The Extinction Club

by Robert Twigger

  Backhouse admitted in 1943, just before he died, to his Swiss friend Dr. Hoeppli, that “I did not falsify it.” Untrustworthy though he undoubtedly was, if he was referring to the actual script, then he may have been telling the truth. Backhouse habitually made mistakes in writing Chinese characters, and the Ching Shan diary, for all its faults, has not been challenged for its calligraphy. Even if he dictated it, Backhouse did not write it.

  What no one can really bear is that neither Westerners nor Chinese have any idea what was going on in the Forbidden City during the siege. It’s a black hole in history, and that makes everyone uncomfortable.

  The contrast between the number of “true” eyewitness accounts that came out of the siege on the foreigners’ side and the paucity on the Chinese side couldn’t be greater. On the face of it, the Chinese appear to be the callous disregarders of truth—after all, what have they to hide? The foreigners blurt it all out; their conscience is clear. But a real regard for truth means using it sparingly.

  Meyrick Hewlett, who survived the siege as a student interpreter, remarks in his memoirs that a coolie repeatedly lied when asked for his account of a petty crime he was involved in. Finally the sheer quantity of his lies caught him out. Then he confessed the truth. Asked why he’d held out for so long, he replied, “The truth is very valuable—you can only use it once.”

  Since we can only provide approximate stories about the past, every account is more or less a fake. Since our personalities are not one but many faceted, any author is operating under a pseudonym. It is not a question of whether a diary is faked or not, but whether we should pay heed at all to so many pieces of paper.

  In the years after the Communist takeover, the people of Peking became used to a new sort of truth, something the Russians had taught the cadres. Suspects would be questioned about their past endlessly—names, dates, places, people. Since everyone is guilty of being an individual rather than an emanation of the state, everyone is guilty of something. Attempts to cover up would be doggedly sniffed out, contradictions would be seized upon, used as a wedge to split open a harmless testimony. In the modern state, the “truth” becomes a weapon of repression.

  BACKHOUSE

  BORN IN 1873 and educated at Winchester and Oxford, Edmund Trelawny Backhouse was already bankrupt with twenty-three thousand pounds of debts by the time he was twenty-three. Three years later he popped up in China with letters of recommendation from then Prime Minister Lord Salisbury and Colonial Secretary Joseph Chamberlin. Coincidentally, Backhouse was distantly related to the IIth Duke of Bedford, Herbrand Russell, through a second cousin.

  Backhouse arrived in China in 1898. It was a time of excitement and opportunity. Never had the Celestial Empire been so open to foreigners, backed up as they were by gunboat diplomacy and foreign troops based in the treaty ports.

  Fortunes were being made. On the other hand, famine was a regular occurrence. In 1894 there had been both flood and famine near Peking on a scale larger than ever before. Whole sections of the Nan Haizi Deer Reserve wall were washed away and huge numbers of Milu escaped into the countryside. These were devoured by the starving peasants, for whom food was more important than conservation.

  It was also a time of crisis for the dowager empress, T’zu-hsi. This former first concubine had outlived her emperor son and his pregnant wife—the first a convenient death, the second a convenient suicide—had outmaneuvered the late emperor’s legitimate widow, and now outflanked her nephew, the docile Kuang-hsu, emperor in name and nothing else. She had ruled since 1861 and, with her Manchu relative and henchman Jung-lu, held onto power using any means available. The Western powers, however, saw a brighter future in supporting the weedy Kuang-hsu.

  Incidentally, he was the last emperor ever to hunt Milu within the Imperial Park. This was no small undertaking. At least two thousand hangers-on would proceed with due ceremony to the parkland, where a temporary pavilion was set up for the royal entourage. Kuang-hsu loved to use his Schlesicky Strohlein binocular telescopes, with their revolutionary aluminum tubes and I6X magnification.

  The hunt was somewhat one-sided and, of course, the emperor himself oversaw operations. A thousand halberdiers would move in a line, rather like beaters rousing pheasants to be shot. The grazing Milu would then be driven toward the imperial dog-handlers, who were clad in purple and controlled two packs of “lion dogs,” surprisingly small terrier-type dogs that were capable, in a pack of thirty, of bringing the largest stag down. Once a beast was isolated and surrounded by barking dogs, the imperial hunters, also wearing purple, but with a green button on the chest, would move in with their pikes and metal-tipped staffs. The stricken deer would be speared in the lungs, tied to a staff, and stretchered off to be butchered. Only the emperor was allowed to taste the meat.

  As well as watching deer being killed, the credulous Kuang-hsu, twenty-seven years old in 1898, was much influenced by the Young China reform movement. This movement, which was based in Canton, was captivated by Western promises of wealth.

  Modernization happened at a rapid rate in the 1890s. The old examinations in the Hanlin Academy were abolished. New tests in mathematics and science were instituted. Sinecures were forbidden in the “New Model” army. The fleet bought several French battleships before the dowager empress siphoned off the rest of the funds to rebuild the Summer Palace. Her sense of humor is apparent in the marble boat, reminiscent of a Mississippi paddle-wheel steamer, which she had built using money designated to buy real ships. Over eighty feet long, it is still “moored” in the palace lake.

  But this act of profligacy was not a great triumph for the dowager empress. It became apparent to her and her Manchu kinsmen that they would be sidelined by the new reforms. Fortunately for the empress, a plot by Kuang-hsu to depose her was discovered by her loyal henchman Jung-lu. The emperor was arrested and forced to live under palace arrest on Ocean Terrace Island, in a lake by the West Wall of the Forbidden City. It is maintained that he was later poisoned on the orders of the dowager empress.

  Initially, Morrison of The Times was impressed with Backhouse, considering him a useful and talented translator. Later he would revile him as a scoundrel.

  During World War I, Backhouse acted as a secret agent for the British and was ordered to buy thousands of rifles and machine-guns for Kitchener s matériel-hungry New Army. He was pressed for results, but being unable to deliver he kept the money and pretended he’d been swindled by the Chinese. This became a pattern for extracting money from gullible foreign firms anxious to trade in China. Forged documents often supported his schemes. He’d learned the power of this with his forgery of the Ching Shan diary, which turned up in 1910 just in time to be useful as a central reference for the immensely influential book he cowrote with J. O. P. Bland, China under the Dowager Empress.

  In later years, Backhouse became a recluse. One of the few people he conversed with was the eminent Peking-based Swiss physician Dr. Hoeppli. It was Hoeppli, in 1942, who encouraged him to complete his supposedly obscene memoirs.

  DECADENCE

  BACKHOUSE’S OBSCENE memoirs. I found the most sympathetic librarian I could. She knew nothing, but the word Backhouse rang a bell with the woman polishing the teapot behind her. Backhouse had just been photographed onto microfilm. I was in luck.

  But I wanted the real thing, not some microfilmed copy. I agreed to try the microfilm, but it was, in places, impossible to read. I demanded the actual text. Everyone looked shifty. They knew it was pornographic. I knew it was pornographic. They weren’t going to let it go without a fight. Eventually the chief curator was called.

  Decadence Mandchoue came in a delightful blue-calico-covered box with interesting flaps and ivory securing pins. It was typed on thin U.S.-sized bond paper with a photo of Backhouse—white-bearded and slant-eyed, the left eye a little sleepy, eyebrows raised to induce a slight epicanthic fold, giving him the desired mandarin air. He was seventy-one.

  Edmund Backhouse always remembered the dowager empr
ess fondly. “I have sought to indicate her greatness even on occasions when dignity might have been dragged in the dust; as when she fondled the genitals of the princes of her clan or inspected the capacious anal cavities of pathic patricians and mimes.”

  I sat in the reading room, sneaking looks at the other readers, full of the childish joy of reading rude stuff when everyone else was politely studying dull and worthy tomes.

  Backhouse had a sense of humor, of that there is no doubt, though it was largely missed by Hugh Trevor-Roper, the historian called in to verify whether the Backhouse memoirs were true or not. Trevor-Roper was later duped by the Hitler Diaries, of which he said: “I know his signature, I know Hitler’s handwriting … the directors of Stern [who unearthed the diaries], one must assume, do not engage in forgery.” Except they did. Or, rather, were eager to pay someone who did. Even though Trevor-Roper changed his mind a week later about the authenticity of the diaries, the fact remained: in the first instance he got it wrong.

  Trevor-Roper had a hard job proving the inauthenticity of Backhouse’s memoirs, because every event referred to has an alibi. Even Backhouse’s first meeting with the dowager empress is covered. He returns cartloads of loot he saved after the relief of the legations—she is grateful and their intimacy proceeds apace. But Backhouse realizes that these carts would have been seen by someone, so he sets the day of their delivery as that of the Peking horse races, which every single foreigner would have attended. A fortunate coincidence, but only a liar would draw it to our attention. His protests of innocence and his “alibis” would work in a conversation, momentarily glossing over the uncomfortable extravagance of his assertions. In print they soon become a screamingly obvious cover-up.

  But there was no proof that Backhouse had lied. Any instinct for the truth has to be backed up by proof, or else we begin to doubt our own instincts. So we learn to trust proof rather than ourselves. Our instincts, like any unused skill, go into abeyance. Paradoxically, then, the Western obsession with evidence serves to undermine our own attempts to become sensitive to, and practiced at, discerning the truth.

  After months spent unearthing scams and duplicities in Backhouse’s eventful life, Trevor-Roper was even more convinced that Backhouse was a compulsive liar. The lies he told were well camouflaged, but eventually official documents showed up inconsistencies. Trevor-Roper at last had his proof. After a thorough perusal of Backhouse’s “grotesque sexual obsessions,” Trevor-Roper announced them to be “pure fantasy throughout.” Trevor-Roper also disapproved: “No verve in the writing can redeem their pathological obscenity.” This is prudery. The memoirs are designed to impress and amuse:

  At school, I recall how Winston Churchill, when being flogged, as very frequently occurred, would vociferate and flinch in coward poltroonery almost before he was hit; while other boys (including myself) bore the chastisement without a groan or the least sign of flinching.

  Or:

  My bizarre affinities amused her [the dowager empress]; my homosexuality, amoral, totally uncurbed by ordinary standards, and its concomitant manoeuvres, masochismus, Sadismus, pedi-catio, fellatio, irrumatic, anal titillation and osculation, labial evolutions (as of a bacchanal or Menade), which some might not, ay, could not, savour, all these appealed to her temperament, as they assuredly did to Li Lien Ying [the chief eunuch], himself a would-be protagonist in such of my amorous “business” as (alas! in the scanty degree available to a eunuch s restriction) was feasible to him.

  Or:

  She [the dowager empress—who was in her seventies at the time] loved to pursue a sort of anal connexion with myself by means of her unusually long and erect clitoris, when she was not inserting her long-nailed index finger (at least four inches long) in my proctal cavity. It may be that other foreign devils would have hesitated to allow such liberties even from T’zu-hsi

  I was bunking off and knew it. Often I’d glance at my watch and make feeble resolutions about when I’d finish reading this filth and start in on the real research; which, of course, was vaguely elsewhere.

  FARM PLAN

  PEOPLE USE different rules of thumb for guessing at the truth of a story. One is the boring = true, interesting = false school. The Hitler Diaries were tediously lacking in bedroom details about Eva Braun, and therefore were more likely to be true than a sexy romp through the wolf’s lair.

  If the truth really is dull, or too complicated, then a mendacious but exciting story will always displace it. That is the power of the Backhouses of this world. Our reaction in the West to this is interesting. It is to throw up our arms in dismay and to castigate the storytellers, the “frauds,” as we like to call them.

  Another reaction might be to use the experience to hone our ability to discern fact from fiction. Since truth survives not by telling truthful stories but through developing our instinct for the true.

  PUB

  KLAUDIA TELEPHONED and said that she would be passing through Oxford on her way back from a literary festival. She suggested that the Novelist and I meet her in “one of Oxford’s great little pubs.”

  It was a timeless summer afternoon, the kind of afternoon that is done nowhere better than Oxford. I cycled down South Parks Road to get to the King’s Arms, past the big iron railings that curve around the University Parks, the flowering trees spilling out a civilized country feeling onto the dry gray tarmac along which my wheels easily turned. Students walked under horse chestnuts dark with foliage, which only recently had been bare branches. Now there was a church-path dimness caused by leaves overburdening ancient outward-leaning walls. And out of this dark tunnel I bicycled into the puddle of light outside the pub, where a forgivable mess of students crammed round two heavy bench-tables with crisp wrappers tightly rolled and jammed into gaps between the planks on top.

  The Novelist was inside. He preferred inside. He particularly liked a back room that was favored, I remembered from my student days, by codgers and odd dons, those with a drink problem. Things had changed. Klaudia and the Novelist were in the narrow, dark, far end of the back room. Instead of the codgers, there was a table of seven girls penning them in. Getting a drink entailed pushing past this annoying table of seven giddy girls drinking pints of lager.

  Since the Novelist was higher up the global pecking order than me, I sat meekly as he and Klaudia talked cryptically about his next novel. From what I could glean, I understood that the new novel might have something to do with Latvia; or perhaps not, since I knew that that was one country the Novelist had never visited. Post breakthrough, it would have to be mega to stop the inevitable backlash, but such thoughts were far from everyone’s mind on that sunny afternoon.

  I told Klaudia about the Pyrenees and Père David and she agreed I was on the right trail. She asked me when I was off to America, to the exotic game ranch. I said soon. “And China after that, I do envy you,” she said. I signaled my agreement by nodding vigorously, though this wasn’t exactly true. With our child about to be born, my mind was fully occupied—so fully occupied that I was hardly writing at all, and I couldn’t even contemplate traveling to another country.

  And I certainly didn’t tell Klaudia my qualms, my darkest fears about the wall I kept circling and could never push through or see over. I knew even as I spoke that America and China were just so much more lateral movement, displacement, side stories. We want things to go forward, but history, I was learning, always went sideways.

  I had hoped we could spend the afternoon like students, drinking and talking about all kinds of interesting things, but the Novelist had to do some research in the Bodleian for his new novel and Klaudia had to get back to her office in London. They left me on my own with a pint of Guinness, sun shining in through the tiny leaded windows and the giddy girls shrieking with laughter.

  EGYPT V

  WITH MY gnawing hunger and a sense of growing defeat, I redoubled my efforts to find secondhand hooks. I did not believe the Lonely Planet guide. Somewhere in Egypt I knew there were books waiting for me.


  We made an excursion out to Fayoum, an oasis near Cairo, and it was there that I first heard about Ezbekiya Gardens.

  We were visiting a friend of a friend, a famous film director who owned a Hasan Fathi—designed villa right on the lake at Fayoum. That’s the good thing about Egypt—famous film directors don’t hide themselves away. If you want to meet them, you can.

  When we arrived I was glad to get out of the car. There had been four accidents on the desert road. Driving past one wrecked car I had seen something wrapped in torn newspaper. It was a dead body lying by the roadside.

  The director made my wife a coffee in the little bare kitchen. The rest of the house was equally empty. There weren’t even carpets on the cold stone floors. He sat in a soft black leather armchair and we sat on a soft black leather sofa, and that was about all the furniture in the whole place.

  The director talked about making films in Egypt. He said that the real skill was being able to get a caterer who actually brought food, actors who actually turned up, a power supply that didn’t pack up, lights that didn’t blow. He said it had taken him fifteen years just to learn how to get things done. Compared to these skills, the artistic side was nothing.

  I didn’t want to comment on the lack of books, in case it sounded rude or high-handed. But in the end he brought the subject up himself.

  “I don’t have any books, you can see. That way, if I’m raided they haven’t got anything on me. It’s all in here” he said, tapping his graying temple.

  I knew the director had been in prison briefly during Sadat’s clampdown in the early eighties, but I thought he had long given up Communism. He drove a new BMW, owned a holiday villa, and directed films that were released on the commercial circuit.