Post-War Arthuriana

Henry Treece, The Great Captains

Chronologically, this is the final volume of what has been called Henry Treece’s ‘celtic quartet’. Although the novels can certainly be made to fit into an overarching narrative and chronology, I’m not aware of any evidence that they were composed as such. It feels more like the creation of Jim Cawthorn and Michael Moorcock when they were first discovering them in the 1950s as they were originally published. Moorcock went on to produce introductions for all four novels in the handsome editions Savoy Books produced when they republished them in the late 70s/early 80s. Still, if that was what it took to get the novels back in print and successfully marketed, then who am I to argue.

And seriously, if you’re going to acquire these novels, then these are the editions to get. Not only do you get the pleasure of Moorcock’s introductions, but also evocative covers from one Michael Heslop, and interior illustrations from the great Jim Cawthorn. Both illustrators feel like they belong to the tail end of that great tradition which stretches back to the nineteenth century. The sort of illustration work that makes you look at most of their modern equivalents and just despair.

And the only way you will acquire any Treece novel nowadays (unless there’s any still lurking in a dusty library corner; assuming there are any dusty library corners left for them to lurk in that is) is second hand, since sadly all his work appears to languishes out of print. A committed romantic in a time when that doesn't appear to have been particularly fashionable (only, is it ever especially fashionable? - the immediate post War period actually saw a flowering of (neo-)romanticism; it was only by the 50s following the end of rationing that it fell out of favour). If any of his work is known at all now it’s the historical fiction, especially his Viking stories, which he produced for children. But he was also a poet and critic, and produced a handful of historical novels aimed at an adult audience. In his introduction to The Great Captains, Moorcock contrasts him with contemporaries such as Alfred Duggan and Robert Graves. Where Graves’ historical fiction is still in print (if only thanks to the successful BBC adaptation of I, Claudius), both Duggan and Treece seem to have been left behind by fashion.

We don’t have to agree with all of Moorcock’s polemical assertions to feel that this is a real shame, since Henry Treece was clearly an excellent writer of historical romance. He gets the mindset of men who lived in a world whose reality still contained mysticism and magic as part of its fabric in a way that few others appear to, at least to my knowledge. These aren’t fantasies exactly. Where magical occurrences do occur, they can easily be rationalised as fantasies of perception. But for the characters who experience them, lacking the capacity to perceive such rationalisations, and living in societies that are governed by myth and ritual, magic is the only plausible explanation.

In his own introduction to his work, Treece is concerned to present this particular fiction as a form of historical truth, arguing that it is as accurate as he could make it. From the bibliography he supplies at the end of the book, Treece was clearly as well read in the period as it was possible to be in the mid-50s when he produced his Arthurian tale. He dismisses Malory as a ‘biased knight’ and positions his work as a corrective to writers such as Tennyson, ‘throw[ing] off all the later accretions of legend and later poetry,’ and appealing to the ‘Court of History.’

Which to me, all rather misses the point. No doubt the stories of King Arthur could have their origin in a real tribal chieftain who lived in post-Roman Britain. My admittedly somewhat limited understanding is that we have to rely more on archaeology than on textual sources for our knowledge about the period, and that as a consequence there is much that we still don’t know about what actually happened in that period of British history. But surely, when it comes to a story like Arthur - one which, like the story of Robin Hood, has been retold so many times - whatever truth which may have first given rise to it, surely the point of the story, for us as modern subjects, is the myth? It’s hard to see what value there is in the comic deflation of the notion of the round table which occurs at one point: nothing more profound than a bleak joke on authority as Arthur and his leaders argue about who should precede who. The narrative voice even pulls back to let us know that this is the event which future generations will eventually misinterpret. Both the myth and the comic deflation are fiction, so why should it matter which we give primacy to?

Seen in this light, The Great Captains seems like a text which has been produced by a sensibility which was at least partly formed by post-War experiences. Greece himself served as an intelligence officer with R.A.F. Bomber Command, so whilst he certainly wasn’t fighting in the front line so to speak, he still clearly experienced the War. If the post-War period was not a period amenable to romanticism, then that was likely due to the experience of the War and it’s aftermath, and the realisation of just what morally corrupted romanticism could lead to. The gritty immediacy which he brings to his depiction of violence in this world seems as much redolent of post-War exhaustion with conflict as it does with his obvious desire for fidelity to a realism of the period of post Roman Britain. One of my favourite moments in the novel depicts Arthur's first successful battle. After considerable attention is paid to the build up before battle, a marvellous depiction of the tension felt by men who are about to go into battle, we then cut straight to the aftermath of battle, starting with a meditation on the point of few of one of the dead men whose body is lying on the battlefield.

The claim to historical accuracy is buttressed by the 'realism' of Treece's telling of the story. And as I said above, that is one of the attractions of his work, just as it is with the work of Rosemary Sutcliff, who also wrote her own version of Arthur. As have many others - a common desire for writers in the twentieth century seems to be the same as Treece's: to provide a more historical, more ‘realistic’ depiction of the Arthurian world.

And yet, for all his criticism of Malory and Tennyson, Treece’s version of Arthur feels equally romantic in some ways. From his first appearance in the text, in which he is successfully ploughing a field with two bulls, Artus the Bear as Treece calls him, seems positively super heroic. He's an epic slightly unbelievable, epic figure, who throughout the narrative he is constantly proving himself through acts of strength and leadership. Eventually, because this is the story, he's brought down through his own self deception over a woman. Our final sight of him, long after his successes in battle and loss of his queen, is as a figure finally brought low by old age. Ultimately, he's a properly tragic figure.

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I find myself wondering if the 'realism' of it's telling isn't actually supporting the novel's romantic elements. When I began writing this piece, I hadn't realised I was writing something which would so easily jibe with my earlier piece. Of course, The Great Captains is not a secondary world fantasy, but the appeal to history, which I am taking to include a more 'realistic' telling of a story which contains strong elements of romance (not only the magic, but also it's tragic end), seems to serve  similar function to the appeal to realism that many of George R.R. Martin's fans seem to make about his work. It's a way of taking a story which contains elements we might now find embarrassing or problematic, or which has been idealised in some way, and making it work in a way that supposedly allows us to take those same elements more seriously. Many of the ideals which motivate Treeece's characters are ones which I, as a twentieth / twenty-first century vaguely left leaning liberal would likely find abhorrent if I encountered them in the real world. Yet they still feel authentic in the world which is depicted in The Great Captains.

(And on reflection, perhaps the realism also undercuts the ideals for which they are supposedly fighting. Treece's Arthur never really appears to achieve a stable success until after his tragedy has occurred. Before that point he's merely leading what is clearly an unstable coalition of competing tribal forces. Almost as soon as he achieves his first military successes he begins to unravel through his pride and self-deception. The values of the characters are viewed with dispassion, and the tragic nature of the story means that it can hardly be said to celebrate those values.)

Since I've not read Martin's work I can't take this insight to what feels like it's proper conclusion and say why Treece's approach works for me whilst A Song of Ice and Fire fails for me, if I even would say something as categorical as that where I to read or watch it. One crucial difference for me which I can say is that Henry Treece was not writing fantasy, but historical fiction, and that does seem to make a difference for me when I'm trying to think about these issues. As violent as his story is at times, there's never any feeling that the narrative is revelling in the violence it depicts. In dwelling far more on both the fear and consequences of violence, yet frequently avoiding its actual depiction, Treece's novel never avoids the issue of just how violent the culture and warfare of post-Roman Britain would be, but it does avoid a self-conscious celebration of that violence.

It's probably unfair of me to single out Martin's work for this kind of criticism, and not simply because I haven't read his books or watched the TV show which is being adapted from them. But also because so much of our popular culture of the last few decades seems to make this error of revelling in gratuitous depictions of violence. I don't think it's confined to works of genre fantasy. It almost certainly includes things which I've enjoyed in the past. We all have our particular lines to draw when it comes to the issue of the depiction of violence, and I doubt that many of us are especially consistent.

Isobel Colegate, The Summer of the Royal Visit

Allow me to begin with a digression about Gosford Park. Whilst it’s certainly a great film, it has one major flaw. No, I’m not referring to Stephen Fry’s inspector, although his performance does feel feel like a major tonal misjudgement with the rest of the narrative. An intrusion into this naturalistic and closely observed world of a character who surely properly belongs in a parody of Agatha Christie. In fact, I’d argue that it almost manages to unbalance the rest of the film. No, the film’s real major flaw is retrospective: the boost that it appears it gave to the career of Julian Fellowes. I’ve read somewhere that little of his actual script survives, that it was used primarily as a basis for the improvisations of the cast. If that is the case, then we should be grateful that the producers engaged the services of Robert Altman, giving the ageing American filmmaker the opportunity to produce a final late (almost) masterpiece.

Nevertheless, Fellows’s script shared in the adulation - didn’t it win awards? - and now we have Downton Abbey. Personally I’d thought that Downton Abbey was nothing more than recycled story lines stolen from Upstairs, Downstairs, only this time from the point of view of the masters. A waste of my time, so I’ve not bothered to watch it. Only a lot of people appear to have latched onto Isobel Colegate’s 1980 novel, The Shooting Party, as a source, taking it as a guide to work out what might happen in future episodes (although surely the end is easy to predict; the aristocracy declines and the house is now administered by the National Trust, assuming it wasn’t demolished after the Second World War. In other words, History happens, despite whatever the nostalgic longings of the creators and audience might wish for). The Shooting Party has recently been republished as a Penguin Classics, with an admiring introduction from Fellowes (Fellowes seems to have a sideline in providing introductions to books which can be made to fit into his idealised reactionary view of an idealised British past), although I think I’m correct in saying that he hadn't actually had read the book when he created Downton Abbey.

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The Shooting Party was itself made into a film in 1985 - in outline it sounds very like that ur-text of the country house narrative, Le Regle de Jue - and won awards. It’s clearly the work of hers which is going to be remembered before the rest of her work. My paperback of her later 1991 novel already advertises itself on the cover as being by the ‘Author of…’. No doubt because of the film.

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“I can do all sorts of voices. I’m virtually a ventriloquist.”

What I wasn’t expecting to find when I started reading The Summer of the Royal Visit was such a visionary novel. A novel which is much closer in feel to the writing of Peter Ackroyd and A.S. Byatt than the kind of historical fiction with which I was mentally associating her work. It makes me eager to actually read The Shooting Party, and wonder what kind of novel I’m going to find.

Which is not to say that it doesn’t provide plenty of the pleasures of historical fiction. There’s plenty of finely judged detail of the past. We’re in a period which is towards the end of Victoria’s reign, in a provincial city which is now a faded reflection of its former glory. I take it to be Bath, with the references to the healing waters, but it’s only ever referred to as ‘the City’, or else more intimately as ‘our City’. Two larger entwined public events overshadow the narrative: the royal visit of the title in which Victoria blesses the opening of a new library and presides over a royal procession through the City, and an architectural competition over the design for a new hotel which is at least partly intended to revive the fortunes and reverse the decline of the City.

In the foreground we have a varied cast which includes the dignitaries and provincial nobility of the City, retired soldiery, a deceitful scholar engaged in a study of the Druids, a theosophist, a priest struggling with his faith, and a youthful poet who is suffering from consumption.

Described like that, it might easily sound as though many of the characters are all late Victorian cliches. There’s something in that I suppose, although Colegate is careful not to simply give in to cliche. Her consumptive poet, Peter Tilsley, dies before producing any work of significance. Yet far from being an undiscovered genius, a Keats at the other end of the century, we're explicitly told that his work is mostly sentimental and without a great deal of merit. He’s actually the type who longs to produce work of real visionary quality, but who simply lacks the talent. We can say that all great writers start with the longing to be a writer, but there must be as many (if not more) who have the same longing but are never able to achieve their ambitions. Sometimes this will be because they are unable or unwilling to put in the work required, but as often it must be because they simply lacked the necessary talent.

But in many ways, these are as much our ‘cliches’ of the Victorian past, an attempt to rediscover the doubt and sexuality that we imagine must have lurked behind the stiff facade of Victorian culture as it's come down to us. The pieces that novelists of the time were unable (or unwilling) to include. The central character in the novel (if it can be said to have one) is one Stephen Collingwood, a priest who has buried himself in his vocation following the death of his wife in childbirth, but finds himself unable to properly connect with the impoverished parishioners among whom he lives, and finds himself doubting his faith.

There’s also a modern narrator providing us with the story the story. A retired historian, he’s a familiar figure from works such as Graham Swift’s Waterland and Maureen Duffy’s Capital, equally visionary novels with ambiguous claims on history. Remaining nameless throughout, he intrudes at various points to discourse on both the past and his late twentieth-century present. His motives for researching this tale of his city stem from his reaction against the contemporary political situation of the world; he is “…simply looking for someone who went this way before me and left a sign on the wall beside the road.”

Ever so quietly then, this is a profoundly anti-Thatcher novel (it was published in 1991, after all). It speaks for the value of community, a value which is extended to all. It's not at all the kind of reactionary nostalgia which produces a work like Downton Abbey, but a novel that digs into the late Victorian past, exposing its nerve endings and moral failings. In fact, much of the material feels like it could  easily belong in an up to date novel about the contemporary early nineties, only displaced back a century or more. One of the secrets lurking behind the Victorian facade is the abuse of children, an issue that became incredibly prevalent in various parts of 90s culture. Arguably we still have a culture which is obsessed with childhood, for better or worse.

The other aspect of 90s culture, which we seem to have moved past in some ways as it's simultaneously become a part of the cultural air, is the popular desemination of post modernism. The winning hotel design for instance, first seen in a vision from the novel’s fake psychic, Madame Sofia, consists of, "Portals and porticos, arches, window on window, an immense thing, and then we have turrets and lookout posts and what can seem to be an little houses from Simla on the roof.” No doubt this is a parody of late Victorian eclecticism, but in it’s profusion of details and borrowed influences, it also feels inescapably postmodern. Elsewhere the city is repeatedly likened to a stage set.

The are no grand narratives. Nothing is certain here. We might even define it as a kind of ‘radical’ nostalgia.

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In theory (and goodness, hasn't post modernism generated a lot of theory!), post modernism elides any stable difference between the present and the past. I don't feel that that has ever been my experience though. The proliferation of pastiches and knowingly fake histories that postmodernism has produced seems rather to serve to reinforce a huge distance between the present and the past. It's a very discomforting sensibility.

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I’ll leave you with our narrator’s lovely, melancholy consideration of history's losses:

You can’t teach history for thirty years and be against change; equally you can’t help noticing that it nearly always brings loss as well as gain. The ratio is hard to determine afterwards and almost impossible at the time. 

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Actually, no, one more thing which I haven’t managed to fit into the main body of my review. Partly because I find it so confusing.

This is also a novel which is concerned to reclaim and acknowledge the visionary aspects of Victorian culture (hence the theosophist, Madame Sofia, and the research into Druids).

But this also creates a problem, in the character of Petchumah, the South Indian wife of Wilf, the retired soldier with whom Stephen Colegate lodges. The novel is clearly acknowledging the reality of Empire in the nineteenth century in a way that I think is often overlooked: the relationships which occurred between soldiers and women from the cultures they were ostensibly oppressing. It's not a meeting of equals between the two cultures, rather it's an acknowledgement of the messiness of humans, the fact that people can't be fitted straightforwardly into a convenient cliche. Consequently, Petchumah has been brought back to our cold island. We hear little of her own voice; mostly, she's talked about by other characters, including her husband. Neither of them are principal characters in the text. But I still feel that her presence in the text is one of its strengths, because it jars nicely with our  typical stereotype of what late Victorian reality and culture was like.

Like everyone else in the town she is viewing the royal procession, accompanied by her husband, Peter Tilsley and Stephen Colgate. As the monarch passes, Peter’s enthusiasm gets the better of him, and the writing rises to a genuinely visionary pitch:

Petchumah, so pushed forward, put her hands together in her traditional greeting and bowed her head in homage. The black-clad figure turned, leant forward, seemed to speak; the royal hands - both royal hands - were half outstretched. In this small northern city the might and mystery of India, the gardens, the temples, palaces, the tiger-haunted forests, the snow-covered hills, the stone-carved elephants four thousand years old, the sacred rivers, the merciless deserts, the ancient cruel gods, bowed in homage in the person of Petchumah in her cerise and blue and silver sari before the plump elderly widow of German extraction into whose slightly protuberant eyes an extraordinary tenderness had come. Again and again Petchumah made her obeisance. Again and again the palms, the plains, the crowded bazaars, the ancient suffering, the distant wisdom based themselves, and the outstretched hands seemed to wish to bless, and the royal lips when they moved to say - or at least Peter said that was what they had said - ‘Beloved India.’

It’s really hard to know quite how to take this passage, to understand what’s going on here. India is reduced to a series of familiar cliches (and it all sounds like rather a lot to place on the shoulders a poor single individual too). At the same time, Victoria’s mystique is punctured. Throughout her appearance in the novel the Queen's magnificence simply dazzles all of the residents of the City with whom she comes into contact. Here, we see her as she was, the elderly woman who would have much preferred to stay hidden away in mourning and had to be forced to engage with her subjects. At the same time, any safe notion of Englishness is complicated by the noting of the Queen’s ethnicity. So, seriously, what the hell is going on here? There’s undoubtedly something deeply offensive about it. But it also feels like an extraordinary balancing act? The writing is genuinely stirring, if also somewhat mystifying.

If anything, it feels as though the writing has got out of control of the author here. The novel contains several other genuinely visionary moments which are much more successfully achieved.

But it also alerts us to a potential pitfall of the visionary mode: it all depends on just whose vision you’re in.

George Mackay Brown, Vinland

Earlier this year my life was rather dominated by the Vikings. Hah!

My wife is an early medievalist, a specialist on the Viking diaspora. Consequently, at the end of April, I was driving her and a colleague around parts of North Yorkshire as part of a research trip. They needed a second driver and none of the rest of the team could drive. We made what I can only describe as a fantastic discovery, as we still need to keep it a bit secret, and as a result the team very kindly invited me to the end of project conference at which the find was unveiled to an academic audience. As a result of being around half a dozen experts on the subject, I got something of a crash course on Viking culture, immigration and assimilation. Obviously I've also picked up plenty here and there from my wife over the last 4 years or so, but this was much more concentrated. And being out in the places where they arrived and settled, listening to the bunch of them discussing the material, you could almost see the past coming to life before you.

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Orkney poet and novelist George Mackay Brown appears to have drawn on the history of the islands for much of his work. Here, in a novel written towards the end of his life, he tells the story of the life of a fictional Orcadian man, Ranald Sigmundson, set in the 11th century. The writing owes much to the example of Norse sagas. There's a swiftness to the telling, and little concern for the interiority of any of the characters. We learn about their thoughts and feelings almost exclusively through what they choose to divulge. The stripped down language took a little getting used to at first - it's not simple by any means - but the result is a pure, elemental language entirely in tune with the harsh lives of its characters and their world, balanced between the 'pagan' Viking past and their Christianising present.

The title comes from the voyage which occurs in the earliest section in which Ranald, having abandoned his rather abusive father midway through his first voyage - and just before his father and his crew are drowned in a violent storm - joins another crew led by the famous Leif Ericson, the first European to reach what is now North America. The stay only a short while after, repelled by the native people of the land. After their return to Europe, Ranald joins another crew lead by one Hakon Treeman, and his travels eventually take him to the Norwegian court before he returns to Orkney to settle down. Thereafter the story focuses on his attempts to raise a family and increase the prosperity of his farm, whilst being occasionally drawn into the political machinations of the sons of Sigurd Hlodvirsson, Earl of Orkney. After one such encounter Ranald becomes thoroughly disillusioned with politics, drawing more and more into himself, until he eventually isolates himself in a remote cottage on his property, obsessing over religion and an escape from the difficulties of the world around him. The novel encompasses a single life, with all it's hardships and disappointments.

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Two things stood out for me in particular, especially given the nature of our conversations the other month. Firstly, 'Viking' is clearly not presented as an ethnic or cultural identity, in line with the stereotypical view of the Vikings our culture still appear to possess. It's a role that Scandinavians may choose to take on, and by the time of the story, 'Viking' raids are a practice which has largely been outlawed. It's equivalent to being a pirate. At one point, after Hakon Treeman is murdered, the remaining crew members debate among themselves whether they should become Viking, and eventually decide not to because of the risks which the role involves. It feels in line with the findings of the 'revisionists'.

Secondly, I was really struck by the way in which the world is connected up. Certainly, it's hardly as connected as our world now, is but people seem to think nothing about getting on a boat and travelling sometimes vast distances. As the story develops it becomes more and more confined to the family farm on Orkney, but it never feels isolated from the outside world. There are strong and functioning cultural, trading and political links between the islands and Norway, Iceland, Scotland and Ireland. The Viking world is, as my wife would put it, a functioning diaspora.

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Digging around online, I found several reviewers suggesting that the encounter with the native American tribe is unrealistic, and that the novel treats them in rather 'new age' fashion as noble savages, living in harmony with nature. I'm not sure that I agree. Leif and Ranald both conceive of the native Americans as such terms, but that is clearly presented as their belief. The tribes people we see in 20 pages or so of the novel in which they appear are completely unknown to the Scandinavian voyagers. There is the beginning of communication between the two groups before the possibility of harmony is destroyed by the actions of the Scandinavian man, Wolf, who loses his nerve and kills one of the tribesmen. Thereafter the native Americans are just as violent as their Scandinavian opponents in their attempts to repulse the people who have revealed themselves to be aggressors. The tragedy of this sequence, and what seems to stay with Ranald throughout his life, is the loss of the chance of understanding these people who were so very different from the Scandinavian and Christian culture Ranald has grown up within.

It links with his disdain for the political leaders whose actions seem to do little more than sow division. In contrast, Ranald is a decent man who does all he can to help the community of small cottagers who are his dependants. His success and prosperity as a farmer never encompasses a compassion for those for whom he is responsible. It may be a mistake to criticise the depiction of the native Americans as idealised, when from our own point of view the life of the Orcadian farmers is similarly pre-lapsarian. Based on small communities of farmers, their lives are just as 'close to nature'.

By the end of his life, for Ranald, Vinland is no longer the place he visited, but has become a metaphor, a land which is more akin to heaven. He dies dreaming of a ship. A ship of death, as D.H. Lawrence similarly puts it in one his final poems.