BOOK: Tomaz Jardim, "Ilse Koch on Trial"

Tomaz Jardim: Ilse Koch on Trial: Making the “Bitch of Buchenwald”. Harvard University Press, 2023. 9780674249189. viii + 357 pp.

This book is an interesting biography of Ilse Koch, whose husband Karl was the commandant of the Buchenwald concentration camp in 1937–41. She grew notorious for contributing to the abuse of the prisoners there, and for allegedly collecting lampshades made out of human skin; I was vaguely aware of this notoriety but didn't really know anything more about her, so I decided to pick up this book to learn more.

As the title of the book suggests, it is mostly interested in her trials, especially the ones after the war, so her life prior to that is dealt with relatively briefly. Indeed relatively little seems to be known about her early life (pp. 11–13), and as with many people who would later grow notorious in the Third Reich, there is nothing particularly remarkable in the background of either Ilse Koch or of her husband. Karl worked as an insurance salesman in the 1920s “and at times resorted to petty thievery and small-time embezzlement” (p. 14) — but then in the 1930s, he rose quickly through the ranks of the SS and, as commandant of Buchenwald, was remarkably brutal and remarkably corrupt even by the standards of Nazi concentration camp commandants (pp. 24–6). He embezzled money and valuables taken from the prisoners and used their slave labour for his own benefit (pp. 26, 59–60). The Kochs and their two children lived in a villa not far from the camp, from which prisoners were often sent to work in or around the house as servants.

The higher-ups didn't particularly mind Karl's reign of terror and arbitrary brutality against the prisoners (though technically much of that was against the rules as well); it was his corruption that eventually got him in trouble. A regional SS official named Josias zu Waldeck started investigating him for this in 1941; for some time, Koch was protected by Himmler, who was willing to overlook some corruption in an effective and loyal commandant (p. 41). But as the war started going badly, rooting out corruption came to be seen as more important than before, and Himmler's support for Koch faded. Both Kochs were arrested in August 1943 (p. 54), and after a lengthy investigation, their trial before an SS court began in September 1944 (p. 68). Besides his embezzlement, Karl was also charged with the unauthorized killing of prisoners, notably two who had treated him for “a case of syphilis he had acquired while in Norway” (p. 57). Ilse was charged with “habitual receiving of stolen goods” (p. 74) and thus being an accessory to her husband's embezzelement. She was found not guilty and was released, but Karl was sentenced to death and was executed at Buchenwald in April 1945, shortly before the Nazis abandoned the camp (p. 77).

After the war, rumours emerged that Ilse Koch used to select prisoners that had interesting tatoos so they would be killed and pieces of their skin preserved, or in some cases even made into lampshades. These objects were indeed exhibited (pp. 83–4), but there doesn't seem to have been anything more than rumour to connect them to Koch; nevertheless the press, both then and later, delighted in reporting on her supposed crimes in the most salacious and sensationalist terms (pp. 93, 141, 143, 289). More sober and more plausible accusations revolved around claims that she had, on a number of occasions, reported prisoners for real or imagined transgressions, thereby ensuring that they would get beaten and possibly killed by the SS guards. At any rate, Koch was arrested by the U.S. occupying authorities and included as a defendant at a trial before a “military commission court” (p. 95); the other thirty or so defendants were mostly SS officers who had served at Buchenwald (p. 91).

In terms of protecting the rights of the defendants, this court left much to be desired (pp. 95–100), but at the same time it was far from a full-blown kangaroo court either; Captain Lewis, the defense counsel appointed by the court (p. 104), seems to have done a vigorous and thorough job. In particular, he showed that many of the prosecution witnesses were unreliable and were only relaying hearsay. He challenged the prosecutor, Denson, to produce the infamous human-skin lampshade as evidence, but was told that “it had been turned over to judicial authorities at Nuremberg” where it could now “no longer be located. The lampshade had mysteriously disappeared, and it would never surface again.” (P. 124.) The witnesses' testimony “left little doubt that tattooed skins had had been collected at Buchenwald [. . .] but was insufficient to implicate Koch” (p. 112).

But the main argument of the prosecution was that the defendants had been “ ‘participating in a common design’ to commmit war crimes”, and that Buchenwald as a whole had been a sort of “criminal enterprise” such that everyone who supported its operations while knowing about their nature was guilty, regardless of what exactly he or she did or didn't do (p. 98). This was harder to defend against; Koch denied, strenously but implausibly, that she had had any idea as to what had been going on inside the camp — she had been just a busy housewife raising her children and not talking to her husband about his work. The route of her daily walks was carefully scrutinized with the aid of a map to demonstrate that she must have seen inside the camp through its barbed-wire fence on numerous occasions (pp. 134, 136).

In the event, the court found her guilty and sentenced her to life imprisonment. However, the proceedings of the court were “subject to a series of automatic reviews” (p. 146), going all the way up to General Lucius Clay, the military governor of the U.S.-occupied zone in Germany (the wikipedia tells us that his office had a funny acronym: OMGUS :))). The reviewers “found unequivocally that the most serious and shocking charges leveled at Ilse Koch were supported by scarcely more than rumor and hearsay” (p. 150) and, at their recommendation, Clay reduced Koch's sentence to four years (which meant she would go free in about a year, in October 1949).

This was received with howls of outrage in the American press, where most of the journalists as well as the general public evidently ignored the weakness of the evidence against her and simply assumed that even the most lurid rumours about her crimes were true (pp. 157–8). Protests were organized; Clay was heckled during a visit to the U.S. (p. 164); the folk singer Woody Guthrie wrote a protest song (p. 166); and even the U.S. senate formed a committee to investigate how this could have happened and what could be done to prevent Koch's release. But they couldn't try her again for the same charges, and there was not enough evidence for fresh charges (p. 173).

Eventually they came up with one of those sleazy technicalities that lawyers are always so good at: her previous trial had been for war crimes, and the jurisdiction of the military commission court specifically excluded any crimes against German citizens. Consequently, she could still be tried in a German court, for regular non-war crimes such as (incitement to) murder or assault, perpetrated against German citizens. These things, after all, had in principle been against the law even under Nazi Germany (p. 192).

The German authorities gathered testimony from a large number of witnesses and even had a few people travel to America to talk to former prisoners who now lived there (pp. 207–10); despite all this effort, all the charges were for incitement to murder or attempted murder, from her habit of reporting prisoners for punishment, which, the prosecution argued, she must have known could get them killed (and in some instances had got them killed). Koch continued her strategy of simply denying everything, but it was clearly not working. The court found her guilty of some, though not all, of the charges, and sentenced her to life imprisonment again (p. 253).

She spent the rest of her life, some sixteen years, in prison. Her numerous appeals for clemency were all rejected, partly because the authorities expected such petitioners to say they are sorry for their crimes, while Koch insisted that she was simply innocent (p. 268); but partly the reasons for keeping her in prison were political: she was so notorious in the eyes of the international public that releasing her would make Germany look soft on Nazis (p. 281). Eventually she lost hope of ever regaining her freedom, and committed suicide in 1967.

*

An interesting recurring topic in this book is the observation that Ilse Koch was adversely affected by what the author, in line with modern-day woke terminology, refers to as “misogyny”: her cruelty and callousness towards the prisoners was greatly at odds with society's expectations that women should be kind and compassionate; and her licentiousness (reports of which, though exaggerated by the press, were not entirely without foundation; pp. 75–6) was at odds with the expectation that they should be chaste and modest. Moreover, she didn't even have the excuse of being part of a system and following orders; it was clear that she had been pursuing her crimes solely at her own whims. In the eyes of society (even more so in the mid-20th century than today) she looked like a greater aberration from social norms than, say, a typical (male) concentration camp guard (p. 281). “By virtue of her gender, the judges implied, Koch should be held to a higher standard of ethical and benevolent behavior in the concentration camps than was expected of her male counterparts.” (P. 257.)* It was easy and comfortable for the German public to observe that this monster still was, and must remain, in prison, and pat themselves on the back for not being soft on fascists, even if most of the other war criminals had been released long before.

[*Our author clearly disapproves of this double standard, and to be sure he is in a certain sense right in doing so; but this is something that has always bothered me a bit about the feminist movement — instead of trying to make the men as good as the women, they have always been content with making the women as bad as the men. True, that is equality of a sort, but it hardly strikes me as a change for the better.]

I think the author is on to something here; it is plainly obvious that she was treated unfairly. Every time that she reported some prisoner for punishment, there must have then been some SS guard who actually beat or killed that prisoner; this is a far worse thing to do than what she had done, and yet it was she and not he who became notorious to the general public, inspired a series of 1970s exploitation films and was the subject of campaigns against her release from prison and of exaggerated, sensationalized press reports that kept on portraying her as a sadistic pervert and repeating as fact the old rumours of her human skin collection — even in notices of her death (pp. 288–9) — although prosecutors had consistently failed to prove that she had had any connection with them.

Moreover, there are one or two other things that bother me a good deal about the court proceedings against her. One is the principle of “participating in a common design” (p. 98) that played such a large role in the various group trials against concentration camp staff and the like. It strikes me as an obvious unprincipled legal trick to make the prosecution's job easier; they knew they would have a hard time proving guilt on an individual basis, so they went for what is basically collective guilt where “the cook is as liable as the hangman” (p. 138); if you applied such a thing consistently throughout the legal system, society would simply collapse. If you declare Buchenwald a “criminal enterprise” (p. 98) — which, fair enough, it sort of was — what's preventing you from declaring the Third Reich as a whole to have been a criminal enterprise, and prosecuting everyone who ever paid taxes to it? Or even outside a war-crimes context, whenever a company breaks the law, you could prosecute all of its shareholders and all of its employees as sharing in the guilt — because, after all, one can hardly ‘participate in a common design’ more obviously and blatantly than by forming a company to do so.

The other thing that bothered me is that she was basically prosecuted twice for more or less the same crimes, purely on the basis of legal technicalities about the jurisdiction of the courts and about whether the victims were German citizens or not; and moreover that the outcome of these two trials was so different: four years in one case, life imprisonment in the other. Something must be very wrong and in a certain fundamental sense unjust about a legal system in which it is possible for the same actions to receive such very different punishments at two different trials. In any case, I think life imprisonment is a grotesquely excessive punishment for mere incitement to murder; but then, I wouldn't approve of life imprisonment even for actual murderers.

Another thing that bothered me is that Koch's third trial, by the postwar German authorities, relied on the use of the pre-Nazi criminal law (p. 192) in a situation where it was obviously not meant to be applied.* There is an interesting observation on pp. 64–5 that Nazi Germany was evolving into “a dual state, where the traditional legal order [. . .] remained largely intact” but “coexisted alongside the ‘prerogative state,’ by which arbitrary power was wielded by the regime [. . .] This duality guaranteed that irony and contradiction would be constant features of the Nazi legal order.” In other words, if, for example, some concentration camp guard arbitrarily killed a prisoner in 1940 or so, this was technically against the law on murder which was still on the books since the days of the German Empire or perhaps of the Weimar Republic; and it was technically even against the SS's own rules (as we can see by the fact that Karl Koch was charged with such murders in his own trial, pp. 70–1); and yet such killings were routinely taking place all the time in concentration camps all over Nazi Germany, with the complete knowledge and connivance of all the relevant authorities. There should, in my opinion, exist some sort of legal principle according to which, if some law or rule is flouted sufficiently widely, routinely, openly, and with not enough being done about it, then it should be held as no longer applying, or at least not applying in those particular circumstances, even if it is technically still on the books somewhere and hasn't been explicitly repealed yet. Otherwise you can get the ‘three felonies a day’ situation where a bunch of impractical laws remain in existence indefinitely, where it is then impossible to live a normal life without violating them all the time, and where the whole population then technically violates those laws all the time and never gets prosecuted for them — except when the authorities want to fuck someone over, in which case they can dust those old laws off and charge a person with violating them.

[*And this is evidently not a one-time occurrence but a common practice; we read on pp. 292–3 that as late as 2021, a 95-year-old former concentration camp secretary was charged with “aiding and abetting murder in more than 10,000 cases”.]

That being said, I do also disapprove of the way the Nazis built up their dual legal order, instead of simply modifying their existing laws to make sure that their oppresive practices would be openly legal. (It would, after all, have been trivial for them to do so, since the Reichstag would pass whatever legislation Hitler wanted, or he could even pass laws by himself under the Enabling Act.) But I suppose they thought this would make them look bad, or they actively preferred the confusion of the dual system as it afforded them better opportunities for arbitrary oppressive behaviour.

*

Anyway, this was an interesting and very readable book about a not-very-pleasant topic. It is written efficiently and not too long, so that I wasn't getting bored at any point; there's a decent amount of photographs as illustrations, and I particularly liked the fact that they are included at the relevant points of the text instead of being gathered into a separate section of plates in the middle of the book as is often the case. But most important of all, the book is very sober and well balanced; it doesn't try to exonerate Koch or believe her impossible protestations of complete innocence, but it does provide an important counterweight to the grotesquely exaggerated, sensationalized accounts of her that had prevailed in the popular press for such a long time. Even the devil is rarely quite as bad as he is made out to be.

BOOK: "The Book of John Mandeville"

The Book of John Mandeville, with related texts. Edited and translated, with an introduction, by Iain Macleod Higgins. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2011. 9780872209350. xxviii + 292 pp.

I have no idea where and when I first heard of Mandeville and his travel book, except that I have been vaguely aware of him for a long time as a late medieval traveller, something along the lines of Marco Polo, only with more exaggerated and fictional elements. E-text editions of his book have been floating on the web since fairly early on (e.g. the Project Gutenberg version appeared in 1997), in more or less heavily antiquated English, which I therefore assumed to be the original thing.

So I was quite interested to learn, after reading the present volume, how mistaken I was about much of that. It turns out that Mandeville originally wrote in French, which I guess shouldn't surprise me since he lived in the 14th century, when England still controlled a considerable chunk of French territory and when its upper class was still at least partly French-speaking. It was a very popular work in its day, and as is common for books which circulated in manuscript form, several different versions of it exist. The French text itself appears in an “Insular” (i.e. British) and a “Continental” (i.e. French) version, and then there is a third version where someone took the Continental text and changed it so as to attribute Mandeville's experiences to Ogier the Dane, one of the fictional paladins of Charlemagne from medieval romances :)) (p. 192). There are some five English translations from 1400 or shortly afterwards (p. 199), i.e. in fairly late Middle English, which becomes reasonably intelligible as long as you modernize the spelling a little, and that's what most later reprints or e-text versions were based on. There were also two translations into German (pp. 203, 205) and five into Latin (four from the Insular version and one from the Continental one; p. 206). The present volume is a new translation from the French, with a very interesting appendix with some additional material from other versions where they differ from the two main French ones. I was surprised and somewhat saddened to learn how much work remains to be done in investigating these things; for example, no critical edition exists of the Continental French version (extant in some 30 manuscripts; p. 187), or of Otto von Diemeringen's German translation (extant in some 45 manuscripts; p. 205), or of the most common Latin version (p. 206).

Moreover, what was also new to me is that Mandeville's book hardly seems to be based on a real journey at all. It's not at all like Marco Polo, who was a real person that had really been to China, even if he exaggerates a little here and there in his book. Mandeville claims to be an Anglo-French knight who spent some thirty years travelling abroad, partly on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, partly in the service of such potentates as the Sultan of Egypt and the Great Khan of Mongolia; but later researchers found that nearly everything in his book was borrowed and reworked from one or two dozen earlier works (p. 219), the most important of which are the writings of two 14th-century travellers, William of Boldensele (a German knight and pilgrim who travelled in the Near East) and Odoric of Pordenone (a Franciscan friar who travelled in India and China). Thus there is no obvious reason why Sir John Mandeville should even be a real person rather than the invention of an otherwise anonymous writer. Efforts to either find the real John Mandeville in archival sources, or to discover the identity of the author if Mandeville is a fiction, don't seem to have been particularly successful so far (p. xviii). Thus the present edition prefers to refer to him as “the Mandeville author” rather than simply as “Mandeville”. There are many interesting footnotes pointing out parallels between Mandeville's text and his sources, as well as an appendix with selected passages from some of those sources so that it is easy for any reader to see how closely Mandeville followed them.

So I certainly have to commend the translator of the present edition for the wealth of interesting information in his introduction, appendices and notes; but as for Mandeville's account itself, I found it more boring than I had expected, though it was tolerable enough in small doses. For one thing, travel books of the last few centuries usually focus on what the traveller himself has seen, done and experienced; but Mandeville (and TBH Marco Polo is no different) mostly just describes the countries he has (supposedly) travelled through and the peoples that inhabit them, while saying relatively little about his own actions and experiences. Nevertheless, since the countries he travelled through were very exotic from the perspective of Mandeville and his western European readership, many things there are strange and bizarre, which means that the book contains plenty of curious factoids that are interesting to read, even if the work as a whole is a bit dry.

The book may be divided approximately into two parts. The first half is about travels in the Near East, to locations that would have been of interest to pilgrims and that would have been familiar to christian readers from the bible. This part is therefore a bit more realistic and was not as interesting to me; there's only so many times you can read about this or that location in Egypt or Palestine etc. that happens to be the site of this or that biblical story before it gets boring. The second half or so of the book is about the Far East (approximately India and everything east of it), about which much less was known and where Mandeville is much more free to mix fact and fantasy. Some of his information may be coming from the handful of Franciscans who travelled to Mongolia or China in the 13th and 14th century, but he is happy to combine it with pure fantasy from medieval romances about Alexander the Great, rumours of Prester John and his kingdom, vaguely recorded scraps of information from ancient times when the Greeks were briefly in contact with India in the wake of Alexander's conquests; there's countless islands populated by various kinds of more or less monstrous-looking humanoids, and at one point he even comes close to Earthly Paradise (the one that Adam and Eve had been expelled from). If nothing else, then, this second half of the book is more varied and contains more bizarre details, and on the whole made for more interesting reading.

Miscellaneous

Constantinople boasts a curious set of relics from the crucifixion of Jesus: not only the cross itself, but a robe worn by Jesus, the sponge with which he was given vinegar to drink, and one of the nails with which he was nailed to the cross (p. 8) :)) Mandeville mentions that Jesus was “fixed to the cross lying on the ground and then was raised with the cross, and thus in its raising He suffered more pain” (p. 10); the translator's note 12 refers oddly to “[t]his sadistic mode of crucifixion”, as if any form of crucifixion could be non-sadistic :S

Speaking of bizarre relics: “Charlemagne was in this Temple [in Jerusalem] when the angel brought him Our Lord Jesus Christ's foreskin from the Circumcision, and he took it to Aix-la-Chapelle” (p. 50). Needless to say, Charlemagne never even went on a pilgrimage to the Holy Land.

A dubious contribution to physics from the translator's note 24, p. 13: “High-mountain air is thin because of diminished gravity; it therefore holds less water”. But surely, if the Earth has a radius of approx. 6378 km, and if gravity falls with the square of the distance, then going e.g. 10 km above the ground means that gravity there is (6378/6388)² = approx. 99.7% of the gravity on the ground. This tiny decrease of gravity can't account for the fact that the air is so much thinner there. Surely the air at higher altitudes is thinner because the higher you go, the less air there is above that altitude and the pressure is therefore lower; and this is because the total amount of air is so limited, not because the gravity would get so much lower so soon.

The pyramids of Egypt are “Joseph's Granaries, which he had made to store the wheat for hard times. [. . .] Some say that they are tombs of the great lords of antiquity, but that is not true, for the common word through the whole country near and far is that they are Joseph's Granaries, and they have it written thus in their chronicles.” (P. 32.) [Incidentally, William of Boldensele, Mandeville's principal source here, is more skeptical: “this cannot be true at all, for no place for putting in the wheat can be found there, and there is inside these columns no empty space where anything can be placed” (p. 231).]

In Bethlehem there is a church “where Our Lady rested after having given birth; and because she had too much milk in her breasts and because they were sore, she squirted some [milk] there on the red marble stones such that the white spots are still there on the stones.” (P. 43.) I guess we can consider ourselves lucky that they didn't attribute the white spots to something else :P

At one point Mandeville mentions Caesar's reform of the calendar: “Caius Caesar, who was emperor of Rome, had two months added” etc. (p. 47). The translator adds this very odd remark (n. 140): “The Roman calendar was reformed by Julius Caesar, not Gaius, as some copyists, including E, correctly note.” But Julius Caesar's first name *was* Gaius, so what is he complaining about?...

When Titus suppressed the Jewish revolt, he took many prisoners and “said that they had sold Jesus Christ for thirty pennies and he would make a better bargain of them: he would offer them at thirty a penny.” :))) (P. 51.) I can't help but be reminded of that old poem about the butcher from Glasgow who sold his wife as mincemeat: “[. . .] For what kind of man is it slaughters his wife/ And sells her a shilling a pun/ [. . .] You widnae object but you widnae expect/ He wid sell the poor woman so cheap” :]

Extreme claims about the Dead Sea: “No living man or animal could die in this sea [. . .] people are thrown in who have deserved death and they have remained three or four days, but they could not die [. . .] Whoever puts iron in it, it swims on top, and whoever puts a feather in, it goes to the bottom” (p. 61).

For the ‘honi soit qui mal y pense’ collection: “Our Lord sent Saint Peter and Saint James to fetch the she-ass on Palm Sunday, and He mounted the she-ass there.” (P. 58.)

“Our Lady gave birth in her fifteenth year” (p. 70). The pedophilia hebephilia jokes practically make themselves :]

“In this country of Libya the sea is indeed higher than the land, and it seems that it should cover the land, and nevertheless it does not pass it bounds. [. . .] In this sea of Libya there are no fish, [. . .] for the water is always boiling because of the great heat.” (Pp. 90–1.)

In the land of Chaldea: “The women are very ugly and badly dressed, [. . .] quite dark, ugly, and hideous, and they are certainly not at all beautiful, but they lack graciousness.” (P. 96.) I can only assume that some Chaldean woman rejected his advances :P

“There is a people [in Ethiopia] that have only one foot [. . .] so large that it shades the whole body from the sun when they are lying down.” (P. 98.)

Of an island somewhere beyond India: “it is so hot on this island that, because of the heat's great force, men's hangers, videlicet testiculi, come out of their bodies halfway down the leg, because of the body's great dissipation.” (P. 101.) On another island: “the rats of this island are as big as dogs here, and they are caught with large mastiffs, for the cats cannot catch them.” (P. 104.) Later he mentions two islands inhabited by giants, one also by “sheep as big as oxen [. . .], and they have very thick wool to match” (p. 169). On a slightly more realistic note, another island has “hedgehogs as big as wild pigs are here; we call them porcupines” (p. 172). Another island has “large mountains of gold that the ants guard carefully [. . .] and the ants are as big as dogs, such that the people dare not approach these mountains” (p. 178).

Dubious customs in India: “the women drink wine and the men do not, and also the women shave their beards and the men do not” (p. 107). But some of the Indian customs he mentions are real: the burning of widows (p. 107), or religious fanatics throwing themselves under the juggernaut (p. 109). Other real customs he mentions later are sky burial in Tibet (i.e. exposing a corpse to be eaten by carrion-birds; “whoever has the greatest number of birds is the most honored”, p. 182) and foot-binding in China (p. 183).

He also mentions an island of what I can only describe as communist cannibals: “all the women of the country are thus common and refuse no man; [. . .] And when the women have children, they give them to those they like who have had sexual relations with them. The land is also common [. . .] and also all the goods of the country are common [. . .] But they have an evil custom, for they more willingly eat human flesh than any other flesh. [. . .] The merchants go there and take children with them for sale to the inhabitants [. . .] if they are lean, they fatten them, and they say that this is the best and sweetest meat in the world.” (P. 111.) :))

Some of the trees on Java “bear poison against which there is only one medicine: that is, to take some of one's own feces and stir with water* and then drink this” (p. 117) :))))) Also on Java, there are “large snails that are so large that several people could dwell inside the shell” (p. 119).

[*The Latin version of Mandeville's book apparently says “to drink one's own dung dissolved in pure water” (p. 216) — because obviously to dissolve your shit in *dirty* water would be just disgusting... :)]

More merry tales of cannibals. Of the island of Dondia, “possibly one of the Andaman Isles” (n. 123): “On this island are people of diverse natures, such that the father eats the son, and the son the father, and the husband the wife, and the wife her husband.” (P. 123.)

Interesting: Mandeville (and other authors of that period) makes a distinction between Manzi, or southern China, and Cathay, or northern China, describing them as two separate countries (pp. 125, 129). The Franciscans actually made some converts in China in the 14th century: “In 1313 John of Monte Corvino was invested as Archbishop of Khanbaliq (Beijing) and set up six Cathayan bishoprics (none outlasted the mid-fourteenth century).” (Translator's note 434, p. 127.)

We would refer to a Mongol emperor as a Khan, but Mandeville spells it Chan and says it is related to the Biblical Cham (i.e. Ham), one of Noah's sons (p. 134). He also claims that Möngke Khan and his better-known brother Kublai Khan were christians (pp. 138–9; they weren't).

At one of the great festivals of the Mongol khans, the Mongols “perform a kind of circumcision” (p. 140). Translator's note 470 adds: “Perhaps an error for ‘coronation’: the Mongols did not practice circumcision.” What an unfortunate error :] By the time you explain the difference to a Mongol, your foreskin is already gone :)))

Hot incest action amongst the Mongols: “they take their kin as wives except their mothers, their daughters, and their sisters on their mother's side, but they can take their sisters on their father's side by another wife, and their brothers' wives after their [brothers'] death, and their stepmoters as well.” (P. 146.) And on an Indian island: “In this country they take their daughters and sisters as wives, and their other relatives, and if there are ten or twelve or more men in a house, the wife of each will be common to all those of the household” (p. 171).

More on Mongol customs: “the greatest sin is to piss in their houses where they dwell [i.e. yurts — he described them on the previous page], and whoever should piss will certainly be killed.” :)) (P. 148.) “They eat dogs, lions, foxes, mares, foals, asses, rats, and mice, and all other animals, large and small, except pigs and animals that were prohibited in the Old Testament” (pp. 148–9).

About cotton: “In this land there are trees that bear wool just like sheep from which one makes clothes to wear.” (P. 159.) This reminded me of the fact that several languages actually call cotton ‘tree wool’ (German Baumwolle, Swedish bomull). But I'm still surprised that anyone would look at cotton plants and think ‘hey, trees’...

Mandeville has a couple of chapters about the legendary kingdom of Prester John, “the great emperor of India, and his kingdom is called the island of Pentoxoire” (p. 160). It is a large and rich country, but not as much as that of the Great Chan. “The Emperor Prester John always takes the Great Chan's daughter as his wife, and the Great Chan [takes] Prester John's daughter as well.” (P. 161. As we can see from this last quote, “Prester John” is actually meant to be a title and not the name of an individual ruler.) “The frame of his bed is of fine sapphires trimmed with gold to make him sleep better and to restrain his lust, for he will sleep with his wives only four times a year” (p. 163).

On another Indian island, men hire someone to take their wife's virginity on their wedding night, because “a long time ago some men had died taking the virginity of their wives, who had snakes in their body; therefore they keep this custom and they always have someone else try out the passage before they endanger themselves.” (P. 170.) For some reason, I absolutely love the phrasing of ‘try out the passage’ :)))

Michel Velser, the late-15th-century German translator of Mandeville, reports that “I have seen in the city of Pavia a dog that was born from an egg, [. . .] it was as large as a greyhound.” (P. 203.) The “bird from which the dog came [. . .] is a little larger than a goose [. . .] It is called frakkales [francolin]. [. . .] It lays three eggs: two become birds and the one, a dog, as I told you before. And this is certainly true” (p. 204). How could you doubt it when he puts it that way? :) Or maybe you could, since we know from the Archpoet's confession that Pavia was a rumbustious party town for college students, so you should probably disregard any wild stories coming from there :))

William of Boldensele (one of Mandeville's sources) writes: “I saw in Cairo three entirely live elephants.” (P. 229.) I can't help but be intrigued by the idea of a *partially* live elephant...

According to Odoric of Pordenone (Mandeville's other major source), the people in the province of Minibar (= Malabar) in India “worship an ox for god. [. . .] His master collects his urine in a silver basin and his dung in a gold one as well, and they present them to the country's ruler. From these the ruler washes his face and hands with the urine, and then his brow and his chest with the dung, most reverently.” (P. 246. Mandeville elaborates on this story a bit on pp. 106–7.) Yule says that this “is little, if at all, exaggerated” :S

A peculiar detail: after giving an account of some country and its people, Mandeville likes to give its “alphabet” (e.g.: Greek, p. 15; Egyptian, p. 33, with pictures; Hebrew, p. 67, with pictures). This is invariably just a list of names of letters, more or less fictional but obviously inspired by the Greek alphabet. Unfortunately the pictures of the letters are not always included in this book, though they seem to have been present in the manuscripts.

BOOK: Freya Stark, "The Valleys of the Assassins"

Freya Stark: The Valleys of the Assassins and Other Persian Travels. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1952. (First published in 1934.) 287 pp. [A scan of the first edition (London: John Murray, 1934) is available on archive.org, and the page numbers below will refer to that edition. The Penguin edition includes the maps, but none of the photographs, from the 1934 edition.]

Freya Stark was a noted travel writer from the first half of the 20th century; she mostly travelled in the Middle East and wrote a number of books about her experiences, and in fact The Valleys of the Assassins seems to have been her first book. First published in 1934, it is about her travels in 1930–32 in remote mountainous regions in western and northern Persia, where few (or, in some cases, none) Europeans had travelled before. I bought my copy of this book, an unassuming Penguin reprint from the 1950s, very cheaply some twenty years ago and only got around to reading it now. Hence I have no idea why exactly I originally decided to buy it, but probably I must have figured that those regions must have been sufficiently exotic in the 1930s that travels there were bound to make for relatively interesting reading; and moreover that this book would presumably be a good introduction to the work of Stark, whom I was vaguely aware of as a very well-regarded travel writer.

I didn't really enjoy this book all that much, though I mostly found it tolerable in small doses. But it would be unfair to criticize the author for it; she does what she can with the material at her disposal. The problem is simply that I'm not *really* all that interested in travel writing. Of course one could in principle be impressed by an account of great discoveries, but it would be unreasonable to expect that here. Obviously, 1930s Persia was not 1860s Africa, where you could step off the boat, march into the nearest jungle, and immediately begin making monumental geographical discoveries. In Stark's case, the regions she travelled through were poorly mapped and we often see her taking observations and measurements which would, in a small way, make a contribution to geographical knowledge; but hardly the sort of contribution that would make for exciting reading. Similarly, she was clearly interested in ancient tombs, ruins of medieval castles, and the like, and often describes these things; but it is all rather perfunctory, she was no archeologist and her travels were not archeological expeditions.

So if you approach Stark's travels from the perspective of her nominal goals, you're bound to be disappointed again and again. She goes in search of a supposed treasure hoard, but fails to find the cave where it is said to be located; she goes to visit Assassin castles, but they prove to be badly dilapidated ruins; she wants to climb Mt. Takht-i-Suleiman, but has to give up long before reaching the summit. The only way to be fair to Stark is to conclude that these goals were not the real point of her travels, or of her book. When you see her moving from one village to another, from one valley to another, from one dusty nomad camp to another, talking to yet another local landowner, yet another mule-driver, yet another random passer-by, yet another desperate peasant applying to her for medical help — it may seem boring and repetitive to me, who would be inclined to tolerate reading about such things only if I was to be rewarded with the account of some impressive achievement at the end; but you have to be fair and conclude that to Stark, these supposedly boring and repetitive things are the real point of her journey. Clearly she just really liked to spend time in remote corners of Persia, admiring the landscape and getting to know the local inhabitants and their way of life. She often makes interesting observations, and sometimes also funny remarks. No doubt this is a very fine travel book for people who like that sort of thing; it often found its way into anthologies and lists of ‘top X travel books’; but for me it was not really any better than tolerable, and I'm not particularly keen to read any more of Stark's work.

A Fortnight in N.W. Luristan

Luristan is a remote mountainous region in western Persia, and at the time of Stark's travels there in 1931 it seems to have still been a fairly wild place. Its inhabitants, the Lurs, were divided into nomadic clans or tribes and preferred to live in tents rather than in houses. The Persian government's presence in the area was rather limited; brigandage and stealing were still the “national art” of its people (p. 50), and there was such a thing as “a district which always shoots its policemen” (p. 53).

However, we see many signs of the government taking the first steps to drag the unwilling inhabitants into modernity: it had recently disarmed them (pp. 50, 59) and was now building a road through the area (p. 20) and trying to force the nomads to settle down, live in houses (p. 45), abandon their traditional costume and hairstyles (pp. 21–2, 33), and send some of their children to schools (p. 40). I couldn't help but be sad upon reading about these instances of progress being rammed down people's throats; it was clearly making the world a drabber and less colourful place. Modernity is a horrible thing.

Stark's chief interest in the area seem to have been Bronze Age artefacts for which Luristan had recently become known (p. 44). Apparently there were numerous prehistoric graveyards there, which were being looted at a prodigious scale; she managed to get the locals to dig up a few graves for her, but the finds weren't particularly impressive (pp. 38–9). Moreover, they were afraid that she might be a government spy trying to catch them in the act of violating the Persian law of antiquities (p. 41) — apparently some of them didn't even believe that she was really a woman! (Pp. 53, 56.)

At any rate, it must have taken a good bit of courage for her to travel through such a wild area, mostly accompanied by only one or two local guides or occasionally a policeman. Along the way we also get some interesting and sometimes surprising portraits of people she encountered, such as that of a local chief who, contrary to what you might expect in such a patriarchal society, was totally under the thumb of his overbearing mother-in-law, who had even “relegated his own mother among the servants” :))) (pp. 27–8), or her last guide, who was full of colourful stories of the people he had shot back in the good old days before the government had disarmed them (pp. 54, 58–9).

The Hidden Treasure

This section of the book didn't turn out to be quite as exciting as it promised to be at the start. While staying in Baghdad, Stark was told by a young man named Hasan, from the region of Pusht-i-kuh (the westernmost part of Luristan; still in Persia, but close to the border with Iraq), about a treasure he knew of, in a cave in that remote region; he wanted her help in getting the treasure out of there without anyone else finding out about it (his main rival was an influential ex-vizier who also knew about the treasure; pp. 63–4). He gave her an approximate map and she made arrangements to travel to that area, with Hasan to follow her a few days later.

Stark, together with an old man named Shah Riza who acted as her guide, crossed the border into Persia; they (wisely, as it later turned out) took the precautions of buying passports, although it would have been easy to sneak across the border without one (pp. 71–2). They also had to get trousers and a hat for Shah Riza so he was able to comply with the new Persian costume regulations (which we already encountered in the previous chapter) :)

Much like the northern parts of Luristan that Stark visited in the previous chapter, Pusht-i-kuh was a very remote area with a sparse population of impoverished nomads living in tents; they had been only recently disarmed by the Persian government, whose presence in the area was limited to the occasional police patrol. The police “have stopped all the traffic that used to travel over the mountain passes”, which caused a “general stagnation” (p. 96).

Despite their poverty, the people invariably treated her with great hospitality. On one or two occasions she was able to return the favour by providing them with medical treatment, the most notable case of which was a boy who got bitten by a snake, with very grisly consequences: “The poison had spread upwards, and first his hand, and then his forearm, had dropped off, the latter leaving the bone still sticking out.” (P. 97; amazingly, he got better, pp. 153–4.)

Interestingly, the area doesn't seem to have always been quite as primitive as in Stark's day; there are a number of ruins of solid buildings and towns from centuries earlier. On a few occasions Stark was able to have some old graves dug up (the locals made no objections as long as they were sure that the grave was not a muslim one; pp. 123–4), though without finding anything more important than a well-preserved skull (p. 129; she later gave it to a museum in Baghdad, p. 192).

“The country is so solitary that everyone in it is known who is anyone at all, and it is the most absurd fallacy to imagine that a lonely region is the one for inconspicuous secrecy.” (P. 128.) Inevitably, news of Stark's little expedition reached the authorities in the capital of the region, Husainabad (pp. 90–1), and soon three policemen showed up to investigate what she was up to (pp. 133–4). They didn't explicitly forbid her from travelling, but kept on following her expedition closely, and tried to pressure the locals into not letting her hire their horses.

Eventually Stark did reach the area where the treasure cave was supposed to be found, and she contrived to shake off her attendants and the police for an hour or two, but failed to find the cave in that time (pp. 148–50). Nevertheless she also heard from one of the locals that there is “a big cave, but with nothing inside it” there (p. 151).

They proceeded to Husainabad, the capital of the region, a very small town built recently by the Persian goverment to solidify their control of the area (p. 168; “[t]he town is an alien thing in this country”, p. 176). Stark had extensive interviews with the chief of police and with the governor there; their suspicions revolved around the possibility that she might be a spy sent from Iraq, or that she wants to loot buried treasures, or that she might get herself killed and cause complications to the government (p. 170). She wrote to Teheran hoping to get a permit for further travel and excavations, but eventually instructions came that she was to be “treated with the greatest consideration” but “accompanied the shortest way to the Iraq frontier” (p. 177).

Nothing particularly eventful happened in the remainder of the journey. Upon her return to Baghdad she learnt that Hasan, who was supposed to have joined her during the journey, had actually been imprisoned by order of his rival the ex-vizier, who had furthermore set up ambushes to intercept Stark on her way back to Iraq and quite possibly kill her, or at least steal any treasure that she might have been carrying; so in a way it was very lucky for her that the Persians had forced her to return under police escort (p. 190). Meanwhile, wild rumours had been circulating of the treasures that she had supposedly found (p. 191). The cave, she concludes, remains unexplored and the existence of the treasure uncertain (p. 192).

So in the end, this chapter feels a little anticlimactic; not much treasure-hunting was actually done, and nothing was found. Most of the text is an account of thoroughly uneventful travels from one dusty nomad camp to another, with a little desultory digging from time to time. This gets monotonous and boring pretty quickly.

I was surprised by how good an opinion she had of the Persian police, although they had hindered her so much in her expedition; “I have personally found them obliging, pleasant and honest, and ready to stretch authority as far in my favour as they could.” (P. 189.) Earlier she remarks about how unpopular the police was with the inhabitants of the area: “Although I never saw any act of actual oppression, I found this unpopularity [of the police] so general over the Pusht-i-Kuh that it is impossible not to suspect some justification for it when there is no foreigner looking on.” (P. 165.) But I guess her standards for oppression are different than mine, as she describes several instances of policemen treating people roughly (p. 164).

A Journey to the Valley of the Assassins

I was aware of the Assassins from before, of course; they inspired one of my favourite historical novels (Vladimir Bartol's Alamut) and one of my favourite video game series (Assassin's Creed). But I never really paid much attention to where their famous mountain stronghold was located and what that area might be like now. So in principle, this chapter should have been an interesting one, as it describes Stark's visit to that area, the valley of Alamut in northern Persia, in 1930.

She starts with a brief historical introduction, which I found informative. I had thought of the Assassins as something more akin to a modern-day terrorist organization, with their dastardly leader, Hasan-i-Sabbah, sending his fanatical adherents to possibly suicidal missions to assassinate his enemies for political reasons (he “treated murder as the suffragette the hunger strike, turning it into an avowed political weapon” :)), p. 198). But as we see here, the whole thing started as more of a religious sect, “a branch of the Isma'ili, who were a branch of the Shi'a” (p. 197), though it soon became very heterodox (p. 218) and came to revolve mostly around Hasan's political ambitions. Apparently, and to my surprise, after the sect ceased to be politically relevant, it nevertheless continued to exist, and still does (or at least did as of the 1930s when Stark wrote this book): “H.H. the Agha Khan receives, as head of the sect, the tithe instituted by Hasan-i-Sabbah [. . .] confirmed during a law-suit before the High Court in Bombay in 1866” (pp. 200–1).

Another interesting detail was that apparently Alamut is just the name of a valley and of the river that flows through it, but not e.g. of a village or of the Assassins' castle itself (pp. 201, 212, 219). Stark mostly refers to that castle as “the Rock”, possibly with an attribute such as “of Alamut” (p. 202) or “of the Assassins” (p. 216). It stands above a village named Qasir Khan (p. 219).

She travelled on muleback, guided by a local mule-driver; they started in the city of Qazvin and travelled for several days, first through a plain and then gradually reaching the hilly country where the valley of Alamut was located. Along the way she made some efforts to collect geographical names, as the area was poorly mapped (p. 212). Eventually she visited the ruins of the castle itself, but they seemed to be in very bad shape: “nearly everything is ruined beyond the power of imagination to reconstruct, and the lower part of the castle [. . .] were inaccessible without climbing-shoes” (p. 221). She also met the local landlord and a suitably suspicious police official, who, however, fortunately didn't give her too much trouble.

She continued to the town of Garmrud on the other side of the valley, where she visited another ruin, the castle of Nevisar Shah (pp. 231), named after a (perhaps legendary?) “unbeliever” king of that name (p. 225). This is where this chapter ends; Stark adds a brief bibliography for “[a]nyone who wishes for scientific information about these matters” but emphasizes that “[w]hat I write here is for pleasure [. . .] I mention the things I like to remember as they come into my head” (p. 228). Unfortunately I find — and this seems to be a recurring feature with this book — that I don't have as much pleasure reading her account as she probably had writing it. This chapter was something of a disappointment to me; the castles she visited turned out to be miserable ruins where nothing impressive or interesting could be seen, and the whole story is just an account of more or less everyday experiences and encounters during a journey through a very remote and mountainous part of rural Persia. Clearly Stark enjoyed her journey and liked to interact with the local people whom she met along the way, but I can't say that it made for a very interesting read.

The Assassins' Castle of Lamiasar

I was interested to learn that the Assassins had numerous fortresses; the Mongols destroyed “fifty or more” of them in the 13th century (p. 234). Lamiasar was notable for having held out longer than most of the others. Stark heard about it from a Persian friend who apparently did not know its actual location, so she set out to find it. Departing from Qazvin with one attendant and two mules, it took them a little less than a day to encounter someone who was able to give them more precise directions to Lamiasar (p. 240). They reached the castle after another day of travel; she explored the ruin thoroughly (pp. 245–8), but it doesn't seem to have been any better preserved than the ones in the previous chapter. The area was mosquito-infested and malarial, and the chapter ends with Stark herself starting to feel ill, and her attendant conspiring with their guide “to mention no more castles, even if he knew of them, in the district of the Shah Rud and its mosquitoes” (p. 251). :))

A funny remark from a Kurdish village that had been visited by British surveyors years before: “They were under the impression that Arabic is the British language, and surprised when I told them that we have a language of our own.” :)) (P. 241.)

The Throne of Solomon

The “Throne of Solomon” (Takht-i-Suleiman) is the third highest mountain in Persia, and there is a bizarre legend behind its name: supposedly King Solomon, finding that his wife was unwilling to sleep with him, set up his tent there one time so that the cold would compel her to join him in bed after all :))) (p. 252; but see p. 288 for another version of the legend).

Stark tried to reach the mountain in 1931, and this chapter begins where the previous one left off, with Stark falling ill in the mosquito-infested valley of the Shah Rud. Her illness proved to be a fairly serious case of malaria and dysentery, and she had to pause her journey for a whole week (p. 255). Then, returning to Alamut valley, she managed to get medical help from a Persian doctor who happened to be vacationing nearby (pp. 261–2) and had plenty of experience with her diseases, as they were very common on the Caspian shores (p. 266).

“Ismail had to unload the baggage and coax the mules one at a time round the corner, telling them the most distressing things about their parentage, punctuated with a stick from behind.” (Pp. 254–5.)

When her doctor offered morphine to help her sleep: “His ideas on quinine ran to three times the maximum marked in my medical guide, and I thought that a similar experiment with morphia might have too permanent an effect altogether.” (P. 262.)

Finally she got well enough to resume her journey. On reaching the village of Garmrud (which we already saw in an earlier chapter), she met the two wives of Aziz, her mule-driver (he “looked rather glum when I remarked that, in my opinion, a man's days of peace are over when he has married two times simultaneously”, p. 273 :))). She was also present when three weddings were being held in that village on the same day, and describes some of the local wedding-customs (pp. 275–8).

In the next valley she visited the “Queen of Sheba's bath”, which she often calls a “watering resort”, but it was actually just a hot spring with some improvised stone shelters for visitors (pp. 289–91). She met the Greek wife of a Hungarian engineer who worked as a surveyor for the Persian government (p. 292) — a very rare case of Europeans living in that remote part of Persia.

Eventually they got close to the mountain and spent a couple of days going uphill, mostly walking as the terrain was very hard for the mules. Stark realized she was not well enough yet to try reaching the top, though “there appeared no difficulty for an able-bodied mountaineer” (p. 297). Later it turned out that the Hungarian engineer, not wanting her to reach the mountain that he himself had not climbed yet, had conspired with her guide and got him to lead Stark to the mountain by a route from which the summit would appear too arduous to reach, instead of by a different route where it would have been possible to reach it! (P. 302. As she says in a footnote, the peak was climbed in 1933 by another British visitor.)

Crossing a ridge, they continued north, where the ground slowly begins to descend towards the Caspian Sea; this area was poorly mapped, and Stark hoped to make some contribution with her measurements (p. 307). She took an interest in the location of the medieval city of Kalar (p. 317; she concluded that it must have coincided with the present-day village of Bashm, p. 324), and bought some ancient pots and a bronze spear-head from a local magnate (p. 321).

In the village of Bijeno she was invited to take a hot bath in a swimming-pool used by the wife of the local landlord and her friends; but it proved to be “a subterranean catacomb littered with débris and egg-shells, where five or six elderly Maenads with nothing on to hide the repulsiveness of their bodies welcomed me with exclamations of joy. I felt as if I were to be initiated among witches into worlds of darkness. [. . .] I gathered up my dressing-gown and fled.” :))) (P. 337.)

Towards the end of the journey she visited yet another ruin, “the Maiden's Castle” (p. 349), but even she describes it as “rather disappointing”. Eventually she reached the new road to Teheran which was then under construction, and returned to the capital by car.

BOOK: Evelyn Waugh, "A Handful of Dust"

The Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh. Volume 4: A Handful of Dust. Ed. by H. R. Woudhuysen. Oxford University Press, 2023. 9780198703150. c + 424 pp.

This is Waugh's fourth novel, and a bit longer than the other Waugh books that I've read so far. It is well-written and I enjoyed reading it, but there were also some things I didn't like that much about it. It is not as light-hearted as Waugh's Vile Bodies, which I read earlier this year (see my post about it); there is still humour in it, but it stays more in the background; what satire there is, is more bitter, and overall it is a sad story with an unhappy end.

<spoiler warning>

Tony and Brenda Last are around 30 years old and have been married for some seven years (p. 14). They are rich, but not extremely rich; Tony inherited some £6000 a year (p. 122) and a sprawling, neo-Gothic mid-19th-century country house (whose architecture is everything that the modernists liked to turn up their noses at; p. 11), where he and Brenda live. Paying off the inheritance taxes and maintaining the house, with its staff of 15 servants (p. 28), consumes more than 5/6 of Tony's income (p. 123), and they have to be careful about their other expenses, at least by rich-people standards (early in the book we even find Brenda travelling to London on a third-class train ticket; p. 30). Clearly they are a fairly advanced example of the decline of the traditional British upper class. Tony would be wise to sell the house (Brenda's family used to have a similar one but had sold it some years before), but he is too sentimentally attached to it and to his quiet life there.

Alas, after seven years of marriage, Brenda got bored of it, and I suspect also of their lifestyle; she has a bunch of friends in London, women who seem to be richer than her, and she would probably prefer to live closer to them where there's more things going on. She also finds the country house “all, every bit of it, appallingly ugly” (p. 28); later we see her institute large redecorations in a modern style blatantly at odds with the original spirit of the building (“white chromium plating”, p. 65).

Brenda starts an affair with John Beaver, a man a few years younger than her (and a distant acquaintance of Tony's). You might say that he is a still more advanced case of upper-class decline; we are not told who or what his late father was, but we do see that his mother, Mrs. Beaver, now has to support herself by running a real-estate and interior design business, and that Beaver himself had been to Oxford and then worked in an advertising agency until he lost his job in the great economic crisis. Since then he has been unemployed (which I guess means several years; the novel appeared in 1934); he lives with his mother (in a house “crowded with the unsaleable furniture of two larger houses”, p. 4 — another sign of decline) and sits eagerly by the phone every day, hoping that some friends will invite him to a party or a dinner (as indeed they often do) and thereby provide him a free meal. In short, he is a harmless parasite that I couldn't help feeling more pity than contempt for.

Over the years of their marriage, Tony, as we are told on more than one occasion, “got into a habit of loving and trusting Brenda” (pp. 102, 107), and she takes full advantage of his trusting nature. She persuades him to rent a small flat for her in London, and announces that she will start taking economics classes at the university there. Soon she seems to be spending less time at home than in London, seeing Beaver in her flat or enjoying social life with her friends (all of whom know about the affair and rather approve of it, or at least consider it harmless; they mostly look down on Tony anyway, p. 54). Tony clearly misses her during these increasingly long absences, and it's a testament to his trusting nature — or should we say his naïveté — that at no point does it seem to occur to him to ask her anything about economics, or to ask to see her course materials.

But I suppose it's no use; from what we've seen of their marriage dynamics, even if he did ask, she'd dismiss him with some vague excuse and make him feel guilty for having posed the question at all. For instance, on one occasion, Tony tries to make a surprise visit to her in London, but she simply refuses to see him: “He's got to be taught not to make surprise visits.” (P. 55.) This leads to a funny episode where Tony and a friend get increasingly drunk, keep calling Brenda on the phone and eventually end the night chatting and dancing with two tarts in a nightclub.

At one point Brenda, apparently figuring that Tony would mind her absences less if he had an affair of his own (p. 67), even tries to introduce him to one of her friends, a bizarre creature named Jenny Abdul Akbar, apparently the estranged English wife of some Moroccan grandee. Tony shows no interest in her and the experiment is not a success, but Brenda agrees with the conclusion of another of her friends: “Anyway, this lets you out. You've done far more than most wives would to cheer the old boy up” (p. 76) — because obviously, staying with Tony and not cheating of him is not an option. A good example of the rather bitter sarcasm that is not uncommon in this book.

Tony and Brenda have a son named John Andrew; he is presumably about seven and I have to commend the author for representing the child's manner of speech very convincingly (e.g. see the excited, breathless sentence on p. 42, ll. 1257–63); I found it annoying, just as I probably would if I heard him speak in real life. Brenda doesn't seem to miss her little son very much, but fortunately he has a nanny to look after him. His main interest is riding and fox-hunting, in which he is encouraged by the Lasts' groom, Ben (we see a similar situation in the early parts of Sassoon's Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) — perhaps Waugh was inspired by that book?).

Then tragedy strikes: John Andrew is killed in what I guess technically counts as a traffic accident, caused by a combination of unfortunate coincidences that nobody is really to blame for. Evidently Brenda's son was the only thing still linking her with Tony;* now she announces that she is moving to London for good and demands a divorce from Tony. Friends advise him to refuse and wait a little, since Brenda is sure to lose interest in Beaver soon enough; but he is disappointed with her and doesn't want her back (p. 121).

[*And not very strongly either. Upon being told that John is dead, Brenda initially takes it to mean John Beaver, her lover, and is actually rather relieved when it turns out to be John Andrew, her son (p. 96). Probably this short but important scene is why the author adopted the otherwise inconvenient idea of giving two characters the same first name.]

This leads to a very curious episode. At that time, divorce was only possible for certain sufficiently good reasons, such as if one partner (but not both; p. lii) had been unfaithful; so Tony has to take a prostitute to a seaside hotel for a weekend and order breakfast in bed so that the hotel staff will be able to testify that they saw him in bed with her. (The fact that Tony and Brenda both agreed on a divorce and colluded to make these arrangements would also, if it became known to the authorities, result in the divorce not being granted; pp. li, 107.)

Initially Brenda and Tony agree that she is to receive £500 a year in alimony, but then, influenced by Beaver and also by her elder brother, Brenda begins to demand £2000 a year, even though she knows that this would force Tony to sell his house. Tony finally realizes how wrong he was to trust her; he decides to leave the country for half a year and then give Brenda the choice between divorce without alimony or no divorce at all.

Tony joins an explorer named Dr. Messinger on an expedition to South America, searching for a lost city deep in the jungles of the Amazon. Eventually their Indian attendants refuse to go any further, insisting that the next tribe are “bad people” (p. 147). Tony and Messinger continue on their own, but then Tony falls sick with fever; Messinger goes on alone, hoping to reach the next village and bring help, but drowns in a boat accident. Tony, more dead than alive, reaches the farm of one Mr. Todd, who nurses him back to health. Todd is illiterate but loves Dickens's novels, so he asks Tony to read them aloud to him every day. Months pass and Tony slowly realizes that he is effectively Todd's prisoner; he can't reach civilization without Todd's help, and Todd clearly intends to keep him there until one of them dies. (He had at least one victim in a similar arrangement years before; p. 178.) At one point a party of Englishmen arrive in search of Tony; but Mr. Todd, either by dint of good luck or by being forewarned of their coming, has arranged for Tony to spend the day drunk and asleep in a nearby Indian village, and has meanwhile convinced the search party that Tony is dead, so that no further rescue attempts are likely to be made and Tony's fate is sealed.

The novel ends with a short epilogue. Beaver seems to have lost interest in Brenda, and has gone to America with his mother (p. 151). Tony has been declared dead; Brenda married his friend Jock, a local MP; and Tony's country house is now in the hands of his cousins, who are just as fond of it as he was, but who have better financial sense than him. They have shrunk the staff to six servants to reduce expenses, and are operating a fur farm to bring in some money; whereby they hope eventually to restore the estate to its former glory.

</spoiler warning>

I've found this novel to be skilfully constructed and there are many things in it; my poor plot summary above is very far from doing it justice. I liked how Waugh often divides the story into fairly short ‘scenes’ (separated by an empty line), resulting in an effect similar to that of a movie. He often uses this to switch between two or more strands of the story, effectively presenting them in parallel (e.g. between Tony in Brazil and the other characters in England).

Another example of a well-constructed scene is the one where Brenda receives the news of her son's death. We hear she has been worrying all day that something might have happened to Beaver, who went on a trip to France (p. 94); meanwhile, Brenda is at a party with a number of her women friends, and at the moment she is having her fortune told from her foot, by what you might call a ‘sole reader’ or a ‘podomantist’ as opposed to a ‘palm reader’ or ‘cheiromantist’. Brenda seems to be taking the podomantist's ominous pronouncements (“Four men dominate your fate” etc.; p. 95) at least half seriously. When her session is over and Jock shows up to tell her that John is dead, she initially thinks it's John Beaver and not John Andrew: “ ‘John . . . John Andrew . . . I . . . Oh thank God . . .’ Then she burst into tears.” (P. 96.) I guess she is herself shocked at her expression of relief that it is her son that got killed, and not her lover. And at the end of that scene, we hear the podomantist telling the fortune of the next woman, *saying the exact same things that she said to Brenda*.

I liked Waugh's attention to little details that show the sentiments of his characters. At one point Brenda invites a bunch of her women friends to spend the weekend at her and Tony's country house. Tony, following his usual Sunday morning custom, buys carnations for all the ladies to wear in their buttonholes. The guests head back to London early on that same day, trashtalking Tony's house and commiserating with Brenda who has to live there: “ ‘My poor Brenda,’ said Veronica, unpinning her carnation and throwing it from the window into the side of the road.” (P. 67.) You can't help feeling that Tony, his whole lifestyle and everything he holds dear, are being thrown away in just the same careless, contemptuous manner.

Another thing I liked about this novel is the abundance of interesting minor characters. I particularly liked Revd. Tendril, the local vicar (p. 25; or rector?, p. 75) whose services Tony attends on Sunday mornings (though Tony isn't really religious himself and is only doing it out of a sense of tradition; you might say he is sort of LARPing how a traditional country squire is supposed to act). Tendril started his career as a military chaplain in India some thirty-odd years before and has been recycling the exact same sermons ever since, complete with references to “our dear ones far away” and “our Gracious Queen Empress in whose service we are here” (p. 25; confusing some of his audience, who do not quite realize that he's talking about Victoria). Another interesting minor character is Mrs. Rattery, a friend of Jock's, who at one point visits Tony's country house by flying her own airplane and landing it in a nearby park (p. 79).

*

Speaking of religion, apparently it holds a greater significance in the novel than meets the eye of a naive reader like me. We read in the editor's introduction (long and interesting, as always in this series) that “Waugh is deeply critical of Tony's taste and of his morals” (p. liv), e.g. because “Tony's church attendance is merely a social rite” (p. lv); later the editor summarizes Waugh's views thus: “Man without religion will seek after strange and false gods (fortune-telling, psychoanalysis, economics, lost cities); these will fail him, and he will find himself in a world where nothing makes sense. Good in the world can only derive from God, and without religion, man is ‘either bestial or a child’.” (P. lx.)

This may well be how Waugh saw things, but from the perspective of a non-religious person like me, this line of thinking seems completely incomprehensible. It is true that the world makes no sense, but what good does it do to make up a fictional answer to your questions? And surely it is obvious that plenty of people without religion somehow manage to be not much more bestial, nor much more childish, and not even much less good, than religious people are. And moreover, even if Tony had been genuinely religious rather than merely performing it as a social rite, what good would that have done him? How would it have prevented the fact that he and Brenda are incompatible in terms of how they want to live, and that therefore their marriage is doomed to fall apart or, if persisted in despite their incompatibilities, make at least one of them, and possibly both, deeply miserable? If Tony were religious, his marriage would still fail, his wife would still despise his beloved house, and her friends would still look down on him as a stuffy old square.

So perhaps for Waugh this novel was about the lack of religion in modern man's life, but for me it's first and foremost a sad story of incompatibility. How unfortunate it is that it took Tony and Brenda seven years of marriage to discover that one of them wants to live a quiet life in his ponderous neo-Gothic house, putting on the role of a country squire, while the other wants to stay in London and flit from party to party in an endless merry-go-round of socializing with her friends! Neither of these two things is bad in itself, it's just that people with such different tastes can't very well live together without being unhappy.

*

The thing that bothers me the most about this novel is how hard it is on Tony, and unfairly so. He hasn't really done anything bad as far as we can see, and yet he loses everything — his son, his marriage, and ultimately his life. In terms of Tony's circumstances, the whole novel is a story of non-stop decline. His Amazonian expedition, too, is in some sense a matter of non-stop decline: at first, Tony and Messinger travel with a group of (English-speaking) Guyanan blacks; then with a group of Indians, with whom it is nearly impossible to communicate; then it's just the two of them; and finally Tony is left alone. And then, when Tony gets into captivity under Mr. Todd, Waugh positively toys with his fate like a cat with a mouse: he was so close to getting rescued, and yet in the end he is as good as buried alive. And back at home, nobody particularly sympathizes with him or has any real appreciation of the sort of lifestyle that he would like to lead.

The only thing that prevents the end of the book from being a total and unmitigated disaster is the fact that Tony's cousin who inherits his house cares about it much like Tony did, and intends to preserve and restore it. And, dare I say, there is just a tiny glimmer of hope even for Tony. We do not, after all, leave him at the end of the book in any worse a state than he had been in for the past many months as an unwilling guest of Mr. Todd. He managed to hand a message to a passing prospector once (p. 178); conceivably a similar opportunity could occur again, and lead to a renewed rescue attempt. Moreover, Todd is almost sixty years old (p. 171), so it is only a matter of time before he dies or falls seriously ill, and the influence which he exerts over the local Indians (p. 177) could then cease and Tony might be able to get them to make him a boat. We do not know much about Mr. Todd's security arrangements but they do not seem to be very high; so it also seems possible to me that Tony might at some point attack and overpower Todd, perhaps get access to his gun, and then threaten Todd and/or the local Indians into helping him. I suspect that Waugh wouldn't think highly of any of these probabilities, but I at any rate am not willing to write off Tony completely just yet.

Interesting things from the editor's introduction

There's an interesting section on real-life influences on this or that element of the novel. For example, Waugh's first wife left him for a man named John, and Brenda in the novel also leaves her husband for a man named John (Beaver) — probably not a coincidence (pp. l, lx). And apparently Waugh himself said that the dog owned by Brenda's sister in the novel is based on a real dog owned by Phyllis de Janzé (pp. lxii–lxiii) — who, incidentally, was the English sister-in-law of Frédéric de Janzé, the author of two books which we encountered on the pages of this blog before (Vertical Land and Tarred with the Same Brush).

But the most interesting result of real-world influence on the novel, in my opinion, is the whole Amazonian episode. In fact it came as a complete surprise to me; when Tony and Brenda's divorce negotiations founder, there was nothing in the book up to that point which could lead one to expect that Tony would suddenly go on an expedition into the jungles of South America (indeed it comes as a result of a chance meeting in one of Tony's clubs; p. 132). Obviously, Waugh was inspired to send Tony to that part of the world because he himself had travelled into the interior of Guiana in 1933 (and described the trip in a travel book, Ninety-Two Days; see my post about it from last year).

Many little details in the Amazonian episode of the novel are based on Waugh's experiences from that journey; for instance, foodstuffs such as farine and tasso (p. 178), or the drinks cassiri (p. 144) and piwari (p. 179), the preparation of which involves chewing on cassava root and spitting it into a bowl; even the mechanical mice with which Dr. Messinger hopes to win over the uncooperative Indians (p. 156) — all these things were already mentioned in Ninety-Two Days. The character of Mr. Todd was inspired by one Mr. Christie (pp. lxxiv, 422), a reclusive rancher and bizarre religious fanatic whom Waugh described in chapter 3 of Ninety-Two Days.

Waugh also took some inspiration from Peter Fleming's journey to Brazil in 1932 (p. lviii–lix), which Fleming described in articles in The Times and then in his book, Brazilian Adventure (1933; see my recent post about it).

And Dr. Messinger and his quest for a lost city in the Amazonian jungle were surely inspired by Percy Fawcett, the famous explorer who disappeared in 1925 while on a quest for just such a city. But I have to admit that Messinger struck me as being more of a scientific type (at least he has a doctorate), while Fawcett was more purely an adventurer (and a military officer by occupation).

But I was shocked and almost hurt by this remark from the editor's introduction: “Fawcett's lack of experience, competence, and common sense is matched by Dr Messinger's; both share messianic tendencies and are, like the leader of the expedition in Fleming's Brazilian Adventure, Major Pingle, essentially frauds and untrustworthy.” (P. lix.) Now, it has been almost twenty years since I read Exploration Fawcett, Fawcett's posthumous autobiography edited by his surviving younger son; but surely, he had been on numerous expeditions into the interior of South America prior to that fateful one in 1925, and he impressed people by his ability to traverse difficult terain quickly while still drawing good-quality maps, to say nothing of his seeming imperviousness to tropical diseases. To say that such a man lacked experience and competence strikes me as completely bizarre. [But see this 2017 article, which suggests that he may have actually been a good deal less competent than I thought.] Nor was he a fraud; by all accounts he sincerely believed in the lost city he was looking for (and, let's not forget, he was willing to stake his life on it) — he may have been badly wrong about that city, but he was no fraud.

And for that matter, I didn't get the impression that Dr. Messinger in the novel is inexperienced or incompetent either, just the contrary in fact; and he struck me as no fraud, but honest in his quest, just as Fawcett had been; my only complaint about Messinger is that he is perhaps a tad too optimistic in his plans. It is shameful to compare these two honest people, the fictional Dr. Messinger and the real Col. Fawcett, to Major Pingle, who really was untrustworthy, for he deliberately lied to Fleming for weeks about his willingness to search for traces of Fawcett's expedition in otherwise unexplored territory (and not just to lead a casual shooting and fishing party).

Incidentally, the whole idea of Tony becoming a sort-of prisoner of Mr. Todd bears a distant resemblance to some of the theories that were being floated in the 1920s or 30s about Fawcett's fate, as people claimed that he was still alive as a captive of the Indians, or perhaps that he became a sort of cult leader amongst them. But I think that Waugh's idea is far more interesting and original than any of those theories. Anyone can imagine Fawcett becoming a captive of the Indians; but to imagine Tony becoming the captive of an illiterate, reclusive rancher with an obsession of having someone read Dickens's novels aloud to him — that takes some real creativity. My hat's off to Waugh for coming up with that one.

*

The editor's introduction also has an interesting account of the publication history of the novel, and I couldn't help but be impressed by how Waugh tried to get as much use out of his material as he could. His trip to Guiana was the basis of his travel book, Ninety-Two Days; it also inspired a short story, “The Man Who Liked Dickens” (which he actually wrote during the journey itself, in Brazil; p. 402), which appeared in Cosmopolitan (p. xxxiii; it's in the September 1933 issue)* and in Nash's—Pall Mall Magazine (pp. .403–4; in the November 1933 issue). Waugh then reused this short story, with some minor changes, as a chapter in A Handful of Dust (about Tony's captivity with Mr. Todd). The material about Tony's and Dr. Hessinger's expedition is mostly new in the novel, however; in the short story that part is dealt with very briefly. (An interesting difference: instead of Dr. Hessinger there is a Prof. Anderson and he dies of malaria rather than in a boat accident.)

[*Waugh grumbled to his agent: “If those Americans wrongly called Cosmopolitan take it there must be no monkeying with the text.” :)) (P. xxxvi.)]

Moreover, before the novel was published as a book, a slightly earlier version of it was serialized in Harper's Bazaar under the title “A Flat in London” (p. xxxvi). However, the chapter that had previously appeared in Cosmopolitan and Nash's couldn't be included here, because of copyright reasons, so Waugh wrote a new and happier ending in which Tony and Brenda apparently get reconciled (ibid.)! This alternative ending was later included as an appendix in the fourth British edition of A Handful of Dust, but, to my disappointment, it is not included in the present volume; apparently it will be published in vol. 5 (pp. xlix, lxxxvii, 414). The same volume will also include the original version of “The Man Who Liked Dickens” (p. xxxiii).

Nevertheless the present volume does include a couple of interesting appendices: there's one with illustrations from the serialization of the novel in Harper's Bazaar (pp. 414–17) and one with a preface which Waugh wrote for the 1964 reprint of the novel (p. 422) and in which he explains his inspiration for the character of Mr. Todd.

Miscellaneous

Waugh supposedly said that “anyone could write a novel given six weeks, pen, paper and no telephone or wife.” (Pp. xlix–l.)

Waugh apparently thought that flats “were essentially un-English” and that the English people have a “love of own front door”; flats were also seen as “a sign of the isolation of modern urban life” (p. xlvi). It's not that I disagree with any of that — I think that ideally every human settlement should look like Hobbiton at the start of the first Lord of the Rings movie — but considering how many people there are nowadays, and how many of them have to live in cities, it's inevitable that most of them will end up in flats.

Tony's butler, Albert, says “clucking like a 'en” on p. 92. I was intrigued by this; I guess it means that when people drop an h at the start of a word, the article a before it does not change into an even if it is now followed by a vowel; the dropped h still exerts a sort of posthumous influence.

One reviewer complained that Waugh's literature is too formulaic: “Waugh, he said, ‘has mixed one of his usual literary cocktails. His recipe is as follows:—One-quarter Ernest Hemingway, one-quarter Michael Arlen, one-quarter Anthony Powell, one-eighth crude caricatures of London personalities, one-eight local colour (tropical for preference). Add a catchphrase, stir to a light froth, and serve very cool.’ ” (P. lxix.) Nevertheless the novel “was clearly a great success” in Britain (p. lxiv), though less so in America (p. lxix).

Brenda reading the newspaper (p. 13): “Two more chaps in gas ovens. . .” I didn't realize that this was such a common method of suicide. Perhaps it is a nod to one of Waugh's previous novels, Vile Bodies, where Lord Balcairn commits suicide in this way?

Brenda complains of the many people involved in maintaining their country house: “[...] odd little men constantly popping in to wind the clocks and cook the accounts and clean the moat, [...]” (p. 28). I love how cooking the accounts is included so casually in that list :) Interestingly, it was omitted from the serialization in the U.S. edition of Harper's Bazaar (p. 263).

Tony and Jock having a chat with two tarts (p. 60): “ ‘What d'you do?’ / ‘I design postmen's hats,’ said Jock. / ‘Oh, go on.’ / ‘And my friend here trains sea lions.’ ” :))

A few interesting instances of racial terminology: Brenda says that Jenny Abdul Akbar is “[n]ot black but married one” (p. 68) — her husband was actually a Moroccan nobleman and surely an Arab rather than what we would call a black now; so I guess this shows that in Waugh's time the word ‘black’ was applied more widely. (Jenny describes her husband and his men as “pure Semitic type” on p. 71, contrasting this with “negroes”.) Later in the book, when Tony and Dr. Messinger travel with a group of actual blacks (from Guiana), they are referred to as “niggers” on p. 144 (ll. 594, 615), but “negroes” on p. 147 (l. 746).

Seven-year-old John Andrew is quite fascinated by Jenny. “ ‘Back to bed,’ she said, ‘or I shall spank you.’ / ‘Would you do it hard? I should't mind.’ ” :))) (P. 72.)

Tony has to take a prostitute to Brighton to provide fake evidence of infidelity for the divorce; but his lawyer tells of an even more bizarre case: “Lately we had a particularly delicate case involving a man of very rigid morality and a certain indifference. In the end his own wife consented to go with him and supply the evidence. She wore a red wig. It was quite successful.” (P. 107.) On a related note, another lawyer says later: “Judges in their more lucid moments sometimes wonder why perfectly respectable, happily married men go off for weekends to the seaside with women they do not know.” (P. 119.) Still, it seems that for the most part this silly stratagem worked to get people the divorce they wanted.

“England was east of America so he and Dr. Messinger got the sun later. It came to them at second hand and slightly soiled” (p. 143). Ewww, what an image :))

I learned from the notes (p. 198) that the name Daisy is a “[l]ate 19th-century form of Margaret”. I hadn't thought of that, but it makes sense, because the equivalent of “Margaret” is used as the word for a daisy (the flower) in many other languages (it seems to have started in French).

Interesting: Waugh had a habit of mentioning the same minor characters in several of his books, e.g. Margot, Lady Metroland (p. 201), or Lord Monomark (p. 227, which also explains the etymology: a monomark was “a short alphanumeric sequence used in place of a postal address” (wiktionary)).

“Make love” in its older sense, which we already encountered in one of Waugh's other books, appears again here (p. 36); the note on p. 203 adds: “the more modern and, initially US, sense of having sex with someone is first recorded by OED in 1927”.

I was interested to learn, from a note on p. 208, that the name Jenny “is a variation of Jane and popular in the 19th century”, although we think of it as a variant of Jennifer nowadays. But what is really strange is that the note says it is “correctly pronounced ‘Jinny’ ”. Maybe if you're a New Zealander... Neither the wikpedia nor the wiktionary nor the OED suggest that it should be pronounced with /ɪ/.

Interestingly, Waugh spells “Thibetan” with an h (p. 93). The note on p. 213 says that this spelling “remained current at least until the 1960s”. However, some editions of the novel use “Tibetan”: the serialization in the British Harper's Bazaar, the reprint in the Albatross Modern Continental Library (1935), and the Penguin edition of 1951 (p. 328). According to Google n-grams, the h-less forms were more common since at least the late 19th century. I suspect that the Th spelling started in an effort to indicate aspiration /tʰ/, perhaps in French, where this might well have made sense; but in English, where such a T is inevitably aspirated anyway, the presence of the h probably causes more harm than good, as it might mislead some people into pronouncing it with /θ/ instead.

I learnt a new word from p. 139: fête, which is the same as a name-day. But it seems to be more French than English.

Honi soit qui mal y pense: “In Guiana, he [i.e. Waugh] traded a Woolworth necklace for a black cock” (p. 226).

Interesting things from the critical apparatus

We've encountered the abbreviation 'ld (for would) instead of 'd in Waugh before (in Vile Bodies), and here it appears again in Waugh's manuscript (p. 287), though not in any printed edition of this novel.

On a few (but only a few) occasions the critical apparatus contains interesting additional material that did not make it into the final version of the novel. See e.g. the additional information about the Old Hundredth club on pp. 289–90 (note to 58.210–12); and their supposed fancy champagne was actually “distilled upstairs by the youngest Miss Weybridge” (p. 291, note to 58.233–59.235).

When Jenny says to the Revd. Tendril: “I could see from your sermon that you knew the East, Rector. [. . .] It has an uncanny fascination, hasn't it?” (p. 75), in early versions of the text the priest replied: “It had—before your day, young lady. You used to meet some of the finest types there. But it's not a white man's country any more.” (P. 307.)

At one point, when Tony and Messinger fail to get the local Indians to tell them the name of the rivers they have crossed, there are a few more lines of conversation between them in the first U.S. edition, but not in the British ones (p. 375, note to 150.856–7). They are not of any great importance, but I still don't see why Waugh thought it necessary to remove them.

Errors

This volume seems to have much fewer errors than some of the earlier ones in this series.

• The comma after “In,” at the start of n. 112, p. lxiv, is redundant.
• “Boa Visa” at the top of p. lxxiv should be “Boa Vista”.
• On p. 196 (note to 16.196), there is a semicolon after “slang)”, but it should be a comma.
• On p. 214 (note to 94.1635) there is a comma instead of a full-stop at the end of the sentence (after “Berkshire”).

But the printers have to be commended on the good job on “İzmir” (p. 222), which is a marked improvement from the embarrassing failure of “I˙zmit” in Helena (p. 133). :)