Category Archives: History

People have always been just as crazy as they are now.

Patrick Leigh Fernor, A Time to Keep Silence

Books, History, , , ,

Cover Art

A Time to Keep Silence is Patrick Leigh Fernor’s account of his experiences as a guest in two French monasteries during the 1950s, and his visit to a long-abandoned monastery carved out of the rocks in Cappadocia, Turkey. It’s a short book, less than a hundred pages; it describes the monasteries and tells their histories, but doesn’t get too heavily into analyzing what it sees. Fernor has theories, but he doesn’t try to definitively explain why the monks chose a silent, regimented lifestyle, or what it means to them. He doesn’t feel qualified.

Fernor begins in a Benedictine abbey, where he comes to feel relatively at home. He then moves to a Trappist monastery where the monks’ lives consist of ceaseless work, endless prayer, and a distinct lack of central heating.1 He has less direct contact with the monks and their values never cease to be alien. Finally, he describes the long-abandoned Cappadocian monastery, not a living place but a part of monastic history, its inhabitants long gone. Fernor zooms out as he goes. Each section creates more distance between the reader and the monks, each section takes away from the reader’s sense of connection. Compared to most nonfiction A Time to Keep Silence is structured backwards; it begins looking like it might have the answers but it leaves with only questions.

Fernor’s more certain about the monastery’s effect on himself. At first the lack of distraction is disorienting. He spends most of a couple of days asleep. He suspects he was recovering from “the tremendous accumulation of tiredness, which must be the common property of all our contemporaries,” created by the thousands of minor stresses and demands on our attention everyone faces every day, which have grown exponentially in the fifty years since this book was published. He feels peaceful, focused, and attentive.

You don’t have to be religious to see why certain people might find this attractive. We live in a world of noise, distraction, and random hostility. Sometimes even the most ordinary inanimate objects–jar lids, DVD cases, computer programs, new shirts full of pins–are out to get you. Sometimes you just want to get the hell away.

“The Abbey was at first a graveyard,” says Fernor; “the outer world seemed afterwards, by contrast, an inferno of noise and vulgarity entirely populated by bounders.” Fernor doesn’t share in the monks’ religion and doesn’t try to explain what their lives are all about, but I suspect for at least some of them the answer to that question is closer than it seems.

  1. The Trappist monastery’s program was developed by a seventeenth-century aristocrat gone radical. According to a legend recounted in the book, after his mistress died he walked into her sickroom to find the undertaker had decapitated her body to fit it into the coffin, casually leaving her head on a table. ↩

The Crusades Drag On

Books, History, ,

Gustave Dore does the Fourth Crusade.

When I open a book called The Fourth Crusade I sort of expect to read about the Fourth Crusade, so the preface to Jonathan Phillips’s The Fourth Crusade came as a speed bump. It’s a two-page argument that the “holy war” has no equivalent in modern Western societies—we’ve given it up for the “just war,” so good on us. It became easier to understand what the hell this was doing here when I checked the copyright. This book about a turn-of-the-thirteenth century European army whose targets had nothing to do with the stated purpose of their war would have been getting its final polish at about the time George W. Bush’s Iraq war was getting started. The preface is a troll prophylactic. “I’m not criticizing the Fearless Leader!” says Jonathan Phillips. “Honest!”

Once you’re past the prologue this is a readable layman’s overview of a war that, even by crusading standards, was pure sleaze from start to finish. It started with propaganda: a round of sermons exhorting the faithful to head out and take Jerusalem back from the Moslems. (Wikipedia gives most of the credit to Fulk of Neuilly. According to Phillips the guy didn’t actually do a hell of a lot, but I wanted to mention him because I like the name “Fulk.” More parents should name their kids Fulk, is what I say.) Some people signed on, partly out of self-interest: crusading would buy them forgiveness for their sins. Which was great, because by the time a crusade was over they’d need it. Continue reading The Crusades Drag On →

The Secret History

Books, History, Weirdness, , , ,

Emperor Justinian

Procopius was a respected historian back in his day. Upright. Sober. The go-to guy if you wanted to know what was up with Emperor Justinian.

So everybody was kind of surprised when, a few centuries later, somebody dug up The Secret History. Procopius hated Justinian. Hated him. Hated hated hated hated hated him. Not as much as he hated Empress Theodora, but still a lot. It wasn’t that Justinian was stupid. It wasn’t that he was corrupt. He managed to be stupid and successfully corrupt at the same time: “never of his own accord speaking the truth to those with whom he conversed, but having a deceitful and crafty intent behind every word and action, and at the same time exposing himself, an easy prey, to those who wished to deceive him.”

The Secret History was where Procopius vented the bile he couldn’t pack into his official histories without getting executed. He starts out… what do they call it these days? “Shrill?” As the pages go by he gets shriller and shriller until he reads like a steam whistle. Look at the chapter titles from the Penguin edition—I think they were added by the translator, but they give you the flavor. They start with “Belisarius and Antonina,” and progress to “Justinian’s Misgovernment,” and then “The Destruction Wrought by a Demon-Emperor,” and by “Everyone and Everything Sacrificed to the Emperor’s Greed” Procopius’s face is bright red and he’s muttering to himself and steam is jetting out of his ears and you’re sort of afraid he’ll pull out a couple of pistols and shoot up the room like Yosemite Sam. (Then you remember he’s been dead for over fourteen centuries. We’re safe!)

Continue reading The Secret History →

A Voyage Long and Tedious

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As I’ve mentioned before, history is big and the layers go down forever. The more you read themore you realize how much you don’t know. The narrative you built out of the things you remember from school is full of holes.

Tony Horowitz had a hole moment on a visit to Plymouth Rock. A guide told him that among the top tourist misconceptions (along with the idea that the ten-foot Indian statue is life-sized. What is wrong with these people?) is the conviction that Columbus and the Pilgrims came over on the same boat. And he wondered: what did happen over that century and a half, anyway? So he wrote A Voyage Long and Strange. And I read the jacket copy and thought, hey, good question.

I didn’t get very far. Horowitz came to the project as a journalist rather than a historian. He seems to have assumed, without really thinking about it, that a history writer should travel to places where things happened. So to prepare for his chapters on the Norse he wandered around Newfoundland, and before writing about Columbus he visited the Dominican Republic.

Not that historians don’t travel. But Horowitz isn’t doing original research; he’s digesting already well researched information into a manageable lump for a general audience. So it’s not clear why he’s taking these trips. Occasionally he hits on some insight into how the history influenced the character of these places today, but these insights are rarely deep and his travels are mostly standard magazine-article tourist ramblings.

And he won’t shut up about them. He doesn’t introduce Columbus by describing the present Dominican Republic, or use his trip as a follow up to the history. He jumps back and forth within the same chapter, and can’t seem to get through more than a couple of pages of history at a time. Constantly, just as the book was getting into, say, the history of the Taino, it would stop dead so Horowitz could gripe about the difficulty of renting a car in Santo Domingo. I gave up somewhere during Horowitz’s quest to trace Coronado’s route through empty desert interspersed with a series of modern-day tourist sites. Somewhere in the world may be the perfect book to rectify my ignorance about that century and a half. This isn’t it.

Harpies and Peanuts

Art, Books, Comics, History, , , , , ,

Wilde attributes this joke to Carlyle: a biography of Michelangelo that would make no mention of the works of Michelangelo. So complex is reality, and so fragmentary and simplified is history, that an omniscient observer could write an indefinite, almost infinite, number of biographies of a man, each emphasizing different facts; we would have to read many of them before we realized that the protagonist was the same.

—Jorge Luis Borges, “On William Beckford’s Vathek”

In the early 16th century, aspiring artist Bartolomeo Torri was thrown out of his teacher’s home after he got a little too absorbed in his anatomy lessons: “for he kept so many limbs and pieces of corpses under his bed and all over his rooms, that they poisoned the whole house,” wrote Giorgio Vasari. Cherubino Alberti fixated on medieval siege engines and filled his home with model catapults. Later, Franz Xavier Messerschmidt believed he was pinched and abused by a “Spirit of Proportion” who could be warded off by pulling grotesque contorted expressions, which Messerschmidt recorded in sculpture.

The cover of Born Under Saturn

Margot & Rudolf Wittkower’s Born Under Saturn is a history of “the Character and Conduct of Artists,” as the subtitle puts it. And, yeah, a lot of these guys are characters. Others were normal, well-behaved types, but, honestly, you’re not going to read this book for Rubens or Bernini. But Born Under Saturn isn’t a freak show. The Wittkowers are analyzing popular ideas about artists, and although stories of eccentricities, feuds, and crimes make this book more readable than a straight academic treatise they also serve a purpose: the varied mass of biography breaks down cultural stereotypes about artists.

Continue reading Harpies and Peanuts →

The Incredibly Strange People Who Stopped Speaking Occitan and Became Mixed-Up Frenchmen

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History is fractal. At the top is the history of nations as singular entities. England declared war on France, Japan closed its borders… on the high-school-textbook-summary level we talk as though nations are monolithic blocks animated by ants marching in lockstep. But nations aren’t made of ants; they have factions and movements and territories, and this internal history is the next level. Then you have the history of individual factions, and particular territories, and cities and boroughs and streets, all the way down to the histories of individuals. There the fractal analogy breaks down. You can’t really write histories of an individual’s internal organs, with the possible exception of Winston Churchill’s liver which declared independence in 1951.

The Discovery of France
I always sort of thought about France as an ant monolith. Even reading Dumas didn’t change this much. My old United States-style high school education treated foreign countries as sort of hazy unimportant little islands off in the far distance. It still lurks in my subconscious. Graham Robb’s The Discovery of France was a great corrective. It turns out most of what we think of as “French culture” has, historically, been the culture of Paris. Away from the city, Parisians would find themselves in a wildly varied mosaic of provinces united only by the encircling national border. For a long time the north of France and the south didn’t even speak the same language. There were towns so isolated that everyone considered it their civic duty to hack a wandering cartographer to death in a fit of superstitious paranoia.

That’s the thing about fractal history: the farther down you go, the weirder it gets. Remember how bored you were in high school Western Civ? You were dealing with the lumbering impersonal history of monolithic nations. Sentences like “England declared war on France” are the stock in trade of textbooks. The declarations of war and treaty negotiations happening up at the nation level are important, but dry. When you drill down to the lower levels, that’s when things get interesting. That’s where you can see humanity in its particularity, and peculiarity. The best history is about people doing what they do best: behaving very, very strangely.

And, man, French people are strange. Of course, so is everyone else—although most of us don’t notice the strangeness of our surroundings, having grown up in them—but anyone who’s just read The Discovery of France could be forgiven for feeling as though France was a weirder place than most—a surrealist country that might have arisin from a conclave of New Weird writers. There are whistling languages and spiderlike shepherds on ten-foot stilts who covered ground at eight miles an hour. Villagers live in caves carved into the sides of quarries. Marshes host a community of fishermen “whose long-legged beds were lapped by the water at high tide and who learned to sail almost before they could talk.” The author of a French-German phrasebook advises her postilion (coach driver) that “I believe that the wheels are on fire. Look and see”—amazing not only for the implication that this was a common enough occurrence to need a standard translation, but also for the idea that this was not something a postilion would notice without help. Survivors pour out basins of water from a house where someone has died, in case the victim’s soul washed itself on the way out—or “tried to extinguish itself,” if on its way to hell.

It’s like an encyclopedia of strange. And yet none of these people would have thought themselves unusual. Neither do we. But two hundred years from now a thousand readers of 21st century history will come up for air, closing their books or switching off their Kindles or whatever, with dazed expressions and universal cries of “Huh?”

Mr. Dickens Goes to Washington

Books, History,

Charles Dickens visited Washington, D.C. in 1842.

I was sometimes asked, in my progress through other places, whether I had not been very much impressed by the HEADS of the lawmakers at Washington; meaning not their chiefs and leaders, but literally their individual and personal heads, whereon their hair grew, and whereby the phrenological character of each legislator was expressed: and I almost as often struck my questioner dumb with indignant consternation by answering ‘No, that I didn’t remember being at all overcome.’ As I must, at whatever hazard, repeat the avowal here, I will follow it up by relating my impressions on this subject in as few words as possible.

[…]

I saw in them, the wheels that move the meanest perversion of virtuous Political Machinery that the worst tools ever wrought. Despicable trickery at elections; under-handed tamperings with public officers; cowardly attacks upon opponents, with scurrilous newspapers for shields, and hired pens for daggers; shameful trucklings to mercenary knaves, whose claim to be considered, is, that every day and week they sow new crops of ruin with their venal types, which are the dragon’s teeth of yore, in everything but sharpness; aidings and abettings of every bad inclination in the popular mind, and artful suppressions of all its good influences: such things as these, and in a word, Dishonest Faction in its most depraved and most unblushing form, stared out from every corner of the crowded hall.

— Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation.

I think Charles would be pleased to learn that, one hundred and sixty-five years later, there has been an important change: members of our nation’s legislative body can now be trusted not to spit on the floor.

The Senate is a dignified and decorous body, and its proceedings are conducted with much gravity and order. Both houses are handsomely carpeted; but the state to which these carpets are reduced by the universal disregard of the spittoon with which every honourable member is accommodated, and the extraordinary improvements on the pattern which are squirted and dabbled upon it in every direction, do not admit of being described. I will merely observe, that I strongly recommend all strangers not to look at the floor; and if they happen to drop anything, though it be their purse, not to pick it up with an ungloved hand on any account.

— American Notes (four paragraphs later).

Review: To Ruhleben–and Back

Books, History, ,

In 1914, two months after England and Germany went to war, Geoffrey Pyke persuaded a newspaper to hire him as a war correspondent. Pyke was about 20 at the time and, acting under the same impulse by which modern 20 year olds crash keg parties and drink themselves into comas, snuck into Berlin. He was arrested, of course. But, hey, at least he got a book out of it.

To Ruhleben–and Back was published in 1916 and recently republished under McSweeney’s (McSweeney’s’s?) Collins Library imprint. (And damn, this is a handsome book. Good paper, a cover made of sturdy boards and real cloth–Cloth! In an age of big-publisher hardcovers covered in construction paper!–and the design must have time-travelled forwards from the days when books were bound like their publishers gave a damn. I stuck it on my shelf between Phillip Pullman and David Quammen and it looked like Mr. Blackwell at a hobo convention.)

Pyke spent months in solitary confinement wondering whether he’d be shot. Then he was transferred to a cold and inadequate POW camp at Ruhleben. A case of pneumonia left him with a weak heart. He escaped in the company of a man who knew the country better. They walked a very long way to the Netherlands with very little food. Pyke collapsed several times and was once almost left for dead.

As Pyke tells it, all of this was hilariously funny. Continue reading Review: To Ruhleben–and Back →

Annals of 19th-Century Chutzpah

Books, History

My most recent on-the-bus reading was The Great Pretenders, by Jan Bondeson. In brief, it’s a collection of historic impostors–most of them con artists, but also a couple of accidental impostors who made no claims of their own but became the subject of conspiracy theories after their deaths.

The cases that caught my attention were two tales of purported lost heirs to 19th-century British peerages: The Tichborne Claimant and the Druce-Portland case.

(I first saw the word “claimant” on the spine of Mark Twain’s novel _The American Claimant_. I was a kid at the time, and not knowing what the word meant but seeing the resemblance to “lament” and “climate,” I got the notion that it was about a guy who complained about the weather. As it turns out, _The American Claimant_ is the book where Twain put all the weather in an appendix to obviate the need to mention it during the actual novel. Ah, the irony. It’s enough to make Alanis Morrissette screech unmelodically.)

Anyway. French-speaking, alcohol-abusing Sir Roger Charles Doughty Tichborne was lost at sea in 1864. Years later, a guy turned up in Wagga Wagga, Australia claiming to be Sir Roger. Apparently in the intervening time he had forgotten how to speak French and increased in weight by over two hundred per cent. And yet the claimant–who later turned out to be a butcher named Arthur Orton–still managed to take his case to court. A *lot* of people believed he was Sir Roger. Some of these people were the same kind of people who these days believe the _National Enquirer_ is fine journalism. Some weren’t. Some were people who had known Sir Roger and were happy to testify that he and Arthur were the same guy.

The detail that gets me–the reason I’m writing this post–is the way our pal Arthur financed his lawsuit. He sold bonds. Seriously. For £20 you could buy a Tichborne Bond with the promise that, once “Sir Roger” had his fortune, you’d get a fivefold return on your investment.

And people *bought* them. They bought *£40,000* worth. And the damndest part was that it was apparently legal. It must have been, because a few decades later it happened *again*.

The fifth Duke of Portland (a pathological recluse and a fascinating subject in himself) died in 1879. Years later a woman named Anna Maria Druce claimed that her late husband, Thomas Charles Druce, had been the Duke wearing an unconvincing fake beard, and that her son was therefore the Portland heir.

Mrs. Druce wasn’t the con artist that Arthur Orton was. Actually, she appears to have been genuinely nuts. It’s been just a couple of days since I read Bondeson’s book and already her story is a crazy blur. At one point she claimed that the Duke had for some reason disguised himself as a homeopath named “Dr. Harms” and gotten himself checked into an asylum by pretending to be a dancing bear.

(I badly want to find out more about this thing. Unfortunately, I found just one in-print book about the case–The Disappearing Duke by Andrew Crofts and Tom Freeman-Keel–and on examination it turned out to be worthless… completely unsourced, and full of dialogue which as far as I could tell the authors invented from what’s usually referred to as whole cloth but which in this case probably didn’t even have all its threads.)

Anyway, at one point Mrs. Druce published a pamphlet called _The Great Druce-Portland_ mystery which ended with an invitation to buy “Druce bonds” entitling the bearers to shares in the Portland estate. A few years later another Druce heir turned up–from Australia again, no less–with an improvement: he formed a limited liability company for the sole purpose of suing to claim the Portland fortune.

Passing yourself off as the heir to a fortune takes gall. Taking your purported family to court to get your hands on takes *unmitigated* gall. Forming a startup company to sell shares in the fortune to finance the legal campaign to take your purported family to court takes gall, unmitigated gall, and chutzpah. You just don’t get this class of con artist anymore.

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