This post started as a collection of quotes comparing two interesting travelogues. It rapidly grew out of control.
One of the joys of the internet age is huge abundance of searchable texts. It's like magic! An entire library where looking up a quotation or tracking down a reference takes a few seconds. One of the downsides is the ability to sprawl. This post took nearly two months to write and, at the end of it, I am not at all convinced it was worth it.
Disclaimers
I am not a trained literary critic. I have read the two books reviewed in this post. I have not, as far as I know, read anything else by the authors, even when it would be useful. Any research is extremely superficial. I have the soul of a washing machine designer. You have been warned.
A Thousand Miles up the Nile
Full Text
Introduction
In 1872, at the age of 41, Amelia B. Edwards spent the summer exploring the Dolomites with her "friend and companion", Lucy Renshaw. Polite society, and Renshaw's "maid and courtier" disapproved of the journey, so they were simply left behind. They had a great time.
In 1873, after a disappointingly rainy journey through France, Edwards traveled to Egypt and travelled up the Nile. The journey was not unknown; tourists and explorers had trod the ground before, but it was still relatively perilous. They traveled from November to April, spending time with profligacy a modern tourist can only envy.
Edwards would later become, against fierce opposition, a leading Egyptologist. A Thousand Miles up the Nile, which she both wrote and illustrated, cemented her reputation.
Notes on the Text
The book clips along at a ferocious pace. Edwards does not waste words or inflate unimportant events. She looks outwards, not inwards, and back in time, not forward. A Thousand Miles up the Nile is both easy and pleasant to read.
For it is no easy task to realize, however imperfectly, the duration of
six or seven thousand years ; and the Great Pyramid, which is supposed to
have been some four thousand two hundred and odd years old at the time of
the birth of Christ, is now in its seventh millennary. Standing there
close against the base of it ; touching it ; measuring her own height
against one of its lowest blocks ; looking up all the stages of that vast,
receding, rugged wall, which leads upward like an Alpine buttress and
seems almost to touch the sky, the Writer suddenly became aware that these
remote dates had never presented themselves to her mind until this moment
as anything but abstract numerals. Now, for the first time, they resolved
themselves into something concrete, definite, real. They were no longer
figures, but years with their changes of season, their high and low Niles,
their seed-times and harvests. The consciousness of that moment will
never, perhaps, quite wear away. It was as if one had been snatched up
for an instant to some vast height overlooking the plains of Time, and had
seen the centuries mapped out beneath one's feet.
[...]
The dais is covered with prayer-rugs, and contains the holy niche and the pulpit of the preacher. We observed that those who came up here came only to pray. Having prayed, they either went away or turned aside into one of the other recesses to rest. There was a charming fountain in the court, with a dome-roof as light and fragile-looking as a big bubble, at which each worshipper performed his ablutions on coming in.
Even her flights of picturesque fancy are interrupted by unpoetic
statements. In the middle of a colourful parade of characters, a note on
pipe prices. Not "four thousand years" but "four thousand two hundred and odd years". It's charming, like she's pulling herself back from falling head over heels into romantic rhapsody. Everything is factual, not because
Edwards is writing a guidebook or a history, but because she seems to like
facts. Tables of measurements, estimated dates, and explanatory
footnotes lurk at the end of each chapter.
Coffee and tobacco are,
indeed, the only luxuries in which the Egyptian peasant indulges ; and our
poor fellows were never more grateful than when we distributed among them
a few pounds of cheap native tobacco. This abominable mixture sells in
the bazaars at sixpence the pound, the plant from which it is gathered
being raised from inferior seed in a soil chemically unsuitable, because
wholly devoid of potash.
[...]
So stately was the approach made by Rameses the Great to the temple
founded about a hundred and fifty years before his time by Amenhotep
III. He also built the courtyard upon which this pylon opened, joining it
to the older part of the building in such wise that the original first
court became now the second court, while next in order came the portico,
the hall of assembly, and the sanctuary. By and by, when the long line of
Rameses had passed away, other and later kings put their hands to the
work. The names of Shabaka (Sabaco), of Ptolemy Philopater, and of
Alexander the Younger, appear among the later inscriptions ; while those
of Amenhotep IV (Khu-en-Aten), Horemheb, and Seti, the father of Rameses
the Great, are found in the earlier parts of the building. It was in this
way that an Egyptian temple grew from age to age, owing a colonnade to
this king and a pylon to that, till it came in time to represent the
styles of many periods. Hence, too, that frequent irregularity of plan,
which, unless it could be ascribed to the caprices of successive builders,
would form so unaccountable a feature in Egyptian architecture. In the
present instance, the pylon and courtyard of Rameses II are set at an
angle of five degrees to the courtyard and sanctuary of Amenhotep
III. This has evidently been done to bring the Temple of Luxor into a
line with the Temple of Karnak, in order that the two might be connected
by means of that stupendous avenue of sphinxes, the scattered remains of
which yet strew the course of the ancient roadway.
As I have already said, these half-buried pylons, this solitary
obelisk, those giant heads rising in ghastly resurrection before the gates
of the Temple, were magnificent still. But it was as the magnificence of
a splendid prologue to a poem of which only garbled fragments remain.
Beyond that entrance lay a smoky, filthy, intricate labyrinth of lanes and
passages. Mud hovels, mud pigeon-towers, mud yards, and a mud mosque,
clustered like wasps' nests in and about the ruins. Architraves
sculptured with royal titles supported the roofs of squalid cabins.
Stately capitals peeped out from the midst of sheds in which buffaloes,
camels, donkeys, dogs, and human beings were seen herding together in
unsavoury fellowship. Cocks crew, hens cackled, pigeons cooed, turkeys
gobbled, children swarmed, women were baking and gossiping, and all the
sordid routine of Arab life was going on, amid winding alleys that masked
the colonnades and defaced the inscriptions of the Pharaohs. To trace the
plan of this part of the building was then impossible.
[...]
Then as we drew nearer, coming by and by to a raised causeway which apparently connected the mounds with some point down by the river, the details of the Temple gradually emerged into distinctness. We could now see the curve and under-shadow of the cornice ; and a small object in front of the façade which looked at first sight like a monolithic altar, resolved itself into a massive gateway of the kind known as a single pylon. Nearer still, among some low outlying mounds, we came upon fragments of sculptured capitals and mutilated statues half-buried in rank grass – upon a series of stagnant nitre-tanks and deserted workshops – upon the telegraph poles and wires which here come striding along the edge of the desert and vanish southward with messages for Nubia and the Soudan.
Egypt is the land of nitre. It is found wherever a crude-brick mound is disturbed or an antique stone structure demolished. The Nile mud is strongly impregnated with it ; and in Nubia we used to find it lying in thick talc-like flakes upon the surface of rocks far above the present level of the inundation. These tanks at Denderah had been sunk, we were told, when the great Temple was excavated by Abbas Pasha more than twenty years ago. The nitre then found was utilised out of hand ; washed and crystallised in the tanks ; and converted into gunpowder in the adjacent workshops. The telegraph wires are more recent intruders, and the work of the Khedive ; but one longed to put them out of sight, to pull down the gunpowder sheds, and to fill up the tanks with débris. For what had the arts of modern warfare or the wonders of modern science to do with Hathor, the Lady of Beauty and the Western Shades, the Nurse of Horus, the Egyptian Aphrodite, to whom yonder mountain of wrought stone and all these wastes were sacred?
Edwards might wish the telegraph poles would vanish, but rarely, if ever, fetishizes poverty or unduly laments progress, except when it might disturb or destroy an ancient monument. She is an antiquarian and and Egyptologist. Everything that brought her to Egypt happened thousands of years ago. While she perceives echoes of the ancient word in the Egypt she visited, I don't believe she demanded the world stand still for her, or remain a perfect painting. She sometimes laments, fairly or unfairly, that the current inhabitants of ancient cities do not know or understand their heritage, and fought for the rest of her life to protect the sites from time, tourists, and foreign looters.
Edwards
seems to be delighted, or at least amused, by what she sees. She
recognizes that her view is tinted by picture-book pastoralism, shrugs
wryly, and carries on.
But the Egyptian, Arab, and Turkish merchants, whether mingling in the
general tide or sitting on their counters, are the most picturesque
personages in all this busy scene. They wear ample turbans, for the most
part white ; long vests of striped Syrian silk reaching to the feet ; and
an outer robe of braided cloth or cashmere. The vest is confined round
the waist by a rich sash ; and the outer robe, or gibbeh, is
generally of some beautiful degraded color, such as maize, mulberry,
olive, peach, sea-green, salmon-pink, sienna-brown, and the like. That
these stately beings should vulgarly buy and sell, instead of reposing all
their lives on luxurious divans and being waited upon by beautiful
Circassians, seems altogether contrary to the eternal fitness of things.
Here, for instance, is a Grand Vizier in a gorgeous white and amber satin
vest, who condescends to retail pipe-bowls, – dull red clay pipe-bowls of
all sizes and prices. He sells nothing else, and has not only a pile of
them on the counter, but a binful at the back of his
shop. They are made
at Siout in Upper Egypt, and may be bought at the Algerine shops in London
almost as cheaply as in Cairo. Another majestic Pasha deals in brass and
copper vessels, drinking-cups, basins, ewers, trays, incense-burners,
chafing-dishes, and the like ; some of which are exquisitely engraved with
Arabesque patterns or sentences from the poets. A third sells silk from
the looms of Lebanon, and gold and silver tissues from Damascus. Others,
again, sell old arms, old porcelain, old embroideries, second-hand
prayer-carpets, and quaint little stools and cabinets of ebony inlaid with
mother-of-pearl. Here, too, the tobacco-merchant sits behind a huge cake
of Latakia as big as his own body ; and the sponge-merchant smokes his
long chibouk in a bower of sponges.
She knows what she is seeing and describing is
picturesque and doesn't particularly care. She is not here to
scrutinize, categorize, and judge. She makes no attempt to get inside
the heads or weigh the souls of the people she meets; she just treats
them, more or less, as people living their lives. She is here to look at
some ruins, make some notes, and have a good time, in a living world
that does not belong to her.
It is all so picturesque,
indeed, so biblical, so poetical, that one is almost in danger of
forgetting that the places are something more than beautiful backgrounds,
and that the people are not merely appropriate figures placed there for
the delight of sketchers, but are made of living flesh and blood, and
moved by hopes, and fears, and sorrows, like our own.
But she is still an English traveler in 1874, and a
scientifically literate one when "science" included some very odious
theories.
Among the Shellalee, or Cataract villagers, one comes suddenly into the
midst of a people that have apparently nothing in common with the
population of Egypt. They belong to a lower ethnological type, and they
speak a language derived from purely African sources. Contrasting with
our Arab sailors the sulky-looking, half-naked, muscular savages who
thronged about the Philæ during her passage up the Cataract, one
could not but perceive that they are to this day as distinct and inferior
a people as when their Egyptian conquerors, massing together in one
contemptuous epithet all nations south of the frontier, were wont to speak
of them as "the vile race of Kush."
As an ardent early feminist, Edwards comments on the condition of women in Egypt throughout her travels, but she is a reviewer, not a reformer.
The
amount of "bazaar" that takes place whenever we enter one of these
villages, is quite alarming. The dogs first give notice of our approach
; and presently we are surrounded by all the women and girls of the
place,
offering live pigeons, eggs, vegetable marrows, necklaces, nose-rings
and
silver bracelets for sale. The boys pester us to buy wretched half-dead
chameleons. The men stand aloof, and leave the bargaining to the women.
And the women not only know how to bargain, but how to assess the
relative value of every coin that passes current on the Nile. Rupees,
roubles, reyals, dollars and shillings are as intelligible to them as
paras or piastres. Sovereigns are not too heavy nor napoleons too light
for them. The times are changed since Belzoni's Nubian, after staring
contemptuously at the first piece of money he had ever seen, asked "Who
would give anything for that small piece of metal?"
[...]
We had little opportunity of observing domestic life in Egypt. L.
visited some of the vice-regal hareems at Cairo, and brought away on
each occasion the same impression of dreariness. A little embroidery, a
few musical toys of Geneva manufacture, a daily drive on the Shubra
road, pipes, cigarettes, sweetmeats, jewellery, and gossip, fill up the
aimless days of most Egyptian ladies of rank. There are, however, some
who take an active interest in politics ; and in Cairo and Alexandria
the opera-boxes of the Khedive and the great Pashas are
nightly occupied by ladies. But it is not by the daily life of the wives
of princes and nobles, but by the life of the lesser gentry and upper
middle-class, that a domestic system should be judged. These ladies of
Ayserat had no London-built brougham, no Shubra road, no opera. They
were absolutely without mental resources ; and they were even without
the means of taking air and exercise. One could see that time hung heavy
on their hands, and that they took but a feeble interest in the things
around them. The hareem stairs were dirty ; the rooms were untidy ;
the general aspect of the place was slatternly and neglected. As for the
inmates, though all good-nature and gentleness, their faces bore the
expression of people who are habitually bored. [...] It seemed to us that the wives of the Fellahîn were in truth the
happiest women in Egypt. They work hard and are bitterly poor ; but they
have the free use of their limbs, and they at least know the fresh air,
the sunshine, and the open fields.
Perhaps crucially for a travelogue, A Thousand Miles up the Nile is funny. Edwards is capable of laughing at herself, at her absurdly privileged position as a traveler, and at her misfortunes, and that makes her story instantly relatable. West lets a hint of cosmic irony or sorrow creep into every humorous situation; Edwards has a good jolly uncomplicated laugh at things. Edwards writes like a happy person; West, as we will see in the second part of this review, writes like an unhappy one.
The camel has its virtues – so much at least must be admitted ; but they
do not lie upon the surface. My Buffon tells me, for instance, that he
carries a fresh-water cistern in his stomach ; which is meritorious. But
the cistern ameliorates neither his gait nor his temper – which are
abominable. Irreproachable as a beast of burden, he is open to many
objections as a steed. It is unpleasant, in the first place, to ride an
animal that not only objects to being ridden, but cherishes a strong
personal antipathy to his rider. Such, however, is his amiable
peculiarity. You know that he hates you, from the moment you first walk
round him, wondering where and how to begin the ascent of his hump. He
does not in fact, hesitate to tell you so in the roundest terms. He
swears freely while you are taking your seat ; snarls if you but move in
the saddle ; and stares you angrily in the face, if you attempt to turn
his head in any direction save that which he himself prefers. Should you
persevere, he tries to bite your feet. If biting your feet does not
answer, he lies down.
Now the lying-down and getting-up of a camel are performances designed
for the express purpose of inflicting grievous bodily harm upon his rider.
Thrown twice forward and twice backward, punched in his "wind" and damaged
in his spine, the luckless novice receives four distinct shocks, each more
violent and unexpected than the last. For this "execrable hunchback" is
fearfully and wonderfully made. He has a superfluous joint somewhere in
his legs, and uses it to revenge himself upon mankind.
His paces, however, are more complicated than his joints and more
trying than his temper. He has four:– a short walk, like the rolling of
a small boat in a chopping sea ; a long walk which dislocates every bone
in your body ; a trot that reduces you to imbecility ; and a gallop that
is sudden death. One tries in vain to imagine a crime for which the
peine forte et dure of sixteen hours on camel-back would not be a
full and sufficient expiation. It is a punishment to which one would not
willingly be the means of condemning any human being – not even a reviewer.
A Thousand Miles Up The Nile does not have a traditional concluding chapter. It begins as it ends, at Cairo. There is no summing up, no indulgent introspection, no moral lessons. The revised introduction to the second edition is mostly facts and updates.
I think Edwards learned a great deal about ancient Egypt during her journey, but if she learned anything about herself or about humanity, she either slid her insights into the text between visits to buried temples and adventures on the river or didn't think her readers would be interested in reading about them.
The Author's Personal Life
According to Wikipedia, "Amelia Ann Blanford Edwards (7 June 1831 – 15 April 1892), also known as Amelia B. Edwards, was an English novelist, journalist, traveller and Egyptologist."
She traveled up the Nile with Lucy Renshawe, referred to, in various biographical articles, as a "friend", "woman companion", "friend" again, "a wealthier single woman" (PDF link), or simply not mentioned at all.
If Ginger Rogers
did everything Fred Astaire did, but backwards and in high heels, then Lucy
Renshawe travelled everywhere Amelia Edward did... but also had to live with
Amelia Edwards, which cannot have been easy at times.
The first breadcrumb on the casual research trail came from a 2018 article in the Morning Star, which, as far as I can tell, lifted its material wholesale from this 2016 Historic England article, mangling details in the process. Shame on you, anonymous Morning Star author.
Original
Her friend, author and critic John Addington Symonds, told sexologist
Havelock Ellis that Amelia Edwards ‘made no secret to me of her Lesbian
tendencies’, and had formed a ménage with an ‘English lady’ and her
clergyman husband. ‘Miss Edwards told me that one day the husband
married her to his wife at the altar of his church – having full
knowledge of the state of affairs.’ These were probably Mr and Mrs
Byrne, whose departure from the area was ‘like a death-blow’ to Edwards.
(The 1871 census shows John and Ellen Byrne living at 7 Cambridge Park, Bristol.)
The Morning Star's Rewrite
As well as writing ghost stories and travel books, Amelia seems to
have made no secret of her unconventional sexual orientation. Some
modern biographers have tried to hide this aspect of her life but
Edwards never did.
Her friend, the author and critic John Addington Symonds, told Henry Havelock Ellis that she made no secret of her lesbian lifestyle.
Havelock Ellis was in 1897 co-author of the first medical textbook in
English on homosexuality and he also published works on a variety of
sexual orientations and inclinations.
She told both Symonds and Ellis she had formed a menage a trois with
an English woman and her clergyman husband. Symonds said she told him
that one day the husband had married Edwards to his wife at the altar of
his church.
This unconventional bisexual couple were almost certainly John Rice
Byrne and Ellen Byrne who the 1871 census shows as living at 7 Cambridge
Park, Bristol. He was a clergyman and school inspector. When they moved
away from Bristol, Edwards told Symonds it was like a death blow.
Newspapers and websites aren't under any obligation to cite their sources, so I have no idea where this information came from, or what references I can follow. It's possible it was lifted from the 2006 biography "More Usefully Employed. Amelia B. Edwards: Writer, Traveller and Campaigner for Ancient Egypt". I'd like to confirm the citations and clear up a few strange inconsistencies in online biographies, but interlibrary loans are suspended due to COVID and I can't justify buying the book just to satisfy idle curiosity.
Her friend Kate Bradbury (quoted by Margaret Drower in Petrie,
page 199) once observed to Petrie that Amelia Edwards "did not love
many people for all her seeming geniality." She went on to tell him that
he was one of perhaps three people she was very fond of, but that
Edward's had stated she "might just as well be fond of a young obelisk."
This sad observation tells us as much about Edwards as it does of the
brilliant and arrestingly handsome Petrie.
-PDF
Wikipedia doesn't mention any of this, but it does note that Edwards was buried next to "her life partner of 30 years, Ellen Drew Braysher." The cited BBC article honouring her doesn't offer any details. Biographical information on Braysher is hard to find, but curiously, Matilda Betham-Edwards dedicated an 1884 book of poetry to Ellen Drew Braysher.
To Ellen Drew Braysher
As some fond traveller should bring a bride,
Late gained, sole loved, from some sweet southern land,
And half with humbleness and half with pride,
Through homely scenes of youth her footsteps guide,
So dear, I crave your grace and take your hand,
And pray you wander through the Past with me,
Less able every step to understand
How aught of beauty or delight could be
Reflected in the life that knew not thee!
Once again, according to Wikipedia, Betham-Edwards is "often cited in anthologies of lesbian poetry, but there is no strong evidence that she had lesbian tendencies."
There's a trend to say "I don't get why Wikipedia isn't allowed as a reliable source." Well this is why!
One final note. By a truly staggering coincidence (or a hitherto-undocumented comical abundance of Victorian lesbian couples in their 40s), the pair ran into Marianne Brockelhurst and her "lady companion" Mary Booth.
Close behind the Philæ lies the 'Bagstones,' – a neat little
dahabeeyah in the occupation of two English ladies who chanced to cross
with us in the 'Simla' from Brindisi, and of whom we have seen so much
ever since that we regard them by this time as quite old friends in a
strange land. I will call them the M. B.'s
The past is a very strange country.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Full Text
Introduction
In 1937, at the age of 45, Rebecca West returned to Yugoslavia with her husband. It was the equivalent of visiting Pompeii in September 79 AD. It is difficult to imagine a more ominous time and place. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is stitched together from three separate trips, with copious edits and invented speeches.
Notes On The Text
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, ostensibly a travelogue, spits in the eye of genre restrictions. It is at least a dozen books at once. Rebecca West was, in spirit if not in fact, one of the Algonquin Round Table set. She turned phrases like a chairmaker turns legs.
When we were driving out of the town I said, ‘I hate the corpses of
empires, they stink as nothing else. They stink so badly that I cannot
believe that even in life they were healthy.’ ‘I do not think you can
convince mankind,’ said my husband, ‘that there is not a certain
magnificence about a great empire in being.’ ‘Of course there is,’ I
admitted, ‘but the hideousness outweighs the beauty. You are not, I
hope, going to tell me that they impose law on lawless people. Empires
live by the violation of law.’
Did they really talk like this? Of course not; this is one of the shorter speeches in the book, and in real life, someone always trips over a rope or says "hrm" and wanders off. Terribly clever people saying terribly clever things never seems to work out. Events pass them by.
Side note: As a blogger, this is moderately concerning.
West assumes she knows what people are thinking, and why they are doing what they are doing. Empathy becomes truth.
Here in Mostar the really adventurous part of our journey began.
Something that had been present in every breath we drew in Dalmatia and
Croatia was absent when we woke the next morning, and dressed and
breakfasted with our eyes on the market square beneath our windows. It
might be identified as conformity in custom as well as creed. The people
we were watching adhered with intensity to certain faiths. They were
Moslem, they were Catholic, they were Orthodox. About marriage, about
birth, about death, they practised immutable rites, determined by these
faiths and the older faiths that lie behind them. But in all other ways
they were highly individualistic. Their goings and comings, their eating
and drinking, were timed by no communal programme, their choice of
destiny might be made on grounds so private as to mean nothing to any
other human being. Such an attitude showed itself in the crowds below us
in a free motion that is the very antithesis in spirit to what we see
when we watch people walking to their work over London Bridge in the
morning. It showed too in their faces, which always spoke of thought
that was never fully shared, of scepticism and satire and lyricism that
felt no deed to have been yet finally judged.
[...]
We were joined by the Danish seller of agricultural machinery, who
regarded us with a benevolence that was galling. We had the impression
that he had just received information that we were completely harmless
and unimportant, and that in any case even if we had some grain of
significance we were leaving, so it did not matter.
And it is beautiful, but is it true?
Does it need to be true? Is she writing about Mostar or about herself? Throughout the book, West expressly tells us very little about herself; her husband is not even named. Yet you'd have to have a stone head not to realize the narrative is deeply introspective. If she's writing about herself, if the ponderous bulk of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is an internal spiritual journey using real places and people as metaphors, then is the result worth it?
Is it an act of supreme egotism or supreme humility to reimagine the history of a nation as the history of your own life?
West is a supremely confident critic of art, embroidery, light, distance, plants, weather, and livestock. And for all I know her judgements might be perfectly correct. Her lifelong record of extreme praise or concentrated acid suggests it might not be so.
Things Yet To Come
There are only two kinds of literary prediction.
1. Vague prediction. E.g. "One day Egypt will fall."
2.
Specific after-the-fact prediction. E.g. "The king will choke on a fish
bone and his junior ministers will fight to replace him."
If
this book was written in 1937 and left untouched until publication in
1941, as West seems to occasionally imply, it would be a remarkable work of
prediction and break all cynical patterns. If,
on the other hand, it was broadly sketched in 1937 but ammended in 1941
before publication, the predictions and insights of the author become
retrospective judgements, but a retrospective judgement of 1941, while bombs fall on London and the world hangs in the balance, is not the same as a retrospective judgment of 1956.
The first chapter, treated as a sort of allegorical vignette, is superb.
This tunnel represents no real frontier. They were still in Austria, and they had left Germany early that morning. Yet when we came out on the other side all the four Germans began to talk quickly and freely, as if they no longer feared something. [...] They all began to tell each other how badly they had needed this holiday they were taking, and what pension terms they were going to pay, and by what date they had to be back in Germany, and to discuss where they were allowed to go as tourists and how much money they would have been allowed if they had gone to other countries and in what form they would have had to take it. The regulations which bound them were obviously of an inconvenient intricacy, for they frequently disputed as to the details; and indeed they frequently uttered expressions of despair at the way they were hemmed in and harried.
It appeared that he owned an apartment house in Berlin, and had for six months been struggling with a wholly unforeseen and inexplicable demand for extra taxes on it. He did not allege that the tax was unjust. He seemed to think that the demand was legal enough, but that the relevant law was so complicated, and was so capriciously interpreted by the Nazi courts, that he had been unable to foresee how much he would be asked for, and was still quite at a loss to calculate what might be exacted in the future. He had also had a great deal of trouble dealing with some undesirable tenants, whose conduct had caused frequent complaints from other tenants, but who were members of the Nazi Party. He left it ambiguous whether he had tried to evict the undesirable tenants and had been foiled by the Nazis, or if he had been too frightened even to try to get redress.
At that the manufacturer and his wife sighed, and said that they could understand. The man spoke with a great deal of reticence and obviously did not want to give away exactly what his business was, lest he get into difficulties; but he said with great resentment that the Nazis had put a director into his company who knew nothing and was simply a Party man in line for a job. He added, however, that what he really minded was the unforeseeable taxes. He laughed at the absurdity of it all, for he was a brave and jolly man; but the mere fact that he stopped giving us details of his worries, when he was obviously extremely expansive by temperament, showed that his spirit was deeply troubled.
[...]
They were all of them falling to pieces under the emotional and intellectual strain laid on them by their Government, poor Laocoöns strangled by red tape. It was obvious that by getting the population into this state the Nazis had guaranteed the continuance of their system; for none of these people could have given any effective support to any rival party that wanted to seize power, and indeed their affairs, which were thoroughly typical, were in such an inextricable state of confusion that no sane party would now wish to take over the government, since it would certainly see nothing but failure ahead. Their misery seemed to have abolished every possible future for them.
[...]
Sighing deeply, he said, evidently referring to something about which he had not spoken, ‘The worst of life under the Nazis is that the private citizen hasn’t any liberty, but the officials haven’t any authority either.’ It was curious that such a sharply critical phrase should have been coined by one whose attitude was so purely passive; for he had spoken of all the forces that had tormented him as if they could not have been opposed, any more than thunder or lightning.
A National Poem
Because she is writing an epic, she ascribes national, international, or cosmic importance to the most trivial events. Every hotel, boat, and restaurant is stretched to its very limits. The result is sometimes tedious, but when it works, it really works. The most enjoyable bits of the book, to me, are the extended historical rhapsodies.
Because this is my blog, and your monitor isn't running out of ink, here's one of my favorite sections in full.
Belgrade was at once bombarded. An army of three hundred and fifty
thousand men fought a rearguard action, without big guns to answer their
enemy’s artillery, with so few arms that some regiments had but one
rifle to two men. They gave up Belgrade, their only town, their earnest
that they were Byzantium reborn materially as well as spiritually, and
pressed back, bitter and amazed. But Belgrade did not fall. It was left
to be defended by a single division commanded by a colonel, who blew up
the iron bridge across the Danube so that it blocked the river against
Austrian traffic, and dressed the customs officials and such townsfolk
as remained in extemporized uniforms so that Austrian spies reported a
large garrison; and by a miracle it remained intact when the Serbian
Army turned on its tracks, and, to the world’s amazement, sprang at the
Austrians’ throats and drove them out of the country in less than a
month. They even invaded Austrian territory and set foot in Bosnia and
Herzegovina and the Serb parts of Hungary, and the Frushka Gora itself.
But the Austrian Empire had numbers. It had at this moment little
else; it had so little virtue or wisdom or even common sense that again
and again the student must marvel that this was the same state as
eighteenth-century Austria. But what it had it used, and it sent back
its armies in September. This time they enjoyed a certain disgraceful
advantage. During the first invasion they had laid waste the country,
pillaging the crops, burning the houses, murdering the civil population:
at least three hundred and six women are known to have been executed,
as well as many people over eighty and children under five. So the
Serbian Army had this time to retreat over a devastated countryside
which could give it no food and offered it much discouragement, not
diminished by the floods of civilian refugees, some Serbian, some from
the Slav parts of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, all hungry and footsore
and with tales to tell of the enemy’s malign brutality. There might have
been panic had it not been for the spirit of the Karageorgevitches and
the higher command. King Peter hobbled up to some troops that were
wavering under artillery fire to which their army had no answer, and
said to them, after the manner of a Homeric general, ‘Heroes, you have
taken two oaths: one to me, your king, and one to your country. From the
first I release you, from the second no man can release you. But if you
decide to return to your homes, and if we should be victorious, you
shall not be made to suffer.’
They did not go. To lead them General Mishitch, the grave and
reluctant regicide whom King Peter had refused to dismiss, now appointed
fourteen hundred young students as non-commissioned officers. Of these
boys, who before the war had been studying at Belgrade, Vienna, Prague,
Berlin, and Paris, one hundred and forty survived the war. Arms came
suddenly to this army, sent from England. These men who were so spent
that they no longer lived by their experience but by what is known to
our common human stock, these boys who had no experience at all and
therefore were also thrown back on that same primitive knowledge, alike
they forgot the usual prudent opinion that dying is disagreeable, and
valued death and life and honour as if they were heroes who had died a
thousand years before or gods who were under no necessity to die. They
flung themselves again on the Austrians. By the end of December they had
retaken Belgrade. They took down the Hungarian flag that had floated
above the palace and laid it on the steps of the Cathedral when King
Peter went with his generals to the mass of thanksgiving for victory.
They had to thank the Lord for a real suspension of natural law; for
when the Austrians had withdrawn over the frontiers there remained
behind rather more Austrian prisoners of war than there were Serbian
soldiers.
It is not known what King Peter thought of the future. In his old age
he had become more of a Serb, and the Genevan mark was not so strong as
it had been. He was now wholly a warrior king, a Nemanya reborn. But it
is said that the Crown Prince Alexander, the pale and pedantic graduate
of St Petersburg Military Academy, knew that the victory was no more
than a breathing-space, and that there must follow another assault,
which would mean defeat. This certainly must have become a growing
horror when it was manifest that the country had received a wound deeper
than any that could be inflicted by military action. Some of the
Austrian troops had come from parts of Galicia where typhus was endemic,
and they had brought the germs with them. Where food was scarce, water
was polluted, and vast districts were littered with dead men and animals
far beyond the power of scavenging, the fever spread. The hospital
system, particularly in the recovered Turkish provinces, was utterly
unable to cope with this inundation of disease, and indeed it killed a
third of all Serbian doctors. There came out several foreign sanitary
units, of which Dr Elsie Inglis’s Scottish Women’s Hospital left an
imperishably glorious name. Alexander, himself sickening of an internal
malady, spent his days travelling up and down the country organizing a
medical service.
[...]
In September the invasion began. By October the Serbian Army, which now numbered a quarter of a million men, was faced with three hundred
thousand Austro-German troops, under the great strategist Mackensen,
and as many Bulgarians. It was now necessary for the country to die. The
soldiers retreated slowly, fighting a rearguard action, leaving the
civil population, that is to say their parents, wives, and children, in
the night of an oppression that they knew to be frightful. Monks came
out of the monasteries and followed the soldiers, carrying on
bullock-carts, and on their shoulders where the roads were too bad, the
coffined bodies of the medieval Serbian kings, the sacred Nemanyas,
which must not be defiled. So was carried King Peter, whose rheumatic
limbs were wholly paralysed by the cold of autumn; and so too, before
the retreat was long on its way, was Prince Alexander. The internal pain
that had vexed him all year grew so fierce that he could no longer ride
his horse. Doctors took him into a cottage and he was operated on for
appendicitis. Then he was packed in bandages wound close as a shroud,
and put on a stretcher and carried in the procession of the troops. It
is like some fantastic detail in a Byzantine fresco, improbable, nearly
impossible, yet a valid symbol of a truth, that a country which was
about to die should bear with it on its journey to death, its kings,
living and dead, all prostrate, immobile.
The retreating army made its last stand on the field of Kossovo,
where a short time before, in a different dream of the Creator, it had
known victory: where the Tsar Lazarevitch had proved that defeat can
last five hundred years. Above them circled enemy aeroplanes, evil’s
newest instrument. After a last rearguard action to shake off the
Bulgarians, they turned to the wall of Montenegrin and Albanian
mountains that rises between Kossovo and the Adriatic. [...] When they came to the foot of the
mountains the weeping gunners destroyed their guns with hand grenades
and burning petrol. The motor-drivers drove their cars and lorries up to
a corner where the road became a horse-trail on the edge of the
precipice, jumped out, and sent them spinning into space. Then all set
out on foot to cross the five-thousand-foot peaks that lay between them
and the sea. Some took other routes, but on any of the roads their fate
was the same. They trudged in mud and snow over the mountain passes, the
December wind piercing their ragged uniforms. Many fell dead, some died
of hunger. They were passing through one of the poorest parts of
Europe, and the inhabitants had little to sell them, and in any case
were instructed to withhold what they had by the King of Montenegro,
who, though he was Serbia’s ally and King Peter’s father-in-law, had
come to a treacherous understanding with Austria. The Serbians ate the
raw flesh of the animals which fell dead by the track, they ate their
boots. Some died of dysentery. Some were shot by Albanian snipers. Of
the quarter of a million Serbian soldiers, one hundred thousand met such
deaths. Of thirty-six thousand boys nearing military age who had joined
the retreat to escape the Austrians, over twenty thousand perished on
this road. Of fifty thousand Austrian and German prisoners, who had had
to follow the Serbians because their own military authorities had
refused to exchange them, the greater part never came down from the
mountains.
T. B. Macaulay said, of his own poem, " 'Horatius at the Bridge' is too long a poem for children to memorize.
But I never saw a boy who did not want some stanzas of it.:" There's a bit of that in West's work. You want to memorize it. Who gives a damn if it's "true".
West admired Proust, and it shows, but Proust's work is almost too easy to read (in translation; I'm sure my comically slow attempts to struggle through the original French do the work no favours.) In Search of Lost Time feels like falling through cotton wool. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon feels closer to the Arabian Nights; tales within tales within tales. Cicily Fairfield, who is Rebecca West, tells the story of Constantine telling the story of an old man from his village telling the story of a saint who, one half-expects, will start telling the story of Rebecca West.
Ethnonationalist Divisions
Yes.
Look, I've rewritten and deleted this section four times, and I cannot secrete the brain chemicals for a fifth attempt. In one chapter, West condemns a policy. In the next, with a different group, she supports it, with no apparent realization of the contradiction. It is impossible to read Black Lamb and Grey Falcon outside the shadow of the '90s. It's like looking at the world through the wrong end of a telescope.
West divides people into categories, assigns qualities (often inconsistently), and sticks with them, with the detachment of the botanist and the sensitivity of a poet. She picks favorites and makes bold predictions. Buckets of Blood with a capital B. As far as any coherent pattern can be discerned in her claims, history took a different path. Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is like the Bible; For any given quotation there is an equal and opposite counterquotation. No wonder Penguin got Christopher Hitchens to write their introduction! It's a book that's as complicated as real life; no one can hold all the pieces in their mind at once.
West, in fine romantic tradition, often imagines an all inclusive Hobbesian struggle of group against group, capital-letter against capital-letter. At the same time, with that classic internal duality, she seems to recognize that humanity is mostly made up of muddlers and bunglers who one day find, with a mixture of surprise and resignation, barbed wire in the garden and a machine gun in the loft.
The Author's Personal Life
Amelia Edwards has limited and
sometimes inaccurate biographical material online, possibly because she
lead a private life, possibly because her early biographers sanitized
her life. Rebecca West has the opposite problem. This review in the Globe and Mail is a decent negative-to-neutral survey of her life.
Bullet
points are the only solution. My "research" is very limited. I've
skimmed a few biographies and articles, but I wouldn't use this as an
authoritative list, and if there are some staggering inaccuracies I
wouldn't be at all surprised.
- 1912: Age 20: Wrote a critical review of H.G Wells which attracted his interest. Wells was 46 and married. The affair lasted 10 years.
- 1922 (?): Age 30(?): Lord Beaverbrook.
- 1923 (?): Age 31(?): "a lanky banker from California named Steven Martin". Died, apparently.
- 1924: Age 32. Had an apparently brief affair with John Gunther. Gunther was 23.
- 1930:
Age 37. Married Henry Maxwell Andrews. According to some sources,
Andrews suffered an undetected stroke two years into their relationship,
leading to eccentric and impulsive behavior. On the other hand,
eccentric and impulsive behavior was not uncommon among West's set. On the other other hand, Time magazine in 1947 said "her devoted husband" had "a cool, scholarly, finely whetted mind", which almost certainly means he was a gibbering lunatic.
- 1934: Age 41. Brief affair with surgeon Thomas Kilner, age 34, who she describes in her letters (which I have not read) as “that horrible cheating sadistic little creature.”
- 1946. Age 54. Brief affair with Francis Biddle, leading American judge at the Nuremberg trials, age 60.
And, apparently, at some point in the '20s, a brief affair with Charlie Chaplin (whose marriages and affairs are at least as notorious as Wells'). And some entirely pointless flirtation with Noël Coward.
None of these liaisons lead to any lasting happiness.
West
is full of contradictions. She loathed T.S. Eliot as a pseudo-intellectual fraud and a "poseur", "detesting his phony
erudition". (The God That Failed, Rollyson). Yet, late in her life, in an interview with the New York Times,
she goes off on a tangent about quarks that feels as phony and hollow
as anything Eliot wrote). (She is studying quantum mechanics for a new book).
''Your early journalism,'' I posit,
''which a new generation will now read in 'Young Rebecca,' is militantly
feminist. How do you view women's lot today?''
''If
you want to be a woman in the fullest sense, and have a husband and a
family, or a lover and a family, the problem is slightly different now.
Husbands and wives become united against the material difficulties of
life, I think. And the extraordinary thing is that the great enemy of
feminism is that it's traditional that men don't like housework. And so
few women do.''
''Is there a
solution?'' ''Well, the physicists talk about quarks. ... If we could
have an army of invisible quarks ... we could just watch and the sink
would suddenly become clean. Wouldn't that be wonderful?''
Her strict dualism is evident in her attitude towards homosexuality in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Men are men and do manly things; women are women and do womanly things.
All is right and proper. Homosexuals are either effeminate men or
masculine women, and therefore abominable. They are doomed to spread
unhappiness. It seems quaint now, and considering West's friendship with
Noël Coward and Frankie Howerd,
it probably became quaint to her as well. West was never particularly
good at sticking to any given position, but she never seems to have
adopted the middle ground on any issue. Lords and peasants, God and the
devil, the past and the future, West and East.
As a critic, West has the advantage of firing superbly crafted shots
in all directions. It's inevitable she'll skewer an author you dislike,
so you forgive her when she wounds an author you admire. Nothing is
merely passable; it is either ambrosia or muck. It's a technique not unknown to modern ad-revenue-driven online reviewers.
Incautious would be the man, but still more the woman, who incurred
the fine wrath of Rebecca West. Her ability to appraise historical and
global figures as if she had recently been personally oppressed or
insulted by them was a great assistance in driving her narrative
forward."
-Introduction to the Penguin edition.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is extremely long. If you want to skip chapters (as is your right), I suggest reading Chapter 1: Journey, Chapter 2. Croatia (Two Castles), Chapter 4 (Split I-III), and Chapter 7. Serbia (Belgrade VII), Chapter 10. Montenegro, and then the (very critical) introduction to the Penguin version.
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| For scale. |
Bonus Book: Edith Sitwell's English Eccentrics
Full Text
In a few places, and to a limited degree, Rebecca West's examination of the Balkans reminded me of of a section of Edith Sitwell's book English Eccentrics (available online here, my notes here). The Reverend's microscopic and timid view that assigned cosmic importance to perfectly ordinary and commonplace events feels like an unintentional parody of some of West's more lyric passages.
The Reverend Henry Blaine, Minister of the Gospel at Tring in Hertfordshire, for instance, found his journey to Ramsgate was not only full of the most perilous incidents, but also that it served him as a model on which to build a Tract, in which he compared the dangers of the voyage to the perils of the Soul in her Earthly Journal, etc. The Reverend Mr Blaine must have been an enchanting acquaintance, if we may judge by the Tract in question, though I imagine the enchantment would be realized only when it was past. When present, it may have been a little too continual.
The tract which I have culled from, Mr John Ashton’s Eighteenth-Century Waifs, contains fifty-four pages, and begins thus:
‘In hopes of recovering that invaluable blessing, health, on Friday, 10 August, 1787, I embarked on board the ship Friends bound for Ramsgate, in Kent. I had heard there was such a place; and many had raised my expectations by their reports of the efficacy of sea-bathing; and others encouraged my hopes by repeating their own experiences of benefit received. By these means I was induced to determine on this little voyage. It reminded me of the never-to-be-forgotten season, when, urged by some motives, and impelled by a power unseen, but not unfelt, I entered on board that stately vessel which the Lord’s prophet saw in a storm. Isaiah liv, II.’
This is a sample of the tract. He then goes on to say: ‘While we waited for the time of sailing [for different purposes, I suppose], many came to board, and appeared, to me at least, as if they intended to embark with us; but they left not the harbour, but, urged by other occasions and inducements they took leave of their friends and departed; while we, who were bound for a distant place, kept steady to our purpose, turned our backs upon home and waited patiently for the gentle breeze and driving tide to convey us to the desired port.
[...]
‘When we drew towards the conflux of the river Thames, there were two objects that attracted our notice; the one, the King’s guardship, placed there for the purpose of good economy; the other a large painted vessel, which floated on the surface of the water, and is called a buoy. While we were passing the King’s ship, I heard the report of a cannon, and saw the flash of the charge at some distance; and, on inquiring the reason of such a circumstance, was informed it was customary for every ship which passed, by way of obedience, to lower her topsail; but the firing of the gun made them hasten to show their obedience, for fear of a more unfavourable salute; for, though a flash of powder might give us some alarm, the discharge of a ball might make us feel the effects of disobedience. . . . Hitherto the generality of our company appeared to carry jollity and mirth in their countenance; but now we began to see the blushing rose die in the sickly cheek, and several of our passengers began to feel the sickening effects of the rolling sea; they withdrew from their mirth, and in pleasure crept into a corner, and silently mourned their lost pleasures in solitude. . . . Thrice happy the souls who are by Divine grace made sick of unsatisfying objects, and seek and find permanent bliss in the friendship of Immanuel.
[...]
‘When we had safely landed our passengers at Margate, we weighed anchor at eleven o’clock at night, in order to sail round the North Foreland for Ramsgate. The North Foreland is a point of land which stretches out some way into the sea, and is the extreme part of our country on the right hand, when we sail down the river Thames; and sailing round the point into the British Channel is esteemed by sailors rather dangerous. However, there was danger enough to awaken the apprehensions of a freshwater sailor. Yet here with some degree of confidence in Him who exercises His power over the sea and dry land, I laid me down and slept in quietness, while the rattling waves drove against the sides of our vessel, and the rustling winds shook our sails and made our yielding masts to speak. I was led to reflect that now there was but a feeble plank between me and the bottomless deep, yet, by a reliance on the divine goodness, my fears were hushed, and a divine calm prevailed within. “Thou will keep him in perfect peace, whose mind is stayed on thee. . . .” Isaiah xxvi, 3.
‘On Saturday morning, I awoke and heard a peaceful sound from shore, which informed me it was two o’clock; and, inquiring where we were, I found we were safe anchored within the commodious harbour of Ramsgate. Being so early an hour, we again composed ourselves to sleep, and lay till five o’clock; then leaving our sleeping apartment, and mounting the peaceful deck—not like the frighted sailor, who leaves the horrid hulk to view a thousand deaths from winds, and waves, and rocks, without a friendly shore in view, but to see one of the finest retreats from all these dangers, which Providence has provided for the safety of those who are exposed to the violence and rage of angry elements. The commodious Pier of Ramsgate seems admirably calculated to shelter and protect vessels which are threatened with destruction from winds and waves. This beautiful piece of architecture is built in the form of a Crescent, or half-moon, the points of which join to the land. The whole of this building of utility appeared to bear a clear resemblance to the glorious Mediator in his offices, who is appointed for a refuge from the storm. . .
‘By six in the morning we went on shore, and joyfully met our friends, who were brought down the day before; but in their passage were overtaken by a violent storm of thunder and lightning, whilst our voyage was smooth and prosperous; but, in the morning, we all met in peace and safety. Thus we sat down to a friendly breakfast, and cheerfully talked over the adventures of the little voyage. Something like this, I think, may take place in the state of blessedness. . . . While we were thus employed, we consulted how to dispose of ourselves while we continued at Ramsgate; we naturally agreed to form ourselves into a little family, and though we could not all lodge, yet we wished to board together in the same house. This is a pleasing instance of bonne camaraderie engendered, in a short time, among agreeable companions.
Or perhaps there's something universal in all travel, from the length of the Nile to the whole of the Balkans to a jaunt down the Thames.
Concluding Notes
We have West, who is extensively biographied, by official
chroniclers, her fiction, her son, and swarms of admiring or venemous
critics. She frequently felt like a martyr to her principles, and, it
seems, didn't mind letting people know how she felt. In a world dominated by men, she fought hard and visibly for a prominent place. She loved
unconventionally, knowing what she wanted in men, and it made her
miserable.
And then we have Edwards, who is lightly
biographied (and with older biographies apparently eager to "sanitize"
her personal life). She did not seek martyrdom; she wanted to live. In a world dominated by men, she did not visibly - at least in this book - brawl, but took her place with unshakable confidence, as if by sovereignty of nature. She loved
unconventionally and, as far as I can tell, it made her happy.
You get the feeling that you'd like West to write about you, positively or not. How would you be sketched or caricatured? What essential elements would she draw out? Or you feel like writing about your journeys and your friends the way West wrote about her friends, amplifying every coffee shop and polishing every witty remark.
But I'd much rather travel with Edwards. It would be exhausting, and some choice words would be exchanged on the subject of yet another pre-dawn donkey ride to some damn obelisk or another, but she'd deal with adversity cheerfully and always have an educational anecdote ready to fill an awkward silence. With West, I feel like I'd quote the Principia Discordia at her, then fling myself out of a moving train and spread my brains over the countryside while she responded with some devastatingly accurate counterpoint.
Is it better to be viewed as an object to be admired or a subject to by psycoanalyzed? To be distantly sketched or vividly skewered?
Is it better to conceal your opinions and let time and softening memories keep you ever on the right side, or write them down every bold prediction and temporary certainty? It's very easy to laugh at people who make predictions - fun too - but if you had to write down your views on any given subject, no matter how trivial, how would they turn out in a few years or decades? How many wild inconsistencies would future critics find? And if people started to take you seriously, how seriously would you take yourself?
And what the hell was the point of all this anyway?
Final Notes
In the myth, the Prophet Elijah (in the form of a grey falcon) offered Prince Lazar a choice between a humiliating defeat that would nevertheless ensure his personal salvation, and victory and temporal peace. He chose defeat and paradise. "All was holy, all was honorable. / And the goodness of God was fulfilled." And West detested him for it.
In game design, accepted wisdom says the worst possible rating is 6/10. It's far more useful to get a 1/10 or a 10/10. A 6, a "meh, it's OK, but nothing special" is significantly worse than rabid loathing or toe-curling delight. A strong reaction ties people to your game; a decent, better-than-middle-of-the-road rating ensures your work will be forgotten.
In
the internet rationalism crowd, the successors of the Fabian society
and the Algonquin Round Table as far as I can tell, all the leading
lights seem to lead deeply unhappy lives. People who claim profound
insights into the clashes of nations and the arc of human existence live
in squalid apartments strewn with the wreckage of failed relationships and dead-end careers.
The conclusion is obvious; the more you analyze your life and your desires, the less
happy you become. There's some sort of bell curve. Analyze a bit, then hit the brakes, lest you think yourself into a tragedy.
I might read A Thousand Miles up the Nile again, but I doubt it, unless I have a specific reference to look up or a quote I'd like to use.
I will almost certainly reread, and reread, and reread, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.
Which one chose defeat and paradise? Which one chose victory?
