A Detour The Size of the Balkans

[recognito]

At this point, all six of you following me for book stuff know that I’ve been reading Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon for the past six-ish weeks. I have exceedingly positive feelings about it along with an embarrassed, “well, this CERTAINLY is a relic of its time!” – which is relevant in the sense that other blog posts about this book usually have some lead up along the lines of, “This book used to be on the must reads/best of reading lists, but no one is reading this now” and the wrap up will end in, “Wow! EVERYONE should be reading this!” or “Pah–NO ONE should be reading this!” As for me, I’m a solid, do you like really great prose? are you tired of reading today’s style but don’t want to dial the crank all the way back to the eighteenth century? want to read something structurally complex? want to read some great chapters????? can you stomach some real 1940s-isms? absolutely, read it! do you want to learn about history? ummmmm, oh boy, if you want….???

A good Rebecca chapter is an amazing chapter by any writer, elegantly guiding you from effortless comedic dialogue to the site of a gruesome and terrible event that dovetails into art, history, and economics then makes a wily pivot back to its central image. On a beat-by-beat level, there’s really a lot to love and admire. Really amazing curation of imagery and moments. And I think it’s also a really great book about friendship and friendship disintegrating over political and personal disagreements in small and difficult to navigate ways.

On the other hand, a bad Rebecca chapter is like watching your well meaning white aunt at Thanksgiving lob off six stereotypes about European ethnicities like noooothing. There are very few moments where she is not exceedingly entertaining or filling one with a sense of, “Oh, wow, THAT’s what it means to be out of time.” I mean, you will sound absolutely fucking bonkers if you recommend this book purely based on craft. It does not take much to realize that she speaks with the sensibility of someone who believes, sincerely, in the superiority of the British Empire even as she insists that empire should not extend too far from its original roots (the reasoning is honestly kind of insane, I won’t reproduce it but lmsdfgnhhb it’s a real rebecca please moment), that Christianity is the best religion even if it has pointless sacrifice at its heart, and that the Serbs (so primitive! so charming!) live more fiercely and truly than the urban, effete English city bureaucrats. Part of what makes her feel out of time is the way this line of thinking is not only explicitly laid out, but believed without the sense that uh people might disagree. Do we all agree with this? Yes we do! Let’s move on!

You really cannot recommend a work just based on the perfection of a few chapters or sentences, so there must be something else that kept me hooked on for 1200+ pages, right? Happily, yes.

This event, this Sarajevo attentat, was in these inconsistencies an apt symbol of life: which is loose and purposeless, which weaves a close pattern and doggedly pursues its ends, which is unpredictable and illogical, which follows a straight line from cause to effect, which is bad, which is good. It shows that human will can do anything, it shows that accident does everything. It shows that man throws away his peace for a vain cause if he insists on acquiring knowledge, for the more one knows about the attentat the more incomprehensible it becomes. It shows also that moral judgment sets itself an impossible task. The soul should choose life. But when the Bosnians chose life, and murdered Franz Ferdinand, they chose death for the French and Germans and English, and if the French and Germans and English had been able to choose life they would have chosen death for the Bosnians. The sum will not add up. It is madness to rack our brains over this sum. But there is nothing else we can do except try to add up this sum. We are nothing but arithmetical functions which exist for that purpose …

Okay sorry I’m just going to throw in another one of these passages because I just like it:

And so it is to some extent to many English intellectuals. If the Serb had done something … something… something, they need not have fought. So one feels, when one is young, on hearing that a friend has to have a dangerous operation for cancer. Surely if she had not eaten meat, if she had not eaten salt, she need not have had cancer; and by inference one need not have cancer oneself. Yet cancer exists, and has a thousand ways of establishing itself in the body; and there is no end to the ways one country may make life intolerable for another. But let us not think of it any more, let us pretend that operations are unnecessary, let every battlefield seem a place of prodigious idiocy. Of this battlefield, indeed, we need never think, for it is so far away. What is Kaimakshalan? A mountain in Macedonia, but where is Macedonia since the Peace Treaty? This part of it is called South Serbia. And where is that, in Czechoslovakia, or in Bulgaria? And what has happened there? The answer is too long, as long, indeed, as this book, which hardly anybody will read by reason of its length. Here is the calamity of our modern life, we cannot know all the things which it is necessary for our survival that we should know. This battlefield is deprived of its essence in the minds of men, because of their fears and ignorances; it cannot even establish itself as a fact, because it is crowded out by a plethora of facts.

 

I think it’s hard to feel like there’s much sense in the world–possibly for the last forever and a half, but I didn’t live those forever and a halfs; I live in this peculiar and dreadful one. I keep thinking about the phrase “[a fact] cannot even establish itself as fact, because it is crowded out by a plethora of facts;” an apt and morbid way of describing how unfiltered information pummels the thinking and feeling mind to numb submission. Sorry only a thousand people read your giant book, Rebecca… I got a lot out of it…

West writes with enormous reserves of energy and actively denies despair even as she writes through the thick of World War 2 and the bombing of London. I think it can be reassuring to dip into the mind of someone who does believe in human goodness and the value of art as a way of mastering experience and turning it into meaning. There’s nothing cringing or self-conscious about her opinions or values. She presents five years of long, hard thinking with real and total conviction in what she sees, feels, and believes.

Uh, let’s see. Last case for Rebecca. She’s very funny, sometimes in mean ways, sometimes in witty ways.

We ate too large a lunch, as is apt to be one’s habit in Belgrade, if one is man enough to stand up to peasant food made luxurious by urban lavishness of supply and a Turkish tradition of subtle and positive flavour. The soups and stews and risottos here are as good as any I know. And the people at the tables round about one come from the same kitchen: rich feeding, not too digestible, but not at all insipid. Some of them, indeed, are definitely indigestible, beings of ambiguous life, never engaged in any enterprise that is crystalline in quality. It is said that Belgrade is the centre of the European spy system, and it may be that some of these people are spies. One about whom such a doubt might be harboured came up to me while we were eating our chicken liver risotto, an Italian whom I had last seen at a night club in Vienna. I remembered our meeting because of his answer to my inquiry as to what he was doing in Austria. ‘I come from Spain, but I have never good fortune,’ he said. 'I hoped to bring here a bullfight, but the bull, he will not come.’ This did not, of course, refer to a startling example of animal sagacity, but to the change noticeable in the attitude of the customs officials as the animal passed from territories where bull-fighting is done to where it is not. The unhappy beast had started on its journey as a symbol of life, glorious in the prospect of meeting a sacrificial death, and ended it as something like a fallen girl, to be rescued by bloodless humanitarians. Today when I asked the Italian a like question about his presence he made a more optimistic answer. 'I am about to take up very, very great concessions,’ he said. 'A pyrites mine in Bosnia.’ 'But,’ I thought, 'the pyrites, he will not come.’

The part of the book I liked least was the hundred page epilogue, but one can forgive a poor epilogue after eleven hundred pages. Are you charmed? Are you willing? Fun to read, kind of impossible to recommend, but I liked it a lot and very happy I read it and will be thinking of it as I move forward and keep reading other things.