Saturday, May 30, 2009

On the Discovery of Books

On today's Saturday Salon at Larvatus Prodeo some-one asked if anybody had read Alexander Pope's translation of The Iliad. (I had glanced at it briefly as a 17 year old but was, back then, put off by Pope's use of rhyming couplets.) This set me reflecting on the discovery of books - the first impressions books and authors of books make on one when you first discover them. Hence this post.

My parents were great lovers of books. My mother read to me from an early age and, by the time I got to school I was, for my age, a pretty accomplished reader. At the age of eight or nine my father gave me a copy of Dickens's Pickwick Papers as a birthday present. I dutifully read it. I was, of course, impressed by Dickens's literary genius, as opposed to comic genius, but I can't say I 'got' the book. I didn't get it until I got round to re-reading it about age forty, and that time I was bursting into uproarious laughter about every second page. I had a similar experience with Dickens's Nicholas Nickleby, which I first read when I was about twenty. I simply got extremely annoyed and bored by the character of Nicholas Nickleby'ss mother, probably because in some was she cut too close to the bone in her resemblance to my much unlamented stepmother.

The next Dickens book my father bought me, the Christmas after he'd got me Pickwick, was Great Expectations. It took me almost a month to go back to the book after I'd read the first chapter. In my boyish imagination I was too scared to go further. And then, Uncle Pumblechook annoyed me. I simply thought he was a very nasty man. (Which he was.)

About this time my father started taking me to a wonderful second-hand bookshop in Castlereagh Street in Sydney - Greenwoods I think it was called. He bought books like John Halifax, Gentleman, the poetry of Mrs. Hemans - The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck' - Thomas Moore, the Irish poet, (I was brought up on stories from Ireland), Henry Lawson's short stories, the poetry of Paterson and Lawson, (Dorothea Mackellar I was discovering at school), and so on.

At age ten a friend of the family bought me the complete works of Shakespeare, a huge book with a red cover and a giant woodcut of Shakespeare as the frontispiece. I'm sure many grown-up back then hadn't read Shakespeare from cover to cover. I did. The Tempest was okay, parts 1, 2, and 3 of Henry VI were enthralling, especially Jack Cade and the Maid of Orleans, but then I discovered that Shakespearian play of blood, death, mutilation and rape that surely must have been the secret delight of many a pubescent boy in that unenlightened era, Titus Andronicus. Then Pericles, Prince of Tyre, with its salacious opening scenes. I spent hours in the garage learning speeches from Julius Caesar, having been inspired by James Mason in the old MGM black and white movie. And Henry V's speech before the battle of Agincourt. (I tried to sound like Laurence Olivier.) I stumped around distorting my cerebral palsy, dragging my foot along the garage concrete floor, pretending I was Richard III. I was hooked for life.

In those days there were Classic Comics, which I devoured with avidity. (I particularly remember a very thick comic about Robin Hood, and being terrified by the comic version of R. H. Dana's Two Years Before the Mast.) But it wasn't long before I graduated to the books themselves. I struggled through Defoe's Robinson Crusoe and badgered my father for money to buy every work by Robert Lewis Stevenson I could find. He refused the money, but took me down to the local library and signed me up as a member. Of course, I loved Kidnapped and Treasure Island, but the two Stevenson books that made the greatest impression on me were The Master of Ballantrae (which almost gave me nightmares) and a collection of short stories, The New Arabian Nights. I can recall the first story in the book was particularly scary, about, I think, some sort of devilish poker game. Sadly, I've never come across the book since.

Enough of childhood reading. I need to get a little bit biographical here. I was brought up in a very strict anti-Communist Catholic family, with horror tales of the Stalinist gulag. By age 15 I'd decided I wanted to find out more about these ice-bound prison camps for myself, so I trudged off to the local library to see what I could find. There was this book about a writer who had spent time in a prison camp. His name was Dostoevsky and the book was Crime and Punishment. I had absolutely no idea what I was letting myself in for, but I got it out rather eagerly. I remember the librarian giving me a very weird look as I booked the book out. There are some, very few books, that hit you in the guts. They take a little of your soul with them. The Master of Ballantrae was one. Crime and Punishment is another. It was the first truly adult book that I had read. I couldn't turn the pages quick enough. It left me emotionally fraught. I was shaking at the end of it, utterly overcome by its power. I had discovered the glory of reading, that thing you don't get with every book, but when you do get it, you know why books are written. As an adult I would experience it with other books, and I will post about those experiences here some time in the future. But Crime and Punishment was the first.

Friday, May 15, 2009

On Going to Book Sales and Stuff

I've just come back from the Rotary Book Sale at the Armidale Race-Course. For a bibliophile like me walking into a capacious room filled with tables crammed with books is, I guess, a bit like going to Heaven (if such a place existed.)

Of course I headed straight for the history book table, eager to see what they had on the eighteenth century and the American Revolution. There was an incredibly wide range of books available: World War 2, World war 1, lots of stuff on Victorian England, a Marx-Engels reader, a few books on the English Civil War, several books on the philosophy and practice of history, some of which I might go back and pick up tomorrow, a fair whack of medieval and Tudor history, some books on Revolutionary Europe, a smattering of books on Chinese and Japanese history, by which I was sorely tempted, and by dint of searching, a few books on the eighteenth century. A veritable feast, really.

I ended up with the following: Daniel J. Boorstin's The Americans, The National Experience - not exactly the period I'm researching and writing about, but I like his work; Ludwig Reiner's biography of Frederick the Great; Dorothy Marshall's Eighteenth Century England - I've read it, but the one I read was a library copy and its nice to have my own copy; Christopher Duffy's The Military Experience in the Age of Reason - which is intrinsically interesting, and I am writing a sort of military/social history of the late 18th century; and the original Oxford History of England volume of Basil Williams's The Whig Supremacy 1714-1760 - which means I now have all the volumes on eighteenth century Britain in both the original and new Oxford History of England series.

After that I searched round for the biography section, tucked away in a corner - there was the usual assortment - biographies of royalty, movie stars, politicians etc., etc., but there was one jewel - Frank McLynn's biography of Bonnie Prince Charlie - apart from it being eighteenth century, as an ex-Catholic I have a sneaking regard for the Jacobites, even if, on balance, the Stuarts were a bunch of incredibly inept monarchs.

Then back to the history table to pick up a copy of Bernal Diaz's The Conquest of New Spain- which I read years ago but want to have another look at. In my spare time when I'm not writing book reviews, researching my book on First Fleeters in the War of American Independence, and fart-arsing around on teh Internet, I've set myself a project of reading (or re-reading) the classic historians. I'm looking for a three volume copy of Gibbon.

My copies of Herodotus, Thucydides, Polybius, Livy, Sallust, Tacitus, Suetonius, Josephus, Ammianus Marcellinus (my favourite Roman historian), Bede, Froissart and Joinville/Villehardouin all disappeared years ago. I was leaving Armidale for a while and left all my books in my flat. In an act of foolish kindness I sublet my flat to a homeless old guy, but he didn't pay the rent, and was evicted. I didn't find out for months. Consequently the real estate agent, who thought I'd disappeared into smoke, either auctioned all the books off or threw them out on the tip. I'd had them for so many years and leafed through them so many times, they were almost falling apart.

Down at the local book shop there's an abridged copy of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion I've got my eye on, along with a copy of Jacob Burckhardt's The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy. And it would be a pleasure to read Macaulay once more. Don't think I'll try Carlyle again though. There are limits.

There are some early Americans - William Bradford for one, I'd like to have a go at. Parkman is one of the few of their greats I've read, waiting for a re-read, and Richard Frothingham's delightful history of Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston, which cheers me every time I dip into it. I'd like to have another go at Prescott's History of the Conquest of Mexico again, too. Last time I found him quite a struggle, though that might have had something to do with the fact that the local library copy I was reading had a warped cover. I just found it annoying.

The book that's inspired me to go on this particular trope is John Burrow's A History of Histories. Well worth a read, though he's far too dismissive of the Marxist contribution to the theory and practice of history in my opinion. (Who can read Christopher Hill, Eric Hobsbawm, Marcus Rediker or Peter Linebaugh without being inspired?)

I once said on another blog, don't get me going on history and books. You can't stop me. But stop I will - for now.

Update: Monday. Went back to the Rotary Book Sale this morning. Its one of those cold drizzly mornings that happen in Armidale, a usual precursor to the horror of an Armidale winter; or what used to be the horror of an Armidale winter before global warming kicked in. But books are one thing that can get me out of bed in winter.

On Saturday, going to the book sale was a bit like going to a David Jones Boxing Day Sale - well, not quite, but I'm sure you know what I mean. Today, though, there was hardly anybody roaming among those numerous tables of books.

I only looked at the history table. And the history god/goddess was with me, I think, because I found a couple of books I would've bought on-line eventually. Lawrence Henry Gipson's The Coming of the Revolution, which I'll start on almost immediately; and Barbara Tuchman's The First Salute. A View of the American Revolution. This book didn't get very good reviews, especially from maritime historians, who said she didn't know one end of a sailing ship from the other, but it will be interesting, nonetheless. Now I'll have to make up my own mind about it.

There were other treasures, too. J. H. Parry's The Age of Reconnaissance - one wonders, though, when the jacket reads 'Profusely illustrated' exactly what one's in for; Boxer's classic history of The Portuguese Seaborne Empire, 1415-1825. And W. J. Eccles' France in America. Written from a Canadian perspective, I suspect, at the very least it will be intriguing.

As I was paying for the books, the Rotary bloke behind the counter where you pay said of the rain, "The spots hardly join together." And he was right. It was a pleasant walk home.

Monday, May 4, 2009

Afghanistan- The Graveyard of Empires

Recently Australia's Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, told us that the Australian commitment in Afghanistan was likely to become deeply unpopular and that it was a long way from over. Rudd is recognised Australia wide as that rare phenomenon in Australian politics, an intellectual. And one presumes that as a former diplomat he has a fair knowledge of history. (If our diplomats are wanting in that department you could probably argue that when it comes to foreign affairs we'd be in more than a bit of a mess) But our Prime Minister seems somewhat lacking in his knowledge of Afghan history. If he wasn't, he wouldn't have sent more Australian troops there.

Okay, it wasn't his fault. We ended up there because Chimpo, aka The American Imbecile aka George W. Bush was running the U. S of A, and he didn't really have his eye on Afghanistan after 9/11. We all know now he was more interested at getting at Saddam Hussein and the Ba'ath Party in Iraq because, in Bush's immortal words, Saddam had tried to poison his Daddy. (One wonders about his morality of starting a ten year war because he was trying to stay in Daddy's good books, after wiping out his brains with cocaine for forty years but that's not the topic of this post, and Bush is gone, so ...) He only went into Afghanistan because that was where most Americans thought Osama Ben Laden was, and Ben Laden, not Saddam Hussein, was responsible for 9/11.

So that brings us to Afghanistan. At last count ten Australian soldiers are dead in Afghanistan, because John Winston Howard (let's put the blame where it really lies) invoked the ANZUS Treaty and followed America into Afghanistan, then concentrated all his attention on the Bush family feud in Iraq, to the grave detriment of the situation in Afghanistan. Those soldiers died fighting the Taliban. Bush, Howard, and probably Rudd and Obama would have us believe that the Taliban arose out of the Mujahadeen irregular forces that resisted the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan from 1975 onwards. (What they no longer wish to remind us of is that the Mujahadeen i.e. the Taliban and/or Al-Quaeda were cheerfully funded and supplied with arms by the CIA and once the Russians had gone said Mujahadeen turned round and bit their financial benefactors on the bum.)

What Howard/Bush/Rudd/Obama haven't told us is that Afghani bandits have been around for centuries, since the time of Alexander the Great, and that imperial forces invading Afghanistan ever since, with the exception of the Mughals, have had a really, really bad time there and have always lost. Its not for nothing its called the graveyard of empires. And that brings me to my narrative of that first European force, the British, who confronted the nineteenth century equivalent of the Taliban. The following is based on the account of the First Afghan War (1839-42) given by Boyd Hilton in A Mad, Bad & Dangerous People? England 1783-1846, Oxford, 2006.

Lord Auckland, India's Governor General (1836-1842) perceived an exaggerated Russian threat to India out of what is now modern day Iran and decided the best way to counter the Russians was to erect an alternative buffer state in Afghanistan. (This was part of what was known at the time and ever since as The Great Game). Unfortunately, this meant the British being involved in tribal warfare in Afghanistan, something they simply didn't understand, and in a series of rapidly changing alliances one might argue are analogous to the situation in Afghanistan/Pakistan today. Basically, just like the present Afghan War, the idea was that local forces should bear the brunt of most of the fighting, in a plot hatched to replace Dost Muhammad, the pro-Persian Emir of Afghanistan in Kabul. This was done easily enough by the British and their Hindu allies. The emir was replaced by a pro-British puppet. The British, however, could not leave well enough alone (a common problem in Victorian India) and they interfered with local tribal practices. The result was a riot and the British Consul at Kabul was shot, then hacked into pieces. The stranded British garrison opted for a retreat to the safety of Jalalabad.

Thus began one of the greatest defeats in British military history up to that time. Major-General William Elphinstone, the commander of the British forces, underestimated the effect of snow and frost-bite on his troops in the cold mountain passes of Afghanistan. Worse, he was surprised by the fanaticism of the supporters of the supplanted Emir Dost, who, in January 1842, attacked the British troops with knives, not guns, and wiped out 12,000 to 16,000 British troops in Jagdalak Pass. Only one white survivor, a medical officer, made it back to Jalalabad.

British honour was impugned. The British Army marched on Kabul, blew up the bazaar, randomly and collectively punished some nearby villages then left, leaving their puppet Shah Shuja without protection. He was, of course murdered and Emir Dost was back in Kabul.

As Hilton has noted, the Afghani bandits were 'oblivious to the conventions of chivalrous warfare.' (p.571.) The West, for the first time, had 'met the equivalent of today's suicide bomber'. (ibid.) A similar fate would meet the Russians in the twentieth century, though it took longer for the Afghanis to rid Afghanistan of them. One has to wonder what Kevin Rudd means when he tells us this new (well, relatively new) war is a long way from over.