Fool’s Testament

Herzog
by Saul Bellow

This is literature, the work of a great novelist aiming for the stars, though perhaps not quite reaching them. In an age of constant bite-sized distractions from the internet and elsewhere, though, it’s hard to give this kind of writing the attention it deserves.

Stylistically exquisite, heart-tuggingly insightful, encyclopaedically informed, Herzog is largely a rendition of its protagonist’s internal monologue, sprinkled with a light salting of action and description. Moses Herzog conducts his compulsive monologue in the form of letters to others – friends, relatives, colleagues, fellow authors, publishers, contemporary politicians, etc. – which he invariably fails to complete and never mails. Not an easy read by any means.

Herzog is a high-flown incompetent, a former academic and historian who is in the throes of a nervous breakdown – a mild psychotic episode, you might call it. He suffers, he remembers, he writes his letters; he takes trips across the country for reasons he is not quite clear about himself, only to turn round and come back home. He has a bit of sex – the one thing he seems to be good at is attracting women – but he doesn’t seem to know how to make the women happy or let them make him happy. Eventually he returns to the place where his unhappiness began and is cured of his temporary insanity, although there is no promise that his apparently lifelong run of failure will end.

I experienced a curious sensation while reading this book – that of finding myself bored and impatient with Herzog and his endless, meandering, futile ruminations, yet eager to read on and find out what happens to him – and yet again being unable to hurry because the prose is so gorgeous and dense with flavour and nutrients. This queasy, ambiguous fascination is an effect that can only be achieved by a great author – an Updike or a Nabokov, or a Bellow.

At times, though, the book I was most reminded of was Portnoy’s Complaint, which is considerably more lowbrow (groin level, in fact, most of the time). Which raises an interesting question: since we already had Saul Bellow, was it really necessary to invent Philip Roth?

Little England & the ’Flu

Population trend for Sri Lanka showing population loss due to

the influenza pandemic of 1918–1919.

Some years ago, I wrote a short story called ‘Little England’, set in the tea-planting districts of Ceylon not long after Independence. These districts lie high among the central hills of Lanka; in pre-colonial times they were barely settled. The British ‘opened them up’, chopping down the ancient cloud-forests that clothed the mountains and planting coffee in their place. Later, when coffee succumbed to a blight, they turned to tea, which ended up being even more successful.

The planters lived in palatial isolation in their estate ‘bungalows’ among the hills. Although they were furnished with every convenience and luxury colonial civilization could provide, access was difficult. There was only one railway line, running from Kandy to Badulla, and the roads that connected the plantations, which were often privately built and maintained, were narrow, winding and terribly dangerous. Since these roads were always climbing up and down steep hills, one verge was usually bordered by a cliffside while the other gave, unfenced, upon an abyss. Mist and fog often made visibility poor, even by day; at night it was worse, and so many planters died on the way home after a boozy evening at ‘the club’ that the fraternity had a term for it: ‘he went into the tea.’ Other hazards included frequent landslides (‘earthslips’) and rockfalls. A breakdown meant exposure to leeches and poisonous snakes, and some districts were home to bears or leopards. Help, if one needed it, was usually available at the nearest estate factory or bungalow – but that, more often than not, would be miles away.

This was just how the planters liked it. Up in their mountain fastnesses, they were largely insulated from the grubby realities of life in the populous Crown Colony of Ceylon. Since their plantations were worked by resident indentured labourers originally imported from South India and their business dealings were entirely with other Europeans, they rarely had occasion for intercourse with the ‘real’ natives of Ceylon – the Sinhalese, Tamils and other races who had inhabited the island for centuries or millennia. The ‘Indian Tamil’ labourers employed on their estates – whose freedom of movement was severely curtailed and whom the native population shunned in any case – were just as isolated. And conversely, few native Ceylonese ever had occasion to visit the hill country beyond the purlieus of Kandy and the Kelani Valley, where numerous Sinhalese and Muslim villages had existed since pre-colonial times.

Thus a strange, artificially self-sufficient society grew up among the hills of Ceylon – a world that some called ‘Little England’. It had absolutely nothing in common with the rest of the island. Its tiny towns (essentially hamlets glorified by the presence of a government administrative office or kaccheri) featured European-style houses set in European-looking gardens, stone churches in Gothic Revival style and picturesque shops and post offices that might have been transported wholesale from a village high street in the Cotswolds. In contrast to the rest of Ceylon, which was populous, hot and insanitary, Little England was cool, sparsely inhabited and spotless. The tea-plantations were neat and trim, while the factory buildings, ‘coolie lines’ and bungalows exhibited that peculiar appearance common to colonial commercial enterprises, an odd combination of domestic cosiness and quasi-military spit and polish.

The capital of Little England was Nuwara Eliya, a high-altitude resort with golf links, a scenic artificial lake and becks stocked with imported trout for the delectation of British anglers and gourmets. In the late nineteenth century the government would move there during the hot season, just as the Imperial Indian government would move to Simla. ‘Newralia’, together with a few isolated clubs among the tea-bushes, supplied the planters and their long-suffering wives with all the human intercourse they permitted themselves; apart from a few expeditions to Colombo during the Christmas and racing seasons, they tended to stay put on their plantations.

So much is common knowledge to all Ceylonese and even a few Sri Lankans, but few now recall just how isolated this plantocratic Elysium was in the days of its pomp. This was brought home to me afresh while reading, recently, a scientific paper about the spread of influenza in Ceylon during the great worldwide epidemic of the disease that followed the First World War.

In their paper The Influenza Pandemic of 1918–1919 in Sri Lanka: its Demographic Cost, Timing, and Propagation, S. Chandra and D. Sarathchandra note that the spread of influenza through Ceylon after its first appearance was not ‘wave-like’ and uniform as in other countries. Instead, the disease spread across the whole island except for the tea-growing districts of Little England. It was only after a second vector of infection arrived, apparently not through the Port of Colombo like the first but via Talaimannar, the port at which indentured labourers from India were landed in Ceylon, that the epidemic reached the hill country. 

The analysis of peak mortality also reveals a penomenon that is distinctive for Sri Lanka. That is, while the epidemic in the north and south of the island peaked in the autumn of 1918, it was not until a few months later, in the spring of 1919, that a number of districts in the central part of the island experienced their peak mortality. This point, which is noted by Langford and Storey, suggests a relative isolation of populations in the central districts of the island from the north and the south, as well as the isolation of the north and the south from each other. This is in stark contrast with the pattern observed elsewhere, where the disease moved wavelike across entire countries. 

In other words, Little England was so isolated that its inhabitants were practically living in quarantine.

By the 1960s, the period in which my short story is set, this isolation was less rigid than it had been, and perhaps half the planters on the estates were Ceylonese – usually members of the Anglophone colonial elite who modelled their manners, views and attitudes on their British predecessors and looked upon national independence as on a tragedy – but the hills of Ceylon were still Little England. Travelling into the tea districts, one left behind the chaos, poverty and deprivation of independent Ceylon; it was like going back in time. Of course, that past time, the colonial era, was one of subjugation and frustration for Ceylonese and cruel exploitation and misery for ‘Indian’ estate workers; the gentility and bucolic prettiness of the tea districts were a façade behind which a great deal of ugliness lay hidden. For all that, the charms of Little England are undeniable: thousands of present-day Sri Lankans still travel to the hill country on holiday or excursion every year, seeking to recapture some of the atmosphere of the past. More often than not, they schedule their journeys for the same season as did the British governors of yore. 

What they encounter scarcely resembles the Little England of my own boyhood, let alone that of the days before independence. The hill country is no longer a world apart. The picture-postcard towns have been modernized and uglified, the tea factories are decrepit, the tea-bushes overgrown and unkempt. But since most people’s idea of the past comprises a fantastic collage of present-day media images and a few half-forgotten nuggets of history learned in school, they are more or less satisfied. They fit what they see into the myths they believe, and are content.

Wabbling Back to the Fire

Don’t you go blaming me: Ruveka Attygalle is chiefly responsible for this great work of moral exegesis. I merely added a verse or two and did some light editing.

THE HUNGRY PROPHET

There was a young man, shrewd and wise,

Who was quick to realize

There’s much to gain from telling lies

And pulling wool o’er people’s eyes.

Thus he went to turn a profit

Making out he was a Prophet.

And this Prophet walked abroad,

Singing praises to the Lord,

Gathering up a charmless horde –

Rich and stupid, fat and bored.

Lonely, jaded, desperate,

We flocked to him and took his bait.

To us then the Saint proposed

That God was just like Santa Claus:

Keen to bless all girls and boys

With the most material joys –

Gold Rolexes, trophy brides –

Free to all who paid their tithes.

Furthermore, the Saint explained,

Being saved did not depend

On sin or virtue, love or hate,

But simply on how much you ate.

‘If through yonder Gates you’d pass,

Curb your appetite and fast.’

 ‘Holiness means skipping dinner;

‘Souls ascend as they grow thinner;

‘So, if truly saved you’d be,

‘Go Breatharian like me.’

Then we fasted and we prayed,

And to him our savings paid.

Feats of prestidigitation

Added to his reputation;

Cures miraculous he wrought,

Though of the reversible sort.

Pretty soon his fame was national;

When are people ever rational?

Thus the Prophet prospered, till

(You might call it Heaven’s will)

One fine day they caught him cheating:

Some apostate filmed him eating!

That was it: the legend crumbled,

Now the greedy fraud was rumbled.

Learning that he loved his meat,

How we wailed and gnashed our teeth!

Moans of loss and grief we uttered

Hearing he liked toast well buttered.

Some in anger left the church

And our Prophet in the lurch.

Then our lives seemed dull and empty;

How we starved amidst our plenty!

How we missed the highs of old

Which we’d paid him for with gold.

Hopeless husbands, helpless wives

Found the wow gone from their lives.

Wand’ring planets, one by one,

Back we wobbled to our Sun;

Though we knew he’d been deceiving,

It was better just believing.

Now we all cough up with zest,
Fools withal, but truly blest.

A Nasty Man in Africa

Remote People
by Evelyn Waugh

Evelyn Waugh was an unpleasant man with nasty political and religious ideas, but a brilliant writer when he chose to be. There are places in this book where he does so choose.

Waugh went to Africa in 1930 to cover the coronation of Ras Tafari, the emperor of Abyssinia, for the Times of London. His descriptions of the ceremony and his travels in the country are vivid and often hilarious, though anyone who has read Wilfred Thesiger’s account of Tafari’s coronation may wonder whether the two men had ended up at different parties by accident. In his autobiography Thesiger presents Abyssinia (now Ethiopia), as a heroically, splendidly barbarous land; Waugh agrees about the barbarity but gives it to us as a gimcrack shambles, populated by savages playing ineptly and absurdly at a game, civilization, to which they do not know the rules. He claims to find it all very funny, but his humorous sallies, which tend to rely for their effect on racism, religious prejudice and snobbery, often fail to amuse because they are so obviously based on a mistaken interpretation of what he sees about him.

Evidently stung at some point during the interminable coronation by the tsetse fly of perversity, Waugh decided afterwards to take in even more of a continent that he must, by then, surely have recognized as disagreeable to his own constitution. He thus commenced to travel by road, rail and steamer down the East African coast, visiting Aden, Kenya and Uganda before making a detour into the Belgian Congo in the hope of catching an aeroplane to fly him over Central Africa to an Atlantic seaport where he could catch a steamer back to England. The last part of this plan failed, leaving him to return to British East Africa and make his way by train down to South Africa, where (his funds now almost exhausted) he bought himself a third-class passage home.

His brief stay in Aden, a hellish place that he mischievously pretends to like, gives us the funniest passages in the book. These describe an outdoor ramble with a Levantine businessman and his muscular European clerks that turns out to be a kind of Outward Bound test of manhood, involving climbs up precipitous cliffs and a swim in a shark-infested bay. He professes to like Kenya, too, and gives us a sympathetic portrait of the white farmers and the decadent Happy Valley Set, who in spite of their decadence were very much his kind of people. Unfortunately he then ventures to expound for several pages on colonial and imperial politics, about which he doesn’t have a clue. It’s demented waffle, all of it, and completely ruins his picture of Kenya for us by making it plain that he traversed Africa quite blind to anything that he had not, in some sense, expected to see. This affects our vicarious experience as much as it did his direct one, because we don’t get to read about anything new, or even about anything old from a fresh perspective.

From this point onwards his travelogue becomes a litany of tedium and discomfort, taking a nosedive into genuine privation aboard a Belgian steamer on the Great Lakes. This part of Africa, I have found, does not lend itself to enjoyable travel writing, principally because it so unpleasant and ugly in every aspect, from the scenery to the souls of the people who inhabit it. Waugh only recovers his composure when he has left the Congo and is safely back in British territory.

There is not much to the book after this. The last few pages, about a visit to a London night-club, seem intended to prove that the civilized world can be quite as unpleasant as the interior of Africa. All they really do prove is that Evelyn Waugh could find something nasty to say in almost any circumstances.

A Birthday Prayer

It was my birthday a few days ago. We had a discreet little celebration, which began well after dark, indoors, at the Dutch Burgher Union Bar. Everyone left obediently at closing time, save for the few who had left earlier. It was delightful, and my wife and I are most grateful to all who attended.

Later, I wrote these lines.

A BIRTHDAY PRAYER

Now the day is over,

Night is coming on;

Sozzled lunchtime stragglers

Decorate the lawn.

Deaf to our entreaties,

Heedless of our threats –

It would take a hailstorm

To rid us of these pests.

How they quaffed and guzzled!

How they quacked and squawked!

Lovers rubbed and nuzzled,

Drunk raconteurs talked;

Fun was had in bagfuls,

Hospitality flowed;

Still the sots insist upon

One more for the road.

Through the dusk the bleary

Stars begin to peep;

Though I know it's early,

How I long for sleep.

Jesu, grant this weary

Birthday boy’s request:

Send away the Gadarene swine,
Let me get some rest.

Voodoo Tetrametrical

The wife lent me Stephen Fry’s The Ode Less Travelled. And now just look...

APOLLOGIA

Space cadets and woo-woo chicks

Clutter up my social media:

Prating, preaching, beating gongs,

Posting tuneless Sixties songs,

Cursing Wikipedia;

Vegan cures for drooping dicks

Flaccify my Facebook page:

Gastroextrudescent yoga,

Tantra, tattva, Kundalini,

Herbal draughts with adu seeni,

Lifestyle gurus wrapped in togas,

Logic and good taste outrage.

I palm my face, yet still do know compassion;

All minds deny mortality in their fashion.

Man of Affairs

Samuel Pepys: the Unequalled Self

by Claire Tomalin

This smells strongly of lamp-oil, as any good portrayal of life in seventeenth-century England should. Ms Tomalin has done her homework, and how; we get an awe-inspiringly detailed account of Pepys’s life and times, not just the Diary years but the whole story from birth to death. The scope and depth of the author’s research is astounding, and her portrayal of the times in which Pepys lived – the early Enlightenment, the English Civil War, the Restoration and the so-called Glorious Revolution – is vivid as well as detailed. The characters in the story are presented in all their human complexity and contradiction.

And if any human being was complex and contradictory, Samuel Pepys was. By today’s standards he was a serial sex offender, exercising his domestic droit de seigneur over the maidservants, visiting prostitutes, forcing his attentions on unwilling women (some young enough to be thought children by the conventions of our own time) and cheating incessantly on his beautiful French wife. He was – again, by today’s standards – a corrupt man, one who used his position as a trusted public servant to enrich himself, in some cases (such as the Tangier Mole affair) at the expense of his country. He charged interest on loans to members of his family and absconded from their funerals. Now and then, he beat his wife (she beat him back). Samuel Pepys was a man of his time.

Though loyal enough, he commanded more devotion than he showed, and was not slow to abandon his benefactors and sponsors when the political winds were changing, as they did with alarming frequency during his lifetime. He was born and raised a Parliamentarian and something of a Puritan, was a vengeful spectator at Charles I’s beheading, served Cromwell with dedication but grew disgusted with the period of Parliamentary misrule that followed the Protector’s death and was not slow to turn his coat, along with his sponsors Edward Montagu and George Downing, in good time for the Restoration. His loyalty swung to and fro between Parliament and Crown thereafter before finally settling with the latter – only for him to be put out of favour again when William III gained the throne.

Claire Tomalin proposes these saving graces: Pepys, she tells us, was a clear-eyed and honest reporter of his own actions and perceptive about his own character and motives as well as those of others. He was prudent, meticulous and a very hard worker, and although he did accept bribes and commissions he excelled at his job and rose from a clerkship in the Navy Department to become, in the course of ten or fifteen years, the civilian boss of the Royal Navy. In this capacity he reported directly to Charles II, and also to James II during the latter’s short, inglorious reign. He looked after his own, friends and family alike, though he expected (and usually managed to) lord it over them while doing so. He had excellent taste in domestic objects, art and food, was a passionate amateur musician, interested himself in science and was at one time president of the Royal Society. He counted Robert Hooke and Sir Isaac Newton among his friends. He was no coward, and in youth had himself operated upon successsfuly for kidney stones, which without anaesthetic and in the absence of sterile modern instruments was one of the bravest things a man or woman of his era could do. He was also, in Tomalin’s words, an expert at ‘squeezing every drop out of the day’. He lived as fully and intensely as any man ever did.

Most of all, of course, Pepys was a great writer, who invented a new literary form – or, if you prefer, elevated one to the condition of literature. There are plenty of quotes from the Diary here. Too many of them, for my taste, are about Pepy’s rather ugly sexual behaviour, which he liked to describe in excruciating detail using a special vocabulary of his own, part foreign words and part made-up ones that clearly held an erotic charge for their coiner. But there are plenty of other extracts that give us the flavour of the man and his thought and which often take our breath away by their frankness and insight. There is no question that he was both a man of, and one of the founding fathers of, the Enlightenment.

And what a reporter! His accounts of London life, the trials and executions he had seen, the plague, the Great Fire of London and so on have survived to this day because they are masterpieces of descriptive journalism – though written, originally, for no eyes but his own. It is largely because of Pepys’s diary that we know so much about London life in those long-ago times.

Although I found Samuel Pepys: The Unequalled Self slow going, I appreciated the level of detail and Ms Tomalin’s own incisive commentary. There are times when she takes speculative risks, as for example when she attributes a painting in Pepys’s library to his mistress, although the evidence is only circumstantial. However, what she has done in terms of writing and research in order to produce this book is extraordinary. I, who have spent the last six years working on a project of similar depth and scope, can only marvel at her scholarship and dedication, and at a work-ethic that clearly rivals her subject’s. It took me forever to read this book, but only in the chapters concerning Pepys’s personal life and relationships during his final years did my interest really flag. As a history of his times (and they were interesting, indeed frightening ones to live in) as well as a biography of a great though largely unsung icon of literature and culture, I heartily recommend it.

Looking Forward to the Past

The Future of History
by John Lukacs

A maverick but respected historian, John Lukacs had a lot to say about his own profession, and in the sunset of his life he gathered together his thoughts on the subject in this small but far from easy book. His theme is the role of history and the historian at the end of a historical era, the Modern Age.

Lukacs believed that modern Western civilization was something qualitatively different from its presumed forebears, the Classical Age of Greece and Rome and the so-called Middle Ages. In his conception, it lasted from roughly the late Renaissance to the end of the ‘short’ twentieth century, which his colleague Eric Hobsbawm defined as having ended in 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Lukacs foresaw a period of cultural retrogression commencing in the twenty-first century – but not necessarily a reversion to ‘barbarism’ as popularly defined, because he thought technology would sustain the lineaments of civilization even as human culture declined and fell. So far, events appear to be proving him right.

This is a book of concentrated wisdom, gnomic and highly quotable. It is often eye-opening, as when, for example, Lukacs writes that

Flaubert’s Sentimental Education is more historical than its near-contemporary War and Peace... Flaubert’s portrait of 1848 is, historically speaking, more complex and more meaningful than Tolstoy’s of 1812, because Flaubert describes how people thought and felt at that time; his novel abounds with descriptions of changing sensitivities, of mutations of opinions and transformations of attitudes.

As the above suggests, The Future of History is much concerned with the relationship of history to literature. Lukacs insists that historians should be readers first, writers second and historians, in a professional sense, only third. He quotes with approval Jacob Burckhardt’s advice to students of history, bisogna saper leggere – ‘you must learn how to read’. This championship of non-professional historical scholarship and authorship runs right through the book, from his praise for de Toqueville to his contempt for the liberal historians who failed to discern or describe the rise of American conservatism in the late twentieth century. Since I am a writer of historical articles and books but no historian, it gives me great pleasure to read that ‘in the twenty-first century the best, the greatest writers of history may not be certified professionals but erudite and imaginative “amateurs”.’

This is in keeping with Lukacs’s view that history is a literary genre and a creative endeavour rather than a strictly empirical pursuit. Yet he is insistent that a historian’s task is above all to search for truth, and he champions diligent research, using original sources as much as possible. He is refreshingly sceptical that such a thing as ‘scientific’ history can exist and contemptuous of what he calls ‘historical fads’ such as social, psychological or feminist history, which he regards as inevitably prejudiced and bound, therefore, to produce false results.

The Future of History is a book best taken in small doses, one or two pages at a time. Read it with a pencil in hand, and mark the bits you find quotable or interesting, because you are sure to want to return to them later: even, perhaps especially, if you disagree with them.