance that he was now right. I saw it so clearly… ‘Do you think I should join up?’ On my answer had depended many things, his self-respect, his confidence for the future, his final good-bye to the past. And I had said nothing, shying away from the question, even then not seeing. In the train I had crossed my legs and sat back, amused, God help me, by the irony of it all.

Now the enormity of the pointless, cruel death of the woman in the bombed house finally breaks his reserve, smashes the smooth, protective arrogance which has been his carapace all his life. He has lived in a trivial world of ‘nice comfortable little theories’ (p.176), protected by his ironies and his detachment. All his life he has refused to embrace the reality of the world.

Stricken with guilt, Hillary spends a sleepless night agonising over his hundred and one failures and only in the last two paragraphs does some kind of way forward appear to him, a way to atone for his shallowness, his heartlessness, his failure to help. He will write. He will write it all out.

I would write of these men, of Peter and of the others. I would write for them and would write with them. They would be at my side. And to whom would I address this book, to whom would I be speaking when I spoke of these men? And that, too, I knew. To Humanity, for Humanity must be the public of any book. Yes, that despised Humanity which I had so scorned and ridiculed to Peter.

If I could do this thing, could tell a little of the lives of these men, I would have justified, at least in some measure, my right to fellowship with my dead, and to the friendship of those with courage and steadfastness who were still living and who would go on fighting until the ideals for which their comrades had died were stamped for ever on the future of civilization.

Those are the last sentences. Reader, you hold in your hands the fruit of Hillary’s decision to help in the wider struggle, to honour his comrades, dead and still living, and to redeem himself. It is, I think, an incredibly powerful ending.

Epilogue

What follows isn’t in the book; it’s the rest of Hillary’s biography as copied from Wikipedia:

In 1941 Hillary persuaded the British authorities to send him to America to rally support for Britain’s war effort. While in the United States, he spoke on the radio, had a love affair with the actress Merle Oberon (!), and drafted much of this book, which was to make him famous.

Hillary managed to bluff his way back into a flying role even though, as was noted in the officers’ mess, he could barely handle a knife and fork. He returned to service with No 54 Operational Training Unit at RAF Charterhall, for a conversion course to pilot light bomber aircraft.

Hillary was killed on 8 January 1943, along with Navigator/Radio Operator Sergeant Wilfred Fison, when he crashed a Bristol Blenheim during a night training flight in adverse weather conditions, the aircraft coming down on farmland in Berwickshire, Scotland.

Credit

The Last Enemy was published by Macmillan and Co in 1942. All references are to the 2018 ‘Centenary Collection’ Penguin paperback edition.

Related links

Other flying memoirs

Second World War reviews

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Posted by Simon on March 11, 2024

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Writing In A War edited by Ronald Blythe (1982)

This is a good, chunky selection of British writing from the Second World War, poems and stories and essays either written and published during the actual conflict or memoirs of wartime experiences published a little later. It consists of 400 densely-printed pages in the Penguin paperback, and features work from some 56 authors: 18 prose writers and 37 poets.

Poets (37)

Dylan Thomas, Edith Sitwell, Henry Reed, Edith Scovell, Henry Treece, Herbert Cory, C. Day-Lewis, Terence Tiller, George Barker, John Pudney, Charles Causley, Roy Fuller, Roy Campbell, Alun Lewis, W.J. Turner, W.R. Rodgers, Sidney Keyes, Mervyn Peake, Robert Graves, Rayner Heppenstall, Keith Douglas, R.N. Currey, Alan Rook, Fancis Scarfe, Timothy Corsellis, Kathleen Raine, F.T. Prince, Louis MacNeice, W.H. Auden, William Empson, Stevie Smith, Vernon Watkins, David Gascoyne, Paul Dehn, T.S. Eliot, G.S. Fraser, Stephen Spender, W.J. Turner.

Short stories (9)

Elizabeth Bowen, William Sansom, William Chappell, Fred Urquhart, James Hanley, J. Maclaren-Ross, V.S. Pritchett, Glyn Jones, Elizabeth Berridge.

Factual memoirs/reportage (5)

  • Bryher – recalls her impressions of Blitz London upon her return to it from Switzerland
  • John Sommerfield – description of his squadron travelling through North-East India to the front line against the Japs in Burma
  • Richard Hillary – description of learning to fly a spitfire
  • Keith Douglas – how he disobeyed orders to rejoin his tank regiment in the desert west of Cairo
  • Denton Welch – a very home front story of being taken to meet the eccentric painter Walter Sickert

Essays (3)

By George Orwell, Arthur Koestler, Virginia Woolf.

Structure

The pieces are divided into seven themed sections, being:

  • The City
  • The Sky
  • The Sea
  • Declarations
  • The Patient Khaki Beast (i.e the soldier)
  • Confessions and Conclusions
  • The Dark

Introduction

In his introduction the book’s editor, Ronald Blythe, explains that the 1930s was the decade of grand declarations, literary cliques and widespread left-wing or even communist confidence that the British establishment was about to be swept away in a wonderfully liberating revolution (traits I noted in my review of Robin Skelton’s Poetry of the Thirties).

The Spanish Civil War

However, a great deal of that fervour to change the world drained away during the three gruelling, disillusioning years of the Spanish Civil War (see my review of the Penguin Book of Spanish Civil War Verse) in which several of the youngest, keenest English poets were killed off and those who survived were thoroughly disillusioned, above all by the revelation of Stalin’s willingness to betray the revolutionary cause in order to further Russia’s national agenda.

(Stalin didn’t want there to be a successful communist revolution in Spain because he thought it would alarm and alienate the governments of France and Britain, which he needed to keep sweet as potential allies against the obviously growing threat from Nazi Germany. Therefore Stalin did not want there to be a successful revolution in Spain. It took British communist volunteers in Spain a long time to grasp the Realpolitik of the situation and when it did, disillusion was total.)

And then the outbreak of the Second World War all happened so quickly. The nationalist leader General Franco declared the Spanish Civil War over on 1 April 1939. The Nazi-Soviet Pact was signed four and a half months later, on 23 August 1939, and one week later Hitler invaded Poland on 1 September.

The people of Europe, and their writers, artists and intellectuals, were thrown into six long years of chaos, bloodshed and holocaust. The world had never before seen destruction and mass murder on such a scale.

Retreat to the personal

Against this background of political disillusion (on the Left), a widespread feeling that the entire political class had let them down, and the universal sense of forces too vast to comprehend tearing the world apart, the writers who flourished during the Second World War retreated back to the personal.

If there was a common theme found across many of the writers during the Second World War, it was the notion that the entire world was being darkened by vast totalitarian movements devoted to wiping out the personal life, to exterminating the individual. Therefore, the greatest protest against the forces of darkness was to assert the importance of individual thoughts and feelings. As so often, W.H. Auden managed to summarise the mood perfectly in his famous poem, September 1 1939.

Defenceless under the night
Our world in stupor lies;
Yet, dotted everywhere,
Ironic points of light
Flash out wherever the Just
Exchange their messages:
May I, composed like them
Of Eros and of dust,
Beleaguered by the same
Negation and despair,
Show an affirming flame.

But Auden had left Britain for America in January 1939, and so was hors du combat. The writers left in Blighty, men and women, either too old to serve or conscripted into the forces, all had to find their own ways of expressing themselves and showing their affirming flames.

So what you have in this book is a wide range of personal reactions to the disaster the world found itself in, writings which are hard to generalise about because they are often so distinctive, not to say idiosyncratic: from the obliquely poetic short story of Elizabeth Bowen, to the intensely religious verse of Edith Sitwell, from the brisk no-nonsense memoir of Bryher to the visionary description of a torpedoed ship going down by James Hanley, from John Sommerfield’s larky description of a long journey by train, paddleboat, train and lorry to the front line in Burma to William Sansom’s brilliant accounts of being a firefighter in Blitzed London, the collection is characterised by its variety of location and event and style.

The collection itself is obviously divided into two distinct forms, verse and prose, with prose further sub-divided into fiction and factual.

Poetry

Having lived through the experimental Modernism and free verse of the 1920s, and the reversion to much more traditional forms with regular stanzas and regular rhyme schemes of the 1930s, poets of the 1940s felt free to pick and choose from either approach as suited their purpose.

So there’s quite a variety of verse forms, but I think I’m right in saying not much of it feels new. Not formally. But in terms of content, there is much that feels new, and I think can be divided into two broad categories, the realistic and the fantastical.

The New Apocalypse and Neo-Romanticism

The war saw an intensification of an aesthetic strand which had existed throughout the 1930s, an interest in the English countryside reimagined as a place of spirits and gods and paganism and Christianity interpreted in its wildest, most apocalyptic shapes. This trend had overlapped with some of the spirit of 1930s Surrealism and had been a reaction against the lucid, rational and political concerns of the dominant school of Thirties poetry.

In the fateful year, 1939, the best writings from this tradition were brought together in a volume titled The New Apocalypse with the result that a ‘movement’ of sorts was named after the book. To quote Wikipedia:

The New Apocalypse (1939)… was edited by J. F. Hendry (1912–1986) and Henry Treece. There followed the further anthologies The White Horseman (1941) and Crown and Sickle (1944).

The New Apocalyptics reacted against the political and social realism of the 1930s with its loving descriptions of factories and arterial roads and motorcycles and electricity pylons, and the belief that human nature was rational and could be rationally appealed to by rational argument. The name itself referenced D. H. Lawrence’s posthumous collection, Apocalypse (1931) and the poets in this tradition turned their backs on the Modern World and plunging into a heady stew of surrealism, myth, and expressionism. And then, of course, the world war broke out and quickly outdid their wildest imaginings of destruction, extreme situations and death.

George Barker

In this volume the Apocalyptics are represented by poems by Henry Treece and George Barker. Blythe includes a very useful 21-page section called ‘Notes on Contributors’ which gives potted biographies and select reading lists for all his authors, and spends half a page explaining Barker’s motivation: the preface to the Apocalypse volume spoke of ‘word explosions’, of their poetry’s ‘air of something desperately snatched from dream or woven around a chime of words, are the results of disintegration, not in ourselves, but in society…’ (G.S. Fraser, another founder member of the New Apocalyptics, quoted page 376).

But to be blunt, I dislike the examples of Barker’s poetry given here. If this is the best, I’m not impressed.

From Sacred Elegy by George Barker

From this window where the North Atlantic
Takes the crow in my mind home in a short line
Over the kissing fish in the wave, and the mine
Where the sailor clasps his death as mermaid like
Sex of a knife in the depth, from this window
Watching I see the farewelling seasons fall
Ever between us like rain. And the lachrymal
Memory, trailing its skirts, walks like a widow
Across those seas looking for home. O my Dido
Heart! Sail, sail the ships ever away from us all.

The phrasing and some of the obscurity which derives from it seems wilful. ‘Farewelling’ sounds like a schoolboy attempt to be interesting. The kissing fish in the wave seems pitifully inadequate to describe the Atlantic Ocean. The reference to Dido at the end kills it for me; falling back on classical references only highlights the main text’s weakness. Possibly, if you are predisposed to an anti-rational, pagan view of the world, this might ring your bell. But reading it in 2024, it felt strained and dated.

Henry Treece

Henry Treece is much more direct and therefore attractive:

From In The Beginning Was The Bird by Henry Treece

In the beginning was the bird,
A spume of feathers on the face of time,
Man’s model for destruction, God’s defence…

Though the third line is notably weaker than the first two (because over the top, grandiloquent, too much). And the word ‘spume’ instantly recalls W.B. Yeats’s much more powerful use of the same word in his wonderful poem Among Schoolchildren:

Plato thought nature but a spume that plays
Upon a ghostly paradigm of things;
Solider Aristotle played the taws
Upon the bottom of a king of kings…

Blythe’s note on Treece tells us that he went on to write an enormous number of books for children or young adults, often about the Dark Ages i.e. Arthur’s Britain, the Romans, the Vikings and so on. You can already feel that in this charming and simple poem.

Lincolnshire Bomber Station by Henry Treece

Across the road the homesick Romans made
The ground-mist thickens to a milky shroud;
Through flat, damp fields call sheep, mourning their dead
In cracked and timeless voices, unutterably sad,
Suffering for all the world, in Lincolnshire.

And I wonder how the Romans liked it here;
Flat fields, no sun, the muddy misty dawn,
And always, above all, the mad rain dripping down,
Rusting sword and helmet, wetting the feet
And soaking to the bone, down to the very heart . . .

It’s a big idea, which I don’t have the scholarship to verify, but I wonder whether the 1940s Neo-Romantic urge to write about the mysterious countryside, pagan beliefs, spirits and so on, after the war went into children’s fiction, went into all those novels about Roman Britain, by authors like Henry Treece or Rosemary Sutcliffe, which I read as a boy in the 1960s.

Dylan Thomas

Some critics tried to lump George Barker and Dylan Thomas together as founders or exponents of a broader literary movement called ‘Neo-Romanticism’. This label works better in the world of art and painting than in literature. In painting there was a definite turning away from the urban towards nostalgic, if highly stylised, sometimes nightmarish, depictions of the English countryside, but a countryside under stress, prey to visions and strange atmospheres. Not Constable’s England at all. (Neo-Romanticism in art.)

But although critics tried to rope him into these movement, Thomas wasn’t interested. Dylan Thomas was just 24 when the war broke out and Blythe amusingly tells us that he took it as a personal affront, a calculated attempt by the world to blunt his promising career. Nevertheless, he produced some fiery, clanging verse responses to the war. Blythe acutely points out that in several of his most famous wartime poems (Ceremony After A Fire Raid and A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London) Thomas ignores the statistics, the general headlines, and – as per Blythe’s thesis – zeroes in on the particular, in each case on one particular victim of the Blitz.

From A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London

Never until the mankind making
Bird beast and flower
Fathering and all humbling darkness
Tells with silence the last light breaking
And the still hour
Is come of the sea tumbling in harness

And I must enter again the round
Zion of the water bead
And the synagogue of the ear of corn
Shall I let pray the shadow of a sound
Or sow my salt seed
In the least valley of sackcloth to mourn

The majesty and burning of the child’s death…

This is in a different class from the Barker. Nobody could compete with these ringing declarations. Thomas seemed to have tapped deep into the wellspring of some pagan power, ‘the force that through the green fuse drives the flower’.

Edith Sitwell

Thomas may be associated with New Romanticism but he is sui generis, one of a kind, his grandiloquent poetry buttressed by the amazingly sonorous power of his readings. But out in the same paddock as Barker and Thomas were the more brittle but just as apocalyptic visions of Edith Sitwell. As Blythe points out, Sitwell’s wartime verse had travelled a long way since ‘the rhyming tomfoolery’ of the 1920s and the best of it uses Christian imagery to achieve a genuine sense of tragedy.

From Still Falls the Rain (The Raids, 1940: Night and Dawn)

Still falls the Rain –
Dark as the world of man, black as our loss –
Blind as the nineteen hundred and forty nails upon the Cross.

Still falls the Rain
With a sound like the pulse of the heart that is changed to the hammer beat
In the Potter’s Field, and the sound of the impious feet

On the Tomb:
Still falls the Rain
In the Field of Blood where the small hopes breed and the human brain
Nurtures its greed, that worm with the brow of Cain.

Still falls the Rain
At the feet of the Starved Man hung upon the Cross,
Christ that each day, each night, nails there, have mercy on us…

T.S. Eliot

The godfather of Modernist poetry was T.S. Eliot and the war saw him complete the epic undertaking of the Four Quartets, four long meditations on death and history and society, underpinned by his complex and sophisticated understanding of Christian faith. They are Burnt Norton (1936), East Coker (1940) The Dry Salvages (1941) and Little Gidding (1942).

These poems are unlike anything before or since in their complexity of structure and interlinking themes and images. To briefly summarise, each one is set in a specific rural location (hence the names) and then uses a physical description of this location and its historical associations to weave a complex web of ideas about time, history, reality and religion.

The Quartets are among the absolutely top masterpieces of twentieth century poetry in English and Blythe makes the super-sensible decision to quote the fourth and final one, Little Gidding, in its entirety. Here is the second part of section 2, a sustained homage to Eliot’s hero, Dante, in which he envisions himself walking through the glass-strewn streets of London after an air-raid and encountering a mysterious strange, much as Dante walked through hell encountering strange figures in the flickering half-light.

From Little Gidding by T.S. Eliot

In the uncertain hour before the morning
Near the ending of interminable night
At the recurrent end of the unending
After the dark dove with the flickering tongue
Had passed below the horizon of his homing
While the dead leaves still rattled on like tin
Over the asphalt where no other sound was
Between three districts whence the smoke arose
I met one walking, loitering and hurried
As if blown towards me like the metal leaves
Before the urban dawn wind unresisting…

Magnificent. Simple language, simple syntax, but a weird and brooding atmosphere leading up to the spooky final line…

Little Gidding online

Soldier poets

Away from the grandeurs of the London literary scene and its professional writers was the completely different category of soldiers, sailors and airman who wrote poetry and prose. The three most famous British poets of the Second World War are Keith Douglas (1920 to 1944), Alun Lewis (1915 to 1944) and Sidney Keyes (1922 to 1943). See how young they all died (24, 29, 21).

I have to say straight away that my favourite poet of the Second World War is Keith Douglas. It might not be a totally true generalisation, but it seems, working through this selection, that the further away you were from the fighting, the more gorgeous, visionary and surreal your writing became (Sitwell, Raine, Barker, Thomas), whereas the closer you were to the fighting, the more precise, detailed (and sometimes banal and everyday) the writing became, as soldiers, sailors and airman tried to nail down precisely what it felt like, to fly a Spitfire (Richard Hillary), to be aboard a torpedoed ship (James Henley), to be stuck in an infantry camp behind the lines during long hours of rainy boredom (Alun Lewis).

In this respect – in terms of clear, convincing description of what it’s like – Richard Hillary’s prose memoir of training as a Spitfire pilot, and Keith Douglas’s memoir of the war in the desert leading up to the Battle of El Alamein, are the standout pieces.

But it is striking that Douglas is the only author featured in this selection as both a poet and a prose writer. Something about his mentalité made him write memorably in both forms. For me, it’s his precision, his ability to get to the point. This doesn’t mean his poetry is prosey. It is as full of metaphor and vision as much other poetry. It’s just that the metaphor and imagery are subsumed, in his best poems, into a kind of laser-like accuracy.

From How to Kill by Keith Douglas

Under the parabola of a ball,
a child turning into a man,
I looked into the air too long.
The ball fell in my hand, it sang
in the closed fist: Open Open
Behold a gift designed to kill.

Now in my dial of glass appears
the soldier who is going to die.
He smiles, and moves about in ways
his mother knows, habits of his.
The wires touch his face: I cry
NOW. Death, like a familiar, hears

and look, has made a man of dust
of a man of flesh. This sorcery
I do. Being damned, I am amused
to see the centre of love diffused
and the wave of love travel into vacancy.
How easy it is to make a ghost…

The clarity and lack of any rhetoric or sentiment or bullshit, just what it is like to aim and shoot another human being.

It’s assisted by the preciseness of the half rhyme (also known as ‘imperfect rhyme’, ‘slant rhyme’, ‘near rhyme’ or ‘oblique rhyme’). Thus ball/kill; man/-pen; long/sang. As you read or hear it you sense that there’s a formal structure, a half-rhyme scheme, and yet the absence of exact rhymes prevents it from being predictable, makes it much closer to speech, like the speech of a man talking to you.

Of course it isn’t, and in fact lines like ‘This sorcery/I do’ has an Elizabethan feel to the syntactical reversal of the ordinary everyday phrase (‘I do this sorcery’) and the vocabulary.

The subtle half rhymes, the use of unexpected sentence structures, the ultra-modern subject matter and yet the knowing echoes of much older verse (are there echoes of Dr Faustus in ‘Being damned, I am amused’?) makes for an utterly modern read, rich in resonances and enjoyments.

Prose descriptions

Prose is more suited to descriptions of action. Thus two of the most vivid pieces are heart-in-the-mouth descriptions and/or stories of being a fireman during the Blitz by William Sansom. In both you are really right there as the vast flaming wall of a warehouse shivers and then topples towards him and his firefighting crew.

I liked John Sommerfield’s description of being part of a squadron which has to undertake an epic journey across North-East India by train and paddleboat and train again to get to the ravaged frontline with the Japanese in Burma.

What a lot of writers from the period share is a tremendous clarity of style and thought. Thus Richard Hillary comes across as very self-absorbed but he describes with wonderful clarity the experience of flying a Spitfire. Keith Douglas conveys with similar clarity the experience of being a tank commander in the excerpt from his memoir of war in the desert, Alamein to Zem Zem.

The memoir of London during the Blitz written by Bryher (pen-name of Annie Winifred Ellerman) is snobbish and self-serving (she keeps on about how she warned everyone about the Nazis since 1933 but would they listen? No, the fools) but also displays great clarity of description in her encounters with shop assistants or soldiers during the Blitz.

Essays

George Orwell

Rather as T.S. Eliot towers over the poets by virtue of the depth and breadth of his vision, in respect of clarity of thinking and prose style George Orwell towers over all the other prose writers. His essay in defence of P.G. Wodehouse (who foolishly and naively made a handful of radio broadcasts for the Nazis in 1940) is a masterpiece of clarity and honesty, and insights.

Orwell makes it clear he’s got hold of as many of Wodehouse’s writings as possible as well as the transcripts of his German broadcasts, and tried to clarify the events surrounding them i.e. he has done as much homework as possible. And then he proceeds to make a convincing case, based on the arguments that:

  • Wodehouse had no idea how his broadcasts would be interpreted
  • he had absolutely no political sense
  • he had been interned by the Germans for a year and so had missed the intensification of the conflict during 1940
  • that the fuss being kicked up about him was really a ruse by the media-owning classes (e.g. Lord Rothermere, owner of the Daily Mail) to distract attention away from their own much more serious pro-Hitler, appeasement attitudes

But it’s not only the clarity of the argument but the many insights it throws up along the way which make it still such an interesting read. For example, Orwell shows how both American and German critics in different ways had completely misunderstood Wodehouse. They thought he was a merciless satirist of the English upper classes. Orwell shows how Wodehouse was a dyed-in-the-wool, public school member of those classes and that all his tomfoolery comes from inside the worldview and is full, ultimately, of love and respect for it.

Arthur Koestler

I’ve reviewed Koestler’s two most famous books, the novels Darkness at Noon (1940) and Arrival and Departure (1943). They contain much vivid detail but are a bit ‘muddy’ in their thinking by which I mean the logic of the arguments, specially in Darkness, are harder to remember than the plight of the central character (an old Russian Bolshevik in prison having been arrested as part of Stalin’s purges).

The Koestler piece here is his short essay The Yogi and the Commissar (1945) which gave its title to a collection of essays published at the end of the war. It goes some way to explaining why Koestler turned into such a bore, publishing some 25 volumes of essays and explorations in the coming decades and becoming steadily more irrelevant.

Koestler proposes a ‘spectrum of philosophies’ which stretch from ‘the Commissar’ at the materialist, scientific end of the spectrum to ‘the Yogi’ at the spiritual, metaphysical end. The Commissar wants to change the individual from outside, the Yogi wants to change the individual from within. This is precisely the kind of clever-sounding intellectual conceit which has bugger-all relevance to the real world and gives rise to a surprising amount of high-sounding verbiage in a short space. It sounds fine but everything it deals with – Fascism, Communism, Democracy, Art, Science – it does so in a shallow, superficial way. I found it unreadable and consider it the only actively bad piece in the book.

Short stories

Elizabeth Bowen

Broadly speaking, the closer they stick to the subject, the more effective the prose works tends to be. Not always, though. The selection kicks off, not with any scene of battle, but with a ghostly and evocative description of a young couple walking round London in the Blackout after a bombing raid has departed. The young woman explains to her soldier boyfriend that she makes sense of it all, the Blitz, the chaos, by imagining the city is the fantasy city of Kôr, mentioned in Henry Rider Haggard’s adventure novel, She.

After this arrestingly atmospheric opening scene the story shifts to the domestic embarrassment of the young lady having to take her boyfriend back to the poky, cramped flat she shares with a girlfriend, and everyone’s general embarrassment and inconvenience. Yet the story is full of sly insights and perceptions just on the edge of consciousness, a subtle poetry of the periphery.

At half past ten, in obedience to the rule of the house, Callie was obliged to turn off the wireless, whereupon silence out of the stepless street began seeping into the silent room.

It took me a moment to realise that ‘stepless’ means empty of people and therefore with no sounds of stepping, of people walking. It’s a tasty sentence and the story is full of just such odd obliquities. It made me want to read more Elizabeth Bowen.

Fred Urquhart

There are other striking experiments. Fred Urquhart (‘described by one critic as the foremost Scottish short story writer of the twentieth century’) is represented by a story about potato pickers in a part of deeply rural Scotland which I didn’t catch because I barely understood the intense dialect he has his characters talking in. It is a war story because it is set during the war and the tattie pickers observe planes flying overhead, which all leads up to the climax when a German bomber crashes and blows up a few miles away.

James Hanley

Far more experimental is James Hanley’s piece, Sailor’s Song, an account of a torpedoed ship going down and a handful of men surviving by clinging to a raft which ought to be grittily realistic but is actually done in the style of Walt Whitman, with both the Ship and the Sea singing, describing their song and the human characters referred to with a kind of Biblical anonymity.

Glyn Jones

A different tone is presented by Welsh short story writer Glyn Jones’s story, Bowan, Moragan and Williams, which is a larky portrait of a boy and his family and friends and friends’ families in a tight-knit Welsh community, where everyone is odd and eccentric. I particularly liked the friend’s relative who is so nervous of other people that he speaks in an increasingly shrill voice and jams the napkin ring into his eye socket as if it is a jeweller’s eyeglass. The war is peripheral to this gallery of likeable eccentrics.

Elizabeth Berridge

Not so the very short story by Elizabeth Berridge in which a woman’s flat in the city is burgled and smashed up (when she’s not there), but she’s been living for some time in a retirement home with a snug community of friends and, after going with the police to examine the wreckage, she enjoys embellishing the description on the train back to the retirement home, relishing the opportunity to make her friends’ flesh creep with this appalling example of society going to the dogs… Only to arrive at the home that night and discover it wildly on fire, having been bombed and all her friends killed. The starkness of the facts and the protagonist’s inability to process what has happened are beautifully captured.

Summary

Except for a handful of poems by the obvious gods – Auden, Eliot, Thomas, Douglas – the short stories are, on the whole, more varied and powerful than any of the poems. This last story by Berridge, stands symbol for the countless millions of people who, although physically unharmed, had their lives ruined and their minds scarred by the appalling, meaningless violence of war.

Credit

Writing In A War edited by Ronald Blythe was first published in 1966. References are to the revised 1982 Penguin paperback edition.

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No Longer at Ease by Chinua Achebe (1960)

‘A man who lives on the banks of the river Niger should not wash his hands with spittle.’
(Traditional Igbo proverb, No Longer At Ease, chapter 1)

‘Na so did world be.’
(Igbo proverb, p.230 and elsewhere)

Chinua Achebe’s second novel is closely linked to the first, Things Fall Apart. The protagonist of that book was Okonkwo, a big man in the village of Umuofia, of the Igbo people in what would later become south-east Nigeria. Three-quarters of Things Fall Apart depicts the culture and practice of the Igbo people in the 1890s; the final quarter depicts the slow but unstoppable arrival of British colonial rule bringing with it European religion, administration, law and order, and showing the adverse affect these had on traditional Igbo culture and on Okonkwo in particular.

This second novel leaps forward about 60 years, to the late 1950s, to describe the life of Okonkwo’s grandson, Obi Okonkwo. In Things Fall Apart one of the many ill effects of the arrival of the British was that Okonkwo’s eldest son, Nwoye, converted to Christianity and moved out of the district altogether, changing his name to Isaac, betraying his heritage and rejecting his (often violent) father. We are told that Nwoye moved to the nearest big town, Umura, where he enrolled in teacher training college. Well, the protagonist of this book, Obi, Okonkwo, is Nwoye’s son (page 159; his mother is named Hannah Okonkwo, p.158).

An executive summary is pretty simple. Obi is a smart young man who gets the opportunity to study law in Britain. After graduating, Obi returns to his native Nigeria and gets a job in the public administration. Here he is shocked to discover that local government, already, before independence (which came in 1960), is mired in corruption.

In various ways, Obi’s attempts at honesty are rebuffed or mocked. He meets a young woman and falls in love, sharing with her the moral dilemmas he is faced with. Just paying to maintain his status, for example, paying the insurance on his car, stretch his resources. then his mother falls ill and needs medical treatment. Then he gets his girlfriend pregnant and has to pay for an abortion. The bank start pressing him about his ever-growing overdraft. Obi starts accepting bribes. The climax comes when he accepts one from an undercover policeman and is subsequently arrested, charged and taken to court for bribery.

The novel opens at the end of the plot, with Obi in court on trial for corruption and the narrative takes the form of flashbacks, back to all the moments which led up to him standing in court, broken and demoralised.

Chapter 1

Chapter 1 describes responses to Obi’s arrest and trial. White colonials (notably Obi’s boss, Mr Green) are depicted as dismissing all Africans as corrupt. He and his cronies are described drinking and pompously laughing at the exclusive white men’s club, served by discreet black stewards.

By complete contrast we are then introduced to the Umuofia Progressive Union, formed 6 or 7 years earlier (i.e. about 1950) by men from Obi’s village of Umuofia, with a view to subsidising the education of the best and brightest among them (p.157).

Obi was the first candidate chosen under this scheme and had been loaned £800 to study in England, to be repaid over 4 years after his return – and now here he is, on trial, bringing shame on his village and clan, harshly criticised by some in the Union. In fact, he had already outraged many in the Union, years earlier, by changing the subject he studied in England from the (useful) Law to (useless) English (p.158).

The narrative then moves further back in time to the big prayer meeting held in Umuofia and hosted by his father, the retired Christian catechist, where Obi is toasted as the pride of the community and given blessings and presents and advice for his trip, first to Lagos, then to London.

Chapter 2

Stories about big city Lagos told by soldiers who’d fought for the British in the Second World War, when they returned to Umuofia. En route to the UK, Obi looks up a friend from his school, Joseph Okeke (‘a second class clerk’), who briefs him about life in the big city.

Then the scene cuts to four years later, with Obi returned from the UK and living in Lagos, now attached to his girlfriend, Clara, and discovering seedier, poorer slums of the city which he hadn’t seen on his brief stay en route to England.

Quite quickly we are immersed in Obi’s post-British life in Lagos, complete with girlfriend Clara Okeke who is a nurse, puts up with Obi reading his poems, prefers to go to trashy violent American movies. His friend Christopher, a graduate from the London School of Economics. They have long arguments about the future of Nigeria and the role of bribery already present in the black administration.

Chapter 3

The reader is getting used to the narrative jumping around in time. Now we leap back to when Obi and Clara first met, at a dance in St Pancras Town Hall in London. Obi was clumsy and gauche. Eighteen months later they meet by chance on the boat back to Nigeria, the MV Sasa, sailing from Liverpool.

Evocative description of the sea journey, companions at dinner, the changing moods of the sea. Obi has bad sea sickness and formerly aloof Clara is kind enough to give him some pills for it. Obi becomes firm friends with a white man, John Macmillan (p.172). They discover they’re both 25 years old.

The ship docks at Funchal, largest city in the Madeira islands. Obi, John and Clara explore the city together. That evening, back on board ship, they have their first kiss.

Chapter 4

On arriving at Lagos a local official tries to extract a £5 import duty on Obi’s radiogram. It’s a symbolic re-introduction to African corruption. ‘Dear old Nigeria,’ he said to himself (p.176).

The officials of the Umuofia Progressive Union arrange a grand gala reception for the prodigal son. We learn his first name is actually Michael, Michael Obi Okonkwo (p.177). The scene is played for laughs (I think) with a big discrepancy between Obi’s informal approach (dressing in shirtsleeves, delivering an informal speech about education) which contrast strongly with the shirt and tie formality of the Union’s officials and a grandiose speech about obi representing their village in the Great Future of the Country etc.

After the reception his friend Joseph takes him to a bar for a drink. Obi wants to eat traditional Nigerian food but finds it impossible to order. Nobody with ambition eats the old-style food (roast yams and bitter-leaf soup).

A flashy car draws up outside the club and out gets the super-popular, handsome and well-groomed politician the Honourable Sam Okoli. Happening to be in a chair facing that way, Obi sees he has a female companion in his flash car. It is Clara.

Bribery and corruption

In the 20 or so books about post-independence Africa I’ve read this year, corruption emerges as such a consistent universal feature of African states and economies that you eventually realise it is the system, the way things are run and managed from the lowest to the highest levels, while the fol-de-rol about democracy or transparent governance etc are formal hoops African leaders have to jump through in order to get their next tranche of World Bank loans, half-mocking lip service paid to western banks.

So this book is a fascinating insight into how the issue of corruption was perceived, discussed and addressed by Africans at the time of independence, over 60 years ago. Just the fact that Achebe chose to make the topic a central theme of his second book, with repeated discussions of it by the characters, is itself hugely revealing. Regarded just as documentary evidence for social history, it’s a fascinating body of evidence. I was riveted by passages like this:

In Nigeria the government was ‘they’. It had nothing to do with you or me. It was an alien institution and people’s business was to get as much from it as they could without getting into trouble. (p.178)

Chapter 5

Obi writes a paper expressing his view that corruption is caused by the older generation and will be stamped out once a new, young generation of university graduates like himself rise to the top. He interviews for a job in the civil service, led by a white man who is happy to discuss recent literature with Obi (recent literature including Graham Greene’s ‘The Heart of The Matter’). This man asks him point blank if he wants to the job (Secretary to the Scholarship Board) so he can take bribes? Obi is understandably furious but also demoralised that this is the universal and low expectation of even educated young Nigerians (cf. p.212 where Joseph’s friends simply expect Obi to take bribes).

While waiting to hear the result, Obi takes a ‘mammy-wagon’ i.e. a packed bus, the 500 miles from Lagos to Umuofia.

On the way corrupt policemen pull them over for a bribe. Obi watches the driver about to pay and both participants shy away from being directly witnessed. This only leads to the driver motoring a bit further on then stopping and running back to pay the policemen. Instead of the standard 2 shillings the bribe is jacked up to 10 shillings. Everyone in the car blames Obi for his goody two shoes, over-educated fussiness which has only ended up making them worse off. Obi despairs of wiping out corruption. Educating the masses would take centuries. It has to come from changing the people at the top. Maybe a benign dictator.

An enlightened dictator. People are scared of the word nowadays. But what kind of democracy can exist side by side with so much corruption and ignorance? (p.186)

This book was published in 1960, just as Nigeria gained independence, six years before it had its first military coup in 1966. To date there have been five military coup d’états in Nigeria. Between 1966 and 1999 Nigeria was ruled by a military government apart from the short-lived Second Nigerian Republic of 1979 to 1983 = 29 years of military rule.

The mammy wagon arrives at the famous market town of Onitsha, allowing Obi to wander round it and Achebe to slip in a description of it, before he completes the last 50 miles to Umuofia. There’s a heartfelt passage, which feels very autobiographical, on how lonely Ibo felt in London, and how he felt like a cultural traitor, studying the language of the colonist, instead of his own culture.

Back in the village he is greeted by a great assembly, featuring his father the Christian but plenty of village elders who have refused to become Christians, and speak and think in the old ways, sitting on goatskin, unable to imagine a ship which sails the oceans, only able to conceive of Obi’s trip as a voyage to the land of the spirits. The old culture lives on very powerfully in Umuofia.

Pidgin

Many of the characters, the minor uneducated ones, appear to speak pidgin English. It feels like this novel is a good source of information about the state of pidgin in 1950s Nigeria, but I am too uneducated / ignorant of the subject to comment.

Christopher’s prowess at pidgin i.e. being able to switch between English, Igbo and pidgin to suit the company, time and situation (p.238).

Chapter 6

When everyone else has left, an intimate portrait of Obi’s family, his mother, father, brother, six sisters (p.196). His father, Isaac, is officious and bossy about his Christian faith in a way reminiscent of his tyrannical father, Okonkwo. Isaac forbade his wife, Obi’s mother, Hannah, to tell her children the old folk stories (p.197). Obi remembers being a boy at the village school and humiliated because when called on by the teacher to stand before the class and tell a folk story, he couldn’t. He went home in tears and told his mother. She said wait till your father goes to his next evening prayer meeting, then she told Obi a folk tale. Then he was able to tell it in school. These all feel like pure autobiography of Achebe whose father was a teacher and evangelist. Achebe’s father took the Christian name Isaiah; Obi’s father takes the Christian name Isaac.

It’s difficult to convey how candid and moving these passages are. No great excitement, no arguments, no historical moments, just a sense of the warmth and companionableness of a large family who enjoy teasing and entertaining each other. Made me jealous.

Chapter 7

He remembers the second white man he saw, a Mr Jones who was a school inspector 20 years previously i.e. about 1937 (in fact, later in the text the narrator dates it to 1935, p.235). Mr Jones was tall and drove a big motorbike which he left half a mile from the school so he could arrive unannounced and detect faults. How he interrupted the black headmaster, Mr Nduka and then, in his rage, slapped him. How Mr Nduka was an expert wrestler and in a flash had Mr Jones on the floor in a wrestling hold. How all the children fled in terror.

Obi presumably passed his interview because we now see him starting h is first job, in government administration. His boss is the rude Mr Green, while his immediate manager is the old and cowering African, Mr Omo, who has bad teeth and can only speak pidgin.

As a new senior civil servant Obi is awarded a clothing allowance and a car. He phones Clara who is thrilled. he discovers the Honourable Sam Okoli has no designs on Clara, in fact is soon to marry her best friend. Sam lives in a massive house. There was controversy when the government blew £35,000 on each new house for its ministers. He shows off to Clara and Obi his gramophone and tape machine. He has immaculate flunkeys to wait on him. All this before independence. You can see why post-colonial critics accuse the Europeans of establishing a template of gross inequality between governors and governed which the African ruling classes simply copied.

Clara tearfully tells Obi she can’t marry him because she is an osu, a kind of Igbo version of the Indian ‘untouchable’, from a family which devoted itself to a particular tribal god and became outcasts (defined on pages 207, 208 and 256). Obi, as an educated man, consider all this gibberish, insists that he will marry her, buys an engagement ring.

The friend in Lagos, Joseph Okeke, whose place he’s still staying at, argues with him, saying his parents, Christians though they may be, will reject an osu as a bride, specially for the local boy made good Obi. (Later Clara says she doesn’t like Joseph because ‘he’s a bushman’ i.e. uneducated, close to the old tribal rural ways, p.237.)

The first educated Nigerian generation

Sprinkled through the book are references to the idea that they – Obi, Clara, Joseph et al – belong to the new young generation, they are going to do things a new way, not just re. corruption, but bringing western education, standards of behaviour etc, in exactly such things as this ridiculous superstition about osu. But some of them are aware that, being a pioneer generation means they can’t change everything at once. For example, his educated friend Christopher coming down on his parents’ side, regarding Clara:

‘You may say that I am not broad-minded but I don’t think we have reached the stage where we can ignore all our customs.’ (p.264)

Chapter 8

We learn the years is 1956 because the Umuofia Progressive Union holds its next meeting on 1 December 1956 (p.212). You can see why the UPU exists, to promote the interests of men from the village who have moved to the big city and have formed what is in effect s self-help group. But you can also see how it itself fits into the matrix of corruption in the sense that, having got ‘one of theirs’ into a good government job, they expect him to speak up for his clansmen and use his influence to get them jobs and money.

In the event Obi makes a gracious speech and a good impression until the President of the UPU (‘the father of the Umuofia people in Lagos’) very mildly starts to refer to Clara as bad company. He had barely hinted at her osu background (‘a girl of doubtful ancestry’) when Obi, trembling with fury, leaps to his feet, shouts abuse at the President and, despite plenty of voices telling him to calm down, storms out of the meeting and has his driver roar off.

Having just read Things Fall Apart I see that Obi has inherited the fiery temper which characterised and was the downfall of his grandfather, Okonkwo.

Chapter 9

At his new work Obi is given an office with Mr Green’s secretary, Miss Marie Tomlinson. She seems to be sweet and friendly although Obi suspects her of being a spy set to catch him out.

Obi has been back from Britain for 6 months when he is first tempted by a bribe. An inoffensive looking man named Mr Mark offers him a bribe to give preferential treatment to his daughter. Obi chases him out of the office, not least because Miss Marie Tomlinson has witnessed the entire thing.

Obi is as proud of himself for resisting temptation as he was after he lost his virginity (to a white woman in England, p.220).

Money pressure. Obi is paid a monthly salary of £47 ten shillings, but from this he is paying back his loan from the UPU at £20 a month, and sending £10 to his parents, and promised his father, on his visit back to Umuofia, that he would pay his younger brother, John’s, school fees.

That evening Mr Mark’s 17 or 18 year old sister, Elsie Mark (p.222) knocks on his apartment door. He kindly invites her in and she tells her sad story, that the family spent all their money on her elder brother who failed all his exams, so now it’s desperately important that she goes to university in order to get a good job with lots of money to support her family and she’ll do anything to get a recommendation from Obi in his capacity as Secretary to the Scholarship Board. I think the implication is she is prepared to sleep with him but at this moment Clara bursts through the front door, bridles when she sees the girl, helps herself to a drink from the fridge, asks about the soup she made for Obi and generally makes it crystal clear that he is her man. But she needn’t have bothered. The poor young girl is humiliated. Obi kindly offers to run her back into town (taxis are expensive) and all the way back Clara gives him a hard time.

Chapter 10

A year later the insurance on Obi’s car is due, £40. He only has £13 in the bank. Not least because he sent his mother £35 to be given private medical treatment. Then there’s his electricity bill. And the tyres have gone and need renewing.

He decides he has to take out a £50 overdraft with the bank. Which all leads to an argument with Clara. Her way of arguing is to go completely silent and, since she does most of the talking, creating a great silence, which eventually intimidates Obi into capitulating.

Chapter 11

Obi’s speculation about Mr Green, who works very hard at the job but, Obi thinks, for a vision of Nigeria which doesn’t exist, for the Nigeria of his western colonialist dreams. Clara sends a package via a messenger from her hospital, which contains £50. Obi goes to see her, to tell her he can’t accept it. They argue about it.

Obi and Clara go to see his friend, Christopher the economist, and his latest girlfriend, Bisi, who persuade them to go dancing at the Imperial Hotel. Interesting description of dancing styles to high-life music. When they emerge from the bar in the early hours it’s to discover that someone’s broken into Obi’s car and stolen the box with Clara’s £50 in it.

Chapter 12

Mr Green is depicted as a bigot who, despite having ‘served’ in the country for 15 years, makes a point of telling everyone that all Africans are corrupt and lecturing Obi on his fellow ‘educated’ Nigerians who expect the Government to pick up the tab for their lives.

He’s obviously meant to be a narrow-minded bigot but I couldn’t help having a sneaking liking for him, as I did for the bigoted ex-pats in Ronan Bennett’s novel about Congo at the time of independence, The Catastrophist. On the face of it they’re illiberal bigots except that they turn out to predict the future (political chaos, violent secessions, civil war, white flight) with perfect precision, while the sympathetic liberal characters, who hoped for the best, turn out to be completely wrong.

Mr Green is more obnoxious than that, he goes out of his way to be offensive and insulting. He’s an arse, basically. But there’s enough truth mixed up in his prejudice to make him an interestingly complicated character.

Obi receives a letter from his father saying his mother requires further medical treatment.

Then he has a day with friend Christopher going to chat up two Irish Catholic girls he knows, then onto Bisi’s place, then to his latest girlfriend’s, Florence. Obi tells him about the girl, Elsie Mark, who appeared to offer herself in order to win a scholarship. She got it anyway and is studying in England, now. Christopher calls him a fool for turning down sex with her. She probably slept with the rest of the Board. Maybe, Obi says, but can’t he see how corrupt it is. They go out for dinner and argue about definitions of bribery late into the night.

Chapter 13

February 1957 (p.249). Clara again tells him she wants to break off the engagement. She says it’s because his parents will disapprove. He reassures her, they kiss, they make love.

Obi takes a week’s leave back home. He explains how villagers like his expect the local boy who made good in the big city to shower them with largesse except that, as we’ve seen, he’s actually broke (specially as he’s just paid John’s fees for one term, £16 ten shillings), so that’s a problem (p.251).

When he gets to Umuofia he discovers his mother is very weak and ill and old, with hands like claws. He tries to contain his sorrow. Performers from a funeral pass by and stop to serenade them. His mother likes music, ‘even when it was heathen music’.

Chapter 14

Still on this week’s leave at his village, Obi finally has the conversation about Clara with his father. His father tells him point blank he cannot marry Clara. They debate it, Obi saying it’s ridiculous superstition and will have disappeared in ten years’ time, his father insisting he will curse himself, his sons and daughters, their sons and daughters, for generations to come. In a funny way Obi enjoys the argument because he feels he is engaging with his father in a way he never has before, in all his 26 years (p.257).

The next morning he is up early to attend family prayers led by his father. Then he is alone with his very sick mother who horrifies him by telling him that if he marries an osu she will kill herself and he will have her blood on his hands!

Obi retires to his bed, claiming to be too tired from the long journey to see anyone, which neighbours and people who’ve come to visit consider a great insult. In the evening his father comes quietly into his bedroom but instead of discussing the osu issue, Obi’s father tells him about how he rebelled against his father and how his father cursed him, and all his life he’s lived under this shadow.

Chapter 15

Obi drives the 500 kilometres all the way back to Lagos in one go, without stopping, nearly crashing into a mammy-wagon on the way. He washes, changes, goes to Clara’s apartment, tells her about his mother, tries to make it sound like a small impediment which can be fixed, but Clara says ‘I told you so’ and hands him back her engagement ring (p.263). Then she lowers her voice and says there was something else she wanted to tell him, but…she’ll sort it out herself. Presumably she means she’s pregnant.

Obi drives to see his friend Christopher who 1) takes his parents’ side, saying he personally would never marry an osu; and 2) he can get him the addresses of some abortionists, though again he personally thinks it’s the woman’s responsibility, not least because you can never be sure whether you’re the father.

The first doctor they go to see is an old guy who refuses point blank to perform an abortion. The second one is much younger and demands £30 in cash. Both ask Obi why doesn’t he simply marry her?

Chapter 16

Obi sweats about where to get the money, rejecting the options of a moneylender, his friends let along the President of the Umuofia Union. He settles on the smooth and handsome and rich Honourable Sam Okoli.

At 2pm the next day Obi is at the clinic and hands the doctor £30 in cash. The doctor tells Clara to stay and Obi to return at 5pm. Obi goes out and gets into his parked car, watches Clara exit the clinic and get into the doctor’s car and they drive away. After a few seconds Obi panics and lurches after them. He’s too late but he drives all over Lagos like a mad thing trying to find them.

At 5pm he’s back at the clinic but the doctor is alone, telling him he wants to keep Clara in overnight in case of complications. Next day Obi’s back at the clinic and pushes past the nurse and all the waiting patients to see the doctor. The doctor very casually says Clara had a few complications but is now at a private clinic being looked after by a colleague of his. Obi races over to the address he gives him, and is told Clara is seriously ill and cannot see visitors.

Chapter 17

Next morning Obi is back at work and the last thing he needs is the poisonous bigot Mr Green criticising the number of holidays Nigerians treat themselves too etc. He had gone to see Clara at the hospital but when she spotted him she simply turned to the wall. All the other patients saw this. Obi has never felt so humiliated.

His finances are pressing. He wants to pay Clara back the £50 that was stolen. He goes see Mr Omo about his advance. I didn’t understand this. I think he got an advance for his visit back to his parents in Umuofia but didn’t realise it was a loan and had to be paid back, retaining a sum calculated according to mileage. He does the sums and discovers he can only claim for £15 for his drive to and from Umuofia. He’ll have to lie and say he went further, say to Cameroon.

When Obi considers the total situation, he realises it’s the burden of having to pay £20 back to the Union which is screwing his finances. He decides to unilaterally stop paying it, without telling them.

He writes and rewrites a long self-extenuating letter to Clara but can’t get the tone right. Yes, great at quoting T.S. Eliot, but rubbish at managing his job, finances and relationships. Portrait of a callow young man.

Chapter 18

Clara is in hospital for five weeks then goes on 70 days sick leave without contacting him. Then he gets a demand from the Revenue for income tax £32. Then his mother dies and, although he sends money, it isn’t enough to pay for an impressive funeral, which is noted by the entire town, and reported back to the UPU in Lagos. An avalanche of troubles and failures.

By this stage it is clear Obi is a man crushed by a combination of circumstances rather than any particular Grand Flaw. Early on in the novel he had argued with the white man who interviews him for his job that tragedy isn’t a matter of one Grand Event which brings closure and satisfaction to all concerned. Real tragedy is the daily grinding down of people by circumstances. You can see how that speech was inserted as a comment on this entire narrative.

The vexing thing is, of course, that everybody misinterprets his actions. We hear a load of speeches at the Union from old timers who’ve seen it happen all-too-often, the young man who gets an education, moves to the big city, is seduced by the sweets of sin i.e. women, and forgets his family, his village and the old ways. They are like the Chorus of a Greek tragedy, or Achebe’s reimagining of a Greek tragedy as one of grinding crushing circumstances rather than a grand climax.

His work gives him leave, he goes home, cries his eyes out and sleeps like a baby. Then Joseph, the ‘bushman’, arrives with a crate of beers to be put in the fridge, and then in groups about 25 of the UPU arrive at Obi’s flat. Joseph may be a ‘bushman’ but he understands his people better than Obi. The arrivals condole with Obi who is genuinely touched, then get on with gossiping about news and current affairs.

The indictment of a young man who doesn’t respond appropriately to his mother’s death reminded me of Albert Camus’s novel The Outsider.

‘Poor mother!’ he said, trying by manipulation to produce the right emotion. But it was no use. The dominant feeling was of peace. (p.280)

Chapter 19

Suddenly the novel ends. Just four more pages, in which Obi feels as if he’s been through the wringer, been through the fire, and emerged new-forged.

It is the season when students applied for their scholarships. Obi has brought a lot of the paperwork home. A flash car pulls up in front of his apartment block. A confident flash man enters his flat and proffers £50 cash if Obi will recommend his son for the scholarship to study in Britain. He goes on to say they ought to become friends, and he will nominate him to become a member of Lagos’s premier club. Then he walks out ignoring Obi’s feeble protestations. The money lies there all the rest of the day and the night while Obi agonises.

In a few swift paragraphs we cut to a scene of Obi dancing with a young girl who is on the short list of candidates. He manoeuvres her to the bedroom. They have sex though it isn’t in the event, very fulfilling. He drives her back to her place then drops round to friend Christopher’s to joke about it.

Obi has, in other words, been thoroughly corrupted. He pays off Sam Okoli who loaned him money, he pays off his bank overdraft. Then someone brings £20. He takes it but a few minutes later the same man returns with a police officer. They search Obi, find the marked notes and he is charged with corruption. The rest is like a dream, he sleepwalks through it in a daze.

And in a quick throwaway paragraph, Achebe brings us back to the very start of the novel with Obi standing in the dock, listening to a series of witnesses to his life saying none of them understand how a fine, upstanding man with all the privileges and perks of his fine education let himself sink to the blah blah blah.

High life music

In chapter 11 Obi and Clara, Christopher and his latest girlfriend, Bisi, go to the Imperial hotel where the band plays this song and the dancefloor is immediately packed.

It’s followed by ‘Gentleman Bobby’.

Music dates stories faster, more completely, than language. This novel is as old as this music and doesn’t the music sound dated, messages from another, more innocent world?

Thoughts

Corruption is the nominal central theme of the novel, as discussed above. But from this emerges the bigger one of the clash of cultures and values over this question of osu, a clash which remains as fierce and intractable as when the missionaries first arrived in Umuofia 60 years earlier. In this respect the novel paints a really persuasive, compelling portrait of the way the old African traditions not only lived on and continued to thrive but presented an ever-wider chasm with the values of ‘the modern world’. It is this clash which the novel really presents, with the power which comes from the slow patient accumulation of thousands and thousands of tiny details, of language and description and characterisation.

Then there’s sexual politics. Clara’s abortion nearly kills her. So no-one dies but Clara nearly does and the foetus does, victims of the failure of a traditional patriarchal society to join the modern world. Mind you, as so often, the real blocker to a rational solution is not Obi’s father, who is presented as almost a victim, a sensitive man who laboured under a lifelong curse – it’s his mother, the caring woman he thought he had a special bond with, who threatens to kill herself if he should marry an osu. He thinks he can talk his father round. With his mother’s absolute ban there can be no negotiation.

Achebe is great for all kinds of reasons, for being the first great African novelist, for his style, for his loyalty to his roots, for his phenomenal ability to completely immerse you in the African milieu. All the way through I was trying to put into words the thing which makes his books so immensely enjoyable, and I think it’s his sincerity. There’s no bullshit, contrivance or pretence, for effect. It feels like he’s giving you his own experiences, slightly tweaked to fit into a novel narrative, but without pretence or contrivance. You feel like you’re reading something really profound and true. Sounds silly but it’s almost an honour to read Chinua Achebe’s novels.

Conrad and Heart of Darkness p.235.

Credit

No Longer At Ease by Chinua Achebe was published in 1960 by Heinemann Books. References are to the 2010 Everyman’s Library hardback edition.

Related links

Chinua Achebe reviews

Africa reviews

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Posted by Simon on January 17, 2024

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Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika by Giles Foden (2004)

Factual history has always played a central role in Foden’s fiction, possibly, arguably, to its detriment.

Thus his harrowing account of a (fictional) Scottish doctor who gets caught up in Idi Amin’s murderous regime in ‘The Last King of Scotland’ begins to go off the rails when it tries to have our hero present at an increasingly unlikely number of actual historical events.

Similarly, ‘Zanzibar’ is a novel about an American couple who get caught up in the 1998 terrorist attacks on embassies in East Africa, a text which, at some points, puts the fiction completely on hold while it delivers straight lectures about the origins of al-Qaeda, or the Starr Enquiry into Bill Clinton, or the precise functioning of a Tomahawk cruise missile, among many other factual digressions.

In this book, Foden’s fondness for historical fact triumphs over fiction: it is not a novel at all. It is a factual account of actual historical events but not done in the dry tones of an academic historian. These real events are viewed from a deliberately playful, quirky angle, written in a consistently whimsical style, and with many scenes and conversations imagined. Semi-fictionalised history…

On Lake Tanganyika

At the outbreak of the First World War, Germany ‘owned’ the colony of German East Africa, roughly present-day Tanzania, bordered by Portuguese East Africa to the south (modern Mozambique) and British East Africa to the north (modern Kenya and Uganda).

The key geographical feature of the region was Lake Tanganyika (at 420 miles, the longest freshwater lake in the world) which the Germans dominated by means of several big warships, two motorboats, a fleet of dhows and some Boston whalers.

Dominance of the lake was important because a) it was the lynchpin to ownership of the entire territory and war is about controlling territory; which in turn b) gave the Germans access to a potentially large supply of native or askari troops, with c) the worst-case scenario of Germ,any assembling an African army from across the region and descending down the Nile to take (British-run) Egypt and threatening the route to the jewel in the crown of the British Empire, India (p.46).

In 1915, with the war in stalemate on the Western Front and Churchill’s Gallipoli campaign about to lurch to disaster, the Admiralty was persuaded by a British big game hunter named John Lee, of a plan to combat and destroy the German battleships on Lake Tanganyika. The plan involved transporting the parts for a couple of fast motorboats by ship to South Africa, then north by rail up through Rhodesia, then by land and river through the Belgian Congo, then by train again East and so, finally, onto the lake directly opposite the German base at Kigoma.

Here the motorboats would be quickly assembled and set to attack the German warships. The whole expedition was put under the command of a well-known eccentric and semi-disgraced naval officer, Commander Geoffrey Spicer-Simpson.

A factual account

I initially thought this was one more of Foden’s deeply historical fictions. It certainly opens with an obviously imagined scene of a big game hunter stalking an elephant, using fictional devices to imagine his thoughts and actions. This, it turns out, is the big game hunter John Lee, whose plan is going to kick start the narrative. It establishes Foden’s method basing everything on documentary evidence of the historical events but freely inventing ‘fictional’ details, especially the characters’ dialogue.

What made me realise it is indeed a history is the extent of Foden’s quotations from other histories, from numerous memoirs, articles and lectures – every page has quotes from other books about the First World War or Africa – and from the flotilla of footnotes bobbing at the bottom of every page. These serve to indicate the scope of Foden’s research and reading and generally bolster the authenticity of the narrative, augmented by four pages of maps at the start, showing just where everything happened, and a three-page bibliography (listing 41 books and articles) at the end. Also at the end is a nifty page showing silhouettes of all the ships involved in the narrative, indicating their relative sizes.

Whimsy

Yet despite all this factual fol-de-rol, it’s not really a book for adults. This begins to be indicated 1) by the frivolous title, 2) by the deliberate ‘Swallows and Amazons’ hand-drawn style of the maps, and 3) by the fact that every chapter starts with an equally children’s book-style illustration (by Matilda Hunt). These all give the visual impression that it is a Swallows and Amazons-style children’s book.

Most of all it’s indicated by the book’s brisk skipping over massively important historical facts (such as the outbreak and progress of the Great War, the conception and deployment of the Gallipoli campaign) in favour of foregrounding the maximum amount of silliness.

For the whole thing is played for laughs, liberally sprinkled with scenes of high farce. Take one of the earliest scenes in the book, which introduces us to the future leader of the expedition, Geoffrey Spicer-Simpson, watching the vessel he was meant to be captain of being torpedoed and sunk while he was irresponsibly having a drink in the bar of an English harbourside hotel. The general idea is that Spicer-Simpson was an obsessive incompetent who the Admiralty was happy only too happy to send on some wild goose chase into darkest Africa.

The narrative goes out of its way to wring the maximum amount of comic effect from the eccentricities of many of the key characters. Take Spicer-Simpson’s insistence on only smoking handmade cigarettes with his name monogrammed on them. Or Sub-Lieutenant Tyrer, ‘one of the earliest English aviators’ and his habit of affecting a monocle and a taste for Worcester sauce as an aperitif and his nickname Piccadilly Johnny. It’s history rewritten in the mode of Jeeves and Wooster. Michael Palin’s ‘Ripping Yarns’. History for the lolz.

It goes out of its way to emphasise the whimsical and and droll: Tubby Eastward acquires a chimpanzee he names Josephine (p.99). When they capture a goat which was a mascot on a German ship, it turns out the goat will let Josephine ride on its back (p.204). A Tanganyika guidebook advises that dead Zebra noses make pretty slippers (p.104). All this before we get onto the expedition leader’s fondness for wearing skirts, admittedly made from army khaki, but which he insisted were suitable for the hot weather, to the derision of pretty much everyone else on the expedition (p.171).

This question of whether it’s for adults was answered for me on page 35, where he gives us a lengthy footnote explaining what the Crystal Palace was, how it was transplanted to Sydenham, and burned down in 1936. He has to explain what the Crystal Palace was. From that point onwards I realised this is an intelligent child’s version of history, and wondered what the book’s target age group was intended to be: 12? 16? A feeling reinforced by the egregious use of exclamation marks to ram home the comedy.

It was supposedly a secret mission, although Kapitän Zimmer’s memoirs reveal that he knew there was a British naval expedition on its way to the lake by late May 1915: before it had even set off! (p.56)

More accurately, maybe, as Conan Doyle wrote somewhere, it’s for the adventuresome boy of any age.

Basic facts

The expedition was officially named the Naval African Expedition. Its mission was to transport two motorboats across land to Lake Tanganyika and use them to sink the Germans’ three battleships, Hedwig von Wissmann, the Kingani and the Graf von Götzen. Here’s all the facts you need to know:

Note how the Battle article cites an impressive number of citations from Foden’s book, suggesting that, despite its larky tone, it is now the definitive modern account of these events.

Why ‘Mimi and Toutou go forth’?

Mimi and Toutou are what Spicer named the two motorboats, telling his men they were French for ‘miaow’ and ‘bow-wow’, respectively (p.37).

‘Mimi’ in 1915. Note the cannon at the front and machine gun at the back. National Maritime Museum, London

As to ‘go forth’, this is a Ripping Yarns-type phrase which Foden deploys early on in the narrative, presumably hoping for a laugh, and then repeats at various points of their journey through the jungle and deployment on the lake, presumably for comic effect. Except that, like most of Foden’s attempts at comic effect, it doesn’t come off. Not for me, anyway.

Timeline of the journey

June 1915: the two motorboats undergo trials on the River Thames.

15 June: the two motorboats loaded aboard the Llanstephen Castle which sets sail from Tilbury, London, bound for Cape Town.

2 July: arrive at Cape Town to hear word of Royal Navy engagement with the German battleship Königsberg, on the Indian Ocean.

16 July: load the motorboats onto trains at Cape Town and set off on the 2,000 mile train journey north.

26 July: arrive at Elizabethville, the most southernmost major city in the Belgian Congo (p.81)

5 August: the expedition reaches the end of the railway at Fungurume. The two boats are unloaded from the train from Cape Town and commence their journey overland (p.90).

Pages 90 to 158 describe the long journey of the motor boats by train, by traction engine-drawn trailer through the jungle, up and over the Mitumba mountains and down into the Congo river for a spell, before docking and taking the train east to Lake Tanganyika, are awesome. It was an epic journey fraught with countless problems (rain, mud, quicksand, buckling bridges, the traction engines continually slipping off the track into the undergrowth or down steep slopes), the white men showing amazing resourcefulness and the reader boggling at the sheer physical labour demanded of the hundreds of native labourers they co-opted to labour for them.

28 September: after the gruelling portage over the Mitumba mountains, the expedition reaches the railhead at Sankisia and the motorboats are transferred to train.

1 October 1915 (p.128) A brisk railway journey brings them to Bukama station, where the motorboats are transferred to lighters on the Lualaba river down which they’ll be ferried. The Lualaba is in fact the name for the higher reaches of the main tributary of the Congo, it changes its name to Congo at the start of the Stanley Falls (p.127). They hitch a ride on the Constantin de Burlay, skippered by the drunk and angry Captain Blaes, passing across Lake Kisabe.

22 October: arrive at the railhead at Kabalo where they’ll leave the river and head east by rail along the valley of the Lukuga towards Lake Tanganyika (p.150).

26 October: the expedition arrives at the railhead which in fact, in that African way, comes to an abrupt halt a few miles before the port at Lukuga, which the Belgians call Albertville. The Belgians ran out of rails and sleepers. The boats are hidden in a siding until

Timeline of naval engagements

1 December: German ship Kingani comes in close to Lukuga and is fired on by Belgian guns (p.176).

22 December: first of the motor boats launched onto the lake (p.184)

26 December: the German Kingani comes incautiously close to the new harbour being built for the motorboats. These wait for her to pass then set off in hot pursuit, scoring direct hits, killing the captain and forcing the chief engineer to surrender. The badly damaged ship is towed into the Belgian port (Lukuga). Macabrely, Spicer takes the signet ring from the finger of the dead captain and wore it continually afterwards (pages 192 to 197). Our boys repair the Kingani, and Spicer renames it Fifi,  in line with his frivolous naming of the two motorboats. Apparently it was the first German ship to be captured and transitioned to the Royal Navy during the Great War (p.204).

9 February: the Hedwig is order to spy out the Belgian port before rendezvousing with the Götzen. Instead it finds itself engaged with four of the allied boats (though not Toutou which had been damaged in a storm, p.222). After an extended chase and shooting, the Brits score two direct hits on the Hedwig and sink her, capturing her captain and crew.

5 June 1916: the flotilla sail south to Bismarckburg to link up with colonial soldiers who take it from the Germans (p.252).

11 June: Belgian seaplanes bomb the Graf von Götzen (p.254).

26 July: seeing that a large Belgian force was about to seize the German base of Kigoma, the captain of the Graf von Götzen gives orders for it to be scuttled (p.255).

After which (from page 257) Foden gives a kind of epilogue. The naval force was broken up. A depressed Spicer was invalided home. The two motorboats were handed over to the Belgians. Various other members of the crew met different fates, staying on in Africa or returning home via different routes.

Ripping diction

Posh diction in a multicultural society

I live in the most multicultural constituency in the UK, Streatham Hill, where over 120 languages are spoken, not least by my Chinese postman, the West African women on the Tesco’s checkout, the Brazilian receptionist at my Asian dentist’s, the Albanian labourers who fixed my fence, the Somalis who sweep the streets and so on.

Foden went to a jolly good public school (Malvern College, current annual boarding fee £46,000 i.e. entire secondary education £322,000 plus extras). He has done terrifically well in the London literary mafia where such a background sets the tone.

Living in this multicultural, multilingual, white minority environment makes me more aware than ever how incongruous it is that a certain kind of jolly, public schoolboy English diction lives on and flourishes in the world of ‘literature’, when it has is being erased and superseded in the world I live in.

Examples of chaps phraseology

It’s this variance between the posh boy diction I still meet in books, and the people I encounter in the real world which made so much of the book’s phraseology really stick out to me. It felt like it came from a lost world, from the ripping yarns of Rider Haggard and Conan Doyle.

  • It is not surprising that Spicer’s fellow officers thought of him as at best peculiar, at worst downright dangerous. (p.14)
  • [Spicer insisted on his medical officer wearing a cutlass], tearing a strip off the doctor when he questioned the point of a medical officer wearing such an item. (p.41)
  • Every evening in the bar he would hold forth on his skill in hunting big game. (p.49)
  • They bespeak the wisdom born of experience… (p.49)
  • The German inshore guns began to fire – 47 mm field guns and small arms – but the Severn and the Mersey returned the compliment in heavier kind. (p.69)
  • Away to the south-west, at a dinner table in Salisbury, skulduggery was afoot. (p.71)
  • Sinking the Hedwig would be no mean feat (p.79)
  • Fate would test Spicer again soon enough (p.164)
  • Odebrecht realised the game was up. (p.225)
  • … a world about to be shaken to its core. (p.237)

I know Foden is writing a deliberate and knowing homage to John Buchanesque adventure stories, I know it is to a large extent deliberate pastiche, but this phraseology feels to me like a message from before the flood, like an old colonel at the club asking for another pink gin, rather than a denizen of 21st century Britain.

One does, doesn’t one?

As does Foden’s routine use of ‘one’:

  • One can be sure that the full story of the victory did not come through on the Lanstephen Castle’s Morse set (p.61)
  • How Spicer didn’t know about the Götzen is a mystery one can only attribute to the parlous state of communications in Africa… (p.77)
  • One certainly gets a more powerful sense of the danger from Dr Hanschell’s account (p.114)
  • One gets a sense of what this must have been like from the travel journals of Evelyn Waugh… (p.135)

I know it’s partly or wholly pastiche and maybe I’m having a bad sense of humour failure, but the archaic pomposity of the style outweighed the slender trickle of comedy and got on my nerves. Only the king sounds like this.

Dangling prepositions

I know it’s a petty point but, given what I’m saying about the modern world and modern English usage, I am irritated by Foden’s sometimes going to absurd lengths and distorting normal English word order so as to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. This is a feature of ‘good style’ which was old fashioned in the 1960s. but lingers on like a fossil in Foden’s writing. Mostly it’s just irritating but occasionally it really messes up the sense of the sentence.

Von Lettow-Vorbeck, the German commander, ordered that [the guns] be dragged back to Dar es Salaam, to which task 400 Africans were promptly put. (p.73)

Why not avoid the problem and write something clear and readable such like: ‘a task which 400 Africans were promptly put to.’ Americans aren’t afraid of ending sentences with a proposition, but posh Brits are. Why? Here’s some advice off the internet.

Yes, it’s fine to end a sentence with a preposition. The ‘rule’ against doing so is overwhelmingly rejected by modern style guides and language authorities and is based on the rules of Latin grammar, not English. Trying to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition often results in very unnatural phrasings. (Scribbr.com)

Which kinds of schools still teach Latin in part because it is meant to form the basis of good English prose style? British public schools of the type Foden attended, bastions of conservatism in thought and style, forming the habits of mind of such masters of English prose as Boris Johnson.

Poor editing

The book appears to have been unusually badly edited. On page 65 we are told that a young journalist named Winston Churchill had stayed at a particular South African hotel during the Boer War.

It’s odd that the text introduces Churchill in this way as he has already been mentioned half a dozen times already:

  • starting on page 22 when his disagreement with First Sea Lord Admiral Fisher is discussed as a contributory factor to the failure of the Gallipoli campaign
  • then later when his removal from his post as First Lord of the Admiralty was a condition of Conservative leader Andrew Bonar-Law joining Lloyd-George’s wartime coalition in 1915
  • then again when Churchill is quoted describing the monotony of life aboard ship (p.48)
  • and the silly tradition of having someone dress up as Neptune and insist on pranks when a British ship crossed the equator (p.57)

So for Churchill to be introduced on page 65, as if for the very first time, reads very much as if whoever edited the book hadn’t noticed the earlier references (?) or that maybe the book was published in magazine instalments and then hastily cobbled together with nobody checking for continuity (?). Whatever the reason, it felt amateurish and further knocked my confidence in the narrative. The research seems to have been pretty thorough but the actual writing of the book, as everything I’ve listed above indicates, is surprisingly slapdash.

The African Queen

Speaking of clumsiness, I was surprised at the clumsy way mention of the classic movie ‘The African Queen’, based on the 1935 novel by C.S. Forester, was just dumped into the text early on, in a parenthesis and without any preparation or explanation.

Their brief holiday over, the Congolese paddlemen were once again put to work. As they paddled through the reeds – sometimes getting out to tug the boats through by hand, as Bogart and Hepburn would do during the filming of The African Queen 36 years later – enormous numbers of birds flew up from their nest places in the marsh. (p.140)

There’s no previous explanation of the film or its stars. It’s just assumed that you know what this is referring to. I do because I’m the kind of white, middle-aged, middle-class film and literature buff this kind of book is aimed at, but the throwaway introduction of the huge fact that Forester’s book and the resulting movie are fictionalised accounts of the Battle of Lake Tanganyika which this book is about, is further disconcerting example of the casual, random, throwaway way even the most important historical or cultural references feel like they’ve just been chucked into the text, almost at random.

Only at the end of the main narrative does Foden devote an entire chapter (chapter 23, pages 265 to 280) to the story of C.S. Forester’s novel and the movie adaptation of it, but even here he tells the story in a cack-handed, arse-over-tit, convoluted way.

In a condensed, hectic way he jumbles up the real history, Forester’s version, John Huston’s screen version, stories about Hollywood producers, a reference to Kathleen Hepburn’s memoir about the filming, quotes from Huston’s autobiography, then that a novel was written about the making of the movie of the novel, and then that this novel was itself made into a movie directed by and starring Clint Eastwood, then that the screenplay was written by James Agee who had written the text for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, Walker Evans’ famous photographic record of the Deep South, and so on.

It’s an extraordinarily muddled, helter-skelter, brain dump of a chapter, a shambles as explication, more like the embarrassing name-dropping of a cocky A-level student. Foden goes on to tell us that Huston’s film crew were ferried about in a boat which, twenty years later picked up Ernest Hemingway after he’d been involved in a plane crash, took him onto another location where he was promptly injured in another plane crash, tells us what Hemingway’s injuries were, then straight onto the trivial pursuit factoid that Hemingway was a big fan of Forester, and so on and so on.

It’s a movie buff equivalent of trainspotting, packed with trivial pursuit facts, quite bereft of insight or interest. I was appalled at the poor level of this farrago.

Heart of Darkness

The most obvious literary reference for any journey in the Congo is Joseph Conrad’s super-famous novel, Heart of Darkness. Foden is not shy about being obvious and his text contains references to and quotes from Conrad on pages 127, 131, 133, 146, 207, 272 and 275.

None of these shed any light whatsoever on Conrad, they are used in the most basic, bucket, banal kind of way just to cross-reference this or that setting or episode in Foden’s narrative. For example, he quotes Conrad’s descriptions of the river Congo, or the jungle, adding nothing much to the narrative except the Sunday supplement pleasure of spotting literary allusions. At one point, with wild inappropriateness, Foden compares Spicer’s daily bath– which he turned into a ritual for the bemusement of the local Africans – with the behaviour of Conrad’s Mr Kurz, who was (obviously) an absolutely and completely different kind of man (p.208). The comparison adds nothing to our understanding of Conrad or Spicer, it’s just a handy reference to chuck in along with a lot of the other lumber and junk which clutters the narrative.

Just as unoriginal is Foden’s yoking in of T.S. Eliot. Dear oh dear, what a lazy sixth form name to drop. The pretext is that one of Eliot’s poems (The Hollow Men) features a quote from Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (‘Mistah Kurtz. He dead’) and his most famous poem, The Waste Land, was to feature another, super-famous quote (‘The horror! The horror!’) until its editor removed it.

Now, as any literature student knows, Eliot claimed that The Waste Land was ‘based’ on contemporary works of anthropology such as Fraser’s Golden Bough or Jesse Weston’s then brand-new study, From Ritual to Romance (p.251). All this irrelevant information is shoehorned into the text because Foden, reasonably enough, wants to give us an account of the African mythology of the people living around Lake Tanganyika and its surrounding mountains, goes on to describe the behaviour of the local Holo-Bolo tribe of killing off old kings and immediately crowning new ones – but it’s at this point that he begins to twist things by claiming that the Holo-Bolo ritual can be said to be an example of the cults of death and rebirth described by Fraser and Weston…and so all this can be linked to Eliot…and Eliot uses an epigraph by Conrad…and Conrad write Heart of Darkness about the Congo…and this book is about an adventure in the Congo…and so…SHAZAM! It all fits!!

See how contrived all this is? All this tying the text up in knots so as to name-drop some of the most obvious works of English literature. It’s like an undergraduate game of Consequences, clever and trivial.

It’s also disturbing or another reason not to take the book seriously, that Foden doesn’t take the opportunity to reference any modern anthropological work about the myths of central Africa, which I’m sure abound and would be genuinely interesting, but would require some actual serious research. Instead he prefers to draw on his own undergraduate degree to serve up bleeding obvious cultural references from a hundred years ago which will be greeted with knowing nods by every other English graduate but are absolutely useless as objective, serious anthropological analysis.

This entry-level use of undergraduate cultural references, combined with their clumsy shoehorning into a farrago of pointless name-dropping, really shook my faith in Foden as a writer. The factual historical parts of the book feel solid and interesting. But the blizzard of cultural references and ‘explanations’ which clutter it up feel obvious, thrown together, shallow and patronising.

Last night I read a comment by a reader on a Guardian article which immediately made me think of this book:

I think it’s quite common for writers to mistake cultural references for substance or insight in their prose. However, they often serve more to exclude rather than enlighten the reader.

(As backup to my view that T.S. Eliot is just about the most obvious English language poet for pretentious people to namedrop, I’m reading Chinua Achebe’s second novel, No Longer At Ease, whose title is a quote from T.S. Eliot’s poem, The Journey of the Magi, and when Achebe wants to highlight his protagonist’s callow inexperienced quickness to show off the learning he’s acquired in his recent English degree, he has him tell his nurse girlfriend that something she’s just said is ‘pure T.S. Eliot’. She is unimpressed. The scene exists in Achebe’s novel to highlight how callow, obvious and immature the protagonist is, keen to show off his newly acquired learning at every opportunity, no matter how inappropriate…)

F0oden on human evolution

A prime example of a completely extraneous bit of pseud-culture which is shoehorned into the narrative and turns out to be both distracting and wrong comes towards the end.

In the final passages of the book, after the historical narrative is finished, Foden moves on to recount his modern-day journeys to research the story of the Battle of Lake Tanganyika. The idea is to see what physical remains of the events, if any, can still be found. Not much, is the answer. Instead these last 30 or so pages feel more like a tourist travelogue as Foden describes the various hardships he underwent on his journey round the lake looking for historical traces, almost as if they’ve been tacked onto the end of the book to bulk it out to the necessary length.

Thus it is that we find the author standing in the Tanzania Museum’s Hall of Man and admitting that he can never remember the sequence of human evolution, does it go Australopithecus, then Homo habilis, then Homo sapiens?

Two points about this. Number one, why doesn’t he look it up on the bloody internet instead of making a point about his own ignorance? Because that’s the kind of text it is: cultivating a deliberate image of bumbling whimsy. It places Foden in direct descent from the bumbling Brits who managed to pull of their historic feat, not least the eccentric Spicer-Simpson. Maybe it’s meant to make him come over as endearingly imperfect, a sort of Michael Palin figure.

Number two: no, that is not the sequence of human ancestors, because our contemporary understanding of human evolution now rejects the entire idea of one line of human development. Instead, all the evidence points to a surprising number of Homo species arising in different places around Africa, flourishing for a while then dying out. The lineage we belong to survived by a fluke. The kind of simple one-line-of-descent Foden can’t even remember properly is, like his reference to Weston and Fraser, completely out of date and discredited. Read:

Having got this completely wrong, Foden goes on to repeat the equally out-of-date error that Homo sapiens ‘wiped out’ Homo neanderthalensis in a ‘genocide’ (p.288).

No. A genocide suggests a co-ordinated and sustained campaign of extermination which requires modern technology, weapons and, above all, population size. Professor Chris Stringer, Research Leader in Human Evolution at the Natural History Museum, says that at their peak there were probably only about 50,000 proto-humans spread across all of Eurasia. The tiny groups they lived in might go years or even decades without bumping into other groups. There weren’t nearly enough early humans to conduct anything remotely like a ‘genocide’. Modern thinking is that they/we just had a fractionally better ability to survive than the Neanderthals, for whatever reason – slightly higher intelligence, slightly better social or cognitive skills – and that this gave us the edge which let us survive in a wide variety of ecological niches while the Neanderthals didn’t.

Why does Foden drag this incorrect misleading stuff into his text? Not to inform us, not to keep us up-to-date with the latest research but, it turns out, purely and solely because he wants to use the non-existent Neanderthal ‘genocide’ to introduce the topic of the appalling behaviour of the pre-Great War Germans in their colonies, where they mounted a real-life genocide against the native inhabitants of South-West Africa, and as a peg to describe how the Germans’ brutal treatment of natives in German East Africa triggered a revolt which was put down with equal brutality.

Why not just say that? Why drag in all this half-understood, out-of-date rubbish about human evolution to get on to the topic he wants to discuss?

By now I hope you can see how this just seemed to me just another example of the book’s modish superficiality. It’s a dinner party trope, a Radio 4 cliché, to talk about the ‘genocide’ of the Neanderthals, even though modern science thinks it’s bunk. Sounds cool, though. Makes it sound like you are a knowledgeable guy with a tough-minded approach to history.

Except it’s wrong.

And it’s insulting. If you’re going to raise the subject of a genocide then at least treat it with the respect it deserves. Foden mentions the extermination of the Herero tribe in half a sentence and the maji rebellion in less than a page. So this book is very much not the place to learn about either of these important events which very much ought to be memorialised and taken seriously.

If you’re interested in either, put down this book and pick up Thomas Pakenham’s epic account of The Scramble for Africa, which devotes chapter 33 to the Herero war (14 densely printed pages) and chapter 34 to the maji-maji rebellion (13 pages). That’s the way to treat a genocide. Give it the length, depth and detail the horribly murdered victims deserve.

So: the entire passage which starts quite promisingly with the author standing in Tanzania Museum’s Hall of Man turns out to be inaccurate, misleading, and only there in order to provide a rather tortuous pretext for references to German imperial brutality which are, like everything else in the book – apart from the central narrative of transporting the motorboats – treated with almost insulting brevity and superficiality.

Thoughts

After working through 311 ages of often gripping narrative, I did, of course, learn a huge amount about this little-known aspect of the Great War. Nevertheless, I was very disappointed. I can see that the book is intended to be a comical entertainment but that comedy almost entirely depends on you buying into the world and tone of eccentric Edwardian chaps which Foden depicts and this, for some reason, I found impossible to do.

Maybe because I had been brutalised by the serious issues and graphic violence of Foden’s first three novels and was still reeling from the snakepit of issues raised by his descriptions of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden, the clash of the West and Islam, discussed at length in his preceding book, Zanzibar and found it impossible to switch to the tone of light-hearted whimsy which dominates this book.

Maybe because I found the use of ‘one’, the odd word order, the jolly chaps phraseology, to be too much of a blocker. Maybe, quite simply, because the text just isn’t as funny as it thinks it is.

It has many striking and memorable moments. The account of the portage of the motorboats through the jungle, up over the Mitumba mountains and along the Congo is awesome. The account of the naval battles on the lake feels very thorough and authoritative. The factual accuracy about the ships, the war and the battles, at all times feels solid. The recreation of so many of the historical characters is full and persuasive.

But for me these achievements were undermined by:

  1. superficial discussion of related topics like the situation on the Western Front, or the sinking of the Lusitania (p.42) or the cack-handed treatment of The African Queen or the rubbish about human evolution or the inadequate treatment of tribal genocides, which I’ve mentioned
  2. the footnotes on every page, most of which are either really obvious or embarrassingly ‘quirky’
  3. the maladroit use of those Conrad quotations and all the other trite and clunkily inserted cultural references
  4. the repeated preference for slick attitudinising on the woke topics of the day (racism, imperialism, genocide) instead of the in-depth explanations or proper analysis which those topics deserve

Above all by the deliberate frivolousness of the tone which, as you can tell, just didn’t work at all for me.

If you like this kind of historical whimsy then ‘Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika’ is for you, and I imagine it sold well to the same kind of people who bought ‘Nathaniel’s Nutmeg’ and other quirky takes on little-known episodes from history.

Maybe it’s a flaw in my taste that I either like full-on comedy (like William Boyd’s outrageously funny ‘A Good Man in Africa’) or full-on, serious history with proper analysis (see the many straight histories in my list of Africa reviews) so that, as you can tell, I just didn’t get on with this larky yarn which falls between both.

Interesting-sounding books which Foden namechecks

  • Phantom Flotilla: The story of the Naval Africa Expedition by Peter Shankland (1968)
  • The Great War in Africa by Bryan Farwell (1987)
  • The First World War by Hew Strachan (2001)

Compare with ‘An Ice-Cream War’

William Boyd’s second novel, ‘An Ice-Cream War’, is set during the First World War in British and German East Africa, so there’s some overlap (though not, in fact, as much as you might think, Boyd’s book being a sweeping account of the land war, Foden’s entirely about the relatively small and specific events on Lake Tanganyika). For example, the (real, historical) overall commander of German forces, Paul Von Lettow-Vorbeck, appears in both books.

If it was a choice between the two books, I would hands down recommend the Boyd novel, which is long, rich, deeply researched, wonderfully imagined and luminously written – the opposite in every way of this book.

Credit

Mimi and Toutou Go Forth: The Bizarre Battle for Lake Tanganyika by Giles Foden was published by Michael Joseph in 2004. References are to the 2005 Penguin paperback edition.

Giles Foden reviews

Africa reviews

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Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit (2004)

The dehumanising picture of the West painted by its enemies is what we have called Occidentalism. It is our intention in this book to examine this cluster of prejudices and trace their historical roots.
(Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism, page 6)

Some features of Occidentalism

Many groups have queued up to hate ‘the West’ over the past 200 years, for many reasons, claiming that:

  • the West is a purveyor of ‘poisonous materialism’
  • Westernism is a disease of the spirit
  • the Western mind splits human knowledge into soulless specialisms
  • Westernism promotes alienated individualism over communal belonging
  • Western science destroys religious belief and faith
  • Western media are decadent and pornographic
  • Western culture is shallow and materialist so destroys spiritual values
  • Western society is capitalist, greedy, exploitative
  • Westernism is a ‘machine civilisation’ (compared to hand-made rural arts and crafts)
  • resentment / hatred of Western imperialism
  • of Western colonialism
  • of Western (particularly American) global power and selfish foreign policy
  • Western civilisation is associated with huge, degraded, corrupt cities (compared with organic rural life)
  • the West represents ‘rootless cosmopolitanism’ and multiculturalism (compared with homogeneous native traditions)

These are the accusations and stereotypes which the authors set out to analyse and investigate, going much further afield than the contemporary Middle East, and much further back in time than the past few troubled decades, to do so.

The authors

Ian Buruma (born 1951, aged 72) is a Dutch writer and editor who lives and works in the US. Much of his writing has focused on the culture of Asia, particularly that of China and 20th-century Japan.

Avishai Margalit (born 1939, aged 83) is an Israeli professor emeritus in philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. From 2006 to 2011 he was George F. Kennan Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Both were contributors to The New York Review of Books during the 1990s and in fact this book grew out of an article published in that magazine in 2002, less than 12 months after the 9/11 attacks on New York shook the world of international affairs.

The background: Edward Said’s Orientalism

Buruma and Margalit don’t mention Edward Said in the text but they explicitly state that their concept of ‘Occidentalism’ is conceived as a mirror image of the notion of Orientalism which Said was instrumental in defining and popularising.

The view of the West in Occidentalism is like the worst aspects of its counterpart, Orientalism, which strips its human targets of their humanity. Some Orientalist prejudices made non-Western people seem less than fully adult human beings; they ha the minds of children and could thus be treated as ‘lesser breeds’. Occidentalism is at least as reductive; its bigotry simply turns the Orientalist view upside down. [It reduces] an entire society or civilisation to a mass of soulless, decadent, money-grabbing, rootless, faithless, unfeeling parasites… (p.11)

Prior to Said’s book, Orientalism had been the value-neutral name given to a perfectly respectable academic discipline, the study of the languages, peoples and societies of ‘the East’ (loosely defined as lands from the Middle East to Japan) until Said published his landmark study, Orientalism in 1978.

Orientalism was a long, thorough, polemical attack on the entire discipline, claiming that from its earliest beginnings it 1) drew up a clear unbridgeable distinction between ‘The East’ and ‘The West’, 2) invented stereotypes of ‘the Oriental’, ‘the Arab’, ‘the Muslim’ and 3) attributed to them and their world a shopping list of negative qualities, the stereotypical ‘Oriental’ being lazy, irrational, dominated by a simple-minded religion, corrupt, sensual, and so on.

Orientalism was intended to be a comprehensive demolition of an entire academic field which Said proved by showing that the same mental structures underpinned, and the same demeaning stereotypes and clichés appeared in, almost all Orientalist writing, from the late eighteenth century right up to the present day.

This would all have been fairly academic, in the narrow sense – academics squabbling over the epistemological foundations of a particular academic field – but for the real bite of the book which is its highly political approach.

This has two elements. Firstly Said claims that the entire field of research into the languages, culture, religions, society and so on of ‘the Orient’ enabled and justified imperial control of the region. Knowledge is power, and the ever-more comprehensive and intrusive studies done of the countless peoples, religions and cultures of this vast area enabled Western imperial control over them. Orientalist academic studies served colonial power.

The Palestinian issue

This by itself would have been a fairly controversial conclusion, but there’s a second, really inflammatory element to Said’s critique. This is his attempt to show the discredited assumptions and degrading attitudes of Orientalism played, and continue to play, an important role in determining attitudes across western culture and politics to the Problem of Palestine.

This, as every educated person knows, is one of the most contentious issues in international affairs. In 1917 the British Home Secretary, Arthur Balfour, declared that Britain would support the Jews of Europe in their wish to create a homeland in the Biblical Lands of Palestine. Between the wars increasing numbers of Jewish immigrants fled Europe and settled in Palestine, buying land from its Arab owners. Tensions between incomers and natives erupted into regular bouts of violence which the British authorities, given a ‘mandate’ to run the area after the First World War, struggled to contain. After the Second World War, an exhausted, impoverished Britain tried to hold the ring between increasingly violent Jewish and Arab nationalist political parties and militias, until, in 1948, they effectively gave up and withdrew.

The well-organised and well-armed Jewish settlers promptly declared the existence of the independent state of Israel and the neighbouring Arab countries promptly attacked it, seeking to strangle it at birth. The Israeli army successfully defended its country and amid, much bloodshed, hundreds of thousands of Palestinians fled, or were expelled, into neighbouring countries, especially Jordan.

In 1967 a joint force of Arab countries led by Egypt was mobilising for another attack when Israel launched a lightning pre-emptive strike, crushing the Egyptian army and forcing the Arabs to sign an armistice after just six days. As a result Israel seized the Jordanian-annexed West Bank (including East Jerusalem), and Egypt’s Sinai Peninsula as well as the Egyptian-occupied Gaza Strip.

As many as 325,000 Palestinians and 100,000 Syrians fled or were expelled from the West Bank and the Golan Heights, respectively, creating a humanitarian crisis.

In 1973 the Arabs launched a surprise attack on October 6, the Jewish holy day of Yom Kippur. Once again Israel faced numerically overwhelming forces but fought them off in what was effectively the Third Arab-Israeli War. In the aftermath of the war the Israelis realised that they couldn’t rely on fighting off Arab armies indefinitely, and so they began to put out feelers for some kind of peace treaty, which was to lead to the 1978 Camp David Accords under which Israel return the entire Sinai Peninsula to Egypt.

Orientalist attitudes to the Palestinian problem

The point of this long digression is that Said was a Palestinian. Both his parents were of Palestinian heritage, he was born in Palestine and raised in Egypt, attending English-language schools in Jerusalem and then Alexandria. Said’s father had served with US Army during the Great War and so earned US citizenship so, when he was expelled from his Egyptian private school for being a troublemaker he was sent to a private boarding school in Massachusetts, USA. Thus began his career as an academic in America (in New York).

But as he progressed through the academic hierarchy, as well as his purely academic publications about comparative literature, Said became known for his ‘outspoken’ opinions about the Palestinian issue, namely speaking up for the plight of the hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees, calling for the government of Israel to moderate its policies in the occupied territories and so on.

This, as you might have expected in polarised politicised America, drew down on his head the wrath of numerous journalists, commentators, Jewish groups and so on, many of which didn’t refrain from employing exactly the kinds of denigratory stereotypes he had listed in Orientalism against Said himself and the Palestinians he spoke up for.

In the Introduction to Orientalism Said explains that the motivation to write the book was partly driven by his own personal experience of Orientalist tropes. In New York academia he found himself extremely isolated as almost the only Palestinian and Arab working in an academic and publishing environment dominated by white liberals or Jews sympathetic to Israel and its policies.

So his own personal experience of having anti-Arab, anti-Palestinian and anti-Muslim slurs directed at himself, his writings and his opinions was a big motivation behind the years of research and labour of love which Orientalism amounts to.

This explains why the huge book, with its mountains of evidence, all work one way, criticising ‘the West’, Western attitudes, Western academia, Western imperialism, Western racism and so on.

In the Introduction Said explicitly says that he is not interested in exploring ‘the Arab Mind’ or ‘the Islamic World’ and so on. That would have doubled or quadrupled the length of the book, plus which he wasn’t professionally qualified to take on such huge subjects. His interest is solely in a deep investigation of how Western attitudes against ‘the Orient’ were created and proliferated throughout Orientalist studies, fiction and so on.

9/11

A lot happened in the real world between Orientalism‘s publication in 1978 and the publication of Occidentalism in 2002, but in the world of academia, magazines and publishing Said’s critique of Western attitudes had become very widespread among bien-pensant liberals. In the academy and liberal journals Said’s view that ‘the West’ continually sees the Middle East, the Arab world and Islam through simplistic, racist ‘Orientalist’ stereotypes, had become very widely accepted.

The 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York, the Pentagon and (possibly) the White House (the fourth plane that came down in Washington) galvanised and transformed the culture, shocking and terrifying people around the Western world. It led numerous commentators and analysts to claim that we had entered a new era of war between ‘the West’ and ‘Islam’ or ‘Islamic terrorism’ or ‘Islamofascism’ etc, an inflammatory rhetoric which translated into actual war when, within a month of the 9/11 attacks, in October 2001, US forces invaded Afghanistan to overthrow the Taliban regime there.

Occidentalism

This is where Buruma and Margalit come in. They readily concede that 9/11, like the First Gulf War before it, led to an explosion throughout the media of just the kind of Orientalist racist stereotypes which Said had dedicated his life to uncovering and critiquing. But they point out that there was a gap in the whole discussion. If ‘the West’ could be accused of deploying Orientalist stereotypes against ‘the East’, ‘the Arab world’ etc, what about the stereotypes of the West which could be found in the media and political and terrorist discourse of the East? Didn’t Arab and Palestinian and Muslim leaders regularly rail against ‘the West’, didn’t an endless stream of news footage show enraged mobs burning the American flag and shouting ‘Down with America’, and wasn’t this anti-western rhetoric routinely associated with a predictable shopping list of negative stereotypes? Short answer, yes.

So what are these anti-Western tropes and where did they come from?

The West and ‘the Modern’

Right at the start Buruma and Margalit made a fundamental conceptual decision which underpins everything that follows: this is to identify anti-Western discourse with anti-Modernism. They argue that when nationalist commentators and activists in the rest of the world attack ‘the West’, they almost always conflate ‘the West’ with every aspect of the modern world which they dislike, despise or fear, everything from industrialisation, secularism, capitalism, rationalism through to cultural products such as pop music and pornography.

What many of the anti-Western nationalist movements of the past 100 or 150 years, whether in India or China or Japan, in the Middle East or across Africa, have in common is that they want to turn the clock back. They dream of an era which preceded the arrival of the West with its monstrous attributes of godless science, nation states, brutal capitalism, cultural hegemony and so on, they dream of an era when their countries were untainted by western influence, untainted by godless capitalism, when everyone lived in small rural communities and shared the same simple faith and devoutness.

At the roots of much anti-Western feeling is a deeper resentment at all these aspects of the modern world and a passionate desire to turn the clock back to simpler, more spiritual times. This leads them to a counter-intuitive conclusion:

Anti-westernism is a western product

The first people to loathe and hate modernism i.e the rise of a secular, godless, liberal, pluralistic society based on industrial capitalism, with the uprooting or rural populations and their herding into monster cities which became sinks of immorality and degeneracy etc, were westerners themselves.

It is one of our contentions that Occidentalism, like capitalism, Marxism, and many other modern isms, was born in Europe before it was transferred to other parts of the world. (p.6, emphasis added)

The main opponents to the birth and spread of industrial capitalist society were inhabitants of that society itself. Marx is the obvious epitome of this trend, but there had been plenty of opponents to the rise of godless rationalism and capitalist industrialisation for generations before him, and loads of theoreticians who tried to cling onto older ideas of pre-industrial societies bound together by a common religion

To put it simply, Western society has, for well over 200 years, contained a large number of intellectuals who fear, hate and loath their own western society, and who have developed an extensive set of concepts and vocabulary to express that hatred in.

Communist anti-westernism

The Bolshevik revolution of 1917 appeared, at a stroke, to validate the enormous, world-reaching rhetoric of Marxist analysis, to prove the inevitable collapse of capitalism and of communist revolution, and the Soviet regime spent the next 70 years energetically spreading its anti-western ideas and rhetoric around the world.

Fascist anti-westernism

But the Bolsheviks triggered an equal and opposite reaction in the extreme nationalist movements which developed into totalitarian fascism in Italy, then Germany and the other European governments who fell prey to authoritarian or fascist regimes between the wars.

And the fascist, anti-modern rhetoric developed by these regimes and their numerous intellectual defenders and propagandists, continued long after the Second World War, helping to justify and underpin semi-fascist military regimes in, for example, Franco’s Spain, Salazar’s Portugal, the Greece of the generals, or right-wing regimes in South America such as Pinochet’s Chile (1973 to 1990) or the military government in Argentina (1976 to 1993).

So this is the most fundamental thing about the book – Buruma and Margalit’s decision to expand its frame of reference faaaar beyond a consideration of anti-western rhetoric in the Middle East, in the Arab world or as expressed by Islamic terrorists like Osama bin Laden, and to turn it into an investigation of anti-Western thought in its widest possible definition.

Scope

In their introduction, on page 11, Buruma and Margalit briefly consider taking a chronological approach to the subject, tracing the origins of anti-western feeling all the way back to the Counter-Reformation, through the Counter-Enlightenment, before exploring the roots of the various types of socialist, communist and fascist opposition to the modern world.

Mercifully, maybe, instead of the kind of exhaustive multi-volume study this would have turned into, they decide to take a thematic approach. They will look at certain key images or symbols of the decadent, greedy, rootless etc West, and sketch out their origins in (mostly) Western discourse. This helps explain why the book is a light and frolicsome 149 pages long, although some of the explication is so dense and compressed that it sometimes feels like longer…

Contents

Accordingly, the text is divided into six chapters. The headings are neat and logical but I found the text they contain often very digressive, in the sense that it hops between quite disparate topics, times and places and then, just as unpredictably, returns to what they were originally discussing. On the upside this means the text is often as interesting for the sidelights or incidental observations it throws out as for the central points.

1. War Against The West

Introduction, as summarised above.

2. The Occidental City

Contrary to received opinion, people who hold strong Occidentalist views tend to be educated, or at least educated enough to be familiar enough with the values of the West to hate them. Taking the view that ‘Western values’ are undermining this or that set of traditional native values requires you to have a pretty good theoretical understanding both of what your native values are, what Western values are, and how the latter is ‘poisoning’ the former.

Far from being a dogma favoured by downtrodden peasants, Occidentalism more often reflects the fears and prejudices of urban intellectuals, who feel displaced in the world of mass commerce. (p.30, emphasis added)

Re. the 9/11 attacks on hi-tech buildings, Osama bin Laden trained as a civil engineer. the ringleader of the hijackers, Mohamed Atta, studied architecture at Cairo University and went on to do a Masters in urban planning at the Hamburg University of Technology. He hated modern architecture. He thought the concrete high-rise buildings built in Cairo and across the region in the 1960s and 1970s ruined the beauty of old neighbourhoods and robbed their people of privacy and dignity.

The tower of Babel

Tall buildings have been a focus of anxieties and symbols of ill omen from at least as long ago as the Bible. The Old Testament or Jewish Bible has barely got going before, in chapter 11, we are told about Nimrod who built the Tower of Babel with a view to making a name for themselves. God and, it appears, his angels, feared what they might do next, so afflicted the workers on it with different languages so they couldn’t understand each other, and then dispersed them across the face of the earth.

I visited New York in the 1980s and went to the top of the South Tower of the World Trade Centre which had an observation deck on the 107th floor and an outdoor viewing platform. It was 1,377 feet above street level. You could feel the building moving under your feet since it was designed to have a certain amount of ‘give’. I have acute vertigo and was terrified.

Cities as sinks of iniquity

Throughout recorded history, cities in every culture have been associated with corruption, greed, exploitation of the poor by the rich, decadence and immorality.

It is a universal story, this clash between old and new, authentic culture and metropolitan chicanery and artifice, country and city. (p.27)

Western sources

Regarding the authors’ focus on western texts, they live down to my expectations. In just the first part of this chapter they quote the Bible, Juvenal, the Goncourt brothers, William Blake (Dark Satanic mills), T.S. Eliot (The Rock), Richard Wagner (despised the frivolity of Paris), Voltaire (admired the liberty of eighteenth century London), Theodor Fontane (disliked London’s materialism), Friedrich Engels (horrified by the poverty of Manchester) and not a single Arab or Muslim voice.

It feels like a fairly obvious sixth form selection of obvious cultural figures (Blake, Eliot, Wagner). I’d so much have preferred an explanation of Islamic traditions about ‘the city’.

Antisemitism

They then move onto antisemitism, long associated with cities, cosmopolitan i.e. non-native culture, money-lending and capitalism etc, citing (again) Eliot, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Marx. The Nazis incorporated late-nineteenth century tropes of seeking to escape the city for a healthier life in the country into their fascist propaganda about racial purity, despising a checklist of big capitalism, cosmopolitan crowds, decadence (nightclubs and jazz), corruption of good Aryan women into prostitution and, of course, managed to blame all of this on ‘the Jews’.

A lot of these concerns and the language they were expressed in were picked up by other nativist nationalists, in Japan (about which Buruma knows a lot and which developed its own form of fascism during the 1930s) and in the Arab Middle East, developing its anti-colonial, anti-western rhetoric (many nationalist Arab leaders allied with Nazi Germany on the twin bases that a) my enemy (Britain)’s enemy is my friend and b) shared antisemitism).

Sayyid Qutb

They make a brief mention of Sayyid Qutb (1906 to 1966), widely considered the father of modern Islamic fundamentalism, to address not his writings, but his miserable alienation when he moved to New York to study in the 1940s and was repelled by absolutely everything about American life, its soulless materialism, its obsession with capitalist consumerism, its degraded immorality. Maybe they felt obligated to wedge him in somewhere, but Qutb’s importance to the development of Islamism or Islamic fundamentalism or Islamic terrorism isn’t developed at all. A paragraph on him before swooping back to Europe and…

The French Revolution

Surprisingly, maybe, they then move to the French Revolution. The French Revolution crystallised Enlightenment trends against medieval monarchs and aristocrats, the rule of the Church, traditions of all sorts, which needed to be torn up and thrown away, replaced by the cult of Reason, modern laws for modern enlightened citizens.

Antisemitism was implicit in Christianity from the beginning, with the Jews being blamed for insisting on the crucifixion of Jesus by the earliest Church Fathers. Buruma and Margalit attribute the birth of modern antisemitism to the French Revolution. Traditional upholders of the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Catholic Church were easily persuaded that the whole thing was a Jewish conspiracy, and so was born a whole modern antisemitic way of thinking about the world, which was to flourish and become steadily more toxic in the heart of Europe as the nineteenth century progressed.

The German Volk

Soon after the revolution, France invaded Germany, or the German states. Ideological opposition to the teachings of the French Revolution became mixed up with patriotic fervour. This all happened to the first generation of German Romantics. France came to represent the modern, godless, cosmopolitan city, riddled with over-clever philosophers and money-grubbing Jews, which was trying to conquer and obliterate the values of the Volkisch, spiritual German town, the German landscape of sturdy peasants, wise artisans and soulful poets. The authors cite the German folklorist Gottfried von Herder (1744 to 1803) as an example of this view.

Japan and China struggle to adopt Western culture

But western ideas of democracy, industrialism, capitalism and so forth were undeniably effective. They provided the underpinnings for the astonishing spread of Western imperialism. The question for rulers in countries from Morocco to Japan was which ideas from the West it would be profitable to accept, and which they needed to reject in order to maintain their culture and traditions, protect their nations from ‘spiritual pollution’ i.e. Western liberal ideas. Tricky.

Japan and China in different ways tried to adopt Western techniques without changing the core of their culture. Japan was much more successful, maybe because its centralised administration was stronger: it imported Western industrialisation while managing to keep a strong sense of national culture. By contrast the Chinese political system had become corrupt and inefficient so it failed to import Western industrialisation but instead found itself infected with all kinds of Western ideas about republics and democracy and the individual etc, ideas which led to the overthrow of the monarchy in 1911.

The appeal of Marxism to anti-colonial nationalists

For the central 70 years of the twentieth century many developing countries thought that Marxism offered a way forward. It was modern, industrial, scientific but rejected the soulless materialism, corruption and imperialist mindset of the Western capitalist societies. hence its attraction for many developing countries, especially in the decades after independence in the 1940s and 50s.

Unfortunately it was the dream which failed. The failure of the secular socialist nationalism promoted by the likes of President Nasser of Egypt, Gaddafi in Libya, Saddam in Iraq, Assad in Syria led to a wave of disillusion across the Arab world and opened the cultural space for Islamists who promoted a radical solution, a return to a world before any kind of modernity existed, back to the pure, unsullied, pious and unified world of the early Caliphate.

Mao and the war against the city

The authors devote 4 or 5 pages to Chairman Mao, ruler of China from 1949 to 1976. They see Mao as the biggest exponent in all world history of the war of the country against the city. The corrupt westernised city was epitomised for Chinese communists like Mao by Shanghai, administered by westerners and packed with a cosmopolitanism, capitalism and corruption. Mao thought such places needed to be purged in the name of a peasant communism.

Mao’s promotion of peasant values promised an escape route from Western capitalism, from urban alienation, decadence and corruption, and a return to integrated rural communities, where life and work would have proper, deep human meaning and purpose.

And so during the 1950s he unleashed the Great Leap Forward which involved rounding up and shooting hundreds of thousands of members of the urban bourgeoisie, those who survived being sent to huge rural labour camps. It was, he boomed, in countless speeches, a good thing ‘to exterminate the bourgeoisie and capitalism in China’ (p.42).

The Khmer Rouge 1975 to 1979

This is the mindset which went on to guide the horrific Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia, 1975 to 1979. Most of Pol Pot’s soldiers were illiterate peasants, often only boys. When they took the capital, Phnom Penh, they were staggered by the wealth, the size, the swarming multinational population, the coffee shops and fleshpots. All these were ruthlessly emptied and its inhabitants either shot on the spot, or dragged off to be tortured, or marched off to labour camps in the countryside. Only by exterminating the urban bourgeoisie could the country be restored to purity and truth and correct living. It was a kind of logical end point of centuries of anti-city rhetoric.

The Taliban 1996

Same with the Taliban, illiterate peasants in flipflops armed with weapons seized from the fleeing Soviets or donated by America. After a ruinous civil war they took the capital of Afghanistan, Kabul, in 1996. First they butchered the leader of the pro-Soviet regime, Mohammad Najibullah, then they banned everything to do with modern life, which they associated with the hated West, in a bid to return society to the ‘purity’ of the earliest days of the Muslim Caliphate.

All music was banned, along with television, soccer, and most forms of socialising. Women had to cover themselves from head to foot and were not allowed out without a chaperone. Kabul was ruled by a six-man shura not one of them from Kabul, not one of them had ever lived in a city.

The Khmer Rouge and the Taliban represented the triumph of ‘authentic’ rural values over the corrupt, decadent modern city.

Germania

The authors then take a characteristic leap in subject, concluding with a page describing a different way of triumphing over the chaotic modern western city: this was to demolish it and build a totalitarian alternative.

Hitler hated Berlin and planned to rebuild it as a totalitarian capital, its alleys and slums replaced by broad boulevards designed for marching armies, its swarming cosmopolitan crowds replaced by the unified adoring Aryan crowd. All the messy attributes of the decadent West – civil liberties, free market economies, democracy, individualism – would be replaced by one Folk, one Reich, one Führer and one Capital City.

The Hitler regime was overthrown before building got very far but other countries have made the experiment. The authors cite Pyongyang, capital of North Korea, as what Germania might have looked like, a neoclassical testament to untrammeled, totalitarian power.

Lastly, they reference the steel and glass cities of coastal China which have mushroomed in the last twenty years, which represent a kind of defiant triumph over the less impressive, shop-soiled cities of the West. We can do it bigger, better and shinier than you, say high rises such as the Burj Khalifa in the United Arab Emirates, Merdeka 118 in Kuala Lumpur, the Shanghai Tower in Shanghai, the Abraj Al-Bait Clock Tower in Mecca, the Ping An International Finance Centre in Seoul and so on.

These are not so much anti-Western, as supra-western, denying old ideas of Western supremacy by outdoing it.

3. Heroes and Merchants

Werner Sombart

This focuses on the roots of Germany’s sustained sense of being different from ‘the West’, which German intellectuals defined as soulless mercantile Britain and godless revolutionary France.

The authors zero in on a book written in 1915 by a German sociologist named Werner Sombart and titled Händler und Helden or Merchants and Heroes. In the book Sombart contrasted the commercial civilisation of Britain and the liberty, equality, fraternity culture of France with the heroic culture of Germany. The Western bourgeois is satisfied with ‘comfort’ (in German Komfortismus) and the soporific sports of the British. By contrast the German welcomes death as the ultimate sacrifice he can make for the Volk.

Similar ideas were shared by the historian Oswald Spengler and the warrior-author Ernst Jünger. Happy happy Germany to have such ideologues of the glory of war. The fundamental trahison des clercs (‘treason of the intellectuals’) is to promote exciting ideas about glory and sacrifice which lead hundreds of thousands of young men to their death. ‘The young must shed their blood,’ write Thomas Abbt (p.58). Other young men, obviously. You need to stay safe in your study in order to produce such intellectual masterworks.

The authors make a direct link between the widespread contempt for bourgeois Komfortismus described by numerous right-wing German intellectuals, and the attitude of the jihadi fighter interviewed early in the 2001 Afghan who said that the Islamists would triumph because ‘You [the West] love life, but we love death’.

Personally, taking a materialist Darwinian evolutionary view of Homo sapiens, it seems unlikely that impatience to make live heroic lives and die in a noble cause, particularly among zealous young men ‘ardent for some desperate glory’, will ever die out. It has been so ubiquitous throughout all human history, in all cultures, that it appears to be hard-wired into the species. I’ve recently read a suite of books about the problems of African society and prominent among them is what to do about disaffected, unemployed youths, hanging round, looking for a cause to redeem their alienated lives…

Military death cults in Japan

The authors go on to trace how German hyper-nationalism and Occidentalism went on to become surprisingly influential in intellectual circles in the Middle East and Japan. The same valuing of a heroic ideal of nationhood which led Hitler to sacrifice an entire generation of German youth, was the one that made the Japanese fight to the death, island by island and send waves of kamikaze pilots in 1944.

Buruma has a counter-intuitive interpretation of Japanese suicide warriors. The phenomenon was considered at the time as being somehow specifically Japanese, but Buruma says the surviving farewell letters of many of the kamikaze pilots (and drivers of the less well-known suicide torpedoes) indicate that most were highly educated students studying the humanities at leading universities, and that a surprising number of them were well read in German literature and philosophy. They dressed up their feelings in tropes about the Samurai and cherry blossom but their fundamental ideas about the diseased decadence of the West and the need for heroic sacrifice are actually Western ideas.

Buruma gives a potted summary of the way Japanese politicians and intellectuals in the mid-nineteenth century cobbled together a patchwork copy of Western intellectual, economic, political, military and religious life, not least in the cobbling together of a state religion, Shinto, which they thought would echo the Christianity which seemed to be such a central part of European life. Ditto the transition of the emperor from a remote and powerless figure in Kyoto, who was moved to Tokyo to become a combination of kaiser, generalissimo, Shinto pope, and highest living deity. People talk (dismissively) about the British inventing many of their ‘traditions’ in the nineteenth century (Christmas trees, the kilt) but the Japanese did the same with knobs on.

Regarding the development of a cult of heroic sacrifice Buruma says an important source was the Imperial Rescript to Soldiers and Sailors of 1882 which the armed forces learned by heart and included a passage commanding the ultimate sacrifice for the emperor.

A practical consequence of this Occidentalism were that, when Western forces surrendered, as at Singapore in 1942, the Japanese viewed surrendering forces as dishonourable cowards who preferred to save their skins rather than fight on to the death i.e. the exact opposite of Japanese martial values.

As a result the Japanese regarded the surrendering British forces as less than human and treated them accordingly, working them to death in brutal labour camps. My best friend at school’s dad was in the army in Burma at the end of the war. He saw the state of soldiers repatriated from the Japanese camps. As a result he refused to have anything Japanese in the house.

The Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh

The authors then move on to India for a quick description of the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) which means the ‘National Volunteer Organisation’. Founded in 1925 this was a far-right, Hindu nationalist paramilitary organisation which aimed to instil ‘Hindu discipline’ in order to unite the Hindu community and establish a Hindu Rashtra (Hindu nation). Like the Nazis they aimed to create a new society based on racial purity, military discipline and sacrifice.

Osama bin Laden

Then, in this whistlestop tour, we are on to your friend and mine, the demon figure of the first decade of the 21st century, Osama bin Laden. The authors give quotes from an interview bin Laden gave after the 1996 al-Khobar Tower attack in Saudi Arabia. They say the language bin Laded uses of self-sacrifice, of suicide attacks, is emphatically not part of the Islamic mainstream tradition. In mainstream Islam dying in battle against the infidel is what creates justified martyrs; blowing yourself up along with unarmed civilians is something quite different, feared and despised by many Muslims as much as by Westerners.

They slightly contradict themselves by then describing the death cult of the Assassins, created in the 13th century for reasons which are still debated, and the pattern they set for being prepared to die for Islam in taking out an infidel opponent.

Anyway, whatever the precise roots there’s no denying that throughout the nineteenth century Muslim leaders called for jihad against western colonists and their godless capitalism, against their Jewish agents, and against native leaders who had been corrupted by their infidel ways.

Assassination

When I read this I immediately thought of President Anwar Sadat of Egypt. He was assassinated in 1981 by members of Egyptian Islamic Jihad for signing a peace treaty with Israel and instigating a crackdown on Islamic extremists, and so was painted as ‘a traitor to Islam’.

Sadat’s fate raises a general principle of Occidentalism which is that often opponents of the West aren’t actually opposed to the distant West, which they had never visited and of which they knew relatively little, so much as against the westernisers in their own society, political or social leaders who they blame for importing Western secular values. So they kill them.

Historically, the main embodiment of Muslim resistance to westernisation was the Muslim Brotherhood, founded in 1928 with the following manifesto:

‘God is our objective; the Qu’uran is our constitution; the Prophet is our leader; Struggle is our way; and death for the sake of God is our highest aspiration.’

Then, in another leap, the authors tell us that Japanese kamikaze tactics were adopted by the Hezbollah in the Lebanon with the 1983 Beirut barracks bombings which killed 241 US and 58 French military personnel.

Buruma and Margalit wrote this book before the US invaded Iraq in March 2003, an occupation which triggered an epidemic of suicide bombings by Sunni and Shias against the occupying forces.

Weimar

They conclude with a simple but crucial message. The Weimar Republic didn’t die because it was liquidated by Nazis, big business and the Army. It died because too few people were prepared to defend it. See the books on the subject by Peter Gay and Walter Laqueur. Passionate young men from the Right and the Left conspired to attack and undermine it at every opportunity. Nobody stood up for the boring, unromantic business of liberal democratic political life.

4. Mind of the West

Russian anti-westernism

Occidentalists accuse the West of being effective, technologically adroit, economically triumphant, and yet lacking the soul, depth, spirit and godliness which the critics, of course, pride themselves on having. I particularly despise the long tradition in Russian culture of belittling the frivolity and superficiality of France or Britain compared to the Great Russian Soul and its vast capacity for Noble Suffering. Tolstoy. Dostoyevsky. Occidentalists.

Dostoyevsky despised the West because it sought happiness and comfort whereas it should have been seeking salvation. And the route to salvation is via suffering. Only suffering brings wisdom. The West is afraid of suffering. The West can never be wise. Only a people devoted to suffering can be genuinely holy. The Russian soul welcomes and endures great suffering. Thus it is superior to everyone else’s.

Dostoyevsky and the propagandists for Russian suffering prepared the way (or just accurately reported the mindset) of the great Soviet barbarism of the twentieth century, the horrific civil war, the mass famines of Stalin, the huge gulags, total repression of civil society, the incredible death toll of the Great Patriotic War caused by Stalin’s ineptitude (and having massacred all his leading army officers) and Russian military readiness to sacrifice soldiers by the hecatomb in ways the Western Allies couldn’t believe. Still. Spiritual superiority, that’s what counts.

The line continues all the way through to Vladimir Putin. Putin sits in the main line of Russian cultural thought in despising, like Tolstoy, like Dostoyevsky, the decadence of Western liberalism, whose rapid end he has confidently predicted in numerous speeches.

Meanwhile, while he wastes his nation’s resources on a stupid nationalist war, the population of Mother Russia is going into decline as people flee Putin’s dictatorship or just die of ill health due to its wretched health problems.

Russia has the world’s 11th-largest economy but ranks 96th in life expectancy. Life expectancy for Russian men is 67, lower than in North Korea, Syria or Bangladesh. Still. Spiritual superiority, that’s what counts, eh.

The authors spend a long section describing ‘the love affair of Russians with their own soul’ and the achievement of nativist thinkers, loosely termed ‘Slavophiles’.

Anti-westernism’s German roots

In fact, counter-intuitively, Buruma and Margalit attribute Slavophilia, like so much anti-westernism, to German roots, specifically German Romanticism. Humiliated by Napoleon’s victories over them, conscious of their political backwardness (fragmented into scores of little princedom and dukedoms) German intellectuals, in a massive case of sour grapes, said worldly success didn’t matter, what mattered was what was in your soul. They compensated for their economic, social, political backwardness by asserting the supremacy of their spiritual life.

A spectrum

It occurs to me that there was a spectrum in the moving west to east across Europe in the nineteenth century. At the western extreme was Britain, economic powerhouse of the world but almost bereft of genuine art, philosophy or religion (sure it had the oppressive Church of England but this had little or no spiritualist tradition). Then came France, nearly as economically diverse as Britain, a good deal more artistic and philosophical. Then Germany, economically and politically backward but packed with ‘deep’ philosophers and its great musical tradition. Poland, which is never taken account of by anybody in these kinds of surveys. And finally Russia, the most economically and socially backward of European nations and, accordingly, possessed of a self-congratulatory sense of its immense spiritual superiority over everyone else.

In the authors’ view, to be blunt, it’s all the Germans’ fault. Extremely resentful of the military, economic and artistic success of Napoleon’s France, German Romantics compensated for national humiliation by working out the theory of the superior spiritual value of Das Volk and the nobility of dying for it.

Isaiah Berlin on German Romanticism

No less an authority than Isaiah Berlin thought this was the case and, moreover, thought the model the Germans worked out became a template which could be exported to all peoples who feel mocked and humiliated. The template was copied by the Russians during the nineteenth century and, as we’ve seen, adopted by Arab and Indian nationalists between the wars.

Buruma and Margalit summarise Berlin’s model. The German Romantic movement was the Counter-Enlightenment. It valued intuition and spirit over reason and calculation. It preferred heroes to shopkeepers. It looked back to a lost era of national and religious unity and looked forward to its glorious restoration.

On this view Nazism, Japanese fascism and Islamic fundamentalism are all the heirs to the original German Romantic anti-Westernism.

Russian Orthodox Christianity

The authors tell me things about Russian Christianity I didn’t know. They describe the messianic conviction that Moscow is a second Rome and only home to true Christianity. They explain that Russian Orthodox Christianity is far less interested in theology than Greek or Roman Christianity and far more concerned with custom and practice. Icons are more important than intellectual debate.

Intellectualism is suspect. And any kind of change is not needed. The thousand year old tradition of the Russian church suffices. Innovation tends to come from outside, representing threat and betrayal.

The authors give a potted history of Russia, with Peter the Great and Catherine the Great realising they had to import Western technology and ideas. Throughout the nineteenth century Russian intellectuals split into westernising and slavophile parties. They give potted biographies of individual westernisers. And they explain that for these men, the West meant Germany and its succession of Romantic philosophers.

As with Orientalism, all these Russian thinkers worked out their theories and defined themselves against the Other, the Other being a highly simplistic, stereotyped view of The West, a West which was materialistic, godless, mechanical, superficial, divided, corrupt and decadent, which lacked the soulfulness and the unity of people and purpose which characterised Mother Russia.

The triumph of will over reason

One major aspect of Occidentalism is the valorising of will over reason. Timid reason calculates the best course of action, tots up the pros and cons, a shopkeeper mentality. All this contrasts with the will which acts instinctively, in large glorious romantic causes. Following the footsteps of Friedrich Nietzsche, Hitler and the Nazis famously praised the Triumph of the Will over pettifogging rationalism. And so did nineteenth century Russians.

Konstantin Leontiev

The Russian Nietzsche was Konstantin Leontiev (1831 to 1891). He wrote a big book, Russia and Europe, which made a big splash. He was one of hundreds of late-nineteenth century philosophers and commentators who worked up an ‘organic’ theory of history i.e. that societies are like organisms which have a birth, a youth, a maturity and then a decay.

Surprise, surprise, Leontiev thought that the West with its decadent liberal democracy was in the last stages of decay. Exactly what Vladimir Putin thinks today, 150 years later. Continuities like this demonstrate that this is not a rational belief based on evidence, it is a prejudice, an unchanging tenet of anti-western bigotry, of Occidentalism.

The authors end the chapter with a brief history of the word nihilism which came to prominence, in Russia, in Ivan Turgenev’s novel Fathers and Sons. The chapter ends with more evidence of Dostoyevsky’s fanatical hatred of the West and fear that it’s godless, scientistic values were undermining the noble soul of Mother Russia.

5. The Wrath of God [Muslim fundamentalism]

 Buruma and Margalit draw a distinction between religious Occidentalism and secular Occidentalism. 

They say that Islamism is the form Occidentalism is taking in our time. What is new or unique is Islamism’s view that the West is guilty of barbarous idolatry and proceed to explain what this means, starting with a definition of idolatry.

They give a pocket history of the concept of idolatry which stems from the Jewish Bible. Here God is depicted as a jealous husband who is hurt when his Chosen People whore after strange gods. But obviously it has a deeper charge than that. God is also king of the universe, master of creation, source of existence. Denying God is the worst kind of blasphemy imaginable. In the Old Testament numerous kings and rulers are depicted as behaving as if they were as powerful as, or more powerful than, their creator, and demanding the veneration which is due to God.

So idolatry is giving to men the devotions and worship which are due to god. They discuss the meaning of Arab terms such as tajhil, jahiliyya and jahili. jahiliyyahas been used to describe the religious ignorance which prevailed in Arabia before the advent of the Prophet Mohammed but also, more metaphorically, as the notion of barbarism, in the same way the ancient Greeks used it to refer to everyone who wasn’t Greek. At school I was told it was a joke term for people whose unGreek languages made them sound like they were saying ba-ba-ba-ba.

To summarise, the use of the term jahiliyya in Islamist discourse can be interpreted as referring to a new barbarism (godless idolatry) which originates from the West and is infecting the Muslim world.

The authors have a digression into the history of Manicheism, first as an actual belief system propounded by the Iranian prophet Mani (216 to 277 AD) then as the strand in most religions which posits an absolute divide between God and Evil. Then they show how ‘evil’ in most religious traditions is associated with the body, with its weakness, tendency to degrade and die, its distracting appetites, worst of which is, as we all know, sex. The body is contrasted with the soul which is taken to be immortal and the part of a human body which can approach or commune with god.

Ali Shari’ati

They discuss Ali Shari’ati (1933 to 1977), an Iranian Shia Muslim revolutionary and opponent of the westernising regime of the Shah. Shari’ati thought the best way for developing countries to fight back against the infection of godless western materialism was by rallying around their religious beliefs and traditions, in his case, Islam. He explicitly linked the influence of the West as encouraging Muslims to idolatry i.e. diverting worship away from God and towards the godless things of man i.e. money, consumer goods.

The industrial revolution made the West rich but it led to what sociologist Max Weber called ‘the disenchantment of the world’. It lost its magic and spirits. It lost God. And so all its goods and products are tainted by this tendency to disenchant and divert men’s worship from God to things. Idolatry.

Sayyid Qutb

The authors tell us about Islamic radical thinkers who fought back against the forces of secularism, for example Muhamed Taleqani in Iran, before returning to Sayyid Qutb, first mentioned in chapter 2.

For Qutb the whole world, from decadent Cairo to New York, was in a state of jahiliyya. He saw the West as a gigantic brothel, steeped in animal lust, greed and selfishness. Human thought, in the West, was ‘given the status of God.’ Material greed, immoral behaviour, inequality and political oppression would end only once the world was ruled by God and by His laws alone. The opportunity to die in a holy war would allow men to overcome selfish ambitions and corrupt oppressors (p.117)

One of the appeals of Islam is its egalitarianism: all men really are equal in the eyes of God in a way they rarely have been in the Christian West, and the Islamic dream is of a society where all men worship God, all laws derive from God, all behaviour is godly, and so it is literally impossible for large disparities in wealth or for corrupt immoral rulers ever to arise.

Qutb is given more space this time around, with a thumbnail biography describing the two years he spent in America to improve his English and which turned him into a West-hating Occidentalist. He also became a ferocious antisemite, literally believing in the famous forgery, The Elders of Zion and the ‘worldwide Jewish conspiracy’ and associating the global nature of finance capital with ‘Jewish bankers’ and so on. Schoolboy antisemitism.

To look at it another way, Qutb thought he was developing an approach which saved the noble and godly in human nature. The West wasn’t just godless, it actively worshipped the things of the body, the West is a cult of physical appetites, valuing food, drink, sex, holidays, fast cars, thus degrading human nature, instead of uplifting it through things of the soul by focusing solely on God. jahiliyya is the culture of animals or, worse, of humans who have thrown away their human attributes in a mad rush to become animals.

So, if Westerners have deliberately denied their humanity and turned themselves into animals, then they can be treated like animals, as worse than sub-humans. It’s this development of a train of thought which led him to consider all Westerners as sub-human which makes Qutb, as Buruma and Margalit out it, ‘the high priest of Occidentalism’ (p.121).

More, the world is in a state of war, between those who seek the righteousness of Islam and the rest. Even Islamic countries have been tainted to some extent by Western or secular innovations, and so jihad must be fought to overthrow idolatrous leaders. This is, obviously enough, an incitement to permanent warfare. You can see why it would appeal to zealous young men disgusted by the West, such as Mohamed Atta and so it explains the never-ending supply of young men prepared to take up arms to defend and assert radical Islam. But it just as easily explains why those societies, Islamic societies, will never be at peace with themselves. Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, Iraq. Permanent war.

Abu-l-A’la Maudadi

Then we are introduced to Abu-l-A’la Maudadi (1903 to 1979) Islamic scholar, Islamist ideologue, Muslim philosopher, jurist, historian, journalist and activist, who is described (on his Wikipedia page) by Wilfred Cantwell Smith as ‘the most systematic thinker of modern Islam’.

The thing about all these Islamic thinkers is it’s hard to remember them because they all appear to have had the same pretty simple idea: Islam needed to reject the corruption of the West, purged of Western corruption, in order to become pure. Then everyone will live happy godly lives.

In practice Maudadi opposed Indian nationalism because it was Hindu, and democracy because it would impose majority Hindu values on Muslims. He said in a speech that anyone who voted would be a traitor to the Prophet and to God. He wanted to revive the early Caliphate (what Islamic fundamentalist doesn’t?).

Maudadid founded the Jamaat I-Islami Party which went on to be influential in the politics of the new country formed at the Partition of India, of Pakistan.

Tawhid and Muhammed Iqbal

Tawhid is the doctrine of the Unity of God. One of its proponents was Muhammed Iqbal (1877 to 1938) writer, philosopher and politician, considered by many to be ‘the spiritual father of Pakistan’. In his view human society should practice unity, harmony and justice in order to reflect the Unity of God. Against this settled social background each individual should be able to develop their individuality or khudi.

So, Buruma and Margalit ask, what was it that made Qutb an Occidentalist and Iqbal not? Partly it was personal psychology; Qutb was overwhelmed and disgusted by everything he experienced in America, whereas Iqbal enjoyed his British education and took a degree at Cambridge.

But basically Iqbal was tolerant. He thought there were many ways to God; the best way is Islam but there might be others for men of good faith. Qutb, by contrast took a fiercely Manichean view: there was the world of Islam and then everything else, which was full of sub-human barbarians. Qutb wrote:

Any society that is not Muslim is jahiliyya

And true believers need to take up jihad to enforce the rule of God in their nations. Permanent war.

Protestantism and liberalism

The authors then shift their ground to explain that the Reformation i.e. rebellion against the grip of the Roman Catholic Church, began the long process whereby religion and the personal sphere were separated out, in the Protestant countries of the West. The separation of church and state. The right to freedom of conscience, of belief, of religion.

And this is anathema to Islamists who insist there is not, there cannot be, a divide between religion and private belief or morality. Everyone must believe and worship the same, follow the same morality. This is why some critics of political Islam liken it to fascism. More accurately it might be likened to totalitarianism. Mussolini said: ‘Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.’ Swap ‘Islam’ for state. Note the Morality Police in Saudi Arabia and Iran.

Women in Islam

Buruma and Margalit finally get around to the hugely contentious subject of women in Islam. They claim that many Muslims yearn for a return to traditional and community values. Islamic fundamentalism draws its support from a nostalgia for a return to proper Muslim values, which are associated with tradition beliefs and customs.

One of the central areas is the role and behaviour of women because in a patriarchal culture like Islam, the behaviour of women directly reflects on the honour of their menfolk, in a way most of us in the West just don’t understand.

Countless visitors to Muslim countries in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries observed the strict segregation of the sexes, the way women were completely invisible in many rural communities, or else were covered from head to foot in towns.

They zero in on the issue of the veil. The veil for women appears to have existed way before Islam there are depictions of it in pictures from the first century. Maybe Muslims copied it from the Byzantine Empire. It came to signify that the owner did not do manual labour i.e. became a status symbol.

During the independence struggle in Algeria many women took the veil as a proud assertion of their Islamic heritage and defiance of the French colonialists. But 50 years later, in the era of the Taliban, women are to be covered in what are effect shapeless sacks, completely denying their physicality, the assumption being that the merest glimpse of female flesh will cause an outbreak of ungodly fleshly thinking among surrounding men. In this respect ‘the veil’ is a symbol of a Manichean tension between the Spirit and the Body.

Wisely the authors don’t propose to delve deeper into the symbolism, meaning and all the debates raging around ‘the veil’, as fully explicating the history and then trying to find quotes in the Koran or the hadith to back up all the different opinions would keep us here till Doomsday.

Their book is not about Islamic beliefs and customs, it has the narrower focus of being about Muslim opinions about the West, in this case, Eastern views about Western women.

Islamic fundamentalists (and, the authors emphasise, Orthodox Jews) regard women’s dress and behaviour in the West as little better than prostitutes’. Here we’re back to Sayid Qutb’s opinion that Western immorality isn’t just bad, but degrades human beings to a level lower than animals. Animals don’t know any better, but humans do, and to reject what they know (of God’s demands for respect and morality) means they forfeit their humanity.

Also, in a patriarchal society, a woman is the ‘protected jewel’ in the crown of a man’s honour. Which means that how a man protects and defends his woman is a large part of his honour or identity. And here’s the point: Western men who relate to Western women as if they were just other citizens without any of the respect due to them in a Muslim country, show that they lack even the most basic sense of honour.

Wahhabism and Saudi Arabia

Three packed little pages which describe the alliance in the eighteenth century of fiercely puritanical preacher Muhammad Ibn Abd al-Wahhab and warlord Muhammad Ibn Saud. The warlord adopted the puritanical beliefs of the preacher and together they conquered the Holy Places. Then a lot of history as first the Ottomans and then the British took control of the Saudi peninsula, but by shrewd manoeuvring the family of the Sauds took control of the new kingdom and imposed an extremely fierce version of Islam on their population.

Then came the discovery of oil and these phenomenally strict Puritans found themselves among the richest people in the world. The result, say Buruma and Margalit, is an uneasy form of ‘officially sanctioned hypocrisy’, where the Saudi authorities impose a strict morality in public but live like Roman emperors in the privacy of their own palaces, or in their mansions in London and New York.

Saudi ‘hypocrisy’ would be of limited interest or importance if it weren’t for the fact that in the last decades of the twentieth century the Saudis began to export their form of intolerant Islam. As of 2004 the authors thought that:

Saudi Arabia is now the prime source of fundamentalist, puritanical ideology affecting Muslims everywhere, from North Africa to Indonesia. Oil money is used to promote religious radicalism around the world… (p.136)

That was 20 years ago, the trend has only increased since then, with Saudi involved not only in the Arab Spring uprisings and aftermaths, funding groups in Tunisia, Libya and Egypt, but also bankrolling sides in the ruinous civil wars in Syria and Yemen; and that’s before accounting for their promotion of their particularly virulent purist form of Islam in Muslim countries across North Africa and central Asia and into the Far East, in countries like Indonesia and Malaysia. And part of the package is a virulently anti-Western Occidentalist message.

6. Seeds of Revolution

A 12-page chapter on how the main venom of Occidentalism falls, even more than on distant America, on Israel. Eccentrically, they tackle this vast bottomless subject via a little known, unimportant novel published by the Theodor Herzl (1860 to 1904), the Austro-Hungarian Jewish journalist who was the father of modern political Zionism.

The Encyclopedia Britannica defines Zionism as a Jewish nationalist movement, originating in central and eastern Europe, that had for its goal the creation of a Jewish national state in Palestine, the ancient homeland of the Jews.

The novel was titled Altneuland which was translated into English as ‘The Old New Land’ when it was published in 1902. It’s apparently a huge text but the core of it is a vision of what Palestine will look like twenty years hence i.e. in 1922, after Palestine has been successfully occupied by Jews. The place has become a technological and economic miracle, the previously barren desert blooming, the previously rundown ports now full of cranes and ships, the rundown towns transformed into European-style cities with wide boulevards and cafes. Religion there is some, but hollowed out to become little more than the civic holidays of a mostly secular European culture.

Visitors to this brave new Jewish world marvel at the gleaming cities and high technology but find time to ask the one Arab in the book what he thinks, and he is overjoyed. Palestinian land-owners sold to the Jews for good prices, Palestinians are employed in all the new works, even the poor are lifted up by the rising standard of living. It’s win-win-win.

Of course it didn’t turn out that way and the modern state of Israel has become the number one hate figure for Arab politicians and Islamists throughout the region, a running sore in the Middle East which will, probably, never go away.

Anyway, the authors don’t really scratch the surface of the issue before proceeding to their rather rushed conclusion: this is that most of the nationalist responses to western imperialism borrowed western ideas to fight it with, whether they be the liberty-equality-fraternity of the French Revolution, the scientific positivism of Comte, the communism of Karl Marx, the anti-Enlightenment tropes of the German Romantics.

They move from Margalit’s home territory (Jerusalem/Israel) back to Buruma’s, Japan. He explains how the samurai leaders of Japan who realised in the 1860s that they needed to carry out a wholesale modernisation of their nation did so by importing selected Western ideas but also sparked a nativist nationalist backlash. But even this, although dressed in Japanese costume, borrowed ideas on how to run society from European fascists and the Nazis in particular.

They conclude that no Occidentalist can be free of ideas from the Occident. The modernisation of Japan gave rise to an anti-modern backlash which borrowed ideas and technology of the modern world in their effort to reject it. Same, they suggest, with Islamic fundamentalists. They loathe and fear western materialism, but communicate using laptops and mobile phones.

On almost the last page the authors start discussing the Ba’ath Party, which gained power in post-independence Syria and Iraq, and how it was forged in the 1930s from a combination of nostalgia for a holistic Arab community and ideas taken from European fascism. One of its theoreticians, Sati’ Husri, was a keen student of German Romantic theorists like Fichte and Herder who rejected the French Enlightenment by promoting the notion of the organic, völkisch nation united by blood and soil. This was translated by Husri into the Arab word asabiyya or (Arab) blood solidarity

The end of the book feels rushed and hurried. Only here do they make the big point that Arab ‘nationalist’ leaders have killed far more of their fellow Arabs than all the colonialists and Zionists put together, witness Saddam Hussein and Hafez al-Assad, who everyone thought was a cruel mass murderer until the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011 and we all discovered that his son, Bashar al-Assad, is even viler. Over half a million Arabs have died in the Syrian civil war.

What not to think

 Buruma and Margalit conclude with some very rushed thoughts. For a start they predict that the war against terror will mostly be fought within Arab states, against extremists. 

Secondly, they say the conflict is against a worldwide, loosely affiliated underground movement. (Presumably they mean al-Qaeda, though they don’t say so.)

As to the first prediction, now, in 2023, 20 years after the book was written, we know that America went ahead with its idiotically badly conceived invasion of Iraq, which on the face of it was an invasion by a foreign power, but that this triggered the collapse of Iraq into prolonged civil war and ethnic cleansing. The ‘within states’ thesis was more dramatically proven by the Arab Spring which led to the disintegration of the states of Libya and Syria, turmoil in Egypt, and a cruel civil war in Yemen. Presumably al-Qaeda and all its affiliates wanted to create pure Islamic states or restore the Caliphate, but they’ve turned out to be part of a process which has destabilised and wrecked much of the Arab world. My view is that it’s their culture, they’re their countries, we’ve interfered enough in that part of the world (and too many other parts of the world, too). Let them sort it out.

Buruma and Margalit say we shouldn’t be paralysed by ‘colonial guilt’ but I think we’re way beyond that now. Every time we intervene we make things worse. We turned Iraq into an abattoir. The Yanks spent a trillion dollars in Afghanistan over 20 years and look at it now: still the poorest country in the world and back to being ruled by the Taliban.

The West intervened in Libya to prevent Gaddafi massacring protesters in Benghazi but didn’t follow it through by leading and uniting the opposition which, instead, collapsed into regional factions, so that twelve years later, Libya has no one central government.

Total intervention, as in Iraq or Afghanistan, failed.

Partial intervention, as in Libya, failed.

I suggest the only viable policy is complete non-intervention as the West, in effect, is doing in Syria.

If Arabs and Muslims want to spend decades massacring each other, it’s not so much that we don’t want to intervene, or don’t have a moral duty or whatever to intervene; it’s more that we’ve tried intervening, in different countries in different ways, and almost always we make it worse. Non-intervention seems to me the only responsible policy.

This book was written when the Western world was reeling from the 9/11 attacks which everybody felt turned the world on its axis and introduced a whole new era. There was felt to be an urgent need for commentary and analysis, not least explanations of what Islamic fundamentalism was and why the terrorists hated us so much. This book was an interesting attempt to fill that gap.

By the end, although it contains lots of references to specific writers and theories, it feels somehow rushed and superficial. Buruma and Margalit’s thesis, which they repeat half a dozen times, is that German Romantic writers of the early nineteenth century developed a worldview opposing the rational scientific values of the French Enlightenment and Revolution, and this template for opposing all the forces of ‘modernity’ was then taken up by intellectuals in other countries which resented the way the godless materialism of Britain and France seemed to be destroying traditional values, in countries as far afield as Russia, China, Japan and India, and, in the twentieth century got mixed into the anger, resentment and humiliation of a number of Arab and Muslim theorists and theologians.

Their basic idea is that opposition to the West, and the negative stereotypes which its enemies use to characterise it which the authors call Occidentalism, began in the West and always carries the spoor of its Western origins.

However, it’s a long time since 9/11. Now, in 2023, it feels like a lot of the excitement, paranoia and hyperbole of that era has drained away. The Arab Spring, then the Arab Winter, then the collapse of Libya, Syria and Yemen, changed the landscape. Up till then Arab nationalists and radical Islamists believed that all they had to do was overthrow the ageing dictators who in one way or another had imposed Western ideas (nationalism, socialism, science) onto their peoples, and the purified, communal, traditional Islam of the good old days would rush back in to restore the Caliphate. Instead , when the dictators were overthrown, first in Iraq, then Tunisia, Libya, Egypt, with the vain attempt to do so in Syria, the result wasn’t the Unity of Islam but chaos and massacre.

Al Qaeda affiliates across North Africa continue to terrorise their countrymen but they will never be able to seize power; all they do is create the chaotic conditions in which warlords and mercenaries like the Wagner group thrive (in places like Chad, Mali or the Central African Republic or the wretched failed state of Somalia), while political and military leaders with no principles overthrow each other in naked bids for power, as in the utterly pointless Sudanese Civil War.

Piled onto all this is the relentless degradation of the environment of the Arab world, which is only going to get hotter and hotter, with evermore water shortages and the loss of evermore agricultural and even pasturing land. A lot of the Arab world is going to become a hellish place to live.

So the situation is massively more screwed up than when Buruma and Margalit wrote this book and their scholarly shuffling through tomes by Herder and Fichte, Schelling and Nietzsche, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, feels like bookish trip down memory lane. Then again maybe they were right to stick to the library; their treatment of the role of Israel in all this, approached through Theodor Herzl’s novel and a half page description of modern Jerusalem, feels entirely inadequate.

Either way, ahead lies total chaos in which the Occidentalism they describe and define will seem increasingly irrelevant to an Arab world collapsing into endless civil war and social collapse. The West wasn’t behind the Arab Springs, that was what so excited the protesters, they were entirely homemade, of domestic Arab and Muslim origin. But so was the chaos and collapse they brought in their wake, of entirely Arab and Muslim origin. It’s their countries, their people, their problems. We’ve intervened too many times. We shouldn’t get involved.

Credit

Occidentalism: A Short History of Anti-Westernism by Ian Buruma and Avishai Margalit was published in 2004 by Atlantic Books. References are to the 2005 Atlantic Books paperback edition.

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by Simon on September 27, 2023  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on September 27, 2023

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Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism @ Dulwich Picture Gallery

This is a lovely exhibition, the first major UK exhibition of the leading French Impressionist Berthe Morisot’s work since 1950, but it’s also much more than that.

At the Ball by Berthe Morisot (1875) © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

It is also a sustained comparison of Morisot’s work with the 18th century artists she knew and loved, which means that about a third of the paintings on display (about 15 out of a total 45 or so) are not by Morisot at all, but by eighteenth century classics, such as Watteau, Fragonard, Boucher and, surprisingly, the Brits Joshua Reynolds and Thomas Gainsborough.

A collaboration

How did this come about? Well, the Musée Marmottan Monet is ‘the world’s leading research centre for the work of Berthe Morisot’ and it turns out that Morisot was very influenced by eighteenth century art – the French eighteenth century work of Fragonard and Watteau and Boucher, but also the English eighteenth century art which she saw on her honeymoon to England in 1875.

And Dulwich Picture Gallery houses a celebrated collection of 18th century painting. So this exhibition is by way of being a collaboration between these two galleries – The Musée Marmottan Monet providing nine key examples of Morisot’s work (along with prime examples from international collections) and these are then juxtaposed with French and English eighteenth century paintings from the Dulwich collection and elsewhere – with the aim of demonstrating Morisot’s debt to the previous century, both in subject matter and aspects of her painting style.

Berthe Morisot potted biography

Berthe Marie Pauline Morisot (1841 to 1895) was a French painter and a founding member of Impressionism. In 1864, she exhibited for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris. Her work was selected for exhibition in six subsequent Salons until, in 1874, she joined the ‘rejected’ Impressionists in the first of their own exhibitions, a show which included Cézanne, Degas, Monet, Pissarro, Renoir and Sisley. Morisot went on to participate prominently in seven of the eight Impressionist exhibitions between 1874 and 1886 (she missed one in 1878, having just given birth to her daughter, Julie). In 1894 the art critic Gustave Geffroy as one of ‘les trois grandes dames’ of Impressionism, alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.

Morisot was well connected. She came from an affluent family who secured her painting lessons, first copying works in the Louvre, and then as a pupil to landscape painter Camille Corot, who taught her to make swift outdoor sketches.

She married Eugène Manet, brother of her friend and colleague Édouard Manet. Her sister, Edma, was also a painter. The Symbolist poet Stephane Mallarmé was a family friend. She was a member of the haut bohemien.

Room one

The exhibition is in four rooms. The first room contains eight paintings, designed partly to give you an introduction to her light and airy style, but almost all of the captions also draw attention to the fact that, even at the time, many critics spotted her closeness in spirit to eighteenth century painting.

Installation view of Room 1 of ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery

What they meant was that something in the lightness and airiness of her style, something in the domestic intimacy of her subjects (almost entirely women), and even in her use of shades of white and silver, related directly back to the mood and tone of French Rococo painting.

‘Woman at her Toilette’ by Berthe Morisot (1875 to 1880). Image courtesy of The Art Institute of Chicago, Stickney Fund

Take ‘Woman at her Toilette’. To quote the curators:

With its silvery palette and fluent brushwork, the painting appears as ephemeral as a mirror reflection. Reviewing it at the Fifth Impressionist exhibition in 1880, art critic Paul Mantz noted: ‘everything floats, nothing is formulated […] there is here a finesse like that found in Fragonard.’

Or:

‘The genius of the eighteenth century, but not its debauchery, lives again in these familiar and select images, which are animated by a kind of airy voluptuousness.’ (Henri Focillon)

Or take the painting at the start of this review, ‘At the Ball’. The woman in evening dress is holding an eighteenth-century fan, opened to display a picture-within-the-picture, a scene of outdoor courtship known as a fête galante, a genre invented by the eighteenth-century artist Watteau. (The fan belonged to Morisot and is included in the exhibition so we can admire its civilised 18th century style.)

Morisot was fond of making this kind of allusion to eighteenth-century visual culture and the connection proved attractive to collectors. The curators tell us that Rococo art had gone into a long period of neglect after the French Revolution but that, in Morisot’s generation, it underwent a revival. Exhibitions reintroduced eighteenth-century French art to the public and the Louvre opened new rooms devoted to the era.

So when Renoir declared her ‘the last elegant and “feminine” artist that we have had since Fragonard’ and Paul Girard, reviewing her summary exhibition in 1896 commented that her work was ‘the eighteenth century modernised’, it showed that she was very much on trend, and it was reflected in her sales. ‘At the Ball’ was bought from the Second Impressionist Exhibition in 1876 by art collector Georges de Bellio, to complement his existing collection of eighteenth-century art, and many of her works were sold to collectors with similar tastes.

Room two

The second room has the highest proportion of non-Morisot to Morisot, 8 or so works by other artists to her four. This is the room where the curators show a number of eighteenth century works and explore Morisot’s relationship to them. This turns out to be quite complicated, in the sense that she had a multi-levelled relationship with the artists of the preceding century, which evolved over time.

Engaging the classics

In her late teens and early twenties she had undergone supervised training which consisted of copying classic works at the Louvre. Over 20 years later, she returned to the Louvre to engage with the classics, no longer copying them but translating them into her own, loose, rough, late-impressionist style.

In her forties and fifties, Morisot engaged directly with grand mythological paintings in museum collections, translating elements of their compositions into her own Impressionist language. Unlike the copies that formed part of her own early training, these are original interpretations by a confident, mature artist.

Thus the exhibition shows us (a photo of) Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé by the great Rococo painter François Boucher:

‘Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé’ by François Boucher (1750)

And then shows us Morisot’s interpretation or translation or reinvention of the two embracing young women at the bottom left of the painting into her own hazy, light, unfinished style:

‘Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé, after François Boucher’ by Berthe Morisot (1892) © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

Now this raises all kinds of questions. On the face of it, I prefer the Boucher, as I consistently preferred all the 18h century originals to Morisot’s ‘interpretations’ when they were laid side by side. There’s more depth, more perspective, more (wonderful) painting technique, more detail and more visual pleasure to be had by the works by Fragonard, Boucher and Watteau on show here. They look and feel like the luxury objects they were intended to be.

And yet, Morisot’s work is doing something different: its looseness, its rough finish, its lack of interest in realistic perspective or twinkly detail are the result of something else. There’s a lot of experimentation going on in the technique, namely the long, blunt, wide brushstrokes which can be seen in the green reeds. (And it’s fascinating to learn that Monet very much liked this feature of Morisot’s later style, and went on to use a similar combination of short and longer sinewy brushstrokes and pastel colouring in his paintings of water lilies.)

But, arguably, there’s also a psychological dimension at play. In the Boucher work, the embracing women are yet more examples of the kind of sumptuous sensuality which floods the painting. In Morisot’s version they’re still naked, and we can see the outlines of their bodies, and yet these bodies are being dissolved into or drowned or clambered over by the powerful green reeds, powerful green reeds which, on the left, swirl and curve, leading the viewer’s eyes into a background which isn’t magically alluring but is more unadorned and bleak. Humanless and troubling.

The female gaze

Something similar can be said of another direct comparison the show gives us. First, look at this characteristically sensual and saucy painting by Fragonard of a woman reclining, all pink nipples and soft porn confection:

‘Young Woman Sleeping’ by François Boucher. Fondation Jacquemart-André – Institut de France, Domaine de Chaalis, Fontaine- Chaalis

Pretty obviously this painting, and this entire genre of painting, was designed to please and titillate its male audience with what T.S. Eliot called the ‘promise of pneumatic bliss’. And here is Morisot’s reinterpretation:

‘Resting’ by Berthe Morisot (1892) Private Collection

Same subject i.e. head and shoulders of a topless young woman reclining on an ornamental sofa or bed and yet…the Morisot comes from a different world, both artistically and psychologically. On the painterly level, the Bouchard buries the outlines of the subject in a realistic depiction i.e. you see more or less what you would see in real life, maybe a little Photoshopped and improved, but the outlines are soft a gentle.

On the contrary, the Morisot makes a point of emphasising outlines. Note the strong green lines shaping her hair, particularly as it tumbles onto her shoulder, the outline of her right shoulder against the pillow, the outlines of her right boob and forearm and left handing resting on it.

This painting isn’t interested in realism; it is making a statement about the artificiality of painting itself. In this respect, several of her later (this is from 1892) works reminded me of Gauguin, who had long ago ceased bothering about ‘realism’ and become interested in simplifying patterns and designs using heavy outlines, shapes which refer back to objects in the real world but take them a long way towards a kind of primitive abstraction.

Morisot isn’t Gauguin, but I thought some of her later works had moved just as far beyond impressionism, but in her own distinctive way. Another vivid example is ‘Julie Manet and her Greyhound Laertes’ from right at the end of her life (1893 – she died in 1895)

The straight-on face and the black, very loosely painted dress, reminded me of Edvard Munch more than Renoir or the other classic-era impressionists.

And this brings me to the other aspect of the work, which is its psychological impact. The Bouchard woman, a sleek airbrushed imago, has been painted for male viewing pleasure. The Morisot picture for other reasons altogether. As discussed, it is, on one level, an exercise in painterly technique, in exploring the world beyond pure realism. But on a psychological level it is just as complex. This woman doesn’t exist to give any man pleasure. This isn’t painted for the controlling male gaze. She comes across as a real individual, with idiosyncratic hair, colouring, non-male-fantasy boobs; like a painting of a woman who happens not to be wearing a top.

And, as well, there is some kind of power radiating from t, a sense of psychological depth. She reminds me of the heroines of late Victorian fiction, of Hardy or Zola or Henry James, of women whose every transient thought and emotion and response is annotated and analysed in vertiginous detail over three or four hundred pages novels.

There are a lot of paintings of women in the exhibition but, in my opinion, there is quite a big gulf between Morisot’s pretty-pretty, dressed-up Victorian women from the 1870s and 1880s, which are often variation on Renoir’s delightful dancing ladies – and these later depictions, which are something altogether different. They anticipate the much blunter honesty and psychological complexity of much early twentieth century portraiture.

Working in pastel

Room three also contains a useful contrast in the medium of pastel. From the 18th century we have a stunningly beautiful portrait of an unknown man by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau. This is the kind of work that has to be seen in the flesh to be appreciated. A reproduction like this flattens and smooths it out. In the flesh you can see the amazing amount of work that’s gone into the pastelwork, for example the way repeated layerings of broad blue crayon create a rich sensual impression like you could reach out and touch it, whereas, the wall label tells us, the intricate detail of his neckerchief was achieved with a fine-nibbed pen. It looks pretty good in this reproduction, but it’s a wonder to stand in front of.

Portrait of a Man, Thought to be Louis Journu, Known as Montagny by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau (1757 to 1758)

And so, placed next to it is a very good pastel portrait of her daughter Julie by Morisot:

Girl carrying a basket by Berthe Morisot (1891)

Again, the Morisot doesn’t have the astonishing finish or visual depth of the Perronneau. And yet, in its very sketchiness, it indicates an infinitely more modern consciousness, a proto-modern sensibility made of gaps and fragments, the strange ellipses and leaps of consciousness which modernist literature was about to start exploring about a decade later (I’m thinking about the earliest works of Kafka and Joyce).

The French eighteenth century

So, as mentioned above, the exhibition is worth visiting to see not just works by Morisot, but also (an admittedly small) number of works by French eighteenth century masters. There’s a pretty poor portrait of a young girl by Fragonard but a dazzling work by Watteau:

Les Plaisirs du bal by Antoine Watteau (1715 to 1717) Courtesy Dulwich Picture Gallery

Completely different in style from those guy’s frothy confections and commedia dell’arte whimsy, there’s a lovely piece by the master of eighteenth century realism, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, The Scullery Maid, a characteristically humble domestic scene of a serving maid getting eggs out of a jug surrounded by beautifully depicted bowls and servant-level bric-a-brac.

This leads off in another direction because it turns out that Morisot’s sister, Edma, was also an artist and she is represented here by just one work, a beautiful landscape in the manner of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot who both girls had studied under. These are all delights.

Landscape by Edma Morisot (1860s) D. and J. Waller

The English connection

But back to the English. The exhibition explains that Morisot spent her honeymoon (with Manet’s brother, Eugène) on a trip which took in the joys of the Isle of Wight and then London. In London she saw the huge collection amassed by Sir Richard Wallace, Marquess of Hertford, which has been preserved for the nation as the Wallace Collection.

It was here that she was introduced to the works of 18th century English masters such as Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough and George Romney. The exhibition takes a little detour to explain the different styles of these three men, and discuss some key works by each of them, and then how their styles or motifs found their way into Morisot’s work.

Gainsborough is the most obviously close to Morisot because of his light, feathery, sketchy approach, which drew criticism from the more grand and finished Reynolds, yet was precisely the quality that attracted the quick, sketchy Frenchwoman.

Installation view of ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery, setting ‘Mrs Mary Robinson’ by George Romney (1781, on the left) against ‘Winter, or Woman with a Muff’ by Berthe Morisot (1880)

Summary

Not all of Morisot’s work is great. The fourth and final room contains only works by her and I have to admit I didn’t like most of them.

Installation view of Room 4 of ‘Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism’ at Dulwich Picture Gallery

Worthy depictions of domestic interiors, of her growing daughter, intimate portraits of women outside in the Bois de Boulogne or out in a boat or resting on divans (clearly a full-time occupation for many Victorian ladies), I often found their style either washed-out (several of the supposedly sweet and intimate studies of her daughter gave her such a yellow-pale face she looked like a corpse, for example, ‘Children with a basin‘) or so quick and sketchy as to feel amateurish.

Very good amateurish, but in many of her paintings the multiple clumsinesses wherever I looked just stopped me really enjoying them, giving in, surrendering, saying Yes.

‘Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight’ by Berthe Morisot (1885) © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

By contrast, I was enraptured by almost all the eighteenth century works (except for the ghastly, ugly Fragonard in room one), by her sister’s one work, and also by the massive work by a painter I haven’t mentioned yet, her contemporary James Tissot (The Ball on Shipboard), included because Tissot moved from Paris to London and made a great success of his career, so much so that, on her honeymoon trip, Morisot seriously considered doing the same and moving to London.

Even the 18th century ‘cartoons’ or preliminary sketches for big works like by Boucher (‘Vulcan’s Forge) delighted and enchanted with a depth and finish and wonderful technique, in a way that most of the Morisot didn’t.

For this reason I hardly think it the scandal of the century that Morisot isn’t as well known as many of the other impressionists. To be blunt, I don’t think she’s as good. Or definitely not on the strength of the works presented here, a handful of which are really good, some are pretty good, and some are positively poor.

But then again, it depends on your aesthetic. Did my general preference for the 18th century works indicate that I’m a peasant, a man of poor taste, a liker of pretty pictures and chocolate box art, who doesn’t appreciate more demanding (and hardly that demanding) art?

Here’s a test. Here’s the bold, take-no-prisoners self-portrait which the curators open the show with.

Self-portrait by Berthe Morisot (1885) © Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris

I get that she’s a strong independent woman, and that this comes over not only in the directness of her gaze but in the super-confidence with which she didn’t finish it. The French have an expression, ‘je-m’en-foutisme’, which translates as ‘I don’t give a damn-ism’ (or ruder, four-letter equivalents).

So, is the scrappy finish and the lack of immediate visual appeal outweighed by the strength of character and psychological depth of a painting like this? Your answer will determine whether you like Morisot, or at least the selection of 30 or so Morisot paintings to be found in this small but incredibly stimulating and hugely enjoyable exhibition.

The merch

I’ve made the point in previous reviews of Impressionist exhibitions, but one reason for the ongoing popularity of the Impressionists is simply that their paintings transfer so well onto posters and mugs and tea towels and jigsaws and the whole world of merchandise. Painting which, large and in the flesh feel half finished and scrappy, when reduced to the size of a coffee cup or tea tray, suddenly look finished, light and attractive. Never ceases to amaze me. As you can see from the full range of Morisot merchandise on sale at the Dulwich Picture Gallery shop:

The promotional video

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Posted by Simon on July 28, 2023

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Seneca’s Plays

What follows are notes on E.F. Watling’s introduction to his translation of Seneca’s plays, published by Penguin Books in 1966, then a summary with comments of the four Seneca plays it contains:

Seneca’s biography

Lucius Annaeus Seneca was born in 4 BC Corduba, Spain, the second son of Annaeus Seneca the Elder. His father had studied rhetoric in Rome and returned to Spain to bring his sons up with respect for the traditional virtues of the Roman Republic, which had ceased to exist a generation earlier, following the victory of Octavian against Anthony at Actium in 31 BC.

As a young man Seneca the Younger studied Stoic philosophy. He lived in Egypt for a while, probably due to ill health (tuberculosis?) and because his aunt was the wife of the prefect there. By 33 AD he was back in Rome, married to his first wife (whose name is unknown) and achieving recognition as a lawyer and teacher of rhetoric.

Seneca had run-ins with several of the early emperors. At one point he was forced to retire into private life due to the suspicions of Caligula. He returned to public life on the accession of the emperor Claudius but in the very same year, 41 AD, was exiled to Corsica, accused of adultery with the new emperor’s niece, Julia, probably at the instigation of Claudius’s scheming third wife, Valeria Messalina. Seneca spent eight years on Corsica during which he wrote a number of philosophical works.

In 48 Claudius had Messalina executed for (supposedly) conspiring to overthrow him, and married his fourth wife, the equally scheming Agrippina. But it was Agrippina who asked for the recall of Seneca and made him tutor to her 12-year-old son, Lucius Domitius, the future emperor Nero. When Nero came to power 6 years later, in 54 AD, aged just 17, Seneca became his principal civil adviser (Nero had a separate adviser for military affairs, Sextus Afranius Burrus).

Some attribute the fact that the first five years of Nero’s reign were relatively peaceful and moderate to Seneca’s restraining influence. According to Tacitus’s Annals, Seneca taught Nero how to speak effectively, and wrote numerous speeches for him to address the senate with, praising clemency, the rule of law, and so on.

However, palace politics slowly became more poisonous, Nero came to rule more despotically, and Seneca’s position and wealth made him the target of increasing political and personal attacks. In 62 Seneca asked to be allowed to retire from public life, a conversation with Nero vividly described (or invented) in Tacitus’s Annals. Emperor and adviser parted on good terms but, over the next few years, Seneca’s name was cited in various plots and conspiracies.

The largest of these was the conspiracy of Gaius Calpurnius Piso in 65, a plot to assassinate Nero which was discovered at the last moment (the morning of the planned murder), and which, as the suspects were interrogated and tortured by Nero’s Guard, turned into a bloodbath of the conspirators.

Historians think Seneca was not an active conspirator, and debate how much he even knew about the plot, but whatever the precise truth, Nero ordered him put to death. Hearing of this, Seneca, en route back to Rome from Campania, committed suicide with a high-minded detachment that impressed the friends who attended the deed, and made him a poster boy for Stoic dignity. Many classic paintings depict the noble scene. Nero himself was, of course, to commit suicide just three years later, in 68 AD.

The Death of Seneca by Manuel Dominguez Sanchez (1871)

Seneca’s works

Seneca was a prolific writer. He wrote 12 philosophical essays, an extensive work of natural science, and 124 letters of moral exhortation to his friend Lucilius. The letters are probably his most accessible and popular work.

But Seneca is also credited as the author of ten plays (though scholars bicker: maybe it’s nine; maybe it’s eight). The plays are all tragedies, loosely modeled on Greek tragedy and featuring Greek tragic protagonists. The Romans had a technical term for these, fabula crepidata, meaning a Roman tragedy with a Greek subject.

Seneca’s plays make a striking contrast to his philosophical works not only in tone but also in worldview. The Letters to Lucilius go into great detail about how to banish all attachments, emotions and feelings from your life in order to achieve a calm, rational, Stoic detachment. By contrast, the plays are full of gruesomely bloodthirsty plots and characters wrought to the utmost degree of emotional extremity. Throughout the Middle Ages and Renaissance the works seemed so utterly different in worldview that scholars thought Seneca the moral philosopher and Seneca the dramatist were two different people.

Critics have been very harsh indeed about these plays. The editor of the Penguin edition, E.F. Watling, accuses them of ‘bombastic extravagance’, of ‘passionate yet artificial rhetoric’. The German critic Schlegel is quoted accusing them of ‘hollow hyperbole’, ‘forced and stilted’. Watling cites the consensus among scholars who condemn them as:

horrible examples of literary and dramatic incompetence, travesties of the noble Greek drama, the last wretched remnant of declining Roman taste. (Introduction, p.8)

And yet Seneca’s plays had a very important influence on Renaissance theatre, influencing Shakespeare and other playwrights in England, and Corneille and Racine in France.

Seneca’s tragedies are customarily considered the source and inspiration for what became known as the genre of ‘Revenge Tragedy’ in Elizabethan theatre, starting with Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy of the 1580s, and continuing on into the Jacobean era (the reign of King James I, 1603 to 1625).

Their importance to Elizabethan drama explains why so fastidious a critic as T.S. Eliot, obsessed as he was with the period, praised Seneca’s plays, singling out Phaedra and Medea – although most critics consider Thyestes to be Seneca’s ‘masterpiece’.

Seneca’s tragedies

  • Agamemnon
  • Hercules or Hercules furens (The Madness of Hercules)
  • Medea
  • Oedipus
  • Phaedra
  • Phoenissae (The Phoenician Women)
  • Thyestes
  • Troades (The Trojan Women)

The Penguin paperback edition of the plays, edited and translated by E.F. Watling, contains four of the ‘best’ plays – Thyestes, Phaedra, Oedipus and The Trojan Women. (It also contains an oddity, a play titled Octavia, which resembles Seneca’s tragedies in melodramatic tone but, since it features Seneca as a character, and describes his death, cannot have been by him. Scholars guesstimate that it was probably written soon after Seneca’s death by someone influenced by his style and aware of the events of his lifetime.)

Watling’s critique

Watling’s introduction pulls no punches in detailing Seneca’s shortcomings:

He was not a constructor of tragic plots; his plays are not concerned with the moral conflict between good and good which is the essence of true tragedy: he only recognises the power of evil to destroy good. He does not delay or complicate the issue by any moral dilemma exhibiting the conflict of justifiable but mutually incompatible ambitions; his tragedy is simply a disastrous event foretold and anticipated from the start and pursued ruthlessly to its end. (p.25)

Seneca routinely stops the action of his ‘plots’ to give characters long, highly-strung, melodramatic speeches, which might not even be particularly relevant to the plot and often take no account of who else is on stage at the time.

His technique of dramatic speech is extremely narrow, having only two modes: either a character is delivering a long monologue, or he deploys stichomythia, where just two characters swap exchanges of dialogue; rarely anything more complicated than that.

Many of the long speeches and even some of the exchanges are so stock and stereotyped that they could easily be swapped from one play to another without anyone noticing. Watling names some of these stock topics – the ‘simple life’ speech, the ‘haunted grove’ speech and ‘the king must be obeyed’ dialogue, which all crop up in several of the plays.

The climax of all the plays is always a gruesome barbarity and Seneca uses the Greek conventions of having it take place offstage and described by a breathless messenger who comes onstage hotfoot from the scene. The messengers’ speeches all follow the exact same formula: the description of the place, the horror of the act, the stoical courage of the sufferer.

Seneca’s use of the Chorus is for the most part flaccid and unconvincing. (p.24)

The Chorus declaims its verse in a different metre from the rest of the play. They are known as Choric odes. The Choric odes’s main purpose is to comment on the main action but they often feature a clotted recital of myths or legends similar or related to the one we are witnessing.

The Chorus also often expresses ideas which contradict the worldview of the play and even of the main action. For example they will powerfully express the idea that death is the end of life and there is nothing after, except that… the plays feature ghosts and numerous descriptions of the classic souls in hell (Sisyphus, Tantalus, Ixion). There is no attempt at consistency – immediate and sensational effect is what is strived for.

The sense of unnecessary repetition is echoed at a verbal level where Seneca creates a drenched and intense effect by repeating synonyms for just one idea – Watling says examples in English would be larding a speech with the synonymous words anger-rage-ire, or fear-terror-dread. No idea is left to float subtly but is bludgeoned into submission by repetition.

Watling sums up Seneca’s plays as 1) sporting a bombastic, over-the-top rhetoric, deriving from 2) gruesomely bloodthirsty plots, which 3) are staged with a remarkable lack of dramatic invention i.e. very clumsily and straightforwardly.

But despite all these shortcomings, the sheer visceral intensity of his plays goes some way to explain why they were useful models for the earliest Elizabethan playwrights writing the first attempts at English tragedy, influencing Kyd, Marlowe and the early Shakespeare of Titus Andronicus (which contains several quotes from Seneca’s Phaedra).

To return to T.S. Eliot who I mentioned above, we can now see why Eliot (in an introduction to a 1927 reprint of Elizabethan translations of Seneca) made the characteristically perceptive remark that, foregrounding vivid rhetoric over more traditional notions of plot or characterisation as the do, might make Seneca’s plays suitable for what was (in 1927) the very new medium of radio – rhetoric i.e. the power of words alone, triumphing over all other factors. A surf of sensationalist sound. The bombastic power of words superseding all considerations of ‘plot’ or ‘characterisation’.

**********

Plots of the four plays

1. Thyestes

Summary

It’s a tragedy of two brothers who hate each other, Atreus who takes a horrific vengeance on his brother, Thyestes.

Background

Tantalus was a son of Jupiter. He killed, cooked and served up his own son, Pelops, at a banquet of the gods. For this atrocity he was condemned to eternal punishment in hell, fixed in a pool of water, dying of thirst but unable to bend down to scoop up any of the water, and dying of hunger, but unable to touch any of the fruit growing just out of reach above him. Hence the English verb to tantalise. Jupiter restored Pelops to life but he himself went on to win a wife and a kingdom by treachery. Pelops banished his two grown-up sons, Atreus and Thyestes, for the murder of their half-brother, Chrysippus. When Pelops died, Atreus returned and took possession of his father’s throne, but Thyestes claimed it too. Thyestes seduced Atreus’s wife, Aërope, who helped him steal the gold-fleeced ram from Atreus’s flocks which was said to grant the kingship. But instead of gaining the crown he was banished. Despite sitting pretty, Atreus wants to make his ascendancy over his brother complete, so he is now planning to recall Thyestes from banishment on the pretext of sharing the throne with him, but in fact carrying out an atrocious act of revenge.

Act I

A Fury raises Tantalus’s miserable spirit from the underworld. He moaningly asks if even more pain and suffering await him. The Fury delivers an extraordinary vision of the sins of the house of Peolops, ramifying out to undermine all the order in the world. The Chorus comes onstage. It consists of citizens of Argos. They invoke the presiding gods of the cities of Greece in the hope they can prevent the tragedy.

Act II

Atreus consults with his minister about the best way of carrying out vengeance on his brother. The minister wonders how he can do this, allowing Atreus to explain that he will offer forgiveness and a share in the crown to lure Thyestes back to Argos, where he can carry out his revenge; what it will be, exactly, he is still considering but it will be awful. The Chorus reproves the ambition of rulers, describing the character of a true king, before singing the praises of a retired life.

Act III

Thyestes, having been invited back to his homeland by Atreus, arrives with his three young sons and expresses his distrust and sense of approaching disaster. Atreus applauds himself: his plan is working. The Chorus, apparently oblivious of the preceding act, praises the fraternal affection of Atreus for putting aside the brother’s enmity.

Act IV

With no development of plot or character, with melodramatic abruptness, a messenger appears who describes to the appalled Chorus the grotesque climax of the play which is that Atreus had Thyestes’s three children killed, cooked and served up to Thyestes at the brothers’ reconciliation feast. It takes the form of a question and answer session, the Chorus asking what happened next, the messenger answering. The Chorus, observing the going down of the Sun, hysterically fears that this criminal act might tear apart the whole fabric of the universe.

Act V

Atreus congratulates himself on his cruel revenge. Thyestes trembles with premonition that something terrible has happened. The Atreus reveals to him that he has just eaten his own beloved sons.

(Incidentally, the curse on the house of Pelops was to continue into the next generation in the persons of Agamemnon, son of Atreus, who was murdered on his return from the Trojan War, by Aegisthus, son of Thyestes – the subject of one of Seneca’s other plays.)

Thyestes demonstrates the classic characteristics of a Seneca play. It maintains a continuous, shrill, hyperbolic tone. Hyperbolic exaggeration Here’s the Fury seeing the feud escalate into end-of-the-world anarchy:

Vengeance shall think no way forbidden her;
Brother shall flee from brother, sire from son,
And son from sire; children shall die in shames
More shameful than their birth; revengeful wives
Shall menace husbands, armies sail to war
In lands across the sea; and every soil
Be soaked with blood; the might of men of battle
In all the mortal world shall be brought down
By Lust triumphant. In this house of sin
Brothers’s adultery with brothers’ wives
Shall be the least of sins; all law, all faith
All honour shall be dead. Nor shall the heavens
Be unaffected by your evil deeds:
What right have stars to twinkle in the sky?
Why need their lights still ornament the world?
Let night be black, let there be no more day.
Let havoc rule this house; call blood and strife
And death; let every corner of this place
Be filled with the revenge of Tantalus!
(Fury, Act 1)

Here’s Atreus whipping himself up to commit the worst crime in the world:

Sanctity begone!
If thou wast ever known within these walls.
Come all the dread battalions of the Furies!
Come, seed of strife, Erinys! Come, Megaera,
With torches armed! My spirit yet lacks fire;
It would be filled with still more murderous rage!
(Atreus, Act 1)

In the introduction Watling talks up the discrepancy between Seneca the lofty Stoic and Seneca the author of blood-thirsty, amoral plays. But there is some overlap, some places where characters appear to speak the language of Stoic detachment, such as the second Choric ode which describes the true nature of kingship as not being power or riches but resilience and mental strength. The true king

is the man who faces unafraid
The lightning’s glancing stroke; is not dismayed
By storm-tossed seas; whose ship securely braves
The windy rage of Adriatic waves;
Who has escaped alive the soldier’s arm,
The brandished steel; who, far removed from harm,
Looks down upon the world, faces her end
With confidence, and greets death as a friend.
(Chorus, Act 2)

That’s the Chorus, but Thyestes himself also declaims an ‘advantages of the simple life‘ speech to his son as they arrive at Atreus’s palace:

While I stood
Among the great, I stood in daily terror;
The very sword I wore at my own side
I feared. It is the height of happiness
To stand in no man’s way, to eat at ease
Reclining on the ground. At humble tables
Food can be eaten without fear; assassins
Will not be found in poor men’s cottages;
The poisoned cup is served in cups of gold.
(Thyestes, Act 3)

(Words which resonate with Seneca’s experiences in the fraught court of the emperor Nero.) In the final act, just before Atreus reveals to Thyestes what he’s done, Thyestes feels a powerful, world-shaking sense of doom, very reminiscent of the same premonition characters experience in Shakespeare’s tragedies:

The table rocked, the floor is shaking.
The torches’ light sinks low; the sky itself
Hangs dull and heavy, seeming to be lost
Between the daylight and the dark. And why –
The ceiling of the heavens seems to shake
With violent convulsions – more and more!
The murk grows darker than the deepest darkness,
Night is engulfed in night; all stars have fled!
(Thyestes, Act 5)

Once the deed has been revealed, here’s the Chorus reciting a welter of classical precedents in an effort to capture the enormity of the event:

Are the Giants escaped from their prison and threatening war?
Has tortured Tityos found strength in his breast again to renew his old aggression?
Or has Typhoeus stretched his muscles to throw off his mountain burden?
Is Ossa to be piled on Pelion again
To build a bridge for the Phlegrean Giants’ assault?
Is all the order of the universe plunged into chaos?
(Chorus, Act 4)

These are all formulae or stock ingredients, which are repeated in all the other plays, and were to be enthusiastically taken up by the Elizabethan playwrights striving for sensational effects in the 1590s and early 1600s.

2. Phaedra

Background

Theseus was a typical Greek ‘hero’ i.e. an appalling human being, guilty of countless crimes, infidelities, murders and rapes. But the play isn’t about him, it’s about his second wife and his son. In his first marriage Theseus married the Amazon warrior Antiope, also known as Hippolyta, who bore him a son, Hippolytus. This Hippolytus grew up despising love, refusing to worship at the temples of Venus. He preferred Diana and the joys of the hunt. During this time, Theseus divorced his first wife and married Phaedra, daughter of Minos, king of Crete (following his adventure on Crete where he slew the Minotaur).

Now, Hyppolitus had grown to be a handsome young man and Phaedra was a mature woman when Theseus left his kingdom for a while to help his friend Peirithous rescue Persephone from the underworld. During his absence, the goddess of love, Venus, determined to take her revenge on Hippolytus for spurning her worship, inflamed his stepmother, Phaedra’s, heart with insatiable desire for the handsome young man.

Prelude (Hippolytus)

Hippolytus soliloquises on the joys of the hunt, delivering a long list of Greek hunting locations to his companions. It not only reveals Hippolytus’s character but impresses the audience with Seneca’s detailed and scholarly knowledge of Greek geography.

Act 1 (Phaedra and the nurse)

Phaedra soliloquy in which she laments that Theseus has gone off to the underworld, abandoning her in a place she has never liked, exiled from her beloved Crete. She wonders that she has recently become obsessed with the hunt.

(Her mother was Pasiphae, wife of King Minos who notoriously allowed herself to be impregnated by a bull, giving birth to the Minotaur. More relevant, though, is that Pasiphae was a daughter of Phoebus the sun god, and Venus the goddess of love has a long-running feud with him. Which explains why Venus is also against Phaedra.)

It is the nurse who makes explicit the fact that Phaedra has fallen in love with her stepson. Phaedra says her infatuation is driving her so mad she wants to kill herself.

Unreason reigns
Supreme, a potent god commands my heart,
The invincible winged god, who rules all earth,
Who strikes and scorches Jove with his fierce flame…

Interestingly, the nurse insists that all this talk of Venus and Eros is rubbish. There is no little god with a bow and arrow fluttering about in the sky. Instead it is the corruption of the times: ‘Too much contentment and prosperity and self-indulgence’ lead to new desires. In fact she states the Stoic theme that the simple life is best and luxury leads to decadence.

Then the Chorus delivers a long impressive hymn to the power of Eros or Love, as demonstrated by mating behaviour throughout the animal kingdom. As a Darwinian materialist I, of course, agree that the urge to mate and reproduce is the primary function of all life forms, including humans.

Act 2

The nurse describes to the Chorus Phaedra’s ever more miserably lovelorn state, pale face, tearful eyes etc. We are shown Phaedra in her boudoir angrily bossing her attendants about, despising her traditional dresses and jewellery, wanting to wear the outfit of a hunting queen and roam through the woods after her beloved.

Enter Hippolytus. The nurse tells him to stop hunting so hard, relax, find love, enjoy his youth. She counsels him to reproduce; if all young men were like him, humanity would cease to exist. Hippolytus replies not really to her points, instead declaring that he prefers simple rustic rural life in its honest simplicity to the deceit of courts and the city, mob rule, envy etc – turns into an extended description of that old chestnut, the sweet and innocent life of the age of Saturn, before cities or ships or agriculture, before war itself. Illogically this long speech ends with a swerve into his hatred of women, who he blames for all conflict and wars, and explains why he shuns women like the plague.

Enter Phaedra and metaphorically falls at Hippolytus’s feet, swearing she will be his slave and do anything for him. He mistakes, thinking she is upset because of the long absence of her husband, his father, Theseus in the underworld. He tries to reassure her, while Phaedra cannot contain her made infatuation:

Madness is in my heart;
It is consumed by love, a wild fire raging
Secretly in my body in my blood,
Like flames that lick across a roof of timber.

Phaedra describes how beautiful Theseus was as a young man when he came to Crete to kill the Minotaur and sue King Minos for the hand of his daughter, Ariadne. But all this leads up to Phaedra kneeling in front of Hippolytus and declaring her love for him. Hippolytus responds with end-of-the-world bombast:

For what cause shall the sky be rent with thunder
If no cloud dims it now? Let ruin wreck
The firmament, and black night hide the day!
Let stars run back and all their courses turn
Into confusion!..
Ruler of gods in heaven and men on earth,
Why is thy hand not armed, will not thy torch
Of triple fire set all the world ablaze?
Hurl against me thy thunderbolt, thy spear,
And let me be consumed in instant fire.

He rebuffs her. She throws herself into his arms, swearing to follow him everywhere. He draws his sword. Yes! She begs to be killed and put out of her misery. He realises it will defile his sword and all the oceans will not be able to clean it. (A very common trope in tragedy, originating with the Greeks, repeated in, for example, Macbeth, one thousand five hundred and fifty years later.)

Phaedra faints, Hippolytus flees. The nurse steps forward to comment and make the suggestion that, now Phaedra’s criminal love is revealed and Hippolytus has rejected her, to deflect blame she ought to accuse him of propositioning her. She yells ‘Help! Rape!’ as the Chorus enters, representing ‘the people’, showing them the sword Hippolytus dropped in his flight and the Queen, lying distraught on the ground, her hair all dishevelled.

The Chorus apparently ignores the cries of the nurse and instead proceeds with a 3-page hymn to Hippolytus’s matchless male beauty.

Act 3

Weirdly, act 3 opens with the self-same Chorus only now summarising the situation i.e. the queen intends to pursue her utterly false claim of rape against Hippolytus. But the Chorus hasn’t got far before who do we see arriving but Theseus, the mature hero, who describes how he has been in the underworld for four long years, only able to return because Hercules rescued him. But what is all this weeping and lamentation he hears?

The nurse explains her wife is distraught and some kind of curtain is lifted or something removed to reveal an ‘inner scene’ where we see Phaedra holding a sword as if to kill herself. Theseus interrogates Phaedra who refuses to explain. So – in the kind of casual mention of hyper violence to servants and slaves which always disturbs me – Theseus says he’ll have the nurse bound and scourged and chained and whipped till she spills the beans.

But before he can do this, Phaedra says Hippolytus tried to rape her, saying this is his sword which he left in his flight. Theseus now delivers the ‘Great gods, what infamy is this!’ type speech. Interestingly, he accuses Hippolytus not only of the obvious things, but accuses him of hypocrisy in his ‘affectation of old time-honoured ways’ i.e. Seneca has expanded Hippolytus’s traditional character of hunter to include this extra dimension of him being a proponent of the whole back-to-the-ways-of-our-ancestors movement, a view Seneca himself propounds in the Letters to Lucilius.

Theseus accuses Hippolytus of being the worst kind of hypocrite, in language which reminds me of Hamlet berating his uncle Claudius, then vows to track him down wherever he flees. He tells us that the god Neptune granted him three wishes, and now he invokes this promise, demanding that Hippolytus never sees another dawn.

The Chorus steps in to lament why the king of the gods never intervenes to ensure justice, why men’s affairs seem governed by blind fate, why the evil triumph and the good are punished.

Act 4

Enter the messenger with stock tears and reluctance to tell what he has seen. Theseus commands him and so the messenger describes the death of Hippolytus. The youth fled, jumped into his chariot, and whipped the horses off at great speed but that is when a strange enormous storm arose at sea, vast waves attacking the land, and giving birth to a monster, a bull-shaped thing coloured green of the sea with fiery red eyes. This thing proceeds to terrify Hippolytus’s horses which run wild, throwing him from the chariot but tangling his arms and legs in the traces, so that he is dragged at speed over the clifftop’s ragged rocks and flayed alive, his body disintegrating into pieces until he collided with a fallen tree trunk and was transfixed in the groin. Theseus laments that his wish has been so violently fulfilled.

The Chorus repeats the idea which I’m coming to see as central to the play, less about love or lust etc but the safeness of the humble life, not exposed to the decadent living, random lusts and shocking violence associated with the rich.

Peace and obscurity make most content,
In lowly homes old age sleeps easily…
For Jupiter is on his guard
And strikes whatever comes too near the sky.
The thunder rumbles round his throne,
But no great harm can come to common folk
Who dwell in modest homes.

If you think about this for a moment, you’ll realise it’s bullshit. Poor people living in lowly homes often have terrible lives, scarred by poverty, ignorance and, of course, the random violence of their superiors who might, for example, decide to start a civil war and devastate the homes and livelihoods of ‘common folk’ in entire regions. Think of Julius Caesar laying waste entire regions of Gaul, burning cities to the ground and selling their entire populations into slavery. It’s the kind of patronising crap rich people tell themselves to convince themselves that they, the filthy rich, living in the lap of luxury, eating at gluttonous banquets, waited on hand and foot by literally hundreds of slaves, and filling their day with sexual perversions, that they are the ones who have it rough.

Act 5

Barely has Theseus heard all from the messenger than Phaedra enters, wailing and wielding the sword. She begins her lament as the ruined corpse of Hippolytus is brought onstage and continues, lamenting his death, berating her treachery and falsehood, confessing to Theseus that Hippolytus was totally innocent, then stabbing herself to death.

Theseus then laments a) was it for this that he was allowed to escape from hell, into a hell of his own devising? And then lists all the ingenious punishments he saw in hell and says none of them are adequate for him.

The Chorus intervenes to advise that they honour and bury the body first and then, very gruesomely, specifically directs Theseus in placing the left hand here and the right hand over here, and so on, as they assemble his body parts, a ghoulish jigsaw.

In the final lines, Theseus orders his staff to a) go scour the landscape to find the last missing bits of Hippolytus and b) and as for the wicked Phaedra:

let a deep pit of earth conceal
And soil lie heavy on her cursed head.

3. The Trojan Women

Background

The Trojan War has ended. Troy has fallen. Outside the smouldering ruins of the city huddle the surviving royal women, rounded up by the victorious Greeks and awaiting their fate. The leading women are Hecuba, widow of King Priam, and Andromache, widow of the great Trojan warrior, Hector.

Act 1

Hecuba opens the play with a long lament about the fall of Troy, symbol of the uncertainty on which all pomp and power is based. She interacts with the Chorus of Trojan women. She makes them unbind their hair and loosen their tunics to expose their bare breasts which they then proceed to beat in lament for Hector, wall of Troy, and Priam its murdered king. But at least they are at peace now and will never be led as slaves to foreign lands.

Happy is Priam, happy every man
That has died in battle
And taken with him his life’s fulfilment.

(The literal baring and beating of their own breasts occurs in several of the plays. Was it performed literally in ancient times? Women mourning in ancient times were meant to not only beat their bare breasts but scratch their faces till they bled. If taken literally, surely this would be as difficult to perform persuasively onstage as a sword fight.)

Act 2

The Chorus wonders why the Greeks are delaying. Talthybius describes the momentous appearance of the ghost of Achilles, demanding the sacrifice he was promised before the fleet can sail. A prime slab of Senecan bombast:

A rift appeared,
Caves yawned, hell gaped, earth parted and revealed
A way from worlds below to worlds above.
His tomb was burst asunder and there stood
The living ghost of the Thessalian leader…

Pyrrhus, son of dead Achilles, takes up the case for his father, first listing his great victories before he even came to Troy, then insisting the Greeks fulfil their vow and make a human sacrifice at his tomb. Agamemnon sharply refuses, saying he regrets the blood and cruelty of the night of the sack of Troy but it was sort of justified by bloodlust. But now in the cold light of day, sacrifice a human being? No. This dialogue turns really bitter as the two Greeks insult each other, accusing each other of cowardice and crimes.

Agamemnon calls for Calchas the soothsayer. Enter Calchas who announces that the gods demand two sacrifices: a young woman dressed as a bride must be sacrificed on Achilles’ tomb; and Priam’s grandson must be thrown from the battlements of Troy. Then the Greek fleet can sail.

The Chorus delivers quite a profound speech about death: is there anything afterwards, does the spirit live on, or is this all? It concludes:

There is nothing after death; and death is nothing –
Only the finishing post of life’s short race.

Therefore, ambition give up your hopes, anxiety give up your fears. (This is the third play in which, contrary to Watling’s comments in the introduction, we find Seneca’s characters delivering very clearly Stoic beliefs, entirely in line with Seneca the philosopher.)

Act 3

Andromache berates the Trojan women for only just learning grief, whereas for her Troy fell and the world ended when her husband, Hector, was killed. Now she only resists the death she wants to protect their son, Astyanax. An Elder performs the function of the nurse in other plays i.e. asks questions and is a sounding board for Andromache’s thoughts. She tells how the ghost of Hector came to her in a dream warning her to hide their son. Now she has come to the tomb of her husband and pushes the boy to go inside it (through gates) and hide, which he does without a word.

Then the Elder warns that Ulysses approaches. Ulysses announces he has been drawn by lot to ask Andromache for her son. While the son of Hector lives no Greek can rest, knowing he will grow up to restore Troy and relaunch the war. Andromache pretends her son was stolen from her during the sack of the city and laments his whereabouts and fate. Ulysses sees through her lies and threatens her with torture. Andromache welcomes torture and death. Ulysses understands her mother love and says it is love of his son, Telemachus, which motivates him.

At which point Andromache, to the accompaniment of fierce oaths, makes the ironic lie that her son right now is entombed with the dead (he, as we saw, is hiding in the tomb of Hector). Ulysses detects that Andromache is still anxious, pacing, muttering, as one who had lost everything would not. She is lying. He orders his men to tear down Hector’s tomb with the aim of scattering the ashes on the sea.

Andromache agonises over whether to surrender her son to save the ashes of her husband. She places herself before the tomb defying the soldiers to kill her first. Ulysses orders them on. She falls to her knees and clasps Ulysses’ legs and begs him to have mercy. She calls forth the boy, who comes from the tomb, she tells him to kneel before Ulysses.

Andromache ridicules the idea that this poor boy but himself could rebuild the walls of the ruined city. She begs Ulysses to let the boy become his slave. But Ulysses ducks responsibility, saying it is not his decision but Calchas’s.

Andromache despises him, but Ulysses says time is marching on, the ships have weighed anchor. He allows her a moment to lament her son and Andromache gives a page-long speech describing Astyanax growing to manhood and being a wise and noble king, which will not now happen. Andromache bids him go with the Greeks, but the boy clings on to his mother and doesn’t want to leave, but Andromache says there is no choice and bids him take a message from her to his father. Ulysses, bored of all this yap, commands his soldiers to take him away.

The Chorus of Trojan women pulls back, as it were, from this immediate scene, to consider the general problem, what will become of them, where will they be sent, whose slaves will they become?

Act 4

Helen laments that she has been ordered by the victorious Greeks to lie to Priam’s daughter Polyxena, and persuade her she is to be married to Pyrrhus. It is, of course, a lie, she is going to be sacrificed, but Helen dutifully tells her to rejoice and dress as a bride. Andromache, hearing all this, is filled with disgust that anyone can think of rejoicing at this disastrous time, and at the unremitting evil Helen represents, ‘bringer of doom, disaster and destruction’.

Helen replies to this attack, saying she had no say in the matter, was handed over like an object won in a competition, has endured 10 years of exile, and is now hated by all sides. Andromache knows Helen is telling lies and orders her to tell the truth. Herself weeping, Helen comes clean and says Polyxena is to be sacrificed, burned, and her ashes scattered over Achilles’ tomb.

Andromache is shocked that Polyxena takes the news that she is about to die with alacrity and enthusiastically changes clothes, braids her hair etc. It means exit from this misery and avoiding a lifetime of slavery. Not so happy is her mother, Hecuba, who laments.

Now Helen tells the Trojan women have been parcelled out to, Andromache to Pyrrhus, Hecuba to Ulysses, Cassandra to Agamemnon. Hecuba rains down curses on Ulysses, hoping that storm and sea will plague his return to Ithaca. And, as Pyrrhus appears, she extends her curse of storms and shipwreck to the entire Greek fleet.

The Chorus of Trojan women point out there is comfort in numbers, it is easier to mourn or suffer with colleagues, and describes how it will feel to be rounded up into the ships and sail away and slowly lose sight of their homeland, the smoke rising from their ruined city, Mount Ida, all fading over the horizon.

Act 5

The messenger arrives and announces the boy has been flung from the tower, the girl has met her death. The women ask for a detailed account, which he gives them. Both died with tremendous bravery, shaming the Greeks.

The last word goes to Hecuba who laments that death has come to everyone in her family, but will not come to her, to ease her suffering.

Thoughts

  1. The supernatural element of Achilles’ ghost rising up from the underworld is very unlike the chaste, restrained style of Euripides’ tragedy on the same subject. it feels closer in style to the Middle Ages or Gothic horror.
  2. The choral ode in act 2 persuasively argues that there is nothing after death, death is the end, our minds expire with our bodies – which is flatly contradicted by everything else in the play, including Achilles’ miraculous appearance, the ghost of Hector, and so on.
  3. The other plays feature a unified chronological plot. The Trojan Women is interesting because it has what feels like two plots, featuring two women (Hecuba and Andromache) running in parallel, though linking up at places. Its emphasis on the suffering of women reminds me of Ovid’s Heroides. It’s my favourite.

4. Oedipus

Background

The most famous Greek myth. A soothsayer tells Oedipus’s parents, Laius and Jocasta, the rulers of Thebes, that their unborn son will kill his father and sleep with his mother. Horrified, the royal couple deliver the baby, but then expose him in the country. To avoid the prophecy coming true they have the baby’s ankles pierced and joined together with a strap. (This caused the child’s feet to swell up and gave rise to Oedipus’ name, which literally means ‘swollen foot’.)

A peasant finds him and takes him to the king of the neighbouring realm, Polybus of Corinth who, being childless, considers him a providential gift from the gods and adopts him. As Oedipus grows to be strong and virile, his peers taunt him that he can’t be the son of the mild and gentle Polybus. So he travels to Delphi where the oracle tells him he is fated to kill his father and sleep with his mother. Horrified, Oedipus vows never to return to Corinth. On the way back he gets into an argument in a narrow path with an old man driving a chariot and hits him so hard he accidentally kills him. On the same journey he comes across the half-human, half-animal sphinx who won’t let him pass unless he answers the riddle: What walks on 4 legs in the morning, 2 legs at noon, and 3 legs in the evening. Oedipus answers correctly that it is Man. He travels on to Thebes to discover that the entire city had been terrorised by the Sphinx but he has saved them all. Not only that, but news has come that old King Laius has been killed. As saviour of the city, Oedipus is offered the hand of the widowed queen and marries Jocasta and becomes the new king.

The play opens as a plague is ravaging Thebes. A sequence of events, and messengers bringing news, slowly reveal to Oedipus that he was never the natural son of King Polybus, that he was adopted, that his true parents were Laius and Jocasta and then…that the old man he killed in the fight in the road was Laius and…he has been sleeping with Jocasta, his own mother, for years. At which point a) Jocasta hangs herself and b) Oedipus blinds himself.

Act 1

Oedipus outlines the situation i.e. he is king at Thebes, the city is stricken with plague which is striking down everyone but himself, he has sent to the oracle at Delphi which has sent back the horrifying prediction that he will kill his father and sleep with his mother. He is pleased he fled his homeland and his father Polybus, but feels a terrible sense of dread.

I see
Disaster everywhere, I doubt myself.
Fate is preparing, even while I speak,
Some blow for me.

Of course the blight of the plague gives Seneca scope for some typical hyperbole, ‘the murk of hell has swallowed up the heavenly citadels’ and so on. The description of the plague goes on at length, describing people too sick to bury the dead and so on, reminding me of the vivid description of the plague which ends Lucretius’s long poem De Rerum Natura, premonitory of Albert Camus’s great novel about a 20th century plague. Oedipus says maybe he brought the bad luck, maybe must leave the city.

His queen (and unbeknown to him, his mother) tells him a true king grasps misfortune with a steady hand.

Oedipus describes his encounter with the Sphinx who is made to sound a hellish beast surrounded by the bones of those who failed her riddle. Well, he triumphed over her but now seems to have himself brought the plague to Thebes.

The Chorus is made up of Theban elders. It gives a 4-page-long, vivid description of the plague, how it first struck animals then moved to humans. With characteristic bombast it then shrilly describes:

Out of the depths of Erebus their prison
The Furies have rushed upon us with the fire of hell.
Phlegethon, river of fire, has burst its banks,
The River of Hades is mingled with the River of Cadmus.

The act ends as Oedipus sees Creon, Jocasta’s brother, arriving. He has been to the oracle.

Act 2

Creon described to Oedipus the mood of horror at the oracle, till a superhuman voice declared that only when the murderer of Laius is driven out will Thebes know peace. Oedipus then makes one of those ironic vows, vowing to all the gods that the murderer of Laius will never know rest but live in permanent exile, a wandering nomad, and find no pardon – ignorant of the fact he is cursing himself.

On a more mundane note Oedipus now asks Creon how Laius met his death. He was attacked and murdered at a crossroads out in the countryside, says Creon.

Enter the old blind prophet Tiresias, led by his daughter, Manto. He tells Oedipus he can interpret the situation through a sacrifice, so a bull and heifer are brought in and the sacrificial flame rises and parts in two parts which fight each other.

[This is a classic example of the way these plays would be hard to stage but work very well when read, or read aloud, or broadcast. The getting onstage of the animal, its execution and especially the behaviour of the flame would be impossible to create onstage but work pretty well when read out.]

Manto describes the strange behaviour of the flame which Tiresias interprets as the gods themselves being ashamed of the truth. Tiresias asks how the animals behaved when sacrificed and Manto tells him the heifer submitted but the bull shied and defied the blows. The heifer bled freely but the bull’s blood not at all, while dark blood poured from its eyes and mouth. When they examined the entrails, they were in bad shape, the heart was shrunk, the veins were livid, part of the lungs was missing, the liver was putrid. Far, far worse, the virgin heifer turned out to be pregnant and the deformed life in her stirred. The fire on the altar roared, the hearth quaked etc.

Oedipus begs to know what this all means, but Tiresias pushes the play deep into Gothic territory by saying they will have to perform a magic rite to call the soul of the dead king himself up from hell to tell them. Oedipus must not attend, so he nominates Creon to go in his place.

Incongruously, oddly, the Chorus sing a sustained hymn to the Bacchus, god of the vine, listing his adventures and achievements – notably the occasion when he scared pirates who had captured him into jumping overboard and being changed into dolphins, and the time he rescued Ariadne from Naxos and proceeded to marry her.

Act 3

Creon enters. Oedipus asks what he saw at the ceremony. Creon is so terrified he repeatedly refuses to speak until Oedipus forces him. Then Creon gives a terrific description of the dark and ill-fated glade where they took Tiresias and dug a ditch and burned animal sacrifices and chanted evil spells and a great chasm opened up and hordes of the dead appeared before them. Last of all came the reluctant figure of Laius, still dishevelled and bloody, who proceeds to give a long speech saying the plague on Thebes is due to the current king, who killed his father and has slept with his mother and had children by her. Only when he is cast out as an unclean thing will Thebes be cured.

Oedipus is appalled but refuses to believe it: after all, his father Polybus lives on at Corinth and he’s never laid a finger on his mother, Merope. Oedipus refuses to believe it and says Creon is conspiring with Tiresias to seize the crown. Creon, for his part, advises Oedipus to abdicate now, to step down to a humbler position before he is pushed. They proceed to have a page of dialogue which turns into a debate about whether a subject should stand up to the king, Oedipus dismissing these as typical arguments of the revolutionary.

The Chorus gives a potted history of the land of Thebes, and the wider region of Boeotia, populated by Cadmus in search of his abducted sister Europa, of the many monsters which have been spawned in this region, with a final mention of the myth of Actaeon, turned into a stag and ripped apart by his own hunting dogs.

Act 4

Oedipus is confused, he asks Jocasta how Laius died and is told he was struck down by a young man when travelling with his entourage at a place where three roads meet. It jogs a faint memory in Oedipus’s mind but then a messenger comes to interrupt his attempts to remember with news that his ‘father’, King Polybus of Corinth, has passed away peacefully in his sleep.

The old man/messenger requests him to come to Corinth to attend the dead king’s funeral, but Oedipus refuses, saying he is afraid of being alone in the company of his mother. The old man reassures him that Meropa was not his real mother and proceeds to tell the full story of how he, the old man, was given Oedipus as a baby, his ankles bound together with a metal pin. ‘Who by?’ Oedipus asks. ‘The keeper of the royal flocks,’ the man replies. ‘Can he remember his name?’ Oedipus asks. No, but he might remember the face. So Oedipus orders his men to assemble all the royal shepherds.

The old man warns Oedipus to stop probing while he still has time, but Oedipus insists he has nothing to fear and the truth will set him free. Poor dupe of fate.

Enter Phorbas, head of Thebes’s royal flocks. He begins to remember the old man. He confirms that he handed the old man a baby but doubts if it can have lived because its ankles were pierced through with an iron bolt and infection had spread.

Who was the baby, Oedipus demands. Phorbas refuses to say so Oedipus says he will order hot coals to torture him with. Phorbas replies with one line: ‘Your wife was that child’s mother.’

With that one line the truth comes flooding in on Oedipus. He is not Polybus and Meropa’s child; they adopted him; he is the child of Laius who he killed at the crossroads and of…Jocasta, the woman he has married and had children with. Oedipus is, understandably, distraught, and expresses it with full Senecan hyperbole:

Earth, be opened!
Ruler of darkness, hide in deepest hell
This monstrous travesty of procreation!

The Chorus continues its very tangential relationship with the story, not commenting on this amazing revelation at all, but instead wishing its ship of life was riding on milder waters to a gentler wind. And then goes off at a real tangent, briefly describing the story of Daedalus and Icarus to show that living in moderation, the golden mean, is best.

Act 5

The Chorus sees a messenger approaching. Never good news these messengers, and this one is no exception. He describes in great detail how distraught Oedipus went into the palace, grabbed a sword and made a great speech about killing himself, but then realised it wasn’t punishment enough, was too quick and easy. Something was demanded to placate the gods and end the curse and the plague, more like a living death, where he would die again and again every day. Then it comes to him to blind himself and the messenger gives a very gory description of Oedipus plucking his own eyes out.

The Chorus gives a brief didactic explanation that Fate is unchangeable, one iron chain of endless causes and consequences. No man can escape it.

Enter Oedipus blinded, freed from the light of the accusing sun.

The Chorus describes Jocasta coming onstage, distraught, uncertain whether to address her son and husband.

Jocasta addresses Oedipus who is horrified and says they must never speak, never be in the same country together. Jocasta seizes his sword and, after some debate exactly where to stab herself, stabs herself in her womb, seat of all her sinfulness, and falls dead.

In his final soliloquy Oedipus says he has expiated his sin and now will set out on his wanderings. He promises the poor suffering people of Thebes that he will take with him the capitalised allegorised figures of infliction and free them at last. What better companions and tormentors could he hope for on his endless wanderings and punishments.

Moral of the story

Even if you’re a childless couple, desperate for a baby, do not accept the gift of a little baby boy whose ankles are pierced together by an iron bar!

*************

Big ideas

When I was a boy reading these Penguin introductions, it was often not specific criticism of specific aspects of the play which stuck with me, but when the scholars and editors made throwaway generalisations which in a flash helped me make sense of an entire genre or period of history.

Thus, in among his detailed critique of specific plays or aspects, Watling offers three big, memorable ideas about Seneca’s influence on English Renaissance literature.

1. One is that Seneca is often blamed for Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights’ addiction to ghosts, ghosts of gruesomely murdered figures who return to the land of the living to trigger the action of the plot (p.28). The ghost of the dead Spanish officer Andrea appears at the start of the archetypal Elizabethan revenge tragedy, Thomas Kyd’s The Spanish Tragedy, and ghosts are important in Shakespeare’s Macbeth and Julius Caesar and central to the plot of his greatest play, Hamlet. In fact, Watling refutes this by pointing out there are only two ghosts in Seneca’s oeuvre, Tantalus in Thyestes and Thyestes in Agamemnon.

2. The other is the simple but illuminating comment that:

The language of Elizabethan drama would not have reached its height of poetic eloquence without the infusion of the classical voice – the Ovidian mythology and the Senecan rhetoric. (p.32)

Aha, Ovid and Seneca – so that was their influence and how they fit together to flow through all Elizabethan drama: Ovid for mythological stories, with their bucolic settings, flowers and curlicues; Seneca for accusing ghosts, characters howling for revenge and invoking the shadows of Erebus and darkest night.

3. There’s a third insight, not so striking as the first two, maybe, and this is that, despite the best efforts of scholars and academically-minded authors like Philip Sidney or Ben Jonson to import the so-called Dramatic Unities and impose them on contemporary drama, they failed; they failed to dent the English preference for ‘straggling narrative plays‘ which cheerfully ignore the cardinal unities of time or place or even action (p.35).

In Watling’s words 1) Senecan rhetoric of extreme emotions was grafted onto 2) plots which lacked Senecan focus and concision, to create a ‘fusion of classical uniformity with romantic multiformity in the Elizabethan theatre.’ (p.37).

In the greatest Elizabethan plays, the theme, the form and the language may have crystallised into an impressive whole:

but yet not so perfect as to tidy up all the loose ends or exclude the superfluities and irrelevances which make the Elizabethan drama of life a different thing from the Roman sculptured monument of death. (p.38)

Messy, mongrel literature has always been our style.

Credit

E.F. Watling’s translation of Four Tragedies and Octavia was published by Penguin Books in 1966.

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Posted by Simon on December 19, 2022

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Tristia by Ovid

How wretched to live among tribal natives
for him whose name was once a household word.
(Tristia book 4, poem 1, lines 67 and 68)

What I seek is not praise but pardon.
(Tristia book 1, poem 7, line 31)

There’s nothing we own that isn’t mortal
save talent, the spark in the mind.
(Tristia, book 3, poem 7, lines 43 and 44)

America-based British academic Peter Green has published an impressive number of books about the ancient world – numerous histories and essays, along with many translations from ancient Greek and Latin.

Among these are two volumes of translations of the Roman poet Ovid for Penguin books: a portmanteau volume titled The Erotic Poems of Ovid, which includes Amores, The Art of Love and The Cure for Love, and this volume, The Poems of Exile, which includes Ovid’s last two works, Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto (‘Letters from the Black Sea’).

These fairly long works (Tristia 103 page, Letters 90 pages) were, as the title suggests, written during Ovid’s 10-year-long and miserable exile at a town called Tomis, on the Black Sea (now the coastal resort of Constanca in Romania).

(Apparently it is important to distinguish between exile (deportatio) – where the banished person lost their Roman citizenship and all their property – and Ovid’s condition, which was the lesser punishment of relegatio, whereby he retained his citizenship and his property – very important for the ongoing life of his wife and daughter back in Rome, see note p.225 among others.

Ovid’s career

Born in 43 BC Ovid was a fluent and prolific poet who made his reputation with a series of books about love, treated in a cynically witty, urbane style:

  • first there was a set of letters supposedly written by women from myth and legend (the Heroides)
  • then the stylish Amores (‘Love poems’) which followed in the line of elegiac love lyrics pioneered by Catullus and developed by Tibullus and Propertius. The Amores were published in 16 BC
  • but most successful, and scandalous, was the Ars Amoris (‘The Art of Love’) which I thought might be a philosophical-moral treatise but turns out to be an extremely cynical, worldly guide to picking up women, preferably married women, for an illicit affair, closer to the world of Tinder and modern pickup artists than Plato or Castiglione. The Ars Amoris was published around 1 BC

Around the age of 40, Ovid made a significant shift in subject matter to produce the vast Metamorphoses, an encyclopedic collection of ancient myths and legends linked by the common topic of physical transformation i.e. tales of men and women who were changed by the gods or magic or fate into flowers, trees, animals, rivers and so on.

The poem contains flattering references to the emperor Augustus (who effectively ruled Rome single handed between 27 BC and his death in 14 AD) and leads up to a description of the apotheosis (conversion into a god) of Augustus’s adoptive father, Julius Caesar and then fulsome praise of Augustus himself. Metamorphoses was published in 8 AD.

Ovid was half way through writing a work which contains even more flattering references to Augustus and his extended family, the Fasti, a long poetic account of the Roman calendar which sets out to explain the origins and aspects of Rome’s numerous religious festivals, anniversaries and important dates – when he received an angry summons to the emperor’s personal presence, was given a fierce dressing down and instructed to pack his bags because he was being sent into exile (or to be precise relegatio). He was ordered to go and live in the wretched frontier town of Tomis, in the only partly-pacified province of Moesia, on the coast of the Black Sea in modern-day Romania.

Born in 43 BC, Ovid was 51 in late 8 AD when he was sent into exile.

Ovid’s exile

Why? What had he done which was so outrageous? For the last ten years of his life (8 to 18 AD) Ovid wrote these two books – 50 or so letters in which he pleaded with all his friends back in Rome to beg the emperor to change his mind and rescind his banishment, and 50 or so poems in which he gave poetic expression to the changing moods of an exile. But although he refers to the causes of his exile quite a few times, he never specifies exactly what it was.

To be precise, Ovid attributes his exile to two causes. One was that his recklessly cynical and amoral pickup guide The Art of Love offended against the very serious efforts of Augustus to restore traditional morality among Rome’s aristocracy, particularly when it came to marriage – banning adultery and rewarding fidelity and especially the parenting of children who should be brought up in a traditional, settled married environment. The Art of Love, as a guide to how to start and maintain adulterous affairs, flew straight in the face of everything Augustus was trying to achieve.

But Ovid himself thinks Augustus’s citing of this poem as a cause for exiling him was a smokescreen for a deeper reason. This he refers to repeatedly as his error but, infuriatingly, tells us his lips are sealed and he won’t explain it. For 2,000 years scholars have been forced to speculate.

Political – maybe was present at discussions about a coup to overthrow Augustus; maybe he was a witness to a secret marriage of Julia – either way Ovid’s hints imply that he himself was never part of a conspiracy, never carried out any action: but that he witnessed something and then, apparently, failed to report it.

The Tristia are accessible and enjoyable

I really struggled with Anne and Peter Wiseman’s prose translation of Ovid’s Fasti, several times thinking I’d have to give up reading the work altogether. It was only when I switched to A.S. Kline’s online verse translation that I was able to finish wading through the often very obscure and confusing text.

By contrast Peter Green’s verse translations of the Tristia and The Letters from Pontus are a delight to read. Above all, unlike long sections of the Fasti, it’s obvious what they’re about. Whether he’s describing the long stormy journey by sea to Tomis, or sending his book back to Rome, or praising his wife for her loyalty, or castigating an old friend for abandoning him, or begging Augustus for forgiveness, or saying his frivolous love poetry didn’t deserve to bring such a harsh fate down on their author’s head – the subject matter is obvious and the development of the argument almost always easy to follow.

Peter Green’s translation

This is immensely helped by Peter Green’s fresh, zingy, accessible translation. In fact there are two very strong points about this edition. One is the translation, which has an enjoyably flexible, rolling rhythm about it. The second is Green’s notes. Wiseman’s notes for the Fasti were sensible but fairly brief, restrained, limited. By contrast Green’s notes are almost long as the texts themselves (Tristia text 103 pages, Green’s notes 90 pages).

Green is gloriously unbuttoned, chatty, opinionated, fluent, garrulous. Tristia is divided into 5 books and each book gets a page or so of introduction explaining when it was written, describing Ovid’s changing tone of voice and approach as the books progress.

Then each poem in each book gets a page introduction to itself, before we get onto notes for specific references: these introductions describe what the poem is about, how it differs from other poems or echoes or repeats certain themes, how it riffs off this or that ancient genre or trope. Green freely discusses contemporary history, Ovid’s family relationships, the climate and people of Tomis, the theories of other scholars (for example, whether the poems are arranged in careful order or are more random) and so on, in a buttonholing garrulous manner which I found immensely interesting and entertaining.

And it is all immensely helpful for understanding how the tone and approach of the books changed over the long 10 years during which they were written; at understanding the genres or rhetorical conventions of Latin poetry which they invoke, copy or modify; for understanding the complex matrix of cross references Ovid sets up between them; and, on the simplest bucket level, understanding the historical events, the real historical people or the mythical personages which the poems refer to.

Instead of a set of standalone, isolated factual explications, Green’s notes are more like one vast essay of commentary and explication. His notes are easily as interesting to read as the poems.

Book 1 (11 poems)

1.1 (128 lines)

Little book – no, I don’t begrudge it you – you’re off to the City
without me, going where your only begetter is banned!

This is the envoi to book 1 and addresses the book as a sentient being which he is sending to Rome to argue on his behalf. This was an established literary convention (used by Catullus and Horace among others) but differs from its predecessors in introducing the recurrent theme that the book will argue for forgiveness and an end to his exile.

1.2 (110 lines)

‘You gods of sea and sky’ – what’s left me now but prayer? –
‘Don’t, break up our storm-tossed ship:
don’t, I beseech you, endorse great Caesar’s fury!’

Description of the violent storms which Ovid endured on his journey by ship across the Mediterranean in December 8 AD, with some poking fun at traditional descriptions and epic conventions around describing storms at sea.

1.3 (102 lines)

Nagging reminders: the black ghost-melancholy vision
of my final night in Rome,
the night I abandoned so much I dearly treasured,
to think of it, even now, starts tears…

Ovid paints the scene of his departure from Rome, the weeping and wailing of his servants and family, especially his (third) wife. With typical irony (and mocking epic convention) he compares himself briefly to Aeneas leaving Troy. More to the point he emphasises that his error was a mistake and not a deliberate crime.

1.4 (28 lines)

Dipped now in Ocean, the She-Bear’s stellar guardian
is stirring up stormy seas: yet here am I
constrained, not by my will, to plough the Adriatic…

Another description of his stormy journey, notable for the description of the figurehead of Minerva at the prow of the ship (Roman and Greek vessels carried painted figureheads of gods, to whom the crew prayed if they got into trouble).

1.5 (84 lines)

Friend, henceforth be reckoned the foremost among my comrades,
who, above all others, made your fate your own,
who first, I recall, when the bolt struck, dared to support me
with words of comfort…

Ovid praises the handful of friends who stuck by him when most of his fairweather friends bolted as soon as Augustus’s wrath struck his home. This passage, and Ovid’s plight generally, remind me much of Oscar Wilde’s sudden, fateful reversal of fortune, from talk of the town to almost complete abandonment by all but a handful of real friends:

Before my house’s downfall
visitors thronged the place, I was à la mode
if not ambitious. The first tremor sent them running…

In the second half of the poem Ovid wittily but bitterly compares himself to Ulysses who made a long and painful journey by sea, but the poet uses the extended comparison to bring out obvious differences, namely that Ulysses was a rough tough warrior, whereas Ovid is a sensitive poet unused to rough conditions; and that Ulysses was heading home to his loving wife and family whereas Ovid is heading away from everything that he loves.

1.6 (36 lines)

Not so dear was Lyde to the Clarian poet, not so truly
loved was Bittis by her singer from Cos
as you are deeply entwined, wife, in my heart…

In praise of his wife’s loyalty, including the (repeated so often as to become hackneyed) comparison with Ulysses’ loyal wife, Penelope. It ends with another theme which was to be repeated scores of times, the notion that his exile has killed off his former self, old Ovid is dead, and the old poetic exuberance borne of his high-flying social life is extinguished – but still the old dead suffering ex-poet can still squeeze out a few last lines:

Alas, my verses possess but scanty strength, your virtues
are more than my tongue can proclaim,
and the spark of creative vigour I once commanded
is extinct, killed off by my long
misfortunes. Yet in so far as our words of praise have power
you shall live through these verses for all time.

1.7 (40 lines)

Reader, if you possess a bust made in my likeness,
strip off the Bacchic ivy from its locks!
Such signs of felicity belong to fortunate poets:
on my temples a wreath is out of place.

A poem to a friend who’s stuck by Ovid, but which is really about the condition of the works Ovid leaves behind him in Rome. The poem claims that Ovid threw his copy of the Metamorphoses into the fire, and that it was unfinished, had yet to have a final revision:

…because the poem was still unfinished, still
in rough draft… it lacks my final hand:
a job snatched from me half-done, while still on the anvil,
a draft minus the last touch of the file.

1.8 (50 lines)

A poem of bitter reproach to an old friend who dumped him when trouble struck, scholars identify as the poem Macer, related to Ovid’s third wife, with whom he travelled through Greece and Asia Minor when he was a student. The poem opens with the rhetorical trope called adynaton meaning ‘impossibility’, similar to the modern saying ‘when hell freezes over’.

Back from the sea now, back to their sources shall deep rivers
flow, and the Sun, wheeling his steeds about,
run backward; earth shall bear stars, the plough cleave heaven,
fire shall give forth water, and water flames,
all things shall move contrary to the laws of nature,
no element in the world shall keep its path,
all that I swore impossible will happen now: there’s nothing left
that I can’t believe. This I prophesy after my betrayal by that person
who, I’d believed, would aid me in my distress…

1.9 (66 lines)

Reader, should you peruse this work without malice, may you
cross life’s finishing-line without a spill!

A poem to a faithful friend, notable for reminding friends who hesitate to support him that Augustus has demonstrated a capacity for clemency and respects those who stay loyal to friends and cause, even if they opposed him. Ovid says he wishes now he had never taken up the wretched art of poetry, seeing as where it’s led him. And repeats other recurring tropes: that the cynical amorality of the Ars Amatoria had nothing to do with his own private life which was chaste and faithful; and that it was a joke, a joke for God’s sake.

1.10 (50 lines)

I have (may I always keep!) blonde Minerva’s protection: my vessel
bears her painted casque, borrows her name.

In contrast to the earlier poems about storms at sea, this is a poem in praise of the good ship Minerva which brought him to a harbour in eastern Greece where they docked, Ovid unloaded and continued his journey by land, but the second half of the poem is an envisioning of the voyage back the ship will take, studded with famous placenames and historical references and calling down blessings on the good ship Minerva.

1.11 (44 lines)

Every word you’ve read in this whole book was written
during the anxious days
of my journey: scribbling lines in mid-Adriatic
while December froze the blood…

A poem highlighting the contrast between the lazy peaceful couch on which he composed his great works back in Rome, and the storm-tossed ship on which he tried to write poems on the blustery, brine-drenched journey East.

If these lines fall short – as they do –
of your hope: they were not written, as formerly, in my garden,
while I lounged on a favourite day-bed, but at sea,
in wintry light, rough-tossed by filthy weather, spindrift
spattering the paper as I write.

Book 2 (578 lines)

Book 2 stands out because instead of a set of 10 or so shorter poems it is one longer poem of 578 lines. Green cites earlier scholars who consider the poem a suasoria, meaning:

Suasoria is an exercise in rhetoric: a form of declamation in which the student makes a speech which is the soliloquy of an historical figure debating how to proceed at a critical junction in his life. (Wikipedia)

Or maybe a legal argument, to be presented in court. It consists of:

  1. the exordium – attempt to placate the judge (Augustus) (lines 1 to 26)
  2. the propositio – outlining the speaker’s aim (27 to 28)
  3. the tractatio – the handling or treatment in which the case is unfolded at length (29 to 578); this can be sub-divided into:
    1. probatio or proof of evidence (29 to 154)
    2. epilogus 1 or first conclusion, entering a plea for mitigation of sentence
    3. refutatio or rebuttal of the charge (Ovid argues that his poetry never corrupted anyone because to the pure all things are pure and to the corrupt, anything is corrupt) (207 to 572)
    4. epilogus 2 or second conclusion, again calling for clemency

In other words, even more than

Book 3 (15 poems)

These poems were composed in 9 to 10 AD. The first excitement of the journey into exile, undertaken in December 8 AD and vividly described in book 1, is over. He has spent one winter in Tomis and now knows the role freezing bitter cold is going to play in his life. And it is dawning on him that this exile isn’t for a year or so, isn’t a game which will come to an end – but is the bitter condition for the rest of his days.

3.1 (82 lines)

‘I’m an exile’s book. He sent me. I’m tired. I feel trepidation
approaching his city – kind reader, lend a hand.’

Book 3 poem 1 repeats the conceit of book 1 poem 1 in conceiving the book as envoy except that whereas in book 1 Ovid had been outside the book, sending it as the author, this poem speaks in the voice of the book itself. This allows the book itself to find its way through Rome in order to seek out readers, a library to stay in, and the palace of the great Augustus (who, for the umpteenth time, Ovid begs for forgiveness). In so doing, the poem provides an interesting and historically useful guide to the layout of the Rome of his day. He is as conscious as ever of the role the Ars Amoria plays in his personal disaster, something so well known that he has his book tell anyone encountering not to fear:

‘Have no fear: I won’t turn out an embarrassment to you:
no instructions about love, not one page,
not a syllable. So bleak my master’s misfortunes, he shouldn’t
try to camouflage them with light verse,
though that sport of his green years, that frivolous disaster
he now – too late, alas! – detests and condemns.
See what I bring you’ll find nothing here but lamentation,
verse matching its circumstances…’

The book’s tour of Rome, appropriately, at Asinius Pollio’s library

3.2 (30 lines)

So it was my destiny to travel as far as Scythia,
that land lying below the Northern pole,
and neither you, Muses, not you, Leto’s son Apollo,
cultured crowd though you are, gave any help
to your own priest…

Ovid makes the theme clear: he is a soft poet, not used to a hard life (‘an escapist, born for leisured comfort’), his erotic poetry was a joke, a pose, he was never a libertine in real life (‘my poetry’s more wanton than my life’). But now all that’s dead and gone.

The journey to Tomis was so stormy and colourful it helped to distract him from the misery of exile, even inspired him a bit. But now the hard fact of exile has hit him and his existence has settled into a monotonous drudge – it’s cold, it’s boring and it’s dangerous. Now ‘weeping is my only pleasure’. Now he yearns for death.

In the poem he knocks at the door of his own sepulchre door, which he finds stubbornly shut against him. (Green makes the typically illuminating comment that this is an inversion of the trope of the paraclausithyron, the image of the poet keeping watch morosely outside the locked door of his beloved, well established in the elegiac tradition and which Ovid had himself used in the Amores.

3.3 (88 lines)

If perhaps you’re wondering why this letter’s drafted
by another’s hand, I’ve been, am, sick,
sick, and at the unmapped world’s remotest limits,
scarce certain of my survival.

Ovid is ill and depressed. He lists the tribulations of exile: cold climate, impure water, depressing landscape, no proper housing, bad diet, no doctors to treat his illness, no friends’ conversation to distract him. He addresses his wife, swearing she’s the only woman he thinks about, he said her name during the delirium of his illness. He imagines his death. He writes his own epitaph.

3.4A (lines 1 to 46)

Ah friend, my dear care as always, though in harsh circumstances
first truly assayed, after my world’s collapse,
if you’ve any respect for the lessons experience has taught me,
live for yourself, keep far from all great names…

A poem to an unnamed friend, advising him to live a discrete, retired life, not to make grand acquaintances, not to fly too high lest, like poor Ovid, he be blasted by Jove’s thunderbolt. (The comparisons of Augustus with Jupiter, and the decision to exile Ovid falling on him like the god’s thunderbolt, appear in virtually all the poems, quickly becoming a part of their standardised litany of complaint.) He warns his friend to:

Live without rousing envy, enjoy years of undistinguished
ease and delight…

3.4B (lines 47 to 78)

A region that neighbours the polar constellations
imprisons me now, land seared by crimping frost…

The poem begins by lamenting the frozen waste he finds himself in, such that Rome and its familiar landscapes now linger on only in his memory. Next to them, his wife, whose image haunts him. And then his loyal friends. He asks them not to forget him, to do what they can to lend a hand to his cause.

3.5 (56 lines)

Our friendship was new and slight: you could have denied it
without any trouble. (You’d have not, I think,
embraced me more closely had my vessel been driven
on by a favouring wind.)

While some of his old friends have abandoned him, the (unnamed) addressee of this poem stuck by him despite being a new acquaintance. Ovid thanks and praises him, then asks that he use his eloquence to argue his cause before the emperor.

Again and again and again Ovid insists he did no wrong, he merely witnessed something and failed to report it: he committed no crime except simply having eyes. Here there’s one of the longest passages describing this, 10 lines of exculpation, emphasising that he committed an error but – as he repeats just as often – shying away from explaining the nature of this ‘error’. God, I can see why it’s driven 2,000 years of scholars mad with frustration.

3.6 (38 lines)

The bond of friendship between us, carissimo, you neither
wish to dissimulate, nor could if you so wished…

To his best friend, praising his loyalty, saying he’s shared everything with him – except the nature of the ‘offence’ which got him banished. If he’d shared it, his friend would have joined him in exile, indicating what a toxically powerful secret it must have been.

He repeats the claim that he, Ovid, didn’t do anything, merely witnessed something – so that it’s his eyes which are to blame. He says that even to hint at his crime would be ‘great risk’. He says it is better buried in deepest night. He asks his friend to help and intercede on his behalf with angry Jupiter.

3.7 (54 lines)

Go quickly, scribbled letter, my loyal mouthpiece,
and greet Perilla for me. Her you’ll find
either sitting in the company of her sweet mother
or among her books and poems…

A sweet and touching poem to his step-daughter, Perilla (his wife’s daughter by an earlier husband), now a young woman. Surprisingly, it turns out that she is a poet too, her talent spotted and nurtured by her dad. They often read their poems to each other. He praises her and tells her, if she’s worried about his fate, that she’ll be fine so long as she doesn’t set out to teach anyone about love (Ovid’s writing of The Art of Love having been given out as the official reason for his banishment).

It ends with a triumphant assertion of the supremacy and triumph of art. Age may wither her, the emperor’s punishment has blasted him – everything can be taken from them, and yet:

There’s nothing we own that isn’t mortal
save talent, the spark in the mind.
Look at me – I’ve lost my home, the two of you, my country,
they’ve stripped me of all they could take,
yet my talent remains my joy, my constant companion:
over this, Caesar could have no rights…

Caesar will die, yet so long as Rome exists, Ovid will be read. It must have been an optimistic claim, made to keep his spirits up and yet, 2,000 years later, amazingly… it’s true!

3.8 (42 lines)

Now I wish I were high aloft in the car of Triptolemus
who flung the untried seed on virgin soil…

He wishes for the paraphernalia of various mythological figures so he can fly back to Rome, then pulls himself up short. Fool! Instead of old legends he should be petitioning the real Augustus in the here and now. If not to end his exile at least to move him somewhere else. The wretched climate, the lack of all amenities and civilised companionship is sapping his spirit, making him ill. God, why didn’t Augustus just kill him outright and be done with it?

3.9 (34 lines)

Here too, then, there are – who would credit it? – Greek cities
among the wild place-names of barbary: here too
colonists, sent out from Miletus, founded Greek outposts
on Getic soil…

An aetiological poem i.e. one which explains a modern custom, practice or place name in terms of a myth or legend. In this case Ovid derives the name of his exile town, Tomis, from the old story that the witch Medea, having fled her homeland, saw the sail of the ship of her father, Aeëtes, approaching and, in panic, conceived a plan to delay him so she could make a getaway. The plan? To rip to shreds her brother and scatter his body parts about the shore, thus forcing her father to collect them together for a proper funeral pyre. In Latin the (false) etymology relates tomé, a noun meaning the act of chopping up, with Tomis.

Green’s notes tell us that a) aetiological poems were a speciality of the Hellenistic poet, Callimachus (305 to 240 BC) and b) Roman aetiological poems almost always get the etymology and derivation of words wrong. Odd that we, 2,000 years later, know more about their customs and, especially their language, than they did.

3.10 (78 lines)

If anyone there still remembers exiled Ovid, if my
name survives in the City now I’m gone,
let him know that beneath those stars that never dip in Ocean
I live now in mid-barbary, hemmed about
by wild Sarmatians, Bessi, Getae, names unworthy
of my talent!

A long vivid poem giving a rare description of what Tomis was actually like, or the landscape around it. To be precise Ovid focuses on the bitter freezing winter weather and the way the many mouths of the river Danube which enter the Black Sea close to the town freeze over. Not only that but the sea itself freezes: he knows, he’s walked on frozen waves.

But it’s worse, it’s not just that it’s cold: normally the river acts as a barrier against barbarian tribes but when it freezes they can ride over it and raid nearby villages. Some peasants flee, leaving their farms and possessions to be looted by the raiders. Some are shackled and led off to slavery. Some die in agony because the raider’s sharp arrowheads are dipped in poison. What they can’t steal, the barbarians burn to the ground.

3.11 (74 lines)

Whoever you are, vile man, who scoff at my misfortunes,
and with bloody zeal fling charges at me – you
were born from the rocks, by wild beasts’ udders nurtured
with flints, I’ll swear, in your breast…

A bitter recrimination against some (unnamed) enemy who is bad mouthing and savaging his character back in Rome. Why make a miserable man more miserable? Ovid laments the coldness, the isolation, he can’t speak the natives’ language, he suffered cruelly on the journey out, now he lives in terror of the violent tribesmen. O vile calumniator, why hit an unfortunate man when he’s down?

3.12 (54 lines)

West winds now ease the cold: at the year’s closure
a longer-than-ever winter must yield at last,
while the Ram (that bore Helle – and dropped her) now equalises
the hours of darkness and light…

March 10 AD. The first half of the poem is a vivid celebration of the sights and sounds of spring back in Rome and the Italian countryside, spring flowers, children playing in the fields, men exercising, the roar of crowds at the theatre.

Then the volta or ‘turn’ to contrast his sad isolated existence. For Ovid Spring means the very slow thaw of the ice, some water runs a bit free in the cistern. Wine left outside no longer freezes solid in the bottle. The Danube flows again and the Black Sea becomes navigable and so, once in a blue moon, a ship may arrive from Rome and Ovid will avidly question the captain for even the slightest scraps of gossip which can, for a moment, revive his link to his long-lost homeland.

3.13 (28 lines)

My birthday god’s here again, on time – and superfluous:
what good did I get from being born?
Cruel spirit, why come to increase this wretch’s years of exile?
You should rather have cut them short…

The Greeks considered the genethliakon or ‘birthday poem’ a genre in its own right, with its own rules and stock imagery. It’s here to mark Ovid’s birthday. He was born on 20 March 43 BC so, if this poem was written in 10 AD, he was 53.

But Ovid deliberately reverses all the conventions of the birthday poem. For example, he curses the birth god (the natalis) who oversaw his birth. It would have been more merciful to have let him die as a baby, or never be born at all, rather than endure this misery. Instead of the customary toga and ritual thanksgivings on his birthday, he’d prefer an altar of death.

3.14 (52 lines)

Patron and reverend guardian of men of letters, you always
befriended my talent – but what’s your attitude now?
In the days before my downfall you used to promote me –
and today?

Scholars consider the addressee of this poem to have been Caius Julius Hyginus, director of the Palatine library, patron of young poets, and a close friend in the old days back in Rome. The poem echoes the themes of books and libraries announced in poem 3.1, in other words they form bookends ti the volume.

Ovid hopes Hyginus is still supportive of his work. Books are like children, they can remain behind in the city even when the father is exiled. Ovid refers to the fact that his erotic poems (The Art of Live, The Cure For Love) have been banned and removed from all libraries, but hopes the others are read.

Interestingly, he is at pains to emphasise that the Metamorphoses was left unfinished (a claim which consciously or unconsciously compares him with Virgil’s famously unfinished masterpiece, the Aeneid).

Then he turns to the present book, ‘a missive from the world’s end’, and asks Hyginus to be indulgent and remember the context of its writing: Ovid fears his talent has withered, he has forgotten his Latin, here in a place surrounded by barbarian tongues and threatened every day with violent attack, he worries all his stylishness has been rubbed off him. Please make allowances.

Book 4 (10 poems)

4.1 (106 lines)

Whatever defects there may be – and there will be – in these poems,
hold them excused, good reader, by the times
in which they were written. An exile, I was seeking solace,
not fame…

In the envoi to book 4 Ovid asks the reader’s indulgence, and to consider the miserable exile. His only true and steadfast companion is his Muse. He tells us how slaves, chained rowers, slave girls, manual labourers, sing songs to pass the time, as did the legendary figures Orpheus and even Achilles, sulking in his tent.

And so Ovid in exile. He ought to curse the avocation which led him to write the love guide which led to his downfall, but he can’t: he’s hooked. Writing transports him away from his miserable situation, drugs him, like the potions which numbed the lotus eaters.

What is he drugging himself from? The horrible situation of living in a walled defensive town liable to attack at any moment from barbarian tribes. He describes the way the way the alarm goes and he has to buckle on a sword although he’s 60 years old! He repeats the description of the way the raiders capture, shackle and lead off to slavery local farmers, or just shoot them with poisoned arrows and leave them to die.

Once again he laments that there is no-one at all to read his poems to who will understand them let alone appreciate them. Sometimes he waters the paper with his tears. Sometimes he crunches them up and throws them in the fire. What has survived he presents in this book and craves our indulgence.

4.2 (74 lines)

Already fierce Germany, like all the world, confronted
by the Caesars, may well have bent her knee
in surrender…

He imagines the full panoply of celebrations surrounding what he assumes must be Tiberius’s victories in Germany, including the sacrifices in temples and the great public triumphant procession through Rome, all under the guiding vision of beneficent Augustus.

The poem switches to meditate on the process of imagination itself, by which he is imagining and visualising all this, for his imagination, his mind’s eye, can go where he, alas, never again can.

4.3 (84 lines)

He asks the stars of the new constellation to turn their eyes upon his wife, ‘sweetest of wives’. He hopes she is missing him. Then addresses her directly and asks a series of rhetorical questions itemising her grief (when she looks at his untouched pillow in their marital bed, does she weep?)

Yet, to be honest, he wishes he had died. Then she would have something simple and pure to weep over, instead of his agonising shame, and the fact that he lives, but forever inaccessible to her. She supported him and was so proud of his achievements, for so long. Please don’t be ashamed of him, now. Defend him. Intercede for him.

4.4 (88 lines)

O you who with your high birth and ancestral titles
in nobility of character still outshine
your clan, whose mind mirrors your father’s brilliance
while retaining a brilliance all your own…

An appeal to Marcus Valerius Corvinus Messalinus, the eldest son of Ovid’s patron (recently deceased), Messalla Corvinus. Ovid sings Valerius’s praises but as the poem proceeds it becomes clear he never really knew the boy and is trying to curry favour because of the connection with his (now dead) father.

This leads Ovid into embarrassed contortions, and apologies, before going on to the usual litany of self-exculpation (‘it wasn’t a crime, it was an error‘) before begging Valerius to intervene with Augustus to ask for his exile to be, if not revoked, that at least he be moved somewhere better, safer from raids by barbarians, hot for blood and plunder, some of whom are cannibals.

4.5 (34 lines)

A sycophantic poem addressed to Messalinus’s younger brother, Marcus Valerius Cotta Maximus although, as with all the Tristia the addressee is not explicitly named – because Ovid knew it would do nobody any good to be associated with his disgrace, his exile, his crime. This young man was loaded and well connected. Ovid politely, discreetly, begs for his help.

Do what you safely can: rejoice in your heart that I’m mindful
of you, that you’ve been loyal to me; still bend,
as now, to your oars to bring me succour…

4.6 (50 lines)

Believe me I’m failing; to judge from my physical condition
I’d say my troubles have a scant
future remaining – I lack my old strength and colour,
there’s barely enough skin to cover my bones;
yet sick though my body is, my mind is sicker
from endless contemplation of its woes…
(lines 39 to 44)

Two winters have passed (of 9 and 10 AD) so scholars think this poem was written in 11. Ovid is tired, worn down, sick in mind and body, and has one hope left – ‘that my troubles may be soon cut short by death’.

4.7 (26 lines)

Twice has the Sun approached me after the chills of icy
winter, twice rounded his journey off
through the sign of the fish.

The sign of the Fish enters the Sun in February so scholars date this poem to 11 AD. Ovid reproaches a dear old friend (unnamed like all the addressees of these poems) for not writing to him, hoping he has written, but that the letters have got lost on the long, fraught journey to the outer reaches of the empire.

4.8 (52 lines)

Already my temples are mimicking swans’ plumage,
and hoary age bleaching my once-dark hair;
already the frail years are on me, the age of inertia,
already my infirm self fins life too hard…

He has grown old. Ships, racehorses, charioteers, old soldiers, all these get to be pensioned off – why not an old poet? Why can’t an old poet be set free from his miserable exile and allowed to return?

At my time of life I shouldn’t be breathing this alien
air, or easing my thirst at Getic wells,
but dividing my days between those peaceful country gardens
I once possessed, and the pleasures of human life,
the human round…

4.9 (32 lines)

Ovid is ferociously angry with an unnamed enemy who has been bad-mouthing the powerless poet back in Rome. Ovid calls down vengeance on him – ‘then luckless sorrow will perforce take arms’ – and promises that his angry words will travel the world and last for generations to come – as they, indeed, did.

Although
I’m sequestered on this wasteland where the northern stars circle
high and dry above my gaze, nevertheless
my clarion message will go forth to countless peoples,
my complaint shall be known world-wide;
whatever I say shall be heard, across deep waters;
my lamentation shall find a mighty voice.

4.10 (132 lines)

This is the best known of all the 100 or so exilic poems for the simple reason that it is a versified autobiography, detailing Ovid’s early life and career, his decision to choose poetry and art over a career in public service, then the inevitable story of his erotic poetry – emphasising, as always, the clear distinction between his promiscuous poetry and his respectable personal life. And then on to his notorious ‘error’ and so into exile.

He dwells on the deaths of his elder brother, which left him maimed. Later the deaths of his father then mother, and he thinks them lucky to have led long blameless lives. Maybe from Elysium they can hear him when he assures them (for the umpteenth time) that his exile was caused by an error not a crime.

When a youth the older poets were like gods to him. Old Macer read him his latest poems. Propertius and he had ‘a close-binding comradeship between us’. Horace, ‘that metrical wizard’, held them spellbound to the sound of the lyre. Virgil he only saw, never spoke to. Tibullus died young, before he could make his acquaintance. He thinks of the elegiac poets as being, in chronological order, Gallus (whose entire oeuvre is lost), Tibullus, Propertius then himself (interesting that he doesn’t mention Catullus).

He lists his three marriages, the first wife ‘worthless and useless’, the second wife died young, and now his long third marriage. His daughter makes him a grandfather. He is growing old when the thunderbolt falls, and he is sent into exile.

The cause (though too familiar to everyone) of my ruin
must not be revealed through testimony of mine.

After a long and gruelling journey (again and again he compares himself to Ulysses) he arrives in his wretched place of exile and now, his only remaining solace is writing poems, when he can. Again, he repeats the idea that everything else is lost, but his talent, his gift, and the Muse which brings it, remain.

Book 5 (15 poems)

Yet another Black Sea booklet
to add to the four I’ve already sent!

The fifth and final book of Tristria is different in tone from the previous four, more resigned, more limited in ambition, with less zest and irony. More tetchy, irritated, and desperate. Only one poem is descriptive (i.e describes Tomis). The other 13 are all addressed to specific individuals, half of them to his wife (more than in the previous four books put together) begging them all to get Augustus to revoke his exile or, at least, assign him somewhere warmer, safer and closer to Rome.

His references and analogies become increasingly repetitive. In every single poem he repeats that he did nothing wrong, he committed no bloodshed, it was a simple ‘error’, he merely witnessed something by accident, by mistake.

In every poem Augustus is compared to Jupiter (reasonably enough). Ovid repeatedly compares himself to Capaneus, one of the heroes of the war against Thebes who, as he led the attack on one of the city’s gates shouted that not even Jupiter could stop him now, so Jupiter promptly zapped him with a thunderbolt.

Or to Philoctetes, suffering from a wound which would never heal, for ten long years abandoned on the inhospitable island of Lemnos.

5.1 (80 lines)

I don’t correct these poems, let them be read as written:
they’re no more barbarous than their place of birth.

He warns his reader that this is not a book of sexy, frivolous poems as by Gallus, Tibullus or Propertius. They are grim and bleak, like his circumstances: ‘A dirge best fits a living death’.

He imagines a critical reader wondering why he’s bothering to write such depressing poems, and defends it as a form of crying out in pain, an action he then defends by giving half a dozen mythological examples of legendary figures crying out in unendurable pain.

He defends his erotic poetry against the charge of immorality by pointing out the only person who ever suffered because of it was him.

(Green makes the droll point that, alone of all the Augustan poets Ovid was singled out for immorality therefore undermining Augustus’s reforming legislation about marriage; and yet, as far as we know, Ovid was the only one of the famous poets to be married: neither Virgil (gay), Horace (promiscuous bachelor), nor Propertius were.)

5.2 (78 lines)

To his wife, increasingly desperate, sick and depressed.

It’s a barbarous land that now holds me, earth’s final outpost,
a place ringed by savage foes.

He accuses his wife of not putting herself out as she should on his behalf. Has she deserted him, like everyone else? He tells her to approach the emperor directly. If she won’t then he will and at line 45 the poem changes to a hymn of praise to Augustus. All the double-edged irony and wit which you can discern in the earlier references to Augustus has evaporated. Now he is on his knees, spouting extravagantly excessive praise and openly begging.

O glory, O image of the country that flourishes through you,
O hero to match the very sphere you rule.

He says it’s not the cold, nor the lack of culture among a people none of whom speak Latin, it’s the fear of attack by uncivilised barbarians, living in a small settlement protected only by one low wall, that he’s seen fighting at close quarters, that he lives in constant anxiety and insecurity. He begs Augustus to move him to some less terrifying place of exile.

5.3 (58 lines)

A poem celebrating Bacchus, god of wine, on his feast day, the Liberalia, 17 March (described in Ovid’s poetic version of the Roman calendar, the Fasti) then asking him to intercede with Augustus.

5.4 (50 lines)

From the Black Sea’s shore I have come, a letter of Ovid’s,
wearied by sea-travel, wearied by the road.
Weeping he told me: ‘See Rome, for you it’s not forbidden –
alas, how better far your lot than mine!’

Ovid repeats the conceit of having the poem speak in the first person as a letter, all the way from the shores of the Black Sea to the (unnamed) recipient in Rome, a letter able to go where he, alas, cannot, sealed with a signet ring wet with his tears.

But he emphasises that he accepts he was wrong, accepts punishment, like a broken horse doesn’t strain against the leash. He just wishes the great god who punished him will show mercy.

The letter rehearses Ovid’s grievances and bitter experiences before going on to describe the addressee as his best friend, remembering how he stuck by him when almost everyone else abandoned him, how he visited Ovid and wept and tried to console him for his sad fate.

5.5 (64 lines)

A poem to his wife. It’s her birthday so he describes going through the rituals to celebrate a birthday, namely wearing a white toga, building an altar from turf, hanging a woven wreath, lighting a fire and sprinkling wine and incense on it. He sends her a fleet of good wishes, may she have a long untroubled life. He says she has a strength of character to match Penelope or Andromache, she is a paragon of ‘uprightness, chastity, faithfulness’.

He introduces a series of classical comparisons with the thought that all those famous women from antiquity were famous because of their husband’s suffering and their loyalty – Andromache, Penelope, Evadne (wife of the recurring figure of Capaneus, blasted by Jupiter), Alcestis, Laodamia.

But she doesn’t deserve to be famous for her husband’s suffering and her share of it, and so the poem ends with a plea to Augustus to forgive him, for his wife’s sake if not his own.

5.6 (46 lines)

Poem to an unnamed friend. Ovid recriminates the friend for dropping him, now he’s in trouble, now he’s become a ‘burden’. Ovid compares him unfavourably to a raft of mythological figures famous for their loyalty. For the umpteenth time he invokes a familiar set of similes to indicate the sheer number of woes he suffers, as numerous as reeds which soak sodden ditches, or bees on Mount Hybla (famous for its honey), or ants carrying grains to their nest, or grains of sand on the seashore, or ears of wheat in a field.

5.7A (lines 1 to 24)

A short letter to an unnamed friend in which he describes himself as wretchedly miserable and gives a rare description of the native inhabitants, great hordes of tribal nomads, Sarmatians, Getae, hogging the road on their horses, each bearing a bow and quiver full of poisoned arrows, fierce faces, harsh voices, shaggy hair and beards, quick to argue and stab each other with the knives in their belts.

These are the people Ovid lives among, the elegant esteem he won for his light love verses back in Rome long, long forgotten and irrelevant in this harsh environment and violent, illiterate society.

5.7B (lines 25 to 68)

Some scholars divide the poem in two, because this second half switches from describing the grim natives of Tomis and whirls us back to Rome where he hears that his poems are now recited and applauded on the stage (the translator, Peter Green, speculates that this is for the pantomimi where an actor declaimed verses while dancers danced; sounds like ballet).

He curses his poetry which got him into such trouble, and yet he has nothing else. Here in this windswept waste amid violent, illiterate tribals, writing poetry is the only consolation he has, the only last slender link with distant Rome and his former life.

Then about language: not a single person in Tomis speaks Latin, none. Some speak a very debased form of Greek, legacy of when the town was founded centuries ago by Greeks. But most speak only the local tribal tongues. When he talks to anyone it is in pidgen-Sarmatian. He worries not only that he’s lost his style, in the absence of Latin speakers to listen to and comment on his poems – he worries that he’s forgetting Latin. And so he spends his time conversing with himself and doing writing exercises and writing these poems, holding at bay the collapse of his language skills and talent.

Thus I drag out my life and time, thus
tear my mind from the contemplation of my woes.
Through writing I seek an anodyne to misery: if my studies
win me such a reward, that is enough.

5.8 (38 lines)

Angry poem to an unnamed person who has been spreading malicious lies about him, a ‘vile wretch’ than whom no-one is lower. Once again Ovid curses this person, then emphasises the non-criminal nature of his error, praises the emperor’s clemency (hoping against hope), and hopes for the end of his exile and recall.

The early part of the poem is an interesting invocation of the goddess Fortune, whose wheel is always turning, and Nemesis, ‘hot for revenge’. Ovid says he has certainly been brought from the pinnacle of fame to miserable exile, but what makes his unnamed critic so confident the same thing won’t happen to him?

For Ovid hopes that Augustus will apply his mercy and recall him, at which point the critic will be amazed to see his face, one day, in Rome and then Ovid knows things which will secure that his critic is sent into exile!

5.9 (38 lines)

A poem to a friend who stayed loyal, Ovid claims more or less the only friend who stayed loyal and so he wishes he could a) name him (but that is forbidden for the friend’s own safety), b) devote every poem he ever writes in future to his friend’s praise.

The poem is factually interesting because it (unconsciously) brings to the fore the thought that whatever Ovid did (his notorious error) may actually have merited death. Therefore his relegatio already exemplified Augustus’s mercy, and that this may account for why no further mercy(i.e. relenting and letting Ovid return; even moving his place of exile to somewhere less inhospitable) may have been impossible for Augustus.

Behind all this is the most common interpretation of his fate which is that it was tied to something he saw being enacted in favour of Julia and her so-called ‘party’, meaning the aide of the extended Augustan family which wanted the succession to pass to a male on her side of the family.

Tiberius had had two sons by Julia, Augustus’s daughter – Gaius and Lucius, who died in 4 and 2 AD, respectively. Agrippa Postumus, Julia’s son by her first husband, Agrippa, had been unadopted and exiled in 7 AD. Julia herself was sent into exile in 8 AD, the same year as Ovid, ostensibly for immorality and widespread adultery, though conspiracy theorists from that day to this speculate that she was involved in some kind of plan to overthrow Augustus and replace the heir apparent with someone from her side of the family, or possibly a male contender who she married in the hypothetical secret marriage that Ovid hypothetically witnessed or knew about but didn’t report.

Both the Roman historians, Cassius Dio and Suetonius refer to a series of plots in the final years of Augustus’s rule, the most serious in the spring or early summer of 8 AD. Green thinks Ovid’s error was some kind of passive involvement in one of these (note p.212).

Thus the speculation engendered by Ovid’s frustrating failure, in over 100 poems of exile, to spell out what his offence was.

If it was a secret marriage, or a vow, or some kind of ceremony binding the Julia party, this explains the unremitting opposition to Ovid of the man who emerged during these years as the (reluctant) heir apparent, Tiberius, and of his scheming mother, Augustus’s second wife, Livia.

If Ovid’s error had somehow proved him sympathetic to the Julia party then not only was this the reason for his relegatio but explains why Livia made quite sure that Augustus, even if he contemplated mercy, never enacted it. And that when Tiberius came to power in 14 AD, Ovid stood no chance.

It explains why Ovid never mentions Tiberius in any of the 100 exile poems, but does mention Germanicus and Drusus, heirs in the Julian line. (Indeed, in exile Ovid reworked the first book of the unfinished Fasti to introduce a new dedication to Germanicus, Tiberius’s nephew, who Augustus had forced him to adopt in 4 AD – presumably in the hope that he would intercede with Augustus.)

It explains something which comes over in the notes – though not explicitly in the poems – which is that his friends back in Rome, in varying degrees, saw the way the wind was blowing, saw that Tiberius’s rise to power was becoming unstoppable, and so shifted allegiance to the coming man.

For all his contacts back in Rome, then, defending Ovid not only risked angering the old and visibly ailing emperor Augustus, but alienating the new master.

5.10 (52 lines)

Ovid tells his addressee he’s been in Tomis for 3 winters, watching the Danube freeze over. He ponders time: has time in general slowed down or is it only for him? In which case, is time subjective? (Well, the experience of it obviously is).

Once again he laments his location and, above all, the endless threat from marauding tribes whose only language is rape and pillage and the feeble defences (a good defensive site and a low wall) which is all that stands between Tomis and violent death. Their poisoned arrows litter the streets. Farmers dare not farm for they will be raided at any moment. Over half the population of the town are tribals, their chest-length hair, their shaggy bears, their trousers, fill him with loathing.

He knows that the townspeople regard him as the outsider, the oddity, with his soft hands and strange foreign language. Here he is the barbarian. OK, he admits, maybe it was right for him to be exiled…but to a place like this? It is cruel.

5.11 (30 lines)

The poem starts out feeling terribly sorry for his wife who, he’s learned, has been called ‘the wife of an exile’ as a deliberate insult. He grieves at the shame he’s brought upon her and tells her to be steadfast.

Then he switches, for the umpteenth time, to consider his fate. He does this to try and console his wife by making a fine legal distinction, namely that the emperor could have had him a) executed or b) fully exiled (deportatio), deprived of all rights and Roman citizenship. Instead Ovid was c) given the milder punishment of relegatio and so has retained life and estates and civil rights; to that extent, the emperor showed clemency, a punishment fitting his error, not a crime. To that extent the bastard who called his wife ‘the wife of an exile’ was wrong. So there! Little comfort, the modern reader might feel, to his lonely, distant wife.

Then in a move which feels pitifully grovelling, Ovid turns to praising the emperor, claiming his decision was just and mild, and that is why he devotes his poems to praising him:

Rightly then, Caesar, and to the very best of their powers
my poems (such as they are) proclaim your praise…

But if the interpretation that Ovid had seen something (as he repeatedly says, he didn’t do anything, his error was simply to witness, to see something) which somehow linked him with the Julia party, implicated him in a secret marriage or plan or collaboration which, in effect, was a conspiracy against the emperor and his chosen successor, Tiberius – if this was the case then it’s sadly obvious to the reader that absolutely no amount of grovellingly sycophantic hymns to Augustus would ever change Ovid’s plight. And they didn’t

5.12 (68 lines)

Reply to a friend who appears to have told him to buck up and write poems. Ovid sullenly replies there are two kinds of poems, the best ones, the real ones, require happiness and peace of mind to emerge, as inspiration (a commonplace of Roman poetry also mentioned by Horace, Tacitus, Juvenal among others). Here, in the grim outback, surrounded by barbarian tribesmen, the best he can do is squeeze out these exile elegies which are, in reality, mere vehicles for his complaints and grievances.

As to cheering up, should Priam have had fun fresh from his son’s funeral, should Niobe have held a party after all her children were killed?

Chief among the Forces undermining the peace of mind needed for composition are fear, constant fear of attack and violent death. Beside, long rusting has eaten away his talent. He is a field that’s been long unploughed and returned to stones and weeds. He is a rowboat kept out of the water that has cracked and rotting. So that explains the poor quality of the poems he now sends to Rome, such as this one itself.

Finally, a young poet is fired by ambition for renown, to be famous, numbered among the immortals. Now all that has soured to nothing. Now he wishes to be unknown, never to have been famous. His poems got him into this mess. He bitterly blames the Muses for ever inspiring him.

No-one in his remote outpost, a place of savage jabber and animal outcry’, even understands Latin, let alone the wonderful refinements and tricks he brought to it. Lastly, he admits his inspiration does still drive him to write – but he still has his standards and most of it ends up in the fire. Only ‘scraps of my efforts’, such as this very poem, survive because they have a practical purpose.

[What, 2,000 years of fans and scholars have wondered, were those poems he consigned to the flames about and how good were they? Unless this is another trope, developed solely for literary purposes, to illustrate his feelings of disgust and failure, just as he claims to have consigned his own draft of the Metamorphoses to the flames in 1.7. (note p.214)]

5.13 (34 lines)

Of all the Tristia poems this one is most like a letter in format, starting with the standard salutation (‘Good health and greetings from Ovid in his outback’) ending with the standard ‘Farewell’. In between the short poem addresses a loyal friend, possessed of ‘oak-touch loyalty’, complaining that:

  • he’s sick, the mental illness has penetrated his body, to give him a searing pain in his side (Green and scholars suspect pleurisy, triggered by the freezing climate)
  • this friend doesn’t send him enough letters to alleviate his bleak isolation

Ovid hopes the friend has not forgotten him, it’s merely the errancy of the postal service not delivering the letters. He remembers their many happy conversations, talking late into the night. Now letters between them can recreate that intimacy and intelligence. Please write.

5.14 (46 lines)

The final poem in the volume is to his wife, ‘dearer to me than myself’. It’s odd because it defines her, praises her, for sharing his suffering; it is this, her role as wife to a famous poet and tragic figure, which will make her immortal, just like Penelope, Andromache and Alcestis, Evadne and Laodameia.

To be good when there are no tribulations is easy; but to be faithful, as she has been, after the wreck of a god’s thunderbolts, ‘that is true married love/that’s loyalty indeed.’

He praises her continually and now – the poem veers in subject matter – wants her to return his devotion by appealing on his behalf. It is a sincere love poem, and that he ends the entire book with it is moving – even though a modern critic, particularly feminist, may find it objectionable, the extent to which he defines his wife solely in relationship to him. But then, he was in a dire situation.

Terms of rhetoric

Green is chatty, loquacious, garrulous, sprinkling his introductions and notes with foreign phrases (not just Latin – French and the like), references to modern poets (T.S Eliot crops up a lot [pages 217, 220, 224], so we can deduce he is an influence on Green’s translating style) and mention of ancient Greek and Roman rhetorical devices. These always interest me but I have a terrible memory for them. So here’s an (incomplete) list:

  • adynaton – a figure of speech in the form of hyperbole taken to such extreme lengths as to insinuate a complete impossibility: ‘pigs will fly’ (note p.216)
  • apologia – a formal written defence of one’s opinions or conduct
  • chiasmus – (‘to shape like the letter Χ’) reversal of grammatical structures in successive phrases or clauses – but no repetition of words: ‘By day the frolic, and the dance by night’
  • circumlocution – the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea; in ancient poetry it refers to poets’ habit of referring to people in terms of their relationships to someone else (‘the son of…’, ‘the wife of…’ etc) or to a place (‘the Phrygian hero’); this can often make ancient poetry difficult to read – it’s particularly common in Ovid’s Fasti which is why I found it such a demanding read (note p.219)
  • genethliakon – a poem in honour of a birthday in association with a gift or standing alone. Callim.
  • hysteron proteron – a figure of speech consisting of the reversal of a natural or rational order: ‘putting the cart before the horse’ (note p.218)
  • laudatio – a poem, or part of a poem, in praise or commendation of someone or something
  • propemptikon – a poem that wishes a departing friend or relative all the best for a prosperous trip overseas, such as 1.1
  • recusatio – a poem, or part of a poem, in which the poet says he is unable or disinclined to write the type of poem which he originally intended to, and instead writes in a different style; the Hellenistic poet Callimachus introduced the trope of saying his poetic gift was too modest to attempt great epics, so he would write frivolous love poems instead, and this trope was copied in Augustan Rome by Virgil, Horace, Propertius and Ovid
  • synkrisis – the juxtaposition of people or things with the aim of comparing them: a famous exampe is the juxtaposition of the long speeches by Caesar then Cato in Sallust’s account of the Catiline conspiracy
  • variatio – varying a theme with digressions, examples and so on
  • zeugma – (note p.220) any case of parallelism and ellipsis working together so that a single word governs two or more other parts of a sentence: ‘She filed her nails and then a complaint against her boss’

Conclusion

After struggling through both the Metamorphoses and especially the Fasti, Tristia came as a welcome relief. Although a hundred pages long in the Penguin translation, it’s made up of short, discrete poems which you can pick up and read in a few minutes. You can immediately grasp what they’re about, what he’s saying, and immediately empathise with his feelings.

All this is hugely helped by Peter Green’s easy-going, demotic translations and his free approach to rhythm and metre which means you barely notice you’re reading poetry, in the best sense, meaning each poem flows smoothly, seems well phrased and expresses its meaning, conveys its purpose, easily and enjoyably. Surprisingly accessible and enjoyable.

And strongly helped by the fact that the editorial apparatus around the poems is so ample and informative. Not only the introduction to the entire volume, but the extremely useful introductions to each individual poem accompanied by useful notes, but also a long Glossary of named individuals and places. Altogether it makes for a full and thorough and rich and informative experience. Other translations are available, but this is one of the best, most compendious, most enjoyable volumes of Roman literature that I’ve read.

Credit

Peter Green’s translation of Tristia by Ovid was published by Penguin books in 1994. All references are to this 1994 paperback edition.

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by Simon on November 30, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on November 30, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/11/30/tristia-ovid/

Virgil and the Christian World by T.S. Eliot (1951)

T.S. Eliot: a potted biography

The great Anglo-American poet, playwright and critic T.S. Eliot (1888 to 1965) came from America to England just before the First World War, published a small number of sensuous, ‘modernist’ poems displaying a sensibility in debt to French Symbolism. Soon after the Great War ended he published the seminal modernist poem, The Waste Land (1922), but also established a reputation as a deeply insightful and intelligent critic of much earlier English literature, particularly the Jacobean playwrights and metaphysical poets of the early 1600s.

His reputation was enhanced and his influence steadily spread, especially among the younger generation of writers and critics, due to his editorship of a literary and philosophical magazine, The Criterion, which he edited from 1922 to 1939. Readers of The Criterion came to realise that, far from being a youthful revolutionary who was set on overturning literary values, and despite the radical format of The Waste Land (collage, fragments, quotes from multiple foreign languages), Eliot was, in fact, a profoundly conservative thinker.

This was made explicit when in 1928, in the foreword to a book of essays titled ‘For Lancelot Andrewes’ (the Jacobean bishop and writer) Eliot ‘came out’, declaring himself ‘a classicist in literature, royalist in politics and Anglo-Catholic in religion,’ committing himself to hierarchy and order in all three fields.

He had already taken British citizenship. In the later 1930s he attempted to revive the verse drama of the Elizabethans which he had spent so much time analysing, on the modern stage, writing a series of plays in verse, starting with Murder in the Cathedral (1935).

During the Second World War Eliot worked as a reader for the publishers Faber & Faber during the day and a fire warden at night. The masterpiece of his maturity was the set of four longer poems collectively titled the Four Quartets (Burnt Norton, 1936, then East Coker, The Dry Salvages, and Little Gidding, published in 1940, 1941 and 1942, respectively).

After the war, Eliot settled into the position of Grand Old Man of Poetry, with a leading role at the leading publisher of poetry, Faber. He continued to write essays and make broadcasts on the radio. With his public conversion to Anglicanism he had achieved an ideological and psychological stability.

Having lived through two ruinous world wars, a lot of Eliot’s effort was now devoted towards helping to define and preserve the best of European civilisation. His early essays had been offshoots of a poet working through his own problems and interests; the later essays are a conscious effort to establish a canon of classic literature, trying to formulate universal categories to define and preserve it.

It is in this spirit that in 1951 he delivered a lecture on BBC radio titled ‘Virgil and the Christian World’, which was then printed in The Listener magazine and collected in the volume On Poetry and Poets.

Virgil and the Christian World

As befits radio this is not an address to a specialist audience of literary scholars but a more broad brush approach for a general audience. Eliot explains that he is not setting out to assert Virgil’s special value as a poet or moralist, but to pay attention to ‘those characteristics of Virgil which render him peculiarly sympathetic to the Christian mind’.

Straight away he addresses the notorious issue of the Virgil’s Fourth Eclogue. This, the fourth and final of Virgil’s set of lengthy poems about the countryside or ‘eclogues’, contains extravagant praise of the forthcoming birth of a special child, who, the poet claims, will bring a new golden age, the return of Saturn and the Virgin, the gift of divine life etc.

As early Christianity established itself, early Christian apologists ransacked all available texts, from old Jewish scriptures to the entire literature of the ancient world, looking for proofs and prophecies, any text anywhere which could be made to prefigure and predict the arrival of their messiah.

Thus the Fourth Eclogue was quickly adopted by these apologists and Virgil was made an honorary Christian before the fact because Christians claimed he had been gifted with spiritual prophecy to foresee the coming of the Christ. Throughout the entire Middle Ages and well into the Renaissance scholars and theologians genuinely believed that Virgil had predicted the coming of the Christ child.

Eliot makes clear right at the start that he in now way thinks that Virgil foresaw the birth of Christ (some 19 years after he himself died). Rather, Eliot thinks the Fourth Eclogue was written to a friend of his, Pollio, whose wife was expecting a baby.

[In fact, the notes to the OUP edition of the Eclogues which I recently read, suggest that this passage of the Fourth Eclogue was describing the hoped-for son of the recent marriage of Antony and Octavius’s sister, Octavia (in 40 BC), because contemporaries devoutly hoped that their union would usher in a final end to Rome’s endless civil wars.]

Eliot then ponders the meaning of the words prophet, prophecy and predict. He himself has no doubt that Virgil had no inkling of the coming of Christ. On the other hand, he suggests that if the word ‘inspiration’ means writing something the poet himself does not completely understand, and which he or she may themselves misinterpret once the ‘inspiration’ has passed, the maybe Virgil was ‘inspired’.

This is by way of preparing the way for some autobiography, for Eliot then paints an obvious portrait of himself and how his most famous poem, The Waste Land, which arose out of his purely private concerns, amazed him by going on to become the rallying cry for an entire generation of writers.

A poet may believe that he is expressing only his private experience; his lines may be for him only a means of talking about himself without giving himself away; yet for his readers what he has written may come to be the expression both of their own secret feelings and of the exultation or despair of a generation.

A poet need not know what his poetry will come to mean for others just as a prophet need not understand the meaning of their prophetic utterance. Thus there may be any number of secular, historical explanations for the Fourth Eclogue; but he repeats his definition of ‘inspiration’ as tapping into a force which defies all historical research.

Anyway the point is that the existence of the Fourth Eclogue which so many Christians mistakenly thought was divinely inspired, gave Virgil and his writing a kind of free pass into the new Christian order, opening ‘the way for his influence in the Christian world’, something mostly denied to other explicitly ‘pagan’ authors. On the face of it this is a lucky accident but Eliot doesn’t believe it was an ‘accident’.

Eliot anticipates Jackson Knight’s view, expressed in his Penguin translation of the Aeneid from a few years later (1956), that Virgil was the poet of the gateway, looking both back to the pagan world and forwards to the Christian dispensation.

So after these preliminaries, Eliot gets to the meat of his essay: In what way did Virgil anticipate the Christian West? Eliot tells us that, to answer his question, he is going to rely on a book by a German scholar, Theodor Haecker, titled Virgil: The Father of the West.

Before he gets started though, Eliot rather surprisingly devotes a page to autobiography, telling us that as a boy learning the Classics he much preferred Greek to Latin (and still does). However he found himself immediately more drawn to Virgil than Homer. The main reason was that the gods in Homer are so capricious, selfish and immoral and all the so-called ‘heroes’ are in fact coarse ruffians. The only decent character in the entire book is Hector.

Nowadays, if forced to explain his preference, he’d say he prefers the world of Virgil to the world of Homer: it was ‘a more civilised world of dignity, reason and order’. Eliot goes on to compare the Greek and Roman worlds, saying the culture of Athens was much superior in the arts, philosophy and pure science. Virgil made of Roman culture something better than it was. Then he quietly makes a very big leap in the argument, claiming that Virgil’s ‘sensibility was more nearly Christian than any other Roman or Greek poet’. How so?

He says he is going to follow Haeckel’s procedure of examining key words in the poem and highlights labor, pietas and fatum. However, he immediately drops this plan and veers off into a consideration of the Georgics. What Virgil really intended the Georgics for remains a bit of a mystery: they’re not particularly useful as a handbook to farming, and they contain many digressions completely extraneous to their ostensible subject matter. After pondering Virgil’s motivation, Eliot concludes that Virgil intended to affirm the dignity of agricultural labour and the importance of the cultivation of the soil for the wellbeing of the state, both materially and spiritually.

The Greeks may have perfected the notion that the highest type of life is the contemplative life (Plato et al) but they tended to look down on manual labour. For Eliot the Georgics affirm the importance of manual labour on the land. Then he makes a leap to talk about the monastic movement which grew up within medieval Christendom and how the monastic orders combined both aspects, combining a life of contemplation with quite arduous labour, as both being essential for the life of the complete man.

It may be that the monks who read and copied Virgil’s manuscripts recognised their spirit in the Georgics.

Now onto the Aeneid. Eliot says this epic poem is:

concerned with the imperium romanum, with the extension and justification of imperial rule.

(quite unlike W.A. Camps with his silly claim that the Aeneid is not a work of propaganda.) But Eliot claims that Virgil’s ‘ideal of empire’ was founded on a devotion to the land, to the region, village, and family within the village. This brief explanation is his discussion of labor because Eliot now turns to the more important concept of pietas.

In English someone is called ‘pious’ if they make a great show of their religious faith. Eliot says that pietas for Virgil had much wider associations: it implies a respectful attitude to the individual, the family, the region, and towards ‘the imperial destiny of Rome’. Aeneas is also ‘pious’ in his respect towards the gods and punctilious observance of rites and offerings.

Eliot delves further into the meanings of the word. Piety to a father can, for example, mean not only affection for an individual but acceptance of a bond which one has not chosen. Piety towards the father is also an acceptance of the correct order of things, and so, obliquely, respect of the gods. After some shilly-shallying Eliot gets to the point he wants to make: all these forms of piety involve some form of humility and humility is a professedly Christian virtue. Aeneas is, in this respect, the polar opposite of Achilles or Odysseus, who have not a shred of humility about them.

[Interestingly, given the date of the essay, written soon after the end of the Second World War, Eliot describes Aeneas as the original Displaced Person, a fugitive from a ruined city and an obliterated society.]

Odysseus endures ten years of exile but eventually returns to his home hearth, to a loyal wife, a dutiful son, his slaves and faithful dog. Whereas Aeneas can’t go home: he is a man on a mission and accomplishing that mission, the poem makes repeatedly clear, is only the very beginning of the long history of Roman origins and rise. Odysseus’s story ends when he gets home (and kills the suitors); Aeneas’s entire journey is itself only an episode in the much larger history of Rome.

Therefore, Eliot asserts (with a bit of a stretch, in my view) Aeneas is ‘the prototype of a Chistian hero’. He accepts the duty laid on him by the gods regardless of the price to himself. He subjugates his own will and desires to his god-given task.

This brings Eliot to fatum (so, OK, we are proceeding via the key word process). There is an excess of words to cover this concept. Eliot says maybe the best translation is ‘destiny’ but then makes the polemical point that you cannot have ‘destiny’ in a purely mechanical universe.

Eliot then tries to give a Christian interpretation to Aeneas’s ‘destiny’. It is a burden and a responsibility rather than a reason for self glorification. It happens to some men and not others because some have the gifts and the responsibility but they did not make these; something external made these and the humble man accepts the gifts and the responsibility. Who made them? Not the anthropomorphised pagan gods who behave so selfishly and vulgarly in the poem. Some power much deeper.

He zeroes in on the entire Dido episode (book 4) in particular Aeneas’s shame at abandoning Dido, shame which is revived when he meets her shade in the underworld in book 6 and she refuses to look at him or speak. This, for Eliot, more than personal shame, symbolises how much Aeneas suffered to carry out his god-given destiny. Making his point completely explicit, he says: ‘it is a very heavy cross to bear.’

Eliot can think of no other pagan poet who could have created this situation with its emotional, psychological and philosophical subtlety.

What does this ‘destiny’ mean? For Virgil’s conscious mind, and his contemporary readers, not least the all-powerful Augustus, there’s no doubt it means the imperium romanum. But Eliot then makes some dubious and sweeping generalisations. He claims that Virgil proposed for his contemporaries a noble ideal of empire – personally, I don’t see that in the poem. There are Anchises’ lines reminding Romans they must rule well and there’s praise of Augustus for bringing peace and order, but that’s about it. Eliot stretches it by claiming that Virgil’s work proposed ‘the highest ideal’ for any secular empire. Personally, I just don’t see that. In my view what the Aeneid praises is military conquest, might and power. There might be a strong thread of regret and sadness running through it, but that is the poem’s overt message.

Eliot proceeds to claim that ‘we are all, so far as we inherit the civilisation of Europe, still citizens of the Roman Empire’. Is that true? I can see strong points on either side of the argument.

But he then goes on to claim that the Roman Empire Virgil imagined was ‘greater’ than the actual one of generals and proconsuls and businessmen. Eliot claims that Virgil invented this ideal and ‘passed [it] on to Christianity to develop and to cherish.’ I disagree on a number of levels.

First, I find the actual process of creating empire, as described in the Aeneid, to be hyper-violent and destructive, flagrantly contrary all Christian morality.

Second, part of the ideal which Eliot is describing must include the idealisation of the first Roman emperor Augustus. I can see why Virgil a) pinned his hopes for peace on b) sucked up to, the most powerful man in Rome, but in the end the entire poem amounts to the propagandistic adulation of a mass murderer, a man who achieved supreme power by liquidating all his enemies and then ensuring nobody could threaten his unique rule for the next 40 years. The Aeneid defends a military dictator.

So I just don’t agree when Eliot claims that it passed onto its Christian heirs any kind of noble model for how to run a spiritual empire. The exact opposite.

Eliot reiterates his claim that we are all still citizens the Roman Empire. Well, there are arguments both ways but ultimately I think he is incorrect. The state we inhabit in England in 2022 owes more to the non-Roman traditions of the pagan Danes and Anglo-Saxons and feudal Normans who each conquered this country, than to the Roman civilisation which they eclipsed. Our democracy owes nothing to Rome; it developed out of medieval feudalism, itself an import from Normandy, itself a colony of Vikings.

I think Eliot’s vision of a total European civilisation is erroneous and that his claim that this civilisation was in part inspired by Virgil is wrong.

Moreover, there is a blindingly obvious problem here, which is that Eliot is defending empire as an ideal form of government. Obviously this was considerably easier to do in 1951 than it would be nowadays. Millions of inhabitants of the former British Empire have immigrated to Britain and their children, in politics, in culture and in academia, have enthusiastically set about damning the British Empire, rubbishing any claim that it ever had anything positive about it. So just the sound of Eliot defending empire as a ‘noble ideal’ sounds badly in our time.

As to whether Virgil’s ideal of a suprahuman noble empire actually did inspire church authorities in the Middle Ages, I think you’d need a book examining the impact of the Virgilian ‘ideal’ on theologians, political thinkers, churchmen and statesmen throughout the Middle Ages and that would be a vast undertaking. I bet one exists, though. I’d love to read it.

This was, after all, only a half-hour radio lecture. Eliot’s sensitivity and insight and intellect bring out all kinds of aspects of Virgil’s achievement. And his thesis – that Virgil’s achievement of creating the notion of an ideal empire was to haunt the European imagination – is one of those ideas which is itself so big and vague that you can’t really prove or disprove it. But it’s an interesting perspective to add to the hundreds of other perspectives with which we can view Virgil’s epic poem.

Eliot concludes his essay with a page about a word which is missing from Virgil which is ‘love’. Amor does crop up, especially in the story of Dido and Aeneas. But it has nowhere near the force and central importance that it has for a Christian poet like Dante. It never has:

the same significance as a principle of order in the human soul, in society and in the universe that pietas is given.

Thus Eliot agrees (no surprise) with Dante’s positioning of Virgil in the Divine Comedy as an inspired teacher and guide right up to the barrier of belief, which he is not allowed to cross. In Eliot’s view Virgil mapped out a universe which in many ways anticipated the Christian universe, and handed many of its values onto later generations of Christian thinkers (and poets). But there is a line and Virgil doesn’t cross over into being a Christian. He can’t.

Instead, Virgil was limited by his position in history: the highest value he can conceive of, the value which underpins so much of the character and action of the Aeneid, was pietas, respect for father, family and fatherland.

But the highest value for the Christian poet Dante was love, the love which has created the entire universe and moves the sun and the stars and which we can all aspire to. Next to the gorgeous rose of Dante’s universe of love, Virgil’s pietas is a hard, iron sword, the colour of Roman imperialism.

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Posted by Simon on September 21, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/09/21/virgil-and-the-christian-world-t-s-eliot/

The Complete Short Stories of Evelyn Waugh

Waugh was a professional writer from the year he published his first short story in 1926 till his death in 1966. During that period he published some 26 short stories. There are several editions of his collected short stories, notable the Everyman one and the Penguin one. I read the Penguin one but the Everyman edition (which includes a few more stories than the Penguin) is the one that’s available online.

What all the editions tend to highlight is that Evelyn Waugh did not, in fact, write many short stories. All the editions include the juvenilia written at school, and the half dozen stories written at Oxford, to bulk up the books. And for real aficionados and completists it’s good to have everything in one volume like this. But the fact remains that in a writing career of 40 years he only published 26 short stories.

Spin-offs from novels or no short stories at all

Not only that, but when you look more closely, you realise that a number of the stories are offcuts of the novels and so closely linked as to be barely standalone narratives.

Thus ‘Incident in Azania’ is set in the fictional country created for the novel Black Mischief and feels very much like an anecdote which could have been included in that novel but was cut as surplus to requirements. ‘Cruise’ is a short squib, a lampoon consisting entirely of postcards written by a gushing, silly, posh young lady on a cruise round the Med, an idea recycled from one of his travel books. ‘Charles Ryder’s Schooldays’ is quite obviously a spin-off from Brideshead Revisited and ‘Basil Seal Rides Again’ is a final flurry for the character at the centre of Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags.

So four of the 26 are direct spin-offs from novels.

More than that, three of the stories are actual extracts from the novels: ‘The Man Who Liked Dickens’ is an early version of the final chapters of A Handful of Dust and ‘By Special Request’ is not a standalone story at all, but the original ending of A Handful of Dust as it first appeared when the novel was serialised in Harper’s Bazaar. ‘Compassion’ was recycled in its entirety into the end section of Unconditional Surrender.

So seven of his adult short stories aren’t really standalone narratives but either rely on the novels they derive from or are actual excerpts from them. Leaving 19.

Two of these 19 aren’t really short stories at all. The post-war narratives ‘Scott-King’s Modern Europe’ and ‘Love Among The Ruins’ are far longer than your normal short story, certainly than the other stories included here, and so are generally categorised as novellas. Leaving 17.

And lastly, by far the longest item in the collection, at around 80 pages, is ‘Work Suspended: Two Chapters of an Unfinished Novel’ which, as the title suggests, is not and was never intended to be a short story, but the first sections of an abandoned novel.

Leaving only about 16 short stories gleaned from a career which lasted nearly 40 years.

Commissions

Finally, the notes in the Penguin edition reveal one more fact about the ‘short stories’, which is that quite a few of them were commissions, not written off his own bat. Now there’s nothing wrong with a story being commissioned – both Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray and Conan Doyle’s The Sign of the Four were commissioned over the same historic dinner (30 August 1889) with the magazine editor, J. M. Stoddart. However, all of Waugh’s commissioned stories only make sense, or make a lot more sense, when you learn they were commissioned as part of series on a set theme:

Thus:

  • ‘A House of Gentlefolks’ was commissioned for a series titled The New Decameron
  • ‘The Kremlin’ was commissioned for a series titled Real Life Stories by Famous Authors (which explains its opening sentence: ‘ This story was told me in Paris very early in the morning by the manager of a famous night club, and I am fairly certain that it is true.’).
  • ‘Too much tolerance’ was commissioned for a series titled The Seven Deadly Sins of Today and only really makes sense in that context
  • and ‘The Sympathetic Passenger’ was written for the Tight Corner series in the Daily Mail, ditto

The short story not Waugh’s metier

So the conclusion I draw from this little statistical analysis is that Waugh was very much not a short story writer, certainly not in the manner of Saki or Somerset Maugham or Kipling or J.G. Ballard, writers who produced a tremendous output of short stories but, more importantly, who suited the short story format. All four of those authors, in their different ways, knew just how to manage their material into artefacts which create maximum artistic and psychological impact and a range of effects. Waugh not so much.

In fact I’m afraid to say I found a lot of Waugh’s stories disappointing. A few I didn’t even understand, I didn’t see the point of them.

In a novel like Vile Bodies Waugh took scores of anecdotes about the shallow, heartless behaviour of his upper class Bright Young Things and combined them in such a way as to produce a kind of group portrait which was much larger than the sum of its parts. But broken down into short, isolated texts, most of these anecdotes feel much weaker, and sometimes pretty lame.

For me the stories’ value was analytical, they gave me a greater understanding of what you could call the ‘mosaic technique’ of Waugh’s novels, what I’ve referred to as the importance of gossip, not only as subject matter of the novels but as a key element of his technique. The way the central events of the novels are always commentated on by the shoals of secondary characters which fill his novels, gossiping at parties and restaurants and balls and dinners, mingling catty comments about the central events of the novel’s narrative with deliberately throwaway mentions of the trials and tribulations of other, unrelated people to give a powerful sense of their ultimate irrelevance; or the way all stories, and all lives in the modern world are swamped and trivialised by the sheer number of people and tragedies and stories we’re meant to pay attention to.

This technique has multiple benefits: from the point of view of literary realism, it helps create the illusion of the throng, of the crowdedness of London High Society, where everyone knows everyone else, goes to each other’s parties and dinners, where everyone spends a lot of time energetically gossiping about each other’s ups and downs and affairs.

Seen in terms of technique it has at least two benefits: it allows Waugh to skip or cut briskly between scenes with great dramatic effect, just as films can cut from one scene to another in a split second. This encourages or suits Waugh’s tendency to be concise and clipped, so that some of his best scenes are only half a page long before they cut away to something completely different. Technique and style are perfectly combined.

(Waugh’s debt to cinema technique becomes overt in some of these texts, not least in ‘Excursion in Reality’ which is a Vile Bodies-era satire about a hapless young writer who gets caught up in the 24/7 crazy world of film production; and the very first text in the collection is a kind of commented-on version of the screenplay of a black-and-white, silent movie.)

Waugh’s understated debt to Modernism

The second benefit of Waugh’s ‘mosaic technique’ is the way this approach subtly incorporates some of the best features of the previous generation’s Modernism. Modernism refers to a movement in literature during and after the Great War which sought to depict the hectic, frantic, fragmented, fractured experience of living in big cities in styles or narrative structures which reflected psychic collapse and disintegration. Thus the disintegration of a highly sensitive mind portrayed in T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land, the extreme fragmentation of Ezra Pound’s Cantos, the collapse of a unified narrative and then of the English language itself in James Joyce’s Ulysses, or the collapse of the patriarchal Victorian tone of voice into the swirling stream of consciousness of Virginia Woolf’s novels.

Waugh swallowed Modernism whole, experimented with it, and then adapted it for his own purposes, keeping only what he needed. The very first story in the collection, ‘The Balance’, published in 1926, is the best example (described below) in the way it is broken up into short snippets headed by the captions of the silent movie it describes. This immediately recalls the clever use of newspaper headlines in the ‘Aeolus’ chapter of Ulysses and anticipates the blizzard of newspaper headlines, advertising slogans, popular songs and so on which litter the classic example of German high Modernism, Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin, published a few years later in 1929.

My point is that this technique of fragments, of consciously breaking up the text of a narrative into a mosaic of short clipped scenes, of cutting away from the main protagonists of an event to a group of their friends heartlessly laughing about their fates, a technique exemplified in Vile Bodies but which appears, with greater or lesser frequency throughout all his fiction, this was Waugh’s version of Modernist fragmentation and alienation.

Waugh and mental breakdown

And although Waugh has the (deserved) reputation of being a great comic writer, actually rereading the novels as I’ve been doing, it has been a shock to realise just how much misery, suffering and pain they include.

There are scores of examples but, focusing literally on mental breakdown, I think of the devastating impact on Tony and Brenda Last of the tragic death of their son in A Handful of Dust. Take the scene where they return from their son’s inquest to big, empty Hetton Hall and Brenda barely makes it into the entrance hall before sitting down in a decorative chair which nobody usually sits on, sitting there and looking around her in a daze. Or immediately after Tony gets news of his son’s death and trembles on the brink of going to pieces, is only saved by the compassion of ‘the Shameless Blonde’, the sturdy American woman aviator who stays with him and forces him to play cards all afternoon. A scene of tremendous psychological power.

Or take Vile Bodies which is all very hilarious up till the racing car crash which precipitates the concussion and nervous collapse and eventual death of the bright, confident heroine Agatha Runcible.

A key strand in the similarly polyphonic novel Put Out More Flags is the psychological decline of Angela Lyne, up to that point a confident, dominating presence in London High Society, whom the advent of war reduces to an alcoholic wreck, hiding out in her serviced apartment, drinking all day in dark glasses with the curtains closed.

A central thread in Brideshead Revisited is the agonising decline of the bright and beautiful young undergraduate Sebastian Flyte into a shambling, poverty-stricken, feverish wreck in the slums of Tunis.

And then, of course, Waugh wrote an entire novel dramatising his own mental breakdown, The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold in 1957.

So for a writer who’s (correctly) associated with the reactionary views of England’s moneyed upper classes and (correctly) famous for his high-spirited comedy, it’s worth repeating that Waugh also wrote throughout his career about extreme tragedy, psychological trauma and mental collapse, and did so using his own version of the polyphonic, mosaic narrative technique – both a subject matter and a technique more usually associated with the avant-garde.

Anyway, to return to the short stories, my point is simply that if most of them had been included in one of his novels, they would have made one more hilarious scene amid the general mayhem of the polyphonic, multi-stranded plots and contributed to the complex artistic and psychological impact of the novels. But given here, as standalone short stories, as just one bald anecdote, a surprising number of them come over as lame and flat.

Which is why I wouldn’t really recommend these short stories to anyone. I’d recommend reading pretty much all the novels first, before you bother with them.

Pre and post-war

One last point. The stories can also be divided in chronological order into those written before the Second World War and those written after. At a glance you can see that he was far more prolific in short stories before (21) than after (5). (For the period of the war itself he was either serving in the Army or, from December 1943 to June 1944, entirely busy writing his magnum opus, Brideshead Revisited.)

If we count Scott-King’s Modern Europe and Love Among the Ruins as novellas, then he can only be said to have written three short stories between 1945 and 1966, confirming my feeling that the short story was emphatically not his genre. That said, all three post-war short stories are good.

Short stories 1. Pre-war

1. The Balance (1926)

Born in 1903, Waugh was only 22 when he wrote this, by far his most experimental and avant-garde text.

In the cinema

Very much in the style of Vile Bodies, this fairly long text uses a number of highly experimental narrative techniques. Most of it, the long first part, consists of scenes from an imagined film. It opens with a cook and a house parlour maid (Gladys and Ada) making their way to their seats in a cinema and then making cheerily working class comments on the action of the movie they’re watching. Somewhere behind them (in the more expensive seats) sits a Cambridge student who drawls knowing intellectual comments (pointing out the debt to European Expressionism of some of the shots, explaining what steak tartare is). And the text is punctuated by the captions in CAPITAL LETTERS which are appearing onscreen, as this is a black-and-white, silent film.

Thus the text consists of: capitalised captions, interspersed with the narrator’s description of what is happening onscreen, interspersed with the working class comments of the two servants given in italics, and the occasional sardonic comment from Mr Cambridge.

The ‘story’ is made up of clichés and stereotypes, which allows his working class women to spot in advance what’s going to happen, the Cambridge man to make superior comments, and Waugh to mock all of them.

Adam is at art school. He loves Imogen. Imogen’s mummy tells her she must stop seeing him. They share a cab to Euston where she catches a train to the country. Ada, catches cab to home near Regent’s Park, goes up to room, melodramatically considers suicide by pills, imagines the vulgarity of family breaking down door, calling police, thinks again. Scoops up his best books and takes them to a luxury second-hand bookseller, the fussing about first editions suddenly reminding me of The Picture of Dorian Gray. He gets a tenner for his books, then a cab to Paddington and train to Oxford and goes to see, one by one, his incredibly posh undergraduate friends. Old Etonians, the Bullingdon Club, chaps who hunt, who paint, who drink very heavily.

The window blind has become stuck halfway up the window so that by day they are shrouded in a twilight as though of the Nether world, and by night Ernest’s light blazes across the quad, revealing interiors of unsurpassed debauchery.

Yes, Dorian Gray. Waugh is channeling Wilde turned into a 1920s silent movie. And deliberately elitist or excluding references to aspects of Oxford life. Eights week. Commem. The Bullingdon. The Canning. All the posh young men he tries are busy till he resorts to visiting the rooms of Ernest Vaughan.

They go for dinner at a local pub, get plastered, go on to some rough proletarian pubs, play darts, get into loud arguments, get kicked out, catch a cab back to the colleges, gatecrash a party, pour drinks on the carpet, nearly get into another fight till Ernest walks dignifiedly out into the quad, throws up and passes out.

Cut to the next evening when the pair gatecrash a Liberal Association party at Oxford town hall. Having irritated the guests and got blind drunk they walk outside where Ernest steals a car, drives it haphazardly down St Aldate’s before mounting then kerb and crashing into a shop window. Police close in and arrest him. Adam walks very depressed back to his hotel room. He uncaps the bottle of poison and drinks the contents down in one.

End of film. Glady and Ada and the smart Cambridge graduate and a hundred others exit the film, all chatting about it, the two women to make their way back to their shared rooms in Earls Court where they’ll carry on discussing it over cups of cocoa.

Adam outside the film

At which point the text cuts and changes to a series of three sections of parts. Part one finds Adam in the hotel bedroom piecing together the fragments of the last 24 drunken hours and then remembering standing by the bedroom window in a storm of nausea before throwing up through it into the courtyard, presumably evacuating the poison from his system.

A boyhood memory

In the short part two he has a vivid memory of being a 7-year-old boy and playing a game with the family cat, Ozymandias, which consisted of locking it and himself in his bedroom then chasing it round the room terrorising it at every stop; only then did the real game begin, which was the challenge of trying to coax it back to a state of relaxed affection. And the particular memory which floats into his head as he lies on the bed recovering from his failed suicide attempt, is of the time that Ozymandias escaped to the top of the wardrobe, so the 7-year-old Adam pulled his table over to the wardrobe and put a chair on top of the table and climbed up on both and reached out for the cat and… the whole lot collapsed to the floor and he fell and knocked himself out. Vivid as yesterday he remembers the sensation of slowly ‘regaining consciousness’ and piecing together like a jigsaw the scattered flowing bodily sensations till he had attached particular pains to particular parts of the body and his ego was once again in control.

This early experience of psychological fragmentation, flotation and reassembly recurs at moments of drunkenness, as now. Now he gets up and has breakfast in the hotel still in a hallucinatory state:

He had breakfasted in a world of phantoms, in a great room full of uncomprehending eyes, protruding grotesquely from monstrous heads that lolled over steaming porridge; marionette waiters had pirouetted about him with uncouth gestures. All round him a macabre dance of shadows had reeled and flickered, and in and out of it Adam had picked his way, conscious only of one insistent need, percolating through to him from the world outside, of immediate escape from the scene upon which the bodiless harlequinade was played, into a third dimension beyond it.

Adam talks to his reflection

Adam walks out of Oxford along the towpath. He had written a letter to Imogen begging her to come back. He crosses a bridge over the canal and looks at a swan sailing by whose reflection is broken and fragmented. He tears up the letter and chucks the fragments into the river, then has a brief conversation with himself. He supposes tearing up the letter means he is over Imogen, and the fact that he’s here at all means he’s resolved to go on living. Was there no moral influence on his decision to live, no wish not to burden his loved ones, no profound insight into the meaning of life? No. Simply a rest, a sleep, a change of scenery. Ultimately, those are the small measures which make all the difference. No intrinsic motives from the soul. Just as random as…circumstance.

A shift of perspective

And then in its last two pages the text does what I mentioned so many of them doing: it switches perspective altogether to create a deliberate alienation effect. Suddenly we are at a country house named Thatch and Mrs Hay has invited her undergraduate son Basil and one friend for luncheon but a whole carload has turned up, gossiping and smoking all the time.

The point being, they are all telling each other about the other night when horrible Adam gatecrashed lovely Gabriel’s party with some ghastly man named Vaughan who was offensive to everyone then threw up. Here, right at the start of his career, we find Waugh using a technique which will serve him again and again, which is spending a lot of time on a close account of the incidents and thoughts of one or two protagonists; and then suddenly cutting far away to hear the same events being retold as throwaway gossip by people who don’t give a damn about the characters we’ve just been following and have invested so much time and trouble in.

It’s a very simple technique but very modernist in feeling, pulling the rug from under our feet, suddenly making us realise how silly and trivial the little trials and tribulations we’ve been following are in the great scale of things. Making the entire fictional edifice in which we had been investing time and emotion seem infinitely fragile and inconsequential.

Short conclusion

Arguably, and certainly to someone like myself, soaked in early twentieth century modernism, this is the most interesting of all the stories in the book. It clearly foregrounds three things: one, the very self-conscious modernist technique which Waugh studied, copied and assimilated; two, the interest in altered and extreme psychological states, reflected not only in Adam’s drunkenness but the much more interesting and vivid descriptions of regaining consciousness after his concussion as a small boy; three, the determinedly, almost offensively, upper class nature of the settings and characters – Mayfair, Lord and Lady this, Old Etonians at Oxford etc.

Of course it was this latter strand, the supremely upper class settings and characters, which were to characterise the rest of his writings. But this, Waugh’s first published short story, makes abundantly clear the surprisingly experimental nature of his early literary taste.

And also shows how an interest in morbid or damaged psychology was not just a personal thing, but has its roots in the fin-de-siecle obsession with decadence, its hyper-Gothic interest in altered states and very deeply troubled psyches, epitomised by Wilde’s novel Dorian Gray which leaves stray echoes in some of the self-consciously aesthetic moments this text – but reborn thirty years later in the era of Freudian psycho-analysis, jazz nightclubs and cocktail bars.

For these reasons I found it by far the most interesting, and intellectually stimulating, story in the collection.

A House of Gentlefolks (1927)

Only a year later and Waugh has swallowed, assimilated and concealed his learnings from Modernism (although there is a surprising reference to the famous Modernist author, Gertrude Stein, on the second page).

This is a first-person narrative which, in style at least, is thumpingly traditional, telling a simple narrative in chronological order with no fancy tricks. The narrator arrives by train at a rural station, it is raining, catches a taxi to Stayle, a grand country house surrounded by a wall, entry via umpteen gates, seat of the Duke of Vanburgh.

The narrator tells us his name is Ernest Vaughan, same name as the drunk in the previous story and, as he tells us he was sent down from Oxford for bad behaviour, it is presumably an early example of Waugh’s career-long habit of populating his fictions with recurring characters.

Anyway, sent down from Oxford, Ernest is at a loose end when his godmother tells him the Duke of Stayle is looking for a tutor to take his 18-year-old grandson and heir to the earldom on a tour round Europe. The only snag is the boy is mad. They now introduce him to the young fellow, actual name George, who has, it must be said, odd manners. Ernest feels sorry for him, as he only attended school for a term and is obviously ill at ease with strangers. He decides to take the job on.

Within a few hours they’re on the train to London, Ernest with a check for £150 in his pocket, where they check into a hotel and Ernest takes George on a tour of London’s attractions, revues, nightclubs and parties with his super-posh friends. Plus the very best tailors to get formal suits and travelling clothes made up. Over the next few days Ernest watches George blossom, learning about food, restaurants, fine wine, and party etiquette before his very eyes.

At one point they have a candid conversation in which he suggests that he isn’t mad at all; maybe it’s his grandfather and his great-aunts (who Ernest met in the first scene) who are the eccentrics, and this certainly seems likely to Ernest and to the reader.

Then it all grinds to a halt. In an ending almost as crass as saying ‘and then I woke up and it was all a dream’, Ernest gets a letter from old Lord Stayle saying the family’s thought better of the experiment and are cancelling the trip. George is to come home straight away. A lawyer arrives to cancel all obligations and take him off. George’s parting words are that in 3 years time he’ll come of age and be able to do what he wants.

In a way the most telling moment comes in the final sentence:

Five minutes later Julia rang up to ask us to luncheon.

This has the brisk brevity of Vile Bodies, powerfully conveying the sense that, oh well, that adventure’s over, he’s mad, she’s dead, they’ve gotten divorced, Harry’s married Margot, he died in the war, she’s pregnant, whatever – conveying the dizzy speed of the high society social life Waugh dedicated himself to.

The Manager of ‘The Kremlin’ (1927)

The unnamed narrator likes going to a restaurant in Paris. One night he stays late and the manager, Boris, tells him his story. He was a student when the revolution joined out and joined a white army fighting the Bolsheviks. It was a motley crew which included various foreign nationals including a Frenchman. Boris helped save this man’s life by lending him his Russian uniform when they travelled through the most backward parts of Asiatic Russia. They were forced to flee east. Once in Japanese territory they shake hands and part. Boris took ship to America where he hoped to join his mother who had fled there early in the revolution. He does not thrive and after a couple of years takes ship to France, travelling to Paris where he hears there is a large diaspora. Here he really runs out of money and is down to his last 200 francs. In a very Russian gesture, he decides to blow it on one last luxury meal. As chance would have it the Frenchman he saved those years ago is dining at the next table. He accosts his old colleague and asks him how he’s doing. Boris explains he’s skint. The Frenchman runs a motor car company and toys with offering him a job but reflects that a man who could blow his last francs on an exquisite French meal is really cut out for the restaurant business. And so he loans Boris the money to start a restaurant and Boris employs some Russians he knows and now he is rich. Which is the story he tells the narrator in the early hours, as the ‘Kremlin’ restaurant closes up.

Love in the Slump (1932)

Big gap between the previous story published in 1927 and this one in 1932. During that time Waugh published his biography of Rossetti, Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), travelled to Abyssinia and produced Remote People (1931).

Originally titled ‘The Patriotic Honeymoon’, this is broad farce. An eligible if unremarkable young couple get married, decide to spend a patriotic honeymoon in England then experience a series of farcical mishaps. The portrait of the young wife is obviously a lampoon but nonetheless interesting social history about just what subjects were lampooned back then – portrait of a frustrated singleton c.1932:

Angela was twenty-five, pretty, good-natured, lively, intelligent and popular—just the sort of girl, in fact, who, for some mysterious cause deep-rooted in Anglo-Saxon psychology, finds it most difficult to get satisfactorily married. During the last seven years she had done everything which it is customary for girls of her sort to do. In London she had danced on an average four evenings a week, for the first three years at private houses, for the last four at restaurants and night clubs; in the country she had been slightly patronising to the neighbours and had taken parties to the hunt ball which she hoped would shock them; she had worked in a slum and a hat shop, had published a novel, been bridesmaid eleven times and godmother once; been in love, unsuitably, twice; had sold her photograph for fifty guineas to the advertising department of a firm of beauty specialists; had got into trouble when her name was mentioned in gossip columns; had acted in five or six charity matinées and two pageants, had canvassed for the Conservative candidate at two General Elections, and, like every girl in the British Isles, was unhappy at home.

It’s interesting that what spurs Angela on to take the initiative and propose to bland, boring, safe, accountant Tom Watch is that he father has announced he has to make economies and will probably be closing the London house in order to retrench to his place in the country, sack a few of the servants, live a simpler life. Angela doesn’t want to live a simple life. So she combines her £200 a year with Tom’s £800 a year which they reckon they’ll be able to live on, just about, though not being able to have a child.

It rains on the wedding. They catch a train to Aunt Martha’s house in Devon. At some remote rural stop Tom gets out to check if they need to change and is buttonholed by an old school acquaintance who insists on buying him a drink then another at the station bar. When they come out on the platform the train’s gone, along with his baggage and bride!

He reluctantly accepts the old school chum’s back to his place and stay over. They drink a lot. He wakes up to discover his host is going hunting. Against his better nature he dons a hunting outfit, is loaned a mare, and has a good day’s run till he’s thrown and the mare trots off. He makes his way across country to an inn, the Royal George Hotel Chagford, where he’s taken in and given a bed for the night. Next morning he discovers the stop for his aunt’s place is no fewer than three changes from his present location so he sets off on slow local stopping trains not arriving at the station till late at night. He has travelled all day in wet clothes. No car is available. He decides to stay the night in the station inn.

Next morning Tom wakes hoarse and feverish. A taxi takes him to Aunt Martha’s where he discovers that… his beloved fiancée has left, having received a telegram from his first host saying Tom had met with an accident, she has travelled to his (the first host)’s house. Tom is too coldy to do anything and goes to bed. Next day, the sixth of the honeymoon, he begins to feel it’s not working our quite as he expected. His aunt’s maid suggests the host’s name will be inside the jacket he lent Tom and so there’s a brief exchange of telegrams with Angela a) saying she’s having a lovely time and b) no point meeting up now, wait till they meet up back in London. Which they do the next day.

And, as so often, the story cuts away from the main protagonists so that we learn from a conversation between Angela’s parents that she’s been given access to a lovely cottage in Devon, quite near the estate of the chap she stayed with. Won’t that lovely? The implication is that, after less than a week of honeymoon, Angela has found someone richer and more exciting than Tom to have an affair with.

Too Much Tolerance (1932)

The narrator is stopping between ships at a stifling little port on the Red Sea. It’s important to know that this ‘story’ was commissioned for a series about the Seven Deadly Sins and as such is a lampoon on the idea of tolerance, too much tolerance. It’s a simple idea. The narrator falls in with the only other European in his hotel, an amiable round-faced moustachioed commercial agent and this man displays the virtue of tolerance to excess. He likes all the races and creeds he meets.

In a gesture towards psychology Waugh explains that he had been brought up by elderly parents, retired from India, who held very fixed beliefs about etiquette and social distinctions. So as a young man he set out to consciously rebel against all that, to be open, and tolerant and accepting.

Slowly the narrator learns how this attitude has led to the man being hopelessly abused and reduced in life. Out of kindness he took a fellow into partnership in the business he’d set up with the legacy from his parents, but while he was serving in the Great War the fellow ran it into bankruptcy. Strange thing, though, almost immediately afterwards, his partner set up a new concern and is now a rich man.

In a similar vein, he reveals he has a 27-year-old son who’s never had a job, wants to be something in the theatre, gads around London with well-off friends. So our chap sends him as much money as he can to support him.

Lastly, he has a wife, or had a wife. His father had strict moral principles about who could and couldn’t be introduced at home, but he thought that was all rubbish and encouraged his wife to have her own friends and go out and about on her own. She liked dancing, he didn’t, she went to dance lessons and then dance clubs and then left him for a chap who was good at dancing and had a bit of a fast reputation.

So here he is. Reduced to ‘selling sewing machines on commission to Indian storekeepers up and down the East African coast’, a victim of his own niceness and credulousness:

a jaunty, tragic little figure, cheated out of his patrimony by his partner, battened on by an obviously worthless son, deserted by his wife, an irrepressible, bewildered figure striding off under his bobbing topee, cheerfully butting his way into a whole continent of rapacious and ruthless jolly good fellows.

Excursion in Reality (1932)

Struggling young novelist Simon Lent, living in a pokey mews flat and managing a relationship with demanding Sylvia, is hired out of the blue by British movie mogul Sir James MacRea. He is collected from his mews flat and plunged into a mad whirligig of meetings, missed appointments, canteen breaks, tours round film studios and sets, a whirlwind affair with Macrae’s secretary, Miss Grits, all based on the nonsensical notion that he should write an updated version of Hamlet, with modern dialogue, with a bit of Macbeth thrown in. Lent demurs. Sir James steamrollers over him:

“Ah, you don’t see my angle. There have been plenty of productions of Shakespeare in modern dress. We are going to produce him in modern speech. How can you expect the public to enjoy Shakespeare when they can’t make head or tail of the dialogue. D’you know I began reading a copy the other day and blessed if I could understand it. At once I said, ‘What the public wants is Shakespeare with all his beauty of thought and character translated into the language of everyday life.’”

For three weeks Lent throws himself into the ridiculous project, working hand in glove with Miss Grits and summoned to meetings at any hour of day or night. And then, as suddenly as he was summoned Lent is dropped by the director and studio, his contract terminated, and returns to the calm life of a struggling novelist, living in a tiny mews flat and having long moody dinners with Sylvia again.

Incident in Azania (1933)

Azania is the name of the fictional African country Waugh invented as the setting for his fourth novel, Black Mischief, loosely based on Zanzibar which he had visited on his 1930 trip to East Africa, recorded in Remote People.

The story is so inconsequential, I wondered if I’d read it right. Into the small colonial society of Matodi, port city of Azania, arrives the strapping blonde Prunella Brookes, attractive feisty daughter of the local oil company agent. Since there are only eight Englishwomen in the entire town, including a 2-year-old and all the rest married, her arrival inevitably causes a stir and soon there is gossip about which of the most eligible bachelors she is likely to date.

Then she disappears, then ransom letters arrive at the club. She has been kidnapped by bandits, led by the notorious Joab! They want £10,000 for her safe return.

The story is picked up by the wider press and a strapping Australian journalist flies in, a reporter for the Daily Excess. In a repetition of the satire on the press which featured in Black Mischief and was to form the central theme of Scoop, this chap writes a series of sensational and utterly invented descriptions of the bandits and their squalid caves and their fearsome leader.

Finally, he collects the ransom money, takes a jeep and the local Armenian businessman and all-round fixed Mr. Youkoumian up in the hills determined to find and confront this Joab, hand over the ransom and free the lovely young virgin. Instead, in a tremendous anti-climax, they encounter Miss Brooks stumbling down the track towards them, apparently freed and unharmed. With complete illogicality, instead of turning and heading back to town, Prunella insists they are surrounded by Joab’s snipers and so Youkoumian had better take the car and ransom and drive further up the hill to the bandit camp.

During the wait Prunella gives the ardent journalist a detailed and obviously completely fictional account of her stay among the bandits. Then Youkoumian returns, Prunella declares the snipers have all withdrawn, they get in the car and return to Matodi.

Much fuss and bother about her, the memsahibs clucking like hens, the chaps congratulating themselves on job well done, the journalist files his last triumphant story and departs, and a couple of months later Prunella quietly sails back to Blighty.

Only slowly does it dawn on some of the senior members of the ex-pat community that they have been diddled. There’s no proof and it isn’t explicitly stated, but the implication is that the entire ‘kidnapping’ was a con set up by Prunella with Mr Youkoumian, who split the £10,000 ransom between themselves.

Bella Fleace Gave a Party (1933)

Miss Annabel Rochfort-Doyle-Fleace or Bella Fleace as she is known to the entire countryside, is a very old lady, ‘over 80’ (p.103), who lives alone in a grand house which somehow survived the upheavals surrounding Irish independence, in a place called Ballingar.

One colourless morning in November she decides to give a Christmas party in the old style. The preparations are elaborate and described in length, along with pen portraits of the house’s staff (butler Riley), the caterers and so on.

The preparations were necessarily stupendous. Seven new servants were recruited in the village and set to work dusting and cleaning and polishing, clearing out furniture and pulling up carpets. Their industry served only to reveal fresh requirements; plaster mouldings, long rotten, crumbled under the feather brooms, worm-eaten mahogany floorboards came up with the tin tacks; bare brick was disclosed behind the cabinets in the great drawing room. A second wave of the invasion brought painters, paperhangers and plumbers, and in a moment of enthusiasm Bella had the cornice and the capitals of the pillars in the hall regilded; windows were reglazed, banisters fitted into gaping sockets, and the stair carpet shifted so that the worn strips were less noticeable.

Bella takes a great deal of trouble writing the invitations by hand and considering who to invite and who to exclude, which leads to more brief portraits of the inhabitants of the grand houses in the area, including the various arrivistes and nouveaux riches.

The great night comes, the mansion is illuminated by candles, decorated by swags of flowers, the staff are ready, the expensive food is cooking but…nobody comes, nobody that is except the two arrivistes she had specifically excluded from inviting, but who are attracted by the lights and music from the old house. Puzzled, then perplexed, the old lady slumps on the sofa in the hall. Next day she dies. Her heir, a distant cousin and Englishman named Banks, arrives to make an inventory of the house and its contents. Tucked away in Bella’s escritoire, beautifully written, stamped and addressed he finds the invitations to the party, unsent.

Cruise, or Letters from a Young Lady of Leisure (1933)

Consists entirely of a series of letters and postcards sent home by a silly young woman on a Mediterranean cruise. Must have seemed very clever when it was published. Still pretty funny.

POSTCARD

This is the Sphinx. Goodness how Sad.

POSTCARD

This is temple of someone. Darling I cant wait to tell you I’m engaged to Arthur. Arthur is the one I thought was a pansy. Bertie thinks egyptian art is v. inartistic.

POSTCARD

This is Tutankhamens v. famous Tomb. Bertie says it is vulgar and is engaged to Miss P. so hes not one to speak and I call her Mabel now. G how S. Bill wont speak to Bertie Robert wont speak to me Papa and Lady M. seem to have had a row there was a man with a snake in a bag also a little boy who told my fortune which was v. prosperous Mum bought a shawl.

The Man Who Liked Dickens (1933)

A version of the story which ends the novel A Handful of Dust namely the man, named Mr McMaster here, Mr Todd in Handful, who lives an extremely isolated life among the Shiriana Indians in the Amazonas for 60 years. One day the Indians bring an Englishman to him who has staggered out of the rainforest, shattered, suffering from shock and exposure, an explorer whose partner Anderson has died.

This Paul Henty has a very similar backstory to Tony Last in Handful i.e. his wife left him for another man and, in the first flush of embitterment he got talking to a chap in his club who was planning an expedition to Amazonia and here he is.

The details of the ‘expedition’ are different. There were initially more members, who are all given pen portraits and to whom various misadventures happened, eventually depriving Henty and Professor Anderson of colleagues and a lot of supplies. And in this version Anderson simply falls ill of malaria and dies, compared to the version in the novel where it is the main hero who falls ill, and the expedition leader, Dr Messinger, who sets off to find help in a canoe and is washed over a waterfall to his death. Here the Indians who had brought him this far overnight abandon Paul, taking the canoe, leaving him to stumble along the river bank, becoming increasingly starved, feverish and hallucinatory. This, also, is less effective than the devastating description of the state of utter, helpless misery Tony Last is reduced to after Dr Messinger disappears.

As in the novel the McMaster/Todd figure has power over the local Indians because he fathered most of them – and he has a gun. He informs Henty that a black man stayed with him and read to him every afternoon. Henty is happy to do the same and is shown the man’s ant-eaten collection of Dickens novels. At first all goes well, but by the time they’re into the second volume of Bleak House Henty is restless. He brings up the idea of him leaving and returning to civilisation and for the first time McMaster becomes slightly menacing. Yes. The black man had the same ideas. Then he died. McMaster says he will get the Indians to build a canoe. The months drag on. Then the rainy season arrives and McMaster says it will be impossible to travel. He tries to communicate with the Indians but they don’t even understand sign language. He finds a token left in Martin Chuzzlewit which is a pledge McMaster gave to the black man, Barnabas Washington, that he would be allowed to leave at the end of reading that book. When Henty insists that McMaste lets him leave McMaster simply tells the Indians to stop making him food, to stop bringing him the same breakfast, lunch and dinner he’s been having as McMaster. Henty is forced to resume.

Then a lonely wandering prospector arrives at the camp. McMaster is vexed, gives him something to eat and sends him on his way in under an hour. But that’s time enough for Henty to scribble his name on a piece of paper and press it into the man’s hand. From that moment he lives in hope that his name will eventually reach civilisation, the towns on the coast, and an expedition will be launched to find and rescue him. Thus encouraged he accepts McMaster’s invitation to a feast given by the Indians. He eats and drinks heartily.

When he wakes up it is days later and his watch has gone. McMaster explains that while he slept a little expedition of three Englishmen arrived looking for him. His wife in England is offering a reward. McMaster shows the men the grave of the black man, saying it was Henty’s, and gave them Henty’s watch as proof that the poor man had gotten ill, died and been buried there. The Englishmen went off well contented with the story, the evidence and the proof. No-one else will come looking for him. Ever. He is doomed to spend the rest of his life reading Dickens to a madman in the depths of the Amazon jungle.

So in all important points it is identical with the text used as the final part of A Handful of Dust. And, as there, the final speech where McMaster explains how he tricked him and that he is now doomed meets with no reply from Henty, no indication of his reaction, making it a thousand times more powerful. In much the same way that there is no response from Basil Seal when the old native in Black Mischief explains he’s just taken part in a cannibal feast and eaten his own girlfriend. None needed. This situation itself is shock enough.

Out of Depth (1933)

This is an oddity, a science fiction story, a time travel story. It starts conventionally enough in Waugh’s usual environment, the posh upper classes. Rip is an ageing American who always dines with Lady Metroland when he’s in London (Margot Metroland having weaved in and out of Waugh’s stories since Decline and Fall). When he arrives for dinner he finds most of the other guests gathered round an unusual figure:

An elderly, large man, quite bald, with a vast white face that spread down and out far beyond the normal limits. It was like Mother Hippo in Tiger Tim; it was like an evening shirt-front in a du Maurier drawing; down in the depths of the face was a little crimson smirking mouth; and, above it, eyes that had a shifty, deprecating look, like those of a temporary butler caught out stealing shirts.

Lady Metroland introduces him as Dr Kakophilos, a magician. She is very proud of the sensation he creates, but Rip finds him a sinister, repellent person with a thin Cockney voice. At the end of the party a very drunk Rip finds himself driving Dr Kakophilos and old friend Alistair Trumpington home. Kakophilos invites them in and in his sitting-room is suddenly dressed in magician’s garb, ‘a crimson robe embroidered with gold symbols and a conical crimson hat.’ He launches on a discourse about time and space, recites words of power, while Rip and Alistair giggle drunkenly. As they get up to leave, the magician asks them both if they have a favourite period in time. Alistair says the time of Ethelred the Unready, Rip prefers to go forwards, to five hundred years in the future, thinking it a load of gibberish then stagger to their car and Alistair drives off very drunk and crashes into a van in Shaftesbury Avenue.

When Rip comes to he finds himself in London five hundred years hence, a deserted city in ruins which has been reclaimed by nature. Piccadilly Circus is covered in hummocky turf and a few sheep.

The entrance of the Underground Station was there, transformed into a Piranesi ruin; a black aperture tufted about with fern and some crumbling steps leading down to black water. Eros had gone, but the pedestal rose above the reeds, moss grown and dilapidated. (p.137)

He walks down to the river, almost all the buildings have gone, it is wild. He finds a cluster of huts built on stilts. At dawn the inhabitants emerge, savage tribal people dressed in skins. He walks forward and they surround him, offering no violence, just puzzled. Rip is convinced this is a drunken hallucination but it just won’t wear off.

Days then weeks pass as he is fed fish and coarse bread and beer. Finally there is a great fuss and some educated people arrive. The big thing in the story is that they are black. For a start the boat they arrive in is mechanically driven i.e. far above the scope of the savages, and they were wearing uniforms of leather and fur and well organised under a commanding leader. They trade with the natives, exchanging manufactured goods for gewgaws the natives have dug up and also taking Rip from them.

In other words, the tables have been turned, the roles reversed, and instead of technologically advanced white men penetrating darkest Africa and trading with primitive blacks, now it is the whites whose society has collapsed and the blacks who penetrate up the wide lazy Thames.

Eventually their ship arrives at a military station on the coast, in the style of the early western outposts in Africa. There is a steamer, a black anthropologist with glasses studies him, they get him to read old books with what is obviously, to them, an ancient accent, they measure his skull with calipers. In every way a reversal of white colonial practice.

Then, described in the briefest way, barely a paragraph, he is in a Christian mission and finds the congregation of illiterate whites staring at an altar where a black priest in the outfit of a Dominican friar conducts a Mass, something Rip remembers from his youth, something which has obviously not changed for 2,500 years.

Then he comes round in a hospital bed to find a priest by his bedside, obviously calling into question the extent to which anything he’s just experienced was ‘real’. But when the priest tells him that Alistair, also in hospital, has woken from a dream of being in the middle ages, Rip in a panic thinks maybe it was true, maybe his consciousness was thrown forward in time.

I have seen this described as Waugh’s most overtly Catholic story, which it might well be. But it was the vision of an England fallen back into uncivilised savagery, and visited by colonising technologically advanced Africans which caught my imagination.

By Special Request (1934)

This was the original ending of A Handful of Dust as it appeared in the original magazine serialisation in Harpers’ Bazaar. It feels very flat and banal compared to the horrifying reading-Dickens ending which he eventually chose. Above all, this original final version of the story is very, very short at just eight pages.

In this version, Tony takes the elaborate steps to secure a divorce which feature in the novel but then, when he realises how avaricious and selfish Brenda has become, he calls off the divorce settlement negotiations and – this is the point of divergence, does not set off on a hair-brained expedition to Brazil, but instead (much more likely) treats himself to a long and leisurely cruise.

The story commences as Tony’s liner returns to Southampton. He is met by his chauffeur but surprised to learn that his estranged wife, Brenda, is in the car. They are frightfully decent and polite to each other. Brenda explains she just had to give up that flat, it smelt so frightfully of hot radiators. He knows this is a Decision Moment: should or should he not take Brenda back and forgive her? But in reality, he falls asleep in the warm soft back of the car and only wakes when they reach Hetton.

Where they are greeted by the butler and the luggage unloaded and then he and Brenda inspect the work which has been done in the renovated bathrooms, checking the taps and so on like a, well, an old married couple.

After dinner they sit in the library and Brenda timidly hopes Tony wasn’t in a rage with her when he left, isn’t in a rage now. Course not, he replies, and asks after Beaver, her one-time lover. Well, it all ends up being about money. Tony cut her off without a cent and Beaver didn’t have any money, was blackballed from clubs, she tried to get a job with Mrs Beaver who turned her down, then working in her friend Daisy’s restaurant but that didn’t last.

Then Beaver met the Shameless Blonde and fell madly in love and chucked Brenda, who was now on the brink, living on scraps from the delicatessen round the corner. But the Blonde wouldn’t have anything to do with him and so his mother eventually sent him off to Europe to be a buyer for her business. And so here she is, penniless and without prospects. During the recitation Tony begins to nod off again and so she says, ‘Come on, let’s go up’, and as simply as that their marriage resumes.

In a 3-page coda months have passed and Tony and Brenda are happily married and have popped up to London to do some shopping. Brenda is on at Tony to do something about the flat she leased a year ago for her affair with John Beaver. So at last Tony goes round to see Mrs Beaver, who owns the apartment block. Only instead of simply cancelling the lease, he comes to a discreet arrangement with Mrs Beaver…to have his name removed from the lease and name board of the block, for a fee. Tony rejoins Brenda after her shopping and they catch the train back their country house.

And the train sped through the darkness towards Hetton.

Clearly that is a metaphorical darkness, for the transaction inaugurates a new era of infidelity and betrayal in their marriage. On the one hand this ending is obviously much more realistic than the reading-Dickens ending. But you can also see why it’s unsatisfactory in several ways.

  1. At a stroke it wrecks Tony’s character, his position as the unchanging moral rock at the centre of the story. And in doing so undermines the… the moral or psychological structure of everything which had preceded it.
  2. And undermines the value of the death of their son. That was such a shocking, staggering event that for the entire story to fizzle out in Tony’s go at having an affair feels cheap and nasty. The reading-Dickens ending may be weird, wildly implausible, bizarre and cruel but it has the great advantage of matching the cruel death of little John. In its madness and cruelty it is a far more fitting ending to the novel.

Period Piece (1936)

Lady Amelia, an old lady, likes having stories read to her by Miss Myers. She likes crime stories, often quite violent ones, American ones with ‘brutal realism and coarse slang’, ‘narratives of rape and betrayal’. I suppose, in Waugh’s circle and for his audience, this idea itself might be quite amusing.

When Miss Myers one day ventures the opinion that the story she’s just finished reading was far fetched, Lady Amelia replies that if you recounted stories from the lives of the people around them, you’d probably call them far-fetched. She then tells the story of ‘the extremely ironic circumstances of the succession of the present Lord Cornphillip.’

Etty a cousin of her mother’s marries Billy Cornphillip, a phenomenally boring man. Lady Amelia was a bridesmaid (p.155). Their marriage upset Ralph Bland who was Billy Cornphillip’s nearest relative and stood to inherit his fortune if he’d died without an heir. He has a wife and children to support and not much money. Over the years, though, Etty fails to become pregnant so Ralph bucks up.

Ralph comes to stay one Christmas but his 6-year-old son gives the game away when he tells Billy that, when he (Billy) inherits, he’ll pull the whole place down. At that point there is a complete breach between the two men and war declared. Billy is a Conservative and Ralph comes down to stand in his constituency as a Radical (and wins). At which point Billy accuses Ralph of corruption during the election and successfully gets him unseated.

Ralph takes this very badly and takes to attending speeches Billy is giving and laughing of clapping in the wrong place, he gets drunk in the local pub and is found asleep on Billy’s terrace. All this is very difficult for skinny Etty who had been friends with Ralph.

One bonfire night Ralph got drunk and made a load of threats against Billy, who called the police and had him up in magistrates court and he was given a banning order but amazed everyone by leaving that very afternoon for Venice with Billy’s wife, Etty! However, the affair was not a success, they stayed in an insanitary palace, Etty fell ill, Ralph ran off with American lady who was much more his type, and so Etty returned to England. She tries to find friends to stay with but, eventually, everyone hears she was back with Billy and about to have a baby. It is a boy i.e. a son and heir.

So this is very broadly the same plot as in Unconditional Surrender – a posh chap accepts the child his wife has had by another man she’s been having an affair with.

But the point of the story, or maybe its literary feature, is the way it veers away at the very end from what might well be the most bombshell part: which is that the boy never knew he wasn’t the son of his father, and which is described only indirectly:

until quite lately, at luncheon with Lady Metroland, when my nephew Simon told him, in a rather ill-natured way. (p.159)

It is very characteristic indeed of Waugh that these kind of bombshell moments are told at one remove or prompt little or no response. Blink and you might miss them. Imagine the impact on the son, his confused feelings, the agonised conversations when he confronts his mother and father. Absolutely none of that is here, all left to the reader to work out, that’s if he or she even notices this revelation, given the way it is tucked away at the end of the little story as a throwaway sentence.

On Guard (1934)

Millicent Blade is a lovely girl but she has a small shapeless nose. In another example of the way Waugh, when reaching for a comparison for anything, thinks first of his prep or public school, his description of Millicent’s nose goes:

It was a nose that pierced the thin surface crust of the English heart to its warm and pulpy core; a nose to take the thoughts of English manhood back to its schooldays, to the doughy-faced urchins on whom it had squandered its first affection, to memories of changing room and chapel and battered straw boaters.

Hector kissed her reverently on the tip of this nose. As he did so, his senses reeled and in momentary delirium he saw the fading light of the November afternoon, the raw mist spreading over the playing fields; overheated youth in the scrum; frigid youth at the touchline, shuffling on the duckboards, chafing their fingers and, when their mouths were emptied of biscuit crumbs, cheering their house team to further exertion…

Hector gazed at her little, shapeless, mobile button of a nose and was lost again . . . “Play up, play up,” and after the match the smell of crumpets being toasted over a gas-ring in his study . . .

A good deal of the upper-class pose in Waugh’s fiction derives from the failure of all these public schoolboys to ever grow up and genuinely confront a wider world; their preference to stay within the safe sanctuaries of Oxbridge colleges or Westminster common rooms or Inns of Court chambers or their gentlemen’s clubs, mentally prisoned in their boyhoods, never growing up.

Anyway, Millicent’s fiancé, Hector, is off to Africa, buying a farm off a chap named Beckthorpe who has consistently bad luck with it. Dining with Beckthorpe at his club, Hector wonders what he can give Millicent as a memento, to make her remember him till he’s well off enough to invite her over. Some jewellery? A photo?

Beckthorpe suggests a dog, and so as to ram the point home, name it Hector. Next day Hector goes to one of London’s largest emporiums and, in rather a panic, buys a poodle. When he leans down to commune, the little perisher takes a snap at him which he adroitly avoids. Hector tells the doggy to prevent any other men getting at Millicent.

Millicent, characteristically, goes to the wrong station so misses seeing Hector off on the train to the port to the ship which will take him to Africa. Hector gives the poodle to Beckthorpe to give to Millicent. Millicent writes to tell him she loves it and it has already bitten a ‘man called Mike.’

The narrative now steps back to reveal that Millicent’s passions for men generally last about 4 months and was reaching that period when Hector’s last minute flurry of activity to find a job slightly renewed it. The comic conceit of the story is the idea that the puppy heard and understood Hector’s injunction not to let other men near Millicent.

The rest of the text develops this idea via mishaps with a series of suitors. Hector the dog adopts strategies to be the centre of attention so no suitor stands a chance: he makes a fuss of the sugar bowl, goes to the door and scratches to be let out then scratches to be let back in, or pretend to be sick, gagging and retching so that Millicent carries him from the room thus destroying any attempt at humour.

As for Hector the supposed fiancé, Millicent soon forgets about him. He writes weekly from the farm in Kenya where things are hard, but Millicent rarely even opens the envelopes and never reads to the end. When friends ask her about Hector, she increasingly thinks they’re referring to the dog not her beloved:

it came naturally to Millicent to reply, ‘He doesn’t like the hot weather much I’m afraid, and his coat is in a very poor state. I’m thinking of having him plucked,’ instead of, ‘He had a go of malaria and there is black worm in his tobacco crop.’

If young men she’s met at parties call, Hector learns to mimic taking a call, cocking his head on one side, so that Millicent gets into the habit of putting the receiver to the dog’s muzzle, deafening the (hungover) young men with a barrage of barks. If men invite Millicent for a walk in the park, Hector goes on ahead, carrying her bag and periodically dropping it so the young man has to pick it up.

Two years pass. Suitors come and go each of them, eventually, foxed by the dog. She has long ago stopped caring about her lover in Kenya. At last Hector meets his match in the person of the middle-aged Major Sir Alexander Dreadnought, Bart., M.P., a man routinely put upon by friends and family from an early age who had developed a forebearing nature.

Hector tries out all his tricks but Dreadnought simply finds him charming. Dreadnought invites Millicent and her mother to his place in the country where Hector does everything he can to be obnoxious, ragging the carpet, rolling in poo in the grounds then coming back and soiling every chair in the house. He howled all night, killed some partridges, hid so the household were up half the night looking for him. Dreadnought takes it all in good part.

Back in London Hector the poodle ponders his options and realises that, all his strategems having failed, there was only one last desperate way for him to keep his promise to his original master, his purchaser, Hector. And so the next time Millicent leans over to nuzzle him, Hector makes one quick snap and bites Millicent’s pretty little snub nose clean off! A plastic surgeon repairs it but creates a new type of nose, strong and Roman. Gone is all Millicent’s schoolboy charm. Hector achieves his aim, and turns her into a suitorless spinster:

Now she has a fine aristocratic beak, worthy of the spinster she is about to become. Like all spinsters she watches eagerly for the foreign mails and keeps carefully under lock and key a casket full of depressing agricultural intelligence; like all spinsters she is accompanied everywhere by an ageing lapdog. (p.171)

Mr. Loveday’s Little Outing (1935)

Has a great comic opening line:

‘You will not find your father greatly changed,’ remarked Lady Moping, as the car turned into the gates of the County Asylum.

Ten years earlier Lord Moping had attempted to hang himself after a particularly distressing annual garden party had been ruined by squally weather. He was taken away and housed in the wing of the asylum reserved for wealthier lunatics where the Lady Moping visited him periodically. This is the first time their grown-up daughter, Angela.

Lord Moping is brought to the doctor’s office where they wait by a kindly old gent with lovely white hair who the doctor tells them is named Mr Loveday. He has become Lord Moping’s assistant in the asylum, patient and kind.

Lord Moping is huffy and busy with all his ‘work’, under the delusion that he needs to do a great deal of research about rivers and fisheries and send off letters to important people such as the Pope. He claims not to recognise or know Angela and hurries back to his room, but Mr Loveday very kindly comes back a few minutes later to see Lady Moping and Angela and assure them that his lordship will like to see them again, it’s just he’s very busy and distracted at the moment.

When he’s gone the governor tells him Loveday is not a warder or nurse, as they thought, but himself an inmate. Why? Twenty years earlier, when a young man, he knocked a young woman off her bicycle and strangled her. Gave himself up immediately.

Angela is a noble spirit, a compassionate soul. She thinks it’s unfair such a sweet kind old man as Mr Loveday should be locked up. She studies the laws surrounding lunacy. She makes an excuse to pop over to the asylum again and asks to ‘interview’ Mr Loveday. When she asks him if he’d like to be free, Loveday replies that, yes, he has one little ambition he’d like to fulfil before he dies.

Angela leaves with the tears of the sensitive in her eyes. She studies more, lobbies the various important personages who come to stay at their house over the summer. Finally she gets her way and it is announced Mr Loveday will be released. There is a big ceremony with the governor, Angela and various lunatics in attendance, then Mr Loveday walks free.

A few hours he is back, handing himself in. He took advantage of his hours of liberty to strangle another young lady who happened to ride by.

Gruesome, in the manner of Roald Dahl’s boom-boom Tales of the Unexpected.

Winner Takes All (1936)

A tale of two brothers, Gervase and Thomas Kent-Cumberland, the first much favoured, feted, celebrated and blessed with all the gifts a grand family can bestow; Thomas an unwanted second child which his mother hoped would be a girl. Throughout their lives Gervase receives all the benefits and gifts:

  • Gervase is born in an expensive nursing home with all the trimmings, his birth celebrated with a bonfire on the beacon hill, his christening with a garden party leading to fireworks; Thomas in a shoddy modern house on the East Coast delivered by a repellently middle class doctor
  • when their uncle buys Thomas the big red model car he’s always wanted for Christmas, their mother assumes he’s got it wrong and changes the labels so Gervase receives the grand toy
  • when their father dies during the Great War their mother becomes extremely parsimonious and obsessed by the threat of Death Duties, cuts are instituted all through the grand household and in their school activities, so that poor Gervase doesn’t inherit the debts – ‘ “It is all for Gervase,” Mrs. Kent-Cumberland used to explain’
  • Gervase is sent to Eton, to save money Tom is sent to a much cheaper, modern school
  • Gervase goes up to Christ Church Oxford where he consorts with other magnificent Etonians in the Bullingdon Club; when Tom goes to visit him he is intimidated and drinks too much in a corner
  • marooned at home after school, his mother sets Tom to reorganising the family library; in it he comes across a manuscript journal kept by a Colonel Jasper Cumberland during the Peninsular War; Tom does a lot of research, identifies maps of the campaign and a picture of the Colonel and writes an introduction and notes to it; all this is taken off him and given to Gervase who publishes it under his own name and gains all the praise and kudos
  • swiftly followed by Gervase’s 21st birthday party whose celebrations are lengthy and elaborate; Tom’s old bedroom is given to a guest and he has to sleep in the local pub
  • meanwhile Tom had been found in a motor manufacturing firm in Wolverhampton and found digs over a fruitshop on the outskirts of town

After a while you realise Waugh has just sat down and made a list of every single humiliation a younger son can be put through, and then inflicted in his fictional Tom. The sequence of humiliations rises to a sort of climax when Tom falls in love with a very ‘common’ girl from the motor manufacturer works, Gladys Cruttwell. When he, finally, reluctantly, takes Gladys home to meet his mother, Mrs Kent-Cumberland is, as you might expect, appalled.

With the result that Tom is swiftly removed from the motor business and dispatched to a farm in Australia! Meanwhile Gervase has come of age and now owns and runs the estate at Tomb with lavish prodigality, extending buildings, buying hunters, contemplating a swimming pool, entertaining lavishly each weekend.

Meanwhile years pass and Mrs Kent-Cumberland does not notice from his letters (which she rarely reads) that Tom has fallen in love with an Australian girl, that he is sailing with her and her father to London, that they have arrived!

She sends Gervase to meet them who reports back that they are a) staying at Claridges (rich and b) going to stay in the country with the Chasms (socially connected). Eventually they arrive, tall Mr MacDougal and daughter Bessie. What quickly emerges is they own vast territories in Australia and are loaded. Bessie is a comically naive and impressionable young woman, impressed by everything she sees. But the more she sees of England the less remarkable Tom seems. The more his brother stands out as a copy of him but with more life. When Mr MacDougal has a confidential chat with Mrs Kent-Cumberland and informs her that his annual revenue is somewhere around £50,000, a twinkle comes into her eye.

She makes plans and carries them out. She encourages Gervase to be very nice to Bessie, drops hints to Bessie about the advantages of being attached to the eldest son and then carries off her masterstroke – she returns from London one day to tell Tom she has just bumped into Gladys Cruttwell! Of course she arranged a luncheon and told Gladys that Tom had never got over him. Now she lies to Tom and tells her Gladys never got over him. She has invited her to come and stay for a few days. She plays on Tom’s sense of guilt and fair play, asking whether he had not, in fact, led on the poor girl and then dumped her.

When they are reunited and left alone they both proceed along these carefully arranged lines with the result that two weeks later Tom and Gladys are married. Mrs Kent-Cumberland explains everything to the MacDougals, not least that Gervase, the taller, handsomer brother is free and available. They are married after 6 weeks engagement. He and Bessie have two children and six racehorses. Tom and Gladys are packed off to Australia where MacDougal gives him a junior management job on a remote ranch in the middle of nowhere.

Not so much a tale of sibling rivalry as of sibling crushing defeat. And the indomitable figure of the scheming upper class mother.

An Englishman’s Home (1939)

Mr Beverley Metcalfe made his pile in the cotton trade in Alexandria and then bought a large acreage and house in the quaint Cotswold village of Much Malcock. He is nouveau riches, he insists on calling the nice Georgian house he’s bought Much Malcock Hall, although all the locals, including his ineffective gardener Boggett, insist on referring to it by its traditional name, the Grumps. The narrative paints a lazy, comic picture of the village and its inhabitants, at least those of the ‘card-leaving class’ aka ‘the gentry’, namely Lord Brakehurst, Lord Lieutenant of the County, his wife Lady Brakehurst had, Lady Peabury (‘a diligent reader of fiction, mistress of many Cairn terriers and of five steady old maidservants’) and Colonel Hodge, and ‘the Hornbeams at the Old Mill were a childless, middle-aged couple who devoted themselves to craftsmanship’, vegetarians and bohemians. Everyone cordially dislikes everyone else. It’s all very English.

Into this placid little world drops a bombshell – a young man has bought one of old farmer Westmacott’s fields and is planning to build an estate of suburban villas there! Now this field abuts at different points the properties of Metcalfe, Peabury, Hodge and Hornbeam and so they convene a series of meetings at which they agree to find out what can be done to prevent the development, contact the local council, the Council for the Preservation of Rural England and so on.

Eventually it becomes clear they are going to have to buy the field off its purchaser in order to keep it undeveloped. Colonel Hodge is sent by the committee to meet the purchaser, Mr. Hargood-Hood at the village’s one pub, the Brakehurst Arms. Here Mr. Hargood-Hood very successfully terrifies the Colonel by showing him what he intends to build: it’s not an estate it’s an experimental industrial laboratory, complete with two great chimneys to emit the poison fumes, a water tower to get high pressures, and six bungalows for his staff.

The text then includes correspondence between Metcalfe and Lady Peabury in which it is revealed that Mr Hargood-Hood wants £500 for the field (and lawyer’s fees and cost of the architect’s drawings). (Back when he bought his Georgian house Metcalfe had been offered the option of buying Westmacott’s field for some £170 but turned it down because of the expense; so this represents a tripling of the asking price.)

Peabury refuses Metcalfe’s offer to go halves on the purchase – the two obstinately refuse to co-operate – with the result it looks like the development will go ahead and both Peabury and Metcalfe begin to make plans to sell their homes and move out of the village when Colonel makes a last-ditch bid to avert building going ahead. He comes up with a solution to the great Peabury-Metcalfe standoff which is to purchase the field in order to build a scout hut on it: Lady Peabury will contribute £250, Metcalfe £500, and the other families a few pounds. This allows the field to be purchased from Hargood-Hood and disaster averted, while Metcalfe gets to have the new building named after him and can swank round the village as a public benefactor.

Only in the last few paragraphs do we learn that it was a scam all along. Hargood-Hood’s ‘lawyer’ is in fact his brother and they make a tidy living by descending on idyllic country villages, buying up a plot with suitably loaded neighbours, then threatening to build their toxic factory and letting the gentry buy back the field at a grossly inflated rate. it’s a scam, a con, although, as ‘Jock’ admits, they cut this one pretty fine. The gentry of Much Malcock squabbled for so long that the brothers were nearly left holding the baby!

The Sympathetic Passenger (1939)

Mr James hates the radio, the endless blare of music from wirelesses owned by his wife and daughter. (Dislike of wirelesses which are on all the time blaring out music being a theme which also crops up ‘Tactical Exercise’ and is prominent in the final volume of the Sword of Honour trilogy)

With relief he leaves his house and sets off to drive to the local train station. On the way he sees a man trying to flag down lifts. He stops and offers him a lift to the station. What follows is the dialogue of these two people in a car. Mr James casually mentions his dislike of the radio and this triggers the hitchhiker into an increasingly demented rant, in which he accuses the BBC of mind control and other wild, delusional accusations. A car overtakes them playing loud blaring music and the hitchhiker orders Mr James to chase it and overtake it so they can kill the heathen driver. Mr James is by now terrified but his car simply won’t go faster at which point the hitchhiker says he will kill Mr James.

They arrive at the station and Mr James leaps out but the other guy is quicker and is closing in on him when…a load of policemen sortie from the station entrance and pounce on the man, Oh yes, he’s a well known lunatic, the policeman tells him cheerily. In fact Mr James is lucky to be alive.

Mr James drives home a chastened man and when he arrives, for once, doesn’t complain about his wife or daughter playing the radio. In fact he now finds it strangely reassuring.

Work Suspended (1942)

This is a long piece and reviewed in a separate blog post.

Charles Ryder’s Schooldays (written 1945, published 1982)

I’ve mentioned the struggle many privately educated writers of Waugh’s generation had in escaping the mental world of their prep and public schools and this is a kind of quintessence of that world and that problem. The thirty or so pages of this fragment are set at a private school named Spierpoint Down which is pretty obviously Waugh’s own public school, Lancing on the South Downs. Crucially, unlike Brideshead Revisited, it is not a first-person narrative told by Charles, but a third person narrative about him. Charles is in the Classical Upper Fifth.

It is the first day back after the summer holidays, Wednesday 24 September 1919. We are treated to an excruciatingly tedious exposition of life at Spierpoint, with its hundred and one stupidly named buildings (Head’s House, Old’s House) and petty regulations and privileges for the different year groups or prefects and so on (the way one is allowed to wear coloured socks or walk arm in arm with a friend once one has graduated to this or that privileged class or clique).

It is a world of private rules designed to create a strong esprit de corps among those who are in the know and exclude everyone outside. It is drenched in hyper-privileged assumption that all the pupils are rich, know London’s restaurants and theatres, belong to a network of extended families which run everything and know each other, and the assumption that all these insufferable fifth formers will, in due course, go on to ‘the university’ meaning Oxford.

Charles likes Art and Drawing. He helps a rather over-confidential master, Mr Graves, assemble a small printing press and sort out the moveable typepieces into different fonts. There is Sunday morning communion with a lavish description of the vast Victorian and unfinished chapel. Charles and two friends are caned for refusing to say their evening prayers when ordered to by their head of house.

The diary of classes, sports, book reading, conversations and petty jealousies continues for another few days until Sunday 28 September and abruptly halts, exhausted by its own tedium. This fat chunk of public school fetishisation lacks any of the wit or humour or fun or lightness which characterises the best of Waugh’s writing. it feels intolerably smug and superior and self-satisfied. You can see why he never published it during his lifetime.

Short stories 2. Post-war

Scott-King’s Modern Europe (1947)

A novella – reviewed in a separate blog post.

Tactical Exercise (1947)

This is good story, in a grim, grand guignol sort of way. John Verney hates his wife Elizabeth. He was wounded in Italy. The pain of the wound leads to outbursts of anger. He returns home to have to live with her family in house in Hampstead. Everything infuriates him: the back garden is a bomb crater, all the glass in the back windows are broken. A grimy life of rationing. John stands as Liberal in a county constituency but loses badly to a Radical who happens to be a Jew. His bitterness against life makes him increasingly antisemitic.

Meanwhile, his wife Elizabeth works in something clandestine in the Foreign Office. She’s clever, she’s a linguist. When John learns her boss is a Jew it crystallises his hatred of his wife. She becomes a symbol of everything he hates with all the resentment and bitterness of the war, his coming down in the world, his political failure. For John his wife becomes a representative of the shabby socialist bureaucracy which shackles him, she is helping communist regimes in eastern Europe, and she works for a Jew!

Still they manage to just about be civil to each other and live together. They both go to see a film, a trite murder mystery in which the wife drugs the husband and throws him out of the window of a holiday home overlooking a cliff. He falls to his death. She inherits his wealth. This gives John the idea of copying it.

A month or so later they go on holiday to a holiday cottage at the edge of a cliff. John thinks he’s being clever by softening up the locals for the crime he plans to commit by telling everyone that his wife sleepwalks, telling chaps at the golf club, down the pub. One of them even recommends him to go talk to the local doctor, a nice chap.

The twist in the tale is that she has been planning to murder John all along. She brought a bottle of whiskey along as a treat and John has been having a glass every evening before supper. Now, when he finishes the glass he starts to feel strangely woozy. She helps him to the sofa, by the window, the window overlooking the cliff, and the long fall to the jagged rocks below…

This macabre little tale is one of several which anticipate the twisted stories of Roald Dahl.

Compassion (1949)

This narrative was recycled in its entirety, and almost verbatim, into the final part of the third novel in the Sword of Honour trilogy, Unconditional Surrender.

In the novel the events involve the trilogy’s protagonist, Guy Crouchback; here they involve a Major Gordon. The basic narrative is identical: Gordon is posted as British Military Mission i.e. liaison with the communist Yugoslav partisans in a place called Begoy in Croatia. He describes the wrecked town and the heavy-handed Partisan authorities who call themselves ‘the Praesidium’. To be precise:

Begoy was the headquarters of a partisan corps in Northern Croatia. It lay in a large area, ten miles by twenty, of what was called “Liberated Territory,” well clear of the essential lines of communication. The Germans were pulling out of Greece and Dalmatia and were concerned only with main roads and supply points. They made no attempt now to administer or patrol the hinterland. There was a field near Begoy where aircraft could land unmolested. They did so nearly every week in the summer of 1944 coming from Bari with partisan officials and modest supplies of equipment. In this area congregated a number of men and women who called themselves the Praesidium of the Federal Republic of Croatia.

Gordon is assigned a creepy interpreter named Bakic who spies on him. The narrative concerns the 108 Jewish displaced persons Major Gordon discovers in the town. Their representative, an anxious young woman named Mme. Kanyi, tells Gordon they want to leave, to get away to Italy. Mme. Kanyi’s husband is an engineer and does his best to keep the struggling power plant going.

Gordon becomes obsessed with helping the Jews but is blocked at every turn, especially by the communist authorities who are very suspicious of his motivation. He manages to get two representatives out on a flight to Bari, but by the time the authorities give permission for the rest to be flown out the autumn fogs and then winter snows prevent planes landing at the airstrip.

When his mission is wound up and he is transferred back to Bari Gordon eventually learns that the Jews were in the end evacuated and sent to a camp for displaced persons near Lecce. When he visits the camp the Jews he helped crowd round but Mme. Kanyi and her husband are not there. All they know is that they were taken off the lorries evacuating them from Begoy at the last moment.

At this point occurs the biggest difference from the narrative as it appears in the novel. Here Gordon gets a cousin in the newly opened embassy in newly liberated Belgrade to do some digging for him. This cousin writes him a letter which is quoted verbatim in which he reports that the Kanyis were executed by the communist authorities. The husband was blamed for sabotaging the power plant and the wife was accused of having an affair with the British liaison officer and for concealing counter-revolutionary propaganda. Now we and Gordon know that the husband was the only person keeping the wretched power plant going, and that the wife was not at all having an affair with him, they just spoke a few times. As for the ‘counter-revolutionary propaganda’ that was a load of old London magazines Gordon left with her to help her while away the long winter nights. Their execution is, in other words, a farcical tragedy and an enormous injustice.

In the story he recounts all this to his regiment’s second in command and the chaplain. When he says it was a complete waste of time, the chaplain gives him a more subtle theological interpretation, saying that no matter how pointless it may seem, the situation a) prompted good works by Gordon but also b) that the Kanyis in some way did him good, drawing out of him a new feeling for compassion and charity which hadn’t been there before. Hmm. Thought-provoking.

In the novel the facts remain mostly the same but the treatment feels completely different. The final scene with the bluff second in command and the chaplain offering words of comfort are completely absent from the novel. But it’s not the absences, it’s the positive additions in the novel which transform the story.

  1. We have known Guy intimately for almost three novels. Everything which happens resonates with his character of sterling integrity and quiet determination.
  2. In the novel Guy has other Brits around him, namely the squadron leader and de Souza who add a kind of variety to his responses, so his obsession with saving the Jews becomes one action among multiple ones carried out by the British Mission.
  3. The final scene with the chaplain is swept away and replaced by a more complex final arrangement: in this, instead of getting a written and therefore rather bland report about the fate of the Kanyis, it is told to him by a lickspittle functionary of the army who we have, through the course of the book, come to realise is a communist fellow traveller or stooge. Unlike the anonymous cousin in Belgrade of the story, this creep, Gilpin, the coward who had to be kicked out of the plane on his first parachute jump then lied to everyone about his ‘bravery’, it is this character who Waugh has gone to great lengths to build up as a representative of the corrupt ‘values’ of the new era, who tells Guy to his face about all the ‘evidence’ of the Kanyis’ counter-revolutionary activity, and smirks that they got the revolutionary justice they deserved. It is a vastly more powerful and disgusting experience to read the version in the novel, and very effectively crystallises all the morel, military, political and social failures and compromises which he sees the end of the war as bringing.

So this is an interesting enough story, but you shouldn’t read it here, you should read The Sword of Honour trilogy where the same basic story acquires multiple extra resonances and meanings from its inclusion in a novel.

Love Among the Ruins (1953)

A novella – reviewed in a separate blog post.

Basil Seal Rides Again (1963)

This was Waugh’s last published work of fiction. All critics quote Waugh’s own description of it in the dedication to old friend Ann Fleming, as: ‘a senile attempt to recapture the manner of my youth’. It certainly contains a roll call of well-loved characters from the 1930s comic novels, including Peter Pastmaster, Parsnip and Pimpernell (the joke names he gave the left-wing 30s writers Auden and Isherwood), Lady Metroland, Sonia Trumpington and numerous others, indeed the narrative opens with Peter and Basil attending a banquet to celebrate the award of the Order of Merit to Ambrose Silk (the lisping aesthete character Waugh based on Brian Howard). Peter and Basil have let themselves go: ‘They were two stout, rubicund, richly dressed old buffers’.

Critics have judged the story harshly but I found some of it funny, for example the opening dialogue between the two old boys as they suffer through long speeches then go for a pee at the same time, gossiping all the time in an amusingly drunken senile way:

‘This Albright married someone — Molly Meadows, perhaps?’
‘I married Molly Meadows.’
‘So you did. I was there. Well, someone like that.’

Returning to his wife, Angela, in their London house, Basil, having caught sight of himself in the toilet mirrors, is more than usually aware that he is fat and unwell. Basil reviews his life and we learn that he blew all the toes off one foot while demonstrating an explosive device during the war, hence his  family nickname of ‘Pobble’ and the need to walk with a cane. Suddenly he realises he is old:

His voice was not the same instrument as of old. He had first assumed it as a conscious imposture; it had become habitual to him; the antiquated, worldly-wise moralities which, using that voice, he had found himself obliged to utter, had become his settled opinions. It had begun as nursery clowning for the diversion of Barbara; a parody of Sir Joseph Mannering; darling, crusty old Pobble performing the part expected of him; and now the parody had become the persona.

He and Angela agree to try out one of those health clinics, sanatorium thingies. They drive down to Kent, check in and have an interview with the presiding doctor:

‘You complain of speechlessness, a sense of heat and strangulation, dizziness and subsequent trembling?’ said this man of science.
‘I feel I’m going to burst,’ said Basil.

For 3 or 4 days they put up with the diet of carrot juice and raw eggs but then, in an entirely predictable bit of comic business, Basil procures some brandy off the young man who runs the resort gym and runs a tidy black market in illicit booze and grub. He drinks it down in one and passes out. The sanatorium  doctor expels him. Basil and Angela return to London.

Here he discovers his daughter, 18 year old Barbara, is in love with a ghastly, uncouth young man, Charles Albright. Late at night Basil discovers the pair rummaging around in his wine cellar, basically stealing some booze to take to a ‘happening’. This is barely into the 1960s so it’s not a psychedelic 60s happening, it’s a beards-and-jazz, beatnik 50s happening.

Basil insists on having an interview with the young man by himself, a solemn occasion for both parties at which Basil is disconcerted to find himself being bested. He looks into the young man’s eyes and face and recognises himself.

After a boozy lunch Basil drops in on Sonia Trumpington who lives alone, with her son, doing charitable works and sewing. He asks Sonia is she knows this Charles Albright, she replies yes, he’s a friend of her son, Robin. When Basil whiningly asks what his daughter can see in the scuffy, beardy young man, Sonia robustly replies, you! He looks, speaks and behaves just like a young Basil.

Sonia says she has photos somewhere of the mother and digs up an old photo album from the 1930s. She identifies the young woman as Elizabeth Stayles, there’s a photo of Basil about to throw her into a lake at some gay 1930s house party.

Seeing the photo awakens an old memory in Basil’s mind. Elizabeth Stayles, yes, didn;t he have an affair with her, all those years ago?

Basil thanks Sonia and returns to his London house whence he invites young Barbara for a chat in Hyde Park by the Serpentine. Here he informs his daughter that her lover is his, Basil’s son. He had a brief fling with Elizabeth Stayles when he got out of hospital after the toes incident, during the Blitz winter of 1940. Only lasted a week then Basil took back up with Angela and Elizabeth (Betty) rooted around for someone else and ended up marrying Clarence Albright, killed in action 1943. Betty herself died young of cancer in 1956. The point is there’s no-one to gainsay his story.

His story being that his daughter, Barbara, has been going out with, and fooling around with, her half-brother. Barbara gets up from the park bench and stumbles across the park. Basil catches a cab to Bellamy’s club for an egg nog, and then onto Claridge’s to meet his wife. She says their daughter returned home looking tragic and locked herself in her room. ‘What she needs,’ says Basil, ‘is a change of scene. I’ve bought all three of us tickets to Bermuda.’

To be honest, from the text I’m not sure whether Charles really is Basil’s son or whether it’s the last in Basil’s long list of outrageous lies and scams. If it is an outrageous lie he has conjured up to scupper his daughter’s relationship with the young man, then it is obviously cruel and heartless. If is isn’t a lie, if it’s true, it’s still a pretty heartless story for Waugh to concoct; told from the father’s point of view it completely ignores the emotional devastation the revelation must have on his daughter.

But I don’t quite understand the handful of critics I’ve read who say the story is ‘disgusting’, as if it was an entirely new note in Basil or Waugh’s career. They seem to forget that Waugh has Basil unknowingly EAT the young woman he fancies in Black Mischief after she’s been caught, killed and cooked by a tribe Basil is staying with. That book was published in 1932, precisely 30 years before this story. Or that in Waugh’s first novel the kindly Mr Prendergast has his head cut off with a hacksaw by a psychotic prison inmate. Or the short story about the polite and docile Mr Loveday who strangles young women to death. Or the devastating ending of Handful of Dust. Or the heartless death of Angela Runcible in Vile Bodies. Or the not one but two suicides in The Loved One.

In other words I wasn’t upset by the story’s apparent cruelty because casual cruelty had been a stock in trade for Waugh’s fiction right from the start.

So: I like the bufferish tone of the story and I liked the old-boy banter between Peter and Basil and especially between 60-something Basil and his wife. It felt both sweet and charitable to the infirmities of age, as was the brief sad interlude where they visit old Margot Metroland and find her sitting in the dark hunched over a television set (as so many lonely old people become addicted to doing).

On the other hand, all the dialogue with his daughter struck me as hopelessly unrealistic, stiff and unnatural, really false although – but how can I know how 60-something posh fathers spoke with their debutante daughters in 1962?

And as to the harsh, cruel sting in the tail, well, it doesn’t feel to me like some sad falling-off of Waugh’s powers at all but entirely in keeping with the cruelty and sadism lurking in the wings of all Waugh’s 1930s novels and of a piece with macabre little horrors such as ‘Mr Loveday’s Little Outing’ (1935) or ‘The Sympathetic Passenger’ (1939).

Credit

The Complete Short Stories by Evelyn Waugh was first published by Chapman and Hall in 1947. All references are to the 2018 Penguin paperback edition.

Related link

Evelyn Waugh reviews

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by Simon on January 17, 2022  •  Permalink
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Posted by Simon on January 17, 2022

https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2022/01/17/complete-short-stories-evelyn-waugh/

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