An Awful Lot of Books (11 page)

But there are now a growing number of first-rate books which take an historical situation and give one an account of it, taking into consideration all the principal factors; the times on either side of its life - i.e. immediate causes and consequences - the temperaments and personalities of the chief characters, and having regard for accuracy which enables their authors to admit ignorance whenever they discover a gap in their material which cannot honestly be filled in. The results are an account far more in proportion and on a much bigger scale, infinitely more interesting to read and far more memorable than the small subjective stabs or larger dishonest sweeps that were generally recognised as memoirs or history. Here is another such book - succinct and masterly, which apart from its qualities of gripping the reader from beginning to end, is really a contribution to contemporary literature.

Less than sixty years ago the diplomatic representatives of eleven countries, their wives and families, Legation guards consisting of twenty officers and three hundred and eighty-nine men and well over two thousand other persons including armed volunteers, missionaries, converts, servants and children, were besieged in Peking from the end of May until the middle of August. They had four pieces of light artillery, an adequate sweet water supply, about one hundred and fifty ponies and mules (for meat) two hundred tons of rice, etc. and large quantities of excellent champagne. The year was 1900: the heat was insufferable; by the end of a month of drought the problem of sewage disposal was insoluble. There was also the stench of putrefying corpses, the fact that nobody could bath and most people had no change of clothing. Some ladies took to “the constant smoking of cigarettes” as a relief, but they were also fortunately sustained by delusions of impending rescue. Outside these cramped quarters, was the great city enclosing them with forty-foot walls and labyrinths lanes and houses - excellent cover for the constantly attacking enemy - initially the fanatical Boxers, but eventually also the Imperial Chinese Army. In the Forbidden City the Empress Dowager was issuing Edicts that were to become less and less obliquely savage towards the besieged as the weeks wore on. Sixty miles away, a relief force led by Admiral Sir Edward Seymour foundered because the Boxers made mincemeat of his railway track. Throughout the world curiosity about the situation in China was so intense that the total absence of real news about it soon led to mis-information: the besieged were reported massacred. In England Lord Salisbury informed the Queen that ‘it was impossible to exaggerate the horror of the news from Peking’ and a Memorial Service in St. Paul’s Cathedral was arranged: in Germany, the Kaiser despatched retributionary forces with many a blood-thirsty injunction.

When towards the end of July, a telegram from the American Minister got through from Peking implying that the besieged were in desperate need of relief, but alive, the armed forces of eight countries amassed and eventually set forth - twenty-thousand strong - on August 4th to reach the British Legation ten days later….The end of this business while not so bloodthirsty as the Kaiser might have wished, was peaceably resolved; lives were saved, the Boxers quelled, international honour - like a range of mountains laced with false summits of competitive greed - was satisfied, and even the looting and bickering of the polyglot garrison came to an end ten days after the Peace Treaty was signed…and what connection, if any, did they have with the Manchu Court?

Mr. Fleming suggests in his foreword that most of us know very little about this mysterious and extraordinarily recent incident: he goes on to point out that the participants in it fall into three categories; the besieged, their assailants and the relief forces. “There was no wireless in 1900, and all the relevant telegraph lines were destroyed at an early stage. Each category was thus insulated from the other two and had only a vague - often erroneous - idea of what they were doing and why they were doing it. Each category left copious records. We are left with the numerous pieces of a large jigsaw puzzle which has never been put together.

Mr. Fleming manages to sift from the records the most probable explanations of the intriguing questions all of which can never be answered with absolute certainty. (The Boxers were a secret society made up of brigands devoted to the pillaging and annihilation of Christians. They were reputed to be invulnerable through magic powers, and it is thought that the Empress Dowager - a lady whose malign tendencies were on a truly operatic scale but who was subject in her declining years to severe bouts of superstition - believed in them, and therefore appeased, tacitly supported and finally openly endorsed their activities and this, very roughly and over simply speaking, brought about the extraordinary situation of the siege.)

I do not think it would be possible to put together the pieces of the jigsaw better than has been done in this wholly admirable book. Mr. Fleming’s writing has the brilliant intelligence of somebody who has really taken the trouble thoroughly to inform himself out of passionate interest in his subject matter: he combines that grasp of the whole which is vital for clarity, with invariably well chosen detail that brings his subject to life, and the result is that one is enthralled from beginning to end, in a way which I do not remember having enjoyed since Mrs. Woodham-Smith’s
The Reason Why
.

It is in fact impossible for me to exaggerate the enormous pleasure that this account of the fifty-nine-years-old news of Peking has given me.

October 1959

The young Alma Schindler was called the most beautiful girl in Vienna. She was the daughter of a painter to the Austro-Hungarian court, and as a young girl spent all her time composing and playing music and reading. When she was twenty-two she met and married Mahler, who was twenty years older than she: he proposed to her at their third meeting demanding that she instantly give up her music and live for his alone. This she did for nine years until his death - seeing him through five symphonies and enduring consecutively his indifference and his frantic jealousy. Towards the end of this time she met a young architect called Walter Gropius, who fell madly in love with her and wrote a letter declaring himself, which he addressed to Mahler. Frau Werfel says; ‘What came then defies description … I had the elemental feeling that I could never leave Mahler. When I told him so, his face became transfigured and he clung to me every second of the day and night, ecstatic with love.’ But also: ‘All of a sudden I knew that my marriage was no marriage, that my own life was utterly unfulfilled.’ When Mahler entered his final illness she nursed him devotedly from America to France and home to Vienna, where he died.

After Mahler’s death she met Oskar Kokoschka, who came to draw her, and who after this one meeting wrote her a remarkable letter in which, among other things, he said: ‘ I know I will lose the faculties I should direct toward a goal outside myself that is sacred to you and to me. If you can respect me then make a real sacrifice and become my wife in secret, while I am still poor.’ She did not marry him, but for three years they were inseparable: he painted her incessantly and was insanely jealous, removing her from the rest of her life excepting her daughter (she had two by Mahler, but one died). In 1914, Kokoschka joined the army, and shortly afterwards she married Gropius, and had a daughter by him. This marriage came to a sudden end, however, after she had met and fallen in love with the poet and novelist Franz Werfel. She lived with him, but did not marry him until 1929, and the rest of the book contains their life together, including their flight from Europe to America, where he wrote
The Song of Bernadette
. He died before he had completely finished dictating his last book.

It is clear that with Werfel she achieved a remarkable marriage - of all the men she had met and who were deeply attracted to her, he came first and last in her heart. After Mahler and Kokoschka he must have seemed far easier to love as well as adore - he was gayer, more gentle, and his muse did not drive him with the same ferocious intensity; also he did not prevent her from mixing with other artists, as he, too enjoyed their work and their company.

October 1959

These books are both about Western Sicily: the first is entirely, the second principally, concerned with the lives of some of the thousands of families who exist without regular work or the prospect of it, actually starving or on the edge of starvation, in rooms or cellars (few families have more than one room) where more and more children are born into disease, despair and violence. It is almost impossible for a man to escape a criminal record, and in some places one man in three has committed murder. Much of both books contains verbatim stories - in both cases excellently translated - but in spite of the similarities, these two books do not simply repeat, they confirm and strengthen each other and are well worth reading consecutively.

Danilo Dolci went to Sicily in 1952 to study the causes and effects of poverty, and started a settlement for the destitute. His activities (which included the ‘reverse strikes’ when he organised unpaid road repairs) and the publication of verbatim material roused official antagonism which has led to his arrest and imprisonment on the most trivial charges, and he is at present awaiting review of a second sentence. His book is divided into three parts: the first and second consisting of the witnesses’ accounts of their lives in Palermo and the surrounding province respectively, and the third a survey, where the people’s widespread answers to five main questions are given. It is an overwhelming testimony, and more striking because Dolci is simply recording what these people have said - excepting in a brief introduction by Aldous Huxley about his work, he does not appear in the book at all. He is speaking for over two million people - mostly of whom are entirely, or almost entirely, illiterate - whose destitution and utter hopelessness of any honesty or justice prevailing result in fathers being imprisoned for a year for stealing food for their children, and mothers working the streets in some quarter where they will not be known. There is no law or order above these people which is not stinking of corruption: in Dolci’s book this is implicit, but when one reads Maxwell, it becomes inescapably plain, for he, after his fishermen and peasants, gives us verbatim accounts by a doctor (whose father had to pay a great deal to the examiners to procure him his degree), and a nun - a ‘Sister of Divine Compassion’ - who says, among other things, ‘We can’t take thought for all the poor - they give us alms and so we can’t give them alms’. In her account of nine pages there is no mention of taking thought for any of them, although she is extremely concerned with every kind of material value. Then there is a priest who is perfectly prepared to pray for his poorest parishioners if they will pay for it (they could get honest jobs if they tried), and meanwhile he can’t be expected to worry about the poor beyond teaching them a few ‘religious laws - introducing superstition here and there’. It is not simply a question of charity: the Church expects - and gets - peasants to work their extensive lands for no wages or food. In a community which is largely illiterate, the doctor and the priest are persons of power and responsibility: here the people are cheated and the power entirely abused - what is above the doctor and the priest? In this case the Christian Democrat Government and the Vatican, in powerful collaboration - the symbol for the former is also the Cross.

Leaving aside any questions of morality or curiosity, why should you want to read these books? Will they not simply shock and depress you, leaving you rather uncomfortably glad that you live in England? There seems to be one good reason. These people, who do not read or write, have a language which is strikingly strong, direct and fresh, and this - through honourable translation - conveys a truth with which, for their different reasons, neither Dolci nor Maxwell have tampered, and somehow or other the truth, however hard and harrowing, has not got the deadweight of depression attendant upon lies.

November 1959

Of all the books that have come my way since I began writing about them, this has given me the most pleasure. It is a poet’s recollections of his childhood, beginning at the age of three when the carrier’s cart dumped him outside the cottage in a village in Gloucestershire which was to remain his home until he was grown. Mr. Lee’s father was already a widower with four children when he married again, added four more to the family of whom Mr. Lee was the youngest but one, and then departed for a safer, more suburban life. His mother took seven of the children to this cottage and waited patiently for his return, but he had gone off to Greenwich in a bullet-proof vest and never came back. The early years are packed with the pangs and comforts of a large family crammed in a cottage alternately flooded with water pouring down the hill, or glowing with smoky warmth, and crowded with the traffic of eight separate lives. The author’s three half-sisters and his mother brought him up and he was content ‘to be bullied, and tumbled through the hand-to-mouth days, patched or dressed up, scolded, admired, swept off my feet in sudden passions of kisses, or dumped forgotten among the unwashed pots’. His village was in a small unvisited valley, and in the ‘twenties it was still a poor, self-sufficient, almost feudal pocket of life, ruled by a rheumy Squire, the Vicar and a village school; with its own outings, and festivals, legends, laws, and a structure made entirely of necessity and experience; where the follies, joys, disasters and amusements all took place within its orbit.