BOOK: Poggio Bracciolini, "On Leaders and Tyrants"

Poggio Bracciolini, Guarino of Verona, Pietro del Monte: On Leaders and Tyrants. Edited and translated by Hester Schadee, Keith Sidwell, with David Rundle. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 99. Harvard University Press, 2024. 9780674297128. xlvii + 566 pp.

This book is about a somewhat unusual subject: a minor controversy that took place amongst several humanist authors, in 1440, about whether Scipio Africanus was more excellent and virtuous than Julius Caesar, or vice versa. Actually we've had one somewhat similar book in the I Tatti Renaissance Library before, Ciceronian Controversies from 2007 (see my post about it); but the pieces that compose the present volume are a bit longer and come from a less numerous cast of authors.

Anyway, while the topic is perhaps a bit obscure, it wasn't too hard to relate to. This whole debate reminded me a little of the sort of arguments that nerds might have nowadays about this or that figure from some science fiction or fantasy franchise; and I guess you could say that the Renaissance-era humanists were fans of ancient Roman civilization in a way not entirely unlike how some people today might be fans of Star Trek or Star Wars or things like that.

On the Excellence of Scipio and Caesar

The controversy begins with a short piece by Poggio Bracciolini titled On the Excellence of Scipio and Caesar. This is shorter than most of the subsequent works in this volume, and was in many ways my favourite. Poggio gives a brief overview of the careers of both men, and I found the part about Scipio particularly interesting since I knew very little about him. I knew, of course, that he had been one of the leading Roman generals from the Second Punic War, but not much else; I remember reading a book about the Punic Wars many years ago and there must have been something about Scipio there, but I remembered nothing at all.

Poggio clearly considered Scipio to be a vastly more virtuous and excellent figure than Caesar, and from what we see of Scipio's and Caesar's life and actions here in Poggio's account, I was happy to agree with him. Admittedly I had disliked Caesar from before, and Poggio's essay didn't change my opinion about him in any way; as for Scipio, the account of his career that we get here is so glowing and impressive that I couldn't help wondering if there was some bias, either on the part of Poggio or of his sources. For example, there is of course plenty of dirt on Caesar in Suetonius's biography of him, as there is on every of the twelve emperors of whom Suetonius wrote biographies; and we might have had some dirt on Scipio too, if someone like Suetonius had written a biography of him, but no one seems to have done so (“The life of Scipio [. . .] was not written down by any of the ancients”, ¶13). My approval of Scipio might even have grown to admiration, were it not for the fact that I support the Carthaginians in the Punic Wars, so that I can't wholeheartedly approve of a general that fought *against* the Carthaginians. But even if Scipio was an instrument of Roman imperialism, Caesar was even more so; and so Scipio comes out looking better than Caesar anyway.

Speaking of Suetonius, Poggio also uses him as his source for various juicy and unfavourable remarks on Caesar's private life: “Caesar's early years, when he first joined the barracks, were not short of disrepute, for he was sometimes called ‘the bedstead of Nicomedes, King of Bithynia’ and ‘queen’ ” (¶4). “That Caesar was a man of immoderate lust is reported by Suetonius, who makes reference to his very many acts of fornication and adultery. That he was rapacious and covetous of other people's property is generally agreed” etc. (¶10). By contrast, “Scipio's youth is marked both by the most excellent conduct and by honorable deeds, and full of self-restraint, chastity, and modesty; but that of Caesar is reproached by all, and stained by outrages and infamy” (¶20).

But, of course, the main part of the comparison between these two men must concern their public careers. Scipio's conquest of Spain early in his career (¶17) seems to have been a good deal less bloodthirsty than the sort of wholesale genocides that one usually associates with Caesar's conquest of Gaul. And later, after his victory over Hannibal, he refused numerous extraordinary honours which the senate and the people offered him (¶19). Still later, when “his power had grown to the extent that, as Seneca reports, ‘it would become inavoidable that either Scipio must injure liberty, or liberty Scipio,’ [. . .] he left for voluntary exile in Liternum, lest by his presence he violate the liberty of the community” (¶20).* What a tremendous contrast in comparison with Caesar, who amassed power and offices with all the furious greed of a rodent on steroids...

[*Scipio died while in exile in Liternum (p. 476, n. 44), and “declined burial in the family tomb in Rome”; his tombstone bore the inscription “Ungrateful fatherland, you will not even have my bones” (ibid., n. 46).]

One curious detail that provides such a neat contrast between them that I couldn't help wondering how much I should trust it: they apparently both had interesting encounters with pirates. That of Caesar, of course, is well known: he got captured by pirates, joked to them that he would have them crucified, and after getting ransomed he gathered a small fleet, caught up with the pirates and kept his promise. By contrast, Scipio's pirate encounter was very different (and quite new to me): “These virtues had earned Scipio so much standing, so much veneration among all that, when he was in exile near Liternum, pirates came to him, revering him as though some divine power: they gave worship at the doorstep of his house as if it were a temple, and once they had placed gifts before the entrance as before some sacred place, they kissed Scipio's hand and left” (¶20). Sure, Caesar comes across as a badass, but also as something of an asshole; meanwhile, Scipio comes across as a paragon, virtuous to a super-humanly (and implausibly) ideal degree.

Anyway, although I enjoyed Poggio's bashing of Caesar (“we find nothing in Caesar's life that deserves worthily to be praised, except for his deeds done in war”, ¶12; “there is nothing on record on which Caesar could leave any trace of his virtue”, ¶21), and read with interest his praises of Scipio, ultimately most of these details are in some sense insignificant compared to the big and obvious difference between them: Scipio had gone out of his way to avoid amassing too much political power in a way that could have harmed the country, while by contrast Caesar went out of his way to gather all the power in his hands, thereby preparing the ground of the reintroduction of monarchy in Rome.

Thus, ultimately, whether you prefer Scipio or Caesar must depend on your attitude towards the monarchy-vs-republic question. I imagine that many people, both in Poggio's time and in other periods, looked with dismay at the turbulent history of republics, both in ancient Greece and Rome, or in renaissance Italy, and decided that monarchy was the preferable option as being more likely to lead to stability; and such people would probably admire Caesar for putting the rotten Roman republic out of its misery and bringing an end to a century of civil wars. I, however, can't regard the introduction of empire in Rome as anything other than a disaster; within a couple of generations they went from people like Caesar or Augustus, who despite their faults were at least capable politicians and administrators, to full-blown lunatics and psychopaths like Nero and Caligula; and they soon had plenty of civil wars again too, as ambitious generals began fighting each other for a chance to become emperor. For all its problems, and they were many, the Roman republic is surely infinitely preferable to the empire that followed it.

Poggio himself is clearly on the side of the republic here, perhaps because he himself was from one (Florence). “Scipio spurned the dictatorship he was offered, Caesar extorted it. One preserved the freedom of his people, the other reduced them to the most pitiful slavery.” (¶24.) In view of all this, the contest between Scipio and Caesar as to who is more excellent and virtuous is not only not close, it's almost completely one-sided; Caesar never stood a chance, and I was happy to see him thoroughly defeated; Scipio comes across as so obviously more virtuous that it's hard to see how Caesar could ever have been seen even as a serious contender.

The debate continues

For me, that first short essay by Poggio was the most interesting part of the book, and the rest of the documents from the controversy don't really add much to it. Another humanist intellectual, Guarino of Verona (also a noted teacher; in one of the early ITRL volumes, Humanist Educational Treatises, there's a treatise by his son, based on Guarino's methods), evidently took exception to Poggio's position and wrote a rebuttal, On the Excellence of Caesar and Scipio, which despite the title is mostly a defense of Caesar (of whom Guarino appears to have been a keen, long-time fan; p. 231). It is much longer than Poggio's essay, and not nearly as interesting; but what I disliked most about it is the rather high-blown rhetorical style in which it is written, constantly addressing Poggio directly and upbraiding him sternly for his supposed errors and shortcomings.

Much of what Guarino does is nitpicking at various little details that Poggio got wrong, or quibbling with small parts of his argument; there's nothing wrong with that in principle, but it has no chance of altering the ultimate conclusion (i.e. that Scipio is better than Caesar). For example, Poggio at some point blames Caesar for the decline of Latin literature in the wake of his reign; Guarino objects and points out the many important authors who flourished after Caesar's time. I'm perfectly willing to agree with Guarino on this particular detail; and moreover, to blame Caesar for any decline in Latin literature is silly because such a decline was inevitable anyway; no golden age lasts for very long, so there was bound to be a decline after Caesar's time regardless of what he did or didn't do. If nothing else, the language was changing, as any living language does; and in most cases, language change is a form of decline; a language usually changes for the worse, not for the better. The Romans, recognizing this, strove to keep on writing in the language of the classical period, and so not unnaturally got the worse at it the more their everyday speech differed from the classical language.

Another example where I agree with Guarino's quibble is where Poggio tried to denigrate Caesar's military successes by suggesting that the Gauls were “a barbarous and wild people, but unused to war” (¶22, p. 29), which is obviously quite absurd, and Guarino cites various authorities to that effect, concluding “that the Gallic people were at no time unused to war” and “were terrifying in arms” (¶57, p. 107).

On the other hand, some of Guarino's quibbles are completely bizarre. When Poggio talks about Caesar's lustful immorality and mentions his affair with Cleopatra as an example, Guarino replies by pointing out that Scipio “was once ensnared by love for a domestic slave and [. . .] surrendered to love”; “which of the two is more deserving of excuse? The man who loved a queen, or the one who loved a servant girl? The man who loved such a beauty that her age produced no finer, or the one who loved an ugly slave?” (¶54). Bold of him to assume that the slave-girl can't have been pretty; and for that matter, who is to say that Cleopatra's beauty can't have been a bit exaggerated by propaganda and then uncritically passed on by ancient historians? (Poggio, in ¶82 of his reply (p. 209), says about Cleopatra being pretty that “Plutarch writes the opposite”, and he mocks Guarino for writing as if he knew that Scipio's slave-girl was ugly.)

Anyway, Guarino, of course, knows that picking on details such as these can't change the argument in favour of Caesar, and so also defends the latter more directly; in his view, Caesar brought much-needed stability to the Roman state; he did not destroy Roman liberty, which “had long since been destroyed, though people still lived in her shadow” (¶60); under him, the fundamental structure of its government didn't change much, and the people were freer than before, being now liberated of the burden of civil strife. I don't doubt that many Romans in Caesar's time saw it that way themselves; his popularity attests to that; but in the long term their acquiescence in the introduction of monarchy was disastrous, and their descendants paid for it by living as subjects to a long series of horrible emperors.

Guarino's treatise provoked an equally long (or even slightly longer) response from Poggio, titled Defense of ‘On the Excellence of Scipio and Caesar’, where Poggio goes into more details that he obviously couldn't go into when writing his original short essay, but on the whole this doesn't really have much potential to affect the outcome of the dispute. By the time you get to this point, you have surely already cast your lot either with Scipio or with Caesar, and you aren't likely to change your mind.

Poggio admits that Caesar does deserve some praise, just not as much as Scipio; “in Caesar there were very great outrages, but none in Scipio” (¶81, p. 207).

One thing where I definitely did symphathize with Poggio in his response was the way he objects not to the fact that Guarino disagreed with him, but to the manner of Guarino's disagreement. Poggio emphasizes that he wrote his opinion and that everyone is free to disagree (though he clearly also thinks that Guarino is being a bit silly with his pro-Caesar position); but since Guarino's response attacked him personally and constantly upbraided him in much too strong terms, he felt obliged to defend himself. (I'm guessing that Guarino had momentarily forgotten that he wasn't dealing with one of his students, who were presumably used to being upbraided by him in this manner.)

Poggio even mocks Guarino by saying that “I, for one, would not have believed this to be his work had it not been signed ‘Guarino’ [. . .] would reckon it had been cobbled together by some ranter in the market place and worthless litigator” (¶1, p. 129). Reminds me of that well-known line: “some asshole is signing your name to stupid letters” :))

Both Poggio and Guarino tried to interest other intellectuals and even various members of the ruling class in the debate, with some success, and the last piece here is a letter to Poggio from Pietro del Monte, a church official who lived in London at the time. (There he even got the Duke of Gloucester (son of King Henry IV) interested in the dispute; ¶6.) Pietro (who was a friend of Poggio's and a former student of Guarino's; ¶1, 4) fully agrees with Poggio, both as regards the original dispute about Caesar and Scipio, as well as regarding the fact that Guarino's response was too personal and that Poggio was right to respond to it in turn. Pietro also provides some more quotations from ancient sources in support of his (and Poggio's) position. I was glad enough to see that we are all (except Guarino) mostly in agreement, but other than that Pietro's letter doesn't change anything substantial about the debate (and it wouldn't be reasonable to expect it to do so), and isn't likely to change anybody's mind.

I liked the part where Pietro compares Caesar to an earlier Roman tyrant, Tarquin the Proud; the expulsion of the latter was generally held to have been praiseworthy; and Caesar being even worse than Tarquin, “the case for killing Caesar was far more just and persuasive than that for expelling Tarquin” (¶32), and he approves full-throatedly of the assassination: “I could never praise worthily enough that deed of the best citizens” (ibid.).

On the Unhappiness of Leaders

Lastly, this volume also contains another work by Poggio, not related to the Scipio/Caesar controversy (though there is a mention of Caesar in C27 here, as an example of how rulers are generally not good people). It is a longish treatise titled On the Unhappiness of Leaders, and though technically in the form of a dialogue involving Poggio and three other learned men, the character of Poggio says very little in it and most of the talking is done by another speaker, Niccolò Niccoli, who I guess represents Poggio's actual views on the subject. He defends, at considerable length and illustrated by countless examples, mostly from ancient history but also a few more recent ones, the idea that “leaders” * aren't (and mostly can't be) happy (“there is no bond between leaders and happiness”, C18). The other speakers occasionally venture minor objections or try to soften his position somewhat, but Niccolò — who seems to be something of a Cynic and has much of the abrasiveness that traditionally went with that philosophical school — mostly just brushes them aside and keeps going (C40).

[*This is how the word principes is translated here, and I wonder why the translators don't say “rulers” or even “princes” instead; surely this would have suited the dialogue better, since pretty much all the examples in it are of monarchs; no other form of leadership is even hinted at. Poggio explicitly writes that “under this heading I want to include emperors, kings, dukes and the rest who hold sway over others” (C18).]

This is the sort of discussion that, although in a sense interesting, nevertheless gets tiresome fairly quickly, since so much of it hinges on how you define happiness. It soon became clear to me that Poggio's understanding of this word is different from mine. He (or should I say Niccolò as one of the characters in the dialogue) points out, for example, that leaders are prone to all sorts of vices and faults, since there is nothing much that would restrain them; the position of a leader “is bound either to corrupt even the good or to wear them out so thoroughly that they can have no taste of happiness” (C28); “ruling corrupts its possessors with a multitude of mental diseases” (C31). The very few who don't get corrupted will still be unhappy because of all the cares and burdens of their position (C18).

Diogenes himself would be proud of Niccolò when he says that “the things which Carlo cited as conducive to gaining happiness, namely riches, resources, the ability to do things, [. . .], these seem rather to be incitements to and instruments of unhappiness than of happiness.” (C32) He finds fault with everything; leaders “fear poison and ambushes set by their friends. Feasts and drinking sessions engender suspicion” etc. (ibid.; cf. also C56–57). Indeed good rulers “have been rarer than the Stoics' sage” (C37). I particularly liked the following sentiment by Niccolò, though I'm not sure if it's meant to be only anti-monarchism or full-blown anarchism: “with how many disasters the desire for power has afflicted the world [. . .] those men appear worthy of execration who first gave to one man what belonged to everyone and who, subjugating the freedom under which they were born to slavery, preferred one person to have more power than everyone else” (C38); “the position of leader is by nature a bad thing” (C40). To the suggestion that some rulers haven't been that bad, he replies simply that “they have been rarer than monsters and miracles” (ibid.)

This is all well and good, and I'm always glad to see rulers being bashed, but what on earth does it all have to do with happiness? Here we come to the crux of the matter. Niccolò turns to ancient authorities as to what happiness even is: “Aristotle tells us [. . .] that happiness is obtained through the exercise of the virtues. Our own Cicero wishes it to be prosperity in honorable matters or a fortune which aids good counsels, and the person who does not experience these cannot by any means be happy. Hence where virtues or good counsels are lacking, where vices are present, in that place there cannot exist any happiness.” (C46) Later Niccolò tells us his own opinion (and, commendably, says he will not define happiness as narrowly as the Stoics would): “happiness follows a mind which is peaceful, at liberty and free of all disturbance” (C84), which he insists a ruler can't possibly be.

Well, at this point the whole dialogue started to feel a bit superfluous; with such a cunning definition of happiness it is of course blindingly obvious that rulers can't be happy. But the definitions he quoted clearly come from moralists who are trying to manipulate us into behaving virtuously by dangling the prospect of happiness before us like some sort of carrot. Our everyday notion of happiness is surely much wider than that; it's an emotion that people feel, sometimes for shorter and sometimes for longer periods, under various circumstances (and I suppose that modern-day science could tell us precisely which hormones are flooding our brains at that particular moment, and which gland emits them, and I'm frankly surprised why we can't buy them in the form of pills yet).

I could very easily imagine a leader being happy; if he has a reasonably well-organized court, he doesn't have to be as paranoid and suspicious all the time as Niccolò suggests; if he has the slightest sense of delegation (a concept which Niccolò never even hints at), he can hand over much of his work to ministers, advisors, etc., and so avoid being overburdened with the business of running the state (which Niccolò often mentions as one of the things that makes rulers unhappy); and then, if he doesn't have too complicated a personality, he can devote himself to enjoying the pomp and ceremony of his court, the feasting and drinking, the musical and theatrical entertainments, he can chat with his friends, he can dally with his concubines, he can go out hunting — heck, he could even dabble in the arts or whatever other hobbies he might be into; he can, in short, be as happy as a pig in the mud. At least he would call himself happy, and you and I would call him happy; but Aristotle and Cicero and Niccolò wouldn't, I suppose.

Later Niccolò lists many instances of cruelties perpetrated by various rulers (especially the killing of family members as potential rivals) and asks rhetorically: “Do you think that among so many and so foul and monstrous crimes any trace of happiness is left?” (C76) But if he cites authorities concerning the nature of happiness, I can do that as well: “One might kill and rob and yet be happy” — Rostov in Tolstoy's War and Peace, book 4, ch. 15. :]

Niccolò also likes to exaggerate the cares and burdens of a ruler's position; “those who think they are in control, are in fact the slaves of everyone” (C85); “a good leader” is “as it were the public slave of everyone” (C87). But, surely, the solution to this is very simple; don't worry too much about being the perfect leader; don't try to micromanage everything; by igoring some of the work and delegating some of the rest, I'm sure the burdens of leadership can be whittled down to something very tolerable.

Towards the end, the author can't resist tooting his own horn a bit; “it is not among leaders, but among private individuals that happiness is sometimes found” (C97), that is if they are virtuous and pursue “wisdom and learning” (C98); “their mind, removed from ambition, free from desire, is content with what is their own, not seeking what is someone else's, they live freely and make their adherents happy” (ibid.); “if any people seek happiness, they should realize that it has its abode not in the position of leader but in virtue and the blessed life” (C102).

Now, I'm perfectly willing to agree that the life of a (preferably independently wealthy*) scholar-intellectual who doesn't seek public office could indeed be very happy; I just disagree that the concept of happiness should be defined so narrowly. Most people, from most walks of life, can be happy from time to time, and pretty much nobody will be happy all the time, since that just isn't how our brain works. Happiness is not confined to any particular segment of society, and it's nonsense to say that rulers aren't, and can't ever be, happy.

[*He adds later: “I would not call leaders more unhappy than those who hang on the leader's nod in their desire for external things”, C102.]

Miscellaneous

I have to commend the translators for translating a quotation from the Aeneid on pp. 261–3 as real verse, with metre and all, and not as prose as is usually done in the ITRL. I tried to google a few phrases from their translation of this passage but got no hits, so I guess the translation is their own, made especially for this volume.

On the other hand, their use of “taboo” on p. 383 feels anachronistic; you can't help being reminded of the fact that the term and the concept come from Polynesian cultures, with which Europeans would not have had contact for quite some time after Poggio's day.

I also raised an eyebrow at “mining bronze” on p. 365. Surely you can't mine bronze, since it's an alloy of copper and tin? Isn't it more likely that the Latin word aes, which can mean both ‘bronze’ and ‘copper’, is intended in the latter sense here?

And on p. 291, we have “as bluebottles fly toward honey”; since this English word was new to me, I peeked at the Latin on the facing page and found that there they are muscae, i.e. simply “flies” and not specifically bluebottles, which are just a subset of flies.

An interesting anecdote that I didn't previously know about: “Plato, after being summoned by Dionysius the tyrant of Sicily because of the glory of his learning, was sold into slavery upon the tyrant's orders.” (On the Unhappiness of Leaders, C62.) Well, that escalated quickly! I wonder how he got out of this terrible predicament.

I have never given this any thought before, but the words serve and preserve are obviously related, but it isn't so obvious why two such related words should have such unrelated meanings. Apparently the ‘preserve’ sense came first: “slaves [servi] are named from the fact that commanders are wont to sell, and thus save [servare], slaves, and not to kill them” (p. 497, n. 109).

Interesting: Poggio, while attending the Council of Constance, spent some time travelling in Germany looking for manuscripts of otherwise lost ancient literary works, and made several important discoveries (p. 510, n. 20).

BOOK: Leon Battista Alberti, "Biographical and Autobiographical Writings"

Leon Battista Alberti: Biographical and Autobiographical Writings. Translated by Margin McLaughlin. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 96. Harvard University Press, 2023. 9780674292680. xxvii + 346 pp.

We have encountered Alberti in the I Tatti Renaissance Library before — one of the early volumes is his satirical novel, Momus. I (re-)read it a few years ago (see my post about it), but didn't like it very much, mostly because I didn't find its brand of humour particularly funny. The present volume brings us five shorter works by him, and I didn't like these very much either, so I'm starting to conclude that I'm just not the right person to appreciate Alberti's writing. The fact that the works here are shorter at least had the advantage that I was never at any real risk of getting bored by them.

Often I felt that he was more interested in showing off his rhetorical skills and his ability to deploy an endless amount of allusions to classical literature than in saying something interesting, original, entertaining or persuasive. His Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature presents us such a pointlessly exaggerated view of the disadvantages that it's hard to believe that he meant it seriously; his Life of St. Potitus is suffering from the problem that it can't tell us much of a story because so little is known about this highly obscure saint; his Dog is based on a silly gimmick: he writes about his dog using tropes from classical biographies of great men, and in doing so he mostly misses the opportunity to express sincerely his feelings for his recently deceased and much beloved canine companion; in his Autobiography, Alberti writes about himself in such glowing terms that it's hard to take him quite seriously, and at the same time he tells us almost nothing about the actual course of his life; and lastly, his Fly praises this animal in the most exaggerated and undeserving terms, a contrast which is supposed to provide humour but which in practice soon grew just as tiresome as the insect itself.

I don't deny that there is originality and variety here, but there are also so many missed opportunities for a work to be about more than just a gimmick and an exercise in style. Overall I just couldn't feel very excited about any of the works in this volume. Thank goodness that nobody reads this blog any more, so that at least I won't be getting hostile comments for admitting that I didn't enjoy the book :)

On the other hand, I have to praise the translator for the interesting introduction and notes, and especially for making a good effort to translate the occasional puns and word-play (see e.g. p. 93, ¶30).

On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Literature

This is the longest work in this volume, but unfortunately it wasn't much to my liking. The subject, of course, is an old and well-trodden one, and I didn't have the impression that Alberti had anything particularly original to say about it; the whole thing is better thought of as a youthful exercise in rhetoric (he himself speaks of the importance of practicing writing; 1.15), and the editor of the present volume calls it an invective on more than one occasion (pp. ix, 292), though unlike Petrarch's invectives that I read many years ago in one of the early ITRL volumes, Alberti's treatise is not directed against any particular individual. But what he does have in common with Petrarch is that rather than trying to be sober and fair and balanced, they deliberately fight dirty with all sort of exaggerations, biases and rhetorical tricks in the service of their goals. Alberti's gimmick is basically to spend the first and last 5% of the work on the advantages of literature, and the intermediate 90% on its disadvantages, so as to make it seem more impressive that he is nevertheless committed to the study of literature despite its immense disadvantages.

Incidentally, what he means by literature here is very broad, basically any sort of study that revolves largely on reading (preferably in Latin) — he includes even lawyers, notaries and physicians among the students of literature. He deliberately takes an unhealthily extremist attitude towards study, so as to have a good excuse to play up its disadvantages; in his view, a student of literature should pore over his books day and night (2.16–22), smell badly of lamp oil (5.39), be a pale and scrawny nerd that people will shun and almost literally point and laugh at (3.10–13); even the slightest interruption to his studies will cause him to forget so much that he will have to spend many hours catching up again (3.32, 45); nothing short of total non-stop dedication will do. Apart from the great expenditure of time and effort, it will also cost you a lot of money to pay for your studies, buy books etc. (4.16–18, 23). He is also aware of the idea of opportunity costs; as a student of literature, you are spending money when you could be making it.

He then proceeds to spend most of his treatise arguing at great length how all this effort and expense will yield you neither wealth not honours. He purports to justify this by indulging in some very dubious mathematics and statistics (4.88–112) to argue that out of every 1000 people who begin the study of literature, only three will “be able to make money from literature” (4.110). Only lawyers, notaries and physicians have some chance of making good money (4.137), but even of them most don't, especially if they are honest (4.144, 154). Nor can a literary scholar get rich by marriage, since women with a big dowry won't have him (4.184–91).

Not only do literary scholars get no wealth, they also get no respect. Alberti argues that they *deserve* the highest respect (5.4), but nobody actually respects them. Rich people will not be impressed by the literary scholar's rhetoric enough to give him a seat at the table when it comes to political decision-making (5.26–9); in fact they simply won't care about his learning; it means nothing to them (5.31–40). The common people won't respect him either, for the simple fact that he isn't rich (5.54, 65). Alberti is also doubtful about trying to win honour by serving in the public administration, as such jobs will distract you from literary study and “expose you to vanity and envy” (5.82).

It is only at the very end of the treatise that he finally returns to the advantages of the literature; he reasserts his commitment to this field of study; of course, that's why he expounded at such length on it disadvantages — the greater these are, the greater his merit is in nevertheless persisting in his studies. And perhaps he doesn't spend too much time on his advantages because he considers them obvious enough that it suffices to state them plainly: “Let the minds of scholars burn with a desire, not for gold or wealth, but for morals and wisdom, and let them learn from literature, not power and the causes of things, but the form and cult of virtue and glory” etc. (6.16–17). You will be rewarded by “peace of mind, the stability of virtue and the beauty of the arts” (6.26); “such a man [. . .] will believe that all his goods are placed within himself” (6.36).

This is a very charming view of literary scholarship, and of course one wishes to believe it; and yet, you can't help noticing that this is nothing more than argument by vigorous assertion. There used to be a widespread idea that studying ancient Greek and Roman literature somehow made you a better and wiser person; I think it was probably true, but that was back when people were still able to study literature earnestly. There would be no use in trying to revive the study of classical literature now that our entire intellectual class has, for the better part of a century, betrayed the rest of society by going in for modernism, postmodernism and other such corrosive ideologies; they know only how to criticize and deconstruct and play language games, but would react to the idea of holding a sincere opinion, or of searching in literature for truth and beauty, like a vampire to sunlight.

*

Apparently Alberti conducted something of a poll: “I diligently asked many literature scholars” (2.3) and they all wanted to deter other people from studying literature rather than encourage them. You can read similar advice from humanities professors nowadays :)

Amongst the expenses involved in the study of literature he lists “those foolhardy ceremonies they call doctorates” (4.24) :))

When he talks about professions where it is easier to make money than in literature, he suggests soldiering and farming... He had a bizarrely rosy view of these: “no expectation is more certain from any other thing than what is reaped from a well cultivated field [. . .] the countryside offers [. . .] the maximum amount of leisure to enjoy the good life” (4.72). Clearly his idea of a farmer was a big landowner who doesn't actually do any farming himself, probably doesn't even bother running his own estate but has managers for that.

A hilarious quote from 4.180: “women are by nature stupid, arrogant, contentious, bold, insolent and rash” :)))) I don't disagree, but then men are all these things as well; it's just human nature :(

Alberti is commendably self-critical: “We have now reached the stage where [. . .] nobody except the most abject and lazy turns to literary studies. For it is the lame, or the scrofulous, or the distorted and diminished, the stupid, dense, inert people who are unable to incompetent to do any other work who all end up studying literature.” :)) (5.85–6)

The Life of St. Potitus

Alberti wrote this biography at the suggestion of his patron, a prelate named Biagio Molin (p. 293, n. 1); I wonder how he chose this obscure saint. Unsurprisingly, very little is known about Potitus, and as a result Alberti's biography can't help but be rather thin, even though he did his best to pad it out with long speeches and the like.

According to Alberti's biography, Potitus was originally from Serdica (present-day Sofia) and lived during the reign of the emperor Antoninus. The son of a rich pagan father, Potitus adopts christianity as quite a young man; ignoring his father's entreaties and arguments (e.g. that the authorities were persecuting christians pretty badly just then), the young zealot moves away from home. The devil tries to lure him away from his chosen path by appearing in the form of a phantom and then of an ox, but Potitus successfully ignores these manifestations. He successfully cures a senator's wife of leprosy by converting her to christianity.*

[*Alberti writes as if he didn't think very highly about this conversion (¶57): “Since the minds of the sick are credulous, the woman suffering from leprosy was willing to try anything if she thought it would do her good.”]

Soon, word of Potitus' miracle reaches the ears of the emperor, by a rather bizarre mechanism: the devil obsesses Antoninus' daughter and makes her tell him that Potitus is a christian and where he lives. Potitus is summoned before the emperor and, with god's help, easily drives out the devil out of the emperor's daughter. However, his subsequent interview with the emperor goes very badly indeed. Now, I'm the first to agree that zealots can be tiresome and Potitus is no exception, but the way Antoninus reacts here is just plain ridiculous. He goes on an unhinged rant (¶81–100) which levels the most implausible accusations against the christians: “there is no people on earth more abject than those who have decided to live all their life in leisure, rejecting both diligence and hard work. They shun, think little of and even hate military duty, literary study, and any ornamentation of life. You must realize that these same Christians are the most worthless race of men: they are lazy, idle, supine; they pursue no labor nor arts, undergo no civic discipline, but have learned to languish in idleness, solitude and sleep” (¶83–4). Holy shit, is he supposed to be for or against this thing? If christianity was like that, I'd convert in a heartbeat :))) But in actual fact, of course, I don't doubt that most christians in Antoninus' time were pretty normal people leading pretty normal lives; I suppose there may have been a few who tried to avoid participation in society as much as possible to avoid being dragged into its sins — but the idea that all or even most of them were like that, as Antoninus says, is just plain silly.

Anyway, the emperor sees that the people have been rather impressed by Potitus' miracle, and is worried that more of them might convert unless he makes an example of him. He tries to pressure Potitus into making a sacrifice to the pagan gods, and when the youth refuses, he is promptly taken to the amphitheatre, tortured with fire and then consigned to the beasts; but lo, another miracle, the beasts grow meek in his presence and worship him. The emperor sends his minions to finish the job by hacking Potitus to pieces, but a (probably unintentionally) comical scene ensues: “The executioners were seized by such zeal for carrying out his order that while trying to be the first to cut pieces off Potitus, they actually wounded each other, whereas the young man remained untouched” (¶106) :)) After another few similar failures, the emperor falls to the ground in a fit of rage and gets badly injured. His daughter implores Potitus — who is somehow *still* not dead — to save him, and she promptly converts to christianity to secure divine aid (¶110).

Antoninus recovers at once, but alas, his temper has not improved. He sees Potitus holding a sermon to the crowd, orders his tongue to be cut off, but Potitus continues speaking despite the lack of a tongue. Eventually they finally manage to kill him by cutting off his head (¶114). He was not yet fourteen years old (p. 171).

I can't say that I found this hagiography particularly enjoyable, though I'm sure that's not Alberti's fault, it's simply what this genre is like. The characters are shallow and two-dimensional; god and the devil intervene in events all the time; and there is something unpleasantly self-congratulatory about the whole thing. The writer and the reader both know that the saint or martyr will eventually triumph; there is never any doubt about the outcome, the story as a whole is predictable and only the details remain to be filled in.

I suppose the christians looked back at their early martyrs as the plucky underdogs who took on the mighty Roman empire and won, triumphed over all the persecutions and the like. And I suppose that a christian who lived in the 2nd century could justifiably consider himself the underdog; but not so in Alberti's time; someone who writes a hagiography in the 15th century is not a supporter of the plucky underdog, but of the establishment; he is the sore winner who has been absolutely triumphant for more than a thousand years yet still can't stop grinding the face of his long-defeated opponent into the dust.

From my perspective, of course, it is not christianity, but the Greco-Roman paganism that was the underdog; even in the 2nd century its days were numbered, and it was very much the underdog by the 4th. So when I read something like the life of Potitus here, I can't sympathize with the saints and martyrs, because I know that very soon they would win and become the oppressors in turn. Moreover, my sympathies are instinctively with the pagans, and I can never quite understand why people converted from paganism to christianity; my attitude can be summarized by Swinburne's lines: “What ailed us, o gods, to desert you / For creeds that refuse and restrain?” Perhaps the problem is that ancient paganism, being long gone, is not so well known to us; we all see how many pleasures christianity denies its followers, and how many unpleasant duties and restrictions it lays upon them; for all I know, ancient paganism, as actually practiced, may well have had many of the same faults; but I know so much less about it that it is easy to see it in a more sympathetic light. You sometimes hear that the closest thing to a modern survival of the ancient pagan religions is hinduism, and that religion certainly looks like a total mess that doesn't seem to have much more to recommend itself than christianity does. Perhaps ancient Roman paganism would also seem less appealing if it survived into the present day.

*

A funny passage from ¶42: at one point, the devil changed “into the color and shape of an ox; and that with a great mooing sound he struck the young man [i.e. Potitus] down” We're used to Satan appearing as a goat, but apparently even the poor ox is now to be distrusted. What's next, a kitten? :))

A fine passage from Antoninus' anti-christian rant: “My goodness, it is ridiculous the way they exaggerate when they speak. The heavens, all the gods, the world itself seem not to be enough for them to talk about; they actually descend to the underworld with their tales.” (¶92) You can practically see him getting enraged at the tiresome religious zealouts and missionaries who keep knocking at his door, trying to convert him :)

My Dog

This rather bizarre composition is again in some sense an exercise in rhetoric; Alberti says he was inspired by funeral oratory with which the ancients used to praise eminent men after their deaths (¶1–3); he apparently also wanted to prove that he could do such a thing better than a certain lesser orator (p. 211).

Anyway, the chief conceit of this piece, of course, is that it is written not for an eminent man, but for Alberti's dog. This is a neat idea and I liked it, but the execution leaves something to be desired; in principle seeing someone praise a dog in terms usually used of a person could make for very funny reading, but most of the time I didn't find Alberti's piece to be particularly funny. There are a few puns here and there, which mostly didn't make it into the translation (but the notes point them out); and at times you can have fun figuring out what certain features and character traits, described as if about a person, actually mean when applied to a dog; but most of the time you can't find any meaningful connection between his oration and a dog's life, and the effect is mostly just odd. As the translator's notes point out, Alberti often uses nearly the same phrases here which he would later reuse in his own autobiography (e.g. see notes 36, 38–9 on p. 306).

By way of illustration, here are a few of the stranger passages from this canine biography. The dog's “mother was distinguished for her piety” (¶9); his ancestors included practically every dog mentioned by any ancient author, and Alberti is tireless in rifling through the works of Pliny, Plutarch, Cicero and countless others for anecdotes in praise of dogs; “some were endowed with such courage and bravery” that they would fight “even an elephant [. . .] no matter how fierce and violent” (¶11). Alberti's dog combined the virtues of “the most renowned commanders” — Fabius Cunctator, the Scipios, Caesar, Alexander, etc. (¶30–1). He “mastered in just a few days all the liberal arts that are worthy of a wellborn dog” (¶44); “before he was three he could understand Greek and Latin as much as Tuscan” (¶46; I guess the joke is that he of course didn't understand any human language; there is some wit there, but you are hardly going to laugh out loud). Such was his dedication to the arts that he “would sometimes sing to the moon in various musical modes which he drew from the harmony of the spheres” (¶58). And he lacked the faults of many great men, e.g. he was not “ambitious like Cicero, who when he was almost exhausted from praising himself, in one of his letters then asked other people to write a book in his praise” ¶69). :))

My favourite part of this oration comes at the very end, when Alberti finally, for a brief while, drops the conceit and writes plainly and honestly about how much he loved his dog and how much he misses him (¶73–6). That brief moment of genuine feeling is worth more than the rest of the treatise combined.

My Life

This short autobiography of Alberti wasn't much to my liking either. First of all, the translator's notes at the end of the book point out so many parallels to various classical authors that I can't help wondering how much this is meant to be taken seriously as an autobiography at all, as opposed to being merely yet another exercise in rhetoric. Alberti writes about himself in the third person and doesn't hold back in attributing to himself all sorts of excellent qualities, abilities, talents and personality traits (even the power of divination :)) ¶77). If you can believe him, he really was the very archetype of the Renaissance man, constantly busy studying and working in a wide range of fields.

Meanwhile this autobiography is actually very bad if you expected any clear account of his actual life, rather than merely 20 pages of saying what a great guy he was. He tells us about his various literary works and briefly discusses each of them, which is nice, but other than that there's almost none of the things I would expect in an autobiography: nothing about his ancestors and family; where and how he grew up; his studies, his travels (I saw from passing mentions in the translator's notes that Alberti studied in Bologna, but he never mentions this in his autobiography here); his employments, if he had any (the impression one gets from the lack of this information in his autobiography is that he was simply an independently wealthy man who spent his time tinkering and writing, and who by dint of sheer grit and talent managed to become an important and influential humanist intellectual; but I wonder whether he really was wealthy, since we read at in the translator's notes that Alberti was an illegitimate child, who therefore couldn't take public office (p. 292, n. 24), and moreover that when his father died and left some money in his will to Alberti, the other family members refused to hand this money over).

An interesting feature of this autobiography is a longish list of his supposed witty sayings, which he was apparently able to come up with on the spur of the moment and in considerable abundance (¶40–107). I didn't actually find most of them to be all that witty, but then I already knew that humour is one of those things that doesn't travel well across centuries and cultural boundaries. Nevertheless here's one anecdote that I liked: when a foreigner in his city asked him the way to the palace of justice, Alberti said he didn't know; upbraided by some passers-by who pointed out that the courthouse was right there, he replied: “I had no recollection of justice ever having been in those premises” :)) (¶43).

He was in the “habit of dictating the first draft of his works”, which “accounts for the oral dimension of early drafts and the complex philology behind his texts” (translator's note 20, p. 313).

At the age of 20, he wrote a comedy, the Philodoxeos, which “circulated for ten years as though it had been written by a little-known ancient writer Lepidus”, until Alberti finally admitted his authorship (translator's note 8, p. 311). I like this idea; it proves that his Latin must have been really good, and moreover people might be less likely to criticize small defects if they believed the work was by a genuine ancient author.

I greatly liked his opinion about art: “He used to ask young boys whether they recognized whose likeness he was painting, and he used to deny that anything could be said to have been painted artistically that could not instantly be recognized by children.” (¶34.) How far we have fallen from this ideal after more than a century of degenerate art!

The Fly

Most of us would agree that the fly is an annoying and worthless creature, but in this short piece Alberti turns this on its head and spends the whole time praising the fly in the highest terms. Much as in the case of My Dog, I agree that this in principle a neat and humorous idea, but in practice I didn't find The Fly particularly funny.

The author pretends to uphold the flies as altogether nobler animals than “the bees, those unworthy favorites of the poets” (¶20; see also ¶4). They are descended from the Centaurs (¶4), a proud warrior race (which we can tell because swarms of flies always accompany human armies, ¶8, and because they always wear “a breastplate with varied colors of gold and bronze”, ¶12) which yet never commits atrocities like human armies do (¶15–16); honourable and sociable creatures, they do everything together and in the open (¶17, 19); they are scientists and philosophers (¶42), “endowed by nature with such enormous eyes that they can easily discover what lies hidden beyond the heavens” (¶25);* a true stoic, the fly “always shows itself to be of the same demeanor” (¶31); the fly “is never idle” and “energetically encourages the lazy to action” (¶39); etc. “We wrote the above laughing, and you too should laugh”, Alberti says at the end; but alas, I almost never did laugh. I don't disagree that there is wit in Alberti's praise of the fly; but it takes more than that to make one laugh.

[*The fly “even knows what blemishes Helen of Troy has on her bottom, has fondled all of Ganymede's hidden parts, and knows by constantly landing on them how bitter is the taste of Andromache's ancient, sagging breasts.” (¶26.) One of the few passages that actually made me laugh :)) ]

Miscellaneous

Apparently another of Alberti's works, the Intercenales or Dinner Pieces, “is forthcoming in this I Tatti Renaissance Library series” (p. xxvi, n. 23). Let's hope I will enjoy it better than the two Alberti volumes I've read so far :)

I was interested to learn (translator's note 36, p. 327) that the names of the musical notes come from “the first syllables in the lines of a famous medieval hymn to St. John the Baptist by Paulus Diaconus: Ut queant laxis resonare fibris, mira gestorum famuli tuorum, solve polluti labii reatum”. From this we also see why so is sometimes called sol. The wikipedia says that ut was replaced by the now usual do in the 17th century, to make it an open syllable.

In his autobiography, Alberti mentions some of his works which he wrote in Italian rather than Latin; the thing I found interesting is that, where the translation says “in the vernacular” and “Tuscan” (p. 219, ¶13), the corresponding word in the original was “etruscos” both times. Of course, in one way it makes sense — the words ‘Tuscan’ and ‘Etruscan’ are related — but on the other hand it sounds a little as if he had written those works in the ancient Etruscan language, and that is a very intriguing alternative-historical idea :)

BOOK: Paolo Giovio, "Portraits of Learned Men"

Paolo Giovio: Portraits of Learned Men. Edited and translated by Kenneth Gouwens. The I Tatti Renaissance Library, Vol. 95. Harvard University Press, 2023. 9780674290150. xviii + 667 pp.

We have already encountered Giovio in the I Tatti Renaissance Library a few years ago — vol. 56 is his dialogue Notable Men and Women of Our Time, consisting mostly of short biographies of notable military commanders, poets, and noblewomen (see my post about it). The present volume, Portraits of Learned Men, has a few things in common with that previous one: it, too, consists of short biographies, though only of men of letters; and both volumes have the same editor and translator, Kenneth Gouwens. (Incidentally, an earlier English translation of this work, by Florence Alden Gragg (1935), is available online. Gouwens mentions a few downsides of this translation in the notes here on pp. 454–5.)

Giovio's Portraits of Learned Men is based on an interesting concept: he was trying to set up a kind of museum,* a villa (open to the public) on the shores of Lago di Como that would house portraits of notable men of letters of the last few generations, roughly from 1300 to his own time (he lived in the early 16th century); and next to each portrait there would be a sheet of parchment with a short biography of the individual in question (p. xi). Unfortunately he didn't manage to gather all the portraits he had hoped to obtain, and it seems that nobody bothered to continue the project after his death; the villa was demolished in the early 17th century.

[*In his time the word still meant simply a place dedicated to the Muses, but I guess efforts like his helped shift it towards our modern sense of a building containing educational exhibits.]

The biographies he wrote for his museum, however, are still extant and are gathered in the present work. There are 106 longer ones (about two pages long on average, which is rather longer than than the amount of time Giovio spends on each person in Notable Men and Women), of people whose portraits he managed to obtain; and then there are about 50 short ones, just one paragraph long or so, of people whose portraits he lacked. He concludes the work with a ‘peroration’, really an appeal to potential supporters of his project in other countries, asking them to donate portraits of eminent men of letters to his museum.

I liked this book a good deal; because the individual biographies are short, it's easy to read them in small doses and thus avoid getting bored. One downside, however, is that he doesn't really have the space to tell you much about each individual and he certainly can't go into any details of either the subject's life or his work. A peculiar obsession of his seem to have been epitaphs: he concludes each biography with one or several epitaphs, short poems commemorating the subject of the biography, sometimes by that subject himself but more often by various minor poets. Perhaps someone who understands Latin (unlike me) can enjoy these epitaphs for their poetical qualities, but from my point of view they didn't really contribute anything of biographical value to the work. Another good feature of this book are the translator's endnotes, which are very extensive; for every person mentioned by Giovio, we get a list of references to further literature; for every work mentioned by Giovio, we get the bibliographical details of its original publication; for every epitaph, we are told what metre it's in; the notes also point out parallels to Giovio's Notable Men and Women (which mention some of the same people are the present work) and contain a wealth of other background information.

Giovio's biographies are arranged in more or less chronological order (he points out that this conveniently avoids any disputes about the order of precedence; p. 25); the first few are actually medieval scholastics: Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus; but then we reach Dante and continue with the usual panoply of Renaissance authors. A good few of them were already slightly familiar to me because we've had some of their works in the I Tatti Renaissance Library, but many others were of course also completely new to me. As one might expect, Giovio's subjects are mostly Italians, but they don't predominate by as much as I thought they would. In the early parts of the book, there are about ten or so Greeks, people who had fled from the declining Byzantine Empire and helped restart the study of ancient Greek language and literature in Italy; to my surprise, there were also several Englishmen (Thomas Linacre, Thomas More, John Fisher), some of whom even spent part of their career in Italy. Later in the book there are more and more northern authors — Dutch, French, Germans, etc., about twenty in total; and Giovio admits on more than one occasion that in his time the study of ancient Greek and Latin was flourishing more in those countries than in Italy. Unsurprisingly, however, he had a harder time getting the portraits of these northerners, so their biographies are mostly among the shorter ones at the end of the book. But he was aware of this deficiency and, as I already mentioned, his peroration at the end of the book contains appeals for potraits from all sorts of countries.* Often enough, western Europeans' idea of Europe used to end at the eastern borders of Germany, and I was pleasantly surprised to see here that this was not the case for Giovio: his world stretches as far as learning is done in Latin, and he extends his appeal for portraits and support as far as Poland (which he calls “Sarmatia” :)), Hungary (“Pannonia”), Transylvania and Dalmatia (pp. 437–9).

[*And clearly his appeals had at least some success; he mentions that the bishop of Arras “is having portraids made for me” (p. 439) and that another Frenchman, Danès,** “even now is sending a portrait ofhis teacher Budé” (p. 443).]

[**This is how it's spelt in the book; but the French wikipedia spells it “Danes” and adds in a note: “And not Danès, although the e is open.” :))]

Miscellaneous

“Pomponio [Leto]'s early morning lectures were so popular that students would arrive at midnight to be sure of getting a seat.” (From the translator's introduction, p. xiii.) Clearly those were very different times :))

Giovio on Duns Scotus: “he seems to have made sport of Christian doctrines: for, hesitating here and there on a question that had been raised, he obscured faith in religious matters with a dense fog of jargon. In this manner he sowed the seeds of interminable quarrels” (III.2). That may well be true, but surely you can say the same of any other theologians. They have been causing disputes and heresies from the first centuries of christianity onwards.

Apparently Scotus was mistakenly buried alive after having an apoplexy; when he “regained consciousness, it was too late: as the poor fellow was shouting, vainly seeking help, and after he had long been beating his head against the sarcophagus, at last he bashed it in and died.” (III.3) Eeek :S But on the other hand, how did Giovio know this? Did someone dig him up later, just in case, and open the sarcophagus?

Giovio points out how mistaken Petrarch was when he thought that he would become famous for his Latin rather than his Italian works: “Fortune, mocking the judgment of so great a man, deceived him grievously when he spurned these works, which would enjoy a life of everlasting favor, in order to pursue surer and nobler glory from his Latin poem Africa” (V.2). The same happened to Boccaccio: “with a fate not unlike Petrarch's, Boccaccio himself was deceived by his opinion of his literary efforts”, but his Latin books “are forgotten and indeed barely retain a breath of life” (VI.2).

There is a biography of Antonio Beccadelli (Panormita) which, to my surprise, contains no mention at all of his infamously, gloriously obscene poems which we saw in the ITRL a few years ago (see my post from back then). Even the translator's notes say that “It is remarkable that Giovio does not mention” them (p. 481, n. 60). I wonder how many other interesting things are missing from other biographies in this book, without me being in a position to notice them...

A bizarre anecdote about how Cardinal Bessarion almost became a pope: “when three of the most powerful cardinals had approached him in his cell at the conclave in order that they might hail him as pope, they were not let in by the doorkeeper” who “said that Bessarion had to be left alone to his studies”; annoyed, they cast their votes for a rival candidate, who thus won the election (XXIV.4). However, judging by the wikipedia page about that conclave, it doesn't seem that Bessarion was quite that close to being elected pope after all.

From the biography of John Argyropoulos: “in the last act of his life, when he made his will, as a joke he made his richer friends heirs to his debt. [. . .] by eating too much watermelon he brought on an autumnal fever, and thus died in his seventieth year.” (XXVII.3.) What a way to go :))

Demetrius Chalcondyles “surpassed the morals of the Greeks, inasmuch as no deceit or artifice was observed in him” (XXIX.1) Wahahaha :))) Judging by my experiences with the Greek tourist industry, Giovio may have been on to something.

The bizarre end of Callimachus, an Italian (his real name was Filippo Buonaccorsi) who spent much of his career in the service of the King of Poland: “he became an exile of sorts, hidden away in the Polish villa of an old friend. His death there was kept secret and he lacked funeral obsequies; once his body had been dried in an oven, it was stored in a chest”; the king later had it buried in a church in Cracow (XLI.2). But according to the translator's note 298 on p. 298, these things “appear to be more fabrications of Paolo Giovio than fact”.

Galeotto Marzio “had such a great belly that he used to ride in a carriage, since even massive pack animals would break down under the tremendous weight of his obese body; and when he was an old man he finally died at Montagnana, near Este, smothered under his own lard” (XLIV.4). You can't accuse Giovio of idealizing his subjects :))

Interesting: “clade Sonciaca” is translated as “the defeat at the Soča River” (XLVIII.2) — I was pleasantly surprised by this, as the ITRL translators tend to use Italian names of such geographical features when available. On the other hand, in chap. CXI “Iustinopoli in Histria” is translated as “Capodistria”.

Syphilis was “called la maladie italienne by the French, and la maladia francese by the Italians” (translator's note 363 on p. 521). Ah, nothing like a bit of neighbourly love <3

Bartolomeo Cocles was a fortune-teller who came to a sad end: he was murdered by a certain Coponi, who “gave no excuse for committing this crime, other than Cocles's having made known to him that he was soon to become a foul murderer.” (LIII.5.) Amazing — this is almost like Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, but in real life :))

A certain physician named Zerbi “lured by a large sum, had traveled to Bosnia to cure from dropsy the pasha Skander Bey [. . .] Zerbi did not make good on what he had extravagantly promised the dying man, and was butchered by Skander's barbarian servants in order that they might yield him up to the spirit of their lord as a sacrificial victim.&rdquo, (LIX.2) Translator's note 436 (p. 531) adds that “in the summer of 1499 Skander Bey led troops from Sarajevo into Friuli and Carinthia and subsequently ‘ravaged the country around the Isonzo River in September [. . .]’ ”.

The poet Pietro Gravina “died in his seventy-fourth year [. . .] when a chestnut burr very lightly punctured his calf as he was taking a siesta in the shade: for by casually scratching it, he opened a sore, bringing upon himself a deadly infection.” (LXXIV.7) I'm starting to sense something of a pattern here — many of Giovio's subjects ended their lives in gruesome ways :]

I was interested to learn that Baldassare Castiglione, who is of course famous as the author of The Courtier, a sort of early etiquette-book, also wrote “a long epic, Cleopatra” (LXXVII.1). This sounds intriguing, but apparently the poem is actually about “an ancient statue of Ariadne purchased by Julius II that was thought to have been of the Egyptian queen” (n. 563 on p. 553).

Giovio's biography of Ludovico Ariosto mentions that “he distinctly surpassed Boiardo and Pulci himself” (LXXXIV.4), which made me realize that these two other epic poets don't have biographies in Giovio's book — a very rare case of two Italian renaissance authors who are famous enough that even I know about them but didn't get biographies here.

Interesting: Machiavelli had “no Latin, or at least a mediocre knowledge of it” (LXXXVII.1); Giovio is amazed that someone with this deficiency was able to become such a good writer. Later he adds: “It's a fact (as he himself used to tell me) that the Greek and Latin he slipped into his writings had come from Marcello Virgilio, whom he served as secretary an assistant when he was working for the government” (LXXXVII.4). So it seems that Machiavelli got his own boss to help him write his books — you've got to admit that that's pretty damn Machiavellian :)

Albert Pigge, “from the Dutch town of Kampen” had a “grotesquely harsh and throaty voice, and his resonant snorts pretty much disfigured the whole appeal of his wisdom.” (CV.1) Sounds like your average Dutch speaker :))) I also liked the mention of snorts, which go well with his porcine surname, but this must be just a coincidence in the translation, since the original is in Latin and I don't think there's any Latin word for a pig that would sound similar to Pighius.

There's also a biography of Giovio's older brother, Benedetto Giovio (CVI). This seems a bit nepotistic but Giovio describes his brother in such affectionate terms that I can't blame him for including this biography in his book.

Pietro Alcionio “was such a shameless slave to gluttony that often, within the space of a day, he cadged meals at two or three different people's tables. [. . .] when at last he was home,he relievedhimself of the burden of excessive drink by throwing up at the very edge of his bed.” (CXXIII.1) A Spaniard named Sepúlveda published a book so critical of Alcionio that the latter “was compelled to go to great expense to buy up his Spanish enemy's books in all the shops to burn them.” (CXXIII.2) Poor Alcionio — I think I'd prefer not to have my portrait in a museum than to have it appear next to such a biography :))

From the short biography of Hector Boece, a Scottish historian: “we marvel greatly that there can be found a written tradition of over a thousand years concerning the islands of the Hebrides and Orkney, so remote from our region; whereas in Italy, that nursemaid of genius, writers were entirely lacking for so many centuries after the expulsion of the Goths.” (CXXXIV)

Near the end of the book Giovio writes that he has “completed the first volume, which contains portraits of the deceased” and that he intends to write a second, which “will treat of the living” (p. 431). I don't know if he ever completed this second volume, however. Perhaps he was distracted by a different project: the translator's introduction says that six years after the present work, Giovio published a similar volume “surveying prominent military and political figures” (p. ix).

The poet Baptista of Mantua was rewarded after death with “a marble likeness of him crowned with laurel [. . .] alongside that of Vergil” (LXI.3), which Giovio thinks ridiculous since Baptista was such a mediocre poet. But what's even funnier is the following from the translator's note (n. 455 on p. 536): “Within months after its completion in 1514, a notice bearing the marquis of Gonzaga's official seal was posted on it forbiding its defacement — and soon thereafter, someone hurled feces at the notice itself” :)))

A poet named Guido Postumo, whom I haven't heard of before, “composed the elegies, for which he is best known today, which describe the pope's court and include a detailed account of a hunting expedition in Palo” (n. 512 on p. 546). Sounds interesting — too bad we don't have that work in the ITRL :)

Cardinal Egidio of Viterbo wrote a Book on Hebrew Letters; this work, “written in hopes of persuading Leo X to reform the Roman alphabet, drew extensively upon the Kabbalah and analyzed what he believed to be the sexual anatomy of Hebrew letters.” (Note 634 on p. 563.) ROFL :)) I think if you're starting to write about the sexual anatomy of the alphabet, it's high time you've put the pen away and had a wank...

BOOK: John Keay, "Last Post"

John Keay: Last Post: The End of Empire in the Far East. London: John Murray, 2005. (First ed.: 1997.) 0719555892. xii + 388 pp.

Another book that I bought nearly twenty years ago and only got around to reading now. This is a very pleasant and very readable narrative history of the end of Western colonialism in the Far East, from about 1930 onwards, but there are also several chapters (covering the first 1/3 or so of the book) about how those areas had come under Western control in the first place, which I thought was a great idea as it makes the story quite self-contained.

Placing the beginning of the end of empire in 1930 means that there are basically four imperialist powers that are of interest for the purposes of this book: Britain, France, the Netherlands, and the USA. Portugal still had a few small scraps of territory such as East Timor and Macao, but those are pretty much irrelevant; Spain had lost her territories (such as the Philippines) to the USA at the end of the 19th century. As for Japan, I guess the idea is that Japanese imperial presence in the Far East came to an end with their defeat in the WW2 and there isn't really a separate process of ‘the end of empire’ distinct from their simply losing the war, so there isn't much to say about them in a book like this (although we do of course see a lot about how Japan's conquests of former Western colonies during WW2 contributed to the end of Western imperialism in the East).

*

Although the book is mostly about the end of empire, I found the early chapters, about the growth of Western imperialism in the Far East, very interesting as well. It turns out there were a lot of differences between the four imperial countries. The Dutch had had a fairly long presence in Indonesia (though they didn't finish conquering it until the late 19th century; p. 28), and it was very important to them since they had almost no other colonies elsewhere; they cared about it only from a business point of view, invested heavily and made it very profitable to themselves (p. 15–17), mostly by requiring the natives to dedicate a certain proportion of their land (and time) to growing cash crops for the government (pp. 21–22).

By contrast, the British had so many different colonies in the east that “few outside the Colonial Office” (p. 35) could have listed them all; unsurprisingly, many of these were quite new to me. And in a such wild variety of political arrangements, too; there were the Federated Malay States, the Unfederated Malay States, the Straits Settlements; there was Sarawak, technically an independent monarchy ruled by ‘White Rajahs’ of the Brooke family; and of course there were treaty ports and concessions in China. Of the treaty ports, Shanghai was by far the most important, initially for trade but later also for industry; all the imperialist powers had a presence there, and their concession, the International Settlement, was an example of the “increasingly collaborative approach” (p. 146) to imperialism.

I knew about the 99-year lease on Hong Kong's New Territories which the British obtained from China in 1898; but it turns out that at the same time they got another lease — Weihaiwei, a town much farther north, on the Shantung Peninsula. They were supposed to keep it for as long as the Russians kept Port Arthur; the Russians had to give up the latter after their defeat against Japan in 1905, but the British stayed in Weihaiwei until 1930, when they finally handed it back to China after some prodding (and with remarkably little fuss). The two British officials who had administered this territory were keen Sinophiles: “Run by a Confucianist with a Buddhist as his assistant, Weihaiwei, it was said, was more Chinese than China” (p. 39).

In the case of France, I was particularly suprised by how short-lived their empire in the Far East was: Keay points out that Ho Chi Minh, the first leader of independent Vietnam, was the son of a minor official in the service of the last emperor prior to French colonial rule (pp. 89–90). One gets the impression that for the French, their empire in Indo-China was not primarily a matter of business and profit, but a means of boosting their national pride and spreading christianity and (French) civilization (pp. 92–3); but despite the fine colonial buildings constructed in Saigon, the French impact on the area was actually very shallow (pp. 99–101).

Lastly, there's the USA, whose colonial presence in the Philippines was even more short-lived, starting only in 1898. I knew that they had been a Spanish colony prior to that, but was now interested to learn that Spain had conquered the Philippines from America and subsequently administered them from Mexico (p. 108). The Philippine revolt against Spanish rule in the late 19th century also had more in common with similar revolts in early-19th-century South America than with the later anti-colonial revolts in Southeast Asia in the 20th century (p. 110). The U.S. was at war with Spain around that time, took over several Spanish territories such as Cuba and Porto Rico, and sort of pretended to have taken over the Philippines from Spain as well, although the Spanish had by then almost completely lost control to the Philippine revolutionaries (whose declaration of independence was simply ignored by the U.S.; pp. 112–13). Apparently the Americans believed that if they didn't occupy the Philippines, some other imperial power would (p. 115), which I guess is entirely possible. Although U.S. presence on the Philippines started with a nasty military campaign to suppress the independence movement, relations got better later on, and the Filipinos, especially their elites, became heavily Americanized (p. 119). The U.S. was in principle committed to Philippine independence at some vague indefinite point in the future, and meanwhile gave them favourable access to U.S. markets (pp. 119–20). In 1933 they promised independence in ten years, and the Philippines indeed became independent after the war, in 1946 (p. 187).

William Taft, who would later become famous as the fattest president in U.S. history, spent some time on the Philippines to help organize a civilian government there: “Taft was chiefly remarkable for a stature which rivalled that of most Filipino homes and a 325 lb bulk which exceeded that of entire Filipino families.” :))) (P. 118.)

*

The Great Depression apparently hit southeast Asia pretty badly; the economic slump brought in its wake higher taxation and labour unrest (pp. 128–33); “[t]he myth of colonial prosperity was wrecked by the depression” (p. 4). Nationalist movements emerged and began calling for an end of colonial rule; but probably they would have emerged sooner or later anyway, regardless of the economy.

China, which had of course never really been colonized by the imperialists, was already governed by a nationalist government under Chiang Kai-shek, who was pushing for a return of the concessions (such as those in Shanghai) under Chinese control, and might have achieved this had the process not been interrupted by the Japanese aggression on China in 1931 (p. 151). The Shanghai concession “rested on bluff” (p. 142) — the imperialist powers had no realistic way of protecting it against the forces which now loomed around it. For a time the bluff worked; in 1931, fighting reached Shanghai but stopped on the borders of the International Settlement, whose inhabitants would gawk at the fighting “[f]rom their roof-tops and verandas” (p. 152). But when the Sino-Japanese conflict escalated into a full-blown war in 1937, “the spell of imperial inviolability” (p. 155) was broken; the settlement got bombed, it had to accept an increasing amount of Japanese control, and its economy declined so much that there was hardly any point in its continued existence (p. 156). Imperial presence in China (except in Hong Kong) was simply swept away in the first couple of years of the war.

Japan's war against China didn't go as well as the Japanese had expected, which led them to increase their war aims so as to justify this unexpectedly large and hard war; they now wanted a “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere” covering the whole Far East (p. 161). This put them on a course for conflict with the Western powers, who were in any case busy with the war in Europe and weren't really in a position to defend their Far Eastern colonies well. Previously Japan had depended on resources imported from the U.S., but the latter now imposed an embargo and Japan pushed into southeast Asia to secure such things as rubber from Malaya and oil from Indonesia (p. 168). Colonial administrations there were embarrassingly easily swept away; the myth “of imperial invincibility was exploded” (p. 4). In French Indo-China it was even easier; Vichy France maintained neutrality towards Japan and yielded to Japanese demands without a fight, e.g. allowing Japan to station troops in Vietnam (p. 166). On the Philippines, the Americans had ambitious plans to defend the islands, but this went badly and they had to abandon most of the territory quickly (pp. 189–90).

General MacArthur, who led the unsuccessful defense of the Philippines in 1941–2, went to considerable lengths to liberate them speedily in 1944–5. As a result, he was enormously popular there (pp. 194–5), and so was the U.S. as a whole: the Philippines became independent in 1946, but kept very close ties to the U.S., and “nowhere in the East [. . .] did the ex-colonial power enjoy greater popularity” (p. 197).

But in countries where the imperial powers intended to re-establish colonial rule, things would not be so easy. Many of these territories were still occupied by Japanese forces when Japan surrendered, which deprived the Dutch, British and French of restoring their colonial prestige by liberating their ex-colonies in a triumphant campaign (p. 213). Moreover, late in the war, Japan had begun promoting the notion of future independence in such occupied countries as Indonesia, Burma, the Philippines etc., with the idea that they would be Japanese puppet-states, or “at least not anti-Japanese” in case Japan lost the war (p. 208). Nationalist movements in Indonesia and north Vietnam declared independence at the end of the war (pp. 210, 219). The former colonial powers would have to wage wars on them to re-establish control; but they were weakened after the WW2 and could hardly expect the U.S. to help them regain their colonial empires.

In Malaya, the British fared a bit better since the country was too ethnically divided for a nationalist movement to have emerged (p. 229); the native Malays were in danger of becoming a minority amidst all the Indian and Chinese immigrants (known as “Malayans”). Moreover, the British empire in the Far East had been attractive and profitable because of “India's eastern trade” (p. 242), and there was little point in trying to hold on to it once India became independent. “Like one stricken with senile impotence, the British found that losing the means to perform coincided with losing the inclination.” :)))) (P. 243.)

By contrast, the French regarded Indo-China as “part of France; their inhabitants could become French citizens, their deputies sat in the French government” (p. 244), and they also saw their colonies as the key to restoring their great power status (p. 275); and the Netherlands needed its colonies for its post-WW2 recovery “and to avoid, as one Dutch statesman put it, ‘becoming another Denmark’ ” :)) (p. 245). These two countries therefore resisted demands for colonial self-government or independence, or at best tried to deflect them by offering to establish vague unions of the metropole and the colonies, in which the former would always have the upper hand (pp. 261, 275).

The situation in Indonesia struck me as particularly bizarre. The nationalist movement obtained Japanese weapons and was in control of the country; in some places former Dutch prisoners now had to stay in their camps under Japanese guard “for their own safety”, due to all the nationalist militias rampaging outside — how embarrassing :)); and occasionally the Japanese, having surrendered, then fought alongside the British against the nationalists (pp. 250–2). The British troops, which were mostly from India, withdrew in late 1947; the Dutch kept fighting but came under heavy international pressure as aggressors against the “Indonesian Republic” (p. 263). The U.S. had reluctantly tolerated the re-establishment of colonial rule on the theory that it helped prevent the spread of communism, but once it became clear that the Indonesian Republic is heavily anti-communist itself, the U.S. withdrew its support of the Dutch and threatened to cut them out of the Marshall Plan; hence they finally caved in and recognized Indonesian independence (pp. 268–9).

The French fought in Vietnam for a few years, relying to a considerable extent on American equipment (pp. 270–4); for some time they negotiated with Ho Chi Minh about the establishment of a French-Vietnamese union, but refused to offer any real autonomy to Vietnam, so that Ho Chi Minh's policy of moderation and negotiation with France was discredited (pp. 283–5). Hitherto the war hadn't mattered much to anyone outside France and Vietnam, but this began to change after the latter gained the support of China and the USSR (p. 291); now the war became part of “America's global crusade against Communism” (p. 292). After the defeat at Dien Bien Phu (1954), the French agreed to partition the country and withdraw from (communist-controlled) North Vietnam; and the U.S. was now propping up South Vietnam, so there was no further role for France there (pp. 295–6). Soon South Vietnam received “more than half of its total revenue” in the form of U.S. aid (p. 347); more and more U.S. equipment and soldiers were being shipped in, and in 1965 the U.S. entered the war in earnest (p. 352). Their public opinion soon grew tired of it, the U.S. withdrew in 1972, and South Vietnam collapsed by 1975 (p. 353).

There was also a communist insurgency in Malaya around 1950, but the British managed to suppress it, partly by wisely minimizing civilian casualties (p. 308) and partly by committing to Malay independence and presenting communism as a common enemy to Malay nationalists (p. 302). Malaya became independent in 1957 and merged with a few other states into Malaysia a few years later — a much smoother transition to independence than in Vietnam (pp. 303, 320). There were even some areas that didn't want independence, such as Penang (p. 316), a region in Malaya; nor were the people of Sarawak happy when the last White Rajah ceded the territory to Britain (p. 239).

The last bit of empire to be surrendered was Hong Kong; the lease on the New Territories ran out in 1997, and the rest of the colony (which had in principle been ceded to Britain permanently) would be unviable without them; moreover China demanded the whole of Hong Kong, and Britain wasn't really in a position to prevent them from doing so. As is well known, the only concession that the British were able to obtain from China was a promise to maintain democracy in Hong Kong for fifty years (p. 364). Keay, writing soon after these events, seems to have regarded this arrangement with a certain amount of optimism, but as we now know, the Chinese broke their promise before even half of the fifty-year period was over.

*

An interesting observation from p. 274: after the WW2, “empire as a mechanism of control was ending because ease of communication was making it obsolete”, e.g. due to the spread of air travel. You could still do imperialism, but didn't have to maintain “elaborate administrative structures and far-flung military establishments”. — U.S. interventions in the Philippines in the '50s (to suppress a communist insurgency; pp. 336–41) or Vietnam in the '60s were a typical case of imperialism, even though they didn't involve “the colouring-in of world maps, the monarch's head on colonial currencies and postage stamps” etc. (p. 335). Old-school empire was simply “outdated” (ibid.). Another sense in which empire is now obsolete is that the sort of wars required to maintain it are unacceptable to Western public opinion (p. 355), which makes these wars politically insupportable (as long as the countries are democratic, at least).

*

Looking back, I can't help but be surprised at how quick and easy the end of Western imperialism in the Far East was. Who would have thought, in 1930, that in little more than twenty years it would all be over? When you look at maps of the world in the Age of Imperialism, with huge swathes of the planet painted pink, blue, etc. to signify the British, French etc. empires, it's hard to resist the temptation to think that such huge empires must have been enormously powerful; and yet they all turned out to have been mere houses of cards, completely unable to preserve themselves, collapsing ignominiously at the slightest push as soon as they were dealing with anything other than literal spear-chucking natives. I think this fact, just how weak these empires really were, is not emphasized enough in education today, and this gives us an unrealistic idea as to just what is possible for a country to accomplish if it sets its mind to it.

Another proof of just how weak the imperialists really were is the fact that they never managed to colonize any substantial parts of China, and never even seriously tried to. Even in the 19th century when they actually won a few wars against China, none of those were proper wars of conquest; and when they won, all they got was just leases here and concessions there, nothing that China couldn't easily claim back once she ceased to be weak. It is telling that the only imperialist country that managed to conquer any substantial amount of Chinese territory was Japan with her conquest of Manchuria, probably due to the advantage of geographical proximity. That famous old cartoon of imperialist powers carving up China turned out to be a mere illusion. I wonder how different the world would be today if China *had* been properly colonized. In that hypothetical scenario, would the China of today be less dangerous and harmful than she is here in the real timeline, with its size, power and malignant authoritarianism? If the imperalist powers had really carved China up, there might be several independent countries there now, smaller and hence less dangerous and less harmful.

Another interesting hypothetical scenario: obviously the WW2 had a big effect towards speeding up the end of imperialism in the Far East, but it's tempting to speculate how things would have developed if the WW2 hadn't taken place, or if the imperialist powers had been able to reassert control after the war — perhaps with American help, if the U.S. hadn't been so heavily opposed to traditional colonial empires at the time. But I suspect that even then, the end of empire could only have been delayed by a few decades, rather than really prevented. Once the whole population of a colony becomes politically conscious and is completely opposed to your colonial rule, what are you going to do? You'd have to have a spy in every street, a squad of soldiers on every corner, send millions of people to prison camps, pile up mountains of skulls, raze villages and cities to the ground. It is certainly possible to control a hostile subject population that way. Many conquerors have done it over the course of history; China's treatment of the Uyghurs is a recent case in point, as is Russia's treatment of the parts of the Ukraine that they are presently occupying. But by the mid-20th century the western powers, and especially their public opinion, didn't have the stomach for that sort of thing any more; and without that you can't do old-style imperialism with any success, and there's no point in even trying. It may even be objectively true that you'd be bringing a better administration to the primitive inhabitants of your colony, but they won't appreciate it, and your efforts will be wasted.

ToRead:

Keay mentions a great many very interesting-sounding books, especially memoirs of people who were involved in the events discussed in this book.

• Hickmann Powell: The Last Paradise (1930). A book about Bali: “A world rent by repressions and revolutions badly needed a new paradise myth, and in this island in the back of beyond it found it” (p. 14).
• Ladislao (László) Székely: Tropic Fever: The Adventures of a Planter in Sumatra (1937). The memoirs of a Hungarian who participated in the ‘gold rush’ focused on tobacco cultivation in late-19th-century Dutch East Indies: “He found unimaginable brutality, described it in appalling detail, yet stayed on long enough to acquire the expected reward” (p. 26).
• R. O. Winstedt: Start from Alif: Countfrom One (1969). An official in British Malaya, he is mentioned here on p. 30 for his remarks on the Dutch exploitation of Java.
• Gregor Krause: Bali (2 vols., 1920; archive.org has the 1922 one-volume reprint); “written in German but lavishly illustrated with photographs of Balinese physiques” (p. 31), this book drew the attention of Western travellers and helped make Bali a tourist destination.
• Reginald Johnston: Lion and Dragon in Northern China (1910). A memoir by a British official in China; later he also became the tutor of the last Chinese emperor and eventually served as the last British governor of Weihaiwei (p. 77). I now see on Johnston's Wikipedia page that he wrote two other interesting-sounding memoirs: From Peking to Mandalay (1908) and Buddhist China (1913).
• Stella Benson: this “sylph-like novelist” (p. 82) of the 1920s and '30s lived in China for a number of years, where her husband was a British customs official; Keay mentions her a few times and occasionally quotes from her letters (Some Letters of Stella Benson, ed. by C. Clarabut, 1978), but doesn't mention any of her novels or travel books specifically. I was greatly intrigued to read, in her wikipedia page, that she received the Benson Medal :)
• Osbert Sitwell: Escape With Me! (1939). A travel book, mentioned here on p. 100 for Sitwell's impression of the shallowness of French presence in Indo-China.
• Sjovald Cunyngham-Brown: Crowded Hour (1975). Memoirs of an “old Malay hand” (p. 233; also quoted on pp. 126, 177).
• Maggie Keswick: The Thistle and the Jade (1980). She was the daughter of John Keswick, a prominent Scottish businessman in China (hence the title). Mentioned here on p.  127; when the Sino-Japanese war started in 1937 and the Chinese authorities “banned the use of the radio telegraph, desperate dealers in Jardine Matheson's office suddenly became avid pigeon fanciers” :)
• R. H. Bruce Lockhart: Memoirs of a British Agent (1932). About his time as a spy in Russia in 1918–19; mentioned here on p. 133.
• Mona Gardner: Menacing Sun (1940). An American writer who visited Singapore shortly before the Japanese invasion; quoted here on p. 172.
• Ronald C. H. Mackie [but everyone else on the internet spells it ‘McKie’]: This Was Singapore (1941). “A laconic Australian journalist with a Philip Marlowe prose style” (p. 173), he spent three years in Singapore just before the war.
• Somerset Maugham: The Circle (1921), The Painted Veil (1925), The Casuarina Tree (1926), The Summing Up (1938). According to the wikipedia, these are a play, a novel, a book of short stories, and a memoir, respectively. Keay refers to them here and there in the book, so presumably they are at least partly set in the Far East (pp. 62, 85, 172).
• Agnes Keith: Land Below the Wind (1939), Three Came Home (1948). A “restrained but heart-rending account, later filmed, of survival in Japanese detention” (p. 180), by the American wife of an English official on Borneo.
• K'tut Tantri: Revolt in Paradise (1960). K'tut Tantri was “the Balinese title used by a Scots-born American called Vaneen Walker” (p. 182; but her wikipedia page currently says Muriel Stuart Walker); she ran a hotel on Bali in the 1930s. Her “account of her wartime exploits as a gun-runner for the Indonesian resistance and then as a prisoner of the Japanese has strained the credulity of critical readers” (p. 257). At the end of the war she gained some notoriety for her radio broadcasts in support of the nationalists trying to prevent the re-establishment of colonial rule in Indonesia (ibid.).
• Albert Klestadt: The Sea Was Kind (1959). “A pipe-smoking back-packer with a taste for intelligence”, Klestadt lived in Manila when the Japanese invaded. He was initially interned but “[s]ome fluency in Japanese [. . .], plus his German birth, secured his release” (p. 190), and after many adventures he eventually made his way to Australia.
• F. Spencer Chapman: The Jungle is Neutral (1953). About his involvement in resistance to Japanese occupation in Malaya (p. 213).
• Compton Mackenzie: All Over the Place (1947). A book about “the wartime exploits of the Indian army” (p. 242): “Nowhere east of Gibraltar had Indian troops not been involved” (p. 243).
• James A. Mitchener: The Voice of Asia (1952). Quoted here on p. 236 for his observations on Vyner Brooke, the last White Rajah of Sarawak.
• Dirk Bogarde: Backcloth (1986). A memoir of his time as an intelligence officer in Indonesia just after the war (pp. 249, 252); later he became a famous actor.
• Norman Lewis: A Dragon Apparent (1951). He travelled in Indo-China while the French were trying to re-establish control (p. 274). For a moment I thought he was the same travel writer who had written Old Calabria some time before WW1, but then it turned out that I mixed him up with Norman Douglas.
• S. J. Perelman: Westward Ha! or, Around the World in 80 Clichés (1948). The author was an American humourist; mentioned here on p. 289 for his encounter with the Vietnamese ex-emperor who, by 1947, was living it up in the night clubs of Hong Kong.
• Lucien Bodard: The Quicksand War: Prelude to Vietnam (1967). The author was a journalist and “friend and mentor to the novelist Graham Greene” (p. 292).
• Graham Greene: The Quiet American (1955). A novel set early in the Vietnam War; some of the characters are based on real people (pp. 343–4).