BOOK: Minoo Dinshaw, "Outlandish Knight"

Minoo Dinshaw: Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman. Penguin Books, 2017 (first ed.: 2016). 9780141979472. xvi + 768 pp.

This is a biography of Steven Runciman, the British historian noted for his books about the Byzantine empire, especially his three-volume History of the Crusades. I guess that in the 1950s, when it was first published, the general public in the west still mostly looked at the crusades from the perspective of the crusaders; and so Runciman's History, written from the perspective of the Byzantine empire, must have provided a really new and refreshing look on the crusades.

It was reprinted a number of times, and was also popular with quasi fine-press publishers such as Easton Press and the Folio Society. I suspect it was in connection with these latter that I first heard of that work, and consequently of Runciman himself, somewhere in the late 90s, a few years before his death in 2000. I was partly fascinated by the subject, but partly also by the author himself, and got the more fascinated the more I heard about his life and work. I'm not really a book collector in the serious sense of the word, but Runciman was one of the few authors for whom I made a decent effort to get first editions of his works (though I'm still missing a few).

What I knew of his life so far was mostly from the obituaries published after his death in 2000 (and a few anecdotes that people contributed to a mailing list, the archives of which I can't find on the web now; see below) and from his own memoir, A Traveller's Alphabet, which appeared in 1991. This last book was a delightful read, but it left me hungry for more, and I wished that he had written a full autobiography.* Runciman didn't exactly have a typical boring academic life; or maybe it was typical enough for his time, but not for the present. So I was glad when I saw, sometime last year, that someone finally wrote a proper book-length biography of Runciman, and now I finally got around to reading it.

[*It turns out that he later did write something of that sort, titled “Footnotes to a Long Life”, but it remained unpublished. Dinshaw occasionally quotes from it here in Outlandish Knight. He also points out a number of places where A Traveller's Alphabet departs from the truth; I was a bit disappointed, but I suppose I should have known better than to expect an autobiographical memoir to be strictly truthful, and like every good raconteur, Runciman must have found it impossible to resist embellishing his anecdotes. Notably, his account of meeting the last emperor of China seems to be quite false (p. 133).]

My only real complaint about Outlandish Knight is that it feels, at times, too gossipy, and not in an entertaining way; it occasionally spends too much time writing about the feelings, sayings and doings of numerous minor characters that I didn't really care much about. But I suppose that such a thing is inevitable considering Runciman's life and background. His grandfather, Walter Runciman, got rich as a shipping magnate, and his father, also called Walter Runciman, was a prominent Liberal politician shortly before the British Liberal party sank into irrelevance. He held various cabinet appointments, but the thing he's best known for is his ill-starred diplomatic mission to Czechoslovakia during the Sudetenland crisis; this is the sort of thing that is still mentioned in any decently thorough book about the origins of the WW2.

With family like this, it's hardly surprising that the early chapters of Outlandish Knight read like a who's-who of early-20th-century Britain; the best-known of these people today is probably George Orwell, who was Runciman's schoolmate at Eton (p. 31). Later, reading about his years at Cambridge, we encounter such an interminable procession of homosexual men (like Runciman himself) that one could be forgiven for wondering how the British upper classes managed to reproduce themselves at all. Anyway, Runciman spent a few years as a professor at Cambridge, but after inheriting some money from his grandfather, he gave up that job so he could focus on travelling and writing. We find him flitting from country to country, mostly in former Byzantine territories, where he easily rubs shoulders with local aristocrats and royalty, British diplomats, the occasional fellow academic, and so on.

During and after the WW2, he spent a few years working for the British Council, first as a professor in Istanbul and later as their representative in Athens, and there are some signs that he may have been vaguely involved in intelligence work as well. I found this part of the book particularly interesting, since I knew so little about early postwar Greece. It seems that Britain tried to maintain a considerable amount of influence there at first, trying to prevent various kinds of communists from gaining power even if that meant propping up unpopular right-wing governments with authoritarian leanings. Eventually, however, Greece descended into civil war anyway.

Next comes the period when he wrote his most famous and popular works: the three-volume History of the Crusades, then the Sicilian Vespers and a little later also The Fall of Constantinople. Dinshaw devotes several chapters to Runciman's books (and to reviewers' opinions about them), discusses his style with great perceptiveness and subtlety, and points out a great many extremely interesting things that would probably never have occurred to me had I read them myself. Runciman's writing, it seems, often manages to work at several levels at the same time: on the one hand he delivers a solid piece of narrative history for the general public, on the other hand he likes to troll his fellow experts with his air of omniscient self-confidence (and his tendency to write in a way that some might think more befitting a novelist than an academic), the occasional shortage of footnotes, and with his sometimes mischievous opinions and judgments on historical events and persons.

A fine example of this: in The Kingdom of Acre, he said that “[t]here was never a greater crime against humanity than the Fourth Crusade” (p. 401) — a phrasing that was sure to raise more than a few eyebrows in a book published less than ten years after the end of WW2. And in the Sicilian Vespers, he writes of the execution of Conradin, king of Naples, in 1268: “To the Germans it has always been the greatest crime in history.” (P. 453.)

But even in this, the most productive period of his life, Runciman still found time to travel and meet interesting people. He spent some time in Hollywood at the invitation of George Cukor, the famous producer, who was thinking of hiring him as a historical consultant for his movies (p. 371). He also spent a couple of years making trips to Sarawak, an island in Malaysia, having been commissioned to write the history of its ‘white rajahs’, three generations of British adventurers who had ruled the island as their personal kingdom in 1841–1946.

There's an interesting chapter about Eigg, a Hebridean island that was owned by the Runciman family for a few decades and where Steven did much of his writing. The whole arrangement struck me as . . . more feudalistic than I would have expected in the middle of the 20th century. There was a population of mostly Gaelic-speaking farmers paying rents to the proprietor, or “laird”, of the island, and he was in charge of such things as arranging pensions for widows (p. 428) and setting up electrical infrastructure (or not; p. 423).

His work as a historian largely ended after Mistra (1980), but his curious social life went on for a good deal longer. We find him taking the Queen Mother to lunch once a year (p. 562), being appointed Grand Orator to the Patriarch of Constantinople (p. 571), having streets named after him in Mistra (p. 585) and Sofia (p. 626), campaigning on behalf of the monks of Mt. Athos in their struggle against the patriarch's interference in their affairs (p. 607), writing occasional newspaper pieces about royal topics (p. 629), and praising the dubious qualities of the regime of the sheikh of Bahrain, which he visited several times at the invitation of an old friend (pp. 632–3).

Curiously, nearly all the chapters of this book are named after Tarot cards, and each chapter begins with an epigraph containing a short description of that card's symbollism from A. E. Waite's book, Key to the Tarot. I'm not sure what to make of this rather whimsical idea, which I guess is meant to be vaguely connected to Runciman's occasional and not very serious claims to a “second sight” (there's an interesting anecdote of him using tarot cards to tell the fortune of King George of Greece, accidentally predicting his imminent death; p. 345).

The book also has a number of illustrations, mostly photographs but my favourite was a cartoon by Hugh Trevor-Roper showing Runciman as a Byzantine emperor, ‘autokrator Stefanos’ receving presents for his 90th birthday :))

At times I wished that the book said a bit less about Runciman's life and a bit more about his work, but it's entirely possible that had that been the case I would now be complaining in the opposite direction. The chapters that focus on Runciman's work were my favourite part of this biography, and made me realize that I really should get around to reading some of his books sooner rather than later. But the chapters about his life were still very interesting reading, with plenty of funny anecdotes and exotic people. Runciman had a long life and often moved in circles far beyond the reach of an average person, with the result that even while he was still alive, he must have seemed to many like a “last remaining link” (p. 629) to various vanished worlds: here was someone who had been hobnobbing with long-dethroned royalty, Bloomsbury writers, Orthodox patriarchs, and yet was still alive as late as 2000. He's a great subject for a biography, and this book did an excellent job of rising to that challenge.

ToRead:

A few books by Runciman that I hadn't been much aware of before reading this biography:

• Eastern Schism (1955, based on his lectures in 1954/5); p. 566.
• The Last Byzantine Renaissance (1970, based on his lectures in 1968). Dinshaw says that “his summary [in Mistra] of the glittering intellectual life at Mistra, culminating in the outstanding quasi-totalitarian and sometimes bizarre work of Plethon, is a condensation” of The Last Byzantine Renaissance (p. 594).
• Paradise Regained (1992); “the novella's action concerned an assortment of allusively named archaeologists”, such as “Dame Helga Shark” :)) (p. 615). Runciman probably wrote it shortly before publication, though he pretended to have written it in 1935 and rediscovered it later. I remember buying this thin booklet on eBay some years ago without being quite sure if it's by this Runciman or someone else of the same name; I'm glad to see that it is by him.
• The She-Devil, “unsigned Steven Runciman short story in The Election Times, no. 4, 3 June 1918, p. 102, digitally accessible from University College London Archive” (p. 644). This seems to be from a magazine edited by students at Eton. I found a record entry at the UCL website, but I can't see any way to access the text of the magazine itself. There is a “RelatedImage1” link there but it's broken.

A great number of interesting books by other authors are also mentioned in this biography:

• Cyril Connolly: Enemies of Promise (1938). A memoir by Connolly, who was the same age as Runciman and attended Eton at more or less the same time. Mentioned here on p. 45, in connection to how history was taught there (the focus being on “the history of personalities”).
• Emily Jones: Quiet Interior (1920). The author was a niece of Robert Ross, the well-known friend and literary executor of Oscar Wilde. This is her first novel, mentioned here on p. 55.
• William Makepeace Thackeray: The Rose and the Ring (1854). A “baroquely satirical romance [. . .] a fairy farce of love, misadventure and monarchy” (p. 62).
• Rosamond Lehmann: Dusty Answer (1927). Her first novel, “an imperfectly transfigured account of the unhappy Cambridge love-affair that had driven her to marry Leslie”, Runciman's brother (p. 100).
• E. F. Benson: Dodo (1893), a novel which “appeared to satirize Margot Tennant, later Asquith, and the rest of the Souls” (p. 106). He also wrote two sequels, Dodo the Second (1913) and Dodo Wonders (1921).
• Edith Wharton: Dieu d'Amour, from her short story collection Certain People (1930); “a historical romance set in Byzantine Cyprus” (p. 117). She and Runciman praised each other's work.
• Patrick Leigh Fermor: The Broken Road (2013). Published posthumously, about his travels in the Balkans in the 1930s. Mentioned here on p. 161 for his interesting observations of the fearsomely francophilic Romanian elite: “It was exciting and impressive to hear the name Marcel dropped so easily . . . that Anna, who seemed to be everyone's cousin, was the Comtesse de Noailles; that Paul, if not Morand, was Valéry; that Jean was Cocteau and that Léon-Paul was Fargue”.
• Marie of Roumania: The Story of My Life (1934–5) [UK ed.: Vol. 1, Vol. 2, Vol. 3; US ed.: Vols. 1–2, Vol. 3]; “ ‘the best of all royal memoirs’, as Steven, a comprehensive judge of the genre, declares” (p. 163).
• Evelyn Waugh: Brideshead Revisited. At one point Dinshaw casually describes Runciman and his friend Eddie Bates, during their trip to Indochina, as “[t]his odd couple, a Samgrass with integrity and a Sebastian without romance” (p. 238), and on trying to look up where these names were from I found they were characters in Waugh's novel.
• Evelyn Waugh: Officers and Gentlemen. Mentioned here on p. 276; partly set in WW2 Cairo, in the same environment that Runciman also spent some time in. Part of his Sword of Honour trilogy, also mentioned here on p. 380 (Dinshaw has an interesting discussion of the phenomenon of ‘WW2 trilogies’ in fiction and the parallels between that and Runciman's Crusades trilogy).
• T. H. White: The Once and Future King (1938–40); “yet another wartime trilogy” (p. 386), though judging by its wikipedia page, a fourth part was added in 1958.
• John Paris (pseud. of Frank Ashton-Gwatkin): Kimono (1921); “as frank and forward-looking on both racial and sexual matters for its day as it is unsettling for a later age” (p. 255). The present age strikes me as a good deal more easily unsettled than would be good for it, but anyway, the novel sounds intriguing. The author was also a diplomat who was involved in Walter Runciman's mission to Czechoslovakia.
• Paul Vyšný: The Runciman Mission to Czechoslovakia, 1938 (2003). Walter Runciman has been criticized for spending too much time during his mission talking to German aristocrats and not enough to Czechs; Minshaw quotes an epic remark from Vyšný's book: “It could, of course, be argued that the fault lay with the Czech nation for having the carelessness to lose most of its aristocracy following the Battle of the White Mountain in 1620, and that a British peer, wishing to associate with his social equals, had little choice but to seek the only suitable company available, which happened to be German.” (P. 256.) :))))
• John Fowles: The Magus (1965). Mentioned here on p. 339; seems pleasantly bizarre.
• Freya Stark: Traveller's Prelude. Her “first volume of memoirs”, mentioned here on p. 358.
• Anthony Powell: A Dance to the Music of Time (12 novels, 1951–75), mentioned here on p. 365: “[. . .] and the rest of the Hypocrites Club who lived fast but, thanks to Brideshead Revisited and A Dance to the Music of Time, never quite died”.
• Robert Darnton: The Great Cat Massacre (1984). Mentioned on p. 395.
• Edwin Pears: The Destruction of the Greek Empire (1903). Runciman praised it as “the best account” of these events in the preface to his own Fall of Constantinople (p. 475).
• Nigel Barley: White Rajah (2002); Philip Eade: Sylvia, Queen of the Headhunters (2008). Biographies of James Brooke, the first of the white rajahs of Sarawak, and of Sylvia Brett, the wife of the last one; being written 40–50 years after Runciman's White Rajahs, they could be a little more frank about certain subjects, such as James Brooke's homosexuality (p. 509).
• John Hervey: Memoirs of the Reign of George the Second (1848) [Vol. 1, Vol. 2]; “well-informed and frank memoirs” by an early-18th-century wit and, apparently, a bisexual (p. 548). The 1848 ed. is based on a censured manuscript; a more complete edition was published in 1931, in three volumes [source] (Some Materials Towards Memoirs of Reign of King George II, ed. by Romney Sedgwick).
• Robert Byron: The Station (1928); about his visits to Mount Athos (p. 600).
• Joan Schenkar: Truly Wilde: The Unsettling Story of Dolly Wilde, Oscar's Unusual Niece (2000). She “achieved a precarious celebrity as a 1920s reincarnation of her uncle, exhibiting his looks, mannerisms and ripostes” (p. 97).
• John MacMurray, How the Peace Was Lost (1992). A memoir by the U.S. ambassador to China in the 1920s, around the time of Runciman's visit there (mentioned on pp. 140 and 654).
• Christine Sutherland: Enchantress: Marthe Bibesco and Her World (1997). The biography of a Romanian princess and an acquaintance of Runciman's (pp. 148, 655).
• Satcheverell Sitwell: A Roumanian Journey (1938). “In the late 1930s King Carol paid several British writers to visit his country” (p. 165), hoping to improve his popularity in Britain, and this book was one of the results. “Steven, less gullible or venal than Sitwell, was not taken in by Carol” (p. 167). I can't help also being intrigued by the author's name, which strikes me as more suitable for a brand of leatherware or upholstery than for a person...
• Zoé Oldenbourg: Massacre at Montségur (1961; mentioned here on p. 660) and The World is Not Enough (1946). A “Russian émigre and French novelist who felt about the Cathars of the Languedoc approximately as Steven felt about the Byzantines”; she was Runciman's favourite historical novelist (p. 461).
• James and Patience Barnes: Nazis in Pre-War London 1930–1939 (2000). Mentioned on p. 664.
• Karina Urbach: Go-Betweens for Hitler (2015). About the role of German aristocrats in aiding the diplomatic efforts of the Nazi regime (e.g. by trying to influence Walter Runciman and his wife Hilda during their visit to the Sudetenland in 1938). Mentioned on p. 256.
• Michael Padev: Escape from the Balkans (1943). The memoirs of a Bulgarian-Amerian journalist who knew Runciman while the latter worked as a press attaché at the British legation in Sofia during the WW2 (pp. 261, 269).
• Georgina Buckler: Anna Komnena: A Study (1929). Dinshaw has an interesting comparison of the descriptions of Anna in the work of Buckler, Runciman, and Christopher Tyerman (whose God's War is widely considered to have taken the place of Runciman's Crusades as the definitive popular work on that subject) on p. 393.
• Alfred J. Andrea, Andrew Holt (eds.): Seven Myths of the Crusades (2015). Cited here on p. 396 in the context of a discussion of the Children's Crusade.
• James Murray (ed.), The Romance and Prophecies of Thomas of Ercildoune (1875). Runciman alludes to the famous ballad of Thomas the Rhymer at one point (p. 460), comparing Thomas's choice of three paths (the narrow road to heaven, the broad road to hell, but also, intriguingly, a third option — the “bonny road [. . .] to fair Elfland”) to his own efforts, in his writing, to find a third option as an alternative to history as dull science on the one hand and historical fiction on the other.

Appendix: Two anecdotes from an old mailing list

Here are two nice anecdotes about Runciman that I saved from the archives of an old mailing list, mediev-l@raven.cc.ukans.edu, soon after Runciman's death in 2000. I can't find those archives online anywhere now, so I figured it might be worth putting them up here for the sake of preservation.

From: Jace Crouch
To: MEDIEV-L@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Sir Steven Runciman — Another Story
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 18:29:29 -0500 (EST)

When he was a young man, Runciman wanted to study under the guidance of J. B. Bury, one of the premier historians of his age. Runciman knew that Bury would be extremely exactly, and was unlikely to take him on as a student. Nevertheless, Runciman made exhaustive preparations before he appproached Bury, learning Latin and Greek and German and French and Spanish and Russian, learning as much as he could about history and inscriptions and paleography. Then he went to Bury. He explained his enthusiasm, showed his credentials, and asked to be taken on as a student. Bury seemed moderately impressed, particularly by Runciman's having studied Russian, and he smiled. He complemented Runciman on his preparations. Then he said (and I can almost quote): “I have just read this extremely interesting article, and I am certain that you will be fascinated by it. Why don't you read it and come back in a couple of weeks and then we'll duscuss it. The article is written in Bulgarian.”

Runciman smiled shyly and said “What could I do? I learned Bulgarian in two weeks.”

Bury took him on as a student.

*

From: Jace Crouch
To: MEDIEV-L@raven.cc.ukans.edu
Subject: Re: Sir Steven Runciman — Another Story
Date: Fri, 3 Nov 2000 18:42:10 -0500 (EST)

This comes from one of my professors in grad school. I cannot remember the precise locations, but here's the story:

During a time when there was serious labor trouble throughout Britain (how's that for temporal precision!), Runciman paid a social visit to the home of a government minister. There were all sorts of demonstrators outside the man's house, and when Runciman's car was being driven into the compound people in the crowd started shouting “Bourgeois! Bourgeois!” Runciman was a kind and self-effacing man, but he had a very firm sense of his own social standing, and so he decided to correct the error of demonstrators. The car was chauffer driven, and Runciman was in the back seat. He rolled down the window, waved his hand at the crowd as though asking for silence, and called out to them, “No, no, I am not bourgeois; I am an aristocrat.”

Alas, it appears that Prof. Crouch, who contributed these anecdotes, himself died in 2013.