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To my knowledge, Samuel Taylor Coleridge never heard of climate change.  Yet his brilliant, influential Rime of the Ancient Mariner - written apparently to illustrate the power of unknowable invisible forces - functions effortlessly as a warning about the suffering wrought by environmental degradation.

In Rime, the Ancient Mariner stops a man on a way to a wedding party and regales him with the story of the Ancient Mariner's last sea voyage.  He describes how his ship became trapped in South Pole ice.  The appearance of an albatross coincided with a fissure in the ice that permitted the helmsman to steer the ship to safety.  Thereafter, the albatross followed the boat.

Then the Ancient Mariner took his crossbow and killed the albatross.  This crucial event is rendered in a mere line-and-a-half, a scant seven words (one hyphenated), in the context of a verse dominated by the wedding guest's exclamations:

"God save thee, ancient Mariner!
From the fiends, that plague thee thus! -
Why look'st though so?" - With my cross-bow
I shot the Albatross.

No motivation for this act of violence is ever requested or offered.  As Barbara Everett, writing in the London Review of Books observed, "It is still often asked why the Mariner shoots the albatross. The only answer is that Mariners did: these heroic New World discoverers killed and culled everywhere they went."  As she colorfully expands, "There is a taste of rottenness, a dead albatross, underneath the history of discovery."  One might add, under the history of development as well.

This example of environmental plunder - as convenient, unthinking and reckless as our current interface with the environment - generates some unpleasant consequences.  Returning to England, the ship hits a dead spot in the Pacific and is stuck without a wind, "As idle as a painted ship/Upon a painted ocean."  The sailors become parched for lack of water; some are afflicted with fevered dreams of a spirit "[n]ine fathom deep" that has followed them from the South Pole.

A skeleton ship emerges from the sky.  This ghost ship's crew consists of Death and his female companion, Life-in-Death.  They are playing dice for the lives of the men aboard the Ancient Mariner's ship.  Death wins the crew; Life-in-Death gets the Ancient Mariner.  The ship's crew - 200 men strong - drops dead on the deck.

Seven days elapse, during which the Ancient Mariner is stuck on the boat with 200 corpses.  He finally spies some water snakes

Within the shadow of the ship
I watched their rich attire:
Blue, glossy green, and velvet black,
They coiled and swam; and every track
Was a flash of golden fire.

O happy living things! no tongue
Their beauty might declare:
A spring of love gushed from my heart,
And I blessed them unaware.

Because of the Ancient Mariner's connection with these "living things," his condition improves.  He is able to pray and sleep and, when he awakes, rain pours onto the ship's deck, saving him from dying of thirst.  Even more extraordinarily, angels embody the corpses of the 200 crew men, raising the dead and getting to work sailing the ship.

But the Ancient Mariner still belongs to Life-in-Death.  He learns that, although he will be returned to his homeland, his life will not be his own.  He will serve a terrible penance, which is the vengeance of the spirit "nine fathom deep"

. . . who bideth by himself
In the land of mist and snow,
He loved the bird that loved the man
Who shot him with his bow.

Were it that every endangered species had a guardian spirit to avenge its killing!  We'd be in a much stronger position, biodiversity-wise, if this kind of incentive structure were in place.  But it's not.  Poachers and real estate developers (among others) whose actions cause the destruction of countless animals find themselves richer and unrepentant; Life-in-Death has yet to call.  

Instead, we're left with the Ancient Mariner's lesson.  Returning to England, the Ancient Mariner experiences periodic "agony" that compels him to recount his tale.  Such agony had possessed him when he saw the wedding guest.  Now he warns

He prayeth well, who loveth well
Both man and bird and beast.

He prayeth best, who loveth best
All things both great and small;
For the dear God who loveth us,
He made and loveth all.

The wedding guest is understandably shaken by this dark tale of the consequences of wanton environmental destruction, and he turns away from the wedding party:

A sadder and a wiser man,
He rose the morrow morn.

At this historic moment, with oil poisoning the Gulf of Mexico, and myriad other environmental catastrophes unfolding, an environmental reading of Rime of the Ancient Mariner is especially poignant.  Given the difficulty of conveying through traditional journalistic and public information channels the consequences of climate change, perhaps Coleridge can impress upon a denying public that Life-in-Death (or Death itself) awaits environmental degraders and their cohorts.

That Coleridge was a religious man, the son of vicar, might make him especially persuasive to climate change doubters.  As Everett emphasized, "Coleridge was an 'anima naturaliter Christiana', a mind born Christian, who said that the 'strongest argument' for Christianity is that it 'fits the human heart'. It fitted his, at any rate." 

Nonetheless, as exegesis of Rime makes clear, Coleridge did not believe (as present-day Christians often espouse) that God made humans the caretakers of animals such that they might dispose of animals as they pleased.  Coleridge's pro-environmental Christianity is a powerful refutation to arguments like, "let's wreck the planet to bring on the rapture."

I am not, of course, idealistically optimistic that the 176-years-dead Coleridge will enjoy a resurrection as an environmentalist of note.  Not on the Al Gore scale, anyway; certainly Coleridge won't be winning any Nobel prizes.  Whatever potential long form Romantic poetry has as an instrument to influence world-wide climate change policy, that potential is deeply buried.

Nonetheless, mash-ups are super popular these days.  If we can have an Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, if readers want Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, why not Rime of the Ancient Climate Change Eco-Terrorist?

(Image of Samuel Taylor Coleridge from The Guardian)

I wonder if anyone else has the experience of wanting to visit a place in exact proportion to the awfulness of its description.  I no sooner hear that a location is subject to such severe flooding that it can only be accessed on alternate Thursdays from October 1-12, and that, upon arrival, the locals will serve me a dish of fermented yak intestines, and I think: I have to go!  I can't hazard a guess as to how and when I drank from the tainted well from which this peculiar response springs, but I can attest to the pain it causes those who care about my well being.  For those of you thinking of describing your hells on earth to me, you'll do my mom a favor if you shade your account along the following lines: "Oh, Brazilian favelas?  They're lovely.  Quiet places where people sit outside on cleanly swept streets, drinking tap water and playing wholesome card games, like Go Fish."

Gerald Hanley's Warriors pushed my "must go to hell on earth" buttons.  Warriors is a memoir of Hanley's experience being posted in a variety of remote areas in Somalia during World War II.  The isolation was extreme, and he suffered many deprivations of food, intellectual stimulation, companionship, pay, etc.  His colleagues were committing suicide with a frequency that would have been impressive in a looney bin that'd run low on its meds.  So searing was his experience, that the first paragraph of his book asserts that,

it is in solitude that one can best understand that there is no solution, except to try and do as little harm as possible while we are here, that there is no losing and no winning, no real end to greed or lust, because the human appetite for novelty can only be fully satisfied by death.

(p. 7.)  Yet, despite his success in conveying viscerally the reality of his misery, I can't resist being charmed.  He makes the insanity he confronted sound so appealing:  

After the Somali troops under his command mutinied for the third time (they hadn't been paid in almost half a year), he gave an order that they could only mutiny on Fridays.  "They took it seriously," he reports (p. 13).  More on his troops:

Like white troops without cigarettes, they talked about ghee all day and night, but unlike white troops, held conferences about it, drew up statements, compiled measurements of the ghee they had not had, and must expect from me when the time of ghee came again, and some of them would come trembling with fury to me about the ghee, after having worked each other up over the camp-fire.

(p. 156-57.)  Then there was the case of the sleepwalking girl, staggering across the village in the dark hours, past curfew, because the elders had summoned her by means of magic.  "I gave [the matter] meticulous examination and was satisfied it was magic," says Hanley.  "I had to tell the askaris [the soldiers] to let this girl walk in her sleep whenever she was called, until the end of the curfew."  (p. 113.)    

Or the case of one of his colleagues who was trying to broker a peace between rival chiefs ready to send their tribes to war.  Beaten down by fruitless negotiations that rehearsed decades-old arguments that had been as useless then as they were now, and watching the chiefs depart to summon their warriors, the colleague said,

"'Remember that it is the elephant asleep in the long grass which defeats the greatest men."  He had no idea what he meant . . . and told me he had said it cynically, out of weariness, exhausted anger, but the chiefs stared at him, exchanged glances with each other, and nodded, went on nodding, and sat down, saying, "let us thrash this matter out again.  That is a splendid thing you have said."

(p. 154.)  And, speaking of saying splendid things, how about this "genealogy" insult hurled by Hanley's cook at his servant:  "'Son of a sick hyena, grandson of a noseless thief, descendant of vultures, father to be of a hermaphrodite baboon, filth and refuse untouchable, animal without religion' - and so on."  (p. 168.)

I love it!  I want to go!  Sadly, the Somalia of World War II doesn't exist anymore, and the one that currently occupies the horn of Africa is so explosive that breathing next to it is a hazard.  But never mind the impossibility: Hanley's hell is on my list of places to visit.

Why?  Undoubtedly, Hanley's storytelling skill and compelling authorial voice is part of the reason.  A good storyteller draws in the audience, even as he or she is saying, "Go away."  Go away, forsooth!  I want to know why I should, tell me more . . .

But even crap storytellers inspire my wanderlust: I've heard perfectly foul storytellers recount information about Senegal, Egypt, Indonesia, Thailand - half the globe, really - and I still want to go.  Hanley would understand.  As he says towards the end of Warriors:

There is an enormous difference between the man who emerges from a safely ensconced segment of society, and the one who is flung into a world in which the shovel is waiting for him.  I recommend the latter to all as a far more exciting world to be thrown into.

(p. 201.)

(Map of Somalia from the UN website)  

Gerald Hanley's Warriors is an extraordinary book for many reasons, including the ambivalence it expresses about colonialism.  

Warriors was published in 1971.  To get a feel for the sentiments about colonialism in that era, consider a statement by Charles Miller, in his author's note to The Lunatic Express, a book about the construction of the Uganda Railway across Kenya, also published in 1971:

[I]t is hardly possible not to have an opinion about the British Empire. . . . For the record, I think that the British Empire, with all its horrendous failings, was on balance a good thing.  I mourned its passing.

(p. viii.)  On the other side of the issue, here's James Beauttah, a leader of the Kikuyu Central Association, quoted in Carl Rosberg and John Nottingham's book, The Myth of Mau Mau: Nationalism in Kenya, published in 1966:

"Our society had [been] broken down [by colonialism] and the unity that we had in our old structure had been replaced by everyone fighting for himself, everyone on his own against all the troubles that had been brought to us.  There was a fundamental growing disunity that was our weakness. . . . [W]e had had so many wishes and ambitions awakened in us and then always the door slammed in our face.  This is worse than never having the ambitions wakened in the first place, far, far, worse."  

(p. 243.)  Now here's Hanley, distilling his observations about colonialism, gathered during his military service in Somalia during World War II:

[T]here is nothing fine or noble about savagery and illiteracy and superstition, no matter how splendid looking the warriors and the women.  After a good long dose of savagery it is interesting how much one has learned to prefer the gentle and the sophisticated.  Primitivism is a very much overrated way of life, and is merely pitiful in essence, no matter how fascinating the carvings and the masks and the quiet zoomorphic ravings on stone and wood, those endless circles in which the tribe has wandered and lost itself, waiting for the stranger to come with the message, even when it leads to the atom bomb.
. . . .
After the enormous orgy of torture and massacre in Europe and Asia [during WWII], I felt it was impossible for any white man to preach again, self-righteously, about goodness and peace, to any non-white man.  And that shame may have been the reason, bigger than African and Eastern restlessness, which caused the white man to pack his kit and go home after the second world war.  We must have all felt something of that shame, I think, and acted upon it without really knowing why.
. . . .
Yet ironically enough, while the conquered everywhere resented losing their country and their freedom, they nearly always took advantage of the policed peace forced upon them, nearly always relaxed, their swords left at home, yet they wanted their country back for themselves, while enjoying the "peace of the grave," as Pandit Nehru once called it, in which they now toiled under aliens. . . . [T]ime is always on the side of the original owners, if they can only survive.

(p. 73-74, 86.)  Later, Hanley quotes a Somali chief:

"We are lending you the labourers," he told me.  "But only because you are living with us here on the river, and because you have spoken well, and not because we recognise this new government which has replaced the Italians.  We do not want to be ruled by any strangers anymore.  They beat us with cannon, but ever inch of this land is ours.  Ours.  It can never belong to any strangers.  Men cannot live under strangers who have taken their lands.  Never.  If I had a spear and you had nothing and I came and took your house from you, and made you work in your own garden for me, you would not like that.  That is what they have done, these governments.  And it must come to an end now.  You can tell them that, for that is what we all feel."

Hanley was moved by the chief's speech.  "I agreed with every word he said," Hanley admits, concluding, "All these people everywhere would have to be let free, left alone, lectured to no more, or this war would be as useless as the last one."  (p. 91.)

Taken together, these excerpts from Hanley reveal a multi-faceted understanding of colonialism that glitters with accuracy.  Eschewing both the "on balance" opinion-drawing of Miller and the focused accusations of Beauttah, Hanley sees: (1) opportunities for a modern life, in contrast to traditional, pre-modern living, as being a good thing, despite the risks, (2) colonized peoples enjoying the benefits of those opportunities, despite resenting having these benefits and risks forced upon them, (3) white men as having no legitimacy to press those opportunities and risks upon non-whites, and (4) the inevitability of white men having to give up trying.  In essence, Hanley achieves the same understanding as Tayeb Salih, who - writing about colonialism in the Sudan in his masterpiece novel Season of Migration to the North - typically offered his insight with more poetry and concision: "[T]he [British] coming too was not the tragedy as we imagine, nor yet a blessing as they imagine."  (p. 60.)

The conflict inherent in this position - I cannot bestow benefits without costs too high; I cannot receive benefits without losses too great - is wrenching.    A mere glance at the current states of constant war in Somalia and the Sudan, and the abysmal governance in Kenya - and at the thousands of refugees, impoverished, starving and violence-traumatized people  in these countries - confirms that, had a resolution to this fundamental conflict been possible, people on both sides of the colonial equation would have been better off.

But to say that is a little like saying (I don't want to push the analogy too far) that, had Communism been able to work out its kinks, the world would have been a better place.  On balance, colonialism wasn't (and isn't) a blessing, any more than Communism was (and is) a blessing.  They are both systems that can be shown viable in abstract form, but the models can't be applied in practice.

The reason is that this basic conflict of being unable either to convey or receive benefits without costs and losses being unacceptable is a dynamic that pervasively poses obstacles to human engagement.  It's not merely the fly in the ointment of colonialism; it's a feature common to all aspects of the the human landscape, be they familial, professional, economic, sexual, creative, political or ecological.  Negotiating this conflict is an integral part of human engagement with "others" - be they our parents, our neighbors, our employers, our creditors, our lovers, our collaborators, our politicians or our environmental resources.

And negotiations notoriously end, neither in victory nor defeat, but in compromise: neither tragedies, nor blessings, they are simple enablers to living.  Hanley's wisdom comes in accepting this fact with ambivalence.

(Drawing of Gerald Hanley by John Huston, 1970s, from Warriors)    

The first five days of March found me on the slopes, and at the summit and peak, of Mount Kilimanjaro.  (In the picture at left, taken at Uhuru Peak, I am the person sitting center, wearing the white hat and green balaclava.) 

I climbed the mountain because the grand finale of the novel that I'm currently writing, The Celebration Husband, takes place at a WWI German military camp at the base of the mountain.  Technically, the research didn't require me to go all the way up the mountain.  But I figured, while I was there . . . .

As it turned out, however, Kilimanjaro was an incredibly useful addition to my writing process.  In order to ascend the mountain, a climber must acclimate to the altitude.  Every step up decreases the amount of available oxygen, until by the end, the climber has to make do with something like 50% of the oxygen found at sea level.  To the unacclimated, this state of oxygen deprivation can result in sleepiness, diarrhea, nausea, vomiting and - in extreme cases - cerebral or pulmonary edema.

Therefore, in order to acclimate, a climber must go slowly.  "Pole pole" is Swahili for "slowly slowly," and it's the unofficial slogan of the mountain.  Any competition in terms of a climber's pace up the mountain can only entail being the very last to arrive at each day's camp.  Climbing Kili demands creeping one's way to success, an approach antithetical to the vroom-to-the-top methodology admired elsewhere in the world.

By temperament and aptitude, I'm a vroom-er.  Left to my own devices, I zip around at a pace that, I gather, most people find to be out of step with their own.  The speed characterizes my writing, as much as my thinking, temper and rate at which I change jobs, abodes and continents.  (The fast pace, by the way, is innate, not induced; though I've never tried cocaine, I've had enough exposure to people who have used it to conclude that it would only slow me down.)

But as my life progresses, I'm finding that I'm a born sprinter being made to run an endurance race.  The life trajectory that I'd mapped out for myself at a more youthful age didn't involve years of struggle to get published.

And, although I recognize that my expectations of fast work leading to fast reward have never once been met, I still default to them.  The Celebration Husband was going to be a sprint for me.  I was going to finish the book in four months; the book would be shopped to publishers by the second half of 2010. 

Now I know that those expectations are unlikely to be fulfilled.  The reasons are best explained by saying that, while some Christians have had their lives custom crafted by an intelligent designer, my life seems to have been hewn by a notably thoughtless sculptor with a sense of humor that I've yet to appreciate. 

Nonetheless, even such maladapted creatures as sprinters in marathons can learn to endure and even thrive, and climbing Mount Kilmanjaro provided this maladapted creature with valuable lessons in success through submission to a hostile (if gorgeous) environment.  No one can fight oxygen deprivation; a climber who hopes to avoid being crushed by altitude sickness can only accept the thin air and acclimate.

For those who surrender to the mountain and acclimate to its demands, the returns are immeasurable.  Of our fifteen guides, four were brothers.  Their father was also our guide.  His name was Mzee Emmanueli (pictured left), and he has climbed Mount Kilimanjaro more than 3,500 times.  He is 80.  

After descending the mountain, I read this excerpt from Ralph Waldo Emerson's journal in an article in The New York Review of Books:

Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare have seen mountains, if they speak of them.  The young writers seem to have seen pictures of mountains.

(John Banville, "Emerson: 'A Few Inches from Calamity'," The New York Review of Books 35 n.4 (Dec. 3-16, 2009).)

I am unlikely ever to be known as a young writer.  But I have seen mountains.

(The second picture was taken just outside Horombo, a camp at 12,000 feet.  Kibo, the crater peak of Mount Kilimanjaro, rises in the distance.  The third picture is of Mawenzi, a second peak on Mount Kilimanjaro.  The fourth picture is of a subsidiary crater below Horombo.)

Over the course of the last three novels I've written, I've found that going on-site to a location helps me write about the events that I imagine to have taken place there.  For the first and third novels, Portnoy's Daughter and Waiting for Love Child respectively, "going on-site" never got more complicated than having drinks at a particular bar that crops up in the novel, or playing laser tag at the People's Liberation Army facility.  "On-site research" was more involved, however, for my second novel, The Swing of Beijing: I traveled through Kazakhstan and Kyrgyzstan and crossed back into China through the Torugart Pass . . . all to write passages that are no longer part of the novel.  No matter: I was honing my methodology.

Therefore, for my fourth novel, which takes place during WWI in British East Africa, I knew that I'd be criss-crossing the territory covered by the British and German armies.  In an earlier blog post, I wrote about my journey to the Narosera River, where Lord Delamere had camped out to recruit Masai scouts just after the start of the war.

This week I returned from a trip to Tsavo West, where most of the troops and action during the war took place.  On this research trip, I was incredibly lucky to have James Willson (pictured above) as my guide to the numerous forts and battlefields that we toured.

The East African front during WWI is not one that is well known.  (Indeed, Ross Anderson wrote a book about it called The Forgotten Front.)  Although ruins of forts and battlefields exist, no effort is made to demarcate, preserve, develop or commemorate the sites in Kenya.  (Imagine Gettysburg as a deserted, overgrown field, without tour guides, memorials or any public awareness of its significance.)  No one - not the British military, nor the Kenyan military, nor the history curricula of either country - is interested.

With the exception of James Willson, that is.  The world's expert on these sites, Willson has discovered and/or explored numerous areas of significance to WWI, including Fort Mzima, Crater Fort, Maktau and Salaita.  Having read deeply on the subject, Willson is able to identify and map the different areas in the forts (trenches, command centers, parade grounds, tent encampments, etc.), and he has encyclopedic knowledge of the debris common at these ruins (shards of glass from Rose's lime juice bottles [pictured right], South African beer bottles, crushed tins that held bully beef, etc.).

With Willson's guidance, the experience of soldiers in WWI clarified in an extraordinary manner.  We drove the route that soldiers marched, in the heat of the day, on their way into battle at Murka.  We picked our way through overgrown brush at Fort Mashoti that the soldiers had clear cut.  From the command center at Maktau (pictured left), we surveyed the landscape on which British soldiers spied approaching German raiding parties.  

However much my on-site research had been useful writing previous books, their value is proving inordinately greater on this fourth book (my first work of historical fiction).  Thanks to Willson, my capacity to write battle scenes and other passages involving soldiers and military encampments has received a vast boost, far beyond anything I could have achieved through book research alone.

Willson's own research has been conducted entirely as a labor of love, independent of any research or academic institution and without any funding.  His knowledge is of incredible value both to our understanding of the past and to our present.  (Many of the issues that the British military faced during WWI - including troops from multiple locations speaking mutually unintelligible languages, and horrendous supply chain challenges - are currently faced by the US and British militaries in Iraq.)  What Willson knows has the potential to enrich many areas of human endeavor, including military strategy, literature and history.

We can only hope that the contents of Willson's brain will be adequately indexed in the coming years, so that his knowledge will be available to future generations.  Willson has written a book that should be forthcoming within the year or so, but his familiarity with the Tsavo landscape and the WWI sites cannot be fully conveyed in a book.  With luck, perhaps enough people will learn the lay of the sites from Willson, so that - when and if funding for preservation and memorialization becomes available - adequate knowledge underpinning those efforts will exist.

In the meantime, the cause of preservation, perpetuation of knowledge and honoring the dead will be well served by honoring the living.  In recognition of his contribution to humanity and history, James Willson deserves an expression of our gratitude.  While this blog post is certainly inadequate, an OBE seems about right. 

Storytellers don't have to be reliable to be entertaining.  Great narrative voices can be widely off the mark - P.G. Wodehouse's marvelous Bertie Wooster is an example - and yet their own haplessness with facts and reality only deepens our delight in hearing what they have to say.

Lord Cranworth is an interesting example of an entertaining, unreliable narrative voice.  Unlike Bertie Wooster, who is fictional, Lord Cranworth was real.  And diverting further from Bertie Wooster, whose lack of reliability was the conscious intent of his creator, Cranworth didn't mean to be unreliable.

Cranworth has become unreliable in part because the passage of time has rendered so many of his opinions politically incorrect.  "I dislike making contact with a black race which emphatically dissents from the superiority I claim for my race and colour," he writes of Ethiopians.  (Lord Cranworth, Kenya Chronicles 178 (1939)).

But Cranworth has also become unreliable because his account of factual events diverges from other contemporaneous accounts.  Here, for example, is Cranworth's version of the events leading up to the deportation of Galbraith Cole:

Galbraith Cole was one of the earliest pioneers, a brother-in-law of Lord Delamere, and deservedly one of the most popular inhabitants both with black and white.  He had suffered repeatedly from thefts of cattle and sheep from his farm on Lake Elmenteita [sic], abutting the Masai Reserve.  One day he caught a party of Masai red-handed driving off his sheep, and, having a rifle, fired a shot to frighten the delinquents.  By an unfortunate mischance the shot struck one of the party, who subsequently died.  The Government were placed in a position of difficulty.  No local jury would, or indeed could, convict Cole of any major crime, and the tribe in question, with whom the punishment for cattle-stealing from time immemorial had been death, saw no justifiable grounds for complaint.  On the other hand, a considerable opinion at home said that in the interest of our own rule and good name an example must be made.  And again it is hard to dissent from that view.  The Governor decided that it was a case for deportation, unpopular though the course might be.

(Kenya Chronicles at 64).

His account omits several salient facts that Karen Blixen mentions about the event:

When Karen Blixen lectured at Lund University in 1938 she gave an example of Galbraith Cole's unswerving conviction, which a man of less fibre would have easily betrayed.  Like the Masai he had killed, he paid his price without question:

The Judge said to Galbraith, 'It's not, you know, that we don't understand that you shot only to stop the thieves.' 'No,' Galbraith said, 'I shot to kill.  I said that I would do so.'

'Think again, Mr. Cole,' said the judge.  'We are convinced that you only shot to stop them.'

'No, by God,' Galbraith said.  'I shot to kill.'  He was then sentenced to leave the country and, in a way, this really caused his death.

Errol Trzebinksi, Silence Will Speak 76 (1977) (quoting Donald Hannah, Isak Dinesen and Karen Blixen: the mask and the reality 35-36 (1971)).

In highlighting this disparity, I am not so much interested in which version is accurate, but in the relationship between an accurate grasp on facts and the formation of opinions that endure the test of time.  My guess is that Cranworth wasn't just unlucky that public opinion shifted away from his conviction of white superiority; rather, I hazard that a certain disposition on his part to tamper with facts supported the formation of opinions that could not survive the eventual triumph of reality.  Hence, the man could write of his early years in British East Africa:

Settlers were coming in with a steadily increasing flow.  New, beautiful and undeveloped territories were being discovered and occupied.  New crops were being tried out and new possibilities became probabilities almost monthly.  Land values improved with great rapidity and the native population became more prosperous and infinitely happier and safer.  No stigma rested at that time on the white settlers for the work that they were doing.

(Kenya Chronicles at 29 (emphasis added).)

Amusing to read now, but not very credible.

(Photo of Berkeley Cole and Lord Cranworth from Kenya Chronicles)

In Richard Dawkins' Introduction to Elspeth Huxley's Red Strangers, he calls the novel "anthropologically illuminating," and that phrase struck me as the most insightful of the compliments he bestowed on the book ("epic," "gripping," "moving" and "humanistically mind-opening" among them).  

Red Strangers recounts the history of Kenya from 1890-1937 through the eyes of three generations of Kikuyu men: history, still written by the victor, but seen through the eyes of colonized, as that perspective is imagined by the colonizer.  

The ambition of Red Strangers is huge, and I have great admiration for the project.  With Red Strangers, Huxley courageously undertook an "experiment," as she put it in her Foreword, to record "the way of life that existed before the white men came" because "within a few years none will survive of those who remember" those days.  (Red Strangers was published in 1939.)  The experiment was unquestionably worthwhile, and the record she has created is of tremendous historical and anthropological interest. 

Nonetheless, Red Strangers suffers two serious flaws.  First, Huxley's storytelling is overshadowed by her agenda.  She wants to describe a bygone society and explain its reaction to the appearance of the colonists more than she wants to tell us a story.  As a result, events occur without narrative pay-off:  Muthengi seduces his adopted sister Ambui . . . but nothing happens as a result.  Matu runs away to live with the Athi people for some time . . . but we never find out why this matters for the plot.  A conflict erupts between the Kipsigis and the Kikuyu on Marafu's farm . . . that goes nowhere.  More disturbingly, the book has the "one thing and then another" feel of poorly-written historical treatises.  Events appear in the Red Strangers because they correspond to actual historical events that happened, not because they advance the plot.

Second, Huxley attempts to describe to a literate society a world that was preliterate, from the point of view of the preliterate.  I am not sure that this goal is achievable.  The thought processes and consciousnesses of preliterate peoples is different from that of literate, modern peoples, and I am not convinced that either methodology can be transmitted directly, that is, without an intervening process of interpretation.  As Huxley herself posits, "[t]he old Kikuyu . . . cannot present their point of view to us because they cannot express it in terms which we can understand."  To circumvent this problem, Huxley has chosen to depict "old Kikuyu" who express their point of view in terms we can understand; in other words, she has created a hybrid character who never existed: a Kikuyu from a preliterate, precolonial society who nonetheless communicates in a literate, post-colonial way.  Unsurprisingly, this character is unsatisfactory.  He (because all three generations of Kikuyu protagonists in Red Strangers are men) doesn't come across as resourceful, intelligent, reflective . . . or believable.  Rather, he's flat and two dimensional.

Following the lead of Dawkins' "anthropologically illuminating" comment, I would guess that a better vehicle for the information Huxley wanted to convey would have been the long-form personal history, something like Marjorie Shostak's Nisa: The Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, a compelling page-turner about a Kalahari bushwoman.  Nisa is an anthropological text, and I suspect that Huxley - who disclaimed any anthropological rigor in Red Strangers - avoided that option because she didn't want to be accused of sloppy scholarship.  All the same, Nisa succeeds where Red Strangers fails.  Although Nisa came from a preliterate society, and although her story was being told through the agency of a literate academic, Nisa comes alive in her book in ways that Muthengi, Matu and Karanja never do in Red Strangers.  A novel, after all, must have a story; but a personal history must only have a life.

(Image of Red Strangers from Fantastic Fiction)     

In Beppo, Lord Byron's verse play, the poet raises an intractable question: were 99 stanzas necessary?

A comic, bawdy Venetian adventure, Beppo ostensibly tells the tale of a woman, Laura, whose husband, Beppo, goes to sea and disappears without a word.  "And really if a man won't let us know/That he's alive, he's dead, or should be so," explains Byron.  So Laura takes a cavalier servente, an openly-accepted second husband.  Six years go by, and Laura and her cavalier servente are enjoying their life together, when - at a masked ball during Carnival - Laura catches the attention of a Turk . . . who turns out to be her husband.

Despite the drama of this situation, the plot is secondary to scene-setting and musings of tangential relevance.  In Beppo, Byron's digressions, quite self-consciously, rule the poem:  

. . . [F]or I find
Digression is a sin, that by degrees
Becomes exceeding tedious to my mind,

Byron complains in stanza 50.  Just thirteen stanzas later, he's moaning again:

To turn, -and to return; the devil take it!
This story slips for ever through my fingers.  

But however much Byron protests his poetic ADD, he devotes extensive energy to it.  As Jeffrey, writing in Edinburgh Review in 1818 observed, "This story, such as it is, occupies about twenty stanzas."  (My own count is not so condemnatory.  I allow the first 20 verses as appropriate background scene-setting, and I only count 27 or so verses of proper digression.  Nonetheless, even by my generous assessment, 47 verses of 99 do not advance the plot.)  

Explanations of Byron's digressions abound.  Jeffrey calls them "unquestionably by far the most lively and interesting parts of the work."  Harsh condemnation of the story then.

Jeffrey is not the only critic to slight Beppo's story.  Writing in The Guardian, Benjamin Markovits calls the story "scant" and explains the digressions in Beppo as follows:

The real hero of the piece is the poet himself . . . . [engaging in] a series of digressions on worldliness: on how to take pleasure from the world, on how to live.

While I agree with both these comments, I think in some sense they miss the larger picture of how the digressions deepen the reader's experience of the story and how the poem's constituent parts relate to the whole.  

If, as Jeffrey and Markovits suggests, the digressions don't relate to the story, but instead supplant the story, then my inquiry is irrelevant.  The constituent parts don't relate beyond allowing the story to serve as a frame for Byron's digressions.

But to explain the story in Beppo as a thin branch on which to hang the poet's "lively and interesting" observations "on how to live" seems (to my mind) to disserve Byron's skills as a storyteller.  Such an interpretation also fails to give meaning to the stanzas in which Byron calls attention to his own digressions.

My reading is that the digressions are integral to the story.  By calling attention to his digressions, Byron is signaling to the reader that they are not the sloppy tangents of a debauched mind, but deliberate and purposeful additions to the story.  Byron is telling the tale of a woman whose relationship with her cavalier servente is a digression in her marriage.  The digression is entertaining, worldly and broad-minded - just like Byron's digressions in the poem.  In Beppo, Byron is offering himself as cavalier servente to the reader; he is inviting his adoring fans to allow him to be a digression in their day, life, relationship.  (The poet isn't the hero of the poem; the reader is.) 

And, in the reader's acceptance of Byron's service, the reader is implicated in Laura's "sin."  Writing of immoral relations for a conservative British audience, Byron stealthily builds the reader's sympathy for Laura - as well as support for the poem's happy ending that allows Laura to escape without punishment - by inviting the reader to partake via literary effigy in Laura's naughtiness.  

Given such playfulness, 99 stanzas are not only necessary, but possibly insufficient.

(Cover of Beppo from Byronetc.com.)