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Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
Written on the brink of World War II, Rebecca West's classic examination of the history, people, and politics of Yugoslavia illuminates a region that is still a focus of international concern. A magnificent blend of travel journal, cultural commentary, and historical insight, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon probes the troubled history of the Balkans, and the uneasy relationships amongst its ethnic groups. The landscape and the people of Yugoslavia are brilliantly observed as West untangles the tensions that rule the country's history as well as its daily life.
1181 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1941
About the author
Rebecca West
110 books400 followersCicely Isabel Fairfield, known by her pen name Rebecca West, or Dame Rebecca West, DBE was an English author, journalist, literary critic, and travel writer. She was brought up in Edinburgh, Scotland, where she attended George Watson's Ladies College.
A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason, later The New Meaning of Treason, a study of World War II and Communist traitors; The Return of the Soldier, a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to British letters.
A prolific, protean author who wrote in many genres, West was committed to feminist and liberal principles and was one of the foremost public intellectuals of the twentieth century. She reviewed books for The Times, the New York Herald Tribune, the Sunday Telegraph, and the New Republic, and she was a correspondent for The Bookman. Her major works include Black Lamb and Grey Falcon (1941), on the history and culture of Yugoslavia; A Train of Powder (1955), her coverage of the Nuremberg trials, published originally in The New Yorker; The Meaning of Treason, later The New Meaning of Treason, a study of World War II and Communist traitors; The Return of the Soldier, a modernist World War I novel; and the "Aubrey trilogy" of autobiographical novels, The Fountain Overflows, This Real Night, and Cousin Rosamund. Time called her "indisputably the world's number one woman writer" in 1947. She was made CBE in 1949, and DBE in 1959, in recognition of her outstanding contributions to British letters.
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February 5, 2015
Writing a five-star review full of superlatives is always difficult: for people who haven’t read it yet, there’s no way any book can live up to the kind of praise that someone who loves it wants to give out. And so I really need to marshal my thoughts here, because I genuinely believe that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is one of the three or four greatest books published in the twentieth century, and I want to make sure I present my case as well as I can. (I say ‘three or four’ just to cover myself – in the privacy of a personal conversation I’d have to admit that personally there’s nothing I’d rate over this.) This is going to be a long review, because I want to quote her in detail.
First of all, let’s acknowledge what a daunting prospect it is. Let’s be honest, eleven hundred pages about the Balkans sounds unpromising, and personally I doubt I would ever have read it unless I’d been travelling to Serbia and Monetenegro myself. Recommending it to people isn’t always easy, because it is certainly big, and it does contain some longueurs – but somehow they become part of its genius. There are some masterpieces which appear to be flawless, the writing of which I cannot even understand – Nabokov’s Pale Fire is one. But then there are other great works whose imperfections seem to be an intrinsic part of what makes them great, and Black Lamb is of that kind. I can understand how it was written, but the sheer depth of thinking involved staggers me.
It’s important to say what it’s not. People who criticise this book sometimes say that its politics are biased, or that recent historiography renders West’s theories about the Byzantine Empire obsolete. This is at best beside the point. The book is not a history, or a political tract: it’s a travel journal, which just happens to involve some deep thinking in several important areas. (Claims that she is ‘anti-German’ are particularly absurd – West and her husband were huge lovers of German culture. What they disliked was Germany’s political environment in the 1930s, which anyone would have to admit is fair enough.)
On the sentence-by-sentence level, her writing is exceptional in its clarity and its striking imagery, by turns witty and beautiful. ‘She was one of those widows whose majesty makes their husbands seem specially dead’, she says of one woman; and of another, ‘It is true that she was plump as an elephant, but she was so beautiful that the resemblance only served to explain what it is that male elephants feel about female elephants.’ On another occasion, after a long description of Orthodox priests chanting hymns, she concludes with extraordinary sensitivity:
I melt over her description of the Islamic call to prayer:
What is most striking for a modern reader is how blindingly direct Rebecca is. Nowadays it’s customary for a lot of writers to distance themselves from controversial views by using disingenuous constructions like ‘Some people might say that…’ or ‘it could be argued that…’ or ‘one might suggest that…’. There is none of that here: she decides what she thinks about an issue, and says it in the most forceful way she can. Some people have taken this to mean that she has a black-and-white view of the world, but to my mind that is a disastrous misreading. Rebecca West’s understanding is very subtle, she just believes that the best way to advance an argument is to state it in its strongest form. For example, she doesn’t agree with the Islamic practice of veiling women – but she says it like this:
It’s extremely refreshing and challenging to read arguments presented in this way. You won’t always agree with her – often you’ll disagree strongly – but you are always engaged with the prose, a two-way conversation, either yelling out in agreement or leaping out of your chair with objections. She is a visceral writer. But at this point, let me digress slightly into
A PERSONAL INTERLUDE
In the mid-2000s, I found myself lodging with a gay sexagenarian Baron who worked at a Tunbridge Wells bookshop. His baronial title had been inherited from Belgian relatives, he drank a lot of blended scotch, and he was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. His entire house was full of books: they went from floor to ceiling in every room of the house, including the kitchen and the stairwells. A man after my own heart.
One day as we sat sipping whisky, I told him that I’d just started reading the most incredible book: ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, I don’t know if you know of it….’ Nick jolted up in his chair. ‘What was that? What did you say? You’re reading Rebecca West? Well that’s – gosh. I knew her, you know….’
It turned out that she had officially opened the secondhand bookshop he used to own, and they had corresponded for a while; he’d even gone up to London with his boyfriend to have dinner with her a few times. ‘I only wish someone had Boswellized her,’ he said to me on several occasions: she was, apparently, even more brilliant and acerbic in real life than she was on paper. One of the things he pointed out to me was how extremely rare it was for a publisher to agree to bring out such a huge book on such an obscure topic in the middle of the war, during paper rationing: ‘In the end they just thought it was of such extraordinary quality that they made an exception.’
So delighted was my landlord to find that someone thirty years younger than him was enjoying this book, that when I left he pulled a 1942 first edition of it, in two volumes, from his shelves, and gave it to me as a parting gift. I kept it open on my desk as I read, and used the Canongate version for scribbling in.
THE REVIEW, CONCLUDED
It is rare to find a travel book that builds a cumulative argument, let alone an argument that can be sustained over more than a thousand pages. Ultimately what makes Black Lamb so astonishing for me is that Rebecca West uses the gifts I outlined above to probe the depths of the human condition in a very clear-sighted way. To end this review I want to look at these arguments a bit more closely – if you want to discover them for yourself, you could consider what follows to be spoilers. As West travels, Europe is on the edge of war: as she publishes, the killing is well underway. What makes humans behave like this?
It’s the sort of grandiose question that usually gets grandiose, evasive answers. But not here. West thinks long and hard about it and she is characteristically blunt in her conclusions. For her there is a systemic problem with the Christianity that underpins western culture, simply because it’s built on the idea of a human sacrifice, and that leaves us fundamentally unsure about right and wrong.
She goes further than this, though. (She always goes further.) When, in Macedonia, West witnesses a lamb being sacrificed in real life, she grasps that this internal chaos mentioned above has very dark consequences for human society and conflict; indeed, for civilised nations this is a paradox that can make us want to be defeated, even when – especially when – fighting for a good cause.
The implications of this extraordinary passage, when it comes to war, are fully explored. West hates war, but she also hates ‘the fatuousness of such pacifism as points out the unpleasantness of war as if people had never noticed it before’.
Some causes are worth fighting for, even though doing so feels abhorrent. As far as I’m concerned, this insight has never been better expressed:
This is the meaning of the book’s title, drawn from a Serbian fable about religious sacrifice. In the global conflict erupting around her, Rebecca West could see emerging the same impulses and psychological currents that she had been studying and thinking about for years, ebbing and flowing throughout history and crystallised in the story of Yugoslavia: because human beings are a species that have evolved just enough intelligence to know that what we do is terrible, but not enough to go beyond it; and that leaves us unable to fight for our better nature with conviction.
I know of no other book that thinks this hard or this deeply, and where depth of thought is combined with such felicity of expression – and that’s without even considering the fact that it was written from within the heart of the maelstrom itself. Following West’s train of thought through this doorstop-sized essay is one of the biggest intellectual trips you can get from picking up a book, and everyone who can cope with the experience deserves to have it. To my mind, Black Lamb is simply unique – a thing of joy and beauty, a peerless example of applied brilliance, a dazzling masterpiece.
First of all, let’s acknowledge what a daunting prospect it is. Let’s be honest, eleven hundred pages about the Balkans sounds unpromising, and personally I doubt I would ever have read it unless I’d been travelling to Serbia and Monetenegro myself. Recommending it to people isn’t always easy, because it is certainly big, and it does contain some longueurs – but somehow they become part of its genius. There are some masterpieces which appear to be flawless, the writing of which I cannot even understand – Nabokov’s Pale Fire is one. But then there are other great works whose imperfections seem to be an intrinsic part of what makes them great, and Black Lamb is of that kind. I can understand how it was written, but the sheer depth of thinking involved staggers me.
It’s important to say what it’s not. People who criticise this book sometimes say that its politics are biased, or that recent historiography renders West’s theories about the Byzantine Empire obsolete. This is at best beside the point. The book is not a history, or a political tract: it’s a travel journal, which just happens to involve some deep thinking in several important areas. (Claims that she is ‘anti-German’ are particularly absurd – West and her husband were huge lovers of German culture. What they disliked was Germany’s political environment in the 1930s, which anyone would have to admit is fair enough.)
On the sentence-by-sentence level, her writing is exceptional in its clarity and its striking imagery, by turns witty and beautiful. ‘She was one of those widows whose majesty makes their husbands seem specially dead’, she says of one woman; and of another, ‘It is true that she was plump as an elephant, but she was so beautiful that the resemblance only served to explain what it is that male elephants feel about female elephants.’ On another occasion, after a long description of Orthodox priests chanting hymns, she concludes with extraordinary sensitivity:
If there be a God who is fount of all goodness, this is the tribute that should logically be paid to Him; if there be only goodness, it is still a logical tribute.
I melt over her description of the Islamic call to prayer:
It is a cry that holds an ultimate sadness, like the hooting of owls and the barking of foxes in night-time. The muezzins are making that plain statement of their cosmogony, and the owls and foxes are obeying the simplest need for expression; yet their cries, which they intended to mean so little, prove more conclusively than any argument that life is an occasion which justifies the hugest expenditure of pity.
What is most striking for a modern reader is how blindingly direct Rebecca is. Nowadays it’s customary for a lot of writers to distance themselves from controversial views by using disingenuous constructions like ‘Some people might say that…’ or ‘it could be argued that…’ or ‘one might suggest that…’. There is none of that here: she decides what she thinks about an issue, and says it in the most forceful way she can. Some people have taken this to mean that she has a black-and-white view of the world, but to my mind that is a disastrous misreading. Rebecca West’s understanding is very subtle, she just believes that the best way to advance an argument is to state it in its strongest form. For example, she doesn’t agree with the Islamic practice of veiling women – but she says it like this:
The veil perpetuates and renews a moment when man, being in league with death, like all creatures that must die, hated his kind for living and transmitting life, and hated woman more than himself, because she is the instrument of birth, and put his hand to the floor to find filth and plastered it on her face, to affront the breath of life in his nostrils.
It’s extremely refreshing and challenging to read arguments presented in this way. You won’t always agree with her – often you’ll disagree strongly – but you are always engaged with the prose, a two-way conversation, either yelling out in agreement or leaping out of your chair with objections. She is a visceral writer. But at this point, let me digress slightly into
A PERSONAL INTERLUDE
In the mid-2000s, I found myself lodging with a gay sexagenarian Baron who worked at a Tunbridge Wells bookshop. His baronial title had been inherited from Belgian relatives, he drank a lot of blended scotch, and he was one of the nicest people I’ve ever met. His entire house was full of books: they went from floor to ceiling in every room of the house, including the kitchen and the stairwells. A man after my own heart.
One day as we sat sipping whisky, I told him that I’d just started reading the most incredible book: ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, I don’t know if you know of it….’ Nick jolted up in his chair. ‘What was that? What did you say? You’re reading Rebecca West? Well that’s – gosh. I knew her, you know….’
It turned out that she had officially opened the secondhand bookshop he used to own, and they had corresponded for a while; he’d even gone up to London with his boyfriend to have dinner with her a few times. ‘I only wish someone had Boswellized her,’ he said to me on several occasions: she was, apparently, even more brilliant and acerbic in real life than she was on paper. One of the things he pointed out to me was how extremely rare it was for a publisher to agree to bring out such a huge book on such an obscure topic in the middle of the war, during paper rationing: ‘In the end they just thought it was of such extraordinary quality that they made an exception.’
So delighted was my landlord to find that someone thirty years younger than him was enjoying this book, that when I left he pulled a 1942 first edition of it, in two volumes, from his shelves, and gave it to me as a parting gift. I kept it open on my desk as I read, and used the Canongate version for scribbling in.
THE REVIEW, CONCLUDED
It is rare to find a travel book that builds a cumulative argument, let alone an argument that can be sustained over more than a thousand pages. Ultimately what makes Black Lamb so astonishing for me is that Rebecca West uses the gifts I outlined above to probe the depths of the human condition in a very clear-sighted way. To end this review I want to look at these arguments a bit more closely – if you want to discover them for yourself, you could consider what follows to be spoilers. As West travels, Europe is on the edge of war: as she publishes, the killing is well underway. What makes humans behave like this?
It’s the sort of grandiose question that usually gets grandiose, evasive answers. But not here. West thinks long and hard about it and she is characteristically blunt in her conclusions. For her there is a systemic problem with the Christianity that underpins western culture, simply because it’s built on the idea of a human sacrifice, and that leaves us fundamentally unsure about right and wrong.
We are continually told to range ourselves with the crucified and the crucifiers, with innocence and guilt, with kind love and cruel hate. Our breasts echo for ever with the cries ‘In murdering goodness we sinned’ and ‘By murdering goodness we were saved.’ ‘The lamb is innocent and must not be killed,’ ‘The dead lamb brings us salvation,’ so we live in chaos.
She goes further than this, though. (She always goes further.) When, in Macedonia, West witnesses a lamb being sacrificed in real life, she grasps that this internal chaos mentioned above has very dark consequences for human society and conflict; indeed, for civilised nations this is a paradox that can make us want to be defeated, even when – especially when – fighting for a good cause.
We believed in our heart of hearts that life was simply this and nothing more, a man cutting the throat of a lamb on a rock to please God and obtain happiness; and when our intelligence told us that the man was performing a disgusting and meaningless act, our response was not to dismiss the idea as a nightmare, but to say, ‘Since it is wrong to be the priest and sacrifice the lamb, I will be the lamb and be sacrificed by the priest.’ We thereby set up a principle that doom was honourable for innocent things, and conceded that if we spoke of kindliness and recommended peace it was fitting that afterwards the knife should be passed across our throats. Therefore it happened again and again that when we fought well for a reasonable cause and were in sight of victory, we were filled with a sense that we were not acting in accordance with divine protocol, and turned away and sought defeat, thus betraying those who had trusted us to win them kindliness and peace.
The implications of this extraordinary passage, when it comes to war, are fully explored. West hates war, but she also hates ‘the fatuousness of such pacifism as points out the unpleasantness of war as if people had never noticed it before’.
That non-resistance paralyses the aggressor is a lie: otherwise the Jews of Germany would all be very well today.
Some causes are worth fighting for, even though doing so feels abhorrent. As far as I’m concerned, this insight has never been better expressed:
I had to be willing to fight for it even though my own cause could not fail to be repulsive to me, since the essence of civilization was disinclination to violence, and when I defended it habit would make me fear that I was betraying it.
This is the meaning of the book’s title, drawn from a Serbian fable about religious sacrifice. In the global conflict erupting around her, Rebecca West could see emerging the same impulses and psychological currents that she had been studying and thinking about for years, ebbing and flowing throughout history and crystallised in the story of Yugoslavia: because human beings are a species that have evolved just enough intelligence to know that what we do is terrible, but not enough to go beyond it; and that leaves us unable to fight for our better nature with conviction.
For we have developed enough sensibility to know that to be cruel is vile, and therefore we would not wish to be the priest whose knife made the blood spurt from the black lamb’s throat; and since we still believed the blood sacrifice to be necessary we were left with no choice, if we desired a part in the service of the good, but to be the black lamb.
I know of no other book that thinks this hard or this deeply, and where depth of thought is combined with such felicity of expression – and that’s without even considering the fact that it was written from within the heart of the maelstrom itself. Following West’s train of thought through this doorstop-sized essay is one of the biggest intellectual trips you can get from picking up a book, and everyone who can cope with the experience deserves to have it. To my mind, Black Lamb is simply unique – a thing of joy and beauty, a peerless example of applied brilliance, a dazzling masterpiece.
August 19, 2011
Google keeps blanking out on the title, but there’s a Ford Madox Ford novel where the main character hears about a friend’s engagement and asks himself why any man would choose to get married. Then he comes up with a generous explanation: well, he thinks, maybe the careful study of one woman gives you a sort of map of all the rest.
See, that’s just crazy enough to work. Not that I’ve ever tried the experiment myself, but in my better moments, I can almost understand the logic. I’m not even talking about marriage per se, really – just a certain philosophy of life. Sometimes I have this dim suspicion that the only way to get a handle on the universe is to scrutinize a tiny corner of it with passionate intensity. Then I get sucked into the MILF portal on Youporn again and the whole vexed question evaporates into a metaphysical mist.
Rebecca West, as far as I know, faced no such distractions. She found her particular corner of the universe in that doomed federation formerly known as Yugoslavia. Already a successful, middle-aged writer when she first visited the Balkans, she discovered a place where the innards of history were just kind of hanging out, painfully exposed. “Take the lid off of life, let me look at the works,” goes a line in an old Mekons song. For West, Yugoslavia is where the lid came off.
At 1100 pages, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a very big book – a vast, teeming, magnum-opussy thingamajig combining history, travelogue, political theory and ethnographic fantastication. So, yeah, not for everybody. I happen to think it’s a work of genius, but even so, it took me well over a year to get through. A genius can be a huge pain in the ass, you know? Their whims and prejudices are so much more extravagant than other people’s. Sometimes I almost prefer a nice, interesting minor talent.
But in order to explain why this huge, maddening book is worth reading, I’m going to tell a trivial anecdote dressed up as an allegory.
One of my co-workers recently competed in the World Jujitsu Championships in California. When he came back to work, we asked him how he did. “I got destroyed,” he answered cheerfully. “But you know, you always learn something. After you come to, you think: huh, I’ve never seen that before.”
On a purely intellectual level, that’s what great writing can do – knock you on your ass and make you think: huh, I’ve never seen that before. Whatever else she is, West is a great writer. Just as a putter-together of interesting sentences, she’s got some serious flair. Sometimes she’ll come at you with a whimsical simile:
[She] was fat in the curious way of beautiful middle-aged Turkish women. She did not look like one fat woman, she looked like a cluster of beautiful women loosely attached to a common centre.
Or she'll take some historical figure and efficiently condense him, like so much evaporated milk:
Prince Montenuovo was one of the strangest figures in Europe of our time; a character that Shakespeare decided at the last moment not to use in King Lear or Othello, and laid by so carelessly that it fell out of art into life.
A bizarre—and bizarrely beautiful—passage finds West hallucinating in what is apparently the Balkans’ worst toilet:
The lavatory was of the old Turkish kind…The whole floor was wet. Everybody who used the place must go out with shoes stained with urine…The dark hole in the floor, and something hieratic in the proportions of the place, made it seem as if dung, having been expelled by man, had set itself up as a new and magically powerful element that could cover the whole earth with dark ooze and sickly humidity.
As in that last example, West's prose gives off occasional whiffs of something infernal, almost apocalyptic. This isn't surprising given that she was writing in the spooky dusk of the late 1930s, and that by the time she added an epilogue in 1941, London was in flames ("Often, when I have thought of invasion, or a bomb has dropped near by, I have prayed, "Let me behave like a Serb."”). This gives the book a terrible urgency, as if West felt she might be writing an extended obituary for her civilization. And in a way, it is a funeral oration – for Yugoslavia, for a certain idea of Europe, for everything beautiful that ends up getting defaced or beaten down by history.
All of which is to say that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon isn’t really a book for the iPhone age. It’s just too big and dense and idiosyncratic. But that’s alright: it’ll still be here when we get tired of Angry Birds, or the bombs start falling again, whichever comes first.
See, that’s just crazy enough to work. Not that I’ve ever tried the experiment myself, but in my better moments, I can almost understand the logic. I’m not even talking about marriage per se, really – just a certain philosophy of life. Sometimes I have this dim suspicion that the only way to get a handle on the universe is to scrutinize a tiny corner of it with passionate intensity. Then I get sucked into the MILF portal on Youporn again and the whole vexed question evaporates into a metaphysical mist.
Rebecca West, as far as I know, faced no such distractions. She found her particular corner of the universe in that doomed federation formerly known as Yugoslavia. Already a successful, middle-aged writer when she first visited the Balkans, she discovered a place where the innards of history were just kind of hanging out, painfully exposed. “Take the lid off of life, let me look at the works,” goes a line in an old Mekons song. For West, Yugoslavia is where the lid came off.
At 1100 pages, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a very big book – a vast, teeming, magnum-opussy thingamajig combining history, travelogue, political theory and ethnographic fantastication. So, yeah, not for everybody. I happen to think it’s a work of genius, but even so, it took me well over a year to get through. A genius can be a huge pain in the ass, you know? Their whims and prejudices are so much more extravagant than other people’s. Sometimes I almost prefer a nice, interesting minor talent.
But in order to explain why this huge, maddening book is worth reading, I’m going to tell a trivial anecdote dressed up as an allegory.
One of my co-workers recently competed in the World Jujitsu Championships in California. When he came back to work, we asked him how he did. “I got destroyed,” he answered cheerfully. “But you know, you always learn something. After you come to, you think: huh, I’ve never seen that before.”
On a purely intellectual level, that’s what great writing can do – knock you on your ass and make you think: huh, I’ve never seen that before. Whatever else she is, West is a great writer. Just as a putter-together of interesting sentences, she’s got some serious flair. Sometimes she’ll come at you with a whimsical simile:
[She] was fat in the curious way of beautiful middle-aged Turkish women. She did not look like one fat woman, she looked like a cluster of beautiful women loosely attached to a common centre.
Or she'll take some historical figure and efficiently condense him, like so much evaporated milk:
Prince Montenuovo was one of the strangest figures in Europe of our time; a character that Shakespeare decided at the last moment not to use in King Lear or Othello, and laid by so carelessly that it fell out of art into life.
A bizarre—and bizarrely beautiful—passage finds West hallucinating in what is apparently the Balkans’ worst toilet:
The lavatory was of the old Turkish kind…The whole floor was wet. Everybody who used the place must go out with shoes stained with urine…The dark hole in the floor, and something hieratic in the proportions of the place, made it seem as if dung, having been expelled by man, had set itself up as a new and magically powerful element that could cover the whole earth with dark ooze and sickly humidity.
As in that last example, West's prose gives off occasional whiffs of something infernal, almost apocalyptic. This isn't surprising given that she was writing in the spooky dusk of the late 1930s, and that by the time she added an epilogue in 1941, London was in flames ("Often, when I have thought of invasion, or a bomb has dropped near by, I have prayed, "Let me behave like a Serb."”). This gives the book a terrible urgency, as if West felt she might be writing an extended obituary for her civilization. And in a way, it is a funeral oration – for Yugoslavia, for a certain idea of Europe, for everything beautiful that ends up getting defaced or beaten down by history.
All of which is to say that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon isn’t really a book for the iPhone age. It’s just too big and dense and idiosyncratic. But that’s alright: it’ll still be here when we get tired of Angry Birds, or the bombs start falling again, whichever comes first.
Read
August 3, 2019I think I only bought this book because it looked fat, plain and unappreciated on the bookshop shelf. It still is fat and plain but is at least occasionally enjoyed on my shelf.
West's prejudices are plain (pro-Yugoslavia and pro-Serb) which on the whole means you can take them into account as you are reading.
Some of her attitudes come across as overly simplistic maybe even naive - for instance her characterisation of the young thrusting Serb states at various points in history contrasted with flabby, lethargic Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. Perhaps this book is best understood as a form of propaganda, or better said, as expressing a distinct political view at a very particular point in time - the run up to the Second World War. And for her Yugoslavia is the real thing of which Mussolini's Italy is simply a flabby imitation, as well as a kind of answer to the 1930s, authoritative, masculine, virile, a country which in her eyes was both well rooted in its past but also confidently looking forward.
She travels both through time and space as she takes us across 1930s Yugoslavia. In Sarajevo she shows us the accidental assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand while taking us back to his troubled relationship with the Imperial court and showing us the mass organised slaughter of his hunting parties, this as a visual counterpoint both to his own slaughter and that of the first world war. She leads us down through the series of battles fought on the Kossovo plain and through the hard lands of Dalmatia stripped bare by foreign occupiers via the city of Split that has grown up in the remains of Diocletian's palace. We see in Belgrade the alternation of Karageorges and Obrenovitchs who in turn struggled to build up a polity out from under the Ottomans. But at the same time she shows us a society in transition and there references to changing habits and traditions.
All of this takes place however in the context of the people that she meets and travels with, much of which is humorous, or at least would be humorous if we didn't know what was very shortly due to happen in this country. And in fact the book ends with people of Marseilles, having heard of Yugoslavia's resistance to Hitler, throwing flowers on the grave of King Alexander.
An extremely empathetic travel book and a rich introduction to the region, although possibly best enjoyed with something a bit sharper and critical to cleanse the palate. In any case a master work of British travel writing, although it transcends that and is a cultural and historical appreciation of a region coloured by the author's disenchantment with late imperial Britain and the politics of the 1930s.
West's prejudices are plain (pro-Yugoslavia and pro-Serb) which on the whole means you can take them into account as you are reading.
Some of her attitudes come across as overly simplistic maybe even naive - for instance her characterisation of the young thrusting Serb states at various points in history contrasted with flabby, lethargic Byzantine and Ottoman Empires. Perhaps this book is best understood as a form of propaganda, or better said, as expressing a distinct political view at a very particular point in time - the run up to the Second World War. And for her Yugoslavia is the real thing of which Mussolini's Italy is simply a flabby imitation, as well as a kind of answer to the 1930s, authoritative, masculine, virile, a country which in her eyes was both well rooted in its past but also confidently looking forward.
She travels both through time and space as she takes us across 1930s Yugoslavia. In Sarajevo she shows us the accidental assassination of the Archduke Ferdinand while taking us back to his troubled relationship with the Imperial court and showing us the mass organised slaughter of his hunting parties, this as a visual counterpoint both to his own slaughter and that of the first world war. She leads us down through the series of battles fought on the Kossovo plain and through the hard lands of Dalmatia stripped bare by foreign occupiers via the city of Split that has grown up in the remains of Diocletian's palace. We see in Belgrade the alternation of Karageorges and Obrenovitchs who in turn struggled to build up a polity out from under the Ottomans. But at the same time she shows us a society in transition and there references to changing habits and traditions.
All of this takes place however in the context of the people that she meets and travels with, much of which is humorous, or at least would be humorous if we didn't know what was very shortly due to happen in this country. And in fact the book ends with people of Marseilles, having heard of Yugoslavia's resistance to Hitler, throwing flowers on the grave of King Alexander.
An extremely empathetic travel book and a rich introduction to the region, although possibly best enjoyed with something a bit sharper and critical to cleanse the palate. In any case a master work of British travel writing, although it transcends that and is a cultural and historical appreciation of a region coloured by the author's disenchantment with late imperial Britain and the politics of the 1930s.
July 8, 2020
I am now on page 588, halfway through the book. Rebecca West is starting to seriously suffocate me on Serbian history and I think I better stop. I really lack the courage for another 500 pages. Perhaps I'll pick up the book again at a later date.
June 1, 2010
A few years ago I read The Return of the Soldier, the first novel of Rebecca West, the pen name of Cicely Isabel Fairfield. I quite liked it, but not nearly enough to pursue the author any further. But earlier this year, on the recommendation of another blogger, I bought Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, one of her later books.
At almost 1200 pages it’s quite a tome, too heavy and too big even for my shoulder bag, which contains all sorts of fripperies! But I’ve been reading it in bite-sized chunks since March, interspersed with other things. I finished it in Rome at the weekend and I already feel a sense of loss; for it’s one of the most remarkable books I have ever come across. There is no exaggeration or hyperbole here.
I’m not sure exactly how to describe Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first published in England in 1941. On the surface it’s an account of the author’s visits to the old state of Yugoslavia - now no more than a historical memory - in the interwar period. To that extent it’s a travelogue, but, oh, how shallow and inadequate that word seems, conjuring up the tedium of train spotting and stamp collecting; places gathered on an itinerary, images frozen in an album.
There are indeed beautiful and lengthy descriptions of the various places she visited, from Croatia in the north to Macedonia and Montenegro in the south, places to follow in her footsteps. But Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is so much more than a travel journal or a Lonely Planet guide. It’s part history, part criticism, part philosophy, part theology, part personal introspection, part political warning and, towards the end, even part novel. Above all, it’s a kind of love story, the story of the writer’s love for the people and the civilization of Serbia. She made me see Serbia partly through her eyes and partly through the eyes a man she identifies as Constantine the Poet, her official government guide through the country. I will have more to say about ‘Constantine’, a figure I fell in love with, a bit later.
The tragedy of Yugoslavia, and, yes, and the story is indeed a tragedy, is that it was a country shaped around some of the great contradictions and fault lines of history – the Western and the Eastern Roman Empires, the Catholic and the Orthodox, the Christian and the Muslim. It was this background, and these influences, that made the Southern Slav State all but an impossible dream.
Driven by internal hatreds, the people were also the victims of empire: of the Turkish Empire, against which the Serbs fought for centuries in pursuit of the right to exist, and of the Austrian Empire, which in its later Austro-Hungarian form was to be a particularly malevolent influence. Beyond that West sees the Slavs as a victim of a ‘Third Empire’, one yet to emerge. This, as she puts it, is Gerda’s empire. Who or what is Gerda, you ask? Gerda is Constantine’s wife, and of her I will also have more to say.
The wonder of this great, meandering book is that it takes one to the heart of a civilization or a people – I really can’t say ‘country’- through its past, through the traces of its past, through its art, particularly in the various religious establishments West visits, places that seem to give one the intensity of the Orthodox experience, mystical, ethereal and yet immediate in the lives of the people. There are long historical passages where she touches on the greatness of the medieval Serbian Empire, the empire of Stephen Dushan, the last best hope of saving Byzantine civilization from the steady encroachment of the Ottoman Turks. But Dushan died and within a generation Serbia crashed to ruin. Serbia met destiny and destruction on the battlefield of Kosovo.
This is another remarkable thing about Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: it shows, as West puts it, the past side by side with the present it created. Here her argument gets quite subtle. She has no time at all for Christian concepts of atonement or sacrifice, in what she calls the blood ritual of the black stone. The black stone in question is a feature in a field she comes across, a place where the peasants come to offer up lambs in sacrifice.
It was this fatal obsession with sacrifice, this obsession with a greater kingdom, an eternal kingdom, which took Tsar Lazar into battle with the Turks on Saint Vitus Day, 28 June 1389, a recurring black day in Slav history. Here she records the old Serbian poem of Tsar Lazar and the Grey Falcon, translated for her by Constantine;
There flies a grey bird, a falcon,
From Jerusalem the holy,
And in his beak he bears a swallow.
That is no falcon, no grey bird,
But it is the Saint Elijah.
He carries no swallow,
But a book from the Mother of God.
He comes to the Tsar at Kossovo,
He lays the book on the Tsar's knees.
This book without like told the Tsar:
"Tsar Lazar, of honourable stock,
Of what kind will you have your kingdom?
Do you want a heavenly kingdom ?
Do you want an earthly kingdom ?
If you want an earthly kingdom,
Saddle your horses, tighten your horses' girths,
Gird on your swords,
Then put an end to the Turkish attacks,
And drive out every Turkish soldier.
But if you want a heavenly kingdom
Build you a church on Kossovo;
Build it not with a floor of marble
But lay down silk and scarlet on the ground,
Give the Eucharist and battle orders to your soldiers,
For all your soldiers shall be destroyed,
And you, prince, you shall be destroyed with them."
When the Tsar read the words,
The Tsar pondered, and he pondered thus:
"Dear God, where are these things, and how are they!
What kingdom shall I choose ?
Shall I choose a heavenly kingdom ?
Shall I choose an earthly kingdom ?
If I choose an earthly kingdom,
An earthly kingdom lasts only a little time,
But a heavenly kingdom will last for eternity and its centuries."
The Tsar chose a heavenly kingdom,
And not an earthly kingdom,
He built a church on Kossovo.
He built it not with floor of marble
But laid down silk and scarlet on the ground.
There he summoned the Serbian Patriarch
And twelve great bishops.
Then he gave his soldiers the Eucharist and their battle orders.
In the same hour as the Prince gave orders to his soldiers
The Turks attacked Kossovo.
Then the Turks overwhelmed Lazar,
And the Tsar Lazar was destroyed,
And his army was destroyed with him,
Of seven and seventy thousand soldiers.
All was holy, all was honourable
And the goodness of God was fulfilled.
But it was not good, so far as West was concerned; for the people were given over to centuries of servitude. Writing from the perspective of the late 1930s it was evident to her that “the whole world was a vast Kosovo”; that Czechoslovakia was the ‘black lamb’ and that Neville Chamberlain, then British prime ministers, was the high priest of the cult of sacrifice. Resistance, not sacrifice, was the essential thing, the noble thing.
I really must stop here for fear of spending as many words in praising this superb book as it took to write it! So let me just finish, as promised, by saying something about Constantine and Gerda.
Constantine, as I have said, is described as a poet and an official, a one-time student of Henri Bergson, the great French philosopher. And taking a cue from Bergson’s philosophy he is for me a living representation of the élan vital. He is full of wit and wisdom, full of simple energy, full of love for the idea of Yugoslavia. Throughout the book he is a dominant influence, a giant. He is also of Jewish origin, a point of some relevance.
When the party arrives in Belgrade we meet Gerda, his wife. Quite simply Gerda is a monster. She is German, not just German but an obvious Nazi. She travels south with West, West’s husband - who accompanies her throughout her trip - and Constantine to Macedonia but hates everything she sees: she despises the Slavs and Slav culture. Her mere presence diminishes Constantine, from giant to dwarf. It was with her that my sense of disbelief kicked in. Here the book was entering into the territory of the novel. I quickly realised that there was no Gerda; that she was an idea, a metaphor for the things to come, a metaphor for the Third Empire that was to visit Yugoslavia in 1941, a metaphor for a final sacrifice to the Black Stone.
No sooner had I finished Black Lamb and Grey Falcon than I began to think about Constantine, about the fate of Constantine. Perhaps worry is a better word. West makes no mention of him in her epilogue. What happened to him, I wondered, after the Nazis took control, after Gerda’s Empire was set in place? The rump state of Serbia was one of the first places to be declared Judenrein – free of Jews. Did this brave and wonderful man, one who survived the death march of the Serbian army in 1915, end up in Auschwitz like so many others? Did he exist at all, or was he just another symbol, another metaphor? I’m delighted to say, after some quick internet research, that he did exist and that he did survive. His name was not Constantine at all. He was Stanislaw Vinaver, an important figure in Serbian literature and culture. He joined the Yugoslav army in 1941 and was held as a prisoner-of-war in a German camp. During this time West sent him food packages through the Red Cross. He died in 1955.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon finishes with bombs falling on London. The author reflects Often, when I have thought of invasion, or a bomb has dropped nearby, I have prayed, ‘Let me behave like a Serb.’ Amen. How extraordinary these people are and how extraordinary it is that we have understood them so little. How extraordinary this book is, a true masterpiece.
At almost 1200 pages it’s quite a tome, too heavy and too big even for my shoulder bag, which contains all sorts of fripperies! But I’ve been reading it in bite-sized chunks since March, interspersed with other things. I finished it in Rome at the weekend and I already feel a sense of loss; for it’s one of the most remarkable books I have ever come across. There is no exaggeration or hyperbole here.
I’m not sure exactly how to describe Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, first published in England in 1941. On the surface it’s an account of the author’s visits to the old state of Yugoslavia - now no more than a historical memory - in the interwar period. To that extent it’s a travelogue, but, oh, how shallow and inadequate that word seems, conjuring up the tedium of train spotting and stamp collecting; places gathered on an itinerary, images frozen in an album.
There are indeed beautiful and lengthy descriptions of the various places she visited, from Croatia in the north to Macedonia and Montenegro in the south, places to follow in her footsteps. But Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is so much more than a travel journal or a Lonely Planet guide. It’s part history, part criticism, part philosophy, part theology, part personal introspection, part political warning and, towards the end, even part novel. Above all, it’s a kind of love story, the story of the writer’s love for the people and the civilization of Serbia. She made me see Serbia partly through her eyes and partly through the eyes a man she identifies as Constantine the Poet, her official government guide through the country. I will have more to say about ‘Constantine’, a figure I fell in love with, a bit later.
The tragedy of Yugoslavia, and, yes, and the story is indeed a tragedy, is that it was a country shaped around some of the great contradictions and fault lines of history – the Western and the Eastern Roman Empires, the Catholic and the Orthodox, the Christian and the Muslim. It was this background, and these influences, that made the Southern Slav State all but an impossible dream.
Driven by internal hatreds, the people were also the victims of empire: of the Turkish Empire, against which the Serbs fought for centuries in pursuit of the right to exist, and of the Austrian Empire, which in its later Austro-Hungarian form was to be a particularly malevolent influence. Beyond that West sees the Slavs as a victim of a ‘Third Empire’, one yet to emerge. This, as she puts it, is Gerda’s empire. Who or what is Gerda, you ask? Gerda is Constantine’s wife, and of her I will also have more to say.
The wonder of this great, meandering book is that it takes one to the heart of a civilization or a people – I really can’t say ‘country’- through its past, through the traces of its past, through its art, particularly in the various religious establishments West visits, places that seem to give one the intensity of the Orthodox experience, mystical, ethereal and yet immediate in the lives of the people. There are long historical passages where she touches on the greatness of the medieval Serbian Empire, the empire of Stephen Dushan, the last best hope of saving Byzantine civilization from the steady encroachment of the Ottoman Turks. But Dushan died and within a generation Serbia crashed to ruin. Serbia met destiny and destruction on the battlefield of Kosovo.
This is another remarkable thing about Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: it shows, as West puts it, the past side by side with the present it created. Here her argument gets quite subtle. She has no time at all for Christian concepts of atonement or sacrifice, in what she calls the blood ritual of the black stone. The black stone in question is a feature in a field she comes across, a place where the peasants come to offer up lambs in sacrifice.
It was this fatal obsession with sacrifice, this obsession with a greater kingdom, an eternal kingdom, which took Tsar Lazar into battle with the Turks on Saint Vitus Day, 28 June 1389, a recurring black day in Slav history. Here she records the old Serbian poem of Tsar Lazar and the Grey Falcon, translated for her by Constantine;
There flies a grey bird, a falcon,
From Jerusalem the holy,
And in his beak he bears a swallow.
That is no falcon, no grey bird,
But it is the Saint Elijah.
He carries no swallow,
But a book from the Mother of God.
He comes to the Tsar at Kossovo,
He lays the book on the Tsar's knees.
This book without like told the Tsar:
"Tsar Lazar, of honourable stock,
Of what kind will you have your kingdom?
Do you want a heavenly kingdom ?
Do you want an earthly kingdom ?
If you want an earthly kingdom,
Saddle your horses, tighten your horses' girths,
Gird on your swords,
Then put an end to the Turkish attacks,
And drive out every Turkish soldier.
But if you want a heavenly kingdom
Build you a church on Kossovo;
Build it not with a floor of marble
But lay down silk and scarlet on the ground,
Give the Eucharist and battle orders to your soldiers,
For all your soldiers shall be destroyed,
And you, prince, you shall be destroyed with them."
When the Tsar read the words,
The Tsar pondered, and he pondered thus:
"Dear God, where are these things, and how are they!
What kingdom shall I choose ?
Shall I choose a heavenly kingdom ?
Shall I choose an earthly kingdom ?
If I choose an earthly kingdom,
An earthly kingdom lasts only a little time,
But a heavenly kingdom will last for eternity and its centuries."
The Tsar chose a heavenly kingdom,
And not an earthly kingdom,
He built a church on Kossovo.
He built it not with floor of marble
But laid down silk and scarlet on the ground.
There he summoned the Serbian Patriarch
And twelve great bishops.
Then he gave his soldiers the Eucharist and their battle orders.
In the same hour as the Prince gave orders to his soldiers
The Turks attacked Kossovo.
Then the Turks overwhelmed Lazar,
And the Tsar Lazar was destroyed,
And his army was destroyed with him,
Of seven and seventy thousand soldiers.
All was holy, all was honourable
And the goodness of God was fulfilled.
But it was not good, so far as West was concerned; for the people were given over to centuries of servitude. Writing from the perspective of the late 1930s it was evident to her that “the whole world was a vast Kosovo”; that Czechoslovakia was the ‘black lamb’ and that Neville Chamberlain, then British prime ministers, was the high priest of the cult of sacrifice. Resistance, not sacrifice, was the essential thing, the noble thing.
I really must stop here for fear of spending as many words in praising this superb book as it took to write it! So let me just finish, as promised, by saying something about Constantine and Gerda.
Constantine, as I have said, is described as a poet and an official, a one-time student of Henri Bergson, the great French philosopher. And taking a cue from Bergson’s philosophy he is for me a living representation of the élan vital. He is full of wit and wisdom, full of simple energy, full of love for the idea of Yugoslavia. Throughout the book he is a dominant influence, a giant. He is also of Jewish origin, a point of some relevance.
When the party arrives in Belgrade we meet Gerda, his wife. Quite simply Gerda is a monster. She is German, not just German but an obvious Nazi. She travels south with West, West’s husband - who accompanies her throughout her trip - and Constantine to Macedonia but hates everything she sees: she despises the Slavs and Slav culture. Her mere presence diminishes Constantine, from giant to dwarf. It was with her that my sense of disbelief kicked in. Here the book was entering into the territory of the novel. I quickly realised that there was no Gerda; that she was an idea, a metaphor for the things to come, a metaphor for the Third Empire that was to visit Yugoslavia in 1941, a metaphor for a final sacrifice to the Black Stone.
No sooner had I finished Black Lamb and Grey Falcon than I began to think about Constantine, about the fate of Constantine. Perhaps worry is a better word. West makes no mention of him in her epilogue. What happened to him, I wondered, after the Nazis took control, after Gerda’s Empire was set in place? The rump state of Serbia was one of the first places to be declared Judenrein – free of Jews. Did this brave and wonderful man, one who survived the death march of the Serbian army in 1915, end up in Auschwitz like so many others? Did he exist at all, or was he just another symbol, another metaphor? I’m delighted to say, after some quick internet research, that he did exist and that he did survive. His name was not Constantine at all. He was Stanislaw Vinaver, an important figure in Serbian literature and culture. He joined the Yugoslav army in 1941 and was held as a prisoner-of-war in a German camp. During this time West sent him food packages through the Red Cross. He died in 1955.
Black Lamb and Grey Falcon finishes with bombs falling on London. The author reflects Often, when I have thought of invasion, or a bomb has dropped nearby, I have prayed, ‘Let me behave like a Serb.’ Amen. How extraordinary these people are and how extraordinary it is that we have understood them so little. How extraordinary this book is, a true masterpiece.
October 5, 2014
Hatred comes before love, and gives the hater strange and delicious pleasures, but its works are short-lived; the head is cut from the body before the time of natural death, the lie is told to frustrate the other rogue’s plan before it comes to fruit. Sooner or later society tires of making a mosaic of these evil fragments; and even if the rule of hatred lasts some centuries it occupies no place in real time, it is a hiatus in reality, and not the vastest material thefts, not world wide raids on mines and granaries, can give it substance.
Throughout my teetering adulthood I often assume and maintain numerous guises. Oh, I am a Southerner, I understand, I'm Irish, It is really for us Intellectuals to ponder, well, you might know if you were a Manchester United fan like I am. So it goes. These aren't fictions, as such, they simply are whiffs of reality rather than constitutional components. This flaccid list could also include I'm a Serb by marriage. I truly feel that I am but I can relate and certainly empathize. The principal reason I never read this book in the former Yugoslavia was that I feared I would be the everybore, asking questions about West's observations, as asking whether so-and-so spa was still in existence and could we go there, that sort of thing. When my wife and I were married 12 years ago I knew about 200 words in Serbian, now I likely know about 150. There isn't constant reinforcement for such in Indiana.
Life, however, is never as simple as that, and human beings rarely so potent.
Rebecca West traveled to Yugoslavia with her husband in the spring of 1937. She had been by herself the year before and returned to document the fascinating land as the dark clouds of war rumbled into view. There isn't a great deal of judgment about races or nations in these 1200 pages. That is refreshing. The pair arrive for a snowy Easter in Dubrovnik and travel to Zagreb and then Sarajevo. The piece here of Gavrilo Princip
and Franz Ferdinand is simply stunning. Then it is on to Belgrade and then to Macedonia, Kosovo (where the fateful battle of 1389 is explored in gorgeous detail) and finally Montenegro. there are a dozens of short sections detailing towns, vineyards and monasteries. The conceptual ambivalence of Roman rule is considered. Did the viaducts and roads outweigh the hegemony? Did the survival of Millennialist cults betray the fate of present day Bosnia? There is an exciting admixture of poetry and philosophy in these historical digressions, how the aesthetic sparkle of the Byzantines was allowed to sleep under 400 years of Ottoman degradation. Along that road, was the Turkish empire really so vacuous?
The narrative is propelled by the foil of their friend Constantine, a poet and Yugoslav official. He's a Serbian Jew married to Gerda, an ethnic German with a loathing of Slavs, the recriminations of Versailles and, well, apparently Rebecca West. This tension keeps the discussions and observations personal but the reader soon tires of Gerda's shrieking. I have been on bad road trips. I would've cut and ran. I finished the book earlier today and I remain afraid to check online for the fate of Constantine.
Throughout my teetering adulthood I often assume and maintain numerous guises. Oh, I am a Southerner, I understand, I'm Irish, It is really for us Intellectuals to ponder, well, you might know if you were a Manchester United fan like I am. So it goes. These aren't fictions, as such, they simply are whiffs of reality rather than constitutional components. This flaccid list could also include I'm a Serb by marriage. I truly feel that I am but I can relate and certainly empathize. The principal reason I never read this book in the former Yugoslavia was that I feared I would be the everybore, asking questions about West's observations, as asking whether so-and-so spa was still in existence and could we go there, that sort of thing. When my wife and I were married 12 years ago I knew about 200 words in Serbian, now I likely know about 150. There isn't constant reinforcement for such in Indiana.
Life, however, is never as simple as that, and human beings rarely so potent.
Rebecca West traveled to Yugoslavia with her husband in the spring of 1937. She had been by herself the year before and returned to document the fascinating land as the dark clouds of war rumbled into view. There isn't a great deal of judgment about races or nations in these 1200 pages. That is refreshing. The pair arrive for a snowy Easter in Dubrovnik and travel to Zagreb and then Sarajevo. The piece here of Gavrilo Princip
and Franz Ferdinand is simply stunning. Then it is on to Belgrade and then to Macedonia, Kosovo (where the fateful battle of 1389 is explored in gorgeous detail) and finally Montenegro. there are a dozens of short sections detailing towns, vineyards and monasteries. The conceptual ambivalence of Roman rule is considered. Did the viaducts and roads outweigh the hegemony? Did the survival of Millennialist cults betray the fate of present day Bosnia? There is an exciting admixture of poetry and philosophy in these historical digressions, how the aesthetic sparkle of the Byzantines was allowed to sleep under 400 years of Ottoman degradation. Along that road, was the Turkish empire really so vacuous?
The narrative is propelled by the foil of their friend Constantine, a poet and Yugoslav official. He's a Serbian Jew married to Gerda, an ethnic German with a loathing of Slavs, the recriminations of Versailles and, well, apparently Rebecca West. This tension keeps the discussions and observations personal but the reader soon tires of Gerda's shrieking. I have been on bad road trips. I would've cut and ran. I finished the book earlier today and I remain afraid to check online for the fate of Constantine.
March 19, 2020
173.2.
That's how many pounds I weigh this morning, ~15 fewer than when I started Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in mid-January, sometime in the middle of the night of the 19th. 10-20 pages one night, 10-20 pages another, an account of King Alexander's assassination followed by Rebecca West and her husband starting out by train for Yugoslavia in 1937, sharing a compartment with tourists from Hitler's Germany, and it was all fascinating...but I wasn't really going to commit to this, was I? Was I really that interested in the Balkans? Wasn't I going to focus more on writing in 2020? If it's true that chess masters actually lose calories by just sitting there and concentrating intently however, maybe that's a vastly elevated variation of what went on here- because this book always made me concentrate, always made me think, and often provoked me to argue with Rebecca West in the margins. Apparently these arguments helped me knock off a pound here and there. Except, that is, for the mornings or nights I wasn't up to it and tried anyway, which occasionally yielded results and occasionally felt like wasted time...but that was almost always my fault, not West's. Of course I've also been trying to lose weight in other ways, and at least one positive about this motherfucking virus is that I'm not tempted to eat out at a restaurant these days- or rather, as of yesterday, that activity will be impossible for residents of New Jersey for the foreseeable future. And soon enough for the rest of the country as well, I suppose.
Like a number of friends I've spoken to, I've already convinced myself about three separate times that I have it, typically after reading some hellish account online. My friend D__, who probably doesn't want me telling the world about his frailties (although I share them) so I'll just use his initial, has been experiencing a tightness in his chest, but he thinks it's just anxiety..."unless it's the disease", he adds. Last time I saw D __, we went to see 'The Irishman', a relatively simple activity that's starting to feel like the memory of a different reality.
My brother compares it to the hurricane we had here, about seven-and-a-half years ago now. It's true that the approach of a hurricane is very eerie, and there was a real apocalyptic vibe to the days afterwards, with all the power out and the long lines at the gas stations and the fallen trees, but I'll take a hurricane over this any day. With a hurricane, you can at least tell when you're in danger and when you're not. And while a hurricane is terrible in the sense of being astoundingly formidable (kind of like the way I understand the Russian word grozny, as in Ivan Grozny, a.k.a. "Ivan the Terrible", as well as the capital of Chechnya- it's not like the Chechens are saying their city is an awful place, I don't think, but more like hey, look out, we are a force to be reckoned with), it is also majestic and even beautiful, or I would say so anyway, and is at least capable of evoking a mental image of an ennobling confrontation with nature. But you can't walk out towards the sea and laugh in this virus's face. It's certainly not majestic or beautiful, just creepy and disgusting, and its duration may last quite a while longer than a hurricane's (as for the effects, well, who can say, but it will probably turn out to be one of the most significant events of our lifetimes). And every time I go outside now, I feel like I'm being stalked by death. Max Von Sydow died last week, and naturally I remember him best from 'The Seventh Seal', playing chess with death while the plague sweeps through Europe. I do not like this feeling. I really don't.
It would be a bit of a relief to discover that I did have it, that my case wasn't too bad, and that all I had to do was stay away from other human beings for a while, which I'm perfectly capable of and often happy to do. After all, a lot of us are going to get it, maybe even most of us, or so I've read, but here in Trump's America it's not really clear that you can get tested, nor how much it might cost...although to be fair it is Biden's America too, the America that has been shaped by all the Bidens over the years, who passively accept among other things the slow (but not that slow) destruction of the planet, so that their donors can keep making money and so they can keep winning elections. And for the first time, by the way, I'm starting to understand the kind of fear that makes people turn to a leviathan, as Hobbes put it. It's not that I would ever vote for Trump- he can kiss my ass, I've made that fairly clear for the last four years or so, but Biden can kiss my ass as well- but for better or worse, I can't help thinking that this next election is going to come down to how physically safe people feel by November.
The drive to the Wawa near me is always a bit eerie in the pre-dawn morning, even when there's not a pandemic going on, especially around the traffic circle. The circle's curve takes you past a 24-hour Exxon station and a car wash, and then on the straightaway there's a place called the Crystal Inn (which isn't an inn- I actually don't know what it is), with strange triangular architecture that looks like some kind of pagan temple and always makes me think of 'The Crystal Ship' by The Doors, law offices, a bowling alley, a 'gentleman's club', the kind of motel where the door to your room opens onto the parking lot, Tattooville, Dr. K's Autocare, a Christian Fellowship at the corner of Heck Ave. (which sounds like a joke, but presumably isn't), and a fishery...all probably closed for business at this point. Sometimes, back from the road in the Crystal Inn parking lot, you'll notice a car just sitting there with its engine on, and it's clear that you don't want to know what that person is up to, unless you want to end up as the subject of an unsolved disappearances podcast. And yet, when contemplating a shutdown of society, there's even something vaguely comforting about knowing that these freaks are out at all hours of the night doing god knows what, that for now the show goes on.
But the eeriness generally ceases when you reach the Wawa at the next major intersection. It's superior to the nearby 7-11 in just about every way, which probably accounts for its comparative popularity. It has a gas station as well, although the real reason I go there is that it has better coffee- and it hadn't abated, at least not by the time I went a few mornings ago, as a hub of human activity. I've been routinely getting there before 5:30 a.m. for the past few weeks, and there were still the guys in hoodies and steel-toed boots emerging from vans with names on the sides like Jose & Sons or R & R or Al's Painting, and other people emerging just from the darkness of the side streets around the store. A couple of those guys were standing around and laughing at the coffee station that morning, as I tried to keep my distance and pushed the coffee lever down...with the sleeve of my shirt, for whatever good that might have done. They didn't seem too concerned, and briefly I let myself think that these guys work with objects all day, they know about risk and measurement, and they wouldn't last long in their jobs if they didn't tend to get things exactly right. So if they're joking and relaxed...
And it's not like their work is completely exotic to me. I remember waking up in the morning and putting on clothes that were stained with primer and caulk. I remember what it's like to sand the side of a house for hours while wishing for rain, with a nearby radio tuned to New Orleans's only classic rock station, Bayou 95.7. I remember the older folks, veteran carpenters who had such intimate relationships with objects that when they carried 2 x 16s to the cutting table it resembled a dance that ended in the dismemberment of one partner. Or both, if you weren't careful- a lot of those older guys were missing a finger or two, which I suppose is one way to learn the "healthy fear" of one's tools that they would often preach to those of us who were inexperienced. Granted, I didn't do that for long, just dipped my toe in, as I've always done- a little taste of a certain kind of life here or there- but the point is that I have some sense of the camaraderie, of the anesthesia-deep sleep of a nap after lunch in a partially constructed house's driveway, and I can remember being told to build a shelf with my buddy Kareem, without any instructions, which took us most of a workday but by god we did it. Now it might have collapsed the very first time they tried to put anything on it, we made sure not to be around for that part, but we built a shelf. I also remember lying on my back in the bed of a truck- kind of illegal (at least I like to think it was illegal), so try to keep your head down, but sublime all the same- speeding over the Lake Pontchartrain bridge. And I know how important it is to stop off for coffee in the morning before you do any of that.
The other point about these fellows is that their routine seems invincible. They give off the impression that, for better or worse, nothing could cause them not to be there in the Wawa early in the morning, filling up their 24 oz.-red coffee cups and adding a hash brown at the register, along with that liquid speed- I'm sorry, those 5-hour energy things. And yet the illusion is dissolving. The guy who's usually behind the register in the morning, who can be a bit hostile (which is understandable), has taken to wearing blue latex gloves, and he's seemed a bit more hostile than usual, and anxious...
...But okay, I hear you, this is not much of a review of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, is it? I guess you can flag me...although maybe you've got other things to worry about, and in the spirit of conciliation I promise that I will try to write a real review of this absolute epic in a few weeks' time and copy & paste this whatever this is to the comments section, so ultimately you'll get two "reviews" for the price of one, assuming civilization endures that long. Incidentally, if you happen to be reading this across the ocean, or anywhere else for that matter, I hope that you're managing to relax, maintaining some human interaction albeit remotely, and remembering that the likelihood is that you're going to be okay.
For now I only feel up to saying that West's book is a masterpiece- by turns jaw-droppingly good, overwhelming and digressive, a 1,150-page meditation on eros and thanatos in the world of 1937. I don't think West would claim that these are inherent drives, but I think she would say that even if they are, they can be either kept in abeyance or triggered by the circumstances of history. Her central philosophical concern, as I understand it, is her suspicion that to be defeated is more nourishing to the soul and to one's sense of piety than victory, that perhaps we find it more satisfying to let evil triumph and in doing so debase itself than to debase ourselves with violence, more satisfying to die than to live. Pacifism may be noble, but maybe the feeling of nobility is an indulgence. Maybe we don't love life as we think we do. "We listen to the evil counsel of the grey falcon", as West puts it. "We allow our throats to be cut like black lambs." What a haunting image.
Granted, you could apply that formulation in a lot of questionable ways, and granted I was less persuaded by West's apparent certainty in assigning the values of good and evil to human representatives. While admitting that her knowledge of history is far superior to mine, I nevertheless found very questionable her implication that Christianity has long represented some civilizing force as opposed to "the Turk", as she keeps referring to Turkish people. I'm not the PC police, I care much less about the form of an utterance than the intent, but it's a usage that aligns with my perception of West's view of the Ottomans as a kind of pestilence. She doesn't talk about the individuals she meets in that way, and she seems to like Atatürk, but it did cross my mind that some right-winger could pick up this book and find support for their belief that history is an eternal clash of civilizations, waged by people with inherent differences- that this is even right, determined by our "blood" (a word that West does use from time to time to evoke the- putative- ghostly demands of ancestors, tradition and national history), a destiny that we would be a little perverse to disobey or question. Maybe that's not quite how West meant it, maybe I'm being unfair, but I do wonder.
And yes, less significantly, like all flawed, jazzy, encyclopedic masterpieces it was sometimes boring, or there were at least parts that I was not able to make interesting to myself- give me a quiz on those Serbian kings and I will fail, just as I would have failed a quiz on cetology after reading Moby-Dick- but it was also often sublime, reaching dizzying heights that put me in mind of Moby-Dick, The Brothers Karamazov, Infinite Jest and The Executioner's Song, which is to say more like a life experience than a book.
The world West knew must also have seemed to be shrinking, the possibilities for movement growing more circumscribed, the lights going down on civilization at least for a time. There was loose in the world not technically a virus, but a madness that spread as surely as a virus from person to person, from country to country, and seems to be personified here in her friend Constantine's wife Gerda. Like Dostoevsky's characters, West's (although they're not exactly "characters", I suppose) are both beautifully rendered individuals but also archetypal, representative of various currents of thought in their specific time and place. Constantine, she writes, "was dying of being a Jew in a world where there were certain ideas to which some new star was lending a strange strength."
I guess I should also admit, at this late point in my ostensible review, that...I haven't quite finished. I'm on page 1,073, the beginning of the epilogue, and I sort of don't want the book to end. I didn't actually have any imminent plans to travel anywhere, but suddenly the knowledge of my inability to travel, even if I had the time and the money and the good health, has made reading about travel, even (especially?) travel in a country that no longer exists, a little sweeter, and makes me not want to get to the end. Maybe Rebecca West felt something similar as she wrote this; the book is dedicated, after all, "to my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved."
But that's the only way to finish an epic like this, I think. Only once you've conquered your own resistance to it, only once you truly want it to keep going, only then do you reach the end.
Want to read
August 10, 2016I imagine this book and I will be together on and off for some months, like a Proust project. But from everything I've heard, I very much look forward to it.
August 26, 2017
Another epic book on the Balkans. The book is the record of a two-month road trip through much of Yugoslavia by a British writer, who meticulously and fastidiously recorded everything that she and her husband experienced on their way. She has a good eye for people and their ways, and deploys her descriptive powers to good effect when describing the country and its inhabitants. Although I don't agree with all her opinions, and some of her flights of fancy verge on the tedious, she nevertheless succeeds in conveying the vivaciousness of Balkan society, and interweaves into her narrative extensive details from the rich and turbulent history of the area. But perhaps the real value of this book is that the writer visited Yugoslavia in 1939, on the eve of WWII, that everyone knew was coming, but no-one suspected would be so bad. As such it is a monument to the lost world that was pre-WWII Yugoslavia. WWII was the only second conflict between Serbs and Croats, and it is the unresolved issues from that time that the nationalist leaders were able to hijack to such devastating effect 50 years later (the first conflict, WWI, was likewise imposed from outside).
January 15, 2013
Holy Mother of God. What a woman. Not since Margeuerite Yourcenar have I felt so humbled and awed by a woman author, whose breadth and scope of panoramic vision is magnificent. This apropos VS Naipul’s spurious attack on female authors as being incapable of breadth and scope.
If Naipul were to be given a (small) point indirectly, it would be that West has paid a price for her erudition. She was a poor mother to her only son, and he estranged from her quite early on. The divide freed her up to gallivant across the world and travel-blog her way through the Balkans and then South America. Yourcenar of course had no progeny. Well. I guess you can’t have it all after all.
So. This is a colossal, 1400 page pontification on Yugoslavia and the Balkan states as were in 1937. Where she went with her husband on a jolly, erm, for cultural reasons.
Now. There is nothing, I put it, in that plethora of pages which retains a kernel of relevance today: its a snapshot of a time gone by and erased by the passage of moments: of interest only to niche specialists or historical buffs with little current application. Still, horses for courses: some will enjoy the kaleidoscope of lost fringe civilisations.
As a voracious, insatiable, mad traveller myself, my interest is a bit of a sideline. (well, not entirely but that a different story). I want to benchmark myself against this woman, and doublecheck my approach not so much to the constitutive equations of assimilating foreign cultures but rather the governing equations: because, thats where the rub really truly lies.
Preconceptions: we all have them. Even when we say we don’t. Rebecca West is comfortable dis-aggrandizing Christianity in general, in keeping, but fails the de Bono pattern sequencing of transferability: whereas Christianity may be a ‘failed’ religiosity it seems to be a paramount value driven zeitgeist: so: primitive as all Balkanites may be, a hierarchy of barbarians ensues: gypsies and turks are marginalised for no other reason than being heathen (I am paraphrasing). Conrad’s Heart of Darkness pertains. Is this still a viable waltenshuung? Intellectually I rise to a protest. Emotionally, if I am true, then recently when I was in Egypt and Jordan at the forefront of some troubles, the fact that my driver was a Christian (whether true or not, who knows), gave me irrational comfort. Mea Culpa.
More preconceptions and Aristotle: everything is relative, right? Its bestest to imbibe the incomparable: if there are no points of reference, then let magic weave its wendy way. But should a misbegotten Yugoslavian aspire to western dress or thought, thus breaking rank, then he falls immediately (although quite subtly) into a category of crass and vulgar. How dare the peasant! Harrumph. These people are best in their oriental and primordeal qualia. Lets all take our places, please, and.....stay there!
What preconceptions am I guilty of as I criss cross the globe? And how can I know what I don’t know? (Socrates)/.
If Naipul were to be given a (small) point indirectly, it would be that West has paid a price for her erudition. She was a poor mother to her only son, and he estranged from her quite early on. The divide freed her up to gallivant across the world and travel-blog her way through the Balkans and then South America. Yourcenar of course had no progeny. Well. I guess you can’t have it all after all.
So. This is a colossal, 1400 page pontification on Yugoslavia and the Balkan states as were in 1937. Where she went with her husband on a jolly, erm, for cultural reasons.
Now. There is nothing, I put it, in that plethora of pages which retains a kernel of relevance today: its a snapshot of a time gone by and erased by the passage of moments: of interest only to niche specialists or historical buffs with little current application. Still, horses for courses: some will enjoy the kaleidoscope of lost fringe civilisations.
As a voracious, insatiable, mad traveller myself, my interest is a bit of a sideline. (well, not entirely but that a different story). I want to benchmark myself against this woman, and doublecheck my approach not so much to the constitutive equations of assimilating foreign cultures but rather the governing equations: because, thats where the rub really truly lies.
Preconceptions: we all have them. Even when we say we don’t. Rebecca West is comfortable dis-aggrandizing Christianity in general, in keeping, but fails the de Bono pattern sequencing of transferability: whereas Christianity may be a ‘failed’ religiosity it seems to be a paramount value driven zeitgeist: so: primitive as all Balkanites may be, a hierarchy of barbarians ensues: gypsies and turks are marginalised for no other reason than being heathen (I am paraphrasing). Conrad’s Heart of Darkness pertains. Is this still a viable waltenshuung? Intellectually I rise to a protest. Emotionally, if I am true, then recently when I was in Egypt and Jordan at the forefront of some troubles, the fact that my driver was a Christian (whether true or not, who knows), gave me irrational comfort. Mea Culpa.
More preconceptions and Aristotle: everything is relative, right? Its bestest to imbibe the incomparable: if there are no points of reference, then let magic weave its wendy way. But should a misbegotten Yugoslavian aspire to western dress or thought, thus breaking rank, then he falls immediately (although quite subtly) into a category of crass and vulgar. How dare the peasant! Harrumph. These people are best in their oriental and primordeal qualia. Lets all take our places, please, and.....stay there!
What preconceptions am I guilty of as I criss cross the globe? And how can I know what I don’t know? (Socrates)/.
Read
March 23, 2018It's beautifully written, it's funny, it's a travel book and a memoir from a time and place on the other side of an abyss. I thoroughly enjoyed it and recommend it highly.
She's opinionated. Sometimes she is wrong. She believes in racial characteristics -- that Germans and Slavs are inherently different for instance. But sometimes she's right, and she's never dull for an instant. She's very good at evoking people and places and things -- the smell of narcissi in the mist, the mosaics in a church, the face of a woman walking around on the mountain to try to make sense of her life.
More than anything else, it reminded me of Auden's September 1st 1939
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
What West is doing here is some of that accurate scholarship. If she's too fond of Byzantium and Serbs and hates Austria too much, it's a forgiveable position for somebody writing it in 1938 and 1939 and 1940 -- she made the trip in 1937.
There's been a lot of history since then, and a bunch of it happened in the Balkans, so there's a certain element of looking down the wrong end of a telescope, and an even stronger element of knowing terrible things happened to the individual people she meets. I was ambushed with grief and anger reading about a happy lunch with an older Jewish couple in Sarajevo and their tacky bathroom decorations. Suddenly it was horrifying not just that the Nazis killed 10,000 of the 14,000 Jews in Sarajevo but that they killed that couple, who loved each other, who were happy. And when she talks about the power of art to save and listening to Mozart in the Blitz because Mozart is more important than the bombs.
This is a beautiful book, and I think it is a useful book about a moment of culture, a moment of time, a human being making a trip and reading history and looking at things. I think it would be taken more seriously if she'd been a man.
There's no reason I read this now and no reason I didn't read it before. Read it for the joy of it.
She's opinionated. Sometimes she is wrong. She believes in racial characteristics -- that Germans and Slavs are inherently different for instance. But sometimes she's right, and she's never dull for an instant. She's very good at evoking people and places and things -- the smell of narcissi in the mist, the mosaics in a church, the face of a woman walking around on the mountain to try to make sense of her life.
More than anything else, it reminded me of Auden's September 1st 1939
Accurate scholarship can
Unearth the whole offence
From Luther until now
That has driven a culture mad,
Find what occurred at Linz,
What huge imago made
A psychopathic god:
I and the public know
What all schoolchildren learn,
Those to whom evil is done
Do evil in return.
What West is doing here is some of that accurate scholarship. If she's too fond of Byzantium and Serbs and hates Austria too much, it's a forgiveable position for somebody writing it in 1938 and 1939 and 1940 -- she made the trip in 1937.
There's been a lot of history since then, and a bunch of it happened in the Balkans, so there's a certain element of looking down the wrong end of a telescope, and an even stronger element of knowing terrible things happened to the individual people she meets. I was ambushed with grief and anger reading about a happy lunch with an older Jewish couple in Sarajevo and their tacky bathroom decorations. Suddenly it was horrifying not just that the Nazis killed 10,000 of the 14,000 Jews in Sarajevo but that they killed that couple, who loved each other, who were happy. And when she talks about the power of art to save and listening to Mozart in the Blitz because Mozart is more important than the bombs.
This is a beautiful book, and I think it is a useful book about a moment of culture, a moment of time, a human being making a trip and reading history and looking at things. I think it would be taken more seriously if she'd been a man.
There's no reason I read this now and no reason I didn't read it before. Read it for the joy of it.
August 24, 2012
Spending what turned out to be 6 weeks with Rebecca West, her husband, her Serbian Jewish guide Constantine and his Nazi wife Gerda as they tour what was then Yugoslavia filling my head with philosophy, Byzantine art, history both modern and medieval, ethnography, descriptions of seedy inns and filling meals was the kind of immersion in a brilliant and quirky mind that reminded me both in pleasure and in length of the times I've spent with Proust.
It's not a book I can recommend lightly -- I read fast and its nearly 1200 pages were daunting. I had just gotten home from a trip through the Balkans, so was intrigued to know more, without some hook it's hard to imagine making the journey.
But if you have time to have your eyes opened and your brain stretched -- even if you find West occasionally by turns naive, preachy, too complex or too biased towards the "manly" "goodlooking" Serbs-- you will find that you can't view history quite the same way. The passion and the urgency with which she writes(at the eve of and during the early days of World War II), as she argues -- against utter darkness -- that history and philosphy matter, that even after 500 years of subjugation (the Serbs but an easy metaphor for the 1000 year Reich then threatening West's existence) hope and renewal are not impossible, make this book surprisingly moving and about much more than "just" the former Yugoslavia.
It's not a book I can recommend lightly -- I read fast and its nearly 1200 pages were daunting. I had just gotten home from a trip through the Balkans, so was intrigued to know more, without some hook it's hard to imagine making the journey.
But if you have time to have your eyes opened and your brain stretched -- even if you find West occasionally by turns naive, preachy, too complex or too biased towards the "manly" "goodlooking" Serbs-- you will find that you can't view history quite the same way. The passion and the urgency with which she writes(at the eve of and during the early days of World War II), as she argues -- against utter darkness -- that history and philosphy matter, that even after 500 years of subjugation (the Serbs but an easy metaphor for the 1000 year Reich then threatening West's existence) hope and renewal are not impossible, make this book surprisingly moving and about much more than "just" the former Yugoslavia.
December 14, 2017
6 stars. Massive massive game changing book and much respect to Rebecca West because the research and detail that must have gone into that book just must have been eye-wateringly massive! Rebecca went to Yugoslavia in the interwar period and wrote this book. The book isn’t really a travel book as you would imagine but for me this covered a journey through the psyche of the Slavic people – a mind map of them if you will. I’m married to a lovely Bosnian lady so this was a huge magnifying glass for me into her people and what I saw frightened me and yet had me in awe in places. What I loved most about the book was Rebecca’s writing style. She had a child with HG Wells apparently. She really reminded me of W Somerset Maugham in that her writing was literally poetic in places. I have lost count how many times I had scribbled “wow – beautifully written Rebecca” on the sides of the text. Not only did she give me angles on an area that I had thought I had understood but wrote it all in such a beautifully poetic manner. As a Muslim myself the one qualm that I had with the book was what I perceived to be a very pro-Serbian angle to it. Could just be my interpretation but the book was split into chapters and there were 2 dedicated to Serbia and older Serbia. She was travelling with a Serbian Jewish dude so that may have influenced her slightly in places. Having said all that I would be lying if I said that I had read all that there was to read about the wars that had happened in the past in that area from the Serbian side, if honest, I don’t think I had read anything from that angle at all, so to hear about some of the Turkish atrocities and the impact of circa 500 years of Turkish rule in that area from “the other side” although written by a diplomatic English lady, was quite eye opening. What comes out to me again and again in the book is what seems to be the natural call to violence and power and strength that sits at the heart of the Slavic character. I guess it’s something I occasionally ask my 2 young boys to tap into when they are sparring in boxing. Slavs are such a tall, strong, beautiful race of people, it’s just a shame that religion divided them into the fractions Yugoslavia was split into after the war and the factions it was split into before the forming of that “south Slav” nature.
There is also an Incredible detailed section on the incident which galvanised the beginning of WW1 when Gavrilo Princip murdered archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo On St Vitus’ day in 1914.
Here are some of my best bits from this fascinating 1,000 plus page book:
• “Since the industrial revolution capitalism has grooved society with a number of free slots along which most human beings can roll smoothly to a fixed destination. When a man takes charge of a factory the factory takes charge of him.”
• “The Croats were originally a Slav tribe who were invited by the emperor Heraclitus to free the Dalmatian coast and the Croatian hinterland from the Avars, one of the most noxious pillaging hordes”
• “Croats are fierce and warlike intellectuals.”
• “The sense of inevitability in a work of art should be quite different from scientific conception of causality for if art were creative then each stage must be new, must have something over and above what was contained in the previous stages and the connexion between the first and the last may be creative in the Bergsonian sense. He added that it is to give this creativeness its chance to create what is at once predictable and inevitable that an artist must never interfere with his characters to make them prove a moral point, because this is to force them down the path of the predictable.”
• “Because men of that day had convictions where we moderns have only opinions”
• “Here was the authentic voice of the Slav, these people hold that the way to make life better is to add good things to it, whereas in the west we hold that the way to make life better is to take bad things away from it.”
• “So you are intellectuals. The false sort that are always in opposition. My God, my God, how easy it is to be an intellectual in oppositions to the man of action.”
• “We in England have an unhistorical attitude to our lives, because every generation has felt excitement over a clear-cut historical novelty which has given it enough to tell its children and grandchildren without drawing on its fathers and grandfathers tales.”
• “And it seemed very probable that Rome was able to conquer foreign territories because she had developed her military genius at the expense of precisely those qualities which would have made her able to rule them. Certainly she lacked them to such an extent that she was unable to work out a satisfactory political and economic policy for Rome itself and perished of that failure.”
• “But I passed one of the nuns and remarked as I had done before that the rank and file of the female religious order presents an unpleasing appearance because they have assumed the expression of credulity natural and inevitable to men who find it difficult to live without the help of philosophical systems which far from outrun ascertained facets, but wholly unsuitable to women who are born with a faith in the unrevealed mystery of life and can therefore afford to be sceptics.”
• “The great men for whom humanity feels ecstatic love need not be good, not even gifted but they must display this fusion of light and darkness which is the essential human character they must even promise by the predominance of darkness that the universe shall forever persist in its imperfection.”
• “There is a Finnish word “sisu” which expresses this ultimate hidden resource in man which will not be worsted, which takes charge when courage goes and consciousness is blackened, which insists on continuing to live no matter what life is worth.”
• “That philanthropy consisted of giving sops to the populace which would make it forget that their masters had seized all the means of production and distribution and therefore held them in a state of complete economic subjection.”
• “These are among the most pleasing architectural gestures ever made by urbanity. They do not publicly declare the relationship of man and god like a Christian tower or spire. They raise a white finger and say only “this is a community of human beings and look you we are not beasts of the field.” - talking about Mosques.
• “Her stillness was more than the habit of a western woman, yet the uncovering of her mouth and chin had shown her completely un-oriental as luminously fair as any Scandinavian. Further away two Moslem men sat on a bench and talked politics beating with their fingers on the headlines of a newspaper. Both were tall, raw-boned bronze haired with eyes crackling with sheer blueness: Danish sea captains perhaps had they not been wearing the fez.”
• “A musical instrument each note for its own colour, the gurgle of wine pouring from a bottle of water trickling though a marble conduit in the garden – all sorts of sounds that many westerners do not even hear, so corrupted are they by the tyranny of the intellect which makes them inattentive to any message to the ear which is without an argument.”
• “These people could pass what the French consider the test of a civilised society: they could practise the art of general conversation, voice dovetailed into voice without impertinent interruption; there was light and shade, sober judgement was corrected by mocking criticism and another sober judgement established and every now and then the cards were swept off the table by a gust of laughter and the game started afresh.”
• “Like her husband she could see no point in consistency, which is the very mortar of society.”
• “He took to shutting himself up in his poor room and read enormously of philosophy and politics undermining his health and nerves by the severity of these undirected studies.” - me?
• “That characteristically Slav look which comes from the pulling of the flesh down from the flat cheekbones by the tense pursing of the mouth.”
• “The lad was the worse off for being a Christian; he had not that air of being sustained in his poverty by the secret spiritual funds that is so noticeable in the poverty stricken Muslim.”
• “It is the misfortune of the Jews that there are kinds of Jews who repel by their ugliness and the repulsion these cause is not counterbalanced by other kinds who are beautiful because they are too beautiful, because their glorious beauty disconcerted the mean and puny element in the gentile nature, at its worst among the English, which cannot stand up to anything abundant or generous which thinks duck too rich and chambertin too heavy and goes to ugly places for its holiday and wears drab clothes.”
• “For she was not Slav and she had not made that acceptance of tragedy that is the basis of Slav life”
• “Suddenly I remembered friendship and how beautiful it is in a way that is difficult in London or any capital where one suffers from an excess of relationship and I realise that it was probably greater comfort for this German woman so far from home to talk with my husband whose German is like a German’s and of her own kind for he learned It in Hamburg and she was of Bremen.”
• “So far the history of Belgrade like many other passages in the life of Europe makes one wonder what the human race has lost by its habit of bleeding itself like a mad medieval surgeon.”
•“Human beings love to inflict pain on their fellow creatures and the species yields to its perverse appetite allowing vast tragedies to happen and endure for centuries people to agonize and become extinct. The pleasantness of life which is so strong when it manifests itself that it is tempting to regard it as the characteristic and even determinant reality of the universe is of no real avail. I could be burnt to death in this church though the air smelt of honey.”
•“It may be that the breakdown of the turkish administration was not only a matter of political incompetence but resulted from a prevalent physical disability affecting men precisely at an age when they would be given the most responsible administrative posts.”
•“Of course the english have no real religious instinct but thy approve of religion because it holds society together.”
•“The congregation had realized what people in the west usually do not know: that the state of mind suitable for conducting the practical affairs of daily life is not suitable for discovering the ultimate meaning of life.”
•“The churches of asia became extinct not because islam threatened them with its sword but because they were not philosophers enough to be interested in it's doctrive not lovers enough to be infatuated with the lovable throughout long centuries and in isolation. But these macedonians had liked to love as they had been taught by the apostles who had come to them from byzantium.”
•“Turkey in europe was an advantage to england who wanted a weak power at the end of the mediterranean to keep out any strong power that might have inconvenient ambitions. It held back the austrian empire on its way to the black sea and the russian empire from its pan slavist dream and its itch for constantinople.”
•“And i alleged to myself that probably nothing had fallen at Kossovo that was an irreparable loss, that perhaps tragedy draws blood but never life blood.”
•“I saw before me what an empire which spreads beyond its legitimate boundaries must do to it's subjects. It cannot spread its own life over the conquered areas for life cannot travel too far from its source and it blights the life that is native to those parts. Therefore it imprisons all it's subjects in a stale conservatism in a seedy gentility that celebrates past achievements over and over again.”
•“What is art? It is not decoration. It is the reliving of experience. The artist says I will make that event happen again altering its shape which was disfigured by its contacts with other events to that it's true significance is revealed.”
There is also an Incredible detailed section on the incident which galvanised the beginning of WW1 when Gavrilo Princip murdered archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife in Sarajevo On St Vitus’ day in 1914.
Here are some of my best bits from this fascinating 1,000 plus page book:
• “Since the industrial revolution capitalism has grooved society with a number of free slots along which most human beings can roll smoothly to a fixed destination. When a man takes charge of a factory the factory takes charge of him.”
• “The Croats were originally a Slav tribe who were invited by the emperor Heraclitus to free the Dalmatian coast and the Croatian hinterland from the Avars, one of the most noxious pillaging hordes”
• “Croats are fierce and warlike intellectuals.”
• “The sense of inevitability in a work of art should be quite different from scientific conception of causality for if art were creative then each stage must be new, must have something over and above what was contained in the previous stages and the connexion between the first and the last may be creative in the Bergsonian sense. He added that it is to give this creativeness its chance to create what is at once predictable and inevitable that an artist must never interfere with his characters to make them prove a moral point, because this is to force them down the path of the predictable.”
• “Because men of that day had convictions where we moderns have only opinions”
• “Here was the authentic voice of the Slav, these people hold that the way to make life better is to add good things to it, whereas in the west we hold that the way to make life better is to take bad things away from it.”
• “So you are intellectuals. The false sort that are always in opposition. My God, my God, how easy it is to be an intellectual in oppositions to the man of action.”
• “We in England have an unhistorical attitude to our lives, because every generation has felt excitement over a clear-cut historical novelty which has given it enough to tell its children and grandchildren without drawing on its fathers and grandfathers tales.”
• “And it seemed very probable that Rome was able to conquer foreign territories because she had developed her military genius at the expense of precisely those qualities which would have made her able to rule them. Certainly she lacked them to such an extent that she was unable to work out a satisfactory political and economic policy for Rome itself and perished of that failure.”
• “But I passed one of the nuns and remarked as I had done before that the rank and file of the female religious order presents an unpleasing appearance because they have assumed the expression of credulity natural and inevitable to men who find it difficult to live without the help of philosophical systems which far from outrun ascertained facets, but wholly unsuitable to women who are born with a faith in the unrevealed mystery of life and can therefore afford to be sceptics.”
• “The great men for whom humanity feels ecstatic love need not be good, not even gifted but they must display this fusion of light and darkness which is the essential human character they must even promise by the predominance of darkness that the universe shall forever persist in its imperfection.”
• “There is a Finnish word “sisu” which expresses this ultimate hidden resource in man which will not be worsted, which takes charge when courage goes and consciousness is blackened, which insists on continuing to live no matter what life is worth.”
• “That philanthropy consisted of giving sops to the populace which would make it forget that their masters had seized all the means of production and distribution and therefore held them in a state of complete economic subjection.”
• “These are among the most pleasing architectural gestures ever made by urbanity. They do not publicly declare the relationship of man and god like a Christian tower or spire. They raise a white finger and say only “this is a community of human beings and look you we are not beasts of the field.” - talking about Mosques.
• “Her stillness was more than the habit of a western woman, yet the uncovering of her mouth and chin had shown her completely un-oriental as luminously fair as any Scandinavian. Further away two Moslem men sat on a bench and talked politics beating with their fingers on the headlines of a newspaper. Both were tall, raw-boned bronze haired with eyes crackling with sheer blueness: Danish sea captains perhaps had they not been wearing the fez.”
• “A musical instrument each note for its own colour, the gurgle of wine pouring from a bottle of water trickling though a marble conduit in the garden – all sorts of sounds that many westerners do not even hear, so corrupted are they by the tyranny of the intellect which makes them inattentive to any message to the ear which is without an argument.”
• “These people could pass what the French consider the test of a civilised society: they could practise the art of general conversation, voice dovetailed into voice without impertinent interruption; there was light and shade, sober judgement was corrected by mocking criticism and another sober judgement established and every now and then the cards were swept off the table by a gust of laughter and the game started afresh.”
• “Like her husband she could see no point in consistency, which is the very mortar of society.”
• “He took to shutting himself up in his poor room and read enormously of philosophy and politics undermining his health and nerves by the severity of these undirected studies.” - me?
• “That characteristically Slav look which comes from the pulling of the flesh down from the flat cheekbones by the tense pursing of the mouth.”
• “The lad was the worse off for being a Christian; he had not that air of being sustained in his poverty by the secret spiritual funds that is so noticeable in the poverty stricken Muslim.”
• “It is the misfortune of the Jews that there are kinds of Jews who repel by their ugliness and the repulsion these cause is not counterbalanced by other kinds who are beautiful because they are too beautiful, because their glorious beauty disconcerted the mean and puny element in the gentile nature, at its worst among the English, which cannot stand up to anything abundant or generous which thinks duck too rich and chambertin too heavy and goes to ugly places for its holiday and wears drab clothes.”
• “For she was not Slav and she had not made that acceptance of tragedy that is the basis of Slav life”
• “Suddenly I remembered friendship and how beautiful it is in a way that is difficult in London or any capital where one suffers from an excess of relationship and I realise that it was probably greater comfort for this German woman so far from home to talk with my husband whose German is like a German’s and of her own kind for he learned It in Hamburg and she was of Bremen.”
• “So far the history of Belgrade like many other passages in the life of Europe makes one wonder what the human race has lost by its habit of bleeding itself like a mad medieval surgeon.”
•“Human beings love to inflict pain on their fellow creatures and the species yields to its perverse appetite allowing vast tragedies to happen and endure for centuries people to agonize and become extinct. The pleasantness of life which is so strong when it manifests itself that it is tempting to regard it as the characteristic and even determinant reality of the universe is of no real avail. I could be burnt to death in this church though the air smelt of honey.”
•“It may be that the breakdown of the turkish administration was not only a matter of political incompetence but resulted from a prevalent physical disability affecting men precisely at an age when they would be given the most responsible administrative posts.”
•“Of course the english have no real religious instinct but thy approve of religion because it holds society together.”
•“The congregation had realized what people in the west usually do not know: that the state of mind suitable for conducting the practical affairs of daily life is not suitable for discovering the ultimate meaning of life.”
•“The churches of asia became extinct not because islam threatened them with its sword but because they were not philosophers enough to be interested in it's doctrive not lovers enough to be infatuated with the lovable throughout long centuries and in isolation. But these macedonians had liked to love as they had been taught by the apostles who had come to them from byzantium.”
•“Turkey in europe was an advantage to england who wanted a weak power at the end of the mediterranean to keep out any strong power that might have inconvenient ambitions. It held back the austrian empire on its way to the black sea and the russian empire from its pan slavist dream and its itch for constantinople.”
•“And i alleged to myself that probably nothing had fallen at Kossovo that was an irreparable loss, that perhaps tragedy draws blood but never life blood.”
•“I saw before me what an empire which spreads beyond its legitimate boundaries must do to it's subjects. It cannot spread its own life over the conquered areas for life cannot travel too far from its source and it blights the life that is native to those parts. Therefore it imprisons all it's subjects in a stale conservatism in a seedy gentility that celebrates past achievements over and over again.”
•“What is art? It is not decoration. It is the reliving of experience. The artist says I will make that event happen again altering its shape which was disfigured by its contacts with other events to that it's true significance is revealed.”
February 18, 2020
Zašto je Rebeki Vest bilo potrebno ovo putovanje?
Putovanje danas nepostojećom zemljom bilo je mnogo više od izuzetno osmišljene turističke ture. Ono je imalo vrednost hodočašća čiji je cilj obuhvatiti „zemlju u kojoj je sve shvatljivo, gde je način života tako otvoren i jasan da uklanja svaku nedoumicu”. (11) Putovanje koje je ujedno hodočašće i potraga postaje monumentalan književni poduhvat. Težnja ka očiglednosti, drukčijem, izvornijem pogledu na svet, proizlazi iz atmosfere posustalosti Evrope. Rebeki Vest bila je potrebna ta imaginarna trajektorija jer bi ona mogla da pronađe meru, da namagnetiše razmagnetisani kompas starog sveta. Međutim, Rebeka Vest je prilično daleko od avangardističkih koncepata balkanskog genija, ali i od one Herderove misli o Slovenima kao budućnosti Evrope. Ona je sasvim osoben konzervativac, jasnog, prosrpskog i projugoslovenskog stava. Taj stav formiran je ne samo empirijski, već i istraživanjima, ali, moguće ponajviše posredstvom skrivenog glavnog junaka ovog putopisa – Konstantina. Ili, da svima bude jasno – Stanislava Vinavera, volšebnika srpske književnosti. Rebeka Vest sigurno nije mogla da ima boljeg vodiča od njega – samo je takva (vasionska) ličnost mogla da joj otvori saznanje kako je pejzaž, zapravo, palimpsest. (Štaviše, za Vinavera će reći da je „istinski pesnik. Zna sve o stvarima o kojima ništa ne zna.” (313) I taj motiv palimpsesta javlja se više puta kod Rebeke – uz pejzaž, palimpsest je i telo i umetničko delo. Stoga bi naziranje tih nanosa predstavljalo pravu egzistencijalnu strategiju – put u onaj željeni, jasniji svet. Nevolja sa takvom težnjom utopijske je prirode. Željena jasnoća postaje sve maglovitija, a sama Jugoslavija, beskrajno inspirativna i podsticajna, ima vidljive šavove prethodnih ranjavanja. I paradoksi se gomilaju, paradoksi-palimpsesti. A da bi palimpsest mogao da se rašrafi, neophodno je bilo izdvajanje slike. Slike ili procesa. Tako je Rebekino delo jedan totalni putopis – enciklopedija ukusa, mirisa, karaktera, gradova, umetnosti, natopljen istorijom, krcat anegdotima, tračevima, aferama, divnim digresijama. Što se mirisa tiče, briljantan je, npr. momenat kada Anđela, sobarica jednog beogradskog hotela, prepoznaje različite goste i njihove nacionalnosti (!) na osnovu mirisa – što Rebeka naziva „olfaktornom avanturom” (354). Izuzetan je i Rebekin smisao za humor, kao i talenat za filmično uprizorivanje npr. kad joj jagnje vlažnom njuškicom dodirne ruku pa skoči preplašena pored grupe kršnih Crnogoraca. Ili krajnje kitnjasta slika: dečak koji joj je predao naramak jorgovana dok je golub izleteo iz bare u kojoj se kupao, a kapljice su blistale poput dijamanata rasutih po vazduhu. (258) Tu je i netrpeljivost prema Greti, Konstantinovoj ženi, koja ih prati po južnim krajevima. A da ne pričam o tome koliko zabavljaju Rebekine gurmanske avanture – kada se u Prištini žali na veličinu pilećih krilaca, u Peći kada pokušava da pronađe mesto u kome se posti jer, eto, želela je te večeri da posti, u Travniku kada jede jagnjeće odreske (kako kaže, ljubav prema uživanju je nešto najbolje što su Turci ostavili ovim prostorima (309)), kada je tamanila palačinke u Hrvatskoj ili razne oblike džigerica po svim krajevima Jugoslavije. Ko želi pronaći će i detaljne podatke o nošnjama, špijunima, razmišljanja o freskama, običajima i veoma temeljni pregled istorije političkih zbivanja. A to je tek samo trunčica.
Ako bih mogao da izdvojim predeo u kome je Rebeka Vest pronašla ono što je tražila, to je začudo bila Makedonija. Makedonija sa jedne strane, kao autentičnija i svakako raznobojnija od Kosova i Crne Gore (posebno me je iznenadio opis i doživljaj Bitolja), koja predstavlja kontratežu hrvatskoj centralnoevropskoj dekadenciji. I zaista je neverovatno, kako je uspela da uz sva svoja interesovanja, tako verodostojno upije sve zablude, muke, ushite i iluzije ovih predela, uz to suvereno vladajući faktografijom. I sva ona mesta koja možemo zameriti autorki, putopis čine još zanimljivijim (poput mestimičnih homofobnih i ne baš feminističkih momenata (166), relativizacija maloletničkih brakova (643), mržnja prema Tolstoju, pojednostavljivanje uloge Vizantije, Turske i Rusije, potreba za teatralnim samosažaljivanjem – npr. kada kaže kako bi joj lakše bilo da je, kada je bila bolesna, imala odrpanu garderobu, jer bi bolje bila povezana sa njenim tadašnjim stanjem, Dečani su joj bljak itd.).
A uostalom, šta je pisac bez svojih slabosti i zabluda... (Loš pisac?)
Putovanje je, posle svega, čitanje sebe. I mi kada čitamo Rebeku, koja čita sebe, neretko upoređujući pejzaže Jugoslavije sa pejažima svoje domovine, otiskujemo se na isto putovanje, ali sa drugačijim tragalačkim ciljevima. Naći sebe u sebi golem je posao.
P. S. Uzgred, na nekoliko mesta primetio sam kako se ovaj roman uporno pogrešno citira. Nigde nisam našao da je Rebeka Vest rekla da je Kalemegdan raj na zemlji (iako joj se izuzetno svideo – štaviše rekla je da je jedan od najlepših parkova na svetu (358), niti da je Nikolaj Velimirović „najizuzetnije biće koje je ikad srela”. Štaviše, vladiku Nikolaja prikazuje kao pomalo mračnog čoveka koji se „silno rve sa čežnjom prema smrću” (715). Imajući u vidu da je Rebeka Vest upravo delo pisala, između ostalog, sa namerom da ukaže na postojeće predrasude i uvrežene predstave prema Slovenima, trebalo bi da mnogi pažljivije čitaju.
P. P. S. Bilo kako bilo, ovo je bio zaista superkratki uvod za jedno od najvažnijih dela vezanih za ove prostore. I iako će makar neko biti inspirisan da se takođe otisne na ovo putovanje koje i umara i obogaćuje, biću srećan.
Putovanje danas nepostojećom zemljom bilo je mnogo više od izuzetno osmišljene turističke ture. Ono je imalo vrednost hodočašća čiji je cilj obuhvatiti „zemlju u kojoj je sve shvatljivo, gde je način života tako otvoren i jasan da uklanja svaku nedoumicu”. (11) Putovanje koje je ujedno hodočašće i potraga postaje monumentalan književni poduhvat. Težnja ka očiglednosti, drukčijem, izvornijem pogledu na svet, proizlazi iz atmosfere posustalosti Evrope. Rebeki Vest bila je potrebna ta imaginarna trajektorija jer bi ona mogla da pronađe meru, da namagnetiše razmagnetisani kompas starog sveta. Međutim, Rebeka Vest je prilično daleko od avangardističkih koncepata balkanskog genija, ali i od one Herderove misli o Slovenima kao budućnosti Evrope. Ona je sasvim osoben konzervativac, jasnog, prosrpskog i projugoslovenskog stava. Taj stav formiran je ne samo empirijski, već i istraživanjima, ali, moguće ponajviše posredstvom skrivenog glavnog junaka ovog putopisa – Konstantina. Ili, da svima bude jasno – Stanislava Vinavera, volšebnika srpske književnosti. Rebeka Vest sigurno nije mogla da ima boljeg vodiča od njega – samo je takva (vasionska) ličnost mogla da joj otvori saznanje kako je pejzaž, zapravo, palimpsest. (Štaviše, za Vinavera će reći da je „istinski pesnik. Zna sve o stvarima o kojima ništa ne zna.” (313) I taj motiv palimpsesta javlja se više puta kod Rebeke – uz pejzaž, palimpsest je i telo i umetničko delo. Stoga bi naziranje tih nanosa predstavljalo pravu egzistencijalnu strategiju – put u onaj željeni, jasniji svet. Nevolja sa takvom težnjom utopijske je prirode. Željena jasnoća postaje sve maglovitija, a sama Jugoslavija, beskrajno inspirativna i podsticajna, ima vidljive šavove prethodnih ranjavanja. I paradoksi se gomilaju, paradoksi-palimpsesti. A da bi palimpsest mogao da se rašrafi, neophodno je bilo izdvajanje slike. Slike ili procesa. Tako je Rebekino delo jedan totalni putopis – enciklopedija ukusa, mirisa, karaktera, gradova, umetnosti, natopljen istorijom, krcat anegdotima, tračevima, aferama, divnim digresijama. Što se mirisa tiče, briljantan je, npr. momenat kada Anđela, sobarica jednog beogradskog hotela, prepoznaje različite goste i njihove nacionalnosti (!) na osnovu mirisa – što Rebeka naziva „olfaktornom avanturom” (354). Izuzetan je i Rebekin smisao za humor, kao i talenat za filmično uprizorivanje npr. kad joj jagnje vlažnom njuškicom dodirne ruku pa skoči preplašena pored grupe kršnih Crnogoraca. Ili krajnje kitnjasta slika: dečak koji joj je predao naramak jorgovana dok je golub izleteo iz bare u kojoj se kupao, a kapljice su blistale poput dijamanata rasutih po vazduhu. (258) Tu je i netrpeljivost prema Greti, Konstantinovoj ženi, koja ih prati po južnim krajevima. A da ne pričam o tome koliko zabavljaju Rebekine gurmanske avanture – kada se u Prištini žali na veličinu pilećih krilaca, u Peći kada pokušava da pronađe mesto u kome se posti jer, eto, želela je te večeri da posti, u Travniku kada jede jagnjeće odreske (kako kaže, ljubav prema uživanju je nešto najbolje što su Turci ostavili ovim prostorima (309)), kada je tamanila palačinke u Hrvatskoj ili razne oblike džigerica po svim krajevima Jugoslavije. Ko želi pronaći će i detaljne podatke o nošnjama, špijunima, razmišljanja o freskama, običajima i veoma temeljni pregled istorije političkih zbivanja. A to je tek samo trunčica.
Ako bih mogao da izdvojim predeo u kome je Rebeka Vest pronašla ono što je tražila, to je začudo bila Makedonija. Makedonija sa jedne strane, kao autentičnija i svakako raznobojnija od Kosova i Crne Gore (posebno me je iznenadio opis i doživljaj Bitolja), koja predstavlja kontratežu hrvatskoj centralnoevropskoj dekadenciji. I zaista je neverovatno, kako je uspela da uz sva svoja interesovanja, tako verodostojno upije sve zablude, muke, ushite i iluzije ovih predela, uz to suvereno vladajući faktografijom. I sva ona mesta koja možemo zameriti autorki, putopis čine još zanimljivijim (poput mestimičnih homofobnih i ne baš feminističkih momenata (166), relativizacija maloletničkih brakova (643), mržnja prema Tolstoju, pojednostavljivanje uloge Vizantije, Turske i Rusije, potreba za teatralnim samosažaljivanjem – npr. kada kaže kako bi joj lakše bilo da je, kada je bila bolesna, imala odrpanu garderobu, jer bi bolje bila povezana sa njenim tadašnjim stanjem, Dečani su joj bljak itd.).
A uostalom, šta je pisac bez svojih slabosti i zabluda... (Loš pisac?)
Putovanje je, posle svega, čitanje sebe. I mi kada čitamo Rebeku, koja čita sebe, neretko upoređujući pejzaže Jugoslavije sa pejažima svoje domovine, otiskujemo se na isto putovanje, ali sa drugačijim tragalačkim ciljevima. Naći sebe u sebi golem je posao.
P. S. Uzgred, na nekoliko mesta primetio sam kako se ovaj roman uporno pogrešno citira. Nigde nisam našao da je Rebeka Vest rekla da je Kalemegdan raj na zemlji (iako joj se izuzetno svideo – štaviše rekla je da je jedan od najlepših parkova na svetu (358), niti da je Nikolaj Velimirović „najizuzetnije biće koje je ikad srela”. Štaviše, vladiku Nikolaja prikazuje kao pomalo mračnog čoveka koji se „silno rve sa čežnjom prema smrću” (715). Imajući u vidu da je Rebeka Vest upravo delo pisala, između ostalog, sa namerom da ukaže na postojeće predrasude i uvrežene predstave prema Slovenima, trebalo bi da mnogi pažljivije čitaju.
P. P. S. Bilo kako bilo, ovo je bio zaista superkratki uvod za jedno od najvažnijih dela vezanih za ove prostore. I iako će makar neko biti inspirisan da se takođe otisne na ovo putovanje koje i umara i obogaćuje, biću srećan.
October 25, 2016
2.5/5
You can blame Goodreads for this rating being rounded down rather than up. Anything three-starred or higher gets churned up in a 'liked it' mash and spewed forth on recommendations that have nothing to do with why I read the book in the first place and everything to do with sucking up to the capitalism machine. If I could get some assurance of my rating having the nuance of 'found it useful despite all odious efforts to the contrary', I'd bother with the effort of joining in with the percentage points that are on the side of yay rather than nay and play its own small role in the advertising juggernaut. As it stands, this book is already suffering from a preponderance of overblown praise intent on selling it to all and sundry without the slightest consideration for how all and sundry may differ from this book's optimal reader, who will be white, well off, and think that Trump really gets the United States. Anyone offended by that last one should take a good look at West and her utter refusal to see where her ideologies and those of her nightmarish Nazis and Facists are in such delightful agreement.
The worst part about this books is I have no idea where to go from here. I can't trust the bibliography, as West's characterizing of epistemological worth relies on little more than on how well she can mold whatever she comes across into some drama of stereotypes and on her pride. Recommendations would be great if I hadn't been led to this work by recommendations in the first place and the compatriot lists below my shelving of this wasn't littered with stars galore and very little serious consideration of values other than how many subjects someone tries to talk about, how well someone writes, and how long their money and self-satisfaction allows them to write. My best bet is to move along the lines of what West admitted to, such as the history of Islam and Turkey (the two are not identical) in southeastern Europe, the Romani (you don't get to say g*psy unless you are Romani. It's a slur, and the hatred is alive and well as evidenced in the white washing that happened in Avengers 2 and films subsequent to that), and history actually written by those with some investiture in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia, beyond some trite approval of tourist souvenirs and a desire to do some novel "noble savage" writing that hadn't already been taken up by Bird and Blixen.
By the end of this book, Constantine, West's officiating friend and knowledgeable tour guide, has had a physically noticeable breakdown that results in, among other things, an increased antagonism towards his English wanderlusters. West chalks it up to his wife's antisemitism (a wife that West blames for everything from Nazis to the denial of world peace) and remains content in the belief that they would be in Constantine's good graces if he was in his right mind. If West had been reading even a fraction of the trash she had written aloud to her Serbian thinker, the only surprise is that his patience didn't run out sooner.
You can blame Goodreads for this rating being rounded down rather than up. Anything three-starred or higher gets churned up in a 'liked it' mash and spewed forth on recommendations that have nothing to do with why I read the book in the first place and everything to do with sucking up to the capitalism machine. If I could get some assurance of my rating having the nuance of 'found it useful despite all odious efforts to the contrary', I'd bother with the effort of joining in with the percentage points that are on the side of yay rather than nay and play its own small role in the advertising juggernaut. As it stands, this book is already suffering from a preponderance of overblown praise intent on selling it to all and sundry without the slightest consideration for how all and sundry may differ from this book's optimal reader, who will be white, well off, and think that Trump really gets the United States. Anyone offended by that last one should take a good look at West and her utter refusal to see where her ideologies and those of her nightmarish Nazis and Facists are in such delightful agreement.
I did not greatly care what he thought of me, for I was too greatly interested in him, and any personal relations between us could not aid my interest, for I could get everything out of him that I could ever get by watching him.That, and some history that was the only redeeming factor for this read by way of utmost usefulness, is the entirety of the book. West goes, West sees, West writes some fanfiction that coagulates around fingers in too many pies and results in some virulently racist and Islamophobic tract whose worth lies only in the few facts that manage to slip past her sentimental grasp. If you took Tolstoy's epilogue to War and Peace and expanded it to 1150 of the 1400+ pages, you'd get a sense of flavor of disgruntled whining filling hundreds upon hundreds of pages; one obsessed with the threat of a literate proletariat, the other convinced that queer people are the reason for everything going wrong in the world. The commentaries on imperialism, nationalism, capitalism, and oppression are aborted by West's tendency to treat with everything as types, rather than facts: "Americans" are wishy washy white liberals with paranoid tendencies, the British Empire has mostly redeeming qualities while the Ottoman Empire was nothing but stagnant filth, and it's the industrial workers that are to blame for Hitler and Mussolini, not the veins of hatred that have been carefully cultivated for centuries by both the European powers and every nation they have spawned. Only a few of the broad sides caused by her continued and defensive thrusting her head in the sand, mind you. She makes apologisms for everything from anti-Semitism to pedophilia, and whatever prose style she has works more to obfuscate her have-her-cake-and-eat-it-too attitude towards the oh so poor but manly Slavs, the sadly neglected but obviously blood inherited aesthetics of the Byzantine Empire, and the Catholic/Orthodox tradition. The fact that I better understand the aspects of religious piety the title of this work refers than she does is sad, to say the least. All that reading, and she couldn't even spare a glance for the hagiographies of female saints? The closest she got was Saint Monica, who wasn't even referred to by name and was probably only appreciated with how she kept her husband a 'true' man and insured her son is remembered to this day.
The worst part about this books is I have no idea where to go from here. I can't trust the bibliography, as West's characterizing of epistemological worth relies on little more than on how well she can mold whatever she comes across into some drama of stereotypes and on her pride. Recommendations would be great if I hadn't been led to this work by recommendations in the first place and the compatriot lists below my shelving of this wasn't littered with stars galore and very little serious consideration of values other than how many subjects someone tries to talk about, how well someone writes, and how long their money and self-satisfaction allows them to write. My best bet is to move along the lines of what West admitted to, such as the history of Islam and Turkey (the two are not identical) in southeastern Europe, the Romani (you don't get to say g*psy unless you are Romani. It's a slur, and the hatred is alive and well as evidenced in the white washing that happened in Avengers 2 and films subsequent to that), and history actually written by those with some investiture in Croatia, Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Macedonia, Montenegro, and Slovenia, beyond some trite approval of tourist souvenirs and a desire to do some novel "noble savage" writing that hadn't already been taken up by Bird and Blixen.
By the end of this book, Constantine, West's officiating friend and knowledgeable tour guide, has had a physically noticeable breakdown that results in, among other things, an increased antagonism towards his English wanderlusters. West chalks it up to his wife's antisemitism (a wife that West blames for everything from Nazis to the denial of world peace) and remains content in the belief that they would be in Constantine's good graces if he was in his right mind. If West had been reading even a fraction of the trash she had written aloud to her Serbian thinker, the only surprise is that his patience didn't run out sooner.
Why should Western cretins drool their spittle on our sacred things?There's nothing like finishing off some monstrous entity to the point that naysayers cannot use lack of completion as leverage for enforcing their own opinionated acceptance onto oneself.
July 19, 2020
Over the last many years I have attempted to read this book three times. This time I made it through. I have been reading it at the approximate rate of 5 pages a day, with some breaks, since July 22, 2019. I have no idea how I will write a review of it but someday soon I will try. For now, I can say that the effort to read it was repaid a thousand times over by the unknown to me history I learned, the deep understanding of the human condition it showed, and the foundation I now have for reading books set in and written by the many writers from what was once called Yugoslavia. I finished today with the feeling of having an immense burden lifted from my shoulders and a sense of wonder at what Rebecca West achieved.
My actual review, written a month later:
I am well aware that this book will not be for everyone but I wanted to have a record of my thoughts on it here. Finishing this book has been my greatest reading accomplishment so far this year. I had attempted to read it twice before but bogged down early both times. Last July I tried again, looked up all the words I didn't know, studied maps and took notes. I set myself a minimal pace of 5 pages at a sitting and 11 months later I finished!
Rebecca West was an infamously successful journalist, political writer, novelist and feminist from 1911 until her death in 1983. I came to her through one of her novels, The Fountain Overflows, one of my favorite novels ever. I first learned about Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in the days of the Bosnian War, a conflict I could never understand no matter how much news I read. It turns out I needed the history of the Balkans and West's book gave that and much more.
She made two extended trips through Yugoslavia, an area also known as the Balkans throughout history. When she visited in 1937 and 1938, the area was a cobbled together country created after WWI at the Paris Peace Conference. Her book follows the second journey taken with her husband.
Beginning in Croatia, they continued through Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro. These were the countries that made up Yugoslavia at the time. They visited major cities as well as villages and historic sites. If that sounds like a lot to take in, it was for both Ms West and myself.
One of my followers found the writing style unlikable. She does revel in long sentences, detailed descriptions and somewhat flowery, emotional reactions to what she sees and how she feels about it all. I did not mind that too much. What else would one expect from someone raised on Shakespeare and Dickens?
Whenever I looked up images of the mountains, valleys, cathedrals and monasteries she described, they looked exactly as she had written about them! Her accounts about the people she met brought them to life as would a novelist with her characters.
When she returned to England in 1938, Hitler was on the rise. She had no doubt that another World War was about to begin. She spent the next few years enlarging her already vast knowledge of the history of those countries, from Roman times, through the Byzantine Empire, the conquering Turks, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the debacle that was WWI, and the arrival of communism from Russia. I can't imagine anyone besides a life long historian being able to encompass so much.
Finally she put it all together into Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, two images that recur over and over in the book. She created her perspective on the historical precedents and causes of what by the time of publication was WWII. When I finished the book, even though I had not read an article on the Serbian War or the Kosovo War for over 20 years, it suddenly all made sense to me.
I don't recommend this tome to everyone. But, if you like to study history, if you have read widely in historical fiction, or you just have an unquenchable desire to understand European history, you might make it through and gain new insights.
Rebecca West was a liberal, a feminist, a humanist thinker, and I can't imagine anyone agreeing wholeheartedly with her politically in 2020. Still, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a huge contribution to historical and political thought.
If you made it through to the end of my attempt to write about this incredible book, you should do fine with Rebecca West, who towered over me in writing and thinking ability.
My actual review, written a month later:
I am well aware that this book will not be for everyone but I wanted to have a record of my thoughts on it here. Finishing this book has been my greatest reading accomplishment so far this year. I had attempted to read it twice before but bogged down early both times. Last July I tried again, looked up all the words I didn't know, studied maps and took notes. I set myself a minimal pace of 5 pages at a sitting and 11 months later I finished!
Rebecca West was an infamously successful journalist, political writer, novelist and feminist from 1911 until her death in 1983. I came to her through one of her novels, The Fountain Overflows, one of my favorite novels ever. I first learned about Black Lamb and Grey Falcon in the days of the Bosnian War, a conflict I could never understand no matter how much news I read. It turns out I needed the history of the Balkans and West's book gave that and much more.
She made two extended trips through Yugoslavia, an area also known as the Balkans throughout history. When she visited in 1937 and 1938, the area was a cobbled together country created after WWI at the Paris Peace Conference. Her book follows the second journey taken with her husband.
Beginning in Croatia, they continued through Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia and Montenegro. These were the countries that made up Yugoslavia at the time. They visited major cities as well as villages and historic sites. If that sounds like a lot to take in, it was for both Ms West and myself.
One of my followers found the writing style unlikable. She does revel in long sentences, detailed descriptions and somewhat flowery, emotional reactions to what she sees and how she feels about it all. I did not mind that too much. What else would one expect from someone raised on Shakespeare and Dickens?
Whenever I looked up images of the mountains, valleys, cathedrals and monasteries she described, they looked exactly as she had written about them! Her accounts about the people she met brought them to life as would a novelist with her characters.
When she returned to England in 1938, Hitler was on the rise. She had no doubt that another World War was about to begin. She spent the next few years enlarging her already vast knowledge of the history of those countries, from Roman times, through the Byzantine Empire, the conquering Turks, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the debacle that was WWI, and the arrival of communism from Russia. I can't imagine anyone besides a life long historian being able to encompass so much.
Finally she put it all together into Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, two images that recur over and over in the book. She created her perspective on the historical precedents and causes of what by the time of publication was WWII. When I finished the book, even though I had not read an article on the Serbian War or the Kosovo War for over 20 years, it suddenly all made sense to me.
I don't recommend this tome to everyone. But, if you like to study history, if you have read widely in historical fiction, or you just have an unquenchable desire to understand European history, you might make it through and gain new insights.
Rebecca West was a liberal, a feminist, a humanist thinker, and I can't imagine anyone agreeing wholeheartedly with her politically in 2020. Still, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a huge contribution to historical and political thought.
If you made it through to the end of my attempt to write about this incredible book, you should do fine with Rebecca West, who towered over me in writing and thinking ability.
August 16, 2016
Well, it's been several months, and I haven't been able to come up with a review that can sum up this overwhelmingly insightful, powerful, and complicated (and yes sometimes problematic) reading experience. But I did take notes as I read, mostly for myself. So what follows isn't a review per se, but more of a bunch of cobbled together impressions and quotes. (For more quotes, please check out all the status updates below this review). Hopefully these notes will be useful to someone else also.
My Notes
Prologue The first chapter (Prologue) is essential in terms of background information and history that leads up to the region, including the preconditions of WWI. Very interesting stuff, will pay off to spend extra time understanding this (and maybe reading other accounts of these same events). Her opinionated, thoughtful and very personal interpretation of history is so much more engaging than any history text, although a bit hard to follow at times (she doesn't always explain everything).
Croats vs. Serbs:
A Croat is a Catholic member and a Serb an Orthodox member of a Slav people that lies widely distributed south of the Danube, between the Adriatic and Bulgaria, and north of the Greek mountains. A Serbian is a subject of the kingdom of Serbia, and might be a Croat, just as a Croatian-born inhabitant of the old Austrian province of Croatia might be a Serb. p. 13Pascal:
"Man is but a reed, the most feeble thing in nature; but he is a thinking reed. The entire universe need not arm itself to crush him. A vapour, a drop of water, suffices to kill him. But if the universe were to crush him, man would still be more noble than that which killed him, because he knows that he dies and the advantage which the universe has over him; the universe knows nothing of this." In these words he writes the sole prescription for a distinguished humanity. We must learn to know the nature of the advantage which the universe has over us (p.22)Chapter 1 traveling on train with Germans, who she characterizes as well-meaning and friendly but steeped in a very peculiar type of self-absorbed bureaucratic malaise and misery of their more-than-well-off lives. It seems a particularly significant portrait given that this book was written between WWI and WWII and the spirit of Nazi Germany was in the air at the time, and to see every day Germans and how they reacted or lived within this system. Also it is a nice contrast between these western cultures of Germany/Austria and the Slavs that we will meet later, who have much less but enjoy their lives much more (and are way more passionate/engaged with life)
(she does seem to characterize / stereotype entire peoples, which is one of the things that bothered me off and on about this book. I talked to a Croatian recently who had a bad opinion of this book because he felt that she had exoticized them into types.)
Part 2: Croatia
Constantine, age 46, is a Serb, Jew (although I don't understand how he can be both Serb (Orthodox) and Jew), poet and gov. official from Serbia, talks a lot, fat, Heine-like (need to read some about Heine), pro-Yugoslavia (but takes it for granted, he thinks Y is needed to maintain themselves against Central Europe), his parents fled from Poland.
Valetta, age 26, is a lecturer in mathematics, and a Croat from Dalmatia (Southern Croatia). Described as "archaic" and statue-esque, very likeable and charming, but can also be severe and martyr-ical with the right causes, he is Anti-Yugoslavian (sees it as an unjust authority) and pro-autonomous Croatia
Marko Gregorievitch, age 56, is tall, gloomy, and Pluto-like. Fought against Hungarians for Croat-rights. Pro-Yugoslavia, and thinks Y represents defiance to Austro-Hungarian Empire. He's super fervent about his beliefs and about Y, and has fought for the cause.
A (IRL!) friend who happens to be reading this at the same time as me (I agree with her): "interesting [that] she's able to connect her sense of the present with the past as if both are unfolding together" ... "history takes on personal relevance... and so does gender relations!"
Yellatchitch: Croat patriot, led victory against Hungarians, in twisted history betw. Croatia and Hungary (p 48 on) Hungarians defeated by Turks, Croatia alone, becomes idiotically loyal to Austria/Hapsburgs: "between Austrian tyranny and Turkish raids, the Croats lived submissively" -- Maria Theresa (a Hapbsurg) "put Croatia under [Hungary] as a slave state"...led to crisis of 1848... Croats asked Austria for divorce from Hungary, and to name Yellachitch as Ban of Croatia (approved only grudgingly and because of circumstance) .. Yella led his men to defeat Hungarian army that was "hurrying to Austria to aid the Viennese revolutionaries against the Habsburgs" ... "Yella and the Croats had saved the Austrian Empire. They got exactly nothing for this service, except this statue..." p 54
Part 3: Dalmatia
We leave the 3 friends, what's left is Rebecca and her husband going to coastal town after coastal town and sharing their history and her impressions. But I miss the friend's arguments, as they pull things together more, make the politics more real in their passionate convictions. They do meet up with some of Rebecca's previous friends, a professor and a Philip, who have interesting things to say also.
Dalmatia is southern part of Croatia, barren because of conquest, incompetence, and misgovernment. Page 119: man from Dalmatia illustrates how everyone is not merely a personality, but a personality molded by long political history; the man's rage against being charged mere pennies more is a byproduct of his entire region's history
The husband: it amuses me to think of the factuality of the husband. As this is a compilation of several trips, we already know she's not keeping exactly to the facts of her travels. I wonder if what he says in this book is made up, as a device for her to express her own thoughts. Husband as device, as a way of reversing sexist tropes. That said, she makes him say very interesting and insightful things.
Part 4: Expedition
Tsavtat (Cavtat, Croatia): Cadmus vs. Pan, talks about literature and art as if it were the strange fruit of knowledge. Interesting descripton of landscape:
and where there were some square yards of level ground there were thick-trunked patriarchal planes, with branches enough to cover an army of concubines. The sea looked poverty-stricken, because, being here without islands, it had no share in this feast served up by the rising sap. p 251On Cadmus's metamorphoses:
"It is an apt symbol of the numbness that comes on the broken-hearted. They become wise; they find comfort in old companionship; but they lose the old human anatomy, the sensations no longer follow the paths of the nerves, the muscles no longer offer their multifold reaction to the behests of the brain, there is no longer a stout fortress of bones, there is nothing but a long, sliding, writhing sorrow. But what happened to Cadmus was perhaps partly contrived by the presiding deity of the coast, for he was the arch-enemy of Pan, since he invented letters. He made humankind eat of the tree of knowledge; he made joy and sorrow dangerous because he furnished the means of commemorating them, that is to say of analysing them, of being appalled by them. p. 252Perast (Montenegro) & the next few chapters, some beautiful tiny islands: https://goo.gl/maps/C9b9Z
Swabian: a German belonging to one of those families which were settled by Maria Theresa on the lands round the Danube between Budapest and Belgrade, because they had gone out of cultivation during the Turkish occupation and had to be recolonized. p 262
Really great part about how religious faith plays a role in a people's power of governance on p. 268.
Part 5: Herzogovina
Trebinye: story of Jeanne Merkus, who seems to have led a martyr's life only to be forgotten, according to West.
"The Republic" refers to Dubrovnik, I think, they were in the middle of Russian and France forces. They never lost their independence, but had to sacrifice for it. 283-etc.
Mostar: the cover image described as Stari most bridge, in a Muslim city called Mostar p288
Sometimes I think Rebecca West is a little harsh towards the Turks and the Muslims. Granted she's also harsh towards the Germans and Austrians, maybe because all of these empires tried to take over the Balkans. But I suspect she may also be biased because she's of the West and she talks of Muslims sometimes in an unfair light.
order and disorder in Muslim culture, p 288-9
muslim dress & women's dresses p 290-2
Part 6: Bosnia
The following 3 chapters take the cake so far for the most interesting and well written history account I've ever read:
Sarajevo V - about Franz and Sophie's assassination, and the many details that led up to its unlikely result, both from Franz's side and from Princip Gavrilo's side
Sarajevo VI - about Franz and Sophie's burial and Serbia's innocence in the plot
Sarajevo VII - about the conspirators' fate -- in prison, tortured, death, etc.
379-380:
This was a Slav, this is what it is to be a Slav. He was offering himself wholly to his sorrow, he was learning the meaning of death and was not refusing any part of the knowledge; for he knew that experience is the cross man must take up and carry. Not for anything would he have chosen to feel one shade less pain; and if it had been joy he was feeling, he would have permitted himself to feel all possible delight. He knew only that in suffering or rejoicing he must not lose that control of the body which enabled him to be a good soldier and to defend himself and his people, so that they would endure experience along their own path and acquire their own revelation of the universe.p. 381 -- not understanding this part wholly, but her writing is just phenomenal that I don't care:
There is no other way of living which promises that man shall ever understand his destiny better than he does, and live less familiarly with evil. Yet to numberless people all over Europe, to numberless people in Great Britain, this man would be loathsome as a leper. It is not pleasant to feel pain, it is the act of a madman to bare the breast to agony. It is not pleasant to admit that we know almost nothing, so little that, for lack of knowledge, our actions are wild and foolish. It is not pleasant to be bound to the task of learning all our days, to be under the obligation to go on learning even though it involves making acquaintance with pain, although we know that we must die still in ignorance. To do these things it is necessary to have faith in what is entirely hidden and unknown, to cast away all the acquisitions and certainties which would ensure a comfortable existence lest they should impede us on a journey which may never be accomplished, which never even offers comfort. Therefore the multitudes in Europe who are not hungry for truth would say: 'Let us kill these Slavs with their dedication to insanity, let us enslave them lest they make all wealth worthless and introduce us at the end to God, who may not be pleasant to meet.'
But the deed as Princip conceived it never took place. It was entangled from its first minute with another deed, a murder which seems to have been fully conceived by none at all, but which had a terrible existence as a fantasy, because it was dreamed of by men whose whole claim to respect rested on their realistic quality, and who abandoned all restraint when they strayed into the sphere of fantasy. Of these two deeds there was made one so potent that it killed its millions and left all living things in our civilization to some degree disabled. I write of a mystery. For that is the way the deed appears to me, and to all Westerners. But to those who look at it on the soil where it was committed, and to the lands east of that, it seems a holy act of liberation; and among such people are those whom the West would have to admit are wise and civilized.Considering the DENSE-ness of her writing here, this 1200 page book is filled with maybe 3000 pages of good material. Probably the only other book I felt this way about is Man Without Qualities. And like that book, this is a book to live with day in and day out for months, savoring it at every stop light and lunch break, marking up its pages, having a conversation with it, my copy is so ruined but so loved, I have torn it into 3 parts just so I can carry it around with me everywhere, but also surprising in that a compact unit of bound paper can give me so much joy that every time I need to I can dip into it for humor and wisdom and knowledge and imagination and soul-enlargement.
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 moreal 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 ... We went out by the new grave where the young officer was trying to add up the sum in the Slav way. A sudden burst of sunshine made the candle-flames sadder than darkness. He swayed so far forward that he had to stay himself by clutching at the cross. His discipline raised him and set him swinging back to his heels again.
Part ?: Serbia
Serbian history is very complicated!
Lineage, looks something like this? (at least the ones she mentions a lot:
* Stephen Dushan (1331–1355) aka "Stefan Uroš IV Dušan" - "the mighty" succeeded by son, Stephen (the weak) who wasn't a great ruler
* Tsar Lazar (reigned from 1373–1389) led battle of Kosovo, major for Serbian history
* Stefan (son of Lazar)
Foreign rule (Austrian & Hungarian rulers go here). Afterwards, Karageorge (Karađorđe) and Obrenovitch families rule Serbia in a back and forth fashion almost. See Wikipedia for full back and forth, but here are the ones mentioned in the book most often and as most important?
* Karađorđe Petrović - 1804-1813 - leader of first uprising
* Aleksandar Karađorđević - 1806-1885
* Prince Michael Obrenovitch (Mihailo Obrenović III) - 1860-1868
* his son: Milan Obrenevitch - 1868-1889 (listed on wiki as both Milan Obrenović IV and Milan I / Prince and King respectively) - secret convention with Austria (married Natalia)
* his son: Alexander I (1889-1903) married Queen Draga
* Peter Karadorde - 1903-1918 -
Other vocabulary:
* Skupshtina (Skupština) is a Serbian and Croatian word for assembly, referring to Parliament.
* Haiduk (Hajduk) - most commonly referring to outlaws, brigands, highwaymen or freedom fighters in Southeastern Europe, and parts of Central and Eastern Europe
Part ??: Macedonia
This part was less history, and more about Constantine and Gerda. And going places, meeting people, seeing things, etc. more in the present. Gerda turns out to be the villain here. The last chapter "St. George's Eve: II" is far and away the best chapter in this section. It talks about this rite of fertility that has been done for many hundreds maybe thousands of years at this rock. There are sacrifices of chickens and black lambs. This is source of the book title.
She talks about how the barren come there in all sincerity and belief, and how their love of life is perverted by the ones who perpetuate this myth so that they can perform a senseless act of violence in the name of something positive. She then spins out a long metaphor about how this is the same lie that is told in Christianity, that Christ had to die for our sins, a totally fabricated story that defies the logic of goodness. When she started talking about Paul I was afraid she would buy into all the Zealot: lies about Paul, but she exposed Paul for who he is.
"If one drops in a piece of suffering, a blessing pops out at once. If one squares death by offering him a sacrifice, one will be allowed some share in life for which one has hungered. Thus those who had a letch for violence could gratify it and at the same time gain authority over those who loved peace and life." p 826Part??: Old Serbia
"All our Western thought is founded on this repulsive pretence that pain is the proper price of any good thing. ... and because we are infatuated with this idea of sacrifice, of shedding innocent blood to secure innocent advantages, we found nothing better to do with this passport to deliverance than destroy [Jesus]." 827
"It is not possible to kill goodness. There is always more of it, it does not take flight from our accursed earth, it perpetually asks us to take what we need from it." 827
"It is not to the credit of mankind that the supreme work of art produced by Western civilization should do nothing more than embody obsession with this rock and revolt against it. Since we have travelled thus far from the speechless and thoughtless roots of our stock we should have travelled further. There must be something vile in us to make us linger, age after age, in this insanitary spot." 830
About the history of Kossovo and the battles lost there.
Constantine starts acting crabby, probably taking on internally the role of Gerda.
They visit some mines & monasteries.
The gray falcon gets introduced, which is a continuation of the concept of the Black Lamb. Around page 913. it comes from a poem about a gray falcon that carries a message in its beak. And can be summed up as: "They want to be right, not to do right [...] The friends of liberty have indeed no ground whatsoever for regarding themselves as in any way superior to their opponents, since they are in effect on their side in wishing defeat and not victory for their own principles." It's a crushing indictment on those rather selfish self-righteous people (Bernie Brothers?)
We meet Gospodin Mac & his wife.
A highlight: the idea of "heroism" of the Montenegrin people, and the chauffeur who tried to kill them rather than admit to the world that he got lost.
Epilogue
(ran out of space... review continues in comments below...)
December 24, 2019
In placing 5 stars on Dame Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon I am giving her credit for writing a book better than it could have been intented. Her book makes many things clear. Including some that did not manifest themselves until long after her death. Her prose can alternate between too florid and poetic to classic history professor. Her fondness for assigning the most abstract and poetic meaning to anything from the weather to the expression of a nearly starving local can be maddening. However there is enough of the dispassionate reporter, learned professor and knowledgeable travel guide to keep me reading even as the length of the read was getting to me.
In over 1100 pages Dame West leads us through the many nations and peoples that then constituted the then newly created Yugoslavia. She is clearly pro Yugoslavia, and pro-Slavic but less certain about the Turks (Muslims). Respecting their beliefs and holding that they are good enough if only they would stay in their own countries. She has little patience for the Austrians and basically assigns all bad things to the Germans, or at least the subset of Germans who were on the verge of launching World War II. And so it goes through the catalogue of ethnicities and nationalities of a crowded part of Europe. If you have forgotten the term Balkanization or why it was coined, Black and Grey makes the case.
She has a educated appreciation of architecture and just enough language skills and at least one well-placed friendly and important local to give her readers access to the many pressures and opinions that were simmering under the newly hung flag of Yugoslavia.
Mostly Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a travelogue as Dame West, her European Banker husband and their guide; Poet friend and government officer, Constantine cover the country. Together they travel mostly by car and train. The year is 1938, this is her second such visit. The publication date of 1941 makes her dedication poignant: “To My Friends in Yugoslavia, Who are All Dead or Enslaved.”
Through her we will visit seven major national homelands, notably Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia all names that should have an eerie and deadly association Dame West would not have wished on a 2017 reader. In each place she will visit (to us) obscure monasteries and monuments. She will recite for us the backgrounds of the royal houses and peoples who were martyred, betrayed or themselves betrayed the many causes that constitute the jumbled nexus of history she knew as Yugoslavia. She makes the case that the selected human tools of the Serbian independence movement that assassinated the Emperor Franz Joseph and started World War One were local heroes.
She takes sides in the case of women, so often sold as breeding animals for political purposes and the more modern pheasant equivalent worked prematurely from the beauty of youth into the exhaustion of age. She is bitter about the casual way the better known western nations sold states in Balkans to Austria or back to the Turks, always to the impoverishment and subjugation of the locals.
Into this mix she offers a plea and a patriotic call to those who had been the isolationist and the idealists. Being above the fray may lend purity to the conscientious objector but at the cost of the blood of those the objector should be sworn to protect. This many years later this can sound as a note of propaganda. Allowing for that it is still an important insight.
When the Bosnian war broke out in 1992 it was common to observe that the war was making enemies of people who had lived in peace for years. By this time Dame West would have been dead for ten years and the state of Yugoslavia that she had traveled was broken with worse to come. What Black Lamb and Grey Falcon achieves, beyond any intention on her part is to remind the modern reader that the forces that broke apart Yugoslavia and started this especially inhumane raping and killing had antecedents centuries in the making. However much individuals had found ways to respect or at least live with each other Dame West had told us, if unwittingly that the spirit of cooperation was weak and the desire for blood had never cooled.
In over 1100 pages Dame West leads us through the many nations and peoples that then constituted the then newly created Yugoslavia. She is clearly pro Yugoslavia, and pro-Slavic but less certain about the Turks (Muslims). Respecting their beliefs and holding that they are good enough if only they would stay in their own countries. She has little patience for the Austrians and basically assigns all bad things to the Germans, or at least the subset of Germans who were on the verge of launching World War II. And so it goes through the catalogue of ethnicities and nationalities of a crowded part of Europe. If you have forgotten the term Balkanization or why it was coined, Black and Grey makes the case.
She has a educated appreciation of architecture and just enough language skills and at least one well-placed friendly and important local to give her readers access to the many pressures and opinions that were simmering under the newly hung flag of Yugoslavia.
Mostly Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a travelogue as Dame West, her European Banker husband and their guide; Poet friend and government officer, Constantine cover the country. Together they travel mostly by car and train. The year is 1938, this is her second such visit. The publication date of 1941 makes her dedication poignant: “To My Friends in Yugoslavia, Who are All Dead or Enslaved.”
Through her we will visit seven major national homelands, notably Croatia, Bosnia, and Serbia all names that should have an eerie and deadly association Dame West would not have wished on a 2017 reader. In each place she will visit (to us) obscure monasteries and monuments. She will recite for us the backgrounds of the royal houses and peoples who were martyred, betrayed or themselves betrayed the many causes that constitute the jumbled nexus of history she knew as Yugoslavia. She makes the case that the selected human tools of the Serbian independence movement that assassinated the Emperor Franz Joseph and started World War One were local heroes.
She takes sides in the case of women, so often sold as breeding animals for political purposes and the more modern pheasant equivalent worked prematurely from the beauty of youth into the exhaustion of age. She is bitter about the casual way the better known western nations sold states in Balkans to Austria or back to the Turks, always to the impoverishment and subjugation of the locals.
Into this mix she offers a plea and a patriotic call to those who had been the isolationist and the idealists. Being above the fray may lend purity to the conscientious objector but at the cost of the blood of those the objector should be sworn to protect. This many years later this can sound as a note of propaganda. Allowing for that it is still an important insight.
When the Bosnian war broke out in 1992 it was common to observe that the war was making enemies of people who had lived in peace for years. By this time Dame West would have been dead for ten years and the state of Yugoslavia that she had traveled was broken with worse to come. What Black Lamb and Grey Falcon achieves, beyond any intention on her part is to remind the modern reader that the forces that broke apart Yugoslavia and started this especially inhumane raping and killing had antecedents centuries in the making. However much individuals had found ways to respect or at least live with each other Dame West had told us, if unwittingly that the spirit of cooperation was weak and the desire for blood had never cooled.
February 2, 2024
I had some time on my hands so I finished this in three days. I am a Slav, don't tell me it cannot be done, anything can be done, especially if you're not ashamed to cry and go to bed at 5am. I didn't even mean to finish it - I was planning on having it as a second leisurely read, but it was entirely unexpected - the nonfictional Rebecca West is entirely unexpected.
Like a Slav, dare I say.
She even expresses herself like a Slav - honest, deeply honest to the point where some would call her callous. But this is not callousness, this is confidence of a higher degree in ones thinking process. And she ought be honest and confident about it, this book is another kind of The Magic Mountain and Constantine (her Serbian guide, rumoured to be the writer and poet Stanislav Vinaver) is another Ludovico Settembrini.
Strange that this book has been used to accuse her of harbouring strict Serbian partisan sentiment, this is not what I've been reading. From page one, once she arrives in Zagreb, Rebecca West is quite fair in drawing the inter-ethnic lines that mould into the soft ball of yarn that formed Yugoslavia and she continues to be very specific throughout the book.
There is no political pro-anyone sentiment here, there is only Love. Her love for a great number of nations and everything that differentiates them as well as everything that binds them. To this end, West had to go through an extensive research trip in the geo-political history of the entire region, detailing individuals and important historical episodes to create order in the chaos that is the story of the region.
No, Rebecca West does not take ethnic sides here. She is just being honest. Like a Slav.
The Bosnia Chapter - everyone ought read this. It is a poignant, incredibly well researched and presented writing on the onset of World War I, giving important context in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the folly and absurdity of political games that lead to war and desolation.
"When the news came in 1941 that the Archduke and his wife had been assassinated by Serbian patriots at Sarajevo, the Austrian authorities throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina arrested all the people who they knew to be of anti-Austrian sentiment and imprisoned some and hanged the rest. There was no attempt at finding out whether they were connected with the assassins, as in fact, none of them were."
It is in Sarajevo that West gets the first impression of a Slavic city that is richly mixed in its religions, she is completely mesmerised by the diversity of it all: Orthodox or Catholic Bosnians, Serbs, Old Serbs who are Orthodox, Catholic or Muslim Austrians, Muslims, Ashkenazi Jews, Orthodox or Liberal Jews and the list goes on and on....
Of Mostar, she says "we travelled in a rough Scottish country, where people walked under crashing rain, unbowed by it." She compares the village of Jezero to Jane Austen's Bath, with the neatness of the front gardens and the architecture of the houses.
I have always been partial to Bosnia and Herzegovina - something about the death toll always being the highest there in any war in the area - in the same way that West was partial to Macedonia (now Republic of North Macedonia). But neither of us are ethnics of these particular groups, therefore we allow ourselves to publicly love the entirety of it.
And that's what West did here: she travelled and she loved. So she came back to London and continued to love: by reading more, researching more, learning more, thinking more and by writing, by writing 1181 pages and after all these pages I can only conclude that at the end of the day, she wrote about Love.
The Croatia chapter: West visits a tuberculosis hospital in Šestine, near Zagreb. Reminiscent of Vera Brittain, West is also taken aback by the vast difference in patient treatment compared to England: the staff is calm and warm, the hospital is clean, the food is abundant, there is a deep psychoanalytical approach to treating illness that did not exist yet in England who were treating all patients as fools, I actually stumbled upon Lacanian ideas coming out of the good doctor's mouth.
"They looked strangely unlike patients. There was not the assumption of innocence which was noticeable in all the English institutions, not the pretence that they like starched sheets as a boundary to life, that the authority of the doctors and nurses is easy to accept and reasonable in action, that a little larking is the only departure from hospital routine they could possibly desire, that they were Sunday school children mindful of their teachers. These people stood there, dark, inquisitive, critical, our equals, fully adult."
Yes, we are a suspicious and inquisitive bunch. And West notices well, there is a strange mysticism surrounding the Slavic culture, something in the clash between civilisations of opposing religious beliefs that transfers deep into the individual's psyche and comes out in interesting ways, such as wearing red coloured thread for embroidery - a common theme that West notices in every subdivision of Yugoslavia. Slavs love Red, for it is the colour of fire and sun. The deeply superstitious (such as granny) believed that the colour they would call Zivocrveni (literal translation: the living red) had magical powers for warding off evil spirits or the evil eye.
In Ilidža, Constantine explains more of this Mysticism, as he tells of the Slavs of Sarajevo for example as they were confronted by the Ottoman Empire at its most magnificent, which is to say Islam at its most magnificent, which is to say Persia at its most magnificent, from which they took its luxury, militarism, pride and above all its concept of Love. The luxury and militarism are gone, but the Persian concept of Love remained. A concept of love that Westerners did not have, something that sends one to read The Arabian Nights with great attention, a concept of love that demands to be sudden, secret and dangerous. To the Westerners, love must be as slow as growing a plant and desire is vulgar, but for this other concept it can be sudden and dangerous, it can be so ecstatic that it can come into full being at a single encounter, that it needs only that encounter to satisfy the lovers. If you offered these lovers a lifetime together you could not offer them more than that one encounter. This implies that there is always Hope, no matter how much suppression comes from the oppressors.
"A sensuality that is also a mysticism, what can a race invent better for itself?"
But all this is bespoke to this second concept of Love, this rare gem (Lacan's agalma - the object of desire), this mystic sensuality with its roots in Old Persia, no different than the Slavic worship of The Cult of Mithras, a mysterious Roman religion that even made its way to Britain, with roots in the Iranian worship of the Zoroastrian divinity Mithra, deity of light, justice, sun, guardian of cattle and the harvest.
"If a Roman woman had, some years before the sack of Rome, realised why it was going to be sacked and what motives inspired the barbarians, and had written down all she knew and felt about it, the record would have been of great value to historians. My situation though probably not so fatal, is as interesting. So I resolved to put on paper what a typical Englishwoman felt and thought in the late 1930s when, already convinced of the inevitably of a second Anglo-German war, she would be able to follow the dark waters of that event back to its source."
If. If. IF. "If...". "probably not so fatal..."
As it is, the publishing of this book coincided with Hitler invading Yugoslavia.
And Rebecca West is right: the Yugoslavs were well aware since time immemorial of the difference between good and evil. Therefore they chose that Yugoslavia should be destroyed rather than submit and be secure in a state of hatred - they made that choice for love of life and not love of death.
I understand. In the black lamb circumstance, I am the one who takes both the rock and the knife and crushes them so tightly in my right Hand that nothing but blackened dust remains.
“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
***
Random quotes:
"There were stalls covered with fine embroidered handkerchiefs and table linen, which was all of it superbly executed, for Slav women have a captured devil in their flying fingers to work wonders for them."
"I had come to Yugoslavia because I knew that the past has made the present and I want to see how the process works. It is plain that it means a great amount of human pain, arranged in an unbroken continuity appalling to any person cradled in the security of the English or American past."
"The superintendent had been telling my husband what a pleasure he had in welcoming us to Croatia, when Gregorievitch corrected him. "To Yugoslavia," he said in the accents of a tutor. After some silence, the superintendent said, "Yes, I will say that I welcome them to Yugoslavia. Who am I, being a Serb, to refuse this favour to a Croat?" "
"Politics, always politics."
"This was a Slav, this is what it is to be a Slav. He was offering himself wholly to his sorrow, he was learning the meaning of death and was not refusing any part of the knowledge, for he knew that experience is the cross man must take up and carry. Not for anything would he had chosen to feel one shade less pain, and if it had been joy he had been feeling, he would have permitted himself to feel all possible delight. He knew only that in suffering and rejoicing he must not lose that control of the body which enabled him to be a good soldier and to defend himself and his people."
"History has made lawyers out of Croats, soldiers and poets of the Serbs."
" 'We Slavs love the terrible,' he said, 'and it happens that when we feel deeply terrible expressions come on our faces. As we love the terrible we keep them there, and they become grins, grimaces, masks that mean nothing'."
"They want to be right, not to do right."
"The black lamb and the grey falcon had worked together here. In this crime, as in nearly all historic crimes, they had been accomplices. This I learnt in Yugoslavia, which writes obscure things plain, which furnishes symbols for what the intellect has not yet formulated."
Like a Slav, dare I say.
She even expresses herself like a Slav - honest, deeply honest to the point where some would call her callous. But this is not callousness, this is confidence of a higher degree in ones thinking process. And she ought be honest and confident about it, this book is another kind of The Magic Mountain and Constantine (her Serbian guide, rumoured to be the writer and poet Stanislav Vinaver) is another Ludovico Settembrini.
Strange that this book has been used to accuse her of harbouring strict Serbian partisan sentiment, this is not what I've been reading. From page one, once she arrives in Zagreb, Rebecca West is quite fair in drawing the inter-ethnic lines that mould into the soft ball of yarn that formed Yugoslavia and she continues to be very specific throughout the book.
There is no political pro-anyone sentiment here, there is only Love. Her love for a great number of nations and everything that differentiates them as well as everything that binds them. To this end, West had to go through an extensive research trip in the geo-political history of the entire region, detailing individuals and important historical episodes to create order in the chaos that is the story of the region.
No, Rebecca West does not take ethnic sides here. She is just being honest. Like a Slav.
The Bosnia Chapter - everyone ought read this. It is a poignant, incredibly well researched and presented writing on the onset of World War I, giving important context in the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and the folly and absurdity of political games that lead to war and desolation.
"When the news came in 1941 that the Archduke and his wife had been assassinated by Serbian patriots at Sarajevo, the Austrian authorities throughout Bosnia and Herzegovina arrested all the people who they knew to be of anti-Austrian sentiment and imprisoned some and hanged the rest. There was no attempt at finding out whether they were connected with the assassins, as in fact, none of them were."
It is in Sarajevo that West gets the first impression of a Slavic city that is richly mixed in its religions, she is completely mesmerised by the diversity of it all: Orthodox or Catholic Bosnians, Serbs, Old Serbs who are Orthodox, Catholic or Muslim Austrians, Muslims, Ashkenazi Jews, Orthodox or Liberal Jews and the list goes on and on....
Of Mostar, she says "we travelled in a rough Scottish country, where people walked under crashing rain, unbowed by it." She compares the village of Jezero to Jane Austen's Bath, with the neatness of the front gardens and the architecture of the houses.
I have always been partial to Bosnia and Herzegovina - something about the death toll always being the highest there in any war in the area - in the same way that West was partial to Macedonia (now Republic of North Macedonia). But neither of us are ethnics of these particular groups, therefore we allow ourselves to publicly love the entirety of it.
And that's what West did here: she travelled and she loved. So she came back to London and continued to love: by reading more, researching more, learning more, thinking more and by writing, by writing 1181 pages and after all these pages I can only conclude that at the end of the day, she wrote about Love.
The Croatia chapter: West visits a tuberculosis hospital in Šestine, near Zagreb. Reminiscent of Vera Brittain, West is also taken aback by the vast difference in patient treatment compared to England: the staff is calm and warm, the hospital is clean, the food is abundant, there is a deep psychoanalytical approach to treating illness that did not exist yet in England who were treating all patients as fools, I actually stumbled upon Lacanian ideas coming out of the good doctor's mouth.
"They looked strangely unlike patients. There was not the assumption of innocence which was noticeable in all the English institutions, not the pretence that they like starched sheets as a boundary to life, that the authority of the doctors and nurses is easy to accept and reasonable in action, that a little larking is the only departure from hospital routine they could possibly desire, that they were Sunday school children mindful of their teachers. These people stood there, dark, inquisitive, critical, our equals, fully adult."
Yes, we are a suspicious and inquisitive bunch. And West notices well, there is a strange mysticism surrounding the Slavic culture, something in the clash between civilisations of opposing religious beliefs that transfers deep into the individual's psyche and comes out in interesting ways, such as wearing red coloured thread for embroidery - a common theme that West notices in every subdivision of Yugoslavia. Slavs love Red, for it is the colour of fire and sun. The deeply superstitious (such as granny) believed that the colour they would call Zivocrveni (literal translation: the living red) had magical powers for warding off evil spirits or the evil eye.
In Ilidža, Constantine explains more of this Mysticism, as he tells of the Slavs of Sarajevo for example as they were confronted by the Ottoman Empire at its most magnificent, which is to say Islam at its most magnificent, which is to say Persia at its most magnificent, from which they took its luxury, militarism, pride and above all its concept of Love. The luxury and militarism are gone, but the Persian concept of Love remained. A concept of love that Westerners did not have, something that sends one to read The Arabian Nights with great attention, a concept of love that demands to be sudden, secret and dangerous. To the Westerners, love must be as slow as growing a plant and desire is vulgar, but for this other concept it can be sudden and dangerous, it can be so ecstatic that it can come into full being at a single encounter, that it needs only that encounter to satisfy the lovers. If you offered these lovers a lifetime together you could not offer them more than that one encounter. This implies that there is always Hope, no matter how much suppression comes from the oppressors.
"A sensuality that is also a mysticism, what can a race invent better for itself?"
But all this is bespoke to this second concept of Love, this rare gem (Lacan's agalma - the object of desire), this mystic sensuality with its roots in Old Persia, no different than the Slavic worship of The Cult of Mithras, a mysterious Roman religion that even made its way to Britain, with roots in the Iranian worship of the Zoroastrian divinity Mithra, deity of light, justice, sun, guardian of cattle and the harvest.
"If a Roman woman had, some years before the sack of Rome, realised why it was going to be sacked and what motives inspired the barbarians, and had written down all she knew and felt about it, the record would have been of great value to historians. My situation though probably not so fatal, is as interesting. So I resolved to put on paper what a typical Englishwoman felt and thought in the late 1930s when, already convinced of the inevitably of a second Anglo-German war, she would be able to follow the dark waters of that event back to its source."
If. If. IF. "If...". "probably not so fatal..."
As it is, the publishing of this book coincided with Hitler invading Yugoslavia.
And Rebecca West is right: the Yugoslavs were well aware since time immemorial of the difference between good and evil. Therefore they chose that Yugoslavia should be destroyed rather than submit and be secure in a state of hatred - they made that choice for love of life and not love of death.
I understand. In the black lamb circumstance, I am the one who takes both the rock and the knife and crushes them so tightly in my right Hand that nothing but blackened dust remains.
“Only part of us is sane: only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”
***
Random quotes:
"There were stalls covered with fine embroidered handkerchiefs and table linen, which was all of it superbly executed, for Slav women have a captured devil in their flying fingers to work wonders for them."
"I had come to Yugoslavia because I knew that the past has made the present and I want to see how the process works. It is plain that it means a great amount of human pain, arranged in an unbroken continuity appalling to any person cradled in the security of the English or American past."
"The superintendent had been telling my husband what a pleasure he had in welcoming us to Croatia, when Gregorievitch corrected him. "To Yugoslavia," he said in the accents of a tutor. After some silence, the superintendent said, "Yes, I will say that I welcome them to Yugoslavia. Who am I, being a Serb, to refuse this favour to a Croat?" "
"Politics, always politics."
"This was a Slav, this is what it is to be a Slav. He was offering himself wholly to his sorrow, he was learning the meaning of death and was not refusing any part of the knowledge, for he knew that experience is the cross man must take up and carry. Not for anything would he had chosen to feel one shade less pain, and if it had been joy he had been feeling, he would have permitted himself to feel all possible delight. He knew only that in suffering and rejoicing he must not lose that control of the body which enabled him to be a good soldier and to defend himself and his people."
"History has made lawyers out of Croats, soldiers and poets of the Serbs."
" 'We Slavs love the terrible,' he said, 'and it happens that when we feel deeply terrible expressions come on our faces. As we love the terrible we keep them there, and they become grins, grimaces, masks that mean nothing'."
"They want to be right, not to do right."
"The black lamb and the grey falcon had worked together here. In this crime, as in nearly all historic crimes, they had been accomplices. This I learnt in Yugoslavia, which writes obscure things plain, which furnishes symbols for what the intellect has not yet formulated."
June 20, 2017
I finished this book quite a while ago, but could not form a coherent opinion about it: on the one hand, her descriptions and stories about Balkans history are really interesting (if somewhat long) - i felt like reading 1001 Night. However, I could not reconcile myself totally to her views and sometimes extremely poisonous comments. She is like not very good teacher having her favourites and her scapegoats in the class. Respectively, the favourites (the Serbs in her case) can get away almost with anything, while the rest are constantly blamed. I understand the context - the Second World War is really in the air. But still, to read it now sometimes feels simply too much. And it tells you more about English Upper-Middle class attitudes, than the views of the Balkans residents.
December 29, 2022
I have to agree with those who've found this one a bit of a slog. I read it for the travel narrative aspect, which is barely one-third of the content, though it's well-presented. Unfortunately, much of the rest consists of historical background, which goes into more detail than I found necessary (rabbit hole effect). There are also discussions with local intellectuals that didn't do much for me. In all honesty, much skimming was done
On the positive side, there's certainly foreshadowing of the brutal 1990s civil war; Yugoslavia as a nation was more tolerated than accepted. Her direct observations of the Yugoslav world around her were vivid: You Are There.
Perhaps this would've been better issued as three three-hundred page volumes? Under other circumstances, that's how I would've read it, at 1/3 each at long intervals. There is almost NO WAY I could see someone getting through it as a library book, even with renewals. (Remember, I skimmed a lot, so am saying I read it, but more dedicated, serious readers should need far more time.)
On the positive side, there's certainly foreshadowing of the brutal 1990s civil war; Yugoslavia as a nation was more tolerated than accepted. Her direct observations of the Yugoslav world around her were vivid: You Are There.
Perhaps this would've been better issued as three three-hundred page volumes? Under other circumstances, that's how I would've read it, at 1/3 each at long intervals. There is almost NO WAY I could see someone getting through it as a library book, even with renewals. (Remember, I skimmed a lot, so am saying I read it, but more dedicated, serious readers should need far more time.)
June 12, 2012
There are two things to keep in mind when reading this book. (1) Rebecca West is very pro-Serb and very anti-Turk. (2) She hates Germans.
Because of her biases, you should not make this book your only source of information if you are at all interested in the history of the Balkans, but she does provide a riveting account of the region’s tumultuous past. What amazes me is how easily she is able to integrate the history of each place that she visits into her description of her own present experiences and then relate that bit of history to the overall history of Yugoslavia. Her descriptions are also beautiful, lush, and evocative. She is incredibly adept in capturing a moment in words. You can almost open the book at random and find an example:
"So we went our way by the river, widened now into a lake, which held on it’s rain-grey mirror a bright yet blurred image of the pastoral slopes that rose to the dark upland forest, and which seemed, like so much of Bosnia, almost too carefully landscape-gardened. At the end, it split with a flourish into two streams, which were linked together by a village set with flowering trees, its minarets as nicely placed as the flowers on those trees."
The picture is so vivid that it makes me sad I'll never be able to see Bosnia like this.
Because of her biases, you should not make this book your only source of information if you are at all interested in the history of the Balkans, but she does provide a riveting account of the region’s tumultuous past. What amazes me is how easily she is able to integrate the history of each place that she visits into her description of her own present experiences and then relate that bit of history to the overall history of Yugoslavia. Her descriptions are also beautiful, lush, and evocative. She is incredibly adept in capturing a moment in words. You can almost open the book at random and find an example:
"So we went our way by the river, widened now into a lake, which held on it’s rain-grey mirror a bright yet blurred image of the pastoral slopes that rose to the dark upland forest, and which seemed, like so much of Bosnia, almost too carefully landscape-gardened. At the end, it split with a flourish into two streams, which were linked together by a village set with flowering trees, its minarets as nicely placed as the flowers on those trees."
The picture is so vivid that it makes me sad I'll never be able to see Bosnia like this.
July 26, 2013
In 1998 I became friends with a political refugee from Bosnia and her family. I also happened to be spending most of my cafe hours at a place owned by a Bosnian couple. Many Bosnians had moved to our neighborhood after Bill Clinton finally, and belatedly, awarded them refugee status. Being pretty ignorant of the history of the South Slavs and having read many times about West's book in articles about the Yugoslavian wars of the nineties, I read it over the course of several days at that cafe.
This is not the book I'd recommend for anyone not already generally conversant with the history of Europe, particularly of the inter-war period. West was chronicling trips she made in the late thirties and covering the history of the constituent parts of what was then The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. An understanding of inter-war history is presupposed. Beyond that, she mixes quite a bit of impressionism of, to me, uncertain value with forays into episodes of the region's history going back to antiquity, but primarily concerning what, for her, were relatively recent events.
This is not the book I'd recommend for anyone not already generally conversant with the history of Europe, particularly of the inter-war period. West was chronicling trips she made in the late thirties and covering the history of the constituent parts of what was then The Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. An understanding of inter-war history is presupposed. Beyond that, she mixes quite a bit of impressionism of, to me, uncertain value with forays into episodes of the region's history going back to antiquity, but primarily concerning what, for her, were relatively recent events.
January 3, 2009
1150 pages including the Epilogue but not the Bibliography! I read this book for months (I believe I started it in July). Black Lamb and Grey Falcon records a journey taken by West and her husband Paul, a banker, through the former Yugoslavia in 1934. They spend several months investigating Croatia, Dalmatia, Herzegovina, Bosnia, Serbia, Macedonia, Old Serbia (Kossovo) and Montenegro, mostly in the company of a Serbian Jewish poet named Constantine and, for a time, his quite unpleasant German wife Gerda. Gerda stands in for everything nasty that an Englishwoman might attribute to a German in the 1930s. West is a fabulous stylist and an often astute observer. However, some of her claims/ views are either dated (she was writing in the 1930s and early 1940s just as WWII was preparing itself and getting underway) or downright wrong-headed. Primarily, I’m thinking here about her obsession with racial and national destinies /identities / behavior. Although she refutes others' categories of superior and inferior races, she herself, at times, assigns relative value to different racial or ethnic groups. For example, she greatly admires the South Slavs, particularly the Serbs, because they drove the Turks out of their country after over 500 years of Turkish rule. She sets Byzantium as her standard for judging "civilization" and is attracted to Orthodox Catholicism. She seems to dislike or disapprove of both Roman Catholicism and Islam (although she does admire the “sensuousness” of the Turks).
West's arguments are often suspect, but her writing is superb. I found the book to be a fascinating read.
West's arguments are often suspect, but her writing is superb. I found the book to be a fascinating read.
March 14, 2013
Absolutely awful reading. It's definitely not because it's 1200 pages book. No, I actually like them like this. I assume a book will provide me with delight, therefore I don't want it to end soon, I don't want it short. And it's not because Rebecca writes like a Serbian ambassador. No, I don't share her point of views, but I guess I could deal with this. The problem is her prose is awfully boring. I managed to read 120 pages and one after the other, boring, boring, boring. She doesn't know how to tell a story. So she randomly writes about this and that, whatever comes to her mind... but writing is not to put on paper whatever comes to mind. This book would be a piece of universal garbage if it was written today. Nobody would buy this, but before that, nobody would publish it.
June 28, 2019
Even if this a huge book, one never gets tired of the splendid narrative built by Rebecca West all along this marvelous book.
3* The Return of the Soldier
5* The Fountain Overflows
3* This Real Night
3* Cousin Rosamund
5* Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
TR The Birds Fall Down
TR The Thinking Reed
TR Harriet Hume
TR Sunflower
3* The Return of the Soldier
5* The Fountain Overflows
3* This Real Night
3* Cousin Rosamund
5* Black Lamb and Grey Falcon
TR The Birds Fall Down
TR The Thinking Reed
TR Harriet Hume
TR Sunflower
November 11, 2017
I only read the first volume of this work, but I'm not going to read the second.
She has been faulted for being excessively pro-Serb, which is certainly true (the Serbs can do no wrong, but when they do, it's for good reasons, but when not for good reasons, it's because they're only human (sometimes) and they make honest mistakes), but that's not really the fundamental problem with the book. She just as easily could have come down on the side of the Croats, or the Bulgarians, or the Montenegrins, or the Slovenes... it just happened to be the Serbs where she settled her admiration.
What the made book such an unpleasant read, despite her eloquence, intelligence, passion for politics, and amazing grasp of Balkan history, is the all-encompassing prism of ethnic identities that distorts and shapes her every thought and opinion. There are no individuals in her world, just types, representatives of a given ethnic nationality. Race is the yardstick she uses to explain every historical event, every political conflict, every victory, every loss, every cultural trait. And nation-races are pure, and easily boxed into the small but well-defined pigeonholes.
That's a view that was all too common in the decades leading up to WWII. But wait, there's more. She has a disturbingly fascist view of culture and history, despite her progressive liberal Anglo-Saxon credentials; she divides the world into binary polarities, then assigns them moral judgments (West bad, East (but not too far East) good; parliamentary politics bad, medieval autocracy good; cities bad, rural good; cosmopolitans bad, peasants good, and so on). The only difference between her and, say, Leni Riefenstahl is the national object of her admiration, but the language and frames of reference are identical.
There's a current of reactionary mythopoetic mystical romantic idealism that frames all her opinions, that echoes the rhetoric of fascist sympathizers of the time. A sample sentence, pulled almost at random from the book: "You will see that there is a Balkan genius so strong that its peoples can never perish, that they can take refuge from material death, and even intellectual or moral death in its spiritual life." Like so many radical ideologues of the time, she conflates aesthetics and morals and politics -- in her considered opinion, the worst thing about the Austrians (the root of all Balkan evil, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever) was their incurable vulgarity. I think if _Triumph of the Will_ were made by a Serb, she would have loudly applauded it.
You can say that she's a product of her time, which is certainly true, or that it's unfair to judge her by today's standards, with the hindsight of history in our favor. I don't buy that -- there were plenty of intelligent people at the time, many her own peers and countrymen, who recognized romantic nationalistic partisanship and mystical race noodlings for what they were, and called them out. But even if I were to grant her the benefit of the doubt, I am a product of my own time, a more skeptical period with a visceral distrust of grand historical narratives, and I see no compelling reason to suspend my prejudices for hers, especially given the results.
All that said, she is a marvelous writer, and when she gets going telling her historical fairy tales, there are few that can beat her. Her narratives of late 19th - early 20th century Balkan history are filled with dramatic characters and events, and I doubt that many people then or now had a better grasp of the details of Balkan politics of that period. The book is an excellent example of how someone can be so smart, so witty, so knowledgeable and yet so wrong. It's an understandably neglected classic -- classic for so many good reasons, and neglected for so many more.
She has been faulted for being excessively pro-Serb, which is certainly true (the Serbs can do no wrong, but when they do, it's for good reasons, but when not for good reasons, it's because they're only human (sometimes) and they make honest mistakes), but that's not really the fundamental problem with the book. She just as easily could have come down on the side of the Croats, or the Bulgarians, or the Montenegrins, or the Slovenes... it just happened to be the Serbs where she settled her admiration.
What the made book such an unpleasant read, despite her eloquence, intelligence, passion for politics, and amazing grasp of Balkan history, is the all-encompassing prism of ethnic identities that distorts and shapes her every thought and opinion. There are no individuals in her world, just types, representatives of a given ethnic nationality. Race is the yardstick she uses to explain every historical event, every political conflict, every victory, every loss, every cultural trait. And nation-races are pure, and easily boxed into the small but well-defined pigeonholes.
That's a view that was all too common in the decades leading up to WWII. But wait, there's more. She has a disturbingly fascist view of culture and history, despite her progressive liberal Anglo-Saxon credentials; she divides the world into binary polarities, then assigns them moral judgments (West bad, East (but not too far East) good; parliamentary politics bad, medieval autocracy good; cities bad, rural good; cosmopolitans bad, peasants good, and so on). The only difference between her and, say, Leni Riefenstahl is the national object of her admiration, but the language and frames of reference are identical.
There's a current of reactionary mythopoetic mystical romantic idealism that frames all her opinions, that echoes the rhetoric of fascist sympathizers of the time. A sample sentence, pulled almost at random from the book: "You will see that there is a Balkan genius so strong that its peoples can never perish, that they can take refuge from material death, and even intellectual or moral death in its spiritual life." Like so many radical ideologues of the time, she conflates aesthetics and morals and politics -- in her considered opinion, the worst thing about the Austrians (the root of all Balkan evil, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever) was their incurable vulgarity. I think if _Triumph of the Will_ were made by a Serb, she would have loudly applauded it.
You can say that she's a product of her time, which is certainly true, or that it's unfair to judge her by today's standards, with the hindsight of history in our favor. I don't buy that -- there were plenty of intelligent people at the time, many her own peers and countrymen, who recognized romantic nationalistic partisanship and mystical race noodlings for what they were, and called them out. But even if I were to grant her the benefit of the doubt, I am a product of my own time, a more skeptical period with a visceral distrust of grand historical narratives, and I see no compelling reason to suspend my prejudices for hers, especially given the results.
All that said, she is a marvelous writer, and when she gets going telling her historical fairy tales, there are few that can beat her. Her narratives of late 19th - early 20th century Balkan history are filled with dramatic characters and events, and I doubt that many people then or now had a better grasp of the details of Balkan politics of that period. The book is an excellent example of how someone can be so smart, so witty, so knowledgeable and yet so wrong. It's an understandably neglected classic -- classic for so many good reasons, and neglected for so many more.
December 19, 2018
Od svih blaga ovog svijeta, dajte mi nešto ljudsko. Jedna je od misli iz ovog djela. Čitajući ovaj putopis, kao da sam prolazio kroz dijelove sebe. Ili mi se čini da ih je autorica otvorila za nas. Da bolje upoznamo sebe kroz zemlju i ljude. I što nas čini takvima kakvi jesmo, kroz stvari koje su nas odredile. Fascinantna je sposobnost autorice zapažanja najljepše pojave kod južnih Slavena, unutarnji život, to bogatstvo ispod površine fizičkog, kojeg ona tako precizno secira, primjećuje i osjeća. Prije svega osjeća. Autorica vuče poveznice kroz povijest sa stanjem koje je zatekla kod pojedinaca , kao i narodne odlike, kod svakog od jugoslavenskih naroda. Djelo izvrsnog zapažanja, osjećaja i povezanosti sa ljudima ovih naših prostora.
December 14, 2020
This was such a good read. The author is well read and it shows in the travel journal writing. If you know Charlotte Mason "spreading a living feast " and ever wondered what it would look like for students who have tasted it, Rebecca West is the final product of it. I am not saying she was educated a la Charlotte Mason, but her studies anxiously were filled with living books as throughout this book she makes connections from all her reading and without effort explain how history has shaped the countries she visited and how religion and politics and even what you est and wear is all interconnected.
If you enjoyed The Island of the World by Micheal O'Brien, this book would be delight for you.
If you enjoyed The Island of the World by Micheal O'Brien, this book would be delight for you.
December 14, 2020
There's a wonderful intro by Christopher Hitchens in the Penguin edition (which I don't have), but you can get said intro free from Kindle if you order the sample of the book. I just got the Penguin version from the library and am copying the intro with my scanner.
Interspersed with centuries of dense historical narrative, West comes up with gems like this description of the Skopje train station: "...the scalp of the years has become dandruffed with undistinguished manufactured good..."
Interspersed with centuries of dense historical narrative, West comes up with gems like this description of the Skopje train station: "...the scalp of the years has become dandruffed with undistinguished manufactured good..."
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