Stench & the City

Emily Cockayne: Hubbub

The New York Sun, July 11, 2007

If there's one voice that can be heard above the hubbub described in Emily Cockayne's aptly titled new book, it is the voice, splenetic, dyspeptic, and thoroughly fed up, of the grumbler in high dudgeon. For all their traditional stoicism, the English have always known how to complain, and to do so with an acerbity and wit that leaves more famously querulous nations (yes, Jacques, yes, Pierre, I'm talking about you) looking like little more than whiny schoolchildren.

When it comes to the topic of "Hubbub" (Yale University Press, 335 pages, $35), the squalor, grubbiness, and general unpleasantness of everyday life in the cities of 17th- and 18th-century England, there was, as its author shows, plenty to gripe about. And to help her, she's recruited an awkward squad of sourly eloquent grumblers, from Samuel Pepys to the "slightly deranged" vegetarian and would-be "boghouse" reformer Thomas Tryon (who died in 1703, allegedly and appropriately, of "Retention of Urine") to the "notoriously peevish" Oxford antiquarian, Anthony à Wood (1632–95).

Here, for example, is what Matt Bramble, the fictional alter ego of the reliably grumpy Tobias Smollett (1721–71) had to say about a society ball in Georgian Bath:

Imagine to yourself a high exalted essence of mingled odours, armpits, sweating feet, running sores and issues, plasters, assafoetida drops, musk, hartshorn, and sal volatile; beside a thousand frowzy streams, which I could not analyse.

Imagine that? You'd probably rather not. But after working your way through the vivid, splendidly horrible pages of "Hubbub," a book that so revels in the nastiness it describes that most of its chapters appear to have been named after Snow White's worst nightmare ("Ugly," "Itchy," and "Mouldy" are just three of their dank and dismal number), you won't be able to avoid doing so. Not only that, you will understand that the stench of assafoetida drops was merely one of the lesser assaults on the senses of poor Mr. Bramble. That party was about as good as it got. Beyond the masterclass theater of ballroom and grand house lay the smoky, reeking cityscapes of early modern England, territories where the medieval was only yesterday, and could, quite easily, have become tomorrow.

It was a muddy, desperate world of licentious fustilugs, determined dog-skinners, essential gunge-farmers, and rootling "piggs," of dissolute rakehells, and the drabs who serviced them, a world of urban dunghills and city "hog-styes," a world inhabited by people marked by tetters, morphew, "psorophtalmy" (eyebrow dandruff, since you ask), and pocky itch, and clothed in grogram tailored by botchers. If you suspect that one of the many pleasures of "Hubbub" is the exuberant vocabulary that so enriches the texts cited by its author, you'd be right. Delightfully, it's an exuberance that has infected Ms. Cockayne herself: She must be one of the few 21st-century writers to use words such as axunge, muculent, and smeech.

This evident, and endearing, empathy for the period of which she writes is more than a matter of language. Yes, it's true that, in a refreshingcontrasttothecarefully picturesque, fiercely scrubbed picture that is the hallmark of BBC manufactured-for-export flummery, the dryly amusing Ms. Cockayne "unashamedly" highlights the worst of urban life of the time. Nevertheless, it's also evident that she is, as she says, determined to guard against what historian E.P. Thompson has called the "enormous condescension of posterity." Some aspects of their ancestors' life might revolt modern Englishmen, but may have been a matter of indifference, or even enjoyment, to their grimy forebears.

At the same time, it would be even more condescending to believe that the citizens of the septic isle were simple fatalists, passively accepting the muck, chaos, and disease that surrounded and, not so occasionally, engulfed them. As Ms. Cockayne's grumblers, not to speak of countless lawsuits against slatternly neighbors and slovenly tradesmen, reveal, they were anything but. Life could be better. Life ought to be better. Life would be better.

This was an age, perhaps the first, of a self-consciously progressive modernity. Raging in the 1740s against the state of the British capital's streets, Lord Tyrconnel sneered that they gave the impression of a place populated by

a herd of barbarians. … The most disgusting part of the character given by travellers, of the most savage nations, is their neglect of cleanliness, of which, perhaps, no part of the World affords more proofs than the streets of London … [the city] abounds with such heaps of filth … as a savage would look on with amazement.

Running through that speech is the implicit understanding that Englishmen had left barbarians and barbarism behind. Englishmen could do better. Englishmen ought to do better. Englishmen would do better.

So, eventually, they did. Twenty years later, parliament passed a series of laws designed to tidy up those streets of shame and much more besides, laws that were just part of an accelerating, if uneven, modernization that quite literally paved the way for industrial revolution and economic triumph.

And some of the credit for this must go to the grumblers. If necessity is the mother of invention, then discontent is the father. So buy this marvelous book, the most engaging work of social history I have read in years, and let Ms. Cockayne introduce you to a cast of characters you will never forget and a past we have failed to remember.

One tip: "Hubbub" is best enjoyed after eating, not before.

England's Arcadia

Juliet Nicolson: The Perfect Summer

The New York Sun, May 2, 2007

Of all the legends with which humanity deludes itself there are few more persistent, enchanting, and tormenting than that of a lost golden age. The Jews of the Old Testament pined for Eden, and the ancient Greeks dreamed of Arcadia. In the fantasies of many modern Britons, that vanished, magical idyll may have taken place on the island they call home, and not that many years ago, but that has only sharpened the sense of loss and tightened its grip on the English imagination.

This particular golden age was said to have been ushered in with a funeral, that of Queen Victoria. It ended, no less ironically, amid celebrations, as cheering crowds feted the declaration of a war that, everyone said, everyone knew, would be over by Christmas. Nearly half a century later, Philip Larkin described the days that followed in his poem "MCMXIV." He did so with a photographer's precision ("moustached archaic faces / Grinning as if it were all / An August Bank Holiday lark"), a poet's lyricism, and a historian's insight. Larkin concludes with lines that blend fact and myth into a lament for the timeless, prelapsarian Albion that had been thrown so carelessly away.

Never such innocence,

Never before or since,

As changed itself to past

Without a word — the men

Leaving the gardens tidy,

The thousands of marriages,

Lasting a little while longer:

Never such innocence again.

Nostalgia for that brief heyday, its glitter, glory, and grandeur only gaining in retrospective magnificence from the years of slaughter and decades of decline that followed, is a reflection of the horror that the British feel about World War I, a conflict that became, and remains, the greatest trauma in their long history. It's a nostalgia, deep, sentimental, self-indulgent and infinitely sad, that can be found in books, in the cinema, on canvas, and just about anywhere else you may care to look. To give just a few instances, it's this nostalgia that inspired the unexpected power of "Another World, 1897–1917," by former Prime Minister, Anthony Eden. It's this nostalgia, misty and melancholic, that saturates "The Shooting Party," James Mason's elegiac farewell to the big screen, and it's this nostalgia, bitter sweet but undeniable, that runs through "The Go-Between," the only one of L.P. Hartley's novels still widely read today.

To understand this nostalgia is to understand the spirit in which Juliet Nicolson has written "The Perfect Summer" (Grove Press, 264 pages, $25) an evocative, gossipy, and, on occasion, profoundly moving description of five sunbaked months in the middle of 1911. To understand this nostalgia is to understand why this book has sold so well in England. Its success may say as much about the United Kingdom today as its contents do about that same country roughly a century ago. The narrative that unfolds in "The Perfect Summer" revolves around country houses, society balls, naughty debutantes, new money, newer mores, ancient aristocracy, artistic experimentation, wild gambling, the coronation of a monarch, and the meals, oh, the meals. A country house breakfast might include "porridge, whiting, devilled kidneys, cold grouse, tongue, ham, omelette, kedgeree, and cold sliced ptarmigan": Never such breakfasts again.

To be sure, the book contains dutiful references to the gross inequality and grotesque poverty that scarred this era, but with the exception of her vivid description of a series of bitter, and portentous, strikes (and what prompted them), it seems as if Ms. Nicolson, a scion herself of the English upper classes, probably only wrote the more hardscrabble passages as a sop to our own more egalitarian age. They represent brief eat your-greens interludes before she returns with evident relish to the richer, wickedly enjoyable fare that makes up the bulk of her book.

After all, she has to: The essence of an idyll is that it must be idyllic. What's more, this particular idyll has long been scripted to derive its emotional force from the way that it was destined to end on the Western front. The suggestion that this splendor might have crumbled regardless has no part to play in this legend. Nor do awkward statistics, such as that Britain lost many more people, albeit far, far less cruelly, through emigration in the decade or so before the war, than it was to lose in the trenches.

Pedantic folk searching for that type of analysis will have to look elsewhere. It has no more place in "The Perfect Summer" than Mrs. Bridges did "upstairs." This book, by contrast, simply asks its readers to lie back and think of an England that never quite was. So pour yourself some champagne and revel in the sybaritic trivia that Ms. Nicolson lays out so invitingly before us. For example, who could not enjoy discovering what really happened during all those country house Saturday-to-Mondays ("weekend" was considered a frightfully common term), especially as they were, it turns out, ideal venues for romantic intrigue?

Ideal, yes, but a hopeful Romeo still had to watch his step. Among the many delightful anecdotes to be found in this book is the tale of Lord Beresford, who was always, apparently, very careful to check that he was sneaking into the right room. There had, you see, been an earlier and most unfortunate occasion when this lord had leapt "with an exultant ‘Cock-a-doodledo,' onto a darkened bed, believing it to contain his lover, only to be vigorously batted away by the much startled Bishop of Chester."

Never such innocence again?

Victory at All Costs

Lynne Olson: Troublesome Young Men

The New York Sun, April 11, 2007

If there is one thing, and one thing only, to be grasped about Britain's failure to head off Hitler in time, it's that it was almost certainly inevitable. Unfortunately, this is something that readers of "Troublesome Young Men" ( Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 448 pages, $27.50), a new book that explains how Winston Churchill rose to power and appeasement fell, will have to discover from another, more balanced source.

What's more, to describe "Troublesome Young Men" as a "new" book in anything other than the most literal sense is to be too kind. Yes, the additional, if occasionally rather gossipy, focus that Lynne Olson puts on some of the critics of appeasement who rallied around Churchill is welcome (she's particularly good on the studied ambiguity of Anthony Eden, the former foreign minister who had resigned from Neville Chamberlain's government in early 1938), but for the most part, the story she tells is as dated as Chamberlain's frock coat. More morality play than serious study of the past, and riddled with the clichés of class warfare, it's a version of events that had already found its definitive form by 1940 with the publication of "Guilty Men," a fierce, best-selling tract by the pseudonymous "Cato" (in reality, a triumvirate led by Michael Foot, a young journalist who later became leader of the Labour Party).

"Guilty Men" was brilliantly written, brilliantly persuasive, and brilliantly unjust. Designed to saddle Britain's Tories with responsibility for the mess in which the country found itself after the collapse of France, while at the same time carefully exonerating the Left from any meaningful share of the blame, this cunning polemic succeeded to an extent that even its shrewd, deft, and manipulative authors cannot have expected. It helped pave the way for the crushing defeat of the Conservative Party (even with Churchill at its head) in the 1945 election, and it shaped the way that Britons thought of the disastrous run-up to the war. More than six decades later, it still does.

It's no surprise that it played so well. By making scapegoats of toffs and Tories, Cato spared the rest of the British people the embarrassment of asking themselves what exactly they had been doing while the threat from the Third Reich grew. It was, after all, a period in which Britons in their millions had not only participated in 1935's unofficial "Peace Ballot" (collective security, "effective" sanctions, you know how it goes), but had also, after three more years of Hitler, taken to the streets to celebrate the deal Chamberlain cut at Munich. Tellingly, Ms. Olson has nothing to say about the former. The latter she attributes to Chamberlain's manipulation of both the press and his own party.

To an extent she's right. Some of the most interesting passages in "Troublesome Young Men" are those that show how the prime minister was nothing like the ineffective weakling of popular legend, at least when it came to domestic politics. Despite that, Chamberlain could not (even had he wanted to) afford to ignore the concerns of an electorate ready to pay almost any price to avoid a fresh European war. Any price, that is, other than spending money soon enough on the rearmament that might have made a difference.

Might? Part of the appeal of "Guilty Men" was that it had no room for such shilly-shallying. To the armchair strategists that wrote it, all was clear. This should have been done. That should have been tried. It was an approach, helped by hindsight and the luxury of the hypothetical, which came with an additional advantage. Suggesting that the solutions to the conundrum posed by Hitler were obvious implied that the failure to adopt them (until too late) must have been the result of stupidity, stubbornness, naïveté, or something more malign. In essence, it presumes some sort of guilt. Like many before her, Ms. Olson has gratefully applauded that verdict.

In reality, the situation was far more complicated. There was indeed plenty of stubbornness, naïveté, and the rest of it to go round in the Baldwin and Chamberlain governments, but the idea that there were any easy answers to the problems that Britain faced is nonsense. For example, there was no significant political constituency for military action against Germany until at least the Anschluss, and even if there had been, how would it have been paid for? A few years after the worst of the Great Depression, there was little money to spare, especially for a nation already burdened by bills for the defense of an empire. As for the failure to cooperate with potential allies against Hitler (another key element in Chamberlain's rap sheet), one, the USSR, was a hostile, genocidal dictatorship with, as the Finns were shortly to demonstrate, a feeble army; another, France, was thoroughly demoralized; and a third, Poland, was to last less than three weeks when the panzers struck. And America, of course, was nowhere to be seen.

Even if we put moral considerations to one side, none of this necessarily justifies what was done at Munich, but it helps explain it. That Ms. Olson has largely chosen to ignore these issues is a shame. She's a skilled and lively writer, quite capable of handling complex topics in a way that would not deter the popular audience at which this book (with its occasional lapses into Harlequin baroque) is clearly aimed. As it is, "Troublesome Young Men," which finds itself on much firmer ground when its author turns her attention to the Phony War and Chamberlain's fall, is a fair read, but, all too often, an unfair history.

Battered Kingdom

Margaret Gaskin: Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940

The New York Sun: January 3, 2007

If, in 1932, nearly 15 years after the catastrophe of the "war to end all wars" had finally drawn to a close, any Britons were still foolish, complacent, or naïve enough to cling to their island nation's traditional sense of inviolability, Stanley Baldwin, the country's once-and-future prime minister, wanted to smash that illusion beyond repair. Speaking to the House of Commons in November of that year, he warned that the "man in the street [had] to realize that there is no power on earth that can protect him from being bombed. Whatever people may tell him, the bomber will always get through."

And so, less than a decade later, the bomber did. Impatient with Germany's defeat (or, more accurately, failure to prevail) in the Battle of Britain, Hitler ordered the Luftwaffe to turn its attention from the few to the many. The duels in the sky during that lonely, legendary, dangerous summer of 1940, almost archaic in their occasional chivalry, were to be replaced by the more typically 20th-century spectacle of fire, ruin, and indiscriminate slaughter. The systematic assault on Britain's cities, then described and now remembered as "the Blitz," began in early September 1940. By the time the worst of it was over, roughly nine months later, nearly 45,000 were dead, with, perhaps, an additional 70,000 seriously injured. The horrors of the V-1 and V-2 attacks on an exhausted England (close to 10,000 killed) toward the end of the war were, of course, yet to come.

In writing "Blitz: The Story of December 29, 1940" (Harcourt, 448 pages, $27), Margaret Gaskin has essentially attempted to tell the story of the Blitz through the events of a single night that saw the largest air raid on London up to that point. It was a 100-bomber onslaught that set off a firestorm designed to reduce the British capital's historic core, the City, to nothing more than rubble. Sadly, despite a careful, and often striking, selection of reminiscences and contemporary accounts (so far as it goes, the book is very well researched) that are often as moving as they are vivid, Ms. Gaskin's overall narrative fails to convince. To use a possibly unfortunate word, her "Blitz" is something of a dud.

In part that's due to a prose style that is sometimes orotund ("A lifetime in the hurly-burly of the public presses had honed the robust tongue in which [Winston Churchill rallied] his London tribe, his British tribe, his tribe of ‘English-speaking peoples'") or shopworn (Hitler's Berchtesgaden is, wait for it, a "spectacular mountain fastness"). But more troubling still is that the author simultaneously manages to cram in and leave out too much information. Readers will have to wade through (a surely unnecessary) World War II 101 ("As Hitler's master manipulator of truth, Goebbels took considerable personal pride in what his Führer saw when he looked at his beloved maps at the end of 1940"), but are deprived of many more directly relevant details surrounding the Blitz that could have put the events Ms. Gaskin is trying to relate into better context.

We are, for example, told remarkably little about the planning, events, and principal personalities on the German side and not much more about those organizing the defense of Churchill's battered kingdom. Nor is there a great deal of discussion about what the decision by Hitler to shift to a mass bombing offensive really meant. Destructive as the Blitz was undoubtedly to prove (oddly, Ms. Gaskin neglects to provide a full accounting of the toll) it was a sign that Berlin's hopes of a quick victory in the west had evaporated. Instead they were replaced by a strategy of attrition (according to Goebbels, some of the pilots involved saw it as an "aerial Verdun," a damning and telling phrase).

The chances that this would succeed, as the German leadership fully understood, were highly dependent on America's assistance to England being kept to a minimum (to be fair, Ms. Gaskin handles the increasing desperation of Britain's pleas to America very well). By leaving the aftermath of December 29 largely out of her book, however, Ms Gaskin makes it impossible to work out where that particular raid fitted into the broader history of the Blitz. Instead, she cuts to Winston Churchill's funeral a quarter of a century later, an epilogue to a drama seemingly without third, fourth, or fifth acts.

Indeed, with a death toll of roughly 200, the bombings of December 29 were far from being the most lethal of the Blitz. Far worse was to come the following year, culminating in the last great attack on May 10 that killed nearly 1,500. That said, the significance of the night Ms. Gaskin describes is that its blazing warehouses, doomed alleys, and tumbling buildings represented the death throes of the old City, the ancient, cluttered, rabbit-warren mercantile and commercial heart of the empire, the stamping ground of Dickens, Pepys, and Johnson. When, some 40 years later, I worked in that same area, the street names — Basinghall, Aldermanbury, Cheapside, Paternoster — may have been freighted with history, but all too often they were lined with nothing more than the drab concrete of utilitarian postwar construction.

And it's difficult not to think that alongside that old City there perished much of the moral restraint holding the British back from the idea — and the, possibly necessary, barbarism — of total war. Grasping this change, is, one would think, an essential element in understanding the meaning, and the consequences, of those months of destruction. Yet the only reference to this issue in Ms. Gaskin's text is a brief remark by Arthur Harris, the deputy chief of air staff. The Germans, he said, had "sown the wind." Indeed they had. Harris subsequently rose to head Britain's Bomber Command and, less than three years later, the firestorms of Operation Gomorrah had already devastated Hamburg. By the time the war ended, some 600,000 Germans had perished in Allied raids over the Reich.

Hitler had sown the wind and his people had reaped the whirlwind.

Stumbling Down the Road to Hell

Ian Kershaw: Making Friends with Hitler

The New York Sun, December 2, 2004

Ian Kershaw is best known for "Hitler," his two-volume, definitive account of one of history's monsters. His new book, by contrast, deals with an irritating British nobleman who was at best a footnote, at worst a nonentity. In telling the strange, sad story of the lord who tried to befriend a fuhrer, Mr. Kershaw highlights the English ineptitude that was to prove so helpful to the German dictator throughout the 1930s. "Making Friends With Hitler" (The Penguin Press, 488 pages, $29.95) also comes with a disturbing contemporary resonance. In part it's a tale of people living in the comfort of Western democracy, but all too ready to excuse totalitarian savagery overseas in the interest of their own ideological obsessions. Those people still exist: Chomsky, Sarandon, Moore, take your pick.

The exhaustingly, and slightly repetitively, named Charles Stewart Henry Vane-Tempest-Stewart, the 7th Marquess of Londonderry, was born into immense wealth and an even larger sense of entitlement. He was also born too late. By the time he became a member of Parliament, the old aristocratic order was beginning to crumble, and by the time he returned home from the trenches of the World War I, Britain was only a few years from its first Labour government.

Oblivious or uncaring, this self-important but not very talented aristocrat still felt high office was his right. The viceroyalty of India eluded his grasp, but in the end perseverance, connections, and aggressive entertaining produced their reward: In effect, Londonderry catered his way into the Cabinet, becoming Britain's Air Minister in 1931. As was said, a touch acidly, about one of his earlier, equally dubious, promotions, it was not possible to "use a man's hospitality and not give him a job."

Maybe, but the early 1930s were not the best time to put a mediocrity into such a role. As minister in charge of the air force he had somehow to reconcile Britain's security requirements with increasingly assertive demands from Germany for strategic parity. All this at a time when most Britons were still calling for disarmament and the exchequer was short of spare cash.

It was a task for which Londonderry was neither intellectually nor temperamentally equipped. As Mr. Kershaw explains, "having imbibed the aristocratic values of Victorian and Edwardian England" he was "totally unprepared for the rough, tough, world of the 1930s ... where the mailed fist and political thuggery were what counted."

But if he was unprepared, so was his country, and that parallel, I suspect, was Mr. Kershaw's point in choosing to make this minor figure the focus of such a major study. Mr. Kershaw treats Londonderry as a symbol of the failures of Britain's governing class; the story of his undeserved rise and precipitate fall is used to tell the wider tale of his country's disastrous failure to head off Hitler.

The problem is that Londonderry was not a particularly representative figure. While his story (which Mr. Kershaw, as one would expect, tells well) is of interest, it is as a curiosity more than anything else - "Believe It or Not" rather than "The Gathering Storm." This is a book for readers who enjoy the byways and the detours of history, and the tales of those who can be found there.

Those wanting a general account of British foreign policy in that "low dishonest decade" should thus look elsewhere. They will be frustrated by the amount of time he spends with Londonderry, a man who lost what little significance he had when he was fired, somewhat unfairly, from government. He then compounded his unimportance by alienating many of the few who could be bothered to pay him any attention.

Had Londonderry gone quietly into retirement, Mr. Kershaw would not have much to say, but instead the fallen minister began the freelance diplomacy that shattered what was left of his reputation. In the hands of a lesser historian, these efforts, designed to promote a more friendly relationship between the Third Reich and Britain, could have been caricatured as the acts of a Nazi sympathizer, even a potential Quisling. Mr. Kershaw recognizes that Londonderry's motives were patriotic and basically well intentioned.

Friendship between Britain and Germany was, this veteran of the Somme believed, essential if the tragedy of another Great War was to be avoided. This was very different from supporting Hitler, or working to establish some sinister New Order in the sceptr'd isle. Even the photographs that illustrate this book under line the distance between Londonderry and the gangsters he was attempting to cultivate: We see him, Savile Row immaculate, posing with Hitler, being entertained by Goring, alongside his houseguest von Ribbentrop. In each picture, this British aristocrat seems guarded, a little uneasy, a thoroughly decent chap not altogether comfortable with the rough company he is keeping.

Certainly some of Londonderry's effusions about Hitler's "tremendous successes" make for very queasy reading. But, to put this into better context, Mr. Kershaw could have included some discussion of the useful idiots who were, at the same time, busy proclaiming the birth of a new civilization in Stalin's slaughterhouse Soviet Union. By comparison with such apologists, Londonderry was relatively restrained in the praise of his dictator. He shared with them, however, their determination to give evil the benefit of every doubt. And like them he lacked much empathy with those unfortunate enough to live under totalitarianism.

We see this most strikingly in Londonderry's underwhelming response to the plight of Germany's Jews. To be sure, he shared in the clubland anti-Semitism of many of his class, but this was a far cry from sympathy for Nazi cruelty. It appears to have been enough to let him regard Hitler's relentlessly grinding pogrom primarily as bad PR, an unnecessary obstacle to the necessary friendship between Britain and Germany. The idea that such horrors might have been evidence of a regime so pathological it could be no more trusted abroad than at home seem not to have occurred to him until too late.

Fortunately, there were others who did understand - none more so than his cousin, Winston Churchill. Relations between the two became, apparently, a little strained.