by Colin Watson
The plots, such as they are, of the Fu-Manchu novels would be quite meaningless in paraphrase. They are a jumble of incredible encounters, pursuits, traps and escapes. Who is trying to accomplish what, and why – this is never explained. All that seems certain is that a titanic struggle is being waged by a man called Nayland Smith to thwart the designs of Fu-Manchu.
At last they truly were face to face – the head of the great Yellow movement, and the man who fought on behalf of the entire white race …
Smith is in some unspecified way an agent of the British Government, whose interests he once served in Burma, Egypt and certain other countries. The police appear to be at his command and even an inspector must expect Smith to address him somewhat peremptorily:
‘Too late!’ rapped my friend. ‘Jump in a taxi and pick up two good men to leave for China at once! Then go and charter a special train to Tilbury to leave in twenty-five minutes. Order another cab to wait outside for me.’
A man with authority to dispatch a pair of Scotland Yard operatives to China at twenty-five minutes’ notice is a magnificent example of the sort of fictional go-getter that must have delighted readers who had no reason to hope that their own lives would ever cease to be hedged with petty prohibitions.
But what is Fu-Manchu up to that measures so drastic have to be taken by the indomitable Nayland Smith? The only answer to this question is rhetorical generalization pregnant with hints about a ‘Yellow Peril’. Here is a typical reflection by the narrator, Dr Petrie:
The mere thought that our trifling error of judgement tonight in tarrying a moment too long might mean the victory of Fu-Manchu might mean the turning of the balance which a wise providence had adjusted between the white and yellow races, was appalling. To Smith and me, who knew something of the secret influences at work to overthrow the Indian Empire, to place, it might be, the whole of Europe and America beneath an Eastern rule, it seemed that a great yellow hand was stretched out over London. Dr Fu-Manchu was a menace to the civilized world.
Passages like this abound throughout Rohmer’s work. They link the action sequences and provide spurious justification for them. Credible motives are entirely lacking. Here is the forerunner – perhaps even the progenitor – of Ian Fleming and the espionage fiction of the 1950s and 1960s, the ancestor of the thriller of unreason.
It often has been said that stories of the Fu-Manchu type were devised purely as entertainment and that any attempt to subject them to serious criticism is misconceived. There is something too pat about this argument. No man writes entirely in a mental vacuum; however slight, however apparently automatic his work, it must proceed from ideas, traces at least of which will be carried to the reader. It is to instant rapport between these conveyed notions and the reader’s existing prejudices, quite as much as to any quality of story-telling, that a book’s success is attributable. The Fu-Manchu novels went into edition after edition. Their only clear message was one of racial vituperation. Had there not existed in the minds of many thousands of people an innate fear or dislike of foreigners – oriental foreigners, in particular – Sax Rohmer never would have become a bestselling author.
Before the second world war, the average middle-class man and woman in England had never seen a Chinaman. The few Chinese who lived and worked in Britain were to be found only in certain areas of the big cities and seaports, generally dockland districts such as London’s Limehouse. Their communities were small, unobtrusive and industrious. They also had their own high standards of respectability and cleanliness. Chinese rarely came into conflict with the law and when they did it was as often as not in consequence of some trivial neighbourhood quarrel.
Such was the unexciting reality. No opium dens. No pad-footed assassins. No Tong wars nor kidnapping nor torture chambers. Seldom in the history of racial intolerance had a minority shown itself so unco-operative in the matter of getting hated. Fortunately for the great ‘fiendish Oriental’ myth, the majority of the British public had never walked down the neat, if dull, little streets of Limehouse nor had occasion to penetrate the harbour districts of Liverpool, South Shields or Cardiff. It did become briefly fashionable in the 1930s for groups of wealthy young Londoners to ‘go slumming’ in the East End, where they supposed that only their daring and their inbred superiority protected them from being doped, robbed or murdered, but they understandably refrained from admitting afterwards that nothing in the least degree thrilling had happened. Nor was the legend contradicted by the provincial and suburban sightseers whose charabanc tours of ‘Chinatown’ proved so consistently and disappointingly uneventful. They preferred to imagine that they had been into dangerous and forbidden territory, which doubtless they had glimpsed through eyes not unlike those of Rohmer’s Doctor Petrie:
‘The mantle of dusk had closed about the squalid activity of the East End streets as we neared our destination. Aliens of every shade of colour were in the glare of the lamps upon the main road about us now, emerging from burrow-like alleys. In the short space of the drive we had passed from the bright world of the West into the dubious underworld of the East.’
The vehemence of this prose is interesting. It is occasioned by nothing in the story itself, and indeed seems unrelated to experience of any kind. Why should street activity in a particular area be described as ‘squalid’ as if rendered so by a mere compass bearing? Why are alleys inhabited by ‘aliens’ specifically ‘burrow-like’? And what has geography got to do with the distinction between ‘world’ and ‘underworld’? Even the verb ‘emerge’, with its suggestion of secret and evil purpose, would seem a curious choice if the scene were not to yield at least one specific act of wickedness. But nothing happens. Rohmer’s narrative, like the Limehouse touring coach, rolls on elsewhere. The readers have not been thrilled; they simply have been prompted to feel superior.
Historically, the British had been well conditioned to accept the myth of Asiatic guile. In common with other European countries during the nineteenth century, Britain had seized upon every commercial advantage offered by China’s vast size and the divisions and weaknesses of her government. China was not colonized, but it was virtually partitioned. The Treaty Ports constituted an effective apparatus of exploitation, and Britain derived additional and special benefit from her control of the Chinese Customs with a consequent vested interest in the opium trade. Like all indefensible arrangements, this called for a virtuous attitude on the part of the beneficiary and a campaign of vilification against the unwilling benefactor – especially after the Opium Wars, in which the Christian forces of Queen Victoria had appeared to be compelling the Heathen Chinese to step up his drug consumption. By the turn of the century, the British had managed to convince themselves that with the exception of a handful of quaint converts, the Chinese were corrupt, untrustworthy, dirty, vicious and cunning. Connoisseurs prized their ancient art, of course, and chinoiserie continued to be a fashionable feature of middle and upper class drawing-rooms, but aesthetic appreciation was quite separate in the public mind from a dislike that verged on loathing for the race which had created that art.
Of all the fields of missionary endeavour that helped gratify the Victorians’ desire to patronize the rest of mankind, China seems to have been regarded as presenting a special challenge. Its wickedness was not something negative, like the poor African’s failure to realize that God was pained by the sight of a bare backside, but a conscious and systematic adherence to non-Christian – and therefore Satanic – traditions. The various rival churches, whose Missions to China unashamedly blackguarded one another and did as much poaching as proselytizing, were united in one respect: their propaganda had the common aim of destroying the idea that a civilization as ancient as the Chinese might actually possess enough merit to warrant its being left alone for a few more centuries. Congregations and, in particular, children at Sunday schools, were treated to harrowing accounts of a land of famine, banditry, infanticide and opium smoking, where only in the beleaguered mission compounds was there to be found e
nlightenment and joy. The theme was pursued in countless pamphlets and parish magazines, illustrated in magic lantern lectures, and worked into that peculiarly British manifestation of sadism, the literature of the Sunday School Prize. Thus – and not for the first or the last time – did actions dictated by political expediency receive the retrospective sanction of religion.
Before the nineteenth century, it was the traveller’s tale that had provided people with their ideas about China. They pictured it much as the first readers of Marco Polo must have done – rich, strange and utterly remote. It inspired awe but also respect. The imperialist and religious propaganda of Victorian times rendered the mystery sinister and the writers of popular literature grasped eagerly this new opportunity of ‘preaching to the nerves’. After the shock of the Boxer uprising in 1900, the reading public was ready to believe anything of the ‘treacherous’ yellow men, with their slant eyes and funny pigtails and evil secret societies. For the next forty years, the ‘Yellow Peril’ was a constantly recurrent theme of adventure and mystery fiction. Because China was so far away and was represented in Britain by only a tiny, scattered and uncommunicative immigrant population, it was possible to chill the blood of the credulous with the wildest inventions and the most absurd racial libels without fear of disproof or even contradiction.
The Chinaman-villain was a figure that might have been tailor-made for the use of crime novelists. He was readily associated in the minds of uninformed, insular people with vices that they conceived to be endemic in the East. He was what all the writers described as ‘inscrutable’ – in other words, a repository of unspoken thoughts and therefore dangerous. He was a drug addict himself and almost certainly a supplier of drugs to others (did not every newspaper reader in the 1920s know about ‘Brilliant Chang’ whose gang provided dope for the Society habitués of Mrs Kate Meyrick’s ‘43’ Club in the West End of London?). Worse still, it was part of the fiendish character of yellow men to desire sexual intercourse with white girls; this they accomplished by abducting their victims and putting them aboard junks that plied between Wapping and the water-front brothels of China. An intriguing incidental to this aspect of oriental villainy was the widespread belief that the labial plane of a Chinese vagina was horizontal instead of vertical and consequently less prized by native sensualists.
Sax Rohmer set a fashion that was to persist for thirty years when he fixed upon the Thames and the poverty-stricken Eastern boroughs of London as the main scene of the operations of his Chinese criminals. This was the sort of thing whereby the Limehouse thriller school sought to horrify their readers:
We stood in a bare and very dirty room, which could only claim kinship with a civilized shaving saloon by virtue of the grimy towel thrown across the back of the solitary chair. A Yiddish theatrical bill of some kind, illustrated, adorned one of the walls, and another bill, in what may have been Chinese, completed the decorations. From behind a curtain heavily brocaded with filth a little Chinaman appeared, dressed in a loose smock, black trousers and thick-soled slippers, and, advancing, shook his head vigorously. ‘No shavee, no shavee,’ he chattered, simian fashion, squinting from one to the other of us with his twinkling eyes. ‘Too late! Shuttee shop!’
CHAPTER 10
Amid the alien corn
The fact of a public generally unaware of the ugliness of ethnic intolerance has to be accepted if one is to understand how so much popular fiction of racialist flavour came to be written without qualm and read without protest in the years before the second world war. Thrillers were packed with despicable and evil-intentioned foreigners, while even writers of the more sedate detective stories devoted some of their talents to remarkably splenetic portraiture of characters with dark complexions or gutteral accents. Foreign was synonymous with criminal in nine novels out of ten, and the conclusion is inescapable that most people found this perfectly natural.
Until the arrival from America of Earl Derr Biggers’s Chinese detective, Charlie Chan, and his popularization through the cinema, the only thinkable role for an Asiatic in crime fiction was that of a felon. Ernest Bramah’s Kai Lung did not count: he was a supposedly historical character and therefore inoffensive. Otherwise, ‘yellow’ men (this quite inaccurate chromatic distinction was insisted upon) were depicted as thieves, assassins, drug pedlars, white slavers and torturers. Sax Rohmer was the most single-minded propounder of Oriental wickedness, but the crude, repetitive and often comic fury of his style failed to disguise an almost total ignorance of the people and countries he affected to find so sinister.
The entire Fu-Manchu saga was on the level of infantile spider-fright. Would it have worked without constant reiteration of words like Eastern, yellow, Chinese, Orient? Almost certainly not. There seems to have been a deeply implanted association in readers’ minds between Asia and things unclean and creepy, and it was exploited by many writers other than Rohmer.
Not all the reasons for the attitude are easy to determine. The most obvious – the spate of political and pseudo-religious propaganda in justification of British intervention in the Far East – was also the most important, but there were others that only an anthropologist or a psychologist could hope to evaluate. They possibly involved anxiety about stature (why were Asiatic murderers always lithe and tiny, torturers and executioners invariably gigantic?); sexual fears (the vertical vagina syndrome); doubt of intellectual competence (Eastern ‘cleverness’ was constantly being emphasized); and a fear of social corruption through drugs (another supposedly Oriental speciality).
‘Drug’ remained a strongly emotive word throughout the 1920s and 1930s. Quite forgetting that large numbers of their Victorian forebears had taken advantage of unrestricted sale of cheap laudanum to anaesthetize themselves and their fractious infants, people regarded the less extensive but more diligently publicized drug addiction that followed the 1914–18 war as a new and deadly threat to civilized society. The very mention of heroin or cocaine – now the two most favoured narcotics – was enough to send a shiver of excitement up the public spine. Newspapers, thankfully aware that the path of social duty ran parallel to that of self-interest, took good care that the shivers continued. Their task was facilitated by the fact that drug-taking, being expensive, was mainly the indulgence of wealthy and often well-connected people: it was a fashionable vice and thus could be covered by the same apparatus that Fleet Street maintained to indulge its readers’ interest in Society. Stories about drugs and drug rings appeared every other day. Although they were seldom factual, repetition conveyed the impression that addiction was a national problem. Physical and moral consequences were never described; the implication was that they were indescribable. Every now and again, a top-drawer addict would ‘tell all’. Behind the portentous language of these hack-ghosted confessions was singularly little information. It was all very vague, but in the compost of imprecision grew an almost superstitious dread which an innocent and ignorant public found very pleasurable.
The writers of crime fiction were quick to discern and to profit from it. Drug trafficking became one of their main themes, joining blackmail, legacy-grasping, larceny of necklaces and concealment of fraud in the canon of thriller motivation. Novelists did not suffer the inhibitions imposed upon newspapers by lack of facts and by the laws of libel. They could happily assume with their readers that ‘the stuff’, as they always termed narcotics in order to sound casually knowledgeable, was smuggled into London from Eastern ports by gangs directed by arch-criminals, usually Chinese; stored awhile in secret riverside warehouses under the guard of desperadoes; and then distributed by incredibly elaborate means to the opium dens of East London and to night-clubs and salons on the opposite side of the city, where languished twitching debutantes, desperate blue-bloods with pin-point pupils, wild artists whose pictures defied identification by normal people, and once brilliant surgeons now broken in mind and body and ready to perform plastic operations on fugitive gangsters as the price of another ‘shot’.
Drugs were credited with
near-magical powers thirty years before the word ‘miracle’ came to be appended to the sulphonamides and antibiotics. It was believed that they transformed the taker, more or less immediately, from a harmless and respected member of society into a monster of guile, violence and depravity. Perhaps the extravagance of this notion was an outcome of native puritanism; it was not very different from the pitch of much of the temperance propaganda in the previous century. People also remembered some of the horrifying accounts of opium addiction whereby the missionary societies had sought to prove the worthiness of their China campaigns. The great impression left by Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde was of further encouragement to the idea that chemical intervention would have instant and drastic effect on personality. Curiously, none of Conan Doyle’s readers seems to have thought the worse of Sherlock Holmes on account of his fondness for cocaine – with the exception of Bernard Shaw, who dismissed poor Holmes as ‘a drug-addict without a single amiable trait’.
SCENE—Hotel Lounge.
The Man. “GOING OUT WITH THAT GHASTLY DAGO AGAIN? YOU’RE GETTING YOURSELF TALKED ABOUT. WHY DON’T YOU GO SOMEWHERE WITH ME FOR A CHANGE?”
The Girl. “MY DEAR, OF COURSE. I’D LOVE IT, BUT I COULD GO ABOUT WITH YOU FOR MONTHS AND NEVER GET TALKED ABOUT AT ALL.”
Lack of knowledge of what the various drugs actually did to people and of their degrees of harmfulness led to many misconceptions. Cocaine was generally implied in fiction to be a stimulant that criminals used as an aid to the planning of brilliant coups. Heroin, perhaps partly because of the suggestiveness of the name, was supposed to be the special weakness of Society women – languid ladies of means and title to whom supplies of ‘the stuff’ would be brought by backstair courier. What pleasures, corrupt or otherwise, heroin opened up for these women were never revealed: an omission that readers doubtless were expected to remedy from imagination. Far more sensational in tone were references to hemp, the Eastern name for which, hashish, was calculated to horrify people who thought heroin a comparatively innocuous indulgence of the idle rich and for whom cocaine had homely associations with dentistry. They thrilled to revelations of imported fiendishness such as this scene in Rohmer’s Si-Fan Mysteries:
