by Rebecca West
Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Introduction
Journey
Journey
Croatia
Zagreb I
Zagreb II
Zagreb III
Shestine
Two Castles
Zagreb IV
Zagreb V
Zagreb VI
Zagreb VII
Dalmatia
Sushak
Senj
Rab
Split I
Split II
Salonæ
Trogir
Split III
Korchula I
Korchula II
Dubrovnik (Ragusa) I
Expedition
I. Tsavtat
II. Perast
III. Kotor
IV. Home by Gruda
Dubrovnik II
Herzegovina
Trebinye
Mostar
Bosnia
Bosnia
Sarajevo I
Sarajevo II
Sarajevo III
Sarajevo IV
Sarajevo V
Sarajevo VI
Sarajevo VII
Ilidzhe
Treboviche
Travnik
Yaitse (Jajce) I
Yaitse (Jajce) II
Yaitse (Jajce) III
Yezero
Sarajevo VIII
Serbia
Serbia
Belgrade I
Belgrade II
Topola
Franzstal
Frushka Gora
Belgrade III
Belgrade IV
Belgrade V
Belgrade VI
Belgrade VII
Belgrade VIII
Belgrade IX
Macedonia
Skoplje I
Skoplje II
Skoplje III
Matka
Skoplje’s Black Mountain
A Convent Somewhere below the Skopska Tserna Gora
Bardovtsi
Neresi
Ochrid I
Ochrid II
Ochrid III
Ochrid IV
Afternoon at Struga
Sveti Naum
Ochrid V
Bitolj I
Kaimakshalan
Bitolj II
Skoplje
St George’s Eve: I
St. George’s Eve: II
Old Serbia
The Plain of Kossovo I
Grachanitsa I
Prishtina
Plain of Kossovo II
Kossovska Mitrovitsa I
Kossovska Mitrovitsa II
Petch I
Petch II
Montenegro
Montenegro
Kolashin
Podgoritsa
Lake Scutari
Tsetinye I
Tsetinye II
Budva
Epilogue
Bibliography
Index
FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE
BLACK LAMB AND GREY FALCON
REBECCA WEST, novelist, biographer, journalist, and critic, was one of the twentieth century’s most brilliant and forceful writers. Born Cicily Isabel Fairfield on December 21, 1892, she was educated at George Watson’s Ladies College. She adopted the nom de plume Rebecca West from Ibsen’s Rosmerholm, in which she once appeared. At an early age she threw herself into the suffragette movement and in 1911 joined the staff of the Freewoman and in the following year became a political writer on the socialist newspaper the Clarion. Her love affair with the novelist H. G. Wells began in 1913 and lasted for ten, not always happy, years. Their son, Anthony West, her only child, was born in 1914. After the break with Wells she went to America, where she lectured and formed what was to be a long association reviewing for the New York Herald-Tribune. In 1930 she married Henry Maxwell Andrews, a banker, and they lived in Buckinghamshire until his death in 1968, after which Rebecca West moved to London.
Her first published book was a critical study of Henry James, her second a novel, The Return of the Soldier (1918), which was made into a successful film. She published eight novels including The Judge (1922), Harriet Hume (1929), and the largely autobiographical The Fountain Overflows (1957). Her last novel, The Birds Fall Down (1966), was adapted for BBC television in 1978. In the midthirties she made several trips to the Balkans in order to gather material for a travel book. But her interest in the subject deepened and she returned to the area many times to collect more material. The result was her masterpiece, Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, published in 1941 in two volumes. In her obituary, The Times (London) remarked of this work that it “was immediately recognized as a magnum opus, as astonishing in its range, in the subtlety and power of its judgment, as it is brilliant in expression.” As a result of the book’s publication, she was invited during the war to superintend the BBC broadcasts to Yugoslavia. After the war she was present at the Nuremberg Trials, and her account of these and of other trials that arose out of the relation of the individual to the state were published in two books, The Meaning of Treason (1949) and A Train of Powder (1955).
She was created a CBE in 1949 and advanced to a DBE (Dame Commander, Order of the British Empire) in 1959. In 1957 she was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honour, in 1968 a Companion of Literature, and in 1972 an Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died on March 15, 1983, at the age of ninety. In a tribute to her, Edward Crankshaw wrote, “Rebecca West was so much a part of this century that now that she has gone it seems almost as though the century itself were over.”
CHRISTOPHER HITCHENS is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a book critic for the Atlantic Monthly. He is the author of studies of Thomas Jefferson, George Orwell, Henry Kissinger, and Mother Teresa, and has published three volumes of essays and criticism. He is a professor of liberal studies at the New School in New York.
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First published in the United States of America in two volumes by the Viking Press 1941
Published in one volume by The Viking Press 1943
Published in a Viking Compass edition 1964
Published in Penguin Books 1982
This edition with an introduction by Christopher Hitchens published 2007
Copyright Rebecca West, 1940, 1941
Copyright renewed Rebecca West, 1968, 1969
Introduction copyright © Christopher Hitchens, 2007
All rights reserved
Portions of this work were first published in The Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Bazaar.
LIBRA
RY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA
West, Rebecca, 1892-1983.
Black lamb and grey falcon / Rebecca West; introduction by Christopher Hitchens.
p. cm.—(Penguin Classics)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
eISBN : 978-1-101-04268-7
1. Yugoslavia—Description and travel. 2. Yugoslavia—History. I. Hitchens, Christopher.
II. Title.
DR1221.R43B55 2007
914.9704’21—dc22 2006050726
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TO MY FRIENDS IN YUGOSLAVIA, WHO ARE NOW ALL DEAD OR ENSLAVED
Grant to them the Fatherland of their desire, and make them again citizens of Paradise.
Note on Pronunciation
The spelling of Yugoslavian names presents a serious problem. The Serbo-Croat language is spoken in all parts of Yugoslavia described in this book; but to write it the Serbs use the Cyrillic alphabet (which is much the same as the Russian, but simpler) and the Croats use the Latin alphabet. Most foreign writers on Yugoslavia follow the Croatian spelling, but this is not satisfactory. The Cyrillic alphabet is designed to give a perfect phonetic rendering of the Slav group of languages, and provides characters for several consonants which other groups lack. The Latin alphabet can only represent these consonants by clapping accents on other consonants which bear some resemblance to them; and the Croatian usage still further confuses the English eye by using “c” to represent not “s” and “k” but “ts,” and “j” for “y.” I have found that in practice the casual English reader is baffled by this unfamiliar use of what looks familiar and is apt to pass over names without grasping them clearly. I have therefore done my best to transliterate all Yugoslavian names into forms most likely to convey the sound of them to English ears. Cetinje is written here as Tsetinye, Jajce as Yaitse, Pec as Petch, Šestinje as Shestinye. Kosovo I have written Kossovo, though the Serbo-Croat language uses no double consonants, because we take them as a sign that the preceding vowel is short.
This is a rough and ready method, and at certain points it has broken down. The Cyrillic alphabet provides special characters for representing liquid consonants; the Latin alphabet can only indicate these by adding “j” to the consonant, and this is extremely confusing at the end of a word. In pronouncing “Senj” the speaker says “Sen,” then starts to says a “y” sound, and stops half-way. The English reader, seeing “Senj,” pronounces it “Senge” to rhyme with “Penge.” But the spelling “Seny” makes him pronounce it as a disyllable; and if the suggestion of the Royal Geographical Society is adopted and the word is spelled “Sen’ ” he is apt for some strange reason to interpret this sign as a Scotch “ch.” I have therefore regarded the problem as insoluble, and have left such words spelt in the Croatian fashion, with the hope that readers will take the presence of the letter “j” as warning that there are dark phonetic doings afoot. In “Bitolj,” I may add, the “I” has almost entirely disappeared, having only a short “y” sound.
I have also given up any attempt to transliterate “Sarajevo” or “Skoplje.” For one thing “Sarajevo” is a tragically familiar form; and for another, it is not a pure Slav word, and has the Turkish word “sarai,” a fortress, embedded in it, with a result hardly to be conveyed by any but a most uncouth spelling. It is pronounced something like “Sa-raï-ye-vo,” with a faint accent on the second syllable, and a short “e.” As for “Skoplje,” the one way one must not pronounce it is the way the English reader will certainly pronounce it if it is spelt “Skoplye.” The “o” is short, and all the letters after it are combined into a single sound. I have committed another irregularity by putting an “e” into the word “Tsrna,” so often found in place-names. This makes it easier for the English reader to grasp that the vowel sound in the rolled “r” comes before it and not after.
R. W
J‘exige un vrai bonheur, un vrai amour, une vraie contrée où le soleil alterne avec la lune, où les saisons se déroulent en ordre, où de vrais arbres portent de vrais fruits, où de vrais poissons habitent les rivières, et de vrais oiseaux le ciel, où la vraie neige découvre de vraies fleurs, où tout sort est vrai, vrai, veritable. J’en ai assez de cette lumière morne, de ces campagnes stériles, sans jour, sans nuit, où ne survivent que les bêtes féroces et rapaces, où les lois de la nature ne fonctionnent plus.
JEAN COCTEAU: Les Chevaliers de la Table Ronde
Fluellen: I think it is in Macedon where Alexander is born. I tell you, captain, if you look in the maps of the‘orld, I warrant you salt find, in the comparisons between Macedon and Monmouth, that the situations, look you, is both alike. There is a river in Macedon; and there is also moreover a river at Monmouth: it is called Wye at Monmouth; but it is out of my brains what is the name of the other river; but ’tis all one, ‘tis alike as my fingers is to my fingers, and there is salmons in both.
SHAKESPEARE: King Henry the Fifth
Introduction
More than a decade ago, at the height of the Balkan wars of the 1990s that succeeded the disintegration or “fall” or “destruction” of Yugoslavia (and so much then hung upon which of the preceding terms one chose to employ for that bloody catastrophe), I returned from a voyage to Macedonia to attend a meeting for Yugoslav democrats at the Cooper Union in New York City. Here I was, under the roof where Abraham Lincoln himself had spoken of union and of the consequences of disunion, and I remember the shiver with which I stood on the same podium to give my own little speech. At a bookstall, I picked up a copy of Ivo Andric’s classic The Bridge on the Drina, and a few other texts I had read or desired to reread, and then hesitated over the book that you now hold in your hands.
I know, in other words, what you may be thinking: more than eleven hundred pages of densely wrought text, concerning what Neville Chamberlain once called, in the same context but another reference, “a faraway country of which we know nothing.” Not just far away in point of distance, either, but remote in point of time and period: a country that no longer exists, an Atlantis of the mind. (On page 773 of the edition I picked up, West resignedly and pessimistically alludes to “this book, which hardly anyone will read by reason of its length.”) The action of buying it seemed almost antiquarian: like laying out money for the purchase of a large anachronistic device. Nevertheless, having learned from other readings to respect the mind of Rebecca West, I decided on the outlay and have been regarding it as a great bargain ever since.
Imagine that you have, in fact, purchased at least four fine books for the price of one: The first and most ostensible of these volumes is one of the great travel narratives of our time, which seeks to net and analyze one of the most gorgeous and various of ancient and modern societies. The second volume gives an account of the mentality and philosophy of a superbly intelligent woman, whose feminism was above all concerned with the respect for, and the preservation of, true masculinity. The third volume transports any thoughtful or historically minded reader into the vertiginous period between the two World Wars: a time when those with intellectual fortitude could face the fact that the next war would be even more terrible than the last, and who did not flinch from that knowledge. The fourth volume is a meditation on the never-ending strife between the secular and the numinous, the faithful and the skeptical, the sacred and the profane.
The woman who brought off this signal polymathic achievement, based on three separate but interwoven visits to the Balkans and published just as the Second World War was disclosing itself as a conflict of ultimate horror, was born Cicely Fairfield in 1892. She demonstrated early brilliance as a reviewer and journalist, soon adopting the name Rebecca West (the heroin
e of Henrik Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm). Her first published book, a study of Henry James, was issued in 1916 and her first novel, The Return of the Soldier, in 1918. She was thus ideally positioned, in point of age and precocity, to take a hand in the journalistic and critical ferment that followed the Great War. Although inclined to experiment and to the eclectic—she published articles in Wyndham Lewis’s vorticist magazine BLAST in addition to Ford Madox Ford’s English Review—she was no intellectual butterfly and, after a brief flirtation with Garsington and Bloomsbury and the world of Virginia Woolf and Ottoline Morrell, found her natural intellectual home on the freethinking liberal left. She was on terms with George Bernard Shaw and Bertrand Russell while barely out of her teens and continued this pattern by conducting a long “older man” affair with H. G. Wells, by whom she soon had a son, Anthony. Her relationships with men were always to be passionate and distraught and full of misery and infidelity (and they included a fling with Lord Beaverbrook, the power-crazy newspaper tycoon who is the original of Lord Copper in Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop). She managed a long marriage to an English banker (“my husband,” otherwise never named, in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon ), but even while in Yugoslavia with him, as her letters and diaries reveal, she was racked with anxiety about another lover. One has, from most accounts of her very long and tempestuous life, the sense of a brilliant and ambitious but unhappy woman, deeply intellectual and much preoccupied with public affairs, who had to strive extremely hard in a man’s world and who found men both essential and impossible. There is an evocative description of her by Virginia Woolf, who wrote that “she has great vitality: is a broad-browed, very vigorous, distinguished woman, but a buf feter and a battler: has taken the waves, I suppose, and can talk in any language: why then this sense of her being a lit up modern block, floodlit by electricity?”
