Epilogue (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

I hate the corpses of empires, they stink as nothing else. They stink so badly that I cannot believe that even in life they were healthy.

AS I WRITE this the first diplomatic talks between Russia and Ukraine to resolve the armed conflict between the two countries have ended.  The world has witnessed the most grotesque violation of the international order since the end of World War II.  The consequences of Russia’s attack on its neighbor will run far.  So it is as I finish reading Black Lamb and Grey Falcon that I feel a temporal kinship with Rebecca West.  She wrote her book during the five years following the Anschluss, Munich, the bisection of Poland, and the invasion of France, the Low Countries, and Norway to the moment that Britain stood alone against Germany.  She published this book in 1941, not long after the Battle of Britain and the German invasion of Yugoslavia.

(Wikipedia)

If anyone was paying attention, and West was paying attention, the expected and inevitable conclusion to her narrative was clear to see for many years.  It is the same for this moment.  Vladimir Putin’s behavior over the last 20 years has clearly led us here.  A fetid campaign of assassinations, false flags, cynical disinformation, wanton destruction, harassment and suppression, assault and annexation – with hardly any response from the civilized world – made him feel invincible.  Until this moment.

It is the spirit of the Ukrainian resistance that feels so familiar to this book.  “Often, when I have thought of invasion, or when a bomb has dropped nearby, I have prayed, ‘Let me behave like a Serb,’” West writes in her epilogue.  The history of Yugoslavia coincides with the legitimate national aspirations of the post-Soviet states in their insistence: We exist.  We don’t have to justify who we are.  We have value.  We have a right and duty to defend who we are against imperial, denuding, conforming power.  That threat is as clear today as it was in 1941.  This time, the diminutive corporal cosplaying Charlemagne is a diminutive ex-KGB apparatchik styling himself after Peter the Great as he attempts to reestablish the Russian Empire by force.

It is easy to apply prescience and order to a narrative that is written in retrospect.  Europe was a very different place in 1937 compared to 1941, obviously, and nobody could have predicted the future even from West’s original vantage point in Yugoslavia.  In 1980 West admitted in a letter to her lawyer that the UK’s Ministry of Information suggested that she write the Epilogue.  This led to criticism late in her life that Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was written as a vehicle for wartime propaganda.  I hope I have argued convincingly that cannot be the case.  The book’s elephantine volume and complexity should be evidence enough.  In any event, West viewed the Epilogue as the book’s “best part,” which, given all that preceded it, is a significant evaluation.  The book is a sprawling argument against war and empire.  She specifically links the Battle of Kosovo in 1389 to the threat to Europe in 1939.  To her Ottoman Turkey and Nazi Germany are avatars of the same human bent toward violence and subjugation.  That reincarnation in Russian aggression today is just as clear.  

The contemporary relevance of West’s argument doesn’t need to rest on current events.  Her point is eternal.  Reaching back to her experience on Kosovo Field, where the Ottomans didn’t so much Turkify Serbia but simply ruin it, she imagines somebody visiting a deracinated, once-German-occupied England 500 years in the future:

Defeat, moreover, must mean to England the same squalor that it had meant to Serbia.  Five centuries hence gentleness would be forgotten by our people; loutish men would bind ploughshares to their women’s backs and walk beside them unashamed, we would grow careless of our dung, ornament, and the use of foreign tongues and the discoveries made by the past genius of our race would be phantoms that sometimes troubled the memory; and over the land would lie the foul jetsam left by the receding tide of a conquering race.  In a Denkmal erected to a German aviator the descendant of his sergeant in the sixteenth generation, a wasted man called Hans with folds of skin instead of rolls of fat at the back of his neck, would show a coffin under a rotting swastika flag, and would praise the dead in a set, half-comprehended speech, and point at faded photographs on the peeling wall, naming the thin one Göring and the fat one Goebbels; and about the tomb of a murdered Gauleiter women wearing lank blonde plaits, listless with the lack of possessions, would picnic among the long grasses in some last recollection of the Strength Through Joy movement, and their men would raise flimsy arms in the Hitler salute, should a tourist come by, otherwise saving the effort.

West has been changed by her journey.  She catalogues the melancholy and nostalgia of ending a holiday only to return to a grim, lived-in reality.  She and her husband travel from Kotor to Dubrovnik by boat and then Zagreb by train, stopping for a few days in the Plivitse Lakes.  On the way they meet friends who are astonished by their eccentric travel in Yugoslavia.  These same people profess support for Naziism as a viable alternative to Communism, if they hold political opinions at all; they inhabit a state of pure ignorance about what will soon come.

West and her husband encounter a demonstration by Croat students protesting the death of their comrades at the hands of Serb gendarmes.  Twice this situation is described to them, in “the same complaining and exultant whine,” the strange timbre of the publicly aggrieved.  That could easily describe Hitler’s mode of public speech.  This “peculiar whining tone” echoes loudly in Vladimir Putin’s louche desk harangues during which he eructs his bizarre and paranoid casus belli for invading Ukraine.

At home in London West meets a young graduate student writing her thesis about West’s work.  This “golden-haired girl” from Vienna irritates West all the more because she is defiantly unread in English and French literature.  This turns to bafflement when West learns the girl is Slav; the girl explains she was raised in Austria and proudly speaks no Serbo-Croatian.  Austria has warped the girl’s ignorance into contempt.  West is appalled.  “Such is the influence that Central Europe exerts on its surroundings,” she writes.  “It cut off this girl from pride in her own race….”

It’s important to note that West frames her entire narrative by the death of King Alexander I of Yugoslavia.  What appeared at the beginning of this book to be a miniature of the Balkans in 1934 takes on much, much larger implications for Europe in 1941 and well beyond.  In that sense the reader is changed by the journey from beginning, which recounts the murder of a forgotten European noble, to the end where Alexander’s assassination takes on much larger and coherent geopolitical import.  It is a destabilizing act with historical consequences that are only obvious in hindsight, that is, during the London Blitz. 

West’s very last words in the book reflect the hope that she felt seeing the stiff partisan resistance to the German assault of Yugoslavia.  It rings in the ears like an echo of the future:

For the news that Hitler had been defied by Yugoslavia travelled like sunshine over the countries which he had devoured and humiliated, promising spring. In Marseille some people picked flowers from tehri gardens and others ordered wreaths from the florists, and they carried them down to the Cannebière.  The police guessed what they meant to do, and would not let them go along the street.  But there were trams passing by, and they boarded them.  The tram-drivers drove very slowly, and the people were able to throw down their flowers on the spot where King Alexander of Yugoslavia had been killed.

The symbol of Ukrainian resistance today is the sunflower.  It represents spring and renewal, an affirmation of life and its pleasures free from compulsion and oppression.  It is the free choice of our earthly kingdom for the living relegating the kingdom of heaven for the dead.  Rebecca West would have recognized this immediately.  “That is what roses are like, that is how they smell,” she writes in the Epilogue. 

We must remember that, down in the darkness.

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Montenegro (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

Under my clothes my skin still kept the joy given by the salt water, the freshness had not left my blood.

REBECCA WEST’S EXCURSION in Yugoslavia is coming to an end.  That is clear in this slight chapter dedicated to Montenegro.  Here intrigue settles onto the narrative like an omen.  Her companions, including her driver Dragtuin, the akiltered Constantine, and a local official, appear agitated and constantly bickering.  Over and over they stumble across fresh indication of nefarious designs on Yugoslavia as foreign figures continue to appear after crossing the Albanian frontier only a few miles away.

West admires this small, cragged country and attributes a national heroic spirit to its mountain people.  By her companions’ telling, this national characteristic nearly led to her demise.  She describes another small set piece in which she and her husband hike a mountain led by a young guide who loses his way in the mist.  His martial pride prevents him from admitting that he is lost before Constantine finds them descending toward a slippery escarpment that the locals, except for the guide, are convinced West and her husband would surely fall from to their deaths.  A hero would brave the descent despite the risk, it is implied, rather that admit he had failed in navigating his own ground.

Budva, Montenegro. Source unknown.

This graze with death does not upset West.  But she appears distracted.  Her interest in the local environment and its people feels rote by this point.  Something else is on her mind.  She has spent the previous several weeks and more than 1,000 pages describing in close and sympathetic detail the difference, beauty, and meaning of different cultures and nations.  This extrospection at last swings inward to consider the worth of her own country which is as threatened by the fascist juggernaut as any other country in Europe. She writes:

My civilization must not die.  It need not die.  My national faith is valid, as the Ottoman faith was not. I know that the English are as unhealthy as lepers compared with perfect health.  They do not give themselves up to feeling or to work as they should, they lack readiness to sacrifice their individual rights for the sake of the corporate good, they do not bid the right welcome to the other man’s soul.  But they are on the side of life, they love justice, they hate violence, and they respect the truth.  It is not always so when they deal with India or Burma; but that is not their fault, it is the fault of Empire, which makes a man own things outside his power to control.  But among themselves, in dealing with things within their reach, they have learned some part of the Christian lesson that it is our disposition to crucify what is good, and that we must therefore circumvent our barbarity.  This measure of wisdom makes it right that my civilization should not perish.

It is impossible not to think of George Orwell’s “The Lion and the Unicorn,” perhaps the only other example of such ambivalent yet affirming patriotism under existential threat:

Yes, there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization.  It is a culture of the individual as that of Spain.  It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes.  It has a flavour of its own.  Moreover it is continuous, it stretches into the future and the past, there is something in it that persists, as in a living creature.  What can the England of 1940 have in common with the England of 1840? But then, what have you in common with the child of five whose photography young mother keeps on the mantelpiece? Nothing except that you happen to be the same person.

And above all, it is your civilization, it is you.

With this on her mind the dark monition follows her.  In a restaurant Constantine stares down a group of “eight people, four men in open shirts and leather shorts, four women in dirndlish cotton dresses, all very fair and much overweight.”  She remarks that they seem harmless enough.  Constantine puts that notion down by idenitifying one of the men as “the chief German agent in Yugoslavia.”

It is possible that this German agent was Wilhelm Höttl, an SS intelligence officer.  He fits the profile and West’s corpulent description in 1937.  A doctor of history and a specialist on southeastern Europe, he joined the Nazi party and then held the position as head of intelligence for the region.  Höttl had a working relationship with Adolph Eichmann and gave testimony for the prosecution in Eichmann’s trial in Jerusalem (he even appears in Hannah Arendt’s report on the banality of evil).  He is identified by several historical authorities (and some Holocaust deniers) as the first reference to the six million deaths of European Jews during the war.  Höttl played a weak hand well after the German defeat, surrendering to the U.S. Office of Strategic Services (precursor to the Central Intelligence Agency) in Switzerland and parlaying that into employment with U.S. Army intelligence.

The party stumbles across another German, whom Constantine identifies as the government minister in Tirana.  This was likely Eberhard von Pannwitz who at that moment served as the German ambassador to Albania in Tirana in 1937.  A career diplomat from a noble family, Von Pannwitz was captured after the German surrender and died in U.S. custody in December 1945.  His son, like Eichmann, emigrated to Argentina.

The last paragraph of this chapter ends the book’s main narrative on a note that would seem hysterical only if everything that followed West’s visit did not in reality occur.  In retrospect it sounds like a cry of alarm, like an air raid siren.  Constantine and the local official notice several foreign automobile makes parked near the town center; each one is driven by foreign diplomats posted to Albania.  They are immediately alarmed: the diplomats would only be here, in Montenegro, if they had to communicate with their capitals in a way the Albanians could not overhear or intercept.  Constantine flags down another acquaintance, hailing him in Greek, for the story.  He returns with this upsetting news:

“It is very bad.  It is a massacre.  The officials all are bought by Italian money and they have taken the four hundred young men who were most likely to give Italy trouble when she takes the country, and they have pretended it is a Communist rising, and they have killed them all.  It is all nasty, so nasty, and it will not stop until the end.”

New York Times front page, May 19, 1937.

Constantine is clairvoyant if not precisely correct.  A quasi-colonial power, Italy installed and propped up Albania’s King Zog and would invade Albania in 1939 less than two years later and one month before sealing the Pact of Steel with Germany. Two years after that Germany would invade Yugoslavia itself.  Constantine very likely describes a real political crisis in Albania.  On May 16, 1937, The New York Times reported “Revolt Flares in Albania, Town is Captured; Enemies of King Act on Unveiling of Women” in the town of Agyrokastron (today Gjirokastër). 

Constantine accurately notes that the Albanian rebels, led by former Interior Minister Ethem Toto, are deemed communists by the government.  (The Times insists on characterizing the revolt as inspired by Islamic mores and this appears to be true.)  It was likely not the massacre Constantine described, but it was violent enough.   Toto was “tracked down and shot”; six others were reported killed and 150 rebels captured.  (Zog, for his part, survived more than 50 assassination attempts.)  With the clear intrigue West documents, it is understandable that Constantine should be so distraught.

One of the last activities West and her party enjoy is a long-delayed dip in the Adriatic.  She describes this experience as the pure essence of physical pleasure.  “[T]he water was hardly water, being fused with sunshine,” she writes.  “It worked its progressive magic on us, delighting the skin, then the blood, then the muscles.”

Just to be alive is good.

It is impossible to hold this image in mind without its antipode, the cataclysm to follow.  This moment on the shore seems to be West’s argument in miniature.  A glimpse of the sea and the feeling of water are pure affirmation of life’s promise that is threatened by millions of human beings driven by a corrupt nihilist desire for domination and destruction.  That is what follows.  West knows this, writing in 1941.  But it is not simple retrospect.  It is true.  In just four years everything she has seen on her journey from London to the Adriatic will be plowed under.  All of this as it was will be gone.

Rebecca West’s travels in Montenegro.

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#BloggingBlackLamb on Remembering Yugoslavia

I am thrilled to be featured in the latest episode of the podcast Remembering Yugoslavia with Peter Korchnak about Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon. You can listen here on wherever you get your favorite podcasts!

Croatia (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

“Politics, always politics.  In the middle of the night, when there is a rap on our bedroom door, it is politics.” (Croatia/Zagreb VII)

ENDING THE JOURNEY of the previous chapter, Rebecca West and her husband arrive in Zagreb proper. Three friends, standing in the rain, greet them on the railway platform. One of them is arguably the most important character of the book besides West and the other two play rhetorical archetypes to set up an argument that will weave its way throughout the book: the nature and benefit of Yugoslavism, the Yugoslav idea, and Yugoslavia itself.

Rebecca West’s travels in Croatia (Google Maps)

West calls the three men Constantine, Valetta, and Marko Gregorijević.  These are pseudonyms and eccentric ones at that.  Valetta is described as a young Croatian from Dalmatia, 26 years old.  He lectures in mathematics at the University of Zagreb.  Gregorijević is an older Croatian journalist and critic, 57 years old.  Based on the little biographical information West provides us, I was unable to determine the true identities of these two men (although Valetta may have been Stanko Bilinski, a mathematician of some renown, who matches Valetta’s profession and approximate birthdate but not his region of origin).  I do not have access to West’s papers and the men are not described in her Selected Letters.  They are not identified by even Croatian language references and sources I have searched.

Stanislav Vinaver, aka “Constantine”

Constantine, however, is much better documented, possibly because he is such a dynamic character in the book.  He accompanies West throughout most of the journey she documents (and his wife, to appear later, will provide an archetype in another argument West sustains throughout the book.)  Constantine’s real name is Stanislav Vinaver.  West describes him as a poet, a Serb, an Orthodox, and a Yugoslav government functionary (as a censor). On the first page we meet him, she writes:

“Constantine is short and fat, with a head like the best-known satyr in the Louvre, and an air of vine-leaves about the brow, though he drinks little.  He is perpetually drunk on what comes out of his mouth, not what goes into it.  He talks incessantly.”

West relates that Constantine’s heritage is Jewish; his parents immigrated from the Pale of Settlement, at the time Russian Poland.  He was born in Serbia and converted to the Serbian Orthodox Church.  He is a Serb patriot in word and deed; he fought against Austria during World War I as part of the Serbian army.  His father, a physician, was a medical officer during the war but died in a typhus outbreak in 1915.  Constantine later fought in the royal Yugoslav army against the Germans during World War II.  Captured, he was held as a prisoner of war but survived and died in 1955.  His mother was less fortunate.  She was murdered as a Jew by the Nazis during the occupation.

While compelling as a character in the book, Vinaver as an individual was more unnerving.  In a letter to her sister during her first, unaccompanied visit, West recounts a harrowing experience with Vinaver in Ohrid, Macedonia.  There, he attempts to sexually assault West in her hotel room not once but twice.  Twice she fights him off, literally.  But he is her official government minder and interpreter, she does not speak the language, has little money and no way to return to Skopje, so she is obliged to maintain his company until they return to the capital.  On the return trip, she contracts a strep infection of the skin and runs a fever.  She is confined to her hotel room, miserably ill.  But this does not keep Vinaver from accosting her a third time. “For 3 hours,” she writes, “he stamped and raved and blustered beside my bed.”  As a government official, he may have been unavoidable on her subsequent trips. But it also explains why West made this second trip accompanied by her husband.

In Zagreb, Constantine is the third leg on the uncomfortable stool that supports the political debate over Yugoslavia.  Constantine is a Serb by adoption with the aggressive patriotic fervor of a convert.  Gregorijević is an old Croat (West describes him as a dour version of Pluto, Mickey Mouse’s dog) who fought Hungarian domination of Croatia by the Habsburgs and sees Yugoslavia as a bulwark against imperial imposition.  Valetta is too young to remember a time when Croatia was not part of Yugoslavia and views this political construct as a vehicle for Serb domination of its neighbors.  (Yugoslavia’s King Alexander I and his issue, Peter II, who ruled Yugoslavia during this time, were Serbian by birth.)  Although West finds their bickering tiresome, the debate personifies the political dynamics of the Balkans.  I will discuss the idea of Yugoslavia in a later post.  For now, you can see here the paradox of the Yugoslav experiment: individually, Yugoslavia’s constituent nations are too weak to defend themselves against their larger neighbors, but together Serbia dominates the union.

Church of St. Mirko, Šestine, Croatia (Wikipedia)

West and company visit St. Mark’s Church in Zagreb and another church in Šestine, in the mountains north of Zagreb.  She does not name St. Mirko’s Church, which sits on a small rise at the town crossroads.  But here again West’s description is so perfect that there is no doubt this is the church: “full to the doors, bright inside as a garden, glowing with scarlet and gold and blue and the unique, rough, warm white of homespun, and shaking with song.”  I found this description of a Catholic mass bracing since good music has been thoroughly driven out of the Church in the United States.

They visit “Two Castles” that West also does not name.  It is unclear why.  They take government motorcars through heavy snow, which delights her and the locals who occasionally have to dig the vehicles out (“doubtless anxious to get back and tell a horse about it”).  The castles can be found as she describes them.  For example, she writes about the Trakošćan Castle as “something like a Balliol,” that is, the Oxford college (coincidentally Christopher Hitchens‘), which turns out to be perfectly apt.  It dates to the 13th century but is stuffed full of Austrian cultural detritus – “a clutterment of the most hideous furniture…walloping stuff bigger than any calculations of use could have suggested, big in accordance with a vulgar idea that bigness is splendid….”  This may appear frivolous – is there anything more poncy than English critique of interior design? – but it serves West’s larger argument that imperial imposition destroys and displaces local cultural expression that is delightful when left alone.

Trakošćan Castle (My Radiant City)

The second castle they visit was built by the same house that owned the first.  A large hilltop fortification, it served during West’s visit as a tuberculosis sanitorium.  Happily, today, Klenovnik Castle is a modern hospital treating pulmonary diseases.  It remains the largest castle in the country.

Klenovnik Castle (source not known)

“[T]he place was clean, fantastically clean, clean like a battleship,” she writes, noting that might be the only thing it had in common with English hospitals which she knows too well. West admires the hospital, its patients and doctors, and its methods precisely because they were un-English.  The doctors are doting but forbearing with their patients, whom they treat in what we might call a holistic way.  The food is excellent, grown on the castle grounds, and ample enough to send patients home several kilograms heavier.  “[The patients] sometimes fall in love, and it is a very good thing,” the superintendent remarks.  “It sometimes makes all the difference, they get a new appetite for living, and they do so well.”  West approves.  She writes:

“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. … Here a patient could be adult, primitive, dusky, defensive; if he chose to foster a poetic fantasy or personal passion to tide him over his crisis, so much the better.  It was the tuberculosis germ that the doctor want to alter, not the patient….”

West delights in good things that give pleasure and she sees those things in the sanitorium.  This is the soft edge of a sharper argument she makes more explicit later in the book: that good things are good on their own, they exist for our pleasure, and don’t require sacrifice, pain, or the prospect of death to enjoy.  This almost feels like moral philosophy but as we might apply it to tangible things like the embroidered homespun, strong plum brandy, or “sucking-pig so delicate that it could be spread on bread like butter” that she enjoys while in Croatia.

West ends this chapter with a miniature social comedy.  She, her husband, and Constantine visit the Gregorijevićs, husband and wife both described as long and melancholy as Great Danes.  They have a small dog who expresses its outrage at these strangers by defecating on the living room rug.  The Gregorijevićs are mortified, even more so as West and her husband try to defuse the situation with humor, a very English trait.  The family’s maid, “in peasant costume,” comes to clean up, “grinning from ear to ear at the joke the dog’s nature had played on the gentry.”  Constantine rescues the Gregorijevićs’ dignity by solemnly taking up the piano to play a Bach motet and then a Mozart sonata.  This may appear to be simply an amusing endnote to her visit, but again West manages to weave her themes through it.  Gregorijević takes Henry aside “to murmur in a voice hoarse with resentment that he had owned both the poodle’s father and grandmother, and that neither of them would ever have dreamed of behaving in such a away.  ‘Nothing, man or beast, is as it was.  Our ideals, think what has happened to our ideals…what has happened to our patriots.’…” 

For some, the country has literally gone to the dogs.

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Working Titles (Blogging Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

“I write books to find out about things.” (Paris Review, 1981)

FOR THIS PROJECT I have four individual editions of Black Lamb separated in publication by 80 years. More than 25 years ago I started reading the 1994 Penguin Books single-volume paperback. It was published without an introduction. I don’t recall purchasing this book, but I had likely read Balkan Ghosts (1993) around this time. This was author Robert Kaplan’s paean to “Dame Rebecca” and her life-defining tome, which he considered more valuable than his passport. That same year my first article for the Daily Bruin, UCLA’s student paper, was about European attempts to end the war in the former Yugoslavia.

My working volume published by Penguin in 1994.

I started reading this edition in 1997 with my coffee at five o’clock in the morning. I got about 300 pages into it (according to the book darts I left in the pages, I appear to have gotten as far as Sarajevo) before abandoning the effort. I really was not equipped to make sense of the book. A mere undergraduate education (more than what Dame Rebecca managed, which is all the more telling) and an undisciplined interest in Yugoslavia were insufficient. I knew none of the region’s histories, languages, or literature. I didn’t even know anyone from Yugoslavia. Consequently, each page I turned was an isometric effort: laborious but unproductive.

After graduate school – where I watched Allied aircraft pummel Serbia in 1999, televised havoc I would later see with my own eyes visiting Belgrade as a NATO official – I moved to Europe and eventually to Brussels and the North Atlantic Alliance itself.  When I joined in 2005, Kosovo was NATO’s largest out-of-area deployment with about 15,000 troops.  Catching up on this important Allied theater of operations, I schooled myself on the tragedy of the former Yugoslavia and began visiting the region as the new republics aligned themselves with NATO and the European Union.  As a result, I met people across the region trying to build a new regional politics, liberal, internationalist, and Western-leaning

My Penguin paperback with a homemade cardstock cover protecting it accompanied me during my trips. I found it easier to approach the book by sections that corresponded to where I was visiting. West described places and history I could visit and see and touch. The more I read, and the more I traveled, the more I could connect the parts of the books into a coherent regional narrative. It was a productive re-introduction to the book.

That led to criticism and commentary of West, including Geoff Dyer, Brian Hall, and Larry Wolff. Richard Holbrooke and Lord David Owen, policy-makers, followed. Holbrooke coined the pejorative “bad history, or the Rebecca West Factor” – a line Christopher Hitchens would parrot – and piled on Hall’s allegations that West was a pro-Serb crypto-nationalist and Islamophobe. That verdict perfectly but inaccurately explained what had just happened in Bosnia as Serb-dominated Yugoslav federal forces reinforcing Bosnian Serb irregulars “cleansed” Muslim-majority cities through siege and massacre. Never mind that West’s intended destination was Macedonia, not Serbia, and she visited Montenegro, Croatia, Dalmatia, and Herzegovina as part of her research. Only in retrospect – actually a narrative heuristic similar to post hoc fallacy – does Kaplan and, by extension, West appear to be prophetic. Robert Kaplan felt the need to defend himself and his West-derived “bad history” in later editions of Balkan Ghosts (in Yugoslavia, he visited only Macedonia, Kosovo and Serbia and spent the other three-quarters of his book in Bulgaria, Greece, and Romania). His main thesis was the best way to understand contemporary politics is through history, which Rebecca West well understood. The past is prologue to what follows but it is not necessarily the provocateur.

There began my initial intuition that these critics, writers and statesmen (they were all men), with the exception of Kaplan, had got something fundamentally wrong about Dame Rebecca. My sporadic reading of Black Lamb, while incomplete, did not fit the accusation of an ethnic polemic. Racist screeds usually burn themselves out well before 1,100 pages. So I returned to the book looking for bias with an eye toward writing an apologia in the old style.

That opportunity came in 2016 as the 75th anniversary of the publication approached. West originally serialized what became the book in The Atlantic and Harper’s Bazaar in early 1941. The first two-volume editions were published by The Viking Press in the United States and Macmillan in the United Kingdom later that same year. To my surprise nobody noted the anniversary date given how much-discussed the book had been just 20 years earlier. NATO was still on the ground in Kosovo and so was a European Union peacekeeping mission in Bosnia.

The 2007 Kindle edition with Christopher Hitchens’ emetic foreword

Augmenting my research was a Kindle version of the Penguin 2007 edition published with Christopher Hitchens’ introduction, which he unsurprisingly handled like an dull mattock. Irritation aside, the Kindle edition features searchable text, bookmarking, highlighting, and a dictionary. This facilitated certain research. For example, the easy exenteration of Hitchens’ claim that “the most repeatedly pejorative word in [West’s] lexicon is ‘impotent’”—a word that appears just six times in the entire book. Likewise “Greater Serbia”—which, like Hall, Hitchens uses to bind West in a chain of causality leading to Serb ethnic cleansing of Muslim Bosnia-Herzegovina and specifically the Srebrenica genocide in 1995—West mentions twice. (More Hitchens gralloch in a future post.)

I published my article in the Los Angeles Review of Books in July 2017.   It had an immediate and thoroughly unexpected result: the executor of West’s literary estate read my article and ordered up a new edition in time for the book’s 80th anniversary.  Coincidentally, the global COVID19 pandemic gave claustrophobic adventurers reason to travel virtually the old-fashioned way.  So Black Lamb has enjoyed a minor renaissance as more readers with more time rediscover it for an ambitious long read.

Viking Press US 1st Edition 1941

With this turn of events, I had to possess the alpha and the omega. Working with Capitol Hill Books in Washington, D.C., I bought the two-volume US first edition. These volumes include photographs and maps. The endleaves feature a visual log of West’s travels. The photos are not terribly good, not even qualifying as postcards. Occasionally, however, they provide insight, such as illustrating West’s astonished description of covered Muslim women’s dress in Mostar “consist[ing] of a man’s coat, made in black or blue cloth, immensely too large for the woman who is going to wear it.” The photo confirms her power of description.

Finally, I ordered the new Canongate edition which at this time is only available for sale from the UK.  It was delivered with the satisfaction of seeing my original LARB article prominently blurbed in the front leaf.

Canongate’s 2020 edition.

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Blogging ‘Black Lamb and Grey Falcon’

“What is Kaimakshalan?  A mountain in Macedonia, but where is Macedonia since the Peace Treaty?  This part of it is called South Serbia.  And where is that, in Czechoslovakia, or in Bulgaria?  And what has happened there?  The answer is too long, as long indeed, as this book, which hardly anybody will read by reason of its length.  Here is the calamity of our modern life, we cannot know all the things which it is necessary for our survival that we should know.” (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon)

Rebecca West by Madame Yevonde (cc)

THIS YEAR MARKS the 80th anniversary of the publication of Black Lamb and Grey Falcon by Rebecca West. Written over five years and totaling more than 1,100 pages, it was almost immediately and universally acclaimed as a masterwork of 20th Century English literature—luster dimmed slightly by aspersions cast during the wars of succession in the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s. After 2000, however, this extraordinary book fell not just from favor but from popular consciousness. So much so that nobody noticed when its 75th anniversary passed in 2016.

Nobody, it seems, but me.  In 2017 I wrote about this collective oversight in the Los Angeles Review of Books and defended West against the ludicrous accusation that her 1930s wayfaring prosopography fed Western inaction during the violent, genocidal breakup of the former Yugoslavia.  To my surprise, West’s literary estate flagged my article and ordered an 80th anniversary edition.  That edition is now available from Canongate with an introduction by Geoff Dyer.

This moment presents an opportunity to revisit the book in detail and in depth.  In the coming weeks and months I will write here about the book as I move through it, region by region.  The book is rich and dense with observation and moment so there will be plenty of material for digressions and diversions.  I have visited several of the locations covered in the book, including Serbia, Macedonia, and Bosnia in addition to Austria, Greece, Hungary and Bulgaria.  My admiration of West and her work grew as I realized what she described in 1941 remained completely true to my own experiences.

I also believe reexamining this book will bring clarity to our own generational inflection point.  As several commentators have noted, during her travels in the mid-1930s West saw and anticipated the crest of fascism preparing to crash across Europe.  Black Lamb documented the damage of rank nationalism and the imperialism of centuries.  West plainly saw the antecedents and historical analogies.  “The difference between [Kosovo] in 1389 and England in 1939,” she wrote, “lay in time and place and not in the events experienced.”

Many thought 1989 was the last caesura with that legacy.  But history has no end.  The apex of post-Cold War democratic advance came in Tunis in 2011.  Since then, more than a dozen countries have rallied to the cynical column led by Moscow, Beijing, Pyongyang, and Tehran.  Freedom House noted of 2020, “[D]emocracy’s defenders sustained heavy new losses in their struggle against authoritarian foes, shifting the international balance in favor of tyranny.”  Western democracies themselves have not been immune to this retrogression, as 2021’s capitol insurrection surely demonstrated.

West saw the same thing coming 85 years ago and warned us.  We should listen.

I hope you’ll join me on this historiographical odyssey.  Please feel free to comment below or e-mail me directly at the address listed under “About James Thomas Snyder”.

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