At the Top of the Greasy Pole

I started my odyssey through Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series of political novels in early 2011, beginning with Can You Forgive Her? I said at the outset of my review of this book that the year was to be my Trollope period, an author I had hitherto overlooked. Well, I only made it as far as Phineas Redux, the fourth in the series, which I reviewed in October, 2011, just before a trip to Egypt. I was sidetracked, as I am invariably am, setting off in the pursuit of various literary foxes, shifting from one horse to another in mid-gallop. I took time out but I was out for almost a year and a half! 

Now I’m back on course, having finished The Prime Minister, the sequel to Phineas Redux, at the weekend. Once again I immersed myself in the high Victorian political and social milieu; once again I was captivated by the intrigues and the machinations of Trollope’s most engaging character – Lady Glencora Palliser, now the Duchess of Omnium. Her husband, Plantagenet Palliser, the Duke of Omnium, formerly the Chancellor of the Exchequer and now the Prime Minister, has at last made it to the top of the greasy pole, but, oh my, what a struggle she has trying to stop him from sliding back down! 

Her problem is simply stated: Plantagenet is the noblest Roman of them all, something of a drawback when it comes to the realities of modern political life. He heads a coalition, a compromise on men and measures, cobbled together to break a political deadlock. He becomes Prime Minister, moreover, simply because there is no one else suitable at the time, not as the fruit of his own ambition. But, alas, he is not comfortable in the role; he is far too honest, far too thin-skinned and far, far too scrupulous. The Duchess, if only it were possible, could have done it so much better;

They should have made me Prime Minister...I could have done all the dirty work. I could have given away garters and ribbons and made my bargains while giving them. I would give pensions or withheld them and make stupid men peers..... a man at a regular office has to work and that is what Plantagenet is fit for. He wants always to be doing something...............but a Prime Minister should never go beyond generalities about commerce, agriculture, peace and general philanthropy. Of course he should have the gift of the gab and that Plantagenet hasn't got....I could do a Mansion House dinner to a marvel.

Oh, Glencora, you were a hundred years too early! 

The truth is that the Duke, for all his moral rectitude, or because of his moral rectitude, is a dull dog, high-minded but uninspiring, wholly unsuited for a position which demands the kind of personal and managerial skills that he simply does not have. Does Trollope conceive of him as an admirable figure? Yes, he obviously does, though he is clearly one best suited the second rank of political life, far better as a Chancellor, where he can ponder the ins and outs of decimalisation – one of his obsessions – without having to concern himself with the kind of things that the Duchess understands are an essential part of effective leadership. A good Prime Minister has to be a consummate actor. Glencora realises this; Plantagenet does not. No, that’s not quite true: he does not want to play a part. Playing a part, to be more exact, involves compromising his Olympian ideals of probity and honour. 

Those who are interested in present day English political realities will find The Prime Minister dryly amusing at points, not least when the author touches on the nature of coalition government. England does not love coalitions, Disraeli said. That may be true, but England has to suffer coalition;

...coalitions of this kind have been generally feeble, sometimes disastrous, and on occasions, even disgraceful. When a man, perhaps through a long political life, has bound himself to a certain code of opinions, how can he change the code in a moment? And when at the same moment, together with the change, he secures power, patronage, and pay, how shall the public voice absolve him? 

The Prime Minister is certainly a political novel, but the game – unlike the novels of Disraeli himself - is played in the minor key; the politics are the personal. There are really no high ideological issues at stake, no great clash of principles. The focus, rather, is on social, sexual and domestic politics, the politics of marriage above all, particularly as this bears on property relations. 

The author is particularly good on the position of women in the Victorian world. Marriage to a virtuous gentleman, as he sees it, is that highest thing they can aim for, but he does not shy away from the penalties: the frustration of limited prospects and circumscribed lives. It’s also a novel of contrasting types. There is the practical Glencora, a foil to the high-minded Plantagenet. But the greatest contrast of all is between the Duke, a very perfect, gentle knight, and one Ferdinand Lopez, a parvenu, an interloper and - in his personal impact on the lifes of those with whom he comes into contact - something of an incubus. 

Where Lopez comes from, who and what his antecedents were, and how this outsider managed to graft himself on to the highest reaches of English society is never fully explained. Why Glencora takes him up – with unfortunate consequences for her husband – is also something of a mystery, given that he is wholly without connections or influence. Lopez, as an interloper, becomes the butt of all sorts of mid-Victorian prejudices. He is “a man without a father, a foreigner, a black Portuguese nameless Jew...[with] a bright eye, a hook nose and a glib tongue.” Whether or not Lopez is Jewish he certainly takes on the role of the unscrupulous financier, comparing himself at one point to Shakespeare’s Shylock.

Lopez is the kind of figure that might very well find a resonance with a modern readership, particularly as we all now live in ABC – the Aftermath of the Banking Crisis. He’s not a banker himself but he is a speculator, a man who uses the money of others wholly without any kind of scruple. Amongst other things he deals in guano, which may or may not be intended to convey the author’s own estimation of a particular kind of entrepreneurial capitalism! Lopez has nothing, no background, no wealth, no prospects; nothing beyond his wit. 

In his smooth glibness, he manages to contract a socially advantageous marriage to one Emily Wharton, the daughter of a wealthy lawyer, who also happens to be a scion of England’s old rural Tory squirearchy. 

I’ve admired a great many of Trollope’s female characters hitherto, particularly Glencora (who could not admire and love her?), Madame Max Goesler and even the colourful and slightly disreputable Lizzie Eustace. 

Emily Wharton is a contrast in every way; she is a crashing bore. Her one defining characteristic is a perverse obstinacy, coupled with dog-like notions of duty. She is obstinate in her desire to marry Lopez, though she knows nothing about him, and she is obstinate in widowhood – sorry for the spoiler – when he has conveniently been dispatched, Anna Karenina-style, though he had previously used her shamefully in an attempt to milk her father's wealth. After his death she descends into morbid mourning, even though the marriage was a disaster. In fact her widowhood becomes a badge of personal self-immolation. The man was unworthy of her; she should never have married; she rejected honest and true love; it's all her fault - mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa. Why poor Andrew Fletcher, part of the family’s county set, continued in his unrelenting devotions I have no idea! 

I was tempted to write that The Prime Minister is a kind of comedy of manners, except there is not really much in the way of comedy (The Duchess has a few good self-deprecating lines, though). It’s certainly a superb panorama, ranging over aspects of Victorian life, attitudes and manners at the higher reaches of society, the kind of parts that Dickens never reached or wanted to reach. Trollope, moreover, has a crisp and engaging style. 

There is also, at least it seems to me, an intriguing ambiguity in his message. He obviously disapproves of the morally reprehensible Lopez, but Lopez, or people like him, were the motors of Victorian transformation, the risk takers and the deal makers. Is he really suggesting that the only alternative is the unimpeachable Whartons and Fletchers, the epitome of rural stasis and torpor? Ah, but as Abel Wharton, Emily's father, reflects "...the world was changing around him every day. Royalty was marrying out of its degree. Peers' sons were looking only for money. And, more than that, peers' daughters were bestowing themselves on Jews and shopkeepers." The world is changing, yes, but all change is accompanied by fear, uncertainty and prejudice. 

Anyway, read it and make up your own mind. I assure you it’s well worth the effort. You may even, like me, be engaged enough to cry out in frustration when the plot takes a particular turn, or certain characters prove to be more than usually annoying. I defy anyone, moreover, not to hate Quintus Slide the newspaper proprietor, as slimy as any modern press baron.

So, yes, I’ve bagged my fifth literary Munro in the Trollope range. I spy the last, The Duke’s Children, in the distance. I promise my next review shall not be as distant. 

In Praise of Tolkien

  

Once again I’ve been back to Middle Earth.  What a delight it was to arrive in The Shire in times BLR - before Lord of the Rings; what a delight it was to see Bilbo in his youth in The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey. 

This is not a movie review.  All I will say is that The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien’s slender prequel to The Lord of the Rings trilogy, has itself been padded out into a trilogy, of which An Unexpected Journey is the first part.  Bilbo’s journey is thus considerably longer than expected.  The yarn has been spun out, unnecessarily so, some might conclude.    

No, it’s not a movie review.  I want to talk about something else altogether: I want to talk about old J. R. R. as a cultural colossus.  Germaine Greer, that 60s feminist fossil, once wrote that it was her nightmare that Tolkien would turn out to be the ‘most influential’ writer of the twentieth century.  What she meant, in her snooty and condescending way, was that he would turn out to be the most popular. 

Tolkien’s popularity might very well be said to be the nightmare of all the Marxist and sub-Marxist literati, forever perplexed by the obduracy of the Masses, who consistently refused to be impressed by such groundbreaking works as The Intellectual Eunuch or Revolutionary Thought for Infants.  Edmund Wilson, that political fraud and fellow traveller, once dismissed The Lord of the Rings as “balderdash” and “juvenile trash.”  By the end of the last century that selfsame “balderdash” and “juvenile trash” was crowned in a survey by English readers as “the greatest book of the twentieth century.”  I expect it was all just a massive case of false consciousness.

Now I do not want you to think I’m a Tolkien groupie, one of the army who believe that the Master is beyond all criticism; I’m most assuredly not.  I do not think that The Lord of the Rings is ‘the greatest book’ of the twentieth century; far from it.  For me it’s too much of a boy’s own world, a muscular masculine mythology created by a retiring Oxford don.  But I can understand the enthusiasm for Middle Earth, for hobbits, elves, dwarfs, wizards, trolls and orcs.  I can understand, above all, the enthusiasm for The Shire, really an idealised England, Merry England, if you like, of a mythical and pre-industrial age. 

The thing is, you see, while Tolkien may not the most influential writer of the last or any other century, he has a good claim to be the most influential conservative writer, and the emphasis really does have to be placed on conservative.  He is the most influential simply because he is the most reassuring, speaking directly to the sub-political conservatism of ordinary people.

George Orwell would have understood this.  In the second part of The Road to Wigan Pier, a journey into England’s industrial north in the 1930s, he discusses the problem of socialism.  In his view socialism, as a cure for the ills of the time, was a jolly good thing.  Even so, he was objective enough to understand that, as a political philosophy, it was deeply repellent to ‘spiritually sensitive’ people.  Why?  Simply because socialism, as he puts it, is essentially an urban creed.  It’s also a creed bound up a theory of endless mechanisation, in the worship of machines.  It must lead to some form of collectivisation; it demands things that are “not compatible with a primitive way of life.”

Middle Earth is a ‘primitive way of life’; life in The Shire is harmonious and primitive, Arcadia at its most benign.  Tolkien spins a moral fable not just of good and evil, but one in which evil is represented as the antithesis of nature.  The orcs are not born; they are tortured into existence, manufactured, if you like.  They serve as the helots of industry.  Who can forget that scene in The Two Towers, the second part of Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movie trilogy, where Saruman, the evil wizard, muses on the future of Middle Earth?  As his orcs are busy destroying Fangorn Forest, the trees to be used as fuel in subterranean manufactories, he sees a new world arising, a joyless world where all are subject to the machine.

In a recent article in the political journal Standpoint (Why do precious leftists loathe Tolkien’s Shire?), David Platt drew my attention to A. N. Wilson’s Age of Elizabeth II.  This opens with a tribute to Tolkien, whom the author regarded as the “towering English literary genius of the Queen’s reign.”  For him Tolkien, in his gloomier mood, presaged the post-war destruction of English life, the dismantling of our cohesive social conventions.  The Shire is the yeoman republic, faced with the onward march of industry, urbanisation and deforestation.

Tolkien’s political message is clear enough.  Those familiar with the novels will be aware that Jackson left out an important postscript in his adaptation of The Return of the King.  The Ring of Power has been destroyed.  Their quest completed, Frodo and the other hobbits return to the Shire, hoping to recapture a home that history has passed by.  But it has not.  Saruman has come.  As Platt says in his article, a collectivist and totalitarian regime has been imposed on the Shire folk, one that is subsequently overthrown in a popular coup.  The attack on post-war socialism could not be more direct. 

Tolkien!, thou should’st be living at this hour: England hath need of thee.  Just imagine what he would have made of the Shire now; just imagine what this professor of Anglo-Saxon and advocate of Beowulf would have made of our yeoman republic in its senescence.  How he would have loathed our world of political correctness, regulation and shabby acronyms, a world where political labels like Conservative, Liberal and Socialist have become practically meaningless as one movement melds into another, as England merges more and more into a ghastly Continental Mordor, watched over by the Great Eye of Brussels. 

So, yes, Tolkien speaks to the conservative in all of us, regardless of our particular politics.  He speaks to all those who reverence the past, all those who despise theory, anything contrived and artificial.  In a deeper sense he speaks to all those who have a love of England and its ancient folkways.  OK, I confess to a personal lack of realism here, nostalgia for things that perhaps never were, for an England of wolves, of fens and of myths, an England where Grendel still broods in the marsh. But I prefer that to Greer and all her howling eunuchs.  

Lawrence and Lovers

I was asked recently for my view on the writer D. H. Lawrence, particularly in reference to his perception of women.  This is my view, uncompromising in my inimitable, no prisoners fashion.  If you admire Lawrence and his writing what follows comes with an apoplexy warning! 

Sons and Lovers was one of the set texts in my English Lit class at high school, really my first acquaintance with Lawrence. I didn't like it at all. More than that - I hated it. But, since it's wrong to judge a writer on the basis of one book, I persevered, reading Women in Love and Lady Chatterley’s Lover, as well as some of his shorter fiction.

Evelyn Waugh said that Lawrence could not write for toffee, which is far too mild a criticism; he could not write for anything. As far as I am concerned he is a complete literary fraud, one who managed to achieve a fashionable notoriety. His prose is cloying, indulgent and wholly inauthentic. I've likened it to wading through treacle. I particularly despise his bogus metaphysics, his soft-soap spirituality. I remember in Sons and Lovers stumbling over 'soul' in every other sentence, as if using the word ad nauseum somehow gave his writing soul. It most assuredly did not.

I'm getting away from the point, which is his perception of women. He knew absolutely nothing about women. His understanding of feminine psychology is impoverished in the extreme, rather odd in that he gave women a leading part in a number of his books. But these are not women as women; these are not people as people. They are manikins; women reflected through a particular set of male attitudes; women there, if you like, not in their own right but to affirm and reassure men. They are objects, not subjects.

Let's look specifically at Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Poor Connie; a sexually impotent husband and a brutish lover like Mellors the gamekeeper, a sort of avatar of Lawrence himself. For all its explicit sexuality it's a completely unerotic book, as lifeless as the products of modern day pornography. Women only exist as submissive chattels. If they are in any way sexually assertive, well, then, they must be lesbians. Otherwise it's lie back and think of England; no love, no passion, no intimacy, no tenderness; just pointless animalistic thrusting.

Is it really a surprise that the only intimacy Mellors is able to achieve is when he is sodomising Connie? And as far as Connie's own attitude towards sex is concerned you have the Mellors/Lawrence commandeering her point of view: "And how, in fear, she had hated it! But how she had really wanted it." There you are - the literary justification for rape. No really does mean yes.

Then there is Mellors wife, who can only get sexual satisfaction through masturbation. He, in his disgust, "took her by the neck and squeezed the life out of her." You see the only women who get satisfaction out of sex, according to Mellors and Lawrence, are black - more like animals -, but they are a turn off for white men because they "look like mud." Quite frankly there is more sexual sadism than love in Lawrence's oeuvre. He knew nothing of women and less of love. He is the last person I would trust to say anything meaningful about real women and real love.

I hope in time more and more people will understand just what a phoney he was, just how worthless most of his writing is insofar as it touches on genuine human feelings and emotions. There is a lot of soul, though.

I wrote about him here a couple of years ago, a piece I headed A Load of Balls (November 4, 2010), which really sums up my view. And here is my summing up -

The thing is I think Lawrence is a grossly overrated writer. I’ve read his main novels, beginning with Sons and Lovers, and I’ve hated them all; hated his overripe metaphysics, his bogus and insincere spirituality, his inflated and unlikable characters and his florid use of language. There is nothing in Lady Chatterley’s Lover that could possibly ‘deprave and corrupt’…it’s just an overblown mess, a bad book by a second rate writer. All the naughty words, all the ‘arse’, ‘fuck’, ‘fucking’, ‘shit’ and ‘balls’ will never make up for the fact that Lady Chatterley, like the rest of this unpleasant man’s canon, is, well, a load of balls.

The prosecution rests.

Past Spirits

I wrote this article at the turn of the year, shortly after visiting the exhibition in question. I held it over until today to mark the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens, one of England’s greatest writers and most generous spirits.

I loved all of my grandparents, but father’s father was the biggest single influence in my life. He died when I was twenty, almost six years ago now. I still miss him, I miss the things we used talk about and the stories he used to tell, wonderful stories of his time in India both before and during the Second World War, stories of his life at school, stories of his Norfolk boyhood.

It was he who introduced me to the tingly pleasures of the ghost story. It’s the winter nights I remember best, cold outside, warm within, when he read aloud, fire blazing and lights dimmed (candle light was best), the tales of haunting long ago. It was by his fireside that I was introduced to the delights of Elizabeth Gaskell, Sheridan Le Fanu, Algernon Blackwood, M. R. James (really scary!), E. F. Benson and so many others. It was by his fireside that I first heard Charles Dickens’ tales of the supernatural, not just A Christmas Carol, the most famous ghost and morality fable ever written, but others like The Signalman and The Ghost in the Bride’s Chamber.

Like me, Dickens was introduced to ghost stories early in life. It was the tales told in childhood that left him with a life-long hankering after ghosts, which just so happens to be the title of a rather charming little exhibition presently being held in the Folio Society Gallery in the British Library!

Scheduled to run until early March, A Hankering after Ghosts: Charles Dickens and the Supernatural displays the author’s interest through a variety of printed media. I went not long before Christmas, which added to the general cosiness of the whole thing. So far as I am concerned the way it was laid out could not be bettered. It presents, if you like, a study in ambivalence: Dickens’s fascination with the subject, informed by his childhood influences, on the one hand, and the scepticism of a mid-Victorian rationalist, on the other.

It’s a kind of voyage in several stages, beginning with childhood, illustrations from The Arabian Nights along with a copy of The Terrific Register, a kind of penny dreadful that the writer read in his teens with lasting effect, not surprising, given the lurid nature of its content. He later recalled that it used to frighten the wits out of his head!

But he recovered them sufficiently to treat some of the more farcical Victorian obsessions, particularly with spiritualism, with amusing condescension. Apparitions and other manifestations of the supernatural could be reduced to natural causes, so he believed. In Well Authenticated Rappings, a satirical sketch published in 1858 in Household Words, an uncanny voice in the narrator’s head turns out to be no more than a thumping Boxing Day hangover. There is more of spirits than spirit about you, one is tempted to observe.

While he could mock the spiritualists, Dickens entertained his own fashionable notions, including a belief in spontaneous combustion (think of Krook in Bleak House) and, most particularly, in mesmerism. His own efforts here were to cause a slight rift with his wife Catherine, as an 1853 letter shows, after the author’s magnetism with one Augusta de la Rue appeared to her to be a little too animal!

In the end one is simply left with the ghost story as a story, all rational explanations aside. It’s not about the real or even the surreal world; it’s simply about imagination and the power of imagination. Here Dickens did so much to stimulate contemporary interest. His ghosts, it might be said, are comfortably bourgeois, no longer inhabiting Gothic piles but Victorian firesides; his apparitions are ever more fearful for appearing by the side of something as modern as the railway.

Now let me say a word or two in appreciation of John Leech, the man who created the splendid illustrations that make A Christmas Carol even more memorable. There is the manifestation of Marley, the magnificent Odin-like figure of The Ghost of Christmas Present and, the most chilling of all, The Last of the Spirits pointing to Scrooge’s doom. As an aside here I have to say that a lot of the film adaptations of A Christmas Carol hopelessly miss the point, seeing this encounter as the decisive moment. It’s not; it’s only the final part of Scrooge’s gradual redemption.

Andrea Lloyd, the curator of the exhibition, has written of its theme and purpose;

Dickens is already closely aligned with Victorian ghost stories in many people’s minds largely because of the success of A Christmas Carol. However, Dickens touches upon the supernatural in many of his other works, revealing his thoughts about unexplained phenomena, which in turn reflect the evolving scientific theories and beliefs that were prevalent in 19th century England. At this time people were debating the virtues of mesmerism and animal magnetism, getting caught up in the Spiritualism craze that arrived from America, and actively investigating and recording ghostly phenomena. By engaging with this vogue for the supernatural, and by tapping into the Victorian attraction to the macabre, Dickens created some of his finest works.

He did more than that. As G. K Chesterton once wrote, he did not strictly make a literature; he made a mythology. I thought of Dickens; I thought of the ghosts of Christmas past, not long past, my past; I thought of my beloved grandfather, to whose memory this article is dedicated.

The Year of Dickens

David Lodge, writing in the December issue of Prospect magazine (Our Mutual Friend), has reminded me that this coming February marks an important event in the literary calendar – the two hundredth anniversary of the birth of Charles Dickens.

A whole series of events are planned to mark the occasion, a torrent of Dickens, in publications, conferences, exhibitions, as well as new film and television adaptations of his work. A statue is also scheduled to be unveiled in Portsmouth in August, the town where he was born.

I’ve written before just how much I love his work (Adoring Dickens, May 27, 2010), so I expect to go, to see, to attend and to read as the mood takes me. The Museum of London is putting on a special exhibition about the writer’s links with the city. In so many ways he’s the chronicler of nineteenth century London, in good times and in bad. His is another human comedy. When asked why he was my favourite author I replied it was because I loved his Dante-like journeys through Victorian London, a great panorama, peopled with the most wonderful eccentrics; with the bad who are very bad and the good who are very good, archetypes one and all.

The BBC, who have produced some excellent adaptations of his novels in the past, are apparently planning several new screenings, including two of Great Expectations – a serial and a movie – and one of The Mystery of Edwin Drood. I shall be particularly interested in the latter because the mystery was never solved, the novel a permanent enigma, unfinished at the time of the author’s death. Presumably some kind of resolution will be offered.

I have a number of previous adaptations on DVD, including two TV serials of Bleak House, a 1985 version starring Denholm Elliot as John Jarndyce and the 2005 version, which I watched at the time, broadcast twice weekly in a half hour, soap opera-style, format, as opposed to the usual hour long classic series format. The latter was particularly noted for the performance of X-Files Gillian Anderson in the role of Lady Deadlock.

Dickens' place in the imagination is now unshakeable, second only to Shakespeare. Even people who have never read him will almost certainly know of some of his characters, Ebenezer Scrooge most of all, as much a part of Christmas as Santa Claus. Indeed in A Christmas Carol Dickens might have been said to have invented the modern form of the seasonal holiday. In past time, before the seventeenth century Civil Wars, it was in part a religious holiday and in part an excuse for a drunken ruckus, represented by the slightly disreputable figure of Father Christmas (not at all like Santa!) and the Lord of Misrule. A Christmas Carol recreated it in the image of Victorian bourgeois respectability and homeliness, a time of feasting, family togetherness and fun, all of the most wholesome kind! God bless us, every one.

After his death in 1870 Dickens work went gradually out of fashion, at least among the high priests of literary taste. The process accelerated, as Lodge argues in his essay, after the First World War, a time of a revaluation of all Victorian values by a generation that left cosy sentimentality in the mud of Flanders. In Evelyn Waugh’s 1934 novel A Handful of Dust the protagonist is held captive by the mad and illiterate Mr Todd, who forces him to read the work of Dickens aloud until the day he dies. This particular fate was among the worst that Waugh could imagine, as his father, a past president of the Dickens Society, insisted on reading aloud to him and his brother.

In a brave new literary world, given to introspection, psychology and floating along on a stream of consciousness, there was no room for someone as playfully unconcerned with deeper motives and states of mind as the great Victorian bard. F. R Leavis in The Great Tradition, a seminal work of literary criticism, excludes Dickens altogether from the pantheon of English literature, on the snooty grounds that “…his genius was that of a great entertainer, and he had for the most part no profounder responsibility as a creative artist than this description suggests.”

But Dickens has endured. He has found a new and ever growing audience. Why? Simply because he is beyond all fashion; because he is so human, a true craftsman in words, a great shaper of the human spirit, a writer of boundless humanity and simple generosity. I’ve read most of his novels more than once, David Copperfield three times in all, finding fresh delights each time, hating Mr Murdstone just as much as I did on first acquaintance! Doubtless I shall read it and the others again. I may even, in future times, read them aloud to my own children. :-)

Heil, Bertie!

Open any anthology on fascism and there is bound to be an introduction telling you that fascism is difficult if not impossible to define. At my own risk I’ll hazard a definition: fascists, generally speaking, are wholly devoid of a sense of humour.

Let me give you a practical example. Take the great humorist P. G. Wodehouse, the satirist of the English upper classes, the creator of Jeeves and Bertie Wooster, possibly the greatest craftsman in words that our language and literature ever produced. Jeeves and Bertie are his best known creations, but there is also Roderick Spode.

Those who love Wodehouse will know all there is to know about Roderick Spode, the seventh earl of Sidcup, the founder of the Black Shorts, because when he got round to fascist politics there were no more shirts!

Now just imagine any Italian or German author writing about Mussolini or Hitler in the way that Wodehouse wrote about Spode, an obvious parody of Sir Oswald Mosley, the real-life leader of the British Union of Fascists. You know and I know what would have happened to such foolhardy souls. You know and I know what would have happened to anyone who could have written this;

The trouble with you, Spode, is that just because you have succeeded in inducing a handful of half-wits to disfigure the London scene by going about in black shorts, you think you're someone. You hear them shouting "Heil, Spode!" and you imagine it is the Voice of the People. That is where you make your bloomer. What the Voice of the People is saying is: "Look at that frightful ass Spode swanking about in footer bags! Did you ever in your puff see such a perfect perisher?"

There are few writers more brilliant than Wodehouse and few less political. Caught up in the German invasion of France in 1940, he was subsequently interned as an enemy alien (“If this is Upper Silesia one wonders what Lower Silesia must be like.”) Released on the grounds of age, he went on to make a series of broadcasts in the summer of 1941 from Berlin at the behest of the Propaganda Ministry, light-hearted banter on life in Europe in typical Wodehouse style, intended for an American audience, for a people not yet at war.

Light-hearted or not, apolitical or not, they were enough for some in England to condemn him as a traitor. In hysterical over-reaction some libraries banned his books, clearly not conscious of the political irony here. He was even accused with total absurdity of being a Quisling, after the notorious Norwegian collaborator. As late as December 1944 in Parliament it was urged that he should be indicted on a charge of treason. Most absurd of all were those who combed through his books looking for ‘fascist tendencies’. What, fascist tendencies, in Bertie Wooster?! Oh, well, maybe in Jeeves.

Wodehouse was later to describe the decision to give these broadcasts as naïve, not treasonable or malicious. He was certainly not treacherous in the way that, say, Ezra Pound was treacherous, broadcasting in a distinctly political manner from Rome. But the criticism, hurtful and vicious on the part of some, caused him to move permanently to America after the war, where he became a citizen in 1955. It was an outcome anticipated by George Orwell in any essay published ten years earlier;

In the desperate circumstances of the time, it was excusable to be angry at what Wodehouse did, but to go on denouncing him three or four years later -- and more, to let an impression remain that he acted with conscious treachery -- is not excusable. Few things in this war have been more morally disgusting than the present hunt after traitors and Quislings…I have striven to show how the wretched Wodehouse -- just because success and expatriation had allowed him to remain mentally in the Edwardian age -- became the corpus vile in a propaganda experiment, and I suggest that it is now time to regard the incident as closed. If Ezra Pound is caught and shot by the American authorities, it will have the effect of establishing his reputation as a poet for hundreds of years; and even in the case of Wodehouse, if we drive him to retire to the United States and renounce his British citizenship, we shall end by being horribly ashamed of ourselves.

Sad to say the accusations have not entirely gone away, fresh fuel being added by a recently declassified Ministry of Intelligence (MI5) memo, part of a file on Werner Plack, an official of the German Foreign Office who acted as Wodehouse’s minder. Reported recently in the Times, it mentions an interview with H. W. Flannery, an American journalist, in which the author is alleged to have said that he was at liberty in Berlin but had to report occasionally to a “Mr. Slack or Black or something”, whom he claimed to have met while in the internment camp.

The memo says “This clearly referred to Werner Plack and was clearly intended to suggest that Wodehouse had so little acquaintance with the German foreign office official that he was uncertain as to his name.” But MI5 already knew that Wodehouse was acquainted with Plack, the two having met in Hollywood prior to the war, where the German was acting as a film extra and a spy. The memo concludes “This incident suggests that Wodehouse is not always quite as frank and ingenious [sic] as he pretends.”

Oh, my, what a heavy burden of guilt, a Plack by any other name would smell as sour! Poor old P. G; poor old Bertie, the one moment in his life when he really needed Jeeves the dashed fellow had taken a spot of French leave!

Although Wodehouse was later to admit that he had, in his own words, made a ‘ghastly mistake’ in broadcasting from Berlin, he categorically denied Flannery’s statement that he had been misleadingly vague about his contacts with Plack.

It would seem obvious that Flannery, a rabid anti-Nazi who believed – wrongly – that Wodehouse had done a deal with the Germans to get out of the internment camp, is far from being a reliable source. But no matter; if this is the weight of the evidence then it is ludicrously light.

I would excuse Wodehouse anything, a return for all the delight he gave me when I was at school, trying to suppress my laughter, reading undercover by torchlight after lights out. We, as a nation, treated him shabbily when he should have been treasured. Our loss was America’s gain.

It is a good rule in life never to apologize. The right sort of people do not want apologies, and the wrong sort take a mean advantage of them.

A Vixen’s Tale

I’ve now completed The Eustace Diamonds, the third in Anthony Trollope’s Palliser series of political novels; another milestone passed; another three to go! I enjoyed Can you Forgive Her? and Phineas Finn, the Irish Member though not nearly as much as the story of Lizzie Eustace and a legacy which brings more trouble than pleasure. It seems to me that the author is much more assured here in his treatment of themes, of plotting and of character, his style much more relaxed, perceptive and gently ironic.

The Eustace Diamonds is said to be the least political of the six. The Pallisers hardly feature at all – though Plantagenet’s obsession with decimalisation makes yet another appearance! -, apart from Lady Glencora's brief lobbying on behalf of Lizzie, taken in as is almost everyone else by this duplicitous woman, such a contrast to the earnest and po-faced Alice Vavasor of Can you Forgive Her?

Yes, Lizzie Eustace is an anti-hero. She reminds me in some ways of Becky Sharp from Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (was this the author’s intention?), though she doesn’t have the same kind of wit or native cunning. Becky makes things happen; things tend to happen to Lizzie, though she is not averse to scheming and lying to try and turn them her way.

It may not be a political novel as such – though the politics of property features highly – but it offers the most marvellous insight into Victorian mores, into contemporary attitudes to property, to wealth, to social relationships and to marriage. Like Vanity Fair, it’s essentially a comedy of manners or a social satire, though not quite as sweeping and as richly textured.

Lizzie Greystock, the daughter of an impecunious Admiral, is a social climber who has climbed quite effectively, making an advantageous marriage to a baronet, Sir Florian Eustace, who conveniently dies, leaving her - as Lady Eustace - with an income, a castle in Scotland and fabulously rich set of diamonds. However, that is not the end of her problems; it’s the beginning.

My, those diamonds; what a burden they are, and not just for the footman who is obliged to carry them from place to place in a strongbox! The problem is that the lawyer acting for the estate insists that the diamonds are not hers at all but an heirloom which should be held in trust, in the face of Lizzie’s insistence that they were a personal gift from her late husband.

I think a Victorian audience would have been more sympathetic to the legal nuances arising here, which now seems all so refined and perhaps rather pointless, especially as the jewels will eventually pass to Lizzie’s younger son, the heir of the Eustace estate. I confess I did not quite understand the motives of Camperdown, the family lawyer, in his relentless pursuit of Lizzie, yea, even so far as the Court of Chancery (Dickens’ Bleak House should be sufficient warning to those who want to take matters there!), especially as John Eustace, her brother-in-law and the nominal head of the family, does not show the same determination. Of course the more legal time the greater the costs, sufficient motive in itself, I suppose.

It’s Lizzie’s misfortune to alienate just about everyone around her, including Lord Fawn, her fiancé, a rather tepid individual and ineffectual member of the Liberal government (her final letter rejecting his already withdrawn marriage proposal had me in stitches!), though her cousin Frank Greystock, whom she deceives without scruple, remains loyal almost to the end.

Abandoned by most decent society, she cultivates her own déclassé and ever so slightly disreputable set, including one Lord George de Bruce Caruthers (one can just picture the twirling moustaches!), a potential suitor and a ‘Corsair’ (Lizzie is an admirer of the poetry of Byron), the grasping Mrs Carbuncle and Lucinda, her self-centred niece, and Sir Griffin Tewett, a man with little in the way of grace or finesse, recalling for me Sir Percival Glyde, the villain of Willkie Collins' The Woman in White. There is also the oleaginous Mister Emilius, the clergyman, who is playing his own disreputable game. All are destined to dance an amusing and wholly mercenary quadrille!

As always some of Trollope’s descriptive passages are quite brilliant, particularly the hunting scenes in which he excels, something I discovered from the two previous novels. The pursuit of the fox is fascinating but not nearly as fascinating as the pursuit of Lizzie the vixen, the most elusive quarry of all.

There are a few things that puzzled me. I’m thinking specifically of Frank Greystock’s treatment of Lucy Morris, the penniless governess he falls in love with and promises to marry, only to neglect her, leaving his conduct, particularly with regard to Lizzie, who has her own designs on him, open to speculation.

It all comes good in the end, though the action here seems to take place ‘off stage,’ so to speak. Was it simply Frank’s insistence that made Lucy acceptable to his family? Was he having second thoughts? He couldn’t visit her while she was a guest of Lady Linlithgow because of her disapproval, but why did he not write?

Sorry; this is Trollope’s novel, not mine, and even with such lacunae it’s a jolly good read, an everyday story of upper class, and shady, Victorian folk. I was completely beguiled, no sooner finished than moving into the foothills of Phineas Redux, my next stage in the journey.

The Man who was Chesterton

One is invariably being pursued by one’s own prejudices; it takes speed and dexterity to avoid being caught! Unfortunately Paul Johnson, journalist and historian, is not quick enough. In a recent review of The Wit and Wisdom of G. K. Chesterton, a compilation of quotations by Bevis Hiller, he suggests that prejudice (“the BBC establishment has always hated him”) was responsible for a failure to televise the author’s Father Brown stories, though they are, in Johnson’s words, ‘a natural.’

A quick spot of research shows that this is not true. Some of the stories were televised, though not by the BBC. In 1974 ITV, the commercial television station, broadcast a series of thirteen episodes, staring the late Kenneth More in the title role. The series is still available on Amazon.

Johnson goes on to suggest reasons for this alleged hostility by the ‘establishment’, mentioning and dismissing Chesterton’s alleged anti-Semitism in passing, before alighting on the real cause as he sees it - the author’s Catholicism. Knowing Johnson, knowing something of his own background, I really have to say he would, wouldn’t he!

The more likely explanation, the explanation I see, is that Chesterton was one of those uneven writers who just stopped being fashionable. He stands in this regard in the same pantheon as Rudyard Kipling and Hilaire Belloc, somewhere on the outer reaches of imagination and taste; of their times, not ours.

This does not mean to say that he is a bad writer; far from it. I admit that my experience of his work is fairly limited, confined mostly to The Man who was Thursday, a novel published just over a hundred years ago, and some shorter pieces. I haven’t read the Father Brown stories and probably never shall because I consider the detective genre to be a lower class of fiction. There you are: a prejudice just caught up with me!

Still, sifting through The Wit and Wisdom has opened up possibilities, opened up some of the intellectual depths of this Oscar Wilde of the conservative right. I use this comparison deliberately simply because Chesterton made, in brilliant aphoristic style, one of the most telling observations about the fate of Wilde that I have ever read;

We feted and flattered Wilde because he preached such an attitude [a new immorality], then broke his heart in penal servitude because he carried it out.

Chesterton adopted something of the method, if not the immorality, to carry out his own counter-attack on those aspects of modernity that disturbed him most. Some of his observations are trenchant and witty; others just ill-placed and bad tempered, hence the uneven quality. I’ve compared him to Oscar Wilde though Hiller draws an altogether more apt parallel with Dr Samuel Johnson, whom he resembled not just in literary grumpiness but in corpulence!

I suppose Paul Johnson is right in part in suggesting that Chesterton’s faith accounts for some of the prejudice to which he alludes. But it seems to me it was less because he was a Catholic - by conversion, incidentally - than because he was more orthodox than the orthodox, often a symptom of any kind of conversion. His Catholicism seems to have been of a particularly obscurantist, neo-medieval kind, allowing him to dismiss the Enlightenment in one sweeping announcement: “I know of no question that Voltaire asked which St Thomas Aquinas did not ask before him – only St Thomas not only asked, but answered the questions.” This is a mind not so much closed but bolted shut!

There is grumpiness here; there is prejudice, attitudes that do not quite harmonise with the modern age, an observation I feel sure that would have delighted the reactionary old fogey, who wanted to return to a feudal economy where every man – no mention of women – would be allocated “two acres and a cow.” Yes, grumpiness and dottiness but also charm, good prose and intelligence; wit, occasionally, of quite brilliant intensity. What more could one ask for?

A load of balls

Is it possible to believe that the publication of a single book, a novel, would begin a major shift in sexual and cultural attitudes; that it would stand as marker on the road to free expression? Well, it did. The book in question is Lady Chatterley’s Lover by D. H Lawrence, a sexually explicit novel whose publication was only officially allowed in England in November 1960, thirty years after the author’s death, following the failure of a prosecution under the Obscene Publications Act. Philip Larkin’s poem Annus Mirabilis opens with his own wryly humorous comment on the significance of this;

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles' first LP.

In retrospect it’s difficult to believe just how backward, how antediluvian attitudes were, particularly among the political and legal establishment, towards sexual and artistic freedom in England prior to the lifting of the Chatterley ban, well out of step with far more progressive attitudes to such matters on Continental Europe. Even the mildest sexual references could provoke a reaction.

In 1928, for example, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, a novel which touched ever so gently on lesbian themes, was destroyed on the orders of a magistrate, horrified that a single line (“and that night they were not divided”) meant that the female protagonists had gone to bed together! The prosecution had even trundled in Rudyard Kipling, by then well past his best by date, just in case a literary expert was required, ready to persuade the court of the need “to keep the Empire pure.”

Publishers continued to be prosecuted for breaching uncodified rules on censorship for years after. Even as late as the 1950s books by James Joyce, Henry Miller, Lawrence Durrell and Cyril Connolly, amongst others, were only available to those who were able to bring them back from Paris, concealed, of course, from customs officials.

Then came the trial fifty years ago of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, which turned out to be a kind of contest between the old and the new. It actually began as a provocation, a test of the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, introduced with high-minded intentions, namely to draw a clear line separating literature from pornography. It was the decision of Penguin Books to publish an unexpurgated paperback edition that set the law in motion.

But what a challenge Lady Chatterley was for the morally self-righteous establishment: not only did it use the word fuck a lot, in the midst of a lot of fucking, but a titled lady was being fucked by the family gamekeeper. The horror! The horror! At one point Mervin Griffith-Jones, leading the prosecution, so antique that he would have been out of place in the nineteenth century, actually asked the jury, all male, of course, if they “would allow your wife or even your servants to read this book?” His was a world where wives were property and servants knew their place. Perhaps the worst thing of all from the perspective of Griffith-Jones and the winged-collared brigade is that the Penguin paperback was available for a few shillings (about twenty pence), well within the means of the randiest game keeper with an eye on aristocratic and frustrated wives!

Just as Kipling was ready to testify for the prosecution in 1928, a whole range of impressive literary figures had been contacted, this time, though, on behalf of the defence. The Obscene Publications Act allowed for expert testimony on a book’s literary merits, a provision not lost on the Penguin defence team. They managed to assemble a panel of the great and the greater of contemporary English letters: people like E. M Foster, Iris Murdoch, T. S Elliot, Graham Greene, J. B. Priestley and Aldous Huxley, to mention but a few, people who were prepared to testify directly or to write testimonials on the novel’s behalf.

There was one exception. Evelyn Waugh demurred, describing Lady Chatterley’s Lover as “dull, absurd in places and pretentious.” Of course none of this was relevant under the law. If it was a great many novels would fail the test, and save us all some excruciating hours! I think the prosecution was wrong, I think censorship in literature is wrong, and I’m glad that Penguin Books won the case…but I’m still in full agreement with Waugh: Lady Chatterley’s Lover is “dull, absurd in places and pretentious.”

The thing is I think Lawrence is a grossly overrated writer. I’ve read his main novels, beginning with Sons and Lovers, and I’ve hated them all; hated his overripe metaphysics, his bogus and insincere spirituality, his inflated and unlikable characters and his florid use of language.

There is nothing in Lady Chatterley’s Lover that could possibly ‘deprave and corrupt’, the test under the 1959 Act; it’s just an overblown mess, a bad book by a second rate writer. All the naughty words, all the ‘arse’, ‘fuck’, ‘fucking’, ‘shit’ and ‘balls’ will never make up for the fact that Lady Chatterley, like the rest of this unpleasant man’s canon, is, well, a load of balls. :-)

Congos and the Country People

When I discover a writer for the first time, someone I find impressive, I tend to work my way in a fever through everything they’ve written. So it was with Graham Greene, who came to me in my mid-teens. I read all of his novels, increasingly fascinated by the moral dilemmas he explores, his short stories and his non-fiction work, including Lord Rochester’s Monkey, an analysis of the poems and life of John Wilmot, second earl of Rochester, a notorious Restoration libertine, and Journey Without Maps, his account of a safari with his cousin Barbara through the West African state of Liberia in the 1930s.

I didn’t think too much about the latter: I saw it; I read it; I forgot it. But an article by Tim Butcher, formerly the Daily Telegraph’s Africa correspondent, in the October issue of History Today (Our Man in Liberia) has not just brought it back to mind but allowed me to focus more specifically on the context of the journey and the history of Liberia, a country, I confess, about which I know virtually nothing, beyond the fact that it was set up by freed slaves returning ‘home’ from the United States in the nineteenth century. The paradox is that Greene was sent to the place as an agent for the Anti-Slavery Society. The ancestors of slaves, in other words, were suspected of practicing slavery!

There are lots of paradoxes here. Liberia itself was a country created not on a principle of freedom but in part on specific forms of racism. The American Colonization Society, set up in the early nineteenth century, was run less by altruists than by those for whom free blacks in a slave-owning society were a problem. The ‘back to Africa’ project, in other words, was a way reinforcing slavery by removing an obvious anomaly.

The project was an early form, if you like, of ethnic cleansing, and was perceived to be such by many among the black population whose home was America, not an Africa of which they knew nothing. Those who did accept the offer of transportation were considered to be lackeys, people who betrayed the struggle against slavery in the United States. In the end only 11,000 agreed to take part in the Liberia venture.

These people were effectively dumped on the shores of what was to become Liberia in the 1820s, on lands bought from local tribal chiefs. Black these settlers may have been but African they most assuredly were not. As Butcher points out, a great many simply could not cope with the local conditions, killed off in large numbers by disease or by hostile tribes, much like the early white settlers in America.

By the late 1840s the population had reduced so much that questions were raised over the project’s viability. By this time the American Colonisation Society had lost all interest. The cords were cut and the few thousand survivors established Liberia as a sovereign nation, with a national motto of ‘The love of Liberty Brought Us Here.’

I used to believe that Liberia survived the late nineteenth century Scramble for Africa because it was under some kind of American protection. That’s the not the case: the simple fact is that it had nothing worth scrambling for. The first signs of any kind of national prosperity did not come until the 1920s, when the Firestone rubber company set up operations in the country.

It’s now that the real divisions began to appear between Americo-Liberians, known to the indigenous people as ‘Congos’, a reminder that it was from here that a huge number of Africans were taken into slavery in past times, and the ‘Country People’, the pejorative expression the settlers used for the native Liberians. It was the struggle between the Congos and the Country People that really defines modern Liberia, superficially called the ‘black republic’ by outsiders.

The greatest contradiction of all was over the issue of slavery, the issue that Greene came to explore. The founding charter of Liberia condemns the slave trade as “that curse of curses”, but by the late 1920s the government was selling its own people, the Country People, rather, into slavery. The Congos offered the bizarre defence that they had simply ‘acquired’ tribesmen disposed of by the village elders, thus preserving a longstanding tradition.

The problem kept coming and going, apparently solved at one moment only to appear at the next. In 1935 the Anti-Slavery and Aboriginal Protection Society described Liberia as “one of our most difficult and anxious problems.” Up to date information was needed and Greene, known from his work on The Times, was the man for the task.


Journey without Maps is far from being my favourite book by Greene; and it’s certainly far from being my favourite book about travel! This is not a trip into the exotic, something the author must have been expecting, but a monotonous sojourn through mile upon mile off elephant grass, punctuated by periodic meals with local villagers, eating something called ‘chop’, a lose term covering culinary horrors! Conditions were generally deplorable, particularly in health care. Greene himself took ill, so badly that he was not expected to live. But he did, thank goodness. No, Journey without Maps is not Conrad but it’s still a worthwhile reminder of past explorations and past times. Besides, the recent history of Liberia and Sierra Leone, through which the author also passed, show that when it comes to Africa darkness is never that far from the heart.

The Politics of Dickens

Charles Dickens was a middle-class, middle-brow, radical progressive- understood in the nineteenth century sense of the term- and something, on occasions, of an old-fashioned Tory paternalist, though I am quite aware that he would have hated to be described in such a fashion!

He hated backward-looking aristocratic reaction, the abuse of power by traditional elites; but he feared the consequences of revolution even more, the essential message of A Tale of Two Cities. He was not in favour of Chartism, as we can guess from hostile sentiments he expressed in his correspondence (Letters, III, 282). He celebrated the fall of the French July Monarchy in 1848, while worrying about the spread of 'public bedevilments’ to England.

His fear of the urban under-class was fully expressed in The Old Curiosity Shop, which takes Little Nell and her Grandfather into England's dangerous industrial heartlands. He hated, above all, forms of demagoguery, which, in his view, exploits the oppressed for selfish political ends. He is generous in his perceptions of the labouring-poor, those, that is, who are deserving of such generosity; people like Betty Higden in Our Mutual Friend. It is best, one supposes, that people like this do not think for themselves over-much, otherwise they end up like the muddle-headed Stephen Blackpool in Hard Times!

West is Best

Having been singularly impressed by my reading of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon I've since carried out a brief spot of research on Rebecca West, the author. What a truly remarkable person she was, a person with whom I can identify so strongly in so many ways. She is one of those people almost impossible to put in an easy intellectual or political compartment.

An early feminist, her causes would appear to have been largely of the left, and there is much on her book on Yugoslavia which would identify her with a form of socialism. But like George Orwell I think she is best understood as an English radical, a radical in the tradition set down by Jonathan Swift and Edmund Burke, the one a great Tory and the other a great Whig. They were all, in their individual ways, haters of ideology and the carriers of ideology.

West was one of the first to understand that the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia was a fraud. She was alerted to the violence of the new regime by Emma Goldman, an American anarchist who had experienced it at first hand, and was frustrated that her message was ignored by others on the left, most of whom were to remain blind to the realities of communism right through the period of Stalin's tyranny. For West people like Stalin had a criminal mentality that communism simply facilitated.

Loving Yugoslavia, she was outraged during the Second World War when the Allies decided to back Tito and his communist partisans rather than the royalist Chetniks, headed by Draža Mihailović. Her anti-communism intensified after the war when she saw the old states of Eastern Europe fall to Soviet imperialism. Unlike others on the liberal left she also took a relatively sanguine view of the Senator Joseph McCartney's pursuit of communist subversives in the United States.

I would say that by this point in her life West was objectively a figure of the libertarian right rather than the socialist left, completing a journey that George Orwell might have taken, though she never considered herself a conservative. But for the Labour Party, whose victory she welcomed in 1945, she was an uncomfortable ally, constantly critical of the domination of the trade unions and singularly unimpressed by such leaders as Michael Foot.

Paradoxically she was a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher, both for her achievement as a woman in rising to the top of a male-dominated establishment and for her readiness to stand up to bullying trade unionists like the reptilian Arthur Scargill, leader of the National Union of Mineworkers. The point is, I suppose, that she, unlike many others, was consistent in her radicalism, though she never quite slaked off the snake skin of socialism. Towards the end of her life the true radicals were all on the right, whereas the left was the captive of outmoded thought and political practices restrictive of choice and personal liberty.

Blood of the Lamb

A few years ago I read The Return of the Soldier, the first novel of Rebecca West, the pen name of Cicely Isabel Fairfield. I quite liked it, but not nearly enough to pursue the author any further. But earlier this year, on the recommendation of another blogger, I bought Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, one of her later books.

At almost 1200 pages it’s quite a tome, too heavy and too big even for my shoulder bag, which contains all sorts of fripperies! But I’ve been reading it in bite-sized chunks since March, interspersed with other things. I finished it in Rome at the weekend and I already feel a sense of loss; for it’s one of the most remarkable books I have ever come across. There is no exaggeration or hyperbole here.

I’m not sure exactly how to describe Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first published in England in 1941. On the surface it’s an account of the author’s visits to the old state of Yugoslavia - now no more than a historical memory - in the interwar period. To that extent it’s a travelogue, but, oh, how shallow and inadequate that word seems, conjuring up the tedium of train spotting and stamp collecting; places gathered on an itinerary, images frozen in an album.

There are indeed beautiful and lengthy descriptions of the various places she visited, from Croatia in the north to Macedonia and Montenegro in the south, places to follow in her footsteps. But Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is so much more than a travel journal or a Lonely Planet guide. It’s part history, part criticism, part philosophy, part theology, part personal introspection, part political warning and, towards the end, even part novel. Above all, it’s a kind of love story, the story of the writer’s love for the people and the civilization of Serbia. She made me see Serbia partly through her eyes and partly through the eyes a man she identifies as Constantine the Poet, her official government guide through the country. I will have more to say about ‘Constantine’, a figure I fell in love with, a bit later.

The tragedy of Yugoslavia, and, yes, and the story is indeed a tragedy, is that it was a country shaped around some of the great contradictions and fault lines of history – the Western and the Eastern Roman Empires, the Catholic and the Orthodox, the Christian and the Muslim. It was this background, and these influences, that made the Southern Slav State all but an impossible dream.

Driven by internal hatreds, the people were also the victims of empire: of the Turkish Empire, against which the Serbs fought for centuries in pursuit of the right to exist, and of the Austrian Empire, which in its later Austro-Hungarian form was to be a particularly malevolent influence. Beyond that West sees the Slavs as a victim of a ‘Third Empire’, one yet to emerge. This, as she puts it, is Gerda’s empire. Who or what is Gerda, you ask? Gerda is Constantine’s wife, and of her I will also have more to say.

The wonder of this great, meandering book is that it takes one to the heart of a civilization or a people – I really can’t say ‘country’- through its past, through the traces of its past, through its art, particularly in the various religious establishments West visits, places that seem to give one the intensity of the Orthodox experience, mystical, ethereal and yet immediate in the lives of the people. There are long historical passages where she touches on the greatness of the medieval Serbian Empire, the empire of Stephen Dushan, the last best hope of saving Byzantine civilization from the steady encroachment of the Ottoman Turks. But Dushan died and within a generation Serbia crashed to ruin. Serbia met destiny and destruction on the battlefield of Kosovo.

This is another remarkable thing about Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: it shows, as West puts it, the past side by side with the present it created. Here her argument gets quite subtle. She has no time at all for Christian concepts of atonement or sacrifice, in what she calls the blood ritual of the black stone. The black stone in question is a feature in a field she comes across, a place where the peasants come to offer up lambs in sacrifice.

It was this fatal obsession with sacrifice, this obsession with a greater kingdom, an eternal kingdom, which took Tsar Lazar into battle with the Turks on Saint Vitus Day, 28 June 1389, a recurring black day in Slav history. Here she records the old Serbian poem of Tsar Lazar and the Grey Falcon, translated for her by Constantine;

There flies a grey bird, a falcon,
From Jerusalem the holy,
And in his beak he bears a swallow.
That is no falcon, no grey bird,
But it is the Saint Elijah.
He carries no swallow,
But a book from the Mother of God.
He comes to the Tsar at Kossovo,
He lays the book on the Tsar's knees.
This book without like told the Tsar:

"Tsar Lazar, of honourable stock,
Of what kind will you have your kingdom?
Do you want a heavenly kingdom ?
Do you want an earthly kingdom ?
If you want an earthly kingdom,
Saddle your horses, tighten your horses' girths,
Gird on your swords,
Then put an end to the Turkish attacks,
And drive out every Turkish soldier.
But if you want a heavenly kingdom
Build you a church on Kossovo;
Build it not with a floor of marble
But lay down silk and scarlet on the ground,
Give the Eucharist and battle orders to your soldiers,
For all your soldiers shall be destroyed,
And you, prince, you shall be destroyed with them."

When the Tsar read the words,
The Tsar pondered, and he pondered thus:

"Dear God, where are these things, and how are they!
What kingdom shall I choose ?
Shall I choose a heavenly kingdom ?
Shall I choose an earthly kingdom ?
If I choose an earthly kingdom,
An earthly kingdom lasts only a little time,
But a heavenly kingdom will last for eternity and its centuries."

The Tsar chose a heavenly kingdom,
And not an earthly kingdom,
He built a church on Kossovo.
He built it not with floor of marble
But laid down silk and scarlet on the ground.
There he summoned the Serbian Patriarch
And twelve great bishops.
Then he gave his soldiers the Eucharist and their battle orders.
In the same hour as the Prince gave orders to his soldiers
The Turks attacked Kossovo.

Then the Turks overwhelmed Lazar,
And the Tsar Lazar was destroyed,
And his army was destroyed with him,
Of seven and seventy thousand soldiers.

All was holy, all was honourable
And the goodness of God was fulfilled.

But it was not good, so far as West was concerned; for the people were given over to centuries of servitude. Writing from the perspective of the late 1930s it was evident to her that “the whole world was a vast Kosovo”; that Czechoslovakia was the ‘black lamb’ and that Neville Chamberlain, then British prime ministers, was the high priest of the cult of sacrifice. Resistance, not sacrifice, was the essential thing, the noble thing.

I really must stop here for fear of spending as many words in praising this superb book as it took to write it! So let me just finish, as promised, by saying something about Constantine and Gerda.

Constantine, as I have said, is described as a poet and an official, a one-time student of Henri Bergson, the great French philosopher. And taking a cue from Bergson’s philosophy he is for me a living representation of the élan vital. He is full of wit and wisdom, full of simple energy, full of love for the idea of Yugoslavia. Throughout the book he is a dominant influence, a giant. He is also of Jewish origin, a point of some relevance.

When the party arrives in Belgrade we meet Gerda, his wife. Quite simply Gerda is a monster. She is German, not just German but an obvious Nazi. She travels south with West, West’s husband - who accompanies her throughout her trip - and Constantine to Macedonia but hates everything she sees: she despises the Slavs and Slav culture. Her mere presence diminishes Constantine, from giant to dwarf. It was with her that my sense of disbelief kicked in. Here the book was entering into the territory of the novel. I quickly realised that there was no Gerda; that she was an idea, a metaphor for the things to come, a metaphor for the Third Empire that was to visit Yugoslavia in 1941, a metaphor for a final sacrifice to the Black Stone.

No sooner had I finished Black Lamb and Grey Falcon than I began to think about Constantine, about the fate of Constantine. Perhaps worry is a better word. West makes no mention of him in her epilogue. What happened to him, I wondered, after the Nazis took control, after Gerda’s Empire was set in place? The rump state of Serbia was one of the first places to be declared Judenrein – free of Jews. Did this brave and wonderful man, one who survived the death march of the Serbian army in 1915, end up in Auschwitz like so many others? Did he exist at all, or was he just another symbol, another metaphor? I’m delighted to say, after some quick internet research, that he did exist and that he did survive. His name was not Constantine at all. He was Stanislaw Vinaver, an important figure in Serbian literature and culture. He joined the Yugoslav army in 1941 and was held as a prisoner-of-war in a German camp. During this time West sent him food packages through the Red Cross. He died in 1955.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon finishes with bombs falling on London. The author reflects Often, when I have thought of invasion, or a bomb has dropped nearby, I have prayed, ‘Let me behave like a Serb.’ Amen. How extraordinary these people are and how extraordinary it is that we have understood them so little. How extraordinary this book is, a true masterpiece.

The Stupidity of Moral Imperialism

I’ve been doing a spot of research on the life of Auberon Waugh, the eldest son of Evelyn Waugh the novelist, who died in 2001. He comes across as something of an unpredictable eccentric, a man with a unique view on political matters.

Although he tried to follow in his father’s literary footsteps, and published some early novels, his work here was disappointing. Instead he became a superb columnist and critic, writing for a variety of publications, latterly editing The Literary Review. He was a perceptive man, seeing through the cant that so many politicians use to justify their actions. He was a Tory but not in any conventional sense. He hated socialism in the same way that I, a scholar of seventeenth century history, hate Puritanism (I hate socialism as well!), simply because it’s the philosophy of the joyless, wanting to ban this pleasure or stop that vice, when really we should all be allowed to go to hell in whatever fashion we choose. But it’s his views on international affairs that I find refreshingly different.

I believe that we have been deceived, and deeply so, on the need to go to war in such places as Afghanistan and Iraq. I believe that Saddam Hussein, a third-rate dictator and thoroughly unpleasant man, was, even so, given a world historical significance that he never had. I am deeply opposed to my country joining with the United States, or any other nation, in the world policeman role, the twenty-first century version of imperialist gun-boat diplomacy.

Given this I was delighted to discover that Waugh believed that after the fall of the Berlin Wall NATO, as a defensive alliance, had lost all purpose. I take the view that its continuing existence, especially given its steady expansion into the backyard of the old Soviet Union, has only served to alienate Russia, a country with whom we in England should be on the closest terms. I believe that it was suspicion of NATO that contributed indirectly to Russia’s brief war with Georgia, that and the irresponsibility of Georgian leadership.

Waugh’s view was even more trenchant. With the end of the Cold War NATO morphed into a “human rights” war machine. Of the hysteria that led to the Gulf War he wrote “I have stuck resolutely to my thesis that there is no Gulf crisis, it has all been cooked up by self-important politicians.”

It was this frightful ‘moral imperialism’ that lead also to intervention in the former Yugoslavia. Waugh rejected what he saw as the lying propaganda used to justify a campaign of ruthless bombing of Belgrade. He took a brave and lonely stand back in 1999, openly saying that Serb atrocities had been deliberately exaggerated. This is a time when we were being told that no less than a quarter of a million Kosovo Albanians had been killed by Serb forces, which turned out to be a massive lie.

Like Waugh we should always been on our guard against hysteria whipped up by hypocritical and self-serving politicians. The so-called war on terror, NATO clunking around the planet like some dim-witted ogre, has made us considerably less secure, even less secure than the days of the Cold War. This is a sad but simple truth.

An Exceedingly Good Writer

Rudyard Kipling is another of my favourite writers, though he is well out of fashion now because of his political views; well out of fashion because he is the high priest of the golden age of imperialism. His eclipse is rather a pity because his prose is vivid, earthy and captivating. He also loved India, a love that is no longer returned, at least by some.

Plans to turn the house where he was born in Bombay into a Kipling museum have been shelved for fear of an adverse political reaction. Instead the place will be used to display the work of local artists, with no mention of its past associations. Mukund Gorash, in charge of the restoration project, was reprimanded by the local authorities for referring to the building as the Kipling House, insisting that it be called the Dean’s House, a reference to its former use.


But there are Indians who do understand that Kipling was so much more than an avatar of imperialism. Sharad Keskar, Chairman of the Kipling Society, said “You have a fairy ignorant officialdom in India, who don’t know much about Kipling apart from the fact that he was an imperialist or part of the Raj. Officially he is still persona non grata. I think that is changing, but it’s rather a slow change.”

It really is time that India woke up to the fact that imperialism was not always a bad thing; that the country owes as much to the British as it does to the Mughals, the previous conquerors. Modern India, it seems obvious to me, is inconceivable without the influence of the Raj, particularly in the use of English as a language that unifies a vast country without a past history of unity.

This brings me back to Kipling. Most people- perhaps even the officials to whom Keskar alludes –know, as if by reflex, at least the first two lines of the “Ballad of East and West”;

Oh, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet,
Till Earth and Sky stand presently at God's great Judgment Seat.

Do they know how it continues I wonder; do you know?

But there is neither East nor West, Border, nor Breed, nor Birth,
When two strong men stand face to face,
tho' they come from the ends of the earth!

And if Pandit Nehru, the first prime minister of India, could describe Kim as his favourite novel then that should be good enough a recommendation for anyone…even Indian bureaucrats. :-)