Category Archives: literature

by Joel | 19 March 2024 · 6:52 am

Weimar Republic’s Versailles Millstone

From The Weimar Years: Rise and Fall 1918–1933, by Frank McDonough (Bloomsbury, 2023), Kindle pp. 126-127, 147-149:

On 28 June 1919, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, exactly five years after the assassination of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand, the spark that led to the outbreak of the First World War. It was signed in the Hall of Mirrors of the Palace of Versailles where 48 years before the German Empire had been proclaimed. The treaty was ratified by a vote in the German National Assembly by 209 to 116 on 9 July. The politicians who signed the treaty on behalf of Germany were the Social Democrat Hermann Müller, and Johannes Bell of Zentrum.

The Treaty of Versailles was a staggering blow to the Weimar Republic. Instead of using their power to assist the embryonic democracy in Germany, the Allies treated its leaders as no different from Kaiser Wilhelm. Hatred towards those who had signed the treaty spread widely in the population, especially on the nationalist Right. The myth of the ‘stab in the back’ now made rapid headway. The leaders of German democracy were depicted by the Right as cowards and traitors under the umbrella term the ‘November Criminals’ and were blamed by the public for all the misfortunes that followed.

There was a huge contrast between the political and economic distress of the Weimar years and the vibrant culture of the period. Yet what is now routinely called ‘Weimar culture’ is by no means the posthumous glorification of a world destroyed. Many aspects of Weimar culture really were years ahead of their time. That culture not only encompassed film, literature, modern art, architecture, design, literature, drama, poetry, and cabaret, but also displayed path-breaking attitudes towards sexuality.

…

On 12 December, the leading British economist John Maynard Keynes launched a blistering attack on the Treaty of Versailles in his best-selling book The Economic Consequences of The Peace. Keynes, who became the most influential economist of the twentieth century, had attended the Paris Peace Conference, as a senior delegate of the British Treasury, but he was so appalled by the injustice the Germans had suffered in the Treaty of Versailles that he had resigned in despair, on 7 June 1919. His book was full of flashing insights and indignation, which laid out clearly the economic crisis facing Europe by explaining what the Treaty had failed to do, and what the consequences would be. Keynes pulled no punches and upset many people. He famously described the Versailles Treaty as a ‘Carthaginian Peace’ – a peace that has the intention of crushing the defeated enemy.

Keynes further argued that the Allies, blinded by self-interest, were determined to punish rather than to rehabilitate Germany. The Versailles Treaty offered nothing to make Germany a ‘good neighbour’, and had conceded far too much to the vengeful spirit of the French government, which wanted to keep Germany weak. It imposed impossible terms on Germany which would soon plunge Europe into economic chaos. The demand for reparations was way beyond what Germany could afford to pay. Keynes also warned the territorial provisions of Versailles would lead to future foreign policy disputes. He blamed the ‘idealist’ US President, Woodrow Wilson, whom he described as a ‘blind and deaf Don Quixote’, for being unable to produce a peace settlement based on his Fourteen Points, which it had been promised during the Armistice negotiations would give Germany a ‘just peace’ with no ‘punitive damages’.

Keynes predicted the economic demands on Germany would cause high inflation and economic stagnation, which would spread throughout Europe. The Treaty of Versailles had to be modified, not just for the sake of Germany, but for the benefit of the world economy. It would damage the conditions for economic recovery and sow the seeds for another world war. In his persuasively argued and deeply influential book, Keynes laid the foundation for the failure of the American Senate to ratify the Treaty of Versailles, and he also helped to create a climate of public opinion in which Germany’s demands for a revision of the terms of the treaty met with a sympathetic response, especially in Britain. Here was sowed the seeds of the policy of appeasement.

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by Joel | 19 January 2024 · 7:10 am

Dalrymple on the Mahabharata

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 321-323:

While its equivalents in the west – the Odyssey, Beowulf or the Nibelungenlied — have died out and are only remembered now by the most bookish of scholars, the story of the Mahabharata is still the common property of every Hindu in the subcontinent, from the highly educated Brahmin scientist down to the untouchable roadside shoe-black. Recently, when a 93-episode adaptation was shown on Indian television, viewing figures never sank beneath 75 per cent and rose to a peak of 95 per cent, an audience of some 600 million people. In villages across India, simple Hindu peasants prostrated themselves in front of their village television screens for two hours every Sunday morning. In the towns the streets were deserted; even the beggars seemed to disappear. In Delhi, government meetings had to be rescheduled after one memorable Sunday morning when almost the entire cabinet failed to turn up to an urgent briefing.

The Mahabharata is more than worthy of its fame. Even in translation it retains the narrative and moral power of a Shakespearian tragedy, but with the action grafted on to the Indian equivalent of the world of Homer. The epic occupies roughly the same place in the Indian national myth as that held in Britain by tales of King Arthur, but for Hindus the Mahabharata also retains the religious significance of the New Testament: included within it is the Bhagavad Gita, the most subtle, wise and sacred of all Hindu religious texts.

The Mahabharata opens in a hermitage on the edge of the Naimisa Forest. There a group of rishis [sages] are preparing for the night when the bard Ugrasravas arrives on the threshold. The sadhus [ascetics] invite the bard to join them on the condition that he amuses them with tales of his travels. Ugrasravas tells them that he has just returned from the great battlefield of Kurukshetra and agrees to tell the story of the apocalyptic war which reached its climax on those plains. He introduces the epic by emphasizing its sacred power.

‘A Brahmin who knows all the four Vedas [the Hindu Old Testament] but does not know this epic, has no learning at all,’ he says. ‘Once one has heard this story no other composition will ever again seem pleasing: it will sound as harsh as the crow sounds to one who has heard the song of the cuckoo. From this supreme epic comes the inspiration of all poets: no story is found on earth that does not rest on this base. If a man learns the Bharata as it is recited, as it once fell from the lips of Vyasa — what need has that man of ablutions in the sacred waters of Pushkar?’

In sheer length, the epic is still unrivalled. It consists of some 100,000 Sanskrit slokas (stanzas), eight times the length of the Iliad and Odyssey put together, four times the length of the Bible; quite simply it is the longest composition in the world. Yet miraculously, even a generation ago, it was common to find wandering storytellers who knew the whole vast epic by heart: they would sit in the coffee houses or on the steps of the Delhi Jama Masjid and recite the entire poem without a break over the course of seven days and seven nights.

Even today, when the wandering bard has followed the Indian lion into near-extinction – killed off, in the case of the epic, by Hindi movies and national television – it is just possible, in very remote places, to find men who still know the epic. A friend of mine, an anthropologist, met one such wandering story-teller in a little village of Andhra Pradesh. My friend asked him how he could remember so huge a poem. The bard replied that in his mind each stanza was written on a pebble. The pile of pebbles lay before him always; all he had to do was to remember the order in which they were arranged and to read the text from one pebble after another.

In the form in which it survives today, the Mahabharata is a colossal miscellany of Hindu religious discourses, folk tales and legends. But all these diversions are built up around a central story of almost minimalist simplicity.

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by Joel | 15 January 2024 · 6:02 am

Taj Mahal’s Husband and Son

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 195-196:

‘After the death of his beloved Queen Taj Mahal,’ wrote Manucci, ‘Shah Jehan selected in Hindustan the city of Dihli in order to build there a new city as his capital. He gave it the name Shahjehanabad — that is to say, “Built by Shah Jehan”. He expended large sums in the construction of this city, and in the foundations he ordered several decapitated criminals to be placed as a sign of sacrifice.’

Shah Jehan was forty-seven when he decided to move his court from Agra to Delhi. He had just lost his wife; his children were now grown up. The building of a new city was the middle-aged Emperor’s bid for immortality.

Shah Jehan had himself come to power twelve years earlier after a bloody civil war. He had been the able but ruthless third son; to seize the throne he had had to rebel against his father and murder his two elder brothers, their two children, and two male cousins. Yet while Shah Jehan was capable of bouts of cold-blooded brutality, he was still the most aesthetically sensitive of all the Mughals. As a boy of fifteen he had impressed his father, the Emperor Jehangir, with the taste he demonstrated in redesigning the Imperial apartments in Kabul. As the young Emperor he had rebuilt the Red Fort in Agra in a new architectural style that he had himself helped to develop. Then, on his wife’s death, he had built the Taj Mahal, arguably the most perfect building in all Islam.

Before her death Mumtaz Mahal had borne Shah Jehan fourteen children; of these, four sons and three daughters survived to adult-hood. The eldest was Dara Shukoh – the Glory of Darius. Contemporary miniatures show that Dara bore a striking resemblance to his father; he had the same deep-set almond eyes, the same straight, narrow nose and long, full beard, although in some pictures he appears to have been slightly darker and more petite than Shah Jehan. Like the Emperor he was luxurious in his tastes and refined in his sensibilities. He preferred life at court to the hardships of campaigning; he liked to deck himself in strings of precious stones and belts studded with priceless gems; he wore clothes of the finest silk and from each ear lobe he hung a single pearl of remarkable size.

Nevertheless Dara was no indolent voluptuary: he had an enquiring mind and enjoyed the company of sages, Sufis and sannyasin (wandering ascetics). He had the Hindu Upanishads, the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga-Vashishta translated into Persian and himself composed religious and mystical treatises. The most remarkable was the Majmua-ul-Baharain (‘The Mingling of the Two Oceans’), a comparative study of Hinduism and Islam which emphasized the compatibility of the two faiths and the common source of their divine revelations. In an age when even the most liberal of Mughal Emperors used to demolish Hindu temples, this was both a brave and novel work; but some considered Dara’s views not just unusual but actually heretical. In private, many of the more orthodox Muslim nobles furrowed their brows and wondered how the crown prince could possibly declare, as one noble put it, ‘infidelity and Islam to be twin brothers’.

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by Joel | 11 January 2024 · 2:56 am

Old Delhi Exiles in Karachi

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 60-62:

In Delhi I had been given an introduction to Shanulhaq Haqqee, a pipe-smoking Urdu poet and the direct descendant of Abdul Haq, a famous literary figure at the court of Shah Jehan. Shanulhaq fled from Delhi in 1947. He left to escape the rioting and meant to return as soon as order was re-established. He was never allowed to except much later, for a week, as a tourist from a foreign country. It was almost exactly seven hundred years since the first of his line arrived in Delhi from Turkestan to fight in the Deccani wars of the thirteenth-century Sultan, Ala-ud-Din Khalji.

Shanulhaq was the only person I had been able to find who was actually a friend of Ahmed Ali. ‘Ali doesn’t mix much,’ a Pakistani friend had told me. ‘He never really fitted in in Karachi.’ ‘He’s a bit abrupt,’ said someone else. ‘You know … rather bitter.’

Shanulhaq Haqqee offered to drive me over to see Ahmed Ali the evening of my arrival. But first, he said, I should come and meet some other Delhi exiles. He would expect me at his house in time for tea.

The exiles – now elderly and respectable figures – sat sipping jasmine tea from porcelain cups while they nibbled pakoras and cucumber sandwiches. On the wall hung a faded sepia photograph of Shanulhaq’s family in their haveli near the Ajmeri Gate around 1912; beside it hung another of a very small boy dressed in late Mughal court dress: a brocaded sherwani, baggy white pyjamas, and on his head, a tiny red fez. It was Shanulhaq as an infant.

‘Of course Karachi Urdu is really pure Delhi Urdu,’ explained a judge, biting a pakora. ‘Now that they have Sanskritized all the dialects in India, this is the last place you can hear it spoken.’

Outside, you could hear the dull drone of the Karachi traffic. The city kept reminding me of the Gulf: the new motorways, the glossy high-rise buildings, the Japanese cars. But when you talked to the exiles it was the Palestinians who came to mind. Each one treasured his childhood memories like a title-deed. Each one knew by heart the stories of the catastrophe, the massacres and the exodus; the forty-year-old tales of exile flowed from everyone’s lips like new gossip. Each one talked about the old city as if it remained unchanged since the day they had departed.

‘Have you ever been to Gulli Churiwallan?’ asked the judge, referring to a dirty ghetto now full of decaying warehouses. ‘The havelis there are the most magnificent in all Delhi. The stonework, the fountains …’

…

‘Do they still teach Ghalib in the schools?’ asked the newsreader, referring to the great Urdu poet. ‘Or is it just Kalidasa and the Ramayana?’

‘I bet no one even knows who Ghalib is in Delhi these days,’ said the judge. ‘They probably think he’s a cricketer.’

Later, Shanulhaq drove me slowly through the streets of Karachi. As we went, he pointed out the shops which had once filled the streets of Delhi: the English Boot House, once of Connaught Place; Abdul Khaliq, the famous sweet-seller of Chandni Chowk; Nihari‘s, the kebab-wallah from the steps of the Delhi Jama Masjid. He pointed out how such and such an area still preserved the distinctive idiom or the distinctive cut of kurta pyjamas unique to such and such an area of Delhi.

Even the streets were like a Delhi Dictionary of Biography. While the roads of modern Delhi are named after a dubious collection of twentieth-century politicians – Archbishop Makarios Marg, Tito Marg and so on – the streets of Karachi are named after the great Delhi-wallahs of history: to get to Ahmed Ali we passed through a litany of Delhi sufis and sultans, poets and philosophers, before turning left into Amir Khusroe Drive.

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by Joel | 10 January 2024 · 3:09 pm

Ahmed Ali’s Twilight in Delhi

From City of Djinns: A Year in Delhi, by William Dalrymple (Penguin, 2003), Kindle pp. 58-60:

The best impression of the Shahjehanabad of Hamida Sultan — of the city that was destroyed in 1947 – can be found not in photographs or pictures, nor even in the jaded memories of the survivors, but in a slim first novel published to some critical acclaim in 1940.

Although the brilliance of Twilight in Delhi by Ahmed Ali was immediately recognized by both E.M. Forster and Virginia Woolf, most copies of the book were lost when the warehouse of the Hogarth Press was destroyed during the Blitz. There was no reprint, and the book was overlooked first during the trauma of the Second World War, then in the holocaust of Partition. Only now with the recent publication of a paperback has the book begun to receive the recognition it deserved. For although (until recently) forgotten even in the city it immortalized, Twilight in Delhi is not only a very fine novel, it is also an irreplaceable record of the vanished life and culture of pre-war Delhi. Written only seven years before the catastrophe of 1947, its gloomy tone and pessimistic title were more visionary than Ahmed Ali could ever have imagined.

The novel follows the fortunes of a traditional Muslim family living in a haveli very like Ali Manzil. At the opening of the book a cloud is looming over the house: the patriarch, an old Mughal named Mir Nihal, disapproves of his son courting a low-born girl named Bilqeece. As the love of Ashgar and Bilqeece first grows, blossoms, then decays, the whole dying world of Shahjehanabad is evoked: the pigeon-fliers and the poets, the alchemists and the Sufis, the beggars and the tradesmen.

Beyond Kashmiri Gate the British usurp the mantle of the Mughal emperors, enforcing their authority but rarely deigning to mix with the ordinary Delhi-wallahs. The First World War and the influenza epidemic strike down the young; vultures circle ominously overhead. Yet inside the walls of the havelis and the lattice screens of the zenana, life goes on as it always did. Births follow upon marriages, love affairs decay, middle age gives way to crumbling senility – but all the time the stories and traditions are passed on.

…

Twilight in Delhi survived Partition to represent the life of Old Delhi to a new readership today, but what, I wondered, had happened to its author? My edition of the book gave no clue; and I scanned the bookshops in vain to find other, later works by the same hand. It was a Delhi publisher friend who told me that Ali was in fact still alive, now an old man living in obscurity in Karachi. This only made it more intriguing: why would anyone who so obviously loved Delhi with a passion opt to leave it? And why had he not gone on to write other even better books? Karachi seemed to hold the key to many of the unanswered questions of 1947. Not only did the city contain some 200,000 refugees who had fled from Delhi to Pakistan in the upheavals of that year, it also contained their most distinguished chronicler. The moment had come for me to visit Karachi for myself.

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by Joel | 14 December 2023 · 11:03 am

Magyar’s Main Modernizer

From Budapest: Portrait of a City Between East and West, by Victor Sebestyen (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 109-111, 115:

In 1801, after serving 2,387 days in jail for a minor walk-on part in the Jacobin movement, Ferenc Kazinczy was released from prison. He felt no bitterness. ‘Examples had to be made to frighten the people,’ he wrote to a friend shortly before he was freed. He was forty-one, an erudite polyglot – translator of, among others, Shakespeare, Goethe, Molière and Schiller – and proprietor of a modest estate close to Buda. He still burned with a zeal for radical change in Hungary, but during his years of incarceration he abandoned an overtly political programme and any ideas of rebellion against the Habsburgs as impractical gestures that were bound to fail. From prison he had been corresponding with a group of like-minded Enlightenment figures, who came to the conclusion that the way to modernize Hungary, to create a new nation, was through its language and culture. Out of prison, he withdrew to his estate, Széphalom, and for the thirty years up to his death he devoted himself to a single passion: the renewal of the Hungarian language and literature. There were many others involved in what amounted to a cultural revolution, but Kazinczy was the practical genius and chief organizer of the so-called ‘Revival Movement’. Antal Szerb in his magnificent History of Hungarian Literature described him as ‘a dictator of literary life’ – though another twentieth-century admirer, the writer László Németh, called Kazinczy ‘the telephone switchboard’.

The revival of the language was the focus of his life. Kazinczy was the leader of the ‘neologists’ who invented modern Hungarian. They transformed the grammar, standardized the syntax, enriched the vocabulary, produced dictionaries and lexicons, and gave new life to a moribund tongue. A twenty-first-century Hungarian would be hard-pressed to understand the archaic, formal and inflexible Magyar used in the eighteenth century – they would feel it was almost entirely foreign, rather as though Chaucer’s English were still being used today. ‘Magyar is half dead, atrophied…worn out. It has lost all vigour and freshness of the centuries long gone,’ he said when he embarked on his undertaking.

There had been a few brilliant exceptions from the Early Middle Ages onwards, but Kazinczy and his collaborators knew that in reality, at this point, there was very little literature in Hungarian. The literary language was German. Few in the poorer classes were literate. Most of the nobles and the tiny middle class, those who were literate, read in German and spoke in German within their family or social circle – and governed in Latin. Alone in Europe, Latin was the official language in Hungary, used in the courts and the bureaucracy. In the rest of the Habsburg Empire, from the Baltic to the Adriatic, the official language was German – ‘We don’t govern the Empire, we administer it, and we do so in German,’ said Metternich. In Buda and Pest, Hungarian was the language of the poor and of some townsfolk – which gave them access, if they could read at all, only to a limited and largely folkloric literature.[See Note.] Hungarian was also the language of the minority of the 8.5 million people living in Hungary; only about 37 per cent of the population, according to the first census conducted in Hungary in 1787, were ethnic Magyars.

Kazinczy and his collaborators created new words based on Hungarian roots, borrowed foreign words and ‘Magyarized’ them, or used image association. For example, the word secretary (tiktár or titoknok) was derived from an existing word for secret: titok. The Hungarian word for theatre was taken from two existing ancient words for ‘colour’ and ‘house’. The word for revolution came from the existing word to boil, ‘forr’, so revolution – a rather useful word in Hungarian as the country lived through so many of them – became forradalom, which translates as ‘on the boil’. The Hungarian word for isolation is taken from the ancient Magyar word for island. A beautiful Hungarian word for wife or female partner was invented: feleség, which literally means ‘my halfness’ – a noun, not an adjective. More than 8,000 new words came into common usage in colloquial and literary Hungarian within a generation.

NOTE: One language reformer, the writer Izidor Guzmics, was a well-known salon wit in Pest and sent a note to the palatine, reminding him of one of his distinguished Habsburg forebears, the sixteenth-century Emperor Charles V, who according to legend spoke French to his friends, German to his horse, Italian to his mistress, Spanish to God and English to the birds. ‘Had he known Magyar doubtless he would have spoken Hungarian to his enemies,’ Guzmics wrote.

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by Joel | 5 December 2023 · 7:31 am

The Restoration’s Brutal Repressions

From The Blazing World: A New History of Revolutionary England, 1603-1689, by Jonathan Healey (Knopf Doubleday, 2023), Kindle pp. 334-335:

The success of [Samuel Butler’s] Hudibras reminds us that Restoration culture, in its fun-loving hedonism, was also about the defeat of Puritanism. As much as Charles talked about forgetting the past, there were plenty who were quite willing to rake up the radicalism of the Republic and remind people of the days when Christmas was banned and the theatres were shut, and soldiers stomped up and down the country closing horse races and fining people for their loyalty to the king. Hudibras was a way of crowing about this. The culture war, that we saw at the start of the century in events like the Cartmel wedding, had been won. Puritanism had been cast out. Momus’s day had come and gone. Merry England was back.

But Pepys is a reminder that there was more to it than this. We think of Charles as a ‘Merry Monarch’, given over to celebration and parties, to theatre and pleasures of the flesh. It’s not a false view as such, but it obscures a lot. For Dissenters, especially Quakers, his reign was one of brutal oppression, harder than anything experienced by the Puritans under his father. In its controls on the press, his government tried to stop the mouths of the English people once more.

The legacy of the Republic remained. Puritanism may have been defeated politically, but it lived on in the dissenting tradition which became such an important element to English religion – and indeed eventually political – culture. Meanwhile, the degree to which the constitutional issues of the earlier seventeenth century had been resolved was quite unclear. Technically, now, the vast majority of revenue came from Parliament, though the king might try and circumvent this by seeking other sources. Taxes on trade, for example, specifically the customs and excise, were increasingly lucrative, and yet were subject to less Parliamentary control than direct taxes because they tended to be granted for the life of the monarch.

The idea of a standing army was now, thanks to the Civil Wars and to Cromwell and his Protectorate, even more anathema to English sensibilities. Yet the realities of European geopolitics, in which armies were generally becoming much bigger and more professional, meant that it would be hard to maintain the country’s clout without one. The press and public opinion were not going away. The world of pamphlets and coffeehouse politics was here to stay. Finally, the country’s religion remained unsettled. The apparent supremacy of Anglicanism masked the resilience of Dissent. More to the point, while in exile both Charles and his brother James had been surrounded by Catholic influences. The nightmare scenario, perhaps, was a king trying to use his prerogative powers to promote Catholicism and to build a standing army that he could use to cow opposition, all funded by indirect taxes – or even a pension from a foreign monarch – while Parliament lay sidelined.

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by Joel | 29 October 2023 · 3:09 pm

French Bishop, Indian Guide

From Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather (Project Gutenberg, 2023; Knopf, 1927), Book 3, Chapter 2:

TAKING leave of Isleta and its priest early in the morning, Father Latour and his guide rode all day through the dry desert plain west of Albuquerque. It was like a country of dry ashes; no juniper, no rabbit brush, nothing but thickets of withered, dead-looking cactus, and patches of wild pumpkin—the only vegetation that had any vitality. It is a vine, remarkable for its tendency, not to spread and ramble, but to mass and mount. Its long, sharp, arrow-shaped leaves, frosted over with prickly silver, are thrust upward and crowded together; the whole rigid, up-thrust matted clump looks less like a plant than like a great colony of grey-green lizards, moving and suddenly arrested by fear.

As the morning wore on they had to make their way through a sand-storm which quite obscured the sun. Jacinto knew the country well, having crossed it often to go to the religious dances at Laguna, but he rode with his head low and a purple handkerchief tied over his mouth. Coming from a pueblo among woods and water, he had a poor opinion of this plain. At noon he alighted and collected enough greasewood to boil the Bishop’s coffee. They knelt on either side of the fire, the sand curling about them so that the bread became gritty as they ate it.

The sun set red in an atmosphere murky with sand. The travellers made a dry camp and rolled themselves in their blankets. All night a cold wind blew over them. Father Latour was so stiff that he arose long before day-break. The dawn came at last, fair and clear, and they made an early start.

About the middle of that afternoon Jacinto pointed out Laguna in the distance, lying, apparently, in the midst of bright yellow waves of high sand dunes—yellow as ochre. As they approached, Father Latour found these were petrified sand dunes; long waves of soft, gritty yellow rock, shining and bare except for a few lines of dark juniper that grew out of the weather cracks,—little trees, and very, very old. At the foot of this sweep of rock waves was the blue lake, a stone basin full of water, from which the pueblo took its name.

The kindly Padre at Isleta had sent his cook’s brother off on foot to warn the Laguna people that the new High Priest was coming, and that he was a good man and did not want money. They were prepared, accordingly; the church was clean and the doors were open; a small white church, painted above and about the altar with gods of wind and rain and thunder, sun and moon, linked together in a geometrical design of crimson and blue and dark green, so that the end of the church seemed to be hung with tapestry. It recalled to Father Latour the interior of a Persian chieftain’s tent he had seen in a textile exhibit at Lyons. Whether this decoration had been done by Spanish missionaries or by Indian converts, he was unable to find out.

The Governor told him that his people would come to Mass in the morning, and that there were a number of children to be baptized. He offered the Bishop the sacristy for the night, but there was a damp, earthy smell about that chamber, and Father Latour had already made up his mind that he would like to sleep on the rock dunes, under the junipers.

Jacinto got firewood and good water from the Lagunas, and they made their camp in a pleasant spot on the rocks north of the village. As the sun dropped low, the light brought the white church and the yellow adobe houses up into relief from the flat ledges. Behind their camp, not far away, lay a group of great mesas. The Bishop asked Jacinto if he knew the name of the one nearest them.

“No, I not know any name,” he shook his head. “I know Indian name,” he added, as if, for once, he were thinking aloud.

“And what is the Indian name?”

“The Laguna Indians call Snow-Bird mountain.” He spoke somewhat unwillingly.

“That is very nice,” said the Bishop musingly. “Yes, that is a pretty name.”

“Oh, Indians have nice names too!” Jacinto replied quickly, with a curl of the lip. Then, as if he felt he had taken out on the Bishop a reproach not deserved, he said in a moment: “The Laguna people think it very funny for a big priest to be a young man. The Governor say, how can I call him Padre when he is younger than my sons?”

There was a note of pride in Jacinto’s voice very flattering to the Bishop. He had noticed how kind the Indian voice could be when it was kind at all; a slight inflection made one feel that one had received a great compliment.

“I am not very young in heart, Jacinto. How old are you, my boy?”

“Twenty-six.”

“Have you a son?”

“One. Baby. Not very long born.”

Jacinto usually dropped the article in speaking Spanish, just as he did in speaking English, though the Bishop had noticed that when he did give a noun its article, he used the right one. The customary omission, therefore, seemed to be a matter of taste, not ignorance. In the Indian conception of language, such attachments were superfluous and unpleasing, perhaps.

They relapsed into the silence which was their usual form of intercourse. The Bishop sat drinking his coffee slowly out of the tin cup, keeping the pot near the embers. The sun had set now, the yellow rocks were turning grey, down in the pueblo the light of the cook fires made red patches of the glassless windows, and the smell of piñon smoke came softly through the still air. The whole western sky was the colour of golden ashes, with here and there a flush of red on the lip of a little cloud. High above the horizon the evening-star flickered like a lamp just lit, and close beside it was another star of constant light, much smaller.

Jacinto threw away the end of his cornhusk cigarette and again spoke without being addressed.

“The ev-en-ing-star,” he said in English, slowly and somewhat sententiously, then relapsed into Spanish. “You see the little star beside, Padre? Indians call him the guide.”

The two companions sat, each thinking his own thoughts as night closed in about them; a blue night set with stars, the bulk of the solitary mesas cutting into the firmament. The Bishop seldom questioned Jacinto about his thoughts or beliefs. He didn’t think it polite, and he believed it to be useless. There was no way in which he could transfer his own memories of European civilization into the Indian mind, and he was quite willing to believe that behind Jacinto there was a long tradition, a story of experience, which no language could translate to him. A chill came with the darkness. Father Latour put on his old fur-lined cloak, and Jacinto, loosening the blanket tied about his loins, drew it up over his head and shoulders.

“Many stars,” he said presently. “What you think about the stars, Padre?”

“The wise men tell us they are worlds, like ours, Jacinto.”

The end of the Indian’s cigarette grew bright and then dull again before he spoke. “I think not,” he said in the tone of one who has considered a proposition fairly and rejected it. “I think they are leaders—great spirits.”

“Perhaps they are,” said the Bishop with a sigh. “Whatever they are, they are great. Let us say Our Father, and go to sleep, my boy.”

Kneeling on either side of the embers they repeated the prayer together and then rolled up in their blankets. The Bishop went to sleep thinking with satisfaction that he was beginning to have some sort of human companionship with his Indian boy. One called the young Indians “boys,” perhaps because there was something youthful and elastic in their bodies. Certainly about their behaviour there was nothing boyish in the American sense, nor even in the European sense. Jacinto was never, by any chance, naïf; he was never taken by surprise. One felt that his training, whatever it had been, had prepared him to meet any situation which might confront him. He was as much at home in the Bishop’s study as in his own pueblo—and he was never too much at home anywhere. Father Latour felt he had gone a good way toward gaining his guide’s friendship, though he did not know how.

The truth was, Jacinto liked the Bishop’s way of meeting people; thought he had the right tone with [rich] Padre Gallegos, the right tone with [poor] Padre Jesus, and that he had good manners with the Indians. In his experience, white people, when they addressed Indians, always put on a false face. There were many kinds of false faces; Father Vaillant’s, for example, was kindly but too vehement. The Bishop put on none at all. He stood straight and turned to the Governor of Laguna, and his face underwent no change. Jacinto thought this remarkable.

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by Joel | 28 October 2023 · 1:34 pm

The Bishop Meets Kit Carson

From Death Comes for the Archbishop, by Willa Cather (Project Gutenberg, 2023; Knopf, 1927), Book 2, Chapter 2:

St. Vrain and his friend got together a search-party at once. They rode out to Scales’s place and found the remains of four men buried under the corral behind the stable, as the woman had said. Scales himself they captured on the road from Taos, where he had gone to look for his wife. They brought him back to Mora, but St. Vrain rode on to Taos to fetch a magistrate.

There was no calabozo in Mora, so Scales was put into an empty stable, under guard. This stable was soon surrounded by a crowd of people, who loitered to hear the blood-curdling threats the prisoner shouted against his wife. Magdalena was kept in the Padre’s house, where she lay on a mat in the corner, begging Father Latour to take her back to Santa Fé, so that her husband could not get at her. Though Scales was bound, the Bishop felt alarmed for her safety. He and the American notary, who had a pistol of the new revolver model, sat in the sala and kept watch over her all night.

In the morning the magistrate and his party arrived from Taos. The notary told him the facts of the case in the plaza, where everyone could hear. The Bishop inquired whether there was any place for Magdalena in Taos, as she could not stay on here in such a state of terror.

A man dressed in buckskin hunting-clothes stepped out of the crowd and asked to see Magdalena. Father Latour conducted him into the room where she lay on her mat. The stranger went up to her, removing his hat. He bent down and put his hand on her shoulder. Though he was clearly an American, he spoke Spanish in the native manner.

“Magdalena, don’t you remember me?”

She looked up at him as out of a dark well; something became alive in her deep, haunted eyes. She caught with both hands at his fringed buckskin knees.

“Christobal!” she wailed. “Oh, Christobal!”

“I’ll take you home with me, Magdalena, and you can stay with my wife. You wouldn’t be afraid in my house, would you?”

“No, no, Christobal, I would not be afraid with you. I am not a wicked woman.”

He smoothed her hair. “You’re a good girl, Magdalena—always were. It will be all right. Just leave things to me.”

Then he turned to the Bishop. “Señor Vicario, she can come to me. I live near Taos. My wife is a native woman, and she’ll be good to her. That varmint won’t come about my place, even if he breaks jail. He knows me. My name is Carson.”

Father Latour had looked forward to meeting the scout. He had supposed him to be a very large man, of powerful body and commanding presence. This Carson was not so tall as the Bishop himself, was very slight in frame, modest in manner, and he spoke English with a soft Southern drawl. His face was both thoughtful and alert; anxiety had drawn a permanent ridge between his blue eyes. Under his blond moustache his mouth had a singular refinement. The lips were full and delicately modelled. There was something curiously unconscious about his mouth, reflective, a little melancholy,—and something that suggested a capacity for tenderness. The Bishop felt a quick glow of pleasure in looking at the man. As he stood there in his buckskin clothes one felt in him standards, loyalties, a code which is not easily put into words but which is instantly felt when two men who live by it come together by chance. He took the scout’s hand. “I have long wanted to meet Kit Carson,” he said, “even before I came to New Mexico. I have been hoping you would pay me a visit at Santa Fé.”

The other smiled. “I’m right shy, sir, and I’m always afraid of being disappointed. But I guess it will be all right from now on.”

This was the beginning of a long friendship.

On their ride back to Carson’s ranch, Magdalena was put in Father Vaillant’s care, and the Bishop and the scout rode together. Carson said he had become a Catholic merely as a matter of form, as Americans usually did when they married a Mexican girl. His wife was a good woman and very devout; but religion had seemed to him pretty much a woman’s affair until his last trip to California. He had been sick out there, and the Fathers at one of the missions took care of him. “I began to see things different, and thought I might some day be a Catholic in earnest. I was brought up to think priests were rascals, and that the nuns were bad women,—all the stuff they talk back in Missouri. A good many of the native priests here bear out that story. Our Padre Martinez at Taos is an old scapegrace, if ever there was one; he’s got children and grandchildren in almost every settlement around here. And Padre Lucero at Arroyo Hondo is a miser, takes everything a poor man’s got to give him a Christian burial.”

The Bishop discussed the needs of his people at length with Carson. He felt great confidence in his judgment. The two men were about the same age, both a little over forty, and both had been sobered and sharpened by wide experience. Carson had been guide in world-renowned explorations, but he was still almost as poor as in the days when he was a beaver trapper. He lived in a little adobe house with his Mexican wife. The great country of desert and mountain ranges between Santa Fé and the Pacific coast was not yet mapped or charted; the most reliable map of it was in Kit Carson’s brain. This Missourian, whose eye was so quick to read a landscape or a human face, could not read a printed page. He could at that time barely write his own name. Yet one felt in him a quick and discriminating intelligence. That he was illiterate was an accident; he had got ahead of books, gone where the printing-press could not follow him. Out of the hardships of his boyhood—from fourteen to twenty picking up a bare living as cook or mule-driver for wagon trains, often in the service of brutal and desperate characters—he had preserved a clean sense of honour and a compassionate heart. In talking to the Bishop of poor Magdalena he said sadly: “I used to see her in Taos when she was such a pretty girl. Ain’t it a pity?”

The degenerate murderer, Buck Scales, was hanged after a short trial.

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by Joel | 11 October 2023 · 8:36 am

Social Mobility on the Great Plains

From My Ántonia, by Willa Cather (Houghton Mifflin, 1924), Book 2, Chapter IX:

THERE was a curious social situation in Black Hawk. All the young men felt the attraction of the fine, well-set-up country girls who had come to town to earn a living, and, in nearly every case, to help the father struggle out of debt, or to make it possible for the younger children of the family to go to school.

Those girls had grown up in the first bitter-hard times, and had got little schooling themselves. But the younger brothers and sisters, for whom they made such sacrifices and who have had “advantages,” never seem to me, when I meet them now, half as interesting or as well educated. The older girls, who helped to break up the wild sod, learned so much from life, from poverty, from their mothers and grandmothers; they had all, like Ántonia, been early awakened and made observant by coming at a tender age from an old country to a new. I can remember a score of these country girls who were in service in Black Hawk during the few years I lived there, and I can remember something unusual and engaging about each of them. Physically they were almost a race apart, and out-of-door work had given them a vigor which, when they got over their first shyness on coming to town, developed into a positive carriage and freedom of movement, and made them conspicuous among Black Hawk women.

That was before the day of High-School athletics. Girls who had to walk more than half a mile to school were pitied. There was not a tennis court in the town; physical exercise was thought rather inelegant for the daughters of well-to-do families. Some of the High-School girls were jolly and pretty, but they stayed indoors in winter because of the cold, and in summer because of the heat. When one danced with them their bodies never moved inside their clothes; their muscles seemed to ask but one thing—not to be disturbed. I remember those girls merely as faces in the schoolroom, gay and rosy, or listless and dull, cut off below the shoulders, like cherubs, by the ink-smeared tops of the high desks that were surely put there to make us round-shouldered and hollow-chested.

The daughters of Black Hawk merchants had a confident, uninquiring belief that they were “refined,” and that the country girls, who “worked out,” were not. The American farmers in our county were quite as hard-pressed as their neighbors from other countries. All alike had come to Nebraska with little capital and no knowledge of the soil they must subdue. All had borrowed money on their land. But no matter in what straits the Pennsylvanian or Virginian found himself, he would not let his daughters go out into service. Unless his girls could teach a country school, they sat at home in poverty. The Bohemian and Scandinavian girls could not get positions as teachers, because they had had no opportunity to learn the language. Determined to help in the struggle to clear the homestead from debt, they had no alternative but to go into service. Some of them, after they came to town, remained as serious and as discreet in behavior as they had been when they ploughed and herded on their father’s farm. Others, like the three Bohemian Marys, tried to make up for the years of youth they had lost. But every one of them did what she had set out to do, and sent home those hard-earned dollars. The girls I knew were always helping to pay for ploughs and reapers, brood-sows, or steers to fatten.

One result of this family solidarity was that the foreign farmers in our county were the first to become prosperous. After the fathers were out of debt, the daughters married the sons of neighbors,—usually of like nationality,—and the girls who once worked in Black Hawk kitchens are to-day managing big farms and fine families of their own; their children are better off than the children of the town women they used to serve.

I thought the attitude of the town people toward these girls very stupid. If I told my schoolmates that Lena Lingard’s grandfather was a clergyman, and much respected in Norway, they looked at me blankly. What did it matter? All foreigners were ignorant people who couldn’t speak English. There was not a man in Black Hawk who had the intelligence or cultivation, much less the personal distinction, of Ántonia’s father. Yet people saw no difference between her and the three Marys; they were all Bohemians, all “hired girls.”

I always knew I should live long enough to see my country girls come into their own, and I have. To-day the best that a harassed Black Hawk merchant can hope for is to sell provisions and farm machinery and automobiles to the rich farms where that first crop of stalwart Bohemian and Scandinavian girls are now the mistresses.

The Black Hawk boys looked forward to marrying Black Hawk girls, and living in a brand-new little house with best chairs that must not be sat upon, and hand-painted china that must not be used. But sometimes a young fellow would look up from his ledger, or out through the grating of his father’s bank, and let his eyes follow Lena Lingard, as she passed the window with her slow, undulating walk, or Tiny Soderball, tripping by in her short skirt and striped stockings.

The country girls were considered a menace to the social order. Their beauty shone out too boldly against a conventional background. But anxious mothers need have felt no alarm. They mistook the mettle of their sons. The respect for respectability was stronger than any desire in Black Hawk youth.

Our young man of position was like the son of a royal house; the boy who swept out his office or drove his delivery wagon might frolic with the jolly country girls, but he himself must sit all evening in a plush parlor where conversation dragged so perceptibly that the father often came in and made blundering efforts to warm up the atmosphere. On his way home from his dull call, he would perhaps meet Tony and Lena, coming along the sidewalk whispering to each other, or the three Bohemian Marys in their long plush coats and caps, comporting themselves with a dignity that only made their eventful histories the more piquant. If he went to the hotel to see a traveling man on business, there was Tiny, arching her shoulders at him like a kitten. If he went into the laundry to get his collars, there were the four Danish girls, smiling up from their ironing-boards, with their white throats and their pink cheeks.

The three Marys were the heroines of a cycle of scandalous stories, which the old men were fond of relating as they sat about the cigar-stand in the drug-store. Mary Dusak had been housekeeper for a bachelor rancher from Boston, and after several years in his service she was forced to retire from the world for a short time. Later she came back to town to take the place of her friend, Mary Svoboda, who was similarly embarrassed. The three Marys were considered as dangerous as high explosives to have about the kitchen, yet they were such good cooks and such admirable housekeepers that they never had to look for a place.

The Vannis’ tent brought the town boys and the country girls together on neutral ground. Sylvester Lovett, who was cashier in his father’s bank, always found his way to the tent on Saturday night. He took all the dances Lena Lingard would give him, and even grew bold enough to walk home with her. If his sisters or their friends happened to be among the onlookers on “popular nights,” Sylvester stood back in the shadow under the cottonwood trees, smoking and watching Lena with a harassed expression. Several times I stumbled upon him there in the dark, and I felt rather sorry for him. He reminded me of Ole Benson, who used to sit on the draw-side and watch Lena herd her cattle. Later in the summer, when Lena went home for a week to visit her mother, I heard from Ántonia that young Lovett drove all the way out there to see her, and took her buggy-riding. In my ingenuousness I hoped that Sylvester would marry Lena, and thus give all the country girls a better position in the town.

Sylvester dallied about Lena until he began to make mistakes in his work; had to stay at the bank until after dark to make his books balance. He was daft about her, and every one knew it. To escape from his predicament he ran away with a widow six years older than himself, who owned a half-section. This remedy worked, apparently. He never looked at Lena again, nor lifted his eyes as he ceremoniously tipped his hat when he happened to meet her on the sidewalk.

So that was what they were like, I thought, these white-handed, high-collared clerks and bookkeepers! I used to glare at young Lovett from a distance and only wished I had some way of showing my contempt for him.