A.E. Housman and Heroin!

Did you know that the poet A.E. Housman,best known for his "Shropshire Lad" cycle of poems, once took heroin?
   When he was in hospital with serious heart trouble over Christmas 1935, it was given to him as a soporific; which shows how very different medical procedures were eighty years ago! From this experience of the drug, Housman made the interesting comment, "I learnt what it is to be totally deprived of intellect".
   As far as is known, he felt no inclination to renew the experience, and he died the following spring.

(Source: Peter Parker: "Housman Country")

Wales: Gorse and Heather

Last week we went for a walk in the hills to the west of Conwy. The sky was clear and the colours of the gorse and heather were magnificent.

This is the view looking eastwards, with the Conwy river and the castle on the near bank; and the village of Deganwy on the far side.

Looking northeast, we find the Great Orme as a peninsula, with the seaside resort of Llandudno nestling below it.

The view to the north shows the village of Dwygyfylchi (if you're not a Welsh-speaker, don't try to pronounce this!), and in the distance a corner of the island of Anglesey, with Penmon Point and Puffin Island.

Report on Resistentialism, by Paul Jennings

Resistentialism is the name given to a school of philosophy which postulates that inanimate objects hate us, and strive to make life difficult for us at every opportunity: a theory invented by the humorous writer Paul Jennings in the early 1960s. Without doubt, all of us have been struck by this thought at times, but Jennings's inventive genius amplifies it with a mass of baroque detail.
   He begins by tracing the origins of the Resistentialist theory to such figures as a 19th century philosopher named Martin Friedegg, who first coined the word and developed the concept of "Thing-hatred" - but "In the confused terminology of this tortured German mystic we are never sure whether it is the Things who hate us, or we who hate the Things". He also refers to the "Clark-Trimble experiments", in which pieces of toast and marmalade were dropped on a series of carpets, ranging from coarse matting to priceless antique Chinese silk, and it was found that the proportion of pieces landing marmalade-side-downwards varied precisely with the value of the carpet - "except when a carpet was screened from the rest, in which case the toast didn't know that Clark-Trimble had other and better carpets".
   The central figure in Jennings's account is, however, a French intellectual called Pierre-Marie Ventre, who coined the phrase, "Les choses sont contre nous": "Things are against us". His gloomy philosophy sees man as a "neant", literally a "nothing", in futile opposition to the "derniere chose", the ultimate Thing, which is the hostile universe. Ventre thus breaks with "all previous thinkers, from the Eleatics to Marx, who have allowed at least some legitimacy to human thought and action". Ventre has written a play, "Puits Clos", about three old men who live at the bottom of a well, where there are also some bricks; "These symbolise Things, and all the old men hate the bricks as much as they hate each other. The play is full of their pitiful attempts to throw the bricks out of the top of the well, but they can of course never throw high enough, and the bricks always fall back on them".
   The "Theatre Jambon" (!) on Paris's Left Bank has now, we are told, staged a new Resistentialist drama by Blanco del Huevo, in which the two main characters are a piano and a medicine cabinet, which always contrive to frustrate the lives of their human owners, who are reduced to the status of mere "Pousses": literally "pushed-arounds". The machinations of the Things lead to both humans perishing miserably.
   Other followers of Ventre have attempted to reduce or eliminate the impact of Things in their fields. A Resistentialist composer produces a symphony for solo timpanum and thirty conductors, and an artist sits before a blank canvas meditating on natural disasters, such as earthquakes, and sometimes then finds his canvas has been covered with paint. Ventre, however, regards this as a dangerous compromise, since Things should ideally be eliminated altogether, including the canvas and paint.
   Recently, we are told, a heretic has emerged within the Resistentialist group in the form of a dramatist called Qwertyuiop. His plays feature a Nietzschean hero called a "geant", who intervenes, "often with great comic effect", to save humans from suffering disaster at the hands of Things. The hard-line Ventrists have reacted by violently interrupting performances of his plays at the "Theatre des Somnabules", and there have been scuffles and subsequent arrests all over the Left Bank.
   It all goes to show, Jennings concludes, that "Paris still maintains her position as the world's intellectual centre". 

Stories: Under the hill, over the hill

"Look, you might think me very old-fashioned, but I always understood there were certain formalities to be gone through on these occasions. You should tell me your name and then boldly challenge me to come forth and defend my hoard: not try to sneak in like you’ve just done. So what is your name? Tristan? Oh, SIR Tristan! I do apologise: no offence intended. And my name? Well, men once called me Chrysophylax: Chrysophylax the Golden, whose wings beshadowed the sun. Rather poetic, don’t you think? If a touch overblown. My real name, of course, couldn’t possibly be pronounced in your language, so I won’t even try. And while we’re on the subject, Sir Tristram: that sword you’re swinging about; does it have a name too? No? not even something crude and vulgar, like “Skullsplitter”? Sad. In my younger days, the warriors who came to challenge me all had swords with names; and some were supposed to have ancient lineage, made by the dwarves or whatever, or were even said to be magical. Absolute tosh, of course; but still quite romantic. Ah well; times change.
   "Now, if we want to do this properly, you should challenge me to fight. Denounce me as a thief and murderer, and tell me you’re going to kill me and take away my ill-gotten gains. But I must point out that, although the accusation is by and large true, I haven’t actually done any plundering and slaughtering for a great many years. It was all a very long time ago; and in any event, I don’t see why it gives you any right to take my treasure for yourself. Or you could be more up-to-date, and talk about the serious deflationary effects of keeping all this gold locked away out of circulation, and how international liquidity would be greatly improved by releasing it onto world markets ….. What? You’ve never even heard of economics, or monetary theory? No, clearly not. Forget it; it’s my fault. I just presumed things out there must be more advanced than they actually are. Heigh-ho.
   "Moving on from there: may I ask, Sir Tristan, why you decided to come? Because dragon-fighting is a game for young warriors, or at least it was. Teenage heroes: many of whom, frankly, were just kids with more guts than sense. Don’t say they’re letting the oldies in on it nowadays: that would NOT be a great idea! I’m no expert in humans, I admit; but it’s obvious you’re not exactly in the first flush of youth. Take the way you swung that sword at me when you came in; quite an effort, wasn’t it? I can tell you’re not as fast as you once were. Shoulders getting stiff, are they? Bit of the old back trouble? Knees start to hurt if you stay en garde too long? And maybe the mailcoat feels rather tight around the waist, but getting a bigger one would be too much of an admission? So what made you come here, and try to get your hands on my treasure? Do you need the money? Or are you trying to recapture the glories of your youth: prove to yourself you can still do it? Or perhaps a bit of both? That’s my suspicion anyway.Now don’t get offended; I quite understand; because I’m getting old too. I’m not sure quite how old, but it must be hundreds of your years, if not thousands. But the notion that dragons are immortal is mythical. We age, just like everyone else, though it takes much longer. Look at me: I haven’t been outside this cave for I don’t know how long. I’m amazed anyone even remembered I was here. And these wings, which once beshadowed the sun; I don’t know whether they’d fly at all now. Not so much golden as rusty these days! Hah!
   "So there you have it: we’re both of us past our best, aren’t we? All washed up. Headed for the scrap-heap. Here we both are, together in my lair under the hill, but at the same time we’re over the hill! That’s a nice ironic little paradox for you, isn’t it?
   "I’m not going to fight you, Sir Tristan. Maybe I’d beat you, maybe you’d beat me; but either way, it’d be an embarrassment. Two old cronks bashing away at each other till they both run out of breath or one of them drops dead with a heart attack! Not good! So I’ve got a better suggestion for you.This treasure, now. It took a lot of looting, burning and general rapine to accumulate it all, and I won’t pretend I didn’t enjoy doing it: in fact it was tremendously enjoyable. But, as I told you, that was all over long ago, and nowadays I don’t seem to do anything except lie here and count it. And I can tell you for a fact, hunting down and collecting something is much more fun than spending years just owning it: it’s not the same thing at all. Sometimes I do wonder why I bother to keep it all, and do you know, I really can’t think of an answer? When you look back on life, you realise that you had set yourself various goals, and some of them you had achieved, only perhaps they weren’t quite as exciting as you expected, and the rest you realise you’ll never achieve now. So what I’m proposing to you is this: instead of fighting for my gold, why don’t you just take as much of it as you can carry, and go home? You can tell people you’ve killed me, for all I care. They’ll probably believe you, and I doubt very much whether anyone will actually come up here to check. If you want, you could make the story more exciting by saying I put a dying curse on the treasure, or something like that. And who knows, when you’re really old, you might come to believe yourself that you once actually killed a dragon. And if everyone, including you, believes it happened, then it’s just as good as if it really did happen, isn’t it?
   "So go ahead; take what you want: I won't stop you".

………………………………...................................

Some time later, the dragon awoke from a doze and thought to himself, Really, that all got pretty tedious, didn’t it? I sometimes wonder what the world’s coming to, when I have to explain the most obvious things, practically spell them out word for word, not just to children but even to adults. I think that as I get older, I don’t get more patient and tolerant, but less! But then he thought, No, it’s not fair to blame poor old Tristan; it’s not really his fault he was so ignorant: it’s just that no-one ever bothered to teach him anything.
   In any case, he may have been a bit over the hill, but he still tasted quite nice!
　

The Creation of Yugoslavia

"Yugoslavia" means the "land of the South Slavs". The Slavs were a people speaking versions of the language-group known as Slavic, who probably originated somewhere around Poland; some of whom migrated southwards into the Balkans in the 7th century to be the ancestors of the Serbs, Croats and others. A Serb kingdom had formed in the 13th century, only to be crushed by the Turks at the battle of Kossovo in 1389.

My old Bartholomew atlas, published around 1880, depicts a situation in the Balkans very different from today. In the 16th century the entire region, including most of Hungary, had formed part of the Ottoman (Turkish) Empire, but by the late 19th century the Turkish tide had receded. Several new states had appeared: the Kingdoms of Greece, Bulgaria, Romania and Montenegro, with frontiers settled at the 1878 Congress of Berlin; and looming over them the Empires of Russia and Austria.
   Since 1867 the Austrian Empire had been divided into two different administrations, with Franz Josef being simultaneously Emperor of Austria and King of Hungary. Most of Croatia formed part of Hungary, but Slovenia and the Dalmatian coast were part of Austria. Although the Serbs and Croats spoke a common language, divisions between them were deep, for the Croats were Catholic and used the Roman alphabet, whereas the Serbs were Greek Orthodox and used the Greek script. Separate from both was Bosnia, which had a large Moslem population: in 1878 it formed a separate territory under Austrian supervision. Meanwhile the Ottoman Empire still included Albania, Macedonia, Kossovo and all the northern coast of the Aegean.
   Peace prevailed in the Balkans for a generation, only to be threatened, though not broken, in 1908, when the Austrians took advantage of a period of Russian weakness to annex Bosnia outright. This alarmed and disgusted the Serbs. Henceforth Austria and Serbia were enemies: the Serbs now looked to Russia for protection against any Austrian aggression, and the Austrians for their part suspected the Serbs of stirring up subversion within the Empire. The Russians for their part were determined not to be diplomatically humiliated by Austria in the future.
   In 1912 all the Balkan states joined together in a war against the Turks, and drove them back to the very gates of Constantinople, but immediately afterwards the other states turned against Bulgaria, which had made the most gains. The result was a new set of frontiers, with Albania as a new state, Macedonia and Kossovo going to Serbia and most of the north Aegean coast to Greece; but the other legacy was high casualties, great civilian suffering and many deep, underlying hatreds.

Everyone knows how in 1914 Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the Austrian Empire, was assassinated in Sarajevo, the capital of Bosnia, by a group of young terrorists of Serbian race, and how the Austrian government (not without some justification) suspected involvement of the Serbian state in the murder. The Austrians, encouraged by Germany, decided to use this as an opportunity to destroy Serbia, and, after the Serbs had refused to accept a very tough ultimatum, declared war. But, unlike in 1908, the Russians felt they had to take a strong line, and mobilised their armies in Serbia's suport; and then Germany, alarmed by this, also mobilised, declared war on Russia and on Russia's principal ally, France. By these moves a quarrel in the Balkans led to the horrors of the First World War.

Serbia's losses in the war were exceptionally heavy for such a small country. Since 1911, over 1.2 million of her people had died, 28% of the population, two thirds of them being civilians. In addition, she now had to cope with 72,000 disabled veterans and 180,000 war widows. She would expect some recompence.

President Wilson's "14 Points" for a future peace settlement, issued in January 1918, made only brief and somewhat vague reference to the Balkans. Point 10 said that "The peoples of Austria-Hungary should be given the freest opportunity of autonomus development", and Point 11 that "Serbia should be accorded free and secure access to the sea". There was also Point 9, which promised "Readjustment of the frontiers of Italy to conform to clearly recognizable lines of nationality". The ambiguities were to lead to trouble.
   In the autumn of 1918 the Austrian Empire disintegrated, and South Slav troops from her army took control of surrounding territories, including Bosnia, Herzegovina, Montenegro and the Dalmatian coast. But what sort of a government should emerge from this? Should it be a centralised state or a loose federation? Yugoslavia, the "Kingdom of the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes", which was envisaged, would actually include substantial minorities of ethnic Germans, Hungarians and Albanians, as well as Bosnian Moslems and considerable numbers of Jews. Furthermore, the Croat leader, Trumbic, despised the Serbs as "half-civilized", and in Montenegro there was civil war, involving groups loyal to the prewar royal family.
   The strongest opposition to a Yugoslav state came from Italy. The Italians had been persuaded to enter the war by the 1915 Treaty of London, which promised them not only the Austrian port of Trieste at the head of the Adriatic, but also some of the Dalmatian coastline and a "protectorate" over Albania. They saw the Slovenes and Croats as enemies who had fought for Austria, and as the war ended, Italian troops entered these territories as conquerors, and Italian agents sought to stir up racial and social disputes. But President Wilson announced that he was not bound by the Treaty of London, and Britain and France,for different reasons, were sympathetic with the creation of a Yugoslav state. The peace negotiations at Versailles saw endless disputes about control of ports on the Dalmatian coast, which culminated in Orlando, the Italian Prime Minister, walking out of the talks in April 1919.
   The future shape of the Balkans was settled in September 1919 by the Treaty of St. Germain with Austria and the Treaty of Trianon with Hungary. Both were reduced to their respective German-speaking and Magyar heartlands, as seen on present-day maps, and treated as defeated enemy powers. New countries emerged: Czechoslovakia in the north and Yugoslavia in the south, and Transylvania was awarded to Romania. Substantial racial minorities found themselves unwillingly placed under new rulers, not least in the new Yugoslavia. The main threat to the infant state came initially from Italy, which claimed the port of Fiume (now called Rijeka). In 1919 Fiume was occupied by a scratch force commanded by the posturing Italian romantic poet and novelist Gabriele d'Annunzio. He withdrew after the Treaty of Rapallo in 1920 awarded Istria and Zadar to Italy, and Fiume was later incorporated into Italy by Mussolini.

The interwar period was far from peaceful for Yugoslavia.  King Alexander of Serbia became monarch of the new state, to the disgust of many Croats. They voted in large numbers for the People's Peasant Party, whose leader, Sjepan Radic, was then shot and fatally wounded in the Parliament building in Belgrade in 1928. The riots which followed the murder were suppressed, and next year King Alexander abolished the constitution and proclaimed a royal dictatorship. In 1934 a Croat Fascist movement, the Ustase, led by Ante Pavelic, asassinated the King in a visit to Marseilles. Yugoslavia was thus always simmering on the edge of violence, and one only has to read contemporary travellers' accounts, such as Rebecca West's "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" to learn how much Serbs and Croats hated and mistrusted each other. All this was to boil over in scenes of hideous brutality in the Second World War.

(To be continued in a later post)

Sir Lewis Namier on the popularity of modern dictators

The great historian Sir Lewis Namier (1888-1960) wrote an essayin 1947 entitled "The First Mountebank Dictator" on the subject of Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte, the nephew of the great Napoleon, who was unexpectedly elected President of the French Republic in 1848, then four years later staged a coup and declared himself Emperor of France. He was finally overthrown after being defeated in the Franco-Prussian war of 1870.
   Louis-Napoleon has always been a mystery to historians: he was first elected by an overwhelming majority of the votes, despite his complete lack of previous achievements; he governed by direct appeal to the masses (who were small farmers in the countryside rather than city workers) and was generally despised by the intellectual classes; and his policies were a mixture of authoritarian control from the centre, some measures of social reform, grandiose public building projects, an interventionist foreign policy in Europe (such as his participation in the Crimean War and his crucial role in the unification of Italy) and imperialism throughout the rest of the world. None of his writings show any sign of coherent political thought.
   Namier discusses Louis-Napoleon's popular appeal, which he styles "Caesarian democracy", characterised by:-

    "Direct appeal to the masses; demagogical slogans; disregard of legality in spite of a professed guardianship of law and order; contempt of political classes and the parliamentary system, of the educated classes and their values; blandishments and vague, contradictory promises for all and sundry; militarism; blatant displays and shady corruption".

   Namier was in origin a Central European Jew, and at the time of his writing this essay what particularly interested him was to draw a comparison between Louis-Napoleon and Hitler. Of the early careers of the two future leaders, which were marked by "miserable failures", he writes:-

   "Both men were treated with humane and neglectful forbearance .... Not even at a later stage did the political leaders realise the full gravity of the situation - thinking in terms of their own and not in those of the masses, they could not descry either in Louis-Napoleon or Hitler a possible ruler or dictator".

   What struck me when reading this essay was how much of this could be applied to certain leaders of the present day - mentioning no names!

Dubrovnik and Kotor

(This is a continuation of my previous blog entry, describing my recent visit to Croatia)

I can recommend our hotel at Dubrovnik, which was the Valamar Argosy, on the coast at the outlying district of Babib Kuk (which, we were told, means “Grandmother’s Hip”, owing to a Turkish misunderstanding of the Serbo-Croat name). It had good rooms, good food and a splendid outdoor pool, and had the inestimable benefit of being the terminus of the No. 6 bus to the old city, so it was impossible to get lost. Ciccadas were very noisy in the trees, and swifts were flying very low.

We had two days in Dubrovnik, separated by an expedition into Montenegro; a very strange country. The only currency accepted there is the Euro, which is surprising because Montenegro is not a member of the E.U. It was suggested to us that the principal business was money-laundering, as shown by the fact that there were no British banks to be seen, but plenty of Russian ones. To coin a phrase: I couldn’t possibly comment… In the wars of the 1990s, the Montenegrans supported Serbia in the bombardment of Dubrovnik (see later).

We had two stops there, at Perast on the Bay of Kotor,

 where we had a boat-trip to a little island with a pretty church, 

and then at the city of Kotor itself. Both these places were devastated by a massive earthquake in 1979, and were rebuilt as they had been; but as my parents’ Communist-era guidebook said, it was unlikely that all the architectural details could ever be reconstructed.

So Kotor is still a mediaeval city, with defensive walls running up the precipitous mountainside behind, and a tangle of alleyways from which motor vehicles are excluded. We were issued with maps, but since hardly any of the narrow, twisted streets bore names, it was very easy to get lost.

 I found the easiest strategy was simply to hand the map to a shopkeeper and ask to be shown where I was. Eventually I managed to find the cathedral and other impressive buildings.

But the highlight of the week was always going to be Dubrovnik. It was once known as Ragusa: a strongly-walled mercantile city-state on the Dalmatian coast, which for centuries managed more or less to retain its autonomy by striking a balance between the neighbouring powers of Venice, the Ottoman Empire and Austria-Hungary. It was even occupied by Napoleon’s troops for a brief period in 1806. In 1815 it was incorporated into the Austrian Empire, and after 1918 assigned to Yugoslavia. This was the position when my parents visited in the 1970s, but when the Yugoslav state fell apart Dubrovnik came under attack from Serbian and Montenegran forces in 1991-2, and was badly damaged by shellfire. Repairs have been made, but the episode has not been forgotten: there are maps posted around the city showing the extent of the destruction.

The classic view in Dubrovnik is the street called the Stradun, which leads eastwards from the Pile gate. 

Alleyways climb steeply on the north side. It passes the Large Onofrio Fountain 

and the Franciscan monastery

 before reaching the Square of the Loggia; the centre of the city.

Here you can find the church of St. Blaise, the patron saint of the city, with a statue of the hero Roland in front of it,

and close by the Rector's Palace, with a splendid interior courtyard, a museum, and most elaborate capitals to the columns in fornt of the entrance

From the harbour nearby 

you can take boat trips along the sea-walls

or out to the Elaphite Islands.

Fine views over the city can be gained by walking a circuit of the walls

but the classic view is obtained by taking the cable-car to Mount Srd, where there is also a monument to those who died defending the city in the 1991-2 "Homeland War"

All this barely scratches the surface of what there is to see in Dubrovnik!