This post is one of a series “books I read that pissed me off enough that I felt the need to chastise them publicly” (cf. Travelling Heroes), but there will be a bit of language-related material at the end, if you persevere. The book to be soundly whipped is Philip Glazebrook’s Journey to Kars, about a journey to eastern Turkey he made in 1980; the relevant section in his obit in The Times gives a good idea of it:
His most praised work was Journey to Kars (1984), an account of a lone journey in the early 1980s through the Balkans to Greenmantle country in eastern Turkey. Influenced by the accounts of Victorian travellers such as Austen Layard, the excavator of Nimrud, and Glazebrook’s fellow Old Etonian Alexander Kinglake, author of Eothen (1844), it was in part a quest for what it was in the Orient that induced such men to abandon the comforts of home.
Glazebrook’s conclusion, couched in prose often as picaresque as those of his inspirations, was that in the East they found an outlet for their romantic notions, fuelled by Malory and Tennyson, of a knight errantry increasingly absent from their ever more mercantile homeland.
For Glazebrook, too, the romanticised past often seemed another, and better, country. He never pretended to be a professional travel writer, one immersed in the culture and language of the place he was visiting – he spent only a fortnight in Turkey. Instead, he approached the East mentally in the company of those earlier authors, and the reality of his encounters with back-packers and modern Turks seemed to provoke disappointment and melancholia in equal measure.
He did bring a novelist’s observational skills to bear, and wrote well about the frustrations and muddles of travel. There was, however, always a sense in his books of a lofty detachment, that of a connoisseur writing more for his own pleasure than from any vulgar need to please a readership.
Now, I have nothing against amateur travel writing in general, and I am drawn to descriptions of that part of the world, which is why I picked up the book in the first place. But Glazebrook seems to want not only to understand the mental world of Layard, Kinglake, et al., he wants to be one of them — except that, lacking their specialized knowledge and interests, he contents himself with their attitude, that of a Victorian Englishman, utterly complacent in his confidence in the superiority of his own “race” (as he would have said) and civilization and contemptuous of the lesser breeds he encounters. And he exhibits a truly bizarre refusal to acquire any information about the places he finds himself in, preferring to be guided by his own random impressions of (say) the bus station where he is dropped off. This produces especially ludicrous results about halfway through the book:
Day had not dawned when we reached Erzurum. The bus boomed through streets emptied by curfew, cold, lit with feeble splashes of sodium. The town by these glimpses was one of the ugliest I have ever seen. Dirty modern concrete masked any old streets it may have contained, and tower blocks of the same repellent grey overtopped any domes or minarets or fortress walls that might still remain. Before long the bus careered into a large open space at the foot of the town, dark and bitterly cold, the otogar where the journey from Kayseri ended. I took my bags and made for the shelter of the café, where many groups swathed in wrappings sat immovable and silent at half-lit tables amid a sea of bundles. What should I do?
Why stop at Erzurum? What was there to interest me here?
So he doesn’t; he takes the next bus to Kars. Now, as it happens, there’s a fair amount to see in Erzurum (named Theodosiopolis until its conquest by the Seljuk Turks) — the castle (originally constructed by Theodosius), the Ulu Cami, the Çifte Minareli Medrese, the Üç Kümbetler (a complex of three Seljuk tombs), all (as my Lonely Planet guide, which served me well during my own trip to Turkey a decade later, says) “conveniently grouped in the old part of town, within easy walking distance of one another.” But Glazebrook cares only about his vibe (as the kids say). And it goes without saying that he would have despised anyone he saw consulting a Lonely Planet guide: vile tourists!
But that stuff just made me roll my eyes; what made me want to hurl the book across the room were his constant references to “races” (“Two were swarthier than Europeans, no doubt Levantines of the mixed races – Greeks, Armenians, Jews – which have controlled trade in these parts since the fall of Troy”) and his anachronistic but deep-rooted confidence in his superiority as an Englishman. When he gets into a spot of trouble about his documents in Trabzon, he has no hesitation in threatening the local bankers with the British Embassy, claiming that his name “was known” to Harold Macmillan; he writes:
I can see why the first phrase in the Englishman’s legendary phrase-book is ‘Take me to the British consul’. Like faith in the power of a British passport, and trust in an English policeman to help him out of a difficulty, this instinctual cry for official protection reveals the middle-class Englishman’s essential belief in the justice of his own institutions, and in his right to claim their support.
And when he gets to Transylvania, he instinctively takes the side of the Magyar landowners and “Saxon” bourgeoisie against the “Wallach” (i.e., Romanian) peasantry:
Instead of well-to-do farmers, a most miserably primitive and debased set of creatures inhabit the land. […] Such horse-drawn traps as there are, with wicker sides and rubber wheels, look dingy and rickety, like the possessions of gypsies. In them, and by the roadside, I never saw so many base and brutish faces, or pig fat trunks on little legs, or such heads like thick squashed fruits gashed for eyes and mouth in the way of Hallowe’en masks. These are the Wallachs.
It made me want to see him bastinadoed, if not impaled. The Victorians at least had the excuse of their historical setting; this guy was born in 1937 and grew up while the Empire was crumbling away. By 1980 you had to be pretty determined to think like that.
Oh, and that passage on language:
No doubt if I spoke Turkish I would discover a thing or two from people like him; but if I spoke Turkish would I then be able to maintain my view of Turkey as mysterious and hostile territory which is the tint most useful to my imagination in the task of resurrecting the Turkey of Ottoman rule?
And a final fillip of ignorance; on p. 128, discussing the Crimean War, he refers to a Russian general he calls “Mouvarieff” — not once but three times, so it’s not a typo. Then in a footnote on the next page he quotes (without bothering to name him) James Henry Skene as follows:
Major Teesdale most deservedly received the Victoria Cross for this exploit, as well as the thanks of General Muravief [sic] which were publicly offered to him, after the capitulation, for his chivalrous humanity towards a wounded enemy.
Glazebrook adds the “[sic]” to call attention to what he thinks is a misspelling, but it is his own “Mouvarieff” that is wrong: the general’s name was Nikolay Muravyov, of which “Muravief” is a perfectly acceptable nineteenth-century rendering. But who has time to investigate the details of Russian nomenclature when you’re busy inspecting the dusty contents of your own navel? It all makes me think of the annoying David Brewer, whose The Greek War of Independence I slapped around two decades ago, ending:
[…] this is yet another in an endless series of slapdash, Britocentric popular histories, full of flashing swords and treachery and glorious patriotism but sadly deficient in accuracy, either in overall perspective or in the small matter of accents.
I’m sure Glazebrook and Brewer would have gotten along like gangbusters.
I was going to write, “at least he doesn’t say, ‘now, take your Turk…’” Then I decided that the racist possessive is too lower class for the likes of this guy, even if he agrees with the sentiment.
After investigation, my best guess as to the meaning of “Greenmantle country in eastern Turkey” is (part of) the geographical setting of this book I will confess to neither having read nor previously heard of, although I have read other things by the same now-long-defunct author. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenmantle
Not to make my own limited knowledge the relevant benchmark, but was that novel really still so well-known among the sort of people who read the obituaries in the Times in 2007 (just over nine decades after it was published) that throwing in the allusion without explanation was likely to be understood by the average relevant reader?
(Let me note separately that “David Brewer” is a reasonably common name and the one hat finds annoying is not the one to whom I am closely related!)
Re the use of this sense of “race,” I wonder if there’s a good and reliable timeline of when it largely* fell out of polite usage in the U.S., because it may well have been more recently than it now feels. Via the internet I am looking at a scan of the 1979 Atheneum Press U.S. edition of Glazebrook’s novel _Byzantine Honeymoon_, which has a blurb on the flyleaf describing the setting (Constantinople in 1895) as “Stamboul in the last years of the last century: a city of many races and creeds, of plots and counter-plots” etc etc. Perhaps that was thought somewhat archaic-sounding in 1979 (and thus good for marketing a novel with a historical setting) but not affirmatively off-putting?
*There is, e.g., a scholarly book published in 2012 by Princeton University Press titled _Irish Nationalists and the Making of the Irish Race_, but I take it the use of the word in that sense would be justified by the fact that it had been so used historically by nationalists in the historical period the book discusses.
was that novel really still so well-known among the sort of people who read the obituaries in the Times in 2007
I think the answer probably is “yes.”
Well, I‘ve read it. All the Hannay books are fun (in their way.) They’re good at doing what Buchan meant them to do; he was capable of less superficial stuff when he wanted to be, as well.
I’ve met people who had actually lived in West Africa for years who were pretty much equally incurious about the people who surrounded them, and consequently just as pig-ignorant as this Glazebrook. Some of them were really perfectly nice people. Travel only broadens the mind if you’ve got a mind capable of broadening in the first place.
The Rough Guide series is (or was, not sure if it’s still extant) the best set of travel guides for West Africa (better thsn Lonely Planet.). Open-minded, properly curious and remarkably well informed. Surprisingly good on history, too, of which West Africa has vastly more recorded than I ever realised before I actually lived there.
was that novel really still so well-known among the sort of people who read the obituaries in the Times in 2007 (just over nine decades after it was published) that throwing in the allusion without explanation was likely to be understood by the average relevant reader?
I wondered that myself.
My separate puzzlement is the reference to “Magyar landowners” in Transylvania in 1980, 35 years after the Communists had come to power and 18 years after (to quote wikipedia) “First Secretary Gheorghiu-Dej announced the end of the collectivization programme [because] 96% of the country’s arable surface and 93.4% of its agricultural land had been included in collective structures.”
Can hat elaborate? No doubt various traces of the different historical economic niches and/or hierarchical rungs of the different “races” still remained visible in the Ceaucescu era, but I’m still puzzled.
I think some non-trivial percentage of well-read Americans of my generation are familiar with _The Thirty-Nine Steps_ by name even if they have not actually read it but few other works by Buchan have that sort of prominence among still-living Americans. I had vaguely thought I had perhaps read another of his with a Turkish-or-Balkan setting but now I find to my embarrassment that my aging memory had muddled him up with Eric Ambler, who was of a different generation.
My separate puzzlement is the reference to “Magyar landowners” in Transylvania in 1980
Sorry, he was talking (as usual) about the nineteenth century, where he seems to have spent most of his mental time. I should have made that clear.
Ah, that (Glazebrook focusing on Hapsburg-era Transylvania while nominally talking about a visit to Communist-era Transylvania) makes perfect sense. But you have now at least reminded me of a lovely bit of prose about the remnants of the old Magyar-landowner class in the Ceaucescu era.
“But how to be a gentleman after 40 years of socialism? I recall the tweed-clad (Dunn & Co, 1926) and trembling elbow of Count Erno de Teleki (MA Cantab, 1927) in a pool of yoghurt in the Lacto-Bar, Jokai (Napoca) Street, Kolozsvar (Cluj), Transylvania, Rumania, 1973. His silver stubble, frayed and greasy tie, Albanian cigarette, implausible causerie. The smell of buttermilk and pickled green peppers. A drunk peasant being quietly sick on the floor. This was the first time I saw a tweed jacket.” This by Gáspár Miklós Tamás* (1948-2023), who went on to become a dissident and an emigre and lived long enough to be elected a member of the post-Communist Hungarian parliament. It reminds me in some peculiar way of my father back in 1983 preparing to send teenage me (with my slovenly half-hippie/half-punk blue-jeans-and-t-shirts wardrobe) off to matriculate in the Ivy League: we drove about 20 miles north to the “Main Line” posh/WASPy suburbs of Philadelphia, since no place closer had what he thought the right sort of inventory, and he bought me a proper tweed jacket. His idea, not mine, but I am grateful.
*Or Tamás Gáspár Miklós if you want to be over-authentically Magyar about it.
a visit to Communist-era Transylvania
Which reminds me: he is astonished at the difference between Romania and Hungary, since he expected all the “Soviet satellites” to be identical gray dungeons where everyone shuffled around looking oppressed.
Far more Americans must be familiar solely with Hitchcock’s film of The Thirty-Nine Steps than with the original Buchan novel. And, frankly, that is the way it should be. The film is far superior and shows the wisdom of Hitchcock’s explanation of why he would never want to make a movie out of a great book. He thought it was important to make the best films he could as a director—not making them his own merely to be creative, but to be free to make whatever changes he thought would improve them. My favorite part of Hitchcock’s The Thirty-Nine Steps comes early on, when Hannay totally misapprehends what is happening, but in a completely natural way that takes the viewer along with the character’s thinking. This element was invented for the movie, and, what is more, it actually fills in an egregious plot hole that is present in the book!
The film is far superior
Perfectly true. (Though the book is fun.)
In his youth Glazebrook had had red hair and the temperament to match. He was quick, urbane and dextrous with words. He had sophisticated taste in paintings and objects, and perhaps more sympathy for them than sometimes he had for other people
Classic obituarese, like “he did not suffer fools gladly” or “he was unmarried.”
I’ve read it, although I’m a bit unusual, to be fair.
There’s usually a fairly modern paperback edition of the Hannah books kicking about in a Scottish bookshop – I think they’re the kind of thing where you can make a steady trickle of money by occasionally putting a new cover on an old text.
It may very well be easier to find works by Buchan in Scotland than elsewhere, for reasons which are not hard to see when you look at his novels as a whole.
Some of the less popular works of Conan Doyle, likewise. I used to have a copy of his Brigadier Gerard stories, which are perfectly OK in their way. The copy I had was adorned with a ludicrous blurb comparing them to War and Peace … I mean, I’m all for Scottish cultural patriotism, but …
I had heard vaguely of Greenmantle but would have hazarded a guess that it was set in the vicinity of Ruritania.
I think the idea that middling books adapt into better films than literary masterpieces is commonplace; did it originate with Hitchcock? Similar seems true of film remakes.
A highly unsympathetic protagonist can make for a compelling narrative —even a first-person narrative, perhaps even a nonfiction narrative— but I think the reader must be able to laugh at something, probably but not necessarily the protagonist.
I’ve not only read Greenmantle and a few others, but also Buchan’s multi-volume history of WWI, which is remarkably good and dispassionate given how in the thick of it he was. His star had certainly faded by 1980, though.
As it happens, my next read is Christopher Clark’s The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914. It seems I can never get enough of the topic — I’ve got a shelf’s worth of books on WWI and the leadup to it.
Hat, if you need a Kars palate cleanser, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow is set there.
John Buchan had connections to the intelligence services, and bits and pieces of real-life events keep popping up in his novels (rather like Ian Fleming). Or perhaps sometimes plots proposed but not actually implemented. There must have been a few old-timers with fond memories of Gordon at Khartoum still around during WWI.
The actual background behind Greenmantle is described in Peter Hopkirk’s On Secret Service East of Constantinople.
John Buchan’s greatest real-life exploit, as Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor-General of Canada, was engineering the highly successful North American tour of the King and Queen during the run-up to WWII. This was a part of the British campaign to persuade the USA to enter the eventual war.
You can perhaps get an idea of his last days from his final novel, Sick Heart River.
I think the idea that middling books adapt into better films than literary masterpieces is commonplace; did it originate with Hitchcock? Similar seems true of film remakes.
This is true not just of film adaptations and remakes, but also of any other form of translation. It’s always relatively easy to take a middling source text and improve it in the translation, but much, much harder to take a superb source text and even do it justice, let alone surpass it.
Hitchcock’s point wasn’t just that it was easier to improve a middling work in adaptation. He didn’t want to be constrained by a feeling of obligation to be fidelitous to the source.
fidelitous
What a ruffianous word. Thanks for introducing me to it ! The ruffian on the stair
Hat, if you need a Kars palate cleanser, Orhan Pamuk’s Snow is set there.
Thanks! I actually have a copy that’s been sitting around for years; you’ve given me an impetus to read it.
@Stu Clayton:
Should we start a movement to require that all quotations from “Invictus” be accompanied by “Madam Life”?
@Nat Shockley:
I agree, though I don’t think I’ve improved any middling works. But with a superb work, there’s always hope; you might find out it’s not as superb as you thought.
@Stu Clayton: The word came to me naturally, but after entering it, I was a bit surprised that my phone didn’t try to “correct” it to something else.
Shocking permissiveness of phones these days. The OED says, “0 result for ‘fidelitous'”.
@Jerry: Should we start a movement
Definitely. Every time I read Madam Life I am astonished by its … tightly packed subtlety, whatever.
Look for “fidelitous” with Google’s advanced search and you will be surprized.
“The fidelitous subject is not only impossible but must be made impossible. The full body is that which eradicates, exterminates the fidelitous subject. The fidelitous subject is a terror to the full body.”
OK, now I’m terrified.
The full body is that which eradicates, exterminates the fidelitous subject.
“Full body” is a property of superior claret, so “fidelitous subject” must be someone who faithfully buys wine from the 7-11.
“The fidelitous subject is not only impossible but must be made impossible. The full body is that which eradicates, exterminates the fidelitous subject. The fidelitous subject is a terror to the full body.”
From a story of mine: “So he’d gotten out [of graduate English studies]; but not before overhearing, in the English department coffee room, a fierce argument between two English majors that had sputtered to a halt when they’d realized that one of them was talking about Deleuze and Guattari and the other one about Pauwels and Bergier.”
A special kind of fidelitous subject: copium eaters.
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For many on the left, another four years of Trump and the prospect of Project 2025 becoming a reality are too much to accept. Some are turning to large doses of “copium” (a portmanteau of “cope” and “opium” popular on social media).
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Closely related is hopium.
Depressives are advised to take only homeopathic doses of mopium.
@Rodger C.: Once upon a time back in the 1980’s when I was an undergraduate, I had a friend who told me once that in his humble opinion all the then-trendy French-Theory-Dudes like Barthes and Derrida and Foucault etc.* were mostly worthless EXCEPT for Deleuze & Guattari, whom he considered by contrast to be The Real Deal. I don’t think either I or anyone else in that milieu brought up Pauwels/Bergier as potential rivals, and I think their star may have rather faded in terms of college-town trendiness by then.
*This would have been during the several-year gap between the death of Paul de Man and blossoming of the De Man Scandal, i.e. the sudden Big Reveal of his embarrassing-to-his-disciples writings from the 1940’s, but I can’t recall whether his name was still being invoked with any comparable reverence or frequency (by those who dug that sort of thing) as the three names I mention.
As a point of comparison, I’m familiar with the others (as Big Names) but am not sure I’ve ever heard of Pauwels or Bergier.
It is recommended that depressives take only homeopathic doses of mopium.
It seems I can never get enough of the topic … [WWI and the lead up to it]
The school curriculum authorities in 1960’s Blighty clearly felt WWII needed explaining, which needed explaining the Great Depression, which needed explaining WWI, which needed explaining European Colonial Adventurism, Boer War, Russo-Japanese War, Franco-Prussian, …
My grandfather was in the trenches in Normandy, his whole platoon got gassed (he as youngest had been sent up the line with some message). He tried explaining it to his daughters (my mother). He couldn’t even explain it to himself. He never talked about it to his grandchildren; but somehow we intuited it needed explaining and couldn’t be.
I don’t see the world today as very different to 1913 Europe. And U.S. isolationism again. Are we going to be able to explain to our grandchildren whatever happens next?
Hell no, we can’t even explain what’s going on now.
Hat: One of the memorable events of my first semester of grad school (fall ’68) was spotting the unforgettable cover of the first English-language paperback edition of The Morning of the Magicians (Le Matin des magiciens), by Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier. I leafed through it and deemed it baloney, but a dozen years later I happened on it in a secondhand bookstore and bought it out of nostalgia, though I quickly confirmed that it was baloney (plus badly translated by one Rollo Myers). (The copy had belonged to the sonorously named DeWain Kami Kalani Bugbee, who turns out to have been Buffy Sainte-Marie’s first husband.)
Thanks for sparing me a dose of baloney — and for that splendid name!
Not “Kamaikalani”? That’s the usual spelling of a straightforward Hawaiian name (‘child of heaven’).
It is indeed Kamaikalani, at least according to this.
AntC
I think you’re mixing your wars up:
“in the trenches in Normandy”
In WW1 the fighting took place in Flanders and Picardy but not Normandy.
Thank you @Peter G for the correction, very likely. My grandfather had been a Telegram delivery boy when he joined up. The geography of London he knew like the back of his hand. Northern France not so much. I should remember the alliteration in ‘Flanders field’. Nota Bene ‘Normandy beaches’.
“Was it over when the Germans bombed us at Pearl Harbor?”
Perhaps DeWain’s culture was attenuated; “Kami Kalani” is what’s written. It is before me even now.
Maybe “Kami” is /kamai/ with English-like spelling?
Anyway, I was stupid. It does not mean ‘child of heaven’, and I can’t parse it correctly.