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Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin (1929)
Who is it standing in Berlin Alexanderplatz, very slowly moving from leg to leg? It's Franz Biberkopf. What has he done? Well, you know all that. A pimp, a hardened criminal, a poor fool, he's been beaten, and he's in for it now. That cursed fist that beat him. That terrible fist that gripped him. The other fists that hammered at him, but he escaped.
A blow fell and the red wound gaped.
But it healed one day.
Franz didn't change and went on his way.
Now the fist keeps up the fight,
it is terrible in its might,
it ravages him body and soul,
Franz advances with timid steps, he has learned his role:
my life no longer belongs to me, I don't know what to set about.
Franz Biberkopf is down and out.
(Berlin Alexanderplatz, Penguin paperback edition, page 418)
Bruno Alfred Döblin (1878 to 1957) was a German novelist, essayist, and doctor, best known for his novel Berlin Alexanderplatz (1929). A prolific writer whose œuvre spans more than half a century and a wide variety of literary movements and styles, Döblin is one of the most important figures of German literary modernism. His complete works comprise over a dozen novels ranging in genre from historical novels to science fiction to novels about the modern metropolis, several dramas, radio plays, and screenplays, a true crime story, a travel account, two book-length philosophical treatises, scores of essays on politics, religion, art, and society, and numerous letters. (Wikipedia)
Berlin Alexanderplatz's 'modernist' aspects
Berlin Alexanderplatz is not only considered Döblin's masterpiece but a central achievement of German Modernism. It is often compared to James Joyce's Ulysses because it, also, is:
– long (478 densely printed pages in the Penguin paperback edition I own)
– urban (not just set in Berlin, but rejoicing in the hectic urban bustle of trams and railway stations, and pubs and bars and music halls and tenements, in 1928 Berlin had a population of four million, p.198)
– concerns ordinary people (The 'hero' of Ulysses is Leopold Bloom, a hard-up seller of newspaper advertising space, and Joyce's novel takes place in just one day, following him as he traipses round Dublin, hustling for work, popping into bars or the public library, attending a funeral and going shopping; the hero of Alexanderplatz, Franz Biberkopf, is distinctly lower down on the social scale from Bloom; he is an uneducated huckster, fresh out of prison, and the novel is set not on one day but much more conventionally, over quite a few months. But, just as in Joyce, we follow the hero around the noisy bustling streets of a 'modern' city, seeing adverts and shop windows, overhearing popular tunes and drinking songs)
The most obvious similarity is the shared use of modernist techniques like montage, multi-textuality and stream of consciousness.
Multi-textuality or Tatsachenphantasie
The narrative often switches, casually and with no warning, from third-person storytelling to direct quotation of texts such as newspaper adverts, magazine articles, anatomical textbooks, tram timetables, legal documents, an official breakdown of causes of mortality in Berlin 1928 and so on.
This approach was so novel at the time that it was given a name, Tatsachenphantasie. To quote the Wikipedia article about Döblin's technique:
His writing is characterized by an innovative use of montage and perspectival play, as well as what he dubbed in 1913 a 'fantasy of fact' (Tatsachenphantasie) – an interdisciplinary poetics that draws on modern discourses ranging from the psychiatric to the anthropological to the theological, in order to 'register and articulate sensory experience and to open up his prose to new areas of knowledge'.
This it certainly does, and I found many of the interpolated documents more interesting – certainly more comprehensible – than the main plot.
At a slightly higher 'level', the narrative is 'bitty': it often cuts and jumps to completely different scenes or points of view, sometimes in the one paragraph – directly copying the cutting between shots, between shot sizes and different angles which is the basic technique of movies.
An obvious example of this multitextuality is the way the text is broken up by headings which are in the style of newspaper headlines, such as 'LINA STICKS IT TO THE NANCY BOYS' or 'VICTORY ALL ALONG THE LINE! FRANZ BIBERKOPF BUYS A VEAL CUTLET'.
This is easy to understand and can be fun and is not really as modern as it first appears; after all, most novels up to the late 19th century included chapter headings which rambled on at length about their contents. Think of Charles Dickens; as a random example, chapter 14 of The Pickwick Papers is described as 'Comprising a brief Description of the Company at the Peacock assembled; and a Tale told by a Bagman', and all the other chapters in this and all his other early novels are given similarly extensive introductory descriptions.
So using newspaper headlines to summarise key events in the narrative can be thought of, and easily assimilated, as an early 20th century variation on a time-honoured tactic.
Almost continually the narrative of events is interspersed with Franz's memories of prison, fragments of songs, or short phrases running through his head.
In fact, as the novel progresses, this applies to almost all the other characters as well. We are introduced to them by a third-person narrator, then suddenly gets sentences starting with an 'I' and realise we have dropped inside their heads to see things from their point of view. The next sentence might be a quote from a song (we know this because it rhymes). The next sentence is the strapline for an advert 'I'd walk a mile for Mampe's brandy, It makes you feel like Jack-a-dandy' (p.33). The next sentence mashes together 'thoughts' the characters had in an earlier scene – the whole thing recombined to depict the way thoughts purl and slide around inside our minds.
So there can be passages, paragraphs, made up of elements like the above, the interesting thing is how quickly you get used to it, and to read it. Occasionally a lot of quick cuts are confusing, but not often. So far, so similar with Joyce, then.
Joyce versus Döblin
But I'd say Berlin Alexanderplatz differs from Ulysses in one big respect: in the basic attitude to prose.
Joyce was not just a great writer, he was a writer of genius with a Shakespearian ability to command the English (and other languages) to perform almost any trick he wanted. All his works go beyond brilliant experiments in style and diction, beyond amazingly accurate parodies and pastiches, to actively dismantle the English language altogether.
Take the opening pages of Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, which use baby talk to try to capture the infant thought processes of a baby which can barely speak; or almost any passage once you get into the main body of Ulysses.
What most characterises Ulysses is less the 'mechanical' and obvious aspects of modernism listed above (collage, stream of consciousness) but Joyce's crafting of different prose styles to reflect each of the chapters and episodes in his story, each successive chapter becoming harder to read as it accumulates verbal references to previous events, given in evermore fragmentary form, and as the English language itself starts to break down as words merge and recombine, leading up to the delirious scene in the brothel where not only the characters, but the English language itself gets totally trolleyed and explodes.
As Ulysses progresses, it becomes more involved in a huge range of verbal special effects designed to convey the mood of, say, a Dublin pub full of heavy drinkers, the section in a library in which Joyce performs a tour de force describing the scene in language which mimics the evolution of the English language from its roots in Anglo-Saxon right through each century's changing styles up to the present day.
At the novel's climax, language breaks down completely as it mimics a host of drunken minds caught up in a drunken riot in a brothel. Then Ulysses concludes with the famous final chapter which consists of one vast flowing stream-of-consciousness rendition of the thoughts of a dozing woman (Molly Bloom, Leopold's wife).
There is nothing at all like this level of verbal ambition in Berlin Alexanderplatz. On the contrary, long stretches of the prose – at least in the 1931 translation by Eugene Jolas which I read – is surprisingly flat, colourless and factual.
Thus Franz Biberkopf, the concrete-worker, and later furniture-mover, that rough, uncouth man of repulsive aspect, returned to Berlin and to the street, the man at whose head a pretty girl from a locksmith's family had thrown herself, a girl whom he had made into a whore, and at last mortally injured in a scuffle. He has sworn to all the world and to himself to remain respectable. And as long as he had money, he remained respectable. Later, however, his money gave out: and that was the moment he had been waiting for, to show everybody, once and for all, what a real man is like. (p.42, last words of Book One)
See what I mean? The prose, in and of itself, often holds little or no interest. It is routinely as flat and grey as old concrete.
One effect of this prose flatness is to make the multi-textuality, the montage and the modest fragments of stream-of-consciousness much easier to recognise and to assimilate whenever they appear. The transitions may be abrupt, but the prose of each fragment is always complete and definite.
That crook Lüders, the woman's letter, I'll land you a knife in the guts. OLORDOLORD, say, leave that alone, we'll take care of ourselves, you rotters, we won't do anybody in, we've already done time in Tegel. Let's see: bespoke tailoring, gents' furnishings, that first, then in the second place, mounting rims on carriage wheels, automobile accessories, important, too, for quick riding, but not too fast. (p.135)
A little tricky, but from the context the reader knows that this a description of Franz walking through the streets of Berlin, his eyes registering advertising hoardings and shop frontages (bespoke tailoring, automobile accessories), angrily thinking how the crook Lüders betrayed him (which he knows from the letter she sent him) and in Franz's violent fantasy he imagines stabbing him in the guts, but then contradicts this thought using 'we' to refer to himself, trying to quell his appetite for violent revenge by telling himself that 'we' (i.e. he, Franz) are not about to 'do anybody in', because 'we' have already 'done time' in Tegel, the name of the prison where he was locked up.
And – another crucial difference with Joyce – even if some passages like this take a bit of effort (though not much) the prose, sooner or later, returns to normal. We return to fairly flat, factual prose and know where we are again.
So Alexanderplatz is a bit confusing, yes, but not impenetrable as a lot of Ulysses quickly becomes (without repeated study). Compared to Joyce's extraordinary and extended experiments with English prose, reading Berlin Alexanderplatz doesn't present any real verbal challenge.
By far the hardest thing about reading this book, I found, was nothing to do with its (fairly tame) modernist techniques: it was trying to figure out why the devil the characters behave as they do. At almost every key crux in the plot I didn't understand what the characters were doing or why (see plot summary, below). The net effects of reading the book were:
enjoyable modernist experimentalism (I liked the insertion of newspaper headlines, official documents etc into the text)
repulsion at the casual lowlife brutalism of almost all the male characters (see below)
complete inability to understand why the characters behaved as they did (for example, the complex sex/love lives of Franz and Mieze and Eva, described from Book Seven onwards)
Nine books
Berlin Alexanderplatz is divided into nine 'books'. Each book is prefaced by a couple of paragraphs describing in general terms what will happen in it, another trait reminiscent of English 18th century novels. Indeed, the entire text is preceded by a one-page summary anticipating the shape of the action, a little as a Greek tragedy is introduced by a chorus telling us what is going to happen.
The obvious difference is that these half-page introductions have more the quality of a fable or children's tale, not least because they generally include deliberately trite jingles or doggerel.
Biberkopf has vowed to become respectable and you have seen how he stayed straight for many a week
but it was only a respite, so to speak.
In the end life finds this going too far,
and trips him up with a wily jar.
To him, Franz Biberkopf, however, this doesn't seem a very sporting trick,
and, for a considerable time, he finds this sordid, draggle-tailed existence, which contradicts his every good intention, a bit too thick.
(Intro to Book Three, p.105)
This fondness for cheap songs, doggerel poetry, advertising jingles, and sometimes just random rhymes, becomes more noticeable as the book progresses and is every bit as prominent as the more obvious NEWSPAPER HEADLINES, insertion of official documents and so on.
In Switzerland, on Tyrol's height,
One feels so well by day and night,
In Tyrol the milk comes warm from the cow,
In Switzerland there's the tall Jungfrau. (p.358)
The children's fairy tale feel is emphasised by the way that, in the one-page preface to the whole text, we are told Franz will suffer three blows, three after all being the canonical number in fairy tales (little pigs, Goldilocks bears, billy goats gruff etc).
Three times this thing crashes against our man, disturbing his scheme of life. It rushes at him with cheating and fraud. The man is able to get up again, he is firm on his feet. It drives and beats him with foul play. He finds it a bit hard to get up, they almost count him out. Finally it torpedoes him with huge and monstrous savagery. (p.7)
Greek and Bible imagery
Joyce's Ulysses is (although it's hard to make this out on a first reading) loosely structured on Homer's ancient Greek epic poem, The Odyssey, with Leopold Bloom wandering round Dublin rather as Odysseus wanders round the Mediterranean, loosely sought by young Stephen Daedelus, in roughly the way that Odysseus's son, Telemachus, searches for his father in Homer's poem – until, at the climax of the book, they are reunited.
Again, Berlin Alexanderplatz doesn't have anything like the same ambition or scope as the Joyce. Instead it contents itself with occasional references to ancient Greek legends or Bible stories, which pop up as ironic references, sometimes taking up a couple of pages of extended description, and thereafter popping up again as anything from paragraphs interrupting the main narrative, sometimes just one-phrase reminders.
So, for example, the sense that Franz's story is like a Greek tragedy is made explicit in the numerous references throughout the book to the plot of the ancient Greek Oresteia in which, while King Agamemnon is away at the Trojan War, his wife Queen Clytemnestra has an affair and, upon his return, murders Agamemon in his bath. Whereupon their son Orestes returns and murders his mother and her lover. Whereupon Orestes is pursued everywhere by the Furies who torment murderers. On a number of occasions Franz's self-torment over his killing of his girlfriend Ida is compared to Orestes and the Furies. It is not, in other words, a very difficult allusion.
Towards the end of the book, as Franz' tribulations build up, there are some extended (two- or three-page-long passages) which quote the Book of Job from the Bible, explicitly comparing Franz to Job (pp.146-149, 399). Again, fairly obvious.
There's an extended comparison with Abraham teetering on the brink of sacrificing his son, Isaac (pages 298 to 299). And as we see more of the murderous underworld Franz has got involved in, the text interpolates quite a few references to the Whore of Babylon, quoting descriptions of her from the Bible's Book of Revelation (pages 266, 306, 400, 446)
The woman is arrayed in purple and scarlet colour and decked with gold and precious stones and pearls, having a golden cup in her hand. She laughs. And upon her forehead is a name written, MYSTERY, BABYLON THE GREAT, THE MOTHER OF HARLOTS AND ABOMINATIONS OF THE EARTH (p.266)
These high literary references sort of enrich the text though, to be honest, I found them a bit boring, less interesting than the newspaper reports Döblin interjects about scandalous murder trials being reported in the newspapers or quotes from communist or Nazi articles or even the extended description of the Berlin slaughterhouses in chapter four (pages 138 to 145). The Oresteia, Job, I know all about; the inside of a Berlin abattoir circa 1928 is a sweaty bloody revelation.
Collapsing house imagery
Also – sewn in among all the other impressions of the city or of Franz's scattered consciousness – Franz has a recurrent vision of Berlin's houses collapsing, their roofs sliding off, cascades of tiles sliding off rooftops and crashing down on him.
Repetition makes this recurring metaphor for Franz's panic attacks acquire a real charge and ominousness.
Collapsing house imagery pages 13, 120, 240, 265, 314, 471.
Book one (pages 11 to 42)
It is 1927 (p.97).
Franz Biberkopf (the surname translates literally as 'beaver head') is released from Tegel prison on the outskirts of Berlin. He is 5 feet 10-and-a-half inches tall (p.176).
He has served four years for the manslaughter of his girlfriend, Ida ('I knocked that tart's ribs to pieces, that's why I had to go in jug', p.34. A detailed anatomical description of their fight, which quotes Newton's Laws of Thermodynamics, is given on page 98).
Franz had been a cement worker, then a furniture remover, among numerous odd jobs (p.96). He catches a tram into town and wanders, dazed at being a free man, through the hectic streets, terrified of the hustle and bustle.
Terror struck at him as he walked down Rosenthaler Strasse and saw a man and a woman sitting in a little beer shop right at the window: they poured beer down their gullets out of mugs, yes, what about it? They were drinking: they had forks and stuck pieces of meat into their mouths, theyn they pulled the forks out again and they were not bleeding. (p.12)
Crude, isn't it. In fact it's almost as crude as language and psychology can get without sinking below the level of human articulation altogether.
Franz retreats into the courtyards of tenements in Dragonerstrasse (p.35), where he is taken in by a couple of Jewish men who (bizarrely) argue fiercely among themselves while they tell him the life story of young Stefan Zannovich the con man who ended up committing suicide in prison, and whose body was taken away by the knacker. It is a strange, offputting start to the book. First time I read it, I gave up at this point.
Having sobered up, as it were, Franz sets off into the streets again, dazed by freedom and the hustle and bustle of the Berlin crowds. A population of four million.
He decides – in the blunt crude German way we got used to in Hermann Broch's novels – that he needs 'a woman' to calm down, but when he picks up and goes home with two successive prostitutes, can't get an erection with either of them. Cue some multi-textuality when a textbook account of impotence is inserted into the text and, a little later, an advert for an aphrodisiac.
Day three and Fritz finds himself knocking at the door of the sister of the girlfriend he murdered, Minna, who reluctantly lets him in, then he rapes her, rather as August Esch rapes Mother Hentjen in Hermann Broch's The Anarchist and then Wilhelm Huguenau rapes Mother Hentjen in The Realist.
German rapists, eh, well worth writing novels about. Well, all their wives and girlfriends would be raped to death 16 years later by the invading Russians, so it was good practice.
Finally Fritz feels content, released, free, like a real man again (p.37).
He leaves but comes back in the following days to bring her presents, but Minna rebuffs him every time. She is married and her husband Karl asks her how she got the black eye and bitemarks on her neck, which are the signs of Franz's assault. Still, they talk quite affably. He comes round with some aprons to replace the ones he tore to shred in the initial rape. She listens, chooses an apron, but is terrified of the neighbours seeing, and keeps crying. The big hearty brute Fritz is quite oblivious to all this.
Book two (pages 45 to 103)
Opens with the characteristic quoting of official texts which read like small announcements from a newspaper, then a detailed technical description of the weather forecast ('Weather changing, more agreeable, a degree or two below freezing-point' [which, incidentally, echoes the opening of Robert Musil's The Man Without Qualities]) and then a list of the main stops of tram number 68, from which Fritz alights amid a blizzard of ad straplines ('Eat more fish, the healthy slimming dish!')
It strikes me this is collage: 'A collage is a composition of materials and objects pasted over a surface.' The quoted texts may or may not be related, but in a way their unrelatedness demonstrates quite well the classic modernist impulse to embody or describe the chaotic, overwhelming sensory and mental stimulation of the 'modern' city.
And so the main action, if you can call it that, is surrounded by side actions, snippets and vignettes of life in the big city. A couple of old geezers chatting in a billiard hall about one of them losing his job. A young woman gets off a tram, is met by her older lover, who takes her to the flat of a friend, while she worries all the way about what mummy and daddy would say if they found out.
It is a few weeks later and Franz has found somewhere to live, has raised some money from savings and selling off furniture, and so is smartly dressed and going round with a plump new Polish girlfriend, Lina, Lina Przyballa of Czernowitz, the only legitimate daughter of the farmer Stanlislaus Przyballa (p.74), according to Lüders, a 'little fat thing' (p.118).
They come across a newspaper seller located in a doorway and – this is very obscurely described – he appears to also sell illicit gay magazines and persuades Franz to take some. Franz presents them to Lina in a café but she is disgusted and insists they go back to the shabby old seller and Franz watches from across the road as she yells at the seller then throws the magazines on the floor.
It is typical of the book's technique that this 'story' is interrupted by an imaginary vignette of a respectably married old chap (a 'greypate') who one day picks up a pretty boy in the park and calls him his sunshine and takes him to a hotel room. It's not even suggested that they have sex, but the hotel room has peepholes and the owner and his wife spy on the pair and then report them to the police. He is hauled up in court but persuades the judge nothing happened; but a letter detailing his court appearance and aquittal is posted to his home where, away on business, his wife opens it and the poor man returns home to weeping and lamentation from his wife (pp.72-3)
Meanwhile, Franz rejoices over his girlfriend's victory over the magazine seller by forking her on the sofa, then they stroll along to the Neue Welt pub in the Hasenheide Park – musicians in Tyrolese costume, beer drinking songs – 'Shun all trouble and shun all pain, Then life's a happy refrain' (p.76) a Charlie Chaplin impersonator on stage, you can buy tickling sticks. Döblin, like a camera, roams among the crowd, alighting briefly on the second fitter of an engineering firm in Neuköln, two couples necking, soldiers with their floozies, there's weight-lifting competitions and see-your-future-wife stalls. Franz gets plastered and ends up at the bar with a fellow drunk complaining about having fought the French, being a patriotic German, but no job, down on his luck, he's going to join the Reds.
It's a deliberately whirligig chaotic depiction of a set of connected, loud, smoky, drunken music halls, yet it's worth noting that the prose never ceases to be correct. It's just broken up into short sentences, with frequent quotes from the cheap songs. But the sentences themselves don't collapse, neither do the word themselves break up and intermingle, as they do in Joyce.
Franz now peddles Nordic Nationalist papers. He's not against the Jews but he's for law and order. The narrative immediately includes block quotes from said Nationalist papers, well conveying the wheedling tone of aggrieved Fascist propaganda. Franz is down the pub with mates, some of whom reminisce about their service in the war, then the trouble afterwards i.e. the communist uprisings in Berlin and elsewhere. Then the inflation and the hunger.
Franz's drinking buddies (Georgie Dreske and Richard Werner, the unemployed locksmith, p.80) down at Henschke's bar take exception to the Fascist armband Franz has taken to wearing. They argue about their war records.
Next night, when Fritz goes there, there are a few strangers with his mates, they all look at him surlily, the sing the Internationale. Franz recites a poem written by a fellow inmate, Drohms, then overcome with sentiment goes on to sing The Watch On The Rhine. This doesn't stop one of the new boys starting a fight, a table is overturned, a plate and glass smashed, but then they back off and Franz walks out to bump into Lina who'd come to meet him there. She shows him a Peace newspaper with a sweet poem about love. She snuggles up to him and quietly suggests it's time they got engaged.
Franz is prone to bad dreams, pangs of conscience. It is partly to quell this psychological eruptions that he longs for Order and Discipline which means escape from his personal demons. This leads to an extended passage about the fate of Agamemnon home from the Trojan War who is murdered by his wife Clyemnestra, who is then murdered by her son Orestes, who is pursued by the Furies – as Franz is by his bad dreams. The section includes a clinical description of how Franz murdered his wife – in fact, in the heat of a row, he hit her twice in the guts with a whisk, but the blows were enough to break a few ribs, rupture a lung, prompt several infections from which she died miserably in hospital five weeks later. And a characteristically ironic modernist juxtaposition of the hilltop flares which signalled the arrival of Agamemon home, with a technical description of the activity of modern radio waves.
Book three (pages 107 to 121)
In this fairly short book, Franz is embroiled with Otto Lüders, a more than usually disreputable prole who's been out of work for a couple of years (a factual interlude in the previous book detailed the rise in unemployment at the end of 1927). Franz is now selling bootlaces on the street or hawking them door to door. He arrives in the pub for a drink with Otto and swankily tells him he's made 10 marks (apparently a tidy sum) out of a woman, a skinny widow women who invited him in for a cup of coffee and he left his whole stock there. I wasn't sure, but I think the implication is that Franz gave her one, as the saying goes. He also seems to have left his entire stock there, though whether as a gift or an oversight I couldn't work out.
Anyway, next day Lüders sneaks along to the building, finds the same widow woman, forces his way in under pretence of being a door to door salesman, extorts a coffee out of her and terrifies her so much, he is able to nick a whole load of stuff, her table cover, sofa cushions etc, and legs it.
With the result that, next day when Franz goes round to see her with a bouquet of flowers, the widow woman slams her door in his face. Franz tries a few times more then leaves her a note telling her to bring his stuff to a pub. But she doesn't. Otto enters said pub, spots Franz looking hacked off, turns and legs it. Franz puts two and two together.
Interlude of a war veteran whose four-year-old son has just died because the doctor was too busy to come and see him. He's loitering outside their apartment house then goes to see the doctor to give him a piece of his mind, then goes upstairs to where his wife is weeping.
Franz is so distraught at Otto's betrayal that he ups and leaves. Pays off his landlady, packs his things and leaves his flat. Doesn't even tell Lina. Lina asks their friend ('little') Gottlieb Meck to find him. Meck goes for a beer with Lüders and then, in one of those scenes I find so disconcerting about this German fiction, walking down a dark street pounces on him, knocks him to the floor, beats the crap out of him and threatens him with a knife, telling him to locate Franz.
Next day Lüders reports back. He's found Franz in a boarding house just three numbers down from his former place. Like Meck, Lüders keeps his hands on an open knife in his pocket as he goes into Franz's room, finds him on the bed with his boots on, depressed. Frane yells at him to get out, then throws the bowl of washing water at him, Lüders insists he's not right in the head.
Book four (pages 125 to 167)
It is February 1928 (p.151)
Lengthy description of all the inhabitants of the tenement in Linienstrasse which Franz has moved to, with intertextuality e.g. the description of lawyer Herr Löwenhund is interrupted by direct quotes from legal documents he's dealing with or letters he's written. Tatsachenphantasie.
Franz is lying around in the squalid room he's renting, drinking all day. I still can't figure out why Lüders going behind his back to threaten the skinny widow woman has affected him like this.
A lengthy description of the abattoir and slaughterhouse district of North Berlin, giving facts and figures as in a government report, then moving on to a precise and stomach-churning description of precisely how they slaughtered pigs and cattle.
With a weird interlude about the story of Job from the Bible.
Which then goes on to an extended yarn about the caretaker of a warehouse, a Herr Gerner, who is persuaded to fall in with a bunch of burglars who want to break into it, to the extent that after the break-in he allows them to stash all the stolen goods in his house. In some obscure way which is hedged around, I think he allows his wife to sleep with the youngest, tallest and handsomest of the thieves. I think. I couldn't make it out. Anyway, the next morning the police call round and arrest him. Franz saw some of this happening i.e. an initial attempt of the burglars to climb over the wall and pinch some stuff, but he refuses to squeal to the cops.
It is freezing cold February morning and on a whim, Franz decides to go and visit Minna who he hasn't seen for a while. But the door is opened by Minna's husband, Karl, who sends him packing with a flea in his ear.
Book five (pages 171 to 223)
A very enjoyable panoramic overview of Alexanderplatz with its roadworks, shops, trams and hustling crowds. It is the evening of 9 February 1928, and little Meck bumps into Franz selling newspapers again. They go to a bar and have inconsequential chat with other working class men. All the antagonism Franz prompted by selling nationalist papers and wearing a swastika armband seems to have disappeared.
Franz gets into a some kind of 'scheme' with a slim stuttering man who wears a shabby army greatcoat named Reinhold ('that quite insignificant figure, a mouse-grey lad in mouse-grey', p.203). This Reinhold is a serial womaniser and takes a new girlfriend each month and shifts his previous one onto Franz. I really didn't understand what anybody has to gain from this or why they'd do it, but a certain Fränzl comes to be Franz's grilfriend for a month or so, and then she's replaced by silly Cilly, and I think Franz then passes them onto little Ede the hunchback. I think that's what happens.
As I mentioned above, I find the passages where the character's walking through the streets, and the text cuts from his thoughts to advertising straplines, song jingles, a Berlin tram timetable, a leader from that day's newspaper – the familiar technique and content of 'modernist' literature – easy to understand and enjoyable to read. In fact the passages where Döblin just inserts highlights and stories from the day's newspaper are interesting social history.
But I find many passages of the apparent plot inexplicable: how exactly did the thieves persuade the nightwatchman Gerner to join them and what went on between the handsome one and Gerner's wife? Why did Lüders going round to see the skinny widow woman upset Franz so much that he dumped Lina and moved apartment? What had Lina done wrong?
The modernism stuff is easy-peasy to process and, as the book progressed, I enjoyed the cumulative collage of Berlin life circa 1928 which it built up. Whereas the bones of the plot – what the characters were doing and why – I frequently found incomprehensible.
Franz gets fed up of getting Reinhold's hand-me-downs every month. Cilly puts up a fight and Franz decides to stick with her and tells Reinhold, who storms off in a huff. Characteristically, that night Reinhold dreams of murdering his current squeeze, Trude.
Disaster strikes
It is the second week of April 1928. Easter. Franz pops out from his 4th floor apartment, leaving Cilly. It's snowing. He bumps into an asthmatic man who tells him about a scam he carries out, which is to offer to buy old junk off people, he turns up, removes the junk, then slips a mimeographed card through their doors saying that 'due to unforeseen circumstances' he can't pay, and legs it, Franz thinks he's a bit bonkers.
They come across a brawl, a crowd has gathered round it. Franz pushes to the front and is enjoying the fight when he realises one of the fighters is Emil, a mate of Reinhold's he's seen around. Just then the cops arrive to break up the fight and Franz charitably helps Emil away to shelter in a doorway.
Here Emil tells Franz he's going to stagger home – he got fairly beaten in the fight – but asks Franz to do him a favour: can he pop round and tell a man named Pums (who we've met knocking about the bars) that he, Emil, won't be able to help with a spot of removal they're planning to do. Franz pleads that he ought to go home & see Cilly, but Emil persuades him to go and see Pums, the house is just nearby. So he does. And Pums offers Franz money to help out with the removal, say five marks an hour for a few hours.
Franz is still reluctant and wants to go tell Cilly where he is, but Pums says there's no time, they'll be leaving soon, they give Franz a pen and paper and he scribbles a note to Cilly saying he's unexpectedly on a little job. Pums's girlfriend takes it – takes it next door and burns it in the fire…
To cut a long grim story short, Franz is piled into one of two cars with Pums and a few other guys including Reinhold, who we discover is one of 'Pums's men'. They drive for a long time to the outskirts of Berlin. And here he suddenly finds himself tasked with acting as lookout while the men comprehensively loot a warehouse, filling the cars with booty. Franz is basically an honest man and gets cold feet, makes to protest but Reinhold hits him very hard on the arm, while the men shuttle past him in the dark, their arms full of loot. Franz makes a second bid to leave, but they've finished anyway and drag him into the car, as both accelerate off.
But they see that someone's spotted them and another car is in pursuit. Then something strange happens in the second of the two escaping crim cars. When Franz hears that another car is in pursuit, Franz stupidly grins. He was very anxious about being the lookout and resented being hit and threatened by the others and now, like an idiot, grins. Reinhold, squashed in next to him, asks him why he's grinning, the damn idiot and then Reinhold's resentment at Franz bubbles up. I found this – as I found all the motivation and psychology in the book – hard to understand, but it seems that although Reinhold persuaded Franz to join his scheme of taking his cast-off women, now – obscurely – in the stress of this tense moment – he resents it, comes to think Franz exploited him somehow, knows dangerous things about him. Franz's idiotic grinning in the flickering light of the streetlamps which whizz by triggers a sudden surge of hatred in Reinhold and…
Reinhold signals to one of the other guys to fling the car door open… someone punches Franz in the face… Reinhold pushes Franz away from him and over the pile of stolen goods… Franz slips out the car but clinging onto the running board but the others hit him on the arm and thigh and then a crashing blow on the head.
Franz falls into the road and the car following close behind runs over him.
Book six (pages 227 to 315)
Is Franz dead? The narrative cuts to Reinhold the next day, drunk as a skunk before noon, his girlfriend, Trude, who he's tired off, whines a little, so he beats her face to a pulp, smashing up her mouth and ruining her looks for ever, she runs away taking her stuff. Still drunk, Reinhold swanks around, remembering the job they did last night and feeling mighty proud of himself.
Poor Cilly waiting in his apartment for him to return, then going out into the snowy streets to find him. She bumps into Reinhold dressed up to the nines and very confident. She had brought a kitchen knife with her to tab him with (!). He doesn't know this, but blames everything on Franz, says Franz has run off with Reinhold's last girl, Trude, and promises Cilly they'll get back together soon, and somehow casts his magic over her so she goes off mooning over him.
Now we learn that some other motorists find Franz in the road, load him into their car. Half conscious he asks to be driven to a bar in Elsasser Strasse and request an old friend of his, Herbert Wischow. Herbert is found and he and his girlfriend Eva taken Franz to their flat and change and dress him. Only then do they drive him to a private hospital in Magdeberg.
Why? I don't know. This, as so much of the actual plot, seems incomprehensible to me. Why didn't Franz just ask to be rushed to the nearest hospital?
In the hospital at Magdeburg the doctors amputate his right arm (!) and fix other broken bones. Then Wischow and Eva take Franz home to recuperate with them. Old friends from before Tegel drop by. Wischow is upset because Franz didn't come to see them when he got out of prison and, now, that he's gotten involved with a crook like Pums. Slowly it comes out that Franz didn't want to go on the job, didn't know what they were up to, is a victim in every way. Wischow asks questions about Pums and the gang and spreads the word about how they ill-treated Franz. The mood of the underworld turns against Pums's mob. Some of them suggest having a whip round to give Franz compensation, and they raise several hundred marks but when Schreiber goes round to deliver it and puts his hand in his pocket, Eva has a hysterical fit thinking he's going to pull a gun and shoot Franz, Franz staggers back, chairs fall over, panic, Schreiber runs off down the stairs, later claiming he gave the money to Eva, and which he keeps for himself.
It's June 1928 (p.246). Franz determines 1. not to squeal 2. to live independently. He goes to the Charity Commission, he gets a job calling out circus attractions. He bumps into his buddy Meck and, realising the Pums gang have told him one story, tells him a far more heroic version where he, Franz, fired a gun at detectives stumbling over the burglary and the tecs shot back injuring his arm. The aim is to let the Pums gang know he's not peaching.
Franz determines to resume normal life, to get a job. He picks up a pretty little thing named Emmi who's been stood up in a bar. Franz is entertaining, they go to a crowded bar. A man with no legs pushes himself along in a kind of trolley. The younger men say anyone who fought and was injured in the war is a fool. When they ask Franz's other arm is he says his girlfriend is very possessive, so he left it at home with her as a pledge that he'd come home. Laughter.
Franz buys a smart suit, wears a stolen Cross of Iron, looks like a respectable butcher, uses a set of false papers belonging to one Franz Räcker, which have done the rounds of the criminal world. Herbert & Eva have been away at a spa. She is the part-time fancy woman of a rich banker. He takes her to the spa, dresses her, dines her and ****s her. One evening, just after he's withdrawn 10,000 marks from the bank, they go down for dinner and it is burgled. The implication is it was stolen by Herbert, her lover, who's followed the couple out there and is tipped off about the money.
Back they come to Berlin, Eva having to live in the fancy apartment the banker puts her up in, hoping he soon tires of her. She can get away fairly often, and she and Herbert introduce Fritz to a pretty young girl they've picked up tarting at the Stettin station. Franz is bowled over by this pretty little thing, fresh as a schoolgirl – initially she's called Sonia, but Franz prefers to call her Mieze (her real name is in fact Emilie Parsunke, p.269).
Franz becomes a pimp
There's a hiccup in their relationship when Franz discovers she's getting letters from admirers. Upset, he goes round to Herbert and Eva's, Eva pushes Herbert out the door and then falls on Franz, ravishing him. She has been in lust with him for ages and seeing him all upset triggered her off. After they've had sex, Eva gets dressed and rushes off to find Mieze. Then returns, all straightened out. Mieze loves Franz but has been meeting during the day with 'admirers' and extorting money out of them. Franz is relieved, overcome with love, and hastens off to find Mieze, they return to his flat and are more in love than ever.
See what I mean about being confused by the behaviour of the characters. So Franz can have sex with the wife of one of his best friends, all the time upset about her being unfaithful to him, then the best friend's wife goes to interpose on his behalf, and when it comes out that Mieze has other male admirers who (I think) she has sex with in order to generate income for Franz, everyone is relieved!
And so, in a way which I once again didn't understand, Franz acknowledges that he has become a pimp (pp.278, 286, 313). Has he? Alright, if the narrator says so, but I found the events & behaviour of the characters hard to follow and almost impossible to understand.
Eva invites Mieze round to their nice apartment but when she admits that she'd like to have a child by Franz, Miese is overjoyed and kisses her and makes a lesbian pass at her (?)
Mieze soon gets set up with a rich admirer, married, who sets her up in a nice flat, though she carries on adoring Franz. Eva comes round and ravishes Franz again, although he's in love with little Mieze. What if she gets pregnant, worries Franz. Oh she'd love to, replies Eva.
Franz attends political meetings with a mate, Willy, in fact a lowlife pickpocket but who enjoys getting chatting to politically minded workers at communist or anarchist meetings. Both Eva and Mieze want Franz to stop attending the meetings and/or hanging out with Willy.
Extended passage where an old anarchist explains to a sceptical Franz how the ruling class of every nation exploits the workers, but how a communist regime would just substitute a new exploiting class (pp.281-286). Willy, by contrast, is a devotee of Nietzsche and Stirner, and believes a man should do as he pleases.
August 1928. Mieze is settled into being her married man's mistress, meanwhile remitting the money to Franz, who is thus living off immoral earnings, while Eva continues to love him. Franz pays a visit to Reinhold, who is terrified he's going to do something. Franz does noting, goes away, feels restless and so returns to Reinhold's apartment.
What is incomprehensible to me is Franz's fatalism, the way he seems to bear no grudge against Reinhold for making him a cripple, he says he knew some kind of change had to happen in his life.
Somehow having confronted Reinhold and got it off his chest makes him happy. That night he dances the night away with Eva, while all the time imagining the two he loves, little Mieze (fair enough) and Reinhold. As I keep saying, it's difficult to follow or understand the psychology. (Though, to be fair, Herbert and Eva are puzzled as to why Franz keeps going round to see the man who was responsible for him losing his arm, p.325).
Book seven (pages 319 to 372)
Opens with pages devoted to some Tatsachenphantasie with an account of one-time air ace Beese-Arnim who is convicted of murdering his girlfriend. And we are given a list of notable America officials who are visiting the German capital. And brief factual accounts of some of the cases passing through the Labour Law Courts. And then a working class girl Anna posts a letter to her boyfriend suggesting they split up. And a young woman of 26 writes in her diary how miserable and weak her periods make her feel, and how she often wants to kill herself.
August moves into September. Franz has unashamedly joined Pums's gang. They're as puzzled as Herbert and Eva but when Franz stands there in front of them saying let bygones be bygones, and they all know he hasn't snitched to the cops, they have to admit he's right. So they let him in.
Then we learn some of the challenges of selling on stolen goods. Pums's fence is playing up. Eventually they carefully plan and pull off a job which requires teamwork, one duo lying low in offices above a place where valuables are kept, waiting till the early hours then drilling down through the ceiling, lowering a rope, while they open the door to this upstairs apartment to let other members get in and pass up the swag, pile it, take it down to the car, clear up after themselves with the smoothest member of the gang, elegant Waldemar Heller, taking a dump on the floor as a calling card (p.335).
Reinhold decides to pay Franz's woman a visit, when he's not there. He climbs the stairs to ominous accompaniment by the narrator, and slicks his ways past Mieze at the door, and lolls on her sofa and calmly describes the way he and Franz used to pass on women between each other. I was scared he was going to murder her, why? Because he's German and this is a German novel, but in fact he just heavily implies that Franz might be considering swapping her – all the time openly eyeing her up, before slipperily seeing himself out. Which leaves Mieze with her heart pounding and her thoughts all mixed up with the lyrics of a sentimental love song being played by an organ grinder outside the house ('In Heidelberg Town I lost my heart…')
Anyway, a few days later another peculiar scene unfolds. Knowing Mieze is out, Franz takes Reinhold back to his apartment and hides him in the bedroom. Reinhold has been pestering Franz about Miese, what's she like, remember when they used to swap girls etc, so Franz hides Reinhold with the intention of showing him what a Lady is like, what a pure good girl is like. But unfortunately Mieze comes in and clings to Franz really closely. She's been away for a few days with her middle-aged gentleman lover. But now she tearfully confesses to Franz that the man brought his young son, a dashing handsome man who made advances to Mieze and so Franz asks whether she loves him and Mieze makes the bad mistake of saying Yes.
At which point Franz goes mental and I thought was going to batter her to death, he slaps her, beats her to the floor, throws himself on her I thought he was going to crush her, one of her eyes is closed, blood is running from her broken lips. Ironically, this is the night Franz chose to bring a witness home to their love and Reinhold watches in amazement, then tries to pull Franz off the cowering whimpering girl. Franz pulls on his coat and storms out and the girl staggers to the staircase shouting after that she still loves him.
Reinhold hesitates to make sure she's alright, then stumbles down the stairs and out, wiping the blood from his hands.
It is barely believable that the passage ends a few hours later with Franz back in his apartment and Mieze making up to him, billing and cooing, them both in love, and her besotted more than ever with him, the wife-beater.
OK, I can grant that some women become in thrall to their beating partners. But the next scene is a ball given by the Pums gang which Mieze attends in a ball mask as the guest of Karl the tinsmith, dances with all of them, even Franz who doesn't recognise her (?really) then allows herself to be driven home in a cab with Karl who heavily seduces her, if not has sex with her, in the back of the cab, for some reason having sex with another member of the gang is not being unfaithful, because she's doing it for Franz, in order to find out more about the gang and help him.
She goes out with Karl a couple of times (telling Franz she's with the rich gentleman friend). Then Reinhold gets wind of this liaison and muscles in. On a couple of odd occasions he persuades Karl to let him come along when they go on outings to the Freienwalde and its pretty Kurgarten, they stroll past the bandstand, through the woods, back to a hotel where Mieze stays the night, locking her door, the two men sit on the terrace smoking their cigars. That's Wednesday 29 August 1928.
On Saturday 1 September, they repeat the experience, Karl making himself scarce while Reinhold goes into seduction mode, chatting sweetly to Mieze, while she is happy to go along with his sweet-talk. In an odd moment he undoes his shirt to show her the tattoo on his chest – an anvil – and harshly grabs her head and tells her to kiss it. She recoils, shouting at him, he's mussed her hair. Nonetheless they move on. He guides her towards a bowl, a hollow in the grass by the woods. by now it's dark. This entire sequence is very long, some 20 pages and 11 pages are devoted to just this evening walk, which changes in mood as Reinhold is now aggressive, now sweet, Mieze is frightened, then seduced back to walking hand in hand. But when he manhandles her down into the hollow, she starts screaming and fighting back and – in a horrible scene – he pushes her to the ground, kneels on her spine and strangles her from behind (p.370). Murders her. Buries her body under brush, goes fetches Karl who's waiting at the car, they return and bury her properly, really deep in the soil, then sand, then scatter underbrush over the tomb. Poor Mieze's smashed and broken body.
Reinhold gives Karl money to get out of Berlin and lie low for while, and keep his mouth shut.
Book eight (pages 375 to 431)
Mieze's murder turns out to be the motor for the climax of the book. Franz becomes slowly more distraught as Mieze's disappearance persists, Eva tries the cheer him up and announces she's pregnant. Franz doesn't tell many people because it's shameful to admit his girl has abandoned him.
Weeks pass. It is early October (p.382) The criminals are restless at Pums's leadership; they want to steal money, he prefers to steal goods and fence them, but they claim he keeps too much of the money. They pull a job on Stralauer Strasse, breaking into a bandage factory at night where there's meant to be money in the safe. But Karl the tinsmith burns himself on his acetylene torch, none of the others can use it properly, in frustration and anger they pour petrol over the office and set it on fire but throw the match a bit too early and Pums himself gets burned on h is back. They all blame Karl the tinsmith for the fiasco and Karl grumbles, and also resents the way he was used by Reinhold to bury the dead girl.
Karl meets a wheelwright in a bar and they go in together, with two others, on the burglary of a clothing store in Elsasser Strasse. They get chatting to the nightwatchman, get invited in to share a coffee, then break it to him that they're going to burgle the place, they'll tie him up, give him some of the proceeds – although when they have tied him up they amuse themselves by beating him a bit round the face and nearly smothering him with a coat over his head. They are not cartoon thieves, they are thoughtless brutes, almost all the male characters in this book.
Next time the Pums gang invite Karl to join a job he is high and mighty and words are exchanged, between Karl and Reinhold especially. Which makes them suspicious of him. Then Karl and the wheelwright are arrested by the police. Their fingerprints match the ones found all over the clothing store watchman's office and he identifies them. Karl is convinced that Reinhold snitched on him as revenge for him not joining that last job.
Karl asks a respectable in-law to find a lawyer for him and then runs past the lawyer where he would stand if he reveals he was involved in burying a dead body. The lawyer cautiously asks if he had any part in the body's death. No. Lawyer leaves. Karl stews all night. Next day, hauled up in front of the judge, he snitches on Reinhold, telling the judge and police in great detail how he helped Reinhold bury the body of the young woman he, Reinhold, had murdered.
Karl leads the police to the burial site, they dig, there's no body in the hole but some scraps of clothing and the hole has obviously recently been dug up i.e. Reinhold got wind of what was happening and moved it. When police publicise the case two garden labourers (p.395) come forward who saw Reinhold lugging a heavy case to another part of the woods. Digging here, the police finally find Mieze's corpse.
This narrative – in itself not unlike a basic murder thriller plot – is given a light dusting of 'modernism' with the insertion of some Tatsachenphantasie – newspaper reports about a tenement block collapsing in Prague, an ambitious early flight of the new Graf Zeppelin over Berlin, and so on (p.397).
Meanwhile, Reinhold gets wind of all this & tries to diffuse the blame by getting Franz involved. He comes round to tell Franz they're arresting people for the last Pums gang job, telling him to do a runner. Franz goes into hiding in a villa in Wilmersdorfer Strasse (p.401) owned by a woman called Fat Toni. Franz takes to wearing a wig.
Days go by then with a great fuss Eva arrives with a newspaper with big front-page photos of Reinhold and Franz next to each other, both equally Wanted by police for Mieze's murder!! Initially Fat Toni and Eva are horrified at the thought that Franz might actually have done it, but when he dissolves into helpless tears and sobbing they realise he didn't.
It is autumn 1928. Franz wanders the streets in a stupor, devastated by Mieze's murder. For obscure reasons he finds himself drawn back to the Tegel prison, then goes to the cemetery to see her grave, he hallucinates conversation with other dead people.
It is November (p.410). The Graf Zeppelin makes a low flight over Berlin, Weather conditions are given. Herbert is incensed at Mieze's murder and scours Berlin to find Reinhold and take revenge. Franz slowly joins him. Franz takes a can of petrol to Reinhold's house. The house speaks. the house has a conversation with Franz (pp.412-13), but Franz sets fire to it anyway, and it burns down.
Two angels, Terah and Sarug, follow Franz everywhere. They discuss his sad fate (pp.414-15). Eva calls Doctor Klemens to come assess Franz who is sunk into a deep depression, and recommends a break, a rest cure. Franz hangs round in bars. We meet other drinkers, overhear their conversations and even songs.
Hush-a-bye
Don't you cry
When you wake
You'll have a little cake.
As the text becomes evermore full of rhymes and jingles.
All his crying, all his protests, all his rage was idle prating,
Evidence was dead against him, and the chains for him were waiting. (p.421)
There is a big police raid on a bar in Rückerstrasse. I can't make out whether it's because the bar was a brothel or unlicensed or a criminal hangout or what, but some fifty cops in lots of cars raid it and round up all the customers who file out. All except for some guy who persists in sitting at his table sipping his beer. When several cops approach shouting at him to gt up and come along Franz (for it is indeed Franz Biberkopf) takes a revolver out of his pocket and shoots one. He falls but the other cops rush Franz, hitting his arm to make him drop the gun, beating him to the floor, he takes a rubber baton to the eye (p.430), and handcuffing him.
Some Tatsachenphantasie as Döblin quotes police arrest forms (Christian Name, Surname, Place of residence etc). Franz is brought in and taken to an office for interrogation.
Book nine (pages 435 to 478)
At the police station they quickly identify Franz as one of the two men wanted for the murder of Mieze. Meanwhile Reinhold, seeing the way things were going, uses the old crook's method of getting arrested for a minor offence, using false papers. He mugs an old lady, is convicted with papers which identify him as Polish (a certain Moroskiewicz, p.435) and locked up in Brandenberg prison as a mugger, thus evading the death penalty for murder. Or so he thinks.
Threats come from two quarters. First, as luck would have it, there's another petty criminal, Dluga, in the prison who knew the real Moroskiewicz and quickly susses out that Reinhold is neither Moroskiewicz nor a Pole. Reinhold has to bribe him with tobacco then accuses him of snitching, which gets him beaten up.
But worse is to come. Reinhold falls in love with a pretty boy, a petty criminal named Konrad, spends all his time billing and cooing with him. But Konrad is soon to be released, so Reinhold spends a last evening with him getting drunk on illicit alcohol and, oops, telling Konrad the whole story, about Franz and Mieze and burying her and his false name etc.
Konrad is soon released, looks up Reinhold's most recent girlfriend, gets money out of her, meets another young lad and makes the mistake of boasting about his criminal mates inside, telling stories and before he knows it has told the full story about Reinhold, the murder, and his fake identity. The mate he's told this swears to keep it a secret, but the next day goes to the police station and discovers the stuff about Reinhold is true and there's a reward of 1,000 marks for anyone who turns him in. So he turns him in, tells the cops Reinhold is in Brandenberg prison under a false name. Cops investigate and arrest Reinhold, who is so beside himself with rage and frustration that they nearly take him to an asylum.
Meanwhile, Franz has gone into a catatonic trance so is taken by the cops to Buch Insane Asylum. He refuses to wear clothes, refuses to eat, loses weight, can be easily carried to the bath where he plays like a child. They force feed him through tubes but Franz vomits it all up.
Cut to a learned discussion between the physicians, with the young doctors enthusiastically prescribing either electro-shock therapy, or talking therapy copied from Freud in order to address the patient's unresolved psychic conflicts.
As he loses weight his soul escapes his body, he has reached deeper strata of consciousness, his soul wants to be an animal or wind or seed blowing across the fields outside the asylum.
Franz hears Death singing (I couldn't help thinking that Joyce's epic ends on a wonderful note of life affirmation while this book, characteristically German, is obsessed with Death). Death tells Franz to start climbing the ladder towards him, illuminating the way with a barrage of hatchets which, as they fall and strike, let out light. Death lectures Franz, telling him that he insisted on being strong – after he was thrown under the car he resolved to rise again; when he had pretty little Mieze all he wanted to do was brag about her to Reinhold. He has insisted on being strong, seeing life on his terms and swanking, self-centred, instead of being meek and realising life is mixed.
Franz screams, screams all day and all night. But silently. To outward appearance he is catatonic and unmoving. Inside his head Death torments him with his stupidity and then a procession comes of all the crims he took up with, Lüders and Reinhold, why did I like them or hang out with them or try to impress them, Franz asks himself.
Ida appears before him, repeatedly buckling and bending, he asks her what is wrong, she turns and says 'You are hitting me, Franz, you are killing me', no no no no he cries. Mieze appears to him at noon, asking his forgiveness, Franz begs her to stay with him, but she can't, she's dead.
Crushed, Franz realises what a miserable worm he is. He sinks into a world of psychological pain, is burnt up, annihilated and, after much suffering, reborn.
Somehow his recovery is connected with a historic panorama of Napoleon's army invading across the Rhine, of marching armies which have marched in the Russian Revolution, Napoleonic Wars, the Peasants Wars and so back into time, Death drawing his vast clock across the ravaged landscape and smiling, oh yes oh yes oh yes.
The old Franz Biberkopf is dead. A new man is reborn, call him Biberkopf. He starts talking. He answers all the police's questions, though reluctantly. He doesn't want to go back. But his alibis stand up and he is cleared of Mieze's murder. And even (hard to believe) shooting a police officer appears to be only a cautionable offence. So after some weeks of slow physical and mental recovery, Biberkopf is released.
DEAR FATHERLAND, DON'T WORRY
I SHAN'T SLIP AGAIN IN A HURRY
Biberkopf returns to Berlin a changed man. Döblin gives us some Tatsachenphantasie, some facts and figures about Berlin's train and subway and tram systems, about current building works and the latest advertising campaigns ('Everybody admires the shoe / That's brightly polished with Egu').
Biberkopf meets up with Eva. Herbert's been arrested by the cops and sent to prison for two years. Eva had been excited about carrying Franz's baby but she had a miscarriage. Just as well. She is still supported by her sugardaddy 'admirer'. They go out to visit Mieze's grave and Eva is struck by how sober and sensible Franz is. Lays a wreath but then walks Eva across the road to a coffee shop where they enjoy some honey cake.
Franz is a witness at the trial of Reinhold. He tells all that he knows but isn't malicious. He still has feelings of friendship for Reinhold. Reinhold, for his part, is puzzled by the new strange blank look on Biberkopf's face. Reinhold is sentenced to ten years in prison.
Immediately afterwards Biberkopf is offered the job of doorman at a medium-sized factory. He has learned that one man alone is overwhelmed by fate. But a hundred or a thousand are stronger. The novel ends with military imagery, of drums rolling and soldiers marching, 'we march to war with iron tread'.
It is a powerful image of determination and unity, of a mass of people united so that it's difficult to tell whether it's a communist or a fascist image, of people determined to look fate in the face, grab it, make it. And at the same time an odd way to end the novel.
Is that the most positive image Döblin can conceive, of free people marching to war with iron tread. Well, ten years later his people did march to war with iron tread and much good it did them.
I find reading these German books hard not because of their 'experimental' or 'avant-garde' 'modernism'. As I've pointed out, above, all of Döblin's techniques are child's play compared with Joyce.
No, I found Berlin Alexanderplatz hard to read for the much more basic reasons that 1. I found the character's behaviour at key moments and in general throughout the book, incomprehensible, and 2. I was deeply repelled by the characters' casual violence in their thoughts and deeds.
1. Incomprehensibility
So I got to the end of the book and I still didn't understand:
the entire opening scene with Franz blundering into the home of some Jews who proceed to tell him a long-winded story about some Polish con artist (?)
why Lüders going behind Franz's back to threaten the skinny widow woman was so devastating to Franz (major plot crux 1)
what the thinking was behind the scheme whereby Reinhold handed his discarded women over to Franz every month or so
what made Reinhold suddenly snap and decide to chuck Franz out of the speeding getaway car (major plot crux 2)
why Franz not only forgives Reinhold for trying to kill him, but ends up liking him and wanting to impress him
the psychology whereby both Herbert and Franz were perfectly content to let their girlfriends (Eva and Mieze) go off and spend nights and weekends having sex with rich sugardaddies
the psychology of Eva 'finding' young and beautiful Mieze 'for' Franz and making her his mistress while, at the same time, being hopelessly in love with Franz and wanting to have his baby
why, in the end, Reinhold had to murder Mieze (major plot crux 3)
why the devil Franz decides to start firing a revolver at the police during the raid of the club instead of going quietly?
So all the modernist techniques were easy and fun to process, but the basic psychology of the characters escaped me at almost every important turn of the plot.
2. Casual brutality
What horribly brutal people they are.
The reader searches high and low in vain for a touch of humour or gentleness. Kicking and stabbing, beating and raping appear to be the only way Germans can communicate with each other.
Franz assaulted his wife violently enough to rupture her lung leading to her death.
Walking through the Berlin streets, Franz fantasises about smashing all the shiny shop windows.
On his first day out of prison, Franz rapes his wife's sister, giving her a black eye in the process.
Franz gets into a fight with commies at Hentchke's pub.
Franz enjoys watching his girlfriend fling the gay magazines at the newsvendor and yell at him in the street.
When Meck tries to find out from Lüders where Franz has disappeared to, he doesn't ask him firmly, he knocks him to the ground, beats him badly and threatens him with a knife.
When Lüders goes to Franz's flat, he keeps hold of an open knife in his pocket in case Franz turns nasty.
In a casually brutal aside, Döblin makes a simile comparing Franz emerging into the slushy slippery Berlin streets, 'just like an old horse that has slid on the wet pavement and gets a kick in the belly with a boot' (p.164), yes that's how Germans treat their animals
The brutal way Pums's gang treat Franz, even before they throw him out of the speeding car.
The brutal way Reinhold beats his girlfriend's face to a pulp without even thinking about it, permanently disfiguring her (p.228).
The horrible way Franz beats Mieze when she tells him she's in love with the young gentleman, knocking her to the floor and smashing her mouth.
The horrible way Pums's back gets burned during the bungled break-in at the factory and the rest of the gang laugh at him.
The really horrible way Reinhold tries to rape and then murders Mieze.
Yuk.
I know the casual brutality reflects the working class and criminal characters Döblin has set out to depict but a) surely there were a few working class people who weren't thieves and rapists b) surely even the roughest thugs have a few moments of charity and affection, c) Joyce was not only far more avant-garde and experimental in his form, but his selection of fairly ordinary characters to describe at such length are loveable and humane.
3. German humour
There are a few moments of comedy in this 480-page-long book, but a close examination suggests that German comedy doesn't seem to be verbal, to involve wit or word play, puns or irony. It consists mostly in laughing at others' misfortune or stupidity.
Lūders laughs at Lina's anxiety about Franz when the latter goes missing (p.118)
Cilly humorously suggests to Franz a headline story in the newspaper such as, a paper-seller had to change some money and gave the right amount by mistake! (p, 208)
Eva has a hysterical panic attack when she thinks Schreiber is about to pull a gun on Franz, leaping to her feet, screaming, making the two men themselves panic, knock over furniture, Schreiber hares off down the stairs, two men from the café come up to find out what one earth the noise is about, the landlady eventually comes in and throws a bucket of water over Eva to calm her down and now, finally calm and quiet, the soaking Eva softly says: 'I want a roll', and the two men from the café laugh (p. 246)
Franz amuses a young woman named Emmi. When she asks where his other arm is, he says his girlfriend is so jealous, he leaves it back home with her as a pledge that he'll return. And goes on to say he's taught it tricks: it can stand on the table and give political speeches: 'Only he who works shall eat!' (p.258)
Franz is joshing with some younger blokes down the pub. 'As the Prussians used to say: hands on the seams of your trousers! And so say we, only not on your own!' (p.261)
Franz is in a getaway car with the Pums gang after pulling a job. The driver accidentally runs over a dog and is really upset. Reinhold and Franz roar with laughter at the bloke being so soft-headed. The man says: 'A thing like that brings you bad luck'. Franz nudges the bloke next to him and says: 'He means cats' and everybody 'roars with laughter' (p.336)
Reinhold pays Mieze a visit when Franz is out and flirts with her, rather intimidatingly. She asks him if he hasn't got any work to do rather than lounging round with her. he replies: 'Even the Lord sometimes takes a holiday, Fräulein, so we plain mortals should take at least two.' She replies: 'Well, I should say you're taking three,' and they both laugh (p.344)
Reinhold keeps pestering Franz to tell him about his new girl (Mieze), saying it does no harm to describe her, does it? Franz admits, 'No, it doesn't harm me, Reinhold, but you're such a swine,' and they both laugh. (p.347)
In a bar, three companions are drinking and joking. One says: An aviator walks onto a field, and there's a girl sitting there. Says he: 'Hey, Miss Lindbergh, how about some trick-flying together?' Says she: 'My name isn't Lindbergh, It's Fokker,' and the three 'roar with laughter' (p.381)
Some detectives come snooping the Alexander Quelle club. Two boys who've recently escaped from a reformatory are sitting chatting with the tinsmith. He has papers but they don't, all three are ordered to the local police station where the boys immediately blab about what they've been up to. Ten the sops reveal they had no idea who they were and weren't particularly looking for them. Damn, says the boys. 'In that case we wouldn't have told you how we hooked it', and they all laugh together, boys and cops (p.385)
The chief doctor in charge of Franz's treatment in the mental institution listens to his two juniors squabbling about theories and ways to treat their catatonic patient, then gets up, laughs heartily and slaps their shoulders (p.450)
Setting them down like this I can appreciate that some of them are funny, I suppose. My negative perception is coloured by the often brutal or cruel remarks which jostle around them.
And in any case, old jokes are difficult to recapture even in English novels from the 1920s and 30s, let alone jokes in a foreign language, from the vanished world of 1920s Berlin.
And at least there is some humour in Alexanderplatz, unlike the solemn, philosophico-hysteria of the Hermann Broch trilogy I have just completed.
All that said, Berlin Alexanderplatz is a quite brilliant novel which gives you a vivid panoramic impression of 1920s Berlin and more insight into Germany and German-ness than anything else I've ever read.
It is full of Weimar touches (the crippled war veterans, the legless man moving around on a wheeled trolley, the immense amount of prostitution, the pretty young things entertaining rich old sugardaddies, the casual sexual partners and the casual bisexuality of Reinhold, the threat of violence in the street from either the communists or the swastika-men, the hectic sense of things being continually hustled along without a chance to catch your breath given by the inclusion of so many newspaper headlines and events) which really do make it read like a verbal equivalent of harsh, unforgiving Weimar Republic artists like George Grosz and Otto Dix.
Twilight by George Grosz (1922)
Berlin Alexanderplatz was published in Germany in 1929. This translation by Eugene Jolas was published as Alexanderplatz by Martin Secker in 1931. All references are to the 1979 Penguin paperback edition.
Reviews of 20th century German literature
The Stoker by Franz Kafka (1911-12)
The Metamorphosis by Franz Kafka (1912)
In the Penal Colony by Franz Kafka (1914)
The Trial by Franz Kafka (1914-15)
The Great Wall of China by Franz Kafka (1917)
A Country Doctor and other stories by Franz Kafka (1917)
Storm of Steel by Ernst Jünger (1920)
Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922)
The Castle by Franz Kafka (1922)
Investigations of a Dog by Franz Kafka (1922)
A Hunger Artist and other stories by Franz Kafka (1924)
The Burrow by Franz Kakfka (1924)
Der Steppenwolf by Hermann Hesse (1927)
All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque (1929)
Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse (1930)
The Man Without Qualities part 1 by Robert Musil (1930)
The Romantic (1888) by Hermann Broch (1931)
The Anarchist (1903) by Hermann Broch (1931)
The Realist (1918) by Hermann Broch (1931)
A Small Yes and a Big No by George Grosz (1946)
The Weimar Republic
Käthe Kollwitz @ the British Museum (September 2019)
Magic Realism Art in Weimar Germany: 1919 to 1933 @ Tate Modern (April 2019)
Anni Albers @ Tate Modern (December 2018)
Aftermath: Art in the wake of World War One @ Tate Britain (September 2018)
Bauhaus: Art as Life @ the Barbican (July 2012)
The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917 to 1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016)
The New Objectivity: Modern German Art in the Weimar Republic 1918 to 1933 ed. Stephanie Barron and Sabine Eckmann (2015)
The New Objectivity
From Weimar to Wall Street 1918 to 1929 (1993)
Art Deco by Alastair Duncan (1988)
Bauhaus by Frank Whitford (1984)
The Weimar Years: A Culture Cut Short by John Willett (1984)
The New Sobriety: Art and Politics in the Weimar Period 1917 to 1933 by John Willett (1978)
Weimar: A Cultural History 1918 to 1933 by Walter Laqueur (1974)
The Expressionists by Wolf-Dieter Dube (1972)
Weimar Culture by Peter Gay (1968)
Ring of Steel by Alexander Watson (2014) A synopsis
Bismarck: The Iron Chancellor by Volker Ullrich (2008)
by Simon on April 14, 2020 • Permalink
Posted in Germany, Literature, Novel
Tagged 1927, 1928, 1929, Alfred Döblin, anarchism, Berlin Alexanderplatz, Bible, Biblical imagery, Book of Job, Brandenberg prison, Buch Insane Asylum, burglary, Charles Dickens, Cilly, collage, crime, criminal classes, doggerel, Dragonerstrasse, Ede the hunchback, Elsasser Strasse, Emilie Parsunke, Eugene Jolas, Eva, Franz Biberkopf, George Grosz, Georgie Dreske, German, German history, German literatur, Germany, Gottlieb Meck, Greek myth, Hasenheide Park, headlines, Herbert Wischow, history, homosexuality, Ida, James Joyce, Laws of Thermodynamics, Lüders, Lina Przyballa, Linienstrasse, Literature, Mieze, Minna, Modernism, montage, multi-textuality, murder, Nazis, Neue Welt, Neuköln, Newton, novel, Odysseus, Otto Dix, Otto Lüders, Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man, prison, prostitution, Pums, rape, Rückerstrasse, Reinhold, rhyme, Rosenthaler Strasse, social history, Stralauer Strasse, stream-of-consciousness, Tatsachenphantasie, Tegel prison, the Alexander Quelle, the Freienwalde, the Kurgarten, the Oresteia, The Pickwick Papers, the Whore of Babylon, Translation, Ulysses, Waldemar Heller, Weimar Republic, Wilmersdorfer Strasse
Posted by Simon on April 14, 2020
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2020/04/14/berlin-alexanderplatz-alfred-doblin/
The Dispossessed by Ursula Le Guin (1974)
This is a good, deep and thoughtful novel even if, in the end, you disagree with some of its ideas and aims.
It is a) set in the far future, b) in a solar system far, far away, and c) starts off as a variation on the age-old science fiction theme of the innocent who arrives in a new world / new civilisation, notes the myriad of ways in which it is different from his home country / civilisation, and then slowly realises he is a pawn in a murky geopolitical power-play.
At various moments it reminded me of some of the earliest science novels such as Looking Backward by Edward Bellamy in which a sleeper wakes into a drastically changed human society and spends the rest of the book being lectured about the badness of the bad old days, or HG Wells's The Sleeper Awakes where a Victorian man wakes in the far future to discover not only that an entire cult has built up around him, but that society is fiercely divided into haves and have-nots and his very awakening triggers a violent revolt by the underclass.
In this novel a naive idealist goes to a more sophisticated future culture and finds himself triggering a major revolt of the long-suffering underclass, which is put down with bloody violence. So at moments I had a strong sense of deja vu.
Urras and Anarres
In this variation of the theme, there are two sister planets, apparently of the 'Cetian' system, named Urras and Anarres, which (seem to) orbit each other and so appear as each other's moons.
Both are occupied by human-type entities, who in fact refer to themselves as Mankind. (There are teasing references to two other planets beyond the immediate system, Haina and Terra, the latter presumably being 'our' Earth: only towards the very end of the book do we learn – from the Terran ambassador no less – that Terra is indeed our earth, that it is eleven light years from Tau Ceti, that humanity almost destroyed itself and has ravaged Earth's environment, and was only saved by the arrival of the more advanced Hainish. There is some intriguing speculation that at some point in the remote past all these planets were colonised by humanoids – which would include Earth, p.119.)
Anyway, these are just intriguing grace-notes of the kind science fiction writers love teasing their readers with and science fiction readers love working up into elaborate theories.
More central to the story is that 170 years before it begins, technology on Urras led to the development of spaceships which could voyage to its 'moon', Anarres. The first arrivals were disappointed to discover the supposedly green planet was in fact a mostly windswept desert of dust, where only rare regions had even low-lying trees, where there were no birds or land animals, for life was still at the fish stage.
Initially, the Urrasti mined the new planet, sending back metals and petroleum which had become rare on Urras due to over-development. But some kind of social revolution was taking place on Urras, led by a woman philosopher and social reformer named Odo. Odo developed a pacifist, anarchist, communitarian, vegetarian, holistic philosophy in several books – the Prison Letters and the Analogy (p.74) – and her teachings spread, threatening to undermine the materialist Urrasti way of life, leading to 'the Insurrection' in the year 747. (Odo had a husband, mentioned once, Aseio, p.157)
And so the authorities – 'the Council of World Governments' (CWG) – on Urras realised a clever way to square the circle would be to pack off the entire sect of 'Odonians' to their 'moon', where they could put all their utopian visions into practice, and also continue to provide the raw materials Urras required.
And so, over a course of 20 years, some million Odonians were ferried up to Anarres, at first settling what became the capital city, Abbenay (which means Mind in the new language they began to use), slowly moving out to colonise the other regions (and discovering just how barren and inhospitable Anerras is).
Shevek
And it's at this point that the narrative opens, focusing on the experiences of the young Anarresti physicist, Shevek. It opens with Shevek boarding one of the rare (only ten or so a year) cargo flights which travel from Anerras back to the 'mother' planet, Urras. The populations of the two planets remain in touch, but – as you might expect – as their social systems, languages and customs have diverged, so suspicion and reserve have arisen on both sides. (In fact, again only towards the end of the book, we learn that the emigration involved signing certain Terms of Settlement which mandated that no Urrasti were allowed off their occasional cargo ships.)
The narrative proceeds by alternating chapters describing Shevek's arrival on Urras, with others giving flashbacks to his childhood, boyhood, and young manhood on his home planet. This sounds like a gimmick but it works wonderfully well, in the second half of the novel the alternating timezones create a powerful rhythm and create a deepening emotional connection with the supremely clever but naive, idealistic and yet troubled Shevek.
In other ways, it is is slowly, through the slow revelation of Shevek's backstory and experiences, that the book reveals its depths.
Initially, we are led to believe that Anarresti society is a Utopia – a non-materialistic, communal society, where there is so little personal property that there aren't even personal pronouns (no 'my', 'your', 'his' or 'her's), where children are raised communally, where everyone works voluntarily and eats freely from the communal refectories, there is no profit motive and no power complexes, in fact no government, just 'syndicates' which specialise in particular areas of work, and a central administration of the division of labour (DivLab) which uses computers to organise the population's work rotas.
'We have no government but the single principle of free association. We have no states, no nations, no presidents, no premiers, no chiefs, no generals, no bosses, no bankers, no landlords, no wages, no charity, no police, no soldiers, no wars. Nor do we have much else. We are sharers, not owners.'
If they are mostly brain workers, then every tenthday (they don't have seven-day weeks, they have ten-day 'decads') they will be rotated to some kind of manual labour. They speak Pravic, a language invented to be rational and without all the words for possession, ownership and exploitation. Anyone beginning to display such tendencies is (mildly) criticised for being a 'propertarian', or told to 'stop egoising' and put the community first.
The sexes (there are two sexes, named men and women) are completely equal, participate equally in work and decision making and scientific study etc, and sex is easy and casually available as and when couples feel the need, with no shame or taboos. If couples partner up, fine, if they break up, fine, just as Shevek's parents split up when he was small, and he was brought up in a communal centre.
Because Anarres is relatively impoverished, there is no waste and everyone lives frugally. Because there are no land animals, everyone is vegetarian.
In other words, Anarres – at least to start with – has very much the feel of a hippy Utopia circa 1974.
Shevek on Urras
When Shevek arrives by rocket on the mother planet Urras – heralded as 'the first visitor from the moon in 170 years' – he of course discovers that, although its inhabitants have more goods and services, their society is unrecognisably different from his communal homeland. Urrastis are 'propertarians', society is ruled by the profit motive, everyone has titles and formal terms of address (unlike the simple one-word names of Anerras which, we learn, are allotted by computer).
The first time he is taken to the two-mile-long shopping street – Saemtenevia Prospect in the capital city, Nio Esseia (p.110) – Shevek is made physically ill by the excess and the waste.
And so on. As is standard with this kind of 'innocent abroad' narrative, we are made to see the corruption, waste and greed of our own wretched capitalist system via a description of a supposedly 'fantasy' civilisation as seen through the eyes of an archetypal outsider.
As well as the fondness for titles and possessive pronouns, Shevek discovers (i.e. Le Guin satirises) various other aspects of Urrasti-American culture. Shevek discovers that women on Urras are second-class citizens, very much confined to the home as housewives, and banned from the university, which he finds unnerving and bizarre.
He can't believe the staggering scale of the conspicuous consumption, the myriads of different clothes, along with the numerous forms of address and politeness, none of which exist on simple, honest Anerras.
He is appalled at the way everything is packaged and wrapped, even the wrapping paper is wrapped in wrapping paper. Waste upon waste.
He goes to the theatre and doesn't understand the play which is full of snide references to copulation which never actually mention the fact; everyone titters and guffaws but he doesn't understand their hypocritical shying away from the basic facts of life.
He goes to a museum and is appalled by all the relics of bloodthirsty barbarity it contains.
Shevek the physicist
The institution of the University looms large and makes me realise I haven't yet explained that, as well as some trade between the two planets, there is also intellectual exchange, and that Shevek is an intellectual prodigy.
The descriptions of his childhood are used to explain Anerras' utopian social structure to us, but also to bring out Shevek's unique vision, his intellectual precocity. We are shown Shevek quickly outdoing his college teachers, one of whom in particular – the sneaky Sabul – suffers from an inferiority complex vis-a-vis the much better-endowed intellectuals of the richer, larger mother planet, and so sends some of Shevek's graduate work back to academics on Urras.
It is this – Shevek's intellectual promise – which leads to the invitation from leading academic figures on Urras to visit them, to take a rocket journey back to the home planet, and to the extended passages where the disorientated visitor is shown round this brave new world by his hosts – all this allowing Le Guin to make her points about the unattractiveness of materialism, capitalism, conspicuous consumption, the oppression of women which this simple, honest, open man is introduced to.
But again, as you might well expect for this kind of storyline, there is trouble in paradise. We slowly learn that Urras is divided between two power blocs, the runaway capitalism and conspicuous consumption of A-Io, and a rival state named Thu, an authoritarian system that claims to rule in the name of the proletariat.
Ring any bells? It would have done in 1974, when this aspect of the story would have been an obvious reference to the way the world was divided between two rival superpowers, super-capitalist USA, and the ruthlessly authoritarian Soviet Union which practiced every kind of tyrannical practice in the name of the 'proletariat'.
It turns out that the scientists – and so the political leaders – of A-Io and Thu have both realised that Shevek's physics is teetering on the brink of a major breakthrough in the understanding of spacetime, a new theory called 'transilience' which could, potentially, lead to the development of vastly more powerful forms of instantaneous communication and maybe transportation across stellar distances.
Thus, as you might have predicted, on one level the novel turns into a kind of Cold War thriller, in which Shevek – who had naively come back to the mother planet seeking to establish 'brotherhood' and a new understanding (p.121) – slowly realises that his smiling, obliging hosts in A-Io are after his knowledge, but so are agents of Thu who have been sent to ingratiate themselves with him, namely Dr Chifoilisk who tries to persuade him that Thuvians are revolutionaries, like the Odonians. He becomes a pawn in the power politics of Anerras.
Indeed, Shevek eventually becomes so disillusioned that he throws in his lot with the inevitable 'underground' movement, getting in touch with them in their haunts on the derelict Old Town part of the capital city, and becoming the symbolic figurehead of an immense protest march of the underclass which wins through the city streets to the Capitol Square, where Shevek makes an inspiring speech about brotherhood and solidarity just before state security helicopters open fire on the crowd, massacring unarmed women and children, and Shevek makes a getaway, helping a mortally wounded man to a hideaway in a derelict warehouse where he stays with the man till he dies of blood loss and shock.
This as well, reads like an only slightly paranoid version of the police state many liberals thought America was in danger of becoming in the final stages of the Vietnam War, with mass civil disobedience leading to atrocities by the National Guard.
From that point onwards Shevek freely expresses his disgust with Urras:
'There is nothing you can do that profit does not enter into, and fear of loss, and a wish for power. You cannot say good morning without knowing which of you is `superior' to the other, or trying to prove it. You cannot act like a brother to other people, you must manipulate them, or command them, or obey them, or trick them. You cannot touch another person, yet they will not leave you alone. There is no freedom. It is a box – Urras is a box, a package, with all the beautiful wrapping of blue sky and meadows and forests and great cities. And you open the box, and what is inside it? A black cellar full of dust, and a dead man.'
Utopia and universities
In the preface to this novel, Le Guin explains how she came across anarchist writings, for example of Kropotkin, and found these a more attractive alternative to the more authoritarian Marxism as, indeed, many well-heeled bourgeois academics and writers have. How wonderful to live in a world with no bosses, no state and where everyone co-operates willingly for the common good!
And, at least to begin with, the description of the utopian arrangements on Anerras for work or sex or education or relationships or family or farming or building and so on come across as idyllically simple and fair and soul-building, allowing each to contribute to society voluntarily, how and as and when they wish.
And it is a central flaw or issue with the book that virtually all the characters are intellectuals: Shevek's school and college career leads straight into a job in the university (though with breaks for quite demanding manual labour); his wife Takver is also an academic, a marine biologist; their friends are writers or fellow intellectuals, and they are all shown having extended arguments about the soul of man, and justice, and property and ownership and communal living and so on. And when he arrives on Urras it is to join the faculty of the famous Ieu Eun university and mix with, yes, more lecturers and professors who spend all their time talking about society and justice and so on.
In fact, although it is regarded as a masterpiece of science fiction, The Disposessed could be considered a sort of campus novel, a tale of two university campuses, and all its lead characters are almost exclusively academics.
He crossed the campus on his way to a lecture. (p.171)
Because Shevek is a young man finding his way in the central chapters about his life on Anerras (aged 24 on p.156 as he falls in love with the marine biologist) and because so much of the book has the feel of an undergraduate debating society, it is a surprise to learn that he has just turned 40 at the point where he decides to take the fateful trip to Urras, and has – by that point – spent over ten years working on the problem of Simultaneity – the General Theory of Temporality.
Towards a subtler picture
The essentially white liberal bourgeois academic milieu and the prolonged and high-minded debates about social organisation and justice sometimes give it the feel not only of a campus novel, but of a very 1970s campus novel, with all the characters, whether radical or reactionary, worrying about the advent of The Revolution as if it's just around the corner, just the way people used to talk about The Revolution in the 1970s.
And, as mentioned, the book has a lot of rather cliched themes – the innocent traveller to a more corrupt culture and the solitary idealistic figure who becomes the trigger for a violent insurrection.
BUT. But but but… I found the second half of the book steadily improved, grew richer and deeper and – crucially – was less expected and predictable. In the alternating flashback chapters we come to ones which describe a really profound drought which affects Anarres and leads to a disastrous famine. Food is short all over, and Shevek volunteers to go and help with famine relief.
Now we begin to see cracks in the high-minded fabric of the utopia. Now we see people not mucking in together, people behaving selfishly, people trying to protect their own. And, during the extensive description of this time, Le Guin emphasises that the entire communal lifestyle is only possible because it is necessary. Part of the reason there is no conspicuous consumption and waste is because there just aren't enough resources on Anarres to make very much more than basic recycled cotton clothes, and the dreariest of simple vegetarian diets.
Slowly, in a number of scenes, we come to see that even people raised from childhood in an egalitarian society can become selfish, jealous, snide, threatening and violent, if the circumstances are correct.
These scenes – and the commentary of the characters such as Shevek and his wife and best friends discussing them – are genuinely interesting reflections on human nature in an entirely invented culture and civilisation, coming under pressure.
Keng
Similarly, towards the end of the novel, after the climactic massacre in Capitol Square, Shevek manages to evade the sinister, black-clad security forces, and his friends in the 'Underground' smuggle him to the neutral city of Rodarred, where he seeks asylum in the Terran Embassy. (A setting which gives rise to all kinds of intriguing contrasts between the physique of the Anarrasti – big and haired all over – and of the Terrans – slight and smooth). And here he meets the slight, smooth-faced female ambassador whose name, Keng, suggests she is of Chinese ancestry.
Here a number of threads are tied up.
Keng arranges with the authorities of A-Io that Shevek can return to Anarres unharmed (in fact he will be carried there by a ship of the fourth race of humanoid mentioned, the Hainish)
The climax of Shevek's mission is that he explains that he has developed the theory which could lead to Transilience and a technology of instantaneous communication (it is here we learn from Keng that the planets we're on are eleven light years from Earth i.e. messages to Terra take at least 11 years there and 11 years back, so instant messaging would transform all the humanoid civilisations). And he asks Keng if she can arrange for the crucial handful of physics equations to be beamed to all the humanoid planets simultaneously, so no one culture gets exclusive use of them.
So they have a fascinating conversation, the slight Terran ambassador and the hulking hairy Anarresti. But what pleased me because it was unexpected and yet seemed psychologically true is that, after Shevek has finished a long speech about how much he now hates and detests Urras and its grotesque capitalist luxury and inequality… what was strangely moving is that the ambassador then makes a speech in which she explains that, from the perspective of the ravaged, ruined Earth, Urras is Paradise!. Sure it has its inequalities and tensions, but her home planet is desolate, barren, a place of ruins and total poverty. At least Urras has life and invention and colour and exuberance.
It's not a very profound fictional move, but it exemplifies the way this slow-building but eventually wonderful and moving book looks at themes and ideas which, to begin with, seem rather stereotyped and over-familiar, and then subjects them to more penetrating examination than you're used to in the generally sensationalist genre of science fiction.
Time and meaning
And it's symptomatic of the way the book leans towards a more 'serious' tone and attitude, that the final chapter isn't triumphalist or doom-laden, it doesn't end in flames or indeed anything very decisive. Only here, right at the end, do we learn about the opposition stirred up to Shevek's idea of travelling to Urras among his fellow anarchists and communalists.
Like people everywhere, it turns out that they can be quite as paranoid, suspicious and vindictive as anyone else – Shevek is treated as a traitor, his wife is cold-shouldered at her work, and even their ten-year-old daughter is bullied and victimised at her learning centre.
All this reinforces the metaphysical strand at the heart of the book, that life isn't a fixed state, happiness isn't something you achieve and then relax. Life is a continual process, and its meaning derives from the union of past and future in a continual flux.
This issue – the question of the meaning of human existence in an endlessly changing world – maps beautifully onto Shevek's intellectual concerns as a physicist trying to reconcile two completely different theories of time, he devotes his life to seeking:
the unification of Sequency and Simultaneity in a general field theory of time,
The fact that Le Guin was raised in the home of two successful academics at first glance helps explain the limitations of the novel – as I've mentioned – to a cast list mostly made up of academics and intellectuals who spend nearly the whole book having philosophical discussions,
But on the upside, it means that she does manage to capture the feel of academic research, the mundaneness of it. The scene – a sequence of a few days – where Shevek – after a disastrous social outing on Urras where he gets humiliatingly drunk on champagne which he's never drunk before – tells his servant to close ad lock the doors, allow no-one admission, and then spends day after day sitting at his desk, getting up, walking round, staring out the window and… suddenly sees the solution, the answer, the way to reconcile the two contradictory ways of thinking about and measuring time… this scene for me marvellously captures the joy of silent, entranced, intellectual effort, and its deep rich rewards, as you become aware of your mind unfolding a huge new way of seeing life.
In a smaller but comparable way, it may occur to the reader that, the alternation of the chapters, which alternate between the 'present' of the main narrative, and a series of flashbacks – all of which are bound together by a narrative which starts with Shevek leaving his home planet and ends with him returning – in their structure reflect Shevek's attempt to integrate a linear and a circular theory of time. That the narrative structure in some sense embodies the theory of integrated time which Shevek is working towards…
It's not a perfect book, and many elements have dated in ways I've indicated. But at its core is a really serious attempt to engage with a number of issues – about politics and society, about the possibility of a fair and just civilisation – about the life of the mind – and above all about time and our place in time's flux – which are rare to encounter in any genre of fiction.
The Dispossessed is not wonderfully written. But it is wonderfully and seriously imagined.
The Dispossessed on Amazon
The Dispossessed online
The Dispossessed Wikipedia article
Other science fiction reviews
1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen
1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the 'owner', Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same future London as The Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth defy her wealthy family in order to marry, fall into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps
1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of 'Cavorite' to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, prompting giant humans to rebel against the 'little people'
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a comet passes through earth's atmosphere and brings about 'the Great Change', inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Kent, gets caught up in the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by 'the Machine' until one of them rebels
1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of 'crowdism'
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic
1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 wakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, where they discover…
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling 'history' of the future of mankind over the next two billion years – surely the most sweeping vista of any science fiction book
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Oxford academic Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra, as the natives call the planet Mars
1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet's new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like 'proles' and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance
1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about 'positronic' robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity's destiny
1950 The Martian Chronicles – 13 short stories with 13 linking passages loosely describing mankind's colonisation of Mars, featuring strange, dreamlike encounters with Martians
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as 'the Mule'
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the 'trilogy' describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1953 Earthman, Come Home by James Blish – the adventures of New York City, a self-contained space city which wanders the galaxy 2,000 years hence powered by spindizzy technology
1953 Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury – a masterpiece, a terrifying anticipation of a future when books are banned and professional firemen are paid to track down stashes of forbidden books and burn them
1953 Childhood's End by Arthur C. Clarke a thrilling narrative involving the 'Overlords' who arrive from space to supervise mankind's transition to the next stage in its evolution
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into 'Spacers' who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or 'caves of steel', and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention, in the near future, of i) the anti-death drugs and ii) the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1956 The Stars My Destination by Alfred Bester – the florid revenge of Gulliver Foyle, a fastpaced phantasmagoria set in the 25th century where humans can teleport and a terrifying new weapon has been invented
1959 The Triumph of Time by James Blish – concluding story of Blish's Okie tetralogy in which Amalfi and his friends are present at the end of the universe
1961 A Fall of Moondust by Arthur C. Clarke a pleasure tourbus on the moon is sucked down into a sink of moondust, sparking a race against time to rescue the trapped crew and passengers
1962 A Life For The Stars by James Blish – third in the Okie series about cities which can fly through space, focusing on the coming of age of kidnapped earther, young Crispin DeFord, aboard New York
1962 The Man in the High Castle by Philip K. Dick In an alternative future America lost the Second World War and has been partitioned between Japan and Nazi Germany. The narrative follows a motley crew of characters including a dealer in antique Americana, a German spy who warns a Japanese official about a looming surprise German attack, and a woman determined to track down the reclusive author of a hit book which describes an alternative future in which America won the Second World War
1968 2001: A Space Odyssey a panoramic narrative which starts with aliens stimulating evolution among the first ape-men and ends with a spaceman being transformed into galactic consciousness
1968 Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick In 1992 androids are almost indistinguishable from humans except by trained bounty hunters like Rick Deckard who is paid to track down and 'retire' escaped andys
1969 Ubik by Philip K. Dick In 1992 the world is threatened by mutants with psionic powers who are combated by 'inertials'. The novel focuses on the weird alternative world experienced by a group of inertials after a catastrophe on the moon
1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world's plastic
1973 Rendezvous With Rama by Arthur C. Clarke – in 2031 a 50-kilometre long object of alien origin enters the solar system, so the crew of the spaceship Endeavour are sent to explore it
1974 Flow My Tears, The Policeman Said by Philip K. Dick – America after the Second World War is a police state but the story is about popular TV host Jason Taverner who is plunged into an alternative version of this world where he is no longer a rich entertainer but down on the streets among the 'ordinaries' and on the run from the police. Why? And how can he get back to his storyline?
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the 'Golden Era' of the genre, basically the 1950s
1982 2010: Odyssey Two by Arthur C. Clarke – Heywood Floyd joins a Russian spaceship on a two-year journey to Jupiter to a) reclaim the abandoned Discovery and b) investigate the monolith on Japetus
1987 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke* – Spaceship Galaxy is hijacked and forced to land on Europa, moon of the former Jupiter, in a 'thriller' notable for Clarke's descriptions of the bizarre landscapes of Halley's Comet and Europa
by Simon on November 29, 2019 • Permalink
Posted in Books, Science Fiction
Tagged 1974, A-Io, Abbenay, anarchism, Anarres, capitalism, Communism, Dr Chifoilisk, Edward Bellamy, General Theory of Temporality, H.G. Wells, Hainish, Keng, Nio Esseia, novel, Odo, Odonians, Philosophy, physics, Politics, Pravic, Prison Letters, propertarian, Rodarred, science fiction, Sequency, Simultaneity, spacetime, Tau Ceti, The Disposessed, The Dispossessed, Thu, Thuvians, transilience, Urras, Ursula Le Guin, Utopia, Vietnam War
Posted by Simon on November 29, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/11/29/the-dispossessed-ursula-le-guin/
Jailbird by Kurt Vonnegut (1979)
The most embarrassing thing to me about this autobiography, surely, is its unbroken chain of proofs that I was never a serious man. I have been in a lot of trouble over the years, but that was all accidental. Never have I risked my life, or even my comfort, in the service of mankind. Shame on me. (p.178)
This is Vonnegut's ninth novel, published 27 years after his first, Player Piano (1952).
A hell of a lot had happened in those years – most of the 1950s, the entire 1960s and most of the 1970s – sex and drugs and rock and roll, the swinging sixties, hippies, glam rock, prog rock, punk – the Vietnam War with all its student protests segueing into the Killing Fields in Cambodia, the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King, the Civil Rights Movement morphing into the Black Panthers and Black Power, the entire Space Age from Sputnik through the moon landings to the Space Shuttle, the oil crisis, Watergate and the discrediting of the American presidency.
Reading Vonnegut's novels in sequence is like following him and his country on an enormous bender, and then waking up dazed and incredibly hungover the morning after.
A return to sobriety
That's how reading Jailbird feels (at first, anyway). In comparison with the freaky experimentalism of Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and of his most fragmented and experimental novel, Breakfast of Champions (1973) which comes complete with Vonnegut's own illustrations – and unlike the knackered sci-fi of the dystopian novel Slapstick (1976), Jailbird seems like a return to sobriety and convention.
For example, unlike those three novels whose texts are split up into fragmented sections and paragraphs by asterisks or arrows, garnished with illustrations, packed with digressions, including the author's speculations about his own characters – Jailbird is visually a return to convention, the prose arranged without gimmicks into consecutive paragraphs, themselves grouped into 23 normal-length chapters (unlike the page or half-page-long chapters of its predecessors). Jailbird looks like a normal book.
The long preface
And it does indeed turn out to be a much more conventional read, in tone, mood and style. This is signalled by the thirty-page preface.
Vonnegut hadn't been shy of writing prefaces to his novels which, as the 60s turned into the 70s, had contained more and more personal, almost intimate, information (for example, about his mother's suicide and his own depression).
In striking contrast to the 'letting it all hang out' approach of those introductions, the introduction to 1979's Jailbird is strikingly serious and earnest. In tones close to that of a history book or journalistic feature, it recounts the story of the Cuyahoga Bridge Massacre, in which, in 1894, peaceful and mostly female protesters outside an iron works which had laid off their menfolk for rejecting a pay cut, were shot down by freelance 'security men' brought in from outside the state.
The link to the rest of the book is that one of the sons of the brutal Scottish immigrant who owned the iron works – Daniel McCone – who was, therefore, responsible for the massacre, is Alexander Hamilton McCone. Well-meaning and well educated Alexander had tried to intervene to break up the protest but is forced to watch the massacre take place, nonetheless.
This results in him withdrawing to live as a traumatised recluse cut off from society, from even his own wife and daughter, by an extreme stammer. His only company is a young boy, the son of the McCone family's cook and chauffeur Walter F. Starbuck. In return for keeping him company, Alexander promises to send the lad to Harvard when he grows up.
And Jailbird turns out to be the story of Walter F. Starbuck's life, as told by himself.
First person memoir
In this respect it is like the first-person memoirs which make up Mother Night, Cat's Cradle and Slapstick. In all of these an ageing man (Starbuck is 66 at the time of writing this book, p.47) looks back over his life from a current situation in which it is drawing to an end. Use of this retrospective point of view means the narrative can jump around from scene to scene, can set up expectations of the future, can signpost major incidents coming up numerous times before actually getting round to describing them.
And it leaves the narrator free to lard the text with his own comments, thoughts and interpretations, something Vonnegut was very inclined to do in those earlier books.
So this memoir or biography is being written by by Walter F. Starbuck.
Right on the first page he gives us the straightforward chronology of his life (just as he did the life of Billy Pilgrim on page one of Slaughterhouse-Five). He was born in 1913, went to Harvard in 1931, got his first government job in 1938. In 1945 he was sent to Germany 'to oversee the feeding and housing of the American, British, French, and Russian delegations to the War Crimes Trials' (p.51) and ends up spending four years in Germany.
In 1946 he married a Jewish translator he met in Germany and quickly had a son from whom he is estranged. In 1953 he was sacked from the federal government and ended up helping his wife with her interior decoration company throughout the 1960s. In 1970 he was offered a job in the Nixon White House, and in 1975 tried and convicted of involvement in the Watergate conspiracies, followed by early release from prison in 1977.
Somewhere in the blurbs for the book it says that this is Vonnegut's Watergate novel but that is wildly misleading. That makes you think you're going to be taken into the labyrinthine complexities of the Watergate conspiracies, meet the various bad guys in the Nixon administration, maybe there will be some thriller-style suspense and uncovering of new evidence.
Imagine how thrilling and exciting a write like Robert Harris would make a thriller about Watergate.
But nothing could be further from the truth. Jailbird is neither thrilling nor exciting, it is weird and – the temptation is to say 'surreal', but really it is nonsensical in the Edward Lear sense of putting nonsensical, non-sequitur and bizarre ideas together to see what effect they give.
RAMJAC Corps
Thus throughout the book we keep hearing that almost any company you can think of is being bought up by the huge and anonymous RAMJAC Corporation. It is only at the end of the book that we realise RAMJAC is run by one of Starbuck's old girlfriends, in fact one of the only four women he's ever loved, Mary Kathleen O'Looney. She lives as a bag lady on the streets of New York, wearing enormous black trainers in which she keeps all her legal documentation, and carrying six stuffed filthy bags around. She stinks, her hair is falling out and she is physically disgusting as Starbuck discovers the day after he is released from prison and a friend hails him in the street.
O'Looney hears his name, grabs hold of his hand, refuses to let go, and takes him down into her secret hideaway in a disused train station beneath Manhattan (to be precise, an abandoned locomotive repair shop beneath Grand Central Station). She reveals that she is the CEO of RAMJAC Corp and sends instructions by mail to the lawyer who administers her wishes under the pseudonym of Mrs Jack Graham. These are verified by including fingerprints of all her fingers and thumbs. This means that criminals who have learned about this system, try to kidnap her and cut off her hands in order to use the fingerprints to steal her money. This is not as paranoid as it sounds: one time she was staying in a hotel suite in Nicaragua waited on only by Mormons, the only people she trusts. She met a woman whose husband had just died of amoebic dysentry and put her up in her rooms, while she (Mary) went to make arrangements to ship the body home.
When she came back the Mormon had been murdered – and both her hands cut off and stolen (p.217).
In the couple of days after being released from prison Starbuck receives kindly treatment from a number of people – a prison guard, the chauffeur who brings him into Manhattan, a waiter at a restaurant, the owner of a deep fat frying joint, and so on.
Chatting to the disgusting, half-bald, filthy O'Looney he mentions their names only to have her straightaway write a letter to her executive lawyer, Arpad Leen, instructing that these eight people (including Starbuck himself) be immediately made Vice Presidents of various divisions of RAMJAC Corps, and that's how the book ends, with a party attended by this random selection of eight guys who now find themselves executives in a massive American corporation.
Starbuck himself ends up as Executive Vice-President of the Down Home Records Division of the RAMJAC Corporation, along with Clyde Carter the prison guard, Cleveland Lawes the limousine driver, Dr Israel Edel the night clerk at the Arapahoe Hotel, Frank Ubriaco owner of the Coffee Shop who once deep-fat-fried his own hand when his expensive watch fell off into the fryer and on impulse he reached in to get it – all Vice presidents of one bit or another of the multinational corporation.
Hopefully, this summary of the RAMJAC/O'Looney thread of the novel shows you that this is not a book about Watergate, nor a thriller, nor really a conventional novel at all.
Satire or ridicule?
And it's not really a satire on corporate America. A satire usually aims to undermine its target by making accurate, insightful hits on it. Inventing the idea that the most powerful corporation in America is run by a baglady hiding out in a derelict station under Manhattan isn't really satirising corporate America, it is ridiculing it. This book – maybe all Vonnegut's books – are less satires than ridicules.
In his view the whole world is so absurd and nonsensical that ridiculing it is the only rational response – including ridiculing the very idea of being a writer and writing novels (which is why I think I like Breakfast of Champions best of the seven novels I've read). There is no subtlety or insight to it.
I will say further, as an officer of an enormous international conglomerate, that nobody who is doing well in this economy ever even wonders what is really going on.
We are chimpanzees. We are orangutans. (p.123)
This is not satire. It is the despairing ridicule of a man who has given up trying to understand.
The Watergate theme, such as it is, is limited to the following. Starbuck tells us that back in the 1950s he was called on to testify about communists in government. Before the famous House Un-American Activities Committee Starbuck lists a number of colleagues who he knows were communists in the 1930s buthave changed their views and present no threat to the American people. Among these he mistakenly includes a colleague named Leland Clewes. Clewes in fact had never been a communist and tries to clear his name.
Starbuck explains that the young assistant to Senator Joe McCarthy, one Richard Milhous Nixon, then spends two years hounding and investigating Clewes and eventually getting him convicted and sent to jail. This drew Nixon into the public eye. In a roundabout way, then, Starbuck takes the blame for having made Nixon's career. This is why, a long time later, Starbuck finds himself offered a job at the Nixon White House. Nixon one day remembered his name, asked his aides what Starbuck was doing, wondered if he'd accept a lowly job.
This nothing job is 'President's special advisor on youth affairs' (p.46). Starbuck was given a windowless room in the basement of the White House ('a sub-basement in the Executive Office Building'), from where he churned out some 200 reports over five years about youth activities, none of which were ever read by anyone. Salary: $36,000 pa.
Starbuck's sole connection with any of the Watergate conspiracy was twofold. Throughout his time there he could hear people stomping about upstairs. One day he coughed loudly and immediately there was a rumpus down the stairs and a couple of senior staffers burst in demanding to know whether he'd been listening in on their conversations. They then tested the soundproofing, with one of them shouting and swearing upstairs, while another one stood in Starbuck's office until he was satisfied that even shouting didn't travel through the floorboards and he could never have heard anything.
And then, in 1975, when police came to search the White House, some of the guilty staffers came rushing downstairs with several crates packed with cash. These were illegal donations to Nixon's re-election campaign, which they thought they could stash in Starbuck's out-of-the-way office. But the cops searched even down here, found it, arrested Starbuck, and that was what he was tried and convicted and sent to gaol for, conspiracy to hide, defraud, illegal contributions etc.
So you see, the book offers little or no insight into Watergate or Nixon, or the intricacies of the conspiracy (there is one scene where Starbuck attends a meeting of the entire cabinet, seated far away, the lowest of the low, and chain smoking so much that Nixon makes a joke about him – that is Starbuck's one and only encounter and anecdote about Nixon pp.61-62. He takes the opportunity to name a number of the men around the table who would end up in prison. But it isn't an insight or exploration or explanation of the Nixon White House. It is one joke and a list of names).
It's more as if Starbuck is an innocent bystander, an inoffensive drone right on the periphery of the administration who gets sent to prison because the bad guys stashed some hot money in his office and he was too dutiful to reveal their names. This could have been the basis of a comedy if the rest of the book wasn't so weird and nonsensical, and about so much else.
For example, there is much more about is wife Ruth, her history, how they met and their life together, than there is about politics. Jewish, Ruth had been hidden for the first part of the war, but then discovered and sent to a concentration camp which she survived to be liberated by the Americans and Starbuck met her only hours after they had been requisitioned by an American army unit which needed a translator at a checkpoint. Starbuck himself requisitioned her, took her to a good hotel, fed her up, and employed her as a translator for his work with the War Trials. He takes ten or so pages to describe their work in some detail, to paint a picture of her earnest pessimism, and the determination with which she sets up an interior design company once they return to American in 1949.
Trout was, by this stage, a well known recurrent figure in Vonnegut's fiction, maybe his most eminent creation, having appeared in Breakfast of Champions, God Bless You Mr. Rosewater, and Slaughterhouse-Five. In Champions he is one of the two major protagonists and we learn a lot about his life. He is definitely a 'real person'. So it comes as a surprise in Jailbird to learn that Trout is in fact one of the pseudonyms of a fellow prison at the gaol where Starbuck serves his two year sentence, in fact the only 'lifer' in the Federal Minimum Security Adult Correctional Facility near Finletter Air Force Base, Georgia. His real name is Dr Robert Fender and he has a doctorate is in veterinary science. While in prison, Fender also writes science fiction novels under another pseudonym, Frank X. Barlow (p.67).
I have seen the way Trout's character changes in different novels as an example of Vonnegut's use of 'unreliable narrators', but I think it's far bigger than that. If we agree that Vonnegut's strategy goes far beyond 'satire' into the realm I've described as 'ridicule', then Jailbird's revealing that Kilgore Trout in fact doesn't exist, is another example of Vonnegut's full-spectrum ridiculing of all stable and sensible ideas about fiction. It is an example of his 'nonsense' approach to fiction.
One strategy Vonnegut retains from earlier books, especially Breakfast of Champions, is that the narrator summarises entire novels or stories by Trout. The result is that, instead of having to read an entire Trout novel, you can simply read the narrator's one or two-page summary which are much zippier, funnier or wackier.
There are other echoes of earlier techniques as well. You know I said that Jailbird looks more conventional in the sense that the prose is arranged into consecutive paragraphs and the chapters are a sensible length (unlike all three of his previous novels). Yes, but he redeploys the catchphrase. In Slaughterhouse many paragraphs or anecdotes ended with the phrase 'So it goes'. Here it is 'And so on'. Similarly, it doesn't happen often, but every now and then Vonnegut just inserts a one-word paragraph saying 'Peace'. Just to remind us that the same wacky nonsensicalist of the earlier experimental books is still there, lurking.
And the spirit of the nonsensicalist emerges more and more as the book progresses. There is an extended description of the night in 1931 he took the 'Yankee clock heiress' Sarah Wyatt to dinner at the swanky Hotel Arapahoe in Manhattan. Partly because he remembers it all when, having just been released from prison in 1977, Starbuck returns to the same hotel to see it much reduced, shabby and dingy and half boarded up. In fact, the receptionist tells him, the entire area where the restaurant used to be has been converted into a porn movie cinema which specialises in gay porn, many of the movies climaxing with scenes of anal fisting, something which, unsurprisingly, shocks and horrifies the narrator (p.130).
When he expresses an opinion, Starbuck just sounds dazed at what his country has come to.
Mary Kathleen O'Looney wasn't the only shopping-bag lady in the United States of America. There were tens of thousands of them in major cities throughout the country. Ragged regiments of them had been produced accidentally, and to imaginable purpose, by the great engine of the economy. Another part of the machine was spitting out unrepentant murderers ten years old, and dope fiends, and child batterers and many other bad things. People claimed to be investigating. Unspecified repairs were to be made at some future time. (p.151)
Sacco and Vanzetti
He's obviously been thinking, or reading, about the celebrated case of the Italian-born American anarchists Sacco and Vanzetti who were controversially convicted of murdering a guard and a paymaster during the April 15, 1920 armed robbery of the Slater and Morrill Shoe Company in Braintree, Massachusetts. They were both executed in the electric chair just after midnight on August 23, 1927.
Vonnegut refers to them in the preface to the book, and the preface ends with a quote from Nicola Sacco writing to his 13-year-old son Dante, a quote which went on to be turned into a song, and rallying cry for the Socialist cause in America.
Help the weak ones that cry for help, help the prosecuted and the victim, because they are your better friends; they are the comrades that fight and fall as your father and Bartolo fought and fell yesterday for the conquest of the joy of freedom for all the poor workers. In this struggle of life you will find more love and you will be loved.
Towards the end of the book, the narrative stops altogether while Vonnegut gives an extended summary of the events surrounding the supposed crimes, trial and execution of the pair. This chimes with the fact that Starbuck, although a Harvard man, was himself a student activist, and an actual member of the communist party.
This is par for the course in Vonnegut's novels all of which contain large chunks of random subject matter thrown in from all sides. It's part of what makes them surprisingly chewy and dense.
But it's difficult to reconcile this apparent earnestness about Sacco and Vanzetti and the anarchist / socialist cause – the totally straight description of the 1894 Cuyahoga Bridge Massacre (fictional, although based on similar worker killings which took place around that time), and descriptions of Starbuck's own student activism (it was while editing a communist student paper at Harvard that he first met the beautiful and idealistic Mary Kathleen O'Toole) — with the helpless nonsensicality of the main plot i.e. the way a ruined baglady turns out to be running the largest corporation in America. It doesn't cohere. It'a as if they're from different worlds – the serious, and the utterly nonsensical.
The nonsense is entertaining and sometimes funny but the trouble is it makes all his 'serious' criticisms of America or war or capitalism tremendously easy to ignore, take with a pinch of salt, and dismiss.
In the epilogue Starbuck describes how, soon after being made Executive Vice-President of the Down Home Records Division of the RAMJAC Corporation, he goes to see Mary Kathleen O'Looney in her secret base under grand Central Station and discovers her in a very poor way. In fact she dies in his arms. The epilogue then describes how Starbuck disposes of her body secretly and doesn't tell anyone. RAMJAC Corporation continues for another two years before the discovery of its CEO's demise is finally made. At which point Starbuck is taken to court once again, and convicted of not reporting her death, fraud etc.
The book ends with a party given for him by all the other vice-presidents, which has the effect of tying up any loose strands of the 'plot', before he is scheduled to be sent back to the slammer. And that is the story of this inveterate jailbird.
Jailbird on Amazon
Kurt Vonnegut reviews
The Sirens of Titan (1959)
Mother Night (1962)
Cat's Cradle (1963)
Slaughterhouse-Five (1969)
Breakfast of Champions (1973)
Slapstick (1976)
Jailbird (1979)
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…
1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling 'history' of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,
1956 They Shall Have Stars by James Blish – explains the invention – in the near future – of the anti-death drugs and the spindizzy technology which allow the human race to colonise the galaxy
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s
by Simon on January 23, 2019 • Permalink
Posted in America, Books, Novel
Tagged Alexander Hamilton McCone, America, anal fisting, anarchism, Arpad Leen, Cleveland Lawes, Clyde Carter, Cuyahoga Bridge Massacre, Dr Robert Fender, fiction, Frank Ubriaco, Germany, Grand Central Station, Harvard, Harvard University, Hotel Arapahoe, House Un-American Activities Committee, Israel Edel, Jailbird, Joe McCarthy, Kilgore Trout, Leland Clewes, Manhattan, Mary Kathleen O'Looney, Mormons, Mrs Jack Graham, Nazi, Nicola Sacco, novel, Politics, RAMJAC Corps, Richard Milhous Nixon, Richard Nixon, Sacco and Vanzetti, Sarah Wyatt, satire, story, Vonnegut, Walter F. Starbuck, War Crimes Trials, Watergate, White House
Posted by Simon on January 23, 2019
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2019/01/23/jailbird-kurt-vonnegut/
The Man Who Was Thursday by G.K. Chesterton (1908)
'We say that the most dangerous criminal now is the entirely lawless modern philosopher. Compared to him, burglars and bigamists are essentially moral men; my heart goes out to them. They accept the essential ideal of man; they merely seek it wrongly. Thieves respect property. They merely wish the property to become their property that they may more perfectly respect it. But philosophers dislike property as property; they wish to destroy the very idea of personal possession.'
(A policeman, talking to the novel's protagonist, Gabriel Syme)
Chesterton's paper-thin characters
Having just read four novels on the trot by H.G. Wells, I am well aware that one of Wells's notorious shortcomings is the way his characters are often mere pawns in scenarios or plotlines designed to convey Wells's social, technological and political ideas.
At least that's what I thought until I read these two novels of Chesterton's. Wells's characters have Shakespearian depth compared to Chesterton's.
Chesterton's characters are names attached to attitudes, or positions, and a great deal of the interchanges between these entities are really the cut and thrust of opposing ideas in a debating society.
I find Wells's characters endearing because, by comparison, they do have real back stories and histories – for example, Wells goes to maybe silly lengths to give realistic depth to his character Bert Smallways. He builds up our sense of Bert's ability with mechanics and engines, at repairing bicycle and motor bikes, a skill which will come in handy as he proceed through the adventures in the novel, The War In the Air.
Chesterton's characters, by contrast, are almost all the same. They all give clever speeches. They are all fond of paradoxes. And very fond of generalising about human nature, about God. Reminiscent of the kind of 'soft' theologising you get in Graham Greene. But whereas Greene does it (at length) in his novels mainly to make the reader share Greene's basically suicidal worldview by blackening human nature at every opportunity…
Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.
We are all of us resigned to death: it's life we aren't resigned to.
In human relationships, kindness and lies are worth a thousand truths.
Innocence is like a dumb leper who has lost his bell, wandering the world, meaning no harm.
… Chesterton does it to make the reader chortle with the recognition of a clever paradox, to satirise the progressive philosophies of his day, and to point to something deeper and more mysterious about human existence.
The introductions to The Napoleon of Notting Hill or The Man Who Was Thursday confidently extract from them certain 'messages' and 'meanings'; but the experience of actually reading the books is nowhere near as clear-cut and simple. I found them both to be murky and difficult reads. I sensed that a 'message' was being propounded, I just couldn't work out what it was.
Chesterton's characters are, in fact, so featureless and interchangeable that they do, often, interchange. The Man Who Was Thursday is not so much a novel, more a fantasy entirely concerned with false identities and secret sides, and characters who flip, in a moment, from being on the side of darkness to being on the side of light – or vice-versa.
The novel is set in the present-day, Edwardian era, where we find two poets in the garden of an artist's colony, located in a fictional new garden city, named Saffron Park.
Mr Lucian Gregory, the red-haired poet, is holding court. All the young ladies of the town flock to admire him and his daringly 'anarchistic' sentiments. But on this evening Gregory is confronted by another poet, flaxen-haired Mr Gabriel Syme, who politely doubts the anarchist's 'commitment'.
Gregory argues that poetry is anarchy and breaking the rules. This makes the young ladies swoon with excitement. Syme counters that poetry is law and gives as an example the wonderful poetry of the London Underground, where you have a map and know exactly which station is coming next on any journey. Law and logic and certainty are the only poetry (says Syme).
Angered, Gregory waits for the party to end then confronts Syme outside the ground of his house. In a feverish conversation Gregory reveals that he really is an anarchist and makes Syme swear not to tell anyone. At which point Syme reveals that he is really a policeman, but that Gregory must swear to tell no-one. They both solemnly swear to keep each other's secrets.
You see how Chesterton's taste for symmetry and paradox overcomes any attempt at 'realism'.
Gregory promptly takes Syme along to a pub which contains a secret table which – in true James Bond style – at the touch of secret button descends down through the floor to a basement below the pub.
This turns out to be the meeting place of the most dangerous Anarchists Club in London. Syme accepts all this with upper-class sang-froid. He is told he is attending a meeting to decide who will become the next leader of this anarchists' 'chapter'. He learns there are seven anarchist groups, each ruled by someone given the codename of a day of the week. Head of the entire Anarchist Movement is a mysterious man named Sunday.
As it happens the man named 'Thursday', who was leader of this section, recently passed away and tonight they are voting for his successor. Everyone expects Gregory to be elected 'Thursday', but he is suddenly overcome by worry that, making them all sound too dangerous will prompt Syme to denounce them all to his police colleagues.
So Gregory makes a surprisingly tame speech recommending they obey the Law, which is met with general disappointment from the assembled anarchists. At which (in a characteristically Chestertonian paradox) Syme the policeman leaps to his feet and makes a startlingly violent speech, denouncing Gregory's pacifism – and he is elected by an overwhelming majority. Humorous paradox, and ironic reversal.
Thus Syme is made the new 'Thursday' and is led off down a secret passage which opens onto the Thames where a steam boat is waiting – leaving Gregory seething with anger and impotence. It is, to say the least, odd to the modern reader that Gregory keeps his promise not to expose his rival – but then the entire novel is odd, and is really more of a psychological fantasia than a 'novel'. If you try applying realistic criteria you will get nowhere.
The man who was Sunday
The steam boat chugs along to the Embankment in central London where 'Thursday' is met by 'the secretary', a posh man with a disfigured face who takes him through the streets up to Leicester Square where the Anarchists are holding a meeting on a balcony overlooking the tourists.
Their leader, Sunday, has a theory that if you loudly announce to everyone that you are an anarchist no-one will believe you. Thus they make their plans to blow up kings and emperors, at an open-air restaurant while waiters come and go bringing drinks and dishes, tut-tutting and laughing at those funny old anarchists who do like their little jokes. Irony. Paradox.
Syme is greeted by the assembled anarchist leaders as the new Thursday and promptly introduced to Monday, Tuesday etc. Chesterton takes the time to introduce them all to us, along with their real identities and histories, including a grey-haired professor.
After all the introductions, Sunday does in fact call them away from the terrace and into a locked room, where he announces that one among them is a traitor!!
This is a scene I've seen in so many James Bond and other spy adventure movies, I wonder if it originated with Chesterton. Probably not, in which case I wonder if an origin can be found – or whether the trope of the spy among the band of conspirators, the traitor in our midst, is not in fact as old as story-telling.
Anyway, Sunday ratchets up the tension with furious denunciations of the as-yet-unidentified spy in their midst, and Syme is just about to stand up and confess that it is he when, to his amazement, a scraggy-haired Polish anarchist does just that – stands up and confesses to being a policeman, throwing his blue police card onto the table.
Sunday is incomprehensibly magnanimous, and asks him to go now and promise not to tell their plans to anyone (!).
Then Sunday gets down to organising an assassination outrage against a politician visiting Paris. After this the group break up and go their separate ways.
Syme is pursued
There is then a spookily atmospheric sequence where Syme wanders along to a Soho restaurant… only to find the so-called Professor has followed him.
Syme gets up, walks through Covent Garden and stops in a pub… only to find the Professor sitting at a table.
Syme storms out and runs along to St Pauls, its dome shimmering as night falls and with it a shower of snow and hears, in the snowdrift quietness… the sound of the Professor pottering along behind him.
Gripped by a kind of panic fear Syme runs on through the black London streets, down to the docks and ducks into a rough pub. Where the Professor walks through the door straight after him.
Sequences like this fully justify the novel's sub-title, 'A Nightmare'. There is something fully nightmareish, something creepily uncanny, about this unstoppable pursuit.
The Professor finally confronts Syme, asking whether he is a policeman, which Syme furiously denies. 'Shame,' replies the Professor', because I am,' and he tosses onto the table the same type of blue police identity card that the Pole had done earlier, at the same time ripping off the mask which makes him look like a senile old man, to reveal a fresh-faced young chap beneath!!!!
So now Syme knows that three of the seven dangerous anarchists sitting round the meeting table off Leicester Square… were in fact policemen (the one who got throw out, himself and now, the Professor)!
Double identities and ironies!
Revealing the other police spies
This has taken us up to chapter 8 of 15. To cut a long story what happens next is that Symes and the Professor then track down the other three members of the group and discover, one by one, that they are all policemen masquerading as anarchists.
Unmasking the last one requires the by-now assembled squad of undercover policemen to catch the ferry to France and track down the last member of the seven, who was nominated to be the assassin sent to blow up a leading politician in Paris. The last of the seven is a French aristocrat named the Marquis de Saint Eustache.
This turns into a really compelling and weird fantasia of a sequence as our man Syme ends up fighting an elaborately staged duel with the Marquis, under the misapprehension that the latter is actually an anarchist.
During the duel (with fencing swords) Syme repeatedly sticks his point into the Marquis with no apparent result. Exactly as in a nightmare where, whatever you do to stop it, the monster keeps getting back up.
The solution of the mystery, revealed at the climax of the contest, is that the Marquis is wearing an early type of bullet-proof vest.
Anyway, the Marquis has no sooner revealed that he, like all the others, is in fact an undercover policeman than the train, which everyone thought he was intending to catch to Paris to carry out his terrorist outrage – pulls into the nearby station.
Chased by anarchists
To the horror of the assembled anarchists-now-revealed-as-policemen, a great crowd of genuine anarchists swarm out of it, all wearing Keystone Cops-style black masks over the tops of their faces, and led by none other than the 'secretary' who had escorted Syme from the Embankment to the anarchist meeting in Leicester Square, in the earlier chapter.
The chase is on! Our chaps run through woods with the gang of black-masked figures gaining on them. They arrive at a farm the marquis knows, where the kindly old owner lends them horses. But the anarchists are still gaining on them and then they are horrified to hear the sounds of horse galloping after them and to recognise the kindly old man among them. He is one of the Enemy!!
Our chaps gallop onto another house where a friend of the Marquis's lends them cars and off they zoom. But one breaks down and they hear… other motor cars chasing them, look up and see the 'friend' among their pursuers. The whole world is against them!
This nightmare sense becomes overwhelming when they arrive at a fishing village on the coast and… the entire population rises up against them, forming a mob, joined now by the horse riders and the car drivers, creating an enormous crowd of black-masked anarchists and villagers and fishermen who surround them and chase them down onto a pier, pushing them further and further out till they reach the end of the pier and have nowhere left to turn.
The earth in anarchy
No wonder this chapter is titled 'The Earth In Anarchy'. Apparently, Chesterton wrote the book during a bout of severe depression. It was partly caused by the great wave of anarchist, socialist, positivist and nihilist thinking which swept over Europe in the 1890s and 1900s. All these trends were materialist, denying the existence of a 'soul' or God, insisting on the purely material view of life as a constant struggle unmediated by any kind of transcendent values.
As a devout Anglican, Chesterton found all of these philosophies represented profound attacks on his most deeply cherished beliefs and all the things he loved in life.
The Man Who Was Thursday is thus a kind of ecstasy of horror, a vision of a world borne down in a great black tide of nihilism. As he explained: 'It was intended to describe the world of wild doubt and despair which the pessimists were generally describing at that date.'
At this, its hysterical climax, Syme, pushed to the end of the quay, suddenly rebels and runs straight at the anarchist crowd and, in particular, at the 'secretary' who is leading them. He accuses them of being filthy anarchists who deny the beauty of order and law and life.
At which point the 'secretary' steps back, tears off his mask and announces 'I arrest you in the name of the law.'
'The law?' screams Syme. 'But you're anarchists.'
'No you're the anarchists,' says the secretary. 'I am a policeman and these are my deputies, and we have dressed up as anarchists as a disguise, to try and mix in with you.'
!!!!!!
The crowd which has been chasing them all this time was doing so because they had been told they were pursuing dangerous anarchists. They aren't anarchists at all. The entire thing has been a mistake and a misunderstanding.
'There is some mistake,' [the Secretary] said. 'Mr. Syme, I hardly think you understand your position. I arrest you in the name of the law.'
'Of the law?' said Syme, and dropped his stick.
'Certainly!' said the Secretary. 'I am a detective from Scotland Yard,' and he took a small blue card from his pocket.
'And what do you suppose we are?' asked the Professor, and threw up his arms.
'You,' said the Secretary stiffly, 'are, as I know for a fact, members of the Supreme Anarchist Council. Disguised as one of you, I – '
Dr. Bull tossed his sword into the sea.
'There never was any Supreme Anarchist Council,' he said. 'We were all a lot of silly policemen looking at each other. And all these nice people who have been peppering us with shot thought we were the dynamiters. I knew I couldn't be wrong about the mob,' he said, beaming over the enormous multitude, which stretched away to the distance on both sides. 'Vulgar people are never mad. I'm vulgar myself, and I know. I am now going on shore to stand a drink to everybody here.'
Note this last little speech. Bull is one of the anarchists-who-is-really-a-policeman and here he expresses one of Chesterton's shibboleths.
It is the intellectuals who we should be worried about, the intellectuals who are promoting anarchy and socialism and nihilism, the intellectuals who are attacking everything good and sweet and clean.
By contrast, the so-called common people have never lost touch with the real values of life, with country lanes and Anglican churches and pints of good old English ale.
Who is Sunday?
So all the six anarchists named after the six days of the week, who are now all revealed to be policemen in disguise, catch the ferry and train back to London and all troop off to Leicester Square to confront big black-suited Sunday. He is still (as in a dream) sitting eating on the balcony overlooking the square where they left him. To be honest I didn't understand the ending at all. Here is the Wikipedia summary:
Sunday reveals that setting them against each other was all part of his Master Plan. In a surreal conclusion, Sunday is unmasked as only seeming to be terrible; in fact, he is a force of good like the detectives. Sunday is unable to give an answer to the question of why he caused so much trouble and pain for the detectives.
Gregory, the only real anarchist, seems to challenge the good council. His accusation is that they, as rulers, have never suffered like Gregory and their other subjects and so their power is illegitimate. Syme refutes the accusation immediately, because of the terrors inflicted by Sunday on the rest of the council.
So the crux of the thing seems to be that Gregory (the poet, the man we met in the opening scene) is the only spokesman for real anarchists – and he says that the opinions of Syme and all the rest are not valid because they have never suffered.
Only Gregory and his kind have suffered, and their terrorism is justified by their suffering.
But Symes denies this. He and others like him have suffered. The anarchists don't have a monopoly of suffering. Syme shouts:
'No agonies can be too great to buy the right to say to this accuser, "We also have suffered."'
And then… it all turns out to be a dream! Syme awakens. He has napped while on a country walk. He resumes his walk along a country lane, in a little epiphany of the kind of values, images and ideas which Chesterton values: the countryside, tradition, good fellowship.
And this hymn leads up to a vision of one of the pretty young women who Syme had met and chatted to in that garden at the start of the novel.
As [Syme] gazed, the great face grew to an awful size, grew larger than the colossal mask of Memnon, which had made him scream as a child. It grew larger and larger, filling the whole sky; then everything went black. Only in the blackness before it entirely destroyed his brain he seemed to hear a distant voice saying a commonplace text that he had heard somewhere, 'Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?'
When men in books awake from a vision, they commonly find themselves in some place in which they might have fallen asleep; they yawn in a chair, or lift themselves with bruised limbs from a field. Syme's experience was something much more psychologically strange if there was indeed anything unreal, in the earthly sense, about the things he had gone through.
For while he could always remember afterwards that he had swooned before the face of Sunday, he could not remember having ever come to at all. He could only remember that gradually and naturally he knew that he was and had been walking along a country lane with an easy and conversational companion. That companion had been a part of his recent drama; it was the red-haired poet Gregory. They were walking like old friends, and were in the middle of a conversation about some triviality. But Syme could only feel an unnatural buoyancy in his body and a crystal simplicity in his mind that seemed to be superior to everything that he said or did. He felt he was in possession of some impossible good news, which made every other thing a triviality, but an adorable triviality.
Dawn was breaking over everything in colours at once clear and timid; as if Nature made a first attempt at yellow and a first attempt at rose. A breeze blew so clean and sweet, that one could not think that it blew from the sky; it blew rather through some hole in the sky.
Syme felt a simple surprise when he saw rising all round him on both sides of the road the red, irregular buildings of Saffron Park. He had no idea that he had walked so near London. He walked by instinct along one white road, on which early birds hopped and sang, and found himself outside a fenced garden. There he saw the sister of Gregory, the girl with the gold-red hair, cutting lilac before breakfast, with the great unconscious gravity of a girl.
Sunday's parting question as the nightmare collapses – 'Can ye drink of the cup that I drink of?' is the question Jesus asks St. James and St. John in the Gospel of Mark, chapter 10, vs 38–39. It is a challenge to Syme and maybe to the reader, asking whether they have the 'commitment' to follow in Jesus' footsteps… Maybe this makes sense to a Christian but within the context of the novel it is difficult to… pin down, to really understand.
Metaphysical landscapes
At its most intense – in the sequence where Syme is followed by the spooky Professor across London, and in the delirious chase scene across the French countryside where everyone on earth seems to be pursuing our heroes – The Man Who Was Thursday becomes a really effective spine-chiller.
And throughout there is an otherworldly sensibility at work. Chesterton's is a mind which doesn't flow toward the concrete but naturally leads him off into apocalyptic theological and symbolical landscapes. Here he is summing up Syme's first impression of the other anarchists sitting round the conference table.
Such were the six men who had sworn to destroy the world. Again and again Syme strove to pull together his common sense in their presence. Sometimes he saw for an instant that these notions were subjective, that he was only looking at ordinary men, one of whom was old, another nervous, another short-sighted. The sense of an unnatural symbolism always settled back on him again.
Each figure seemed to be, somehow, on the borderland of things, just as their theory was on the borderland of thought. He knew that each one of these men stood at the extreme end, so to speak, of some wild road of reasoning. He could only fancy, as in some old-world fable, that if a man went westward to the end of the world he would find something – say a tree – that was more or less than a tree, a tree possessed by a spirit; and that if he went east to the end of the world he would find something else that was not wholly itself – a tower, perhaps, of which the very shape was wicked. So these figures seemed to stand up, violent and unaccountable, against an ultimate horizon, visions from the verge. The ends of the earth were closing in.
'An ultimate horizon, visions from the verge.' That is where a lot of Chesterton's imagination is always tending. He is always moving from the actual towards the metaphysical, but the metaphysical with an Edwardian twist.
The strangeness of some of these visions reminds me of the weird otherworldly landscapes conjured up in C.S. Lewis's great science fiction trilogy, or even in Wyndham Lewis's very peculiar theological science fiction novel, The Childermass.
London landscapes
However, the parts of the book I liked most were when Chesterton's natural taste for the fantastical is tied, anchored and embedded in naturalistic descriptions of Edwardian London.
For example, on the tugboat journey from the secret basement where Syme is elected 'Thursday' to a mooring at the Embankment near Charing Cross, where he first meets the 'Secretary' and is escorted to Leicester Square.
Over the whole landscape lay a luminous and unnatural discoloration, as of that disastrous twilight which Milton spoke of as shed by the sun in eclipse; so that Syme fell easily into his first thought, that he was actually on some other and emptier planet, which circled round some sadder star.
But the more he felt this glittering desolation in the moonlit land, the more his own chivalric folly glowed in the night like a great fire. Even the common things he carried with him – the food and the brandy and the loaded pistol [which he has brought from the anarchists meeting] – took on exactly that concrete and material poetry which a child feels when he takes a gun upon a journey or a bun with him to bed.
The sword-stick and the brandy-flask, though in themselves only the tools of morbid conspirators, became the expressions of his own more healthy romance. The sword-stick became almost the sword of chivalry, and the brandy the wine of the stirrup-cup. For even the most dehumanised modern fantasies depend on some older and simpler figure; the adventures may be mad, but the adventurer must be sane. The dragon without St. George would not even be grotesque.
So this inhuman landscape was only imaginative by the presence of a man really human. To Syme's exaggerative mind the bright, bleak houses and terraces by the Thames looked as empty as the mountains of the moon. But even the moon is only poetical because there is a man in the moon.
The tug was worked by two men, and with much toil went comparatively slowly. The clear moon that had lit up Chiswick had gone down by the time that they passed Battersea, and when they came under the enormous bulk of Westminster day had already begun to break. It broke like the splitting of great bars of lead, showing bars of silver; and these had brightened like white fire when the tug, changing its onward course, turned inward to a large landing stage rather beyond Charing Cross.
The great stones of the Embankment seemed equally dark and gigantic as Syme looked up at them. They were big and black against the huge white dawn. They made him feel that he was landing on the colossal steps of some Egyptian palace; and, indeed, the thing suited his mood, for he was, in his own mind, mounting to attack the solid thrones of horrible and heathen kings. He leapt out of the boat on to one slimy step, and stood, a dark and slender figure, amid the enormous masonry. The two men in the tug put her off again and turned up stream. They had never spoken a word.
Chesterton's point in the middle of the passage is a conservative, Christian one, that even the little things in our life are illuminated and somehow redeemed by repeating older, more noble 'figures' and archetypes.
Maybe. Maybe not. But there is no denying the majesty of his description of day breaking like the splitting of great bars of lead, nor the power of his description of Syme leaping onto the slimy steps of a quay, a slender figure dwarfed by the enormous stones of the Embankment.
For Chesterton that physical description is the basis for his theological points; but for me the physical description is the metaphysical. The depiction of the actual world around us – whether in well-chosen phrases or in lines of pen or charcoal – is, for me, the really true worship.
The seven days of the week
He was the Secretary of the Council, and his twisted smile was regarded with more terror than anything, except the President's horrible, happy laughter. But now that Syme had more space and light to observe him, there were other touches. His fine face was so emaciated, that Syme thought it must be wasted with some disease; yet somehow the very distress of his dark eyes denied this. It was no physical ill that troubled him. His eyes were alive with intellectual torture, as if pure thought was pain.
The man's name, it seemed, was Gogol; he was a Pole, and in this circle of days he was called Tuesday. His soul and speech were incurably tragic; he could not force himself to play the prosperous and frivolous part demanded of him by President Sunday… Gogol, or Tuesday, had his simplicity well symbolised by a dress designed upon the division of the waters, a dress that separated upon his forehead and fell to his feet, grey and silver, like a sheet of rain
A certain Marquis de St. Eustache, a sufficiently characteristic figure. The first few glances found nothing unusual about him, except that he was the only man at table who wore the fashionable clothes as if they were really his own. He had a black French beard cut square and a black English frock-coat cut even squarer. But Syme, sensitive to such things, felt somehow that the man carried a rich atmosphere with him, a rich atmosphere that suffocated. It reminded one irrationally of drowsy odours and of dying lamps in the darker poems of Byron and Poe. With this went a sense of his being clad, not in lighter colours, but in softer materials; his black seemed richer and warmer than the black shades about him, as if it were compounded of profound colour. His black coat looked as if it were only black by being too dense a purple. His black beard looked as if it were only black by being too deep a blue. And in the gloom and thickness of the beard his dark red mouth showed sensual and scornful. Whatever he was he was not a Frenchman; he might be a Jew; he might be something deeper yet in the dark heart of the East. In the bright coloured Persian tiles and pictures showing tyrants hunting, you may see just those almond eyes, those blue-black beards, those cruel, crimson lips.
Next a very old man, Professor de Worms, who still kept the chair of Friday, though every day it was expected that his death would leave it empty. Save for his intellect, he was in the last dissolution of senile decay. His face was as grey as his long grey beard, his forehead was lifted and fixed finally in a furrow of mild despair. In no other case, not even that of Gogol, did the bridegroom brilliancy of the morning dress express a more painful contrast. For the red flower in his button-hole showed up against a face that was literally discoloured like lead; the whole hideous effect was as if some drunken dandies had put their clothes upon a corpse. When he rose or sat down, which was with long labour and peril, something worse was expressed than mere weakness, something indefinably connected with the horror of the whole scene. It did not express decrepitude merely, but corruption. Another hateful fancy crossed Syme's quivering mind. He could not help thinking that whenever the man moved a leg or arm might fall off.
Right at the end sat the man called Saturday, the simplest and the most baffling of all. He was a short, square man with a dark, square face clean-shaven, a medical practitioner going by the name of Bull. He had that combination of savoir-faire with a sort of well-groomed coarseness which is not uncommon in young doctors. He carried his fine clothes with confidence rather than ease, and he mostly wore a set smile. There was nothing whatever odd about him, except that he wore a pair of dark, almost opaque spectacles. It may have been merely a crescendo of nervous fancy that had gone before, but those black discs were dreadful to Syme; they reminded him of half-remembered ugly tales, of some story about pennies being put on the eyes of the dead. Syme's eye always caught the black glasses and the blind grin. Had the dying Professor worn them, or even the pale Secretary, they would have been appropriate. But on the younger and grosser man they seemed only an enigma. They took away the key of the face. You could not tell what his smile or his gravity meant. Partly from this, and partly because he had a vulgar virility wanting in most of the others it seemed to Syme that he might be the wickedest of all those wicked men. Syme even had the thought that his eyes might be covered up because they were too frightful to see.
At the nearest end of the balcony, blocking up a great part of the perspective, was the back of a great mountain of a man. When Syme had seen him, his first thought was that the weight of him must break down the balcony of stone. His vastness did not lie only in the fact that he was abnormally tall and quite incredibly fat. This man was planned enormously in his original proportions, like a statue carved deliberately as colossal. His head, crowned with white hair, as seen from behind looked bigger than a head ought to be. The ears that stood out from it looked larger than human ears. He was enlarged terribly to scale; and this sense of size was so staggering, that when Syme saw him all the other figures seemed quite suddenly to dwindle and become dwarfish.
The Man Who Was Thursday online
The Man Who Was Thursday Wikipedia article
Review of The Napoleon of Notting Hill (1904)
Posted in Adventure, Novel
Tagged 1908, anarchism, Bull, Charing Cross, Chesterton, Christianity, G.K. Chesterton, Gabriel Syme, Gogol, Graham Greene, H.G. Wells, James Bond, Jesus, Leicester Square, London, Lucian Gregory, Marquis de St. Eustache, metaphysics, novel, Professor de Worms, religion, Saffron Park, St. George, terrorism, the Embankment, The Man Who Was Thursday, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, The War in the Air, Theology, thriller
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/11/23/the-man-who-was-thursday-g-k-chesterton/
Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia by Dominic Lieven (2015)
Towards the Flame is a diplomatic history of imperial Russia in the years 1905 to 1920. By diplomatic history, I mean a detailed – a really detailed – account of the men who ran Russia's Foreign Ministry and its embassies (with sometimes a nod to the heads of the army, navy or other government ministers), their policies, debates and disagreements.
We are given pen portraits of Russia's premiers, foreign and finance ministers, and key ambassadors to London, Paris, Berlin, Vienna and beyond and the guts of the book is a history of their diplomacy – the papers and memos they wrote laying out Russia's strategies – the information they gathered about rival nations' aims and goals – the assessments each nations' military attaches made about their rivals' readiness for war.
(For example, Lieven examines position papers like the brilliantly prescient memorandum the former head of secret police, Petr Durnovo, gave Tsar Nicholas in February 1914, which said that the biggest risk of a prolonged war was that it would trigger a massive social and political revolution (p.304).)
In intricate detail Lieven builds up a picture of the web of political and diplomatic intrigue which took place in the crucial run-up to the Great War, not only between nations, but within nations, as ruling elites were riven by conflicting strategies and visions, by political and personal rivalries, subjected to pressure from often rabidly nationalistic newspapers, and harassed by a series of international crises which repeatedly threatened to plunge the continent into war.
In Lieven's account the question is not, 'Why did the First World War happen', but 'How did they manage to put it off for so long?'
Like many historians of twentieth century Europe, Lieven tells us he has benefited enormously from the opening of Russian archives after the fall of the Soviet Union. He has obviously used the opportunity to track down pretty much every diplomatic telegraph and memo and report and study written by all the key ambassadors, Foreign Ministers, the Tsar and his prime ministers, during these fateful years, and his book presents an excellent summary and contextualising of them.
This is what gives the book its character and distinction. At every crux – for example, over the Bosnian Crisis of 1908 – Lieven briefly tells us what happened on the ground (his book deliberately skips over purely military details, just as it skips over detail of the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand – all this can be found in thousands of other sources) in order to analyse the attitude of the Russian Foreign Ministry.
Lieven details disagreements in overall strategy between the Foreign Minister, his Deputy, the Finance Minister, the Tsar and the Tsar's unofficial advisers (like his uncle, Grand Duke Nicholas, leader of the so-called 'Panslavic tendency').
Lieven gives us summaries of the reports and recommendations coming in from the embassies in London, Paris, Berlin and Vienna, as well as opinions from the Russian officials on the ground in the Balkans: Count so-and-so reports back on a conversation with the King of Bulgaria, Prince such-and-such writes a long summary of the political situation in Serbia.
Lieven explains:
how each of these varying opinions fit in with their authors' visions of what Russia is or could be (over the course of the book we get to know most of these diplomats and get a sense of their individual capacities and opinions)
how they fit in with conflicting views in the Russian elite about whether Russia should be allying with France and Britain, or with Austria and Germany
how the reports map onto the enduring belief in Russian elite opinion that Russia's 'history destiny' was to conquer the Turks, take Constantinople and become leader of the world's Slavic peoples
how they affect ongoing debates in the Russian government about whether Russia should be focusing its energies and resources to the East, to settle Siberia, or should cleave to its traditional role in the European balance of power
And so on. It is a deep, deep immersion into the small, densely populated and fiercely argued world of pre-war Russian government officials, and particularly the men of the Russian diplomatic service, who managed Russian foreign relations in the buildup to the war.
World War One an eastern war
Lieven opens his book with a bold claim: Contrary to all Western writing on the subject, the First World War was not a western but an east European war, triggered by events in eastern Europe, exacerbated by rivalries between east European empires, and with seismic consequences across east and central Europe.
So his focus in this book is on Russia and the East and his aim is to reorientate our thinking away from France and the Somme, towards the Eastern powers and the problems they faced, which he proceeds to describe in absorbing detail.
His core focus is Russian history 1905 to 1920, but to even begin to understand this period you have to range back in time by about a century, as well as comparing Russia's imperial problems with the challenges faced by other countries further afield, as far away as America and Japan.
The balance of power
The backdrop to all this – the worldview of the time – is the diplomatic and military game which dominated the world for the century leading up the Great War, and the idea of a balance of power.
At the Congress of Vienna in 1815 the victorious Allies who had defeated Napoleon tried to parcel out Europe's real estate to ensure that no one power could ever again secure domination over the continent (pp.120, 124).
The 1848 revolutions, the Crimean War (1853-6), the Franco-Prussian War (1870), unification of Germany (1870), the unification of Italy (1871), the spread of nationalism, the spread of the industrial revolution – all these events were processed by the leaders of every European nation insofar as they affected this will o' the wisp, this fictional entity – the balance of power.
Every large nation was kept on constant tenterhooks about whether the latest little war in the Balkans, or the bids for independence by Hungary or Bulgaria or the Czechs, whether the Austrian alliance with Germany, or the Russian alliance with France, or Britain's influence over Ottoman Turkey, would affect the balance of power.
And not only nations were concerned. Every nation contained factions, ruling parties, opposition parties and, increasingly, 'public opinion', which had to be taken into account.
(It is one of the many ironies of history that the spread of literacy, education and 'civil society' i.e. newspapers and a free press, which is so assiduously promoted by liberals, in actual fact, in the event, tended to encourage rabble-rousing nationalism. The press in Serbia comes in for special criticism for its ferociously nationalistic warmongering, but the panslavic Russian newspaper, Novoe Vremia, was so consistently anti-German that the authorities in Berlin singled it out as a prime cause of the poisoning of German-Russian relations, pp.215, 220, 289.)
One of the few critics of the entire balance of power idea was Baron Roman Rosen (Russian minister to Tokyo during the Russo-Japanese War, posted to Washington, then served on the Tsar's Council of Ministers until 1917). Rosen thought that, far from creating a secure basis for peace, the so-called balance of power had merely created two armed camps which lived in constant fear of each other (p.138). As you read on in the book you can't help agreeing with Rosen's view. Lieven himself appears to agree, stating that the problem with the diplomacy of the 1900s was it was armed diplomacy, with the constant threat of violence behind it. This is what made it so inherently unstable – the slightest misunderstanding threatened to escalate into Armageddon (p.339).
It was an age of empires – the British empire, the French empire, the German Reich, the Austro-Hungarian empire, the Ottoman empire and the Russian empire. But Lieven's book is at pains to make you put aside the traditional Anglophone notion of 'empire' as power exerted over black and brown people far overseas in Africa and Asia. He is concerned with the great land empires of Austro-Hungary, the Ottomans and Russia, the empires which were mostly land-locked and had to expand, if at all, into territory contested by the other empires.
It was a zero sum game, meaning that Russia could only gain territory at the expense of the Ottomans or the Austrians; the Austrians, when they formally annexed Bosnia Herzegovina in 1908, did so at the cost of the humiliation of Russia, which considered itself to have a special leading role in the Balkans. And both Russia and Austria expected to seize or annex territory at the expense of the failing Ottoman Empire.
In fact it was almost an age of super-empires, for around 1900 there was a lot of chatter from journalists, writers, commentators and even politicians from the larger nations about consolidating themselves into ethno-religious power blocs.
What does that mean? An example is the way the hugely popular British politician Joseph Chamberlain proposed to create a new federation out of the white nations of the British Empire, bringing together Canada, Australia and New Zealand into a confederation with the UK, creating a free trade organisation, bringing their laws into harmony, to create a 'British white empire-nation' (p.21).
On an even bigger scale, some Brits and Yanks fantasised about bringing America into this union, to create a massive trading, political and military bloc – the Anglosphere.
(This is the background to a lot of Rudyard Kipling's writings at the turn of the century, his marriage to an American, his friendship with America's buccaneering Teddy Roosevelt, president from 1901 to 1909, his hopes for a union of white English-speaking peoples. This explains conservative support for the Boer War, because the Boers were seen as a backward people who were blocking Cecil Rhodes' great vision of a corridor of white imperialist rule running the length of Africa, from Cape Town to Alexandria. They imperialists had a vision, not of power for its own sake, but for the union of white English-speaking peoples to bring economic development and liberal civilisation to the non-white world.)
For their part, diplomats and statesmen in both Germany and Austria continued to speculate about a merger between the two countries to create a Greater Germany, something which had been debated since Bismarck had wondered whether to bring Austria into, or leave it outside, his project for a United Germany in the 1860s. Gross-Deutschland would then, of course, want to reclaim the German-speaking populations of the Czech lands and of Poland.
The other continental powers were well aware that this tendency to expansion was a powerful strand in German political thought (and, of course, it was revived by the Nazis with their claim for Lebensraum which led them to invade first Poland, then the Soviet Union 25 years later).
The price of failure And all the empires were nervously aware of what happened if your empire failed. They had before them the woeful examples of the Ottoman empire and, further away, the Chinese Qing empire, both of which were visibly falling to pieces. (Interestingly, Lieven uses the phrase 'scramble for China', which I don't think I'd heard before, saying that if the 1880s saw a scramble for Africa, the 1890s saw a 'scramble for China'.)
So everyone could see what happened to a failing empire. The great powers imposed unequal trade treaties on you, humiliated your government, annexed the tastiest parts of your lands, dismissed your culture and traditions. Total humiliation. China was probably the most humiliated: Russia and Japan signed conventions in 1910 and again in 1912 agreeing to divide 'spheres of interest' in China's north-east borderlands (p.195).
None of these rulers could see forward a hundred years to our happy European Union of liberal democracies. The only alternative they could see in their own time to building up strong, aggressive empires was total collapse, anarchy and humiliation.
In the age of high imperialism, there was nothing strange in Austrian arrogance towards lesser breeds. In this era, Anglo-American Protestants most confidently stood at the top of the ladder of civilisation and looked down on everyone. The Germans were climbing the ladder fast, but their sense of superiority still lacked the confidence of their British rivals and could be all the more bruising as a result. The Russians knew that they stood well down the ladder of civilisation in Western eyes, which helps to explain many undercurrents in Russian culture and society of the time. By despising and measuring themselves off against the weak, barbarous and un-Christian Turks, they in turn asserted their membership in the world's exclusive club of European, civilised great powers. (p.208)
Hence the stress, hence the anxiety in so many of their calculations. It was a dog-eat-dog world. It was win, or be eaten alive.
Russian rearmament reflected a desperate search for security and status born of a deep sense of weakness and humiliation. (p.226)
But then, running counter to all these trends to expand and build up empires, the latter half of the 19th century was also the age of nationalism. In his epic biography of Karl Marx, Gareth Stedman Jones shows in detail how the virus of nationalism was spread by the troops of Napoleon's army to the Rhineland of Marx's boyhood, and the rest of Germany. The French revolutionary armies took it everywhere as they tramped across Europe in the early 1800s, telling peoples and ethnic groups that they should be free.
The struggle for Greek independence in the 1820s was an early example of the trend which was eclipsed by the massive central European struggles for the unification of Germany and Italy which dominated the mid-century.
But it was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that the spread of industrial technology led to the dissemination of at least basic education and literacy to more remote populations, and that the growth of interest in folk stories, languages and traditions among newly educated intelligentsias helped to foment 'independence' and 'nationalist' movements among the smaller nationalities – the Czechs, the Bulgarians, the long-suffering Poles, the Ukrainians and, fatefully, among the squabbling peoples of the Balkans.
Nationalism was, to use the Marxist notion of the dialectic, the antithesis to the thesis of imperialism. One bred the other. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century nationalisms popped up all across Europe as a result of the civilising impact of their imperial rulers, but which threatened to undermine the great land empires, continually jeopardising the famous balance of power.
So, the central political problem of the age for the administrators of empires was – how to handle the nationalist demands for independence which threatened to undermine the homelands of empire.
Ireland Lieven takes the unexpected but illuminating example of Ireland. Irish Home Rule from the 1880s onwards was so bitterly opposed by the British Conservative and Union Party because the British elite was well aware how relatively small and fragile the homeland of the global British empire – i.e. the four nations of the British Isles – really was. Knock away one of the four legs supporting the table and maybe the whole thing would collapse.
Austro-Hungary It is one of the many insights thrown up by Lieven's book that he applies the same logic to the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the Balkans. In the late 19th century virtually all the European nations clambered on the bandwagon of empire building, seeing it as the only viable way to maintain economic and political equality with the leading nations, France and Britain. Hence the 'scramble for Africa' in which even little Italy and puny Spain took part (claiming Libya and the north of Morocco, respectively).
Thus even landlocked Germany managed to seize some choice parts of Africa (German South West Africa, Cameroon, German East Africa).
But Austro-Hungary was not only landlocked but – having lost territory in Italy and France in the 1870s – its rulers were struggling to hang on to what they'd got, struggling to manage the rising tide of Czech nationalism in the borderlands with Germany on the north, and the bickering of Balkan nationalities (Bosnians, Croats, Serbs) at the south-east fringe of Europe (p.205).
(Lieven quotes the opinion of Alexander Giers, ambassador to Montenegro, that there was little to choose between the Serbs, the Greeks, the Bulgarians and the Romanians: 'They all hate each other', quoted p.142).
Permanently anxious about her alliance with Germany, and permanently twitchy about the presence of the huge Russian Empire on her borders, the Austrians felt about the Serbs something like the British felt about the Irish. And reacted with just the same over-violence born out of prolonged stress and anxiety, as the British did to the Irish.
Serb nationalism Thus when Serb nationalists assassinated Archduke Ferdinand in July 1914, hawks in the Austrian government thought it would make an excellent opportunity to crush little Serbia's bid for independence and put paid to bickering in the Balkans once and for all. Show them who's boss. Make the Austrian empire secure for a generation.
This is just one of the many insights and fruitful comparisons thrown up Lieven's deliberately non-Anglocentric perspective.
The majority of Lieven's content is about Russia. He takes you swiftly by the hand through the highlights of the previous two hundred years of Russian history – Peter the Great (1682-1725), Catherine the Great (1762-96), Napoleon and 1812, Crimean War (1853-56), the emancipation of the serfs (1861) – Russia's geographical resources and economic and political development – and shows how parties or factions naturally and logically arose from the specific Russian situation.
Court and country parties
For example, Lieven explains the fundamental fact that there were 'court' and 'country' parties in Russian government. The court party surrounded the young, inexperienced and shy Tsar Nicholas II. Sophisticated St Petersburg liberals, they thought Russia should welcome Western influences, Western industrialisation, Western technology and Western values. They promoted alliance with France and Britain. (p.106)
By contrast, the 'country' party despised Petersburg intellectuals, half of them had foreign (often German) names or Jewish ancestry, for God's sake! The country party were based in Moscow, good old patriotic, heart-of-Russia Moscow (p.129). They thought the Tsar should reject western values. They thought Russia should ally with the most powerful nation in Europe, Germany, and her handmaiden, Austria. (p.70)
Some of the country party subscribed to various shades of 'Slavophilia' i.e. the notion that Russia was special, had a special Orthodox culture, a special social system, a special ruler etc, and so should emphatically reject all Western ideas and the Western route to 'modernisation', which were corrupt, decadent and irrelevant to Russia's special traditions.
Another major thread of 'Slavophilia' was the notion that the Slavic Russians should support their Slav brothers in the Balkans, the peoples of Serbia or Bulgaria, defend and lead the noble Slavic inheritance.
Onwards to Constantinople
A complicated mix of motives kept the issue of Constantinople bubbling at the top of the agenda. One was religious-ethnic. Some Russian thinkers thought that Russia had a historic destiny to sweep through the Balkans and recapture Constantinople from the weak and failing Ottoman Turks. This would:
Unite all the Slavic peoples of the Balkans, reviving and glorifying Slavic culture.
Allow Constantinople to be reborn as a great Christian capital, as it had been until conquered by the Turks as recently as 1453. It would be a symbolic rebirth of the 'second Rome' of Byzantium to rank alongside the 'third Rome' of Moscow.
Less quixotic than these millennial religious fantasies, hard-headed military men also thought a lot about Constantinople. Russia possessed the largest territory in the world, with immense land, people and resources. And yet it was prevented from projecting that power outwards, unlike all the nations on the ocean e.g. Britain, France, Spain, Holland, and especially America, sitting astride the two great oceans.
(The importance of naval power was crystallised in the widely-read contemporary book by American theorist Alfred Mahan, summarised on page 160).
Russia possessed three big fleets and naval ports – in the Baltic, at Vladivostok in the far Pacific East, and at Crimea in the Black Sea – but all of them were problematic. The Baltic was nearest to homeland Europe but was frozen for half of the year, and egress was blocked by Germany and Denmark. Vladivostok was too far away from the European centres of power.
All thoughts were therefore focused on the Black Sea, where Russia's main shipyards were, and on the Crimea, which was the base for a large, modern naval fleet.
Yet it was a permanent irritation to the Russian military that this fleet was blocked up in the Black Sea, prevented from sailing through the Dardanelles and into the Mediterranean. The subtle way round this perennial problem was to negotiate alliances and pacts with the other European powers to bring pressure to bear on the Ottoman controllers of the Dardanelles to allow the Russian fleet out to patrol the high seas and claim her rights as a Great Power.
The not-so-subtle approach was to launch the umpteenth Russo-Turkish War, march on Constantinople and seize the Straits, solving the problem once and for all. After all – as Lieven points out in a thought-provoking comparison, the British had bullied their way to seizing Egypt and the Suez Canal in 1882, and the Americans had created the country of Panama in 1903 solely in order to build a canal joining the Pacific and Atlantic, both empires acting in unashamed self-interest.
The only catch being that the major European nations would probably pile in to stop Russia – as they had during the disastrous Crimean War when Britain and France came to Turkey's aid against aggressive Russian incursions into Ottoman territory.
All of these 'country' party ideas – Pan-Slavism, conquering Constantinople – were deprecated by the 'court' party, who thought they were:
low and vulgar, usually whipped up by rabble-rousing nationalist newspapers
contrary to Russia's true interests – Russian peasants and workers couldn't give a damn about Constantinople
and anyway, Russia's course was best left to the professional, aristocratic diplomats like themselves, who knew best
Nonetheless, Russian leaders of all parties looked on with dismay as British ascendancy over the Turks, which had lasted into the 1880s, was slowly replaced by the influence of Germany, which sent soldiers to train the Turkish army and engineers to build a railway from Berlin to Baghdad. (As Lieven points out, the Germans were the only European power who had not at some stage tried to seize Ottoman territory – you can see how this might work in their favour in Istanbul.)
(And, of course, Turkey would end up joining the side of the Germans in the Great War. With the result that the Allies in 1915 themselves took up the Constantinople Question, floating the possibility that Russia would be encouraged to take the city. Prince Grigorii Trubetskoi was even named the future Russian commissar of the city. Wheels within wheels.)
West or East?
Another school of thought, and advisers, recommended leaving the complex problems of Europe to sort themselves out, and focusing on what Russia already possessed, namely the vast extent of Siberia and the East – a policy which, after the Revolution, would come to be known as 'Eurasianism' (p.143).
It was under Nicholas II that the great Trans-Siberian Railway was built. Proponents of an Eastern policy pointed out that Siberia had huge untapped natural resources, it just needed:
the infrastructure to join up the tens of thousands of settlements scattered across this vast waste of steppe and tundra
the emigration of settlers into the vast empty spaces
the creation of new towns and cities
the harvesting of the country's natural and human potential
Given peace in the troublesome West, given enough time, the Eurasian party believed that Russia could develop its economy and resources enough to compete with Germany, even compete with America, to become a truly great power.
The Russo-Japanese War 1904-5
All of these hopes came crashing down when Russia came into conflict with the new, aggressive and confident Japanese Empire in 1904 and was badly beaten. Beaten for a number of reasons – their army was big but badly trained and under-equipped, the navy had to steam all the way from the Baltic to the Far East, by which time the major land battles had already been lost, and in any case it was then comprehensively trashed by the much better-led Japanese navy.
Defeat rocked all the traditional pillars of Russian society. The Tsar was personally blamed, the Army and Navy looked like fools, even the Orthodox Church which had blessed the war as a 'crusade' was made to look powerless and irrelevant.
The war gave rise to a revolution whose specific trigger was when troops fired on a protest march in Petersburg on 22 January 1905, which went down in folklore as 'Bloody Sunday', and rebellion, mutiny, strikes and insurrection spread like wildfire across the country.
The revolution was, in the end, only quelled when the Tsar issued the October Manifesto of 1905 which pledged major political reforms such as the creation of a parliament – called the Duma – with elected representatives, plus land and industrial reforms. The strikes ended, the agrarian disturbances subsided, the mutinies were crushed – but to many, even committed supporters of the Romanov Dynasty, the clock was ticking.
Towards the flame
Believe it or not, everything I've just summarised is all just the introduction to the book's core and is covered off in just the first 100 pages or so. If you recall, the text's main focus is on the period 1905 to 1920, i.e. beginning after the Russo-Japanese War and the 1905 revolution.
Having set the scene and established many of the enduring themes of Russian politics and diplomacy in the first hundred pages or so, Lieven now goes into very great detail about the personnel, the men who manned the key roles in the Russian government – Foreign Ministry, Finance Ministry, Army, Navy and so on. These men's backgrounds, their families and family connections, their beliefs and the policies they pursued are all described in a long chapter titled The Decision Makers (pages 91 to 181).
Lieven gives pen portraits of the main diplomats, their careers and their views, including:
Count Vladimir Lambsdorff, Foreign Minister to 1906
Count Alexander Izvolsky, Foreign Minister 1906 to 1910, architect of the alliance with Britain
Sergey Sazonov, Foreign Minister from November 1910 to July 1916 i.e. during the crisis of 1914
Pyotr Stolypin, Prime Minister of Russia and Minister of Internal Affairs from 1906, who tried to counter revolutionary groups and pass agrarian reforms, until he was assassinated in 1911
Prince Vladimir Meshchersky, editor of the Monarchist newspaper, Grazhdanin, the only paper Tsar Nicholas read, an unpopular reactionary
Count Vladimir Kokovtsov, who replaced Stolypin as Prime Minister of Russia from 1911 to 1914
Count Sergei Witte, Finance Minister 1892 to 1903, Chairman of the Committee of Ministers 1903 to 1905, first Prime Minister of Russia 1905-6 during which he designed Russia's first constitution – an intelligent businessman who thought Russia needed a generation of peace to blossom
Prince Grigorii Trubetskoi, epitome of liberal imperialists and the panslavic policy, head the Near Eastern Department of the Foreign Ministry, which was responsible for Balkan and Ottoman affairs 1912-14 i.e. at the heart of the 1914 crisis
Baron Roman Rosen, 1903 ambassador to Tokyo, ambassador to USA 1905, State Council of Imperial Russia 1911-17 – who believed Russia should forget Constantinople and the Balkans and focus on developing Siberia and the East
Alexander Giers, Consul General in Macedonia, Press Council 1906, who saw at first hand how unreliable and unpredictable the Balkan Slavs were and warned that the Serbs were manipulating Russia into backing them against Austria
Nikolai Hartwig, Russian ambassador to Persia (1906–1908) and Serbia (1909–1914), a strong pro-Slav, sometimes described as 'more Serbian than the Serbs'
Lieven then gives similar treatment to the main military leaders of the period – heads of the army and navy, major military thinkers, their dates, relationships and the often bitter in-fighting between them for resources and about strategy.
Having established a) the deep themes or concerns of the Russian state and its ruling elite, and having b) described in some detail all the key personnel, all the 'decision makers' of the period – Lieven then takes us through the years leading up to Armageddon, with chapters devoted to:
the emergence of the Triple Entente 1904-9
the sequence of crises 1909-13, being:
The First Moroccan Crisis, 1905–06 – Germany challenged France's control of Morocco – worsening German relations with both France and Britain
The Bosnian Crisis 1908 – Austro-Hungary annexed Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had been under its sovereignty since 1879 but which infuriated the Serbs and Pan-Slavic nationalism in the region
The Agadir crisis in Morocco, 1911 – the French sent troops into Morocco, angering the Germans who sent a gunboat to Agadir, eventually backing down but the crisis cemented the alliance between France and Britain
The Italo-Turkish War 1911–12 – Italy invaded what is today Libya but was then a province of the Ottoman Empire. Nobody came to Turkey's aid, showing that Turkey was now friendless – which meant that land grabs in the Balkans would be unopposed – i.e. the delicate balance of power had vanished
The First Balkan War October 1912 to May 1913 in which the Balkan League (the kingdoms of Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro) defeated the Ottoman Empire and seized almost all of Turkey's territory in Europe
The Second Balkan War June to August 1913, in which Bulgaria, dissatisfied with the settlement of the first war, attacked Greece and Serbia, and also managed to provoke neighbouring Romania, all of whom defeated Bulgarian forces, forcing it to concede territory to all of them
the crisis of 1914
The First World War and the Russian Revolution
The backwardness and repressiveness of Russia bred a special kind of fanatic – extreme socialists or anarchists – who thought they could bring about change through strategic assassinations.
Russia was riddled by extremist political factions for the fifty years before the revolution, and plagued by the assassinations of high officials. As Lieven points out, it is no coincidence that the Russian aristocracy and gentry produced the two greatest anarchist thinkers of the nineteenth century, Prince Peter Kropotkin and Mikhail Bakunin (p.119)
But the entire strategy of assassination was almost always counter-productive. It is a great irony that the assassins who murdered Tsar Alexander II in 1881 did so just as he was about to authorise a set of liberal laws. His successor, Alexander III, was an old-style, clumsy, bearish, paternal reactionary who inaugurated thirty years of repression, thus condemning Russian radicals to decades of arrest, Siberian imprisonment and exile, and polarising the intelligentsia even further.
The view from the upper classes
Lieven is posh. From Wikipedia we learn that:
Dominic Lieven is the second son and third child (of five children) of Alexander Lieven (of the Baltic German princely family, tracing ancestry to Liv chieftain Kaupo) by his first wife, Irishwoman Veronica Monahan (d. 1979).
He is the elder brother of Anatol Lieven and Nathalie Lieven QC, and a brother of Elena Lieven and distantly related to the Christopher Lieven (1774–1839), who was Ambassador to the Court of St James from Imperial Russia over the period 1812 to 1834, and whose wife was Dorothea von Benckendorff, later Princess Lieven (1785–1857), a notable society hostess in Saint Petersburg.
Lieven is 'a great-grandson of the Lord Chamberlain of the Imperial Court' of Russia.
He was privately educated at Downside School, the famous Benedictine Roman Catholic boarding school.
Having just read Edmund Wilson's long study of the communist tradition, and Engels's powerful pamphlet Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, my head is full of revolutionary thoughts about the industrial proletariat and about the way the ruling classes everywhere use repressive 'ideologies' to keep the exploited in their place, ideas like 'empire' and 'tsar' and 'religion', 'honour' and 'duty' and 'fatherland'.
There is little of that Marxist sensibility present in Lieven's book. Lieven takes it for granted that there were empires and that they were ruled by an extraordinarily privileged aristocratic elite. I'm not saying he's naively in favour of them. But he takes them on their own terms. This became obvious during the long, sometimes pretty boring chapter, about the Decision Makers. Prince so-and-so of the court party was related to Count so-and-so who took a slavophile line, while his cousin, the archduke so-and-so was more a supporter of the policy of eastern expansion. And so on for a hundred pages.
In a way typical of prewar European diplomacy, the Foreign Ministry and Russian diplomacy were a nest of the aristocracy and gentry. The nest was very, very small: in 1914, there were fewer than two hundred men of all ages who had passed the diplomatic exam and in principle were eligible for mainstream posts. (p.119)
Later he points out the importance of notions of honour to the Russian aristocracy, and the vital importance of remaining a great power to the entire diplomatic, military and political leadership.
But to the ordinary Russian, these concepts were all but meaningless. The Russian ruling classes thought that, when push came to shove, the masses would demonstrate their love for the Tsar and for Mother Russia and the Great Pan-Slavic Cause, but they were wrong, so wrong.
Exciting the Russian masses about Constantinople or their Slave brothers proved an impossible task. In 1909, Grigorii Trubetskoy's brother Prince Evgenii Trubetskoy wrote that only someone who believed Russia to be a 'corpse' could imagine that when it stood up for its honour and the Slav cause against Germany, there would not be a surge of 'powerful and elemental patriotism'.
The First World War was to prove him wrong. (p.131)
What makes it puzzling is that the Russian elite had already had the test drive of the 1905 revolution in which they should have learned that far from rallying to the cause of Mother Russia, peasants and workers all across the country rose up against the court, the aristocracy, the police, the Church and everything the elite believed in.
For me the big question is, 'How was the Russian ruling elite able to persist in their obtuse ignorance of the true nature of the country they were living in?'
Without doubt the tiny coterie of men Lieven describes made up the diplomatic and foreign policy elite, and their decisions counted, and it was the clash of their policies and ideas which made up 'debate' in the ruling elite and determined Russia's strategy through the decade of crises leading up to 1914.
Without doubt this is precisely the point of Lieven's book, to give an unprecedentedly detailed account of the sequence of events 1905 to 1920 from the Russian point of view, explaining the key personnel and their ruling ideas and concerns and how they reacted to, and created, events.
In this aim the book doubtless succeeds and can't help impressing you with the depth of its research and the thoroughness of its analysis.
But it feels so airless, so claustrophobic, so oppressively upper class. Clever, well educated, sensitive and sophisticated though the Russian ruling class so obviously are, you can't help cheering when the enraged workers storm their palaces and throw all their fancy paintings and porcelain out into the street.
To put it another way – as Lieven himself does half way through the book – the Russian ruling élite believed its own ideology, defined itself in terms of its preposterously unreal, disconnected value system – forged its identity in terms of Russian dignity and nobility and honour and the need to remain an Empire and a Great Power.
So they were staggered when they discovered that the overwhelming majority of the Russian people didn't give a toss about these fantasies, was incapable of defending them, and eventually rebelled against them.
In a nice detail, Lieven tells of a German officer during the Great War, whose job was to debrief Allied prisoners of war. He discovered that the French and British soldiers had a clear sense of what they were fighting for, but the Russian soldiers didn't have a clue. Pan-Slavism – what was that? Controlling the Turkish Straits – what were they? Preserving the European Balance of Power – what on earth was that?
The over-educated, incestuous, airless narrowness of Russia's elite condemned itself to extinction.
Towards the Flame: Empire, War and the End of Tsarist Russia on Amazon
Other blog posts about Russia
Red Star over Russia @ Tate Modern (January 2018)
Revolution: Russian Art 1917–1932 @ the Royal Academy (March 2017)
Russia and the Arts @ National Portrait Gallery (March 2016)
Frank Brangwyn and the First World War @ William Morris Gallery (July 2014)
The Rest is Noise 6: The Art of Fear (May 2013)
Iron Curtain by Anne Applebaum (2012)
Afgantsy: The Russians in Afghanistan 1979-89 by Rodric Braithwaite (2011)
Bloodlands: Europe between Hitler and Stalin by Timothy Snyder (2010)
Warsaw 1920 by Adam Zamoyski (2008)
The Cold War by John Lewis Gaddis (2005)
Dr Zhivago by Boris Pasternak (1957)
To The Finland Station by Edmund Wilson (1940)
Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler (1940)
The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov (1926)
Red Cavalry by Isaac Babel (1926)
Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov (1925)
Tales from the Don by Mikhail Sholokov (1924)
Other blog posts about the First World War
The Vanquished: Why the First World War Failed to End 1917-1923 by Robert Gerwarth (2016)
Forgotten Victory: the First World War Myths and Realities by Gary Sheffield (2001)
The Great War (BBC TV series)
Elgar's Great War music
Complete Memoirs of George Sherston by Siegfried Sassoon (1936)
The Middle Parts of Fortune: Somme And Ancre, 1916 by Frederic Manning (1929)
Goodbye to All That by Robert Graves (1929)
In Our Time by Ernest Hemingway (1925)
Under Fire by Henri Barbusse (1917)
by Simon on September 2, 2018 • Permalink
Posted in History, Politics, Russia, Russian literature, War
Tagged 1905 revolution, 2015, Agadir crisis, Alexander Giers, Alexander II, Alexander III, Alexander Izvolsky, Alfred Mahan, America, anarchism, Anglosphere, Archduke Ferdinand, Austro-Hungary, balance of power, Bismarck, Black Sea, Bloody Sunday, Boer War, book, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bosnian Crisis, Britain, Cecil Rhodes, Congress of Vienna, Constantinople, Crimean War, Dardanelles, diplomatic history, Dominic Lieven, Duma, Eurasianism, Evgenii Trubetskoy, First Balkan War, First Moroccan Crisis, First World War, France, Franco-Prussian War, Gareth Stedman Jones, Germany, Grand Duke Nicholas, Grazhdanin, Great War, Greek independence, Grigorii Trubetskoi, history, imperial Russia, imperialism, Ireland, Italo-Turkish War, Japan, Joseph Chamberlain, Karl Marx, Lebensraum, Lenin, Libya, Mikhail Bakunin, Montenegro, Morocco, Moscow, Napoleon, nationalism, Nazis, Nicholas II, Nikolai Hartwig, Novoe Vremia, October Manifesto, Orthodox Church, Ottoman Empire, Pan-Slavism, Panama Canal, Peter Kropotkin, Petr Durnovo, Prussia, Pyotr Stolypin, Qing dynasty, Roman Rosen, Romanov Dynasty, Rudyard Kipling, Russo-Japanese War, scramble for Africa, scramble for China, Second Balkan War, Serbia, Sergei Witte, Sergey Sazonov, Slavophilia, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, Soviet Union, St Petersburg, Suez Canal, Teddy Roosevelt, the Balkans, Towards the Flame, Towards the Flame: Empire, Trans-Siberian Railway, Triple Entente, Tsar, Vladimir Kokovtsov, Vladimir Lambsdorff, Vladimir Meshchersky, Vladivostok, War and the End of Tsarist Russia
Posted by Simon on September 2, 2018
https://astrofella.wordpress.com/2018/09/02/towards-the-flame-empire-war-and-the-end-of-tsarist-russia-dominic-lieven/