Stolen literary documents 1


Reading the introduction to N Denhom-Young’s Richard of Cornwall (Oxford, 1947) I was reminded of my own paranoia at the possibility of losing my draft thesis to burglars. When I went away, I used to back up on two zip discs; hiding one in a suit pocket and giving the other to a neighbour. Denholm-Young writes that “all my notes towards this book and a draft of about a third of it were stolen from the Zurich-Chur express in the winter of 1938-9". So whilst the storm clouds closed over Central Europe, a robber bothered to steal these documents. Of course, Richard of Cornwall was also the only English King of Germany but did the robber really target these documents. It took poor old Denholm-Young the whole of the War to get his work rewritten and published. This triggered off another memory of a Central European stolen literary document; this time the crime took place on the shore of the Mondsee in Austria. Umberto Eco rested there after a journey down the Danube to the great abbey of Melk with his beloved. He recalls in The Name of the Rose that, after one tragic night, she left him taking his valued source book with her.

What does one do when an event like this happens? My first reaction would be to bury my head in my hands and burst into tears. In the end my thesis survived but I know, from the times when a long witness statement carefully dictated over many hours was wiped before typing, that I would pick my self up and start again. Or would I? Anyway I am glad that Denholm-Young and Eco both did.

The Crusades I


Reading Amin Maalouf’s book, The Crusades through Arab Eyes (2004 edition) is a real eye-opener. Although I have read of Arab comments on the Crusades as part of general histories of the crusading movement, this well-written book concentrates on the Arab viewpoint. To read it, is a salutatory experience. The heroes of the early crusades such as Bohemund, and Raymond of St Gilles, Count of Toulouse, lose their glamour as fine knights assigned to them in Alfred Duggan’s novels and are shown to be brutal disregarders of the traditions and safety of the inhabitants of the lands they conquered. Massacres abound and if one feels that the Arab evidence is suspect, in many cases the Frankish writers confirm much of the horror. A reversion to cannibalism is found in sources on both sides of the divide. But even the justified criticism of the Crusaders can not take away from the sufferings that many of them experienced in a genuine desire to restore the Holy shrines to Christian control. And Arab generals are also given to massacre but they were more likely to keep their word to spare surrendering opponents. Is the Arab evidence always accurate? Does it suffer from exaggeration? In some cases it must be suspect. For instance, it is claimed that the walls of a town of a population of 100, 000 were taken down stone by stone within a month of its capture. That would have been a logistical triumph and a possible strategic blunder.

Is Maalouf even-handed? Not always; he rightly condemns the massacre of prisoners by Richard I after the fall of Acre (although apologists for the Lionheart do pray in aid the problem of looking after prisoners) but, when the Moslems retake Acre, a century later, he writes simply ’ King Henry and most of the notables hastily sailed off to take refuge in Cyprus. The other Franji were all captured and killed’. The Arabs were certainly not above violence’; of a run of fifteen rulers of Cairo, only one left office alive. The Arabs were amazed at Frankish judicial practices which allowed for trail by battle and ordeal. However, these practice were already losing their popularity in the West. Henry II’s establishment of the Grand Assize gave a blood-free method of settling claims in England and, in the next century, the Fourth Lateran Council (1215) settled long-held doubts. It forbade clerical participation in the ordeal which had implied appeals to God to determine guilt or innocence. This meant that the criminal jury system assumed paramouncy.

Maalouf, whilst acknowledging the magnanimity and nobility with which Saladin treated his captives, criticises him for a serious military and political error. But was it? His conquest of the Holy Land was made much easier and less costly by his known willingness to spare surrendering citizens and his insistence on keeping his word. The regrouping of his Frankish opponents in the sea port that he left them was a consequence but the benefits he won may have been worth it. Saladin is to be much admired, although he too could be ruthless; all the Templar and Hospitaller knights captured after his stunning victory at the Horns of Hattin were executed.

One of the most interesting , and unexpected, features of this book is the epilogue which considers the impact of the Crusades on history. Maalouf notes that the fall of Acre in 1291 and the extinction of the Crusader state was a triumph for the Arab world and, in 1453, the Muslims would take Constantinople and be at the gates of Vienna in 1529. But he feels that a contradictory observation has to be made. Perhaps the victory sounded the death knell for Arab civilisation. He puts this down to the Arabs refusal to learn from the Occidentals whereas they drew heavily on their contracts with the Arabs whose great leaders had almost always been no-Arab foreigners such as Kurds and Turks. The Arabs became aliens in their own lands and they failed to build stable institutions. The death of a ruler provoked a civil war. Maalouf draws modern parallels with Nasser dreaming of establishing a united Syria and Egypt and the Arabs’ perception of the 1956 Suez invasion as a new crusade. Even the Turk, who tried to assassinate Pope John Paul II, saw his attack as an act against the commander of the Crusades. For the Arabs the Crusades were a rape which justifies vengeance. Maalouf wrote this in 1983. How much more perceptive is his view in the light of the continued oppression of Palestine, the two Iraq wars and the hostility of the West to Syria and Iran?

Sebaldia 1


It is always such a pleasure to open something by Sebald which I have not read. W.G.Sebald and Jan Peter Tripp, Unrecounted (2004) is a strange minimalist book. In an introduction ‘Max’ Sebald’s friend and translator, Michael Hamburger, draws attention to unusual features. Some of the pieces had already been published albeit in a few cases with slight changes. Why did Max, who was almost pathologically scholarly, allow this to happen and why does he appear to have translated some work in an unacknowledged way, so contrary to his norm? Hamburger suggests that Sebald was undergoing some crisis in his last years which we will have to wait for a biographer to explain what it was. Hamburger also explains the unusual title which is difficult to render from the original German.

Beautifully laid out and using landscape format, Sebald adds a few lines to a series of Tripp's pictures of eyes. But sometimes he does not and there are also blank pages. He agreed with Tripp how many pictures to write for (33) but produced alternative texts, all done at a distance. For myself, I found the eye pictures of little interest. They reminded me of physiological tests I have done to help doctoral psychology students at Sussex University. As for the haiku-like texts, some resonated, others did not but I expect any reader would have their own hits and misses. For me the best were;-

Pliny says that elephants are intelligent & righteous , revere the stars & worship the sun and moon (15)
On 8 May 1927 the pilots Nungesser and Coli took off from Le Bourget & after that were never seen again (27)
In deepest sleep a Polish mechanic came & for a thousand silver dollars made me a new perfectly functioning head. (35)
In the dining car of the Arlberg express sits a man with a mourning lapel & calmly, carefully consumes his Milanese cutlet (61)

and the best

They say that Napoleon was colour-blind & blood for him was green as grass (55)

In a concluding piece by Sebald on Tripp’s art, one gets a much better impression of his range and work but the lack of colour in the book undermines Sebald’s case. I was fascinated by the dog and clog who migrate from the Arnolfini Marriage to a version of Tripp’s La Déclaration de guerre. A tale piece by Andrea Kohler on Sebald himself is acute and well worth reading. She refers to his ‘great work of archivization” and how the book has ‘segments in the melody of a melancholic litany’. Sebald shares with Tripp an emphasis on ‘stupendous exactness’. His text seem like ‘inscriptions, memorials and quotations’.
I read this book on the train and was transfixed but I still worry that I did not respond to the ‘eye portraits’.