by Ian Buruma
Apart from the family lore, my knowledge came mostly from British comic books, which celebrated the heroic feats of little blond boys in shorts and striped blazers. The most heroic ones looked a bit like my friend Victor. They represented a fanciful world, but it was the only one I knew. Perhaps they helped English boys put up with the hardships of boarding school life by making it seem exciting and patriotic and helped those fortunate or unfortunate enough to be spared the experience to enjoy it vicariously. The difference between the heroic schoolboys, winning games against all odds through sheer pluck and native valor, and the Spitfire pilots featured in the same comic books was negligible. They were part of the same imaginary world in which British is best, Germans are both funny and wicked, and all other foreigners just funny.
Some of this stuff—Billy Bunter comics, for example, or the Biggies stories, or books about a schoolboy named Jennings—was translated into Dutch and widely read. I don’t think anyone was put off by the chauvinism. After all, we also thought Germans were wicked (though not necessarily funny), and it was soon enough after the war to bask in the afterglow of Anglo-Saxon triumphalism without a feeling of absurdity or distaste. I find it hard to imagine English boys reading comics about French heroics. Maybe it is all to do with the war. But it is also the fate of those growing up in small nations to share in the jingoism of larger ones.
But no one, to my knowledge, read Tom Brown’s School Days except me. I took to it in the way some young girls take to books about horses. This idealized account of life at Rugby School in the 1830s represented a glimpse of heaven. Thomas Hughes wisely kept Dr. Thomas Arnold, the formidable headmaster, in the background. He must have realized that Arnold’s earnest preaching about “muscular Christianity” and saving boys from the clutches of Satan would be unattractive to most of his young readers. Sex and violence, on the other hand, are always appealing. On one level, Tom Brown’s School Days belongs to the same fascinating category as movies about prisons: males fighting for survival in a cage.
The story of Tom Brown, entering the strange world of Rugby, learning its secrets and codes, being bullied by Flashman, worshiping old Brooke, taking care of sensitive George Arthur, and winning the cricket match for his house, is exotic—especially to those who never went to boarding school—yet not so outlandish that one can’t identify with the characters. There is enough violence—the bullying, the boxing, the “fagging,” the caning—to satisfy a child’s thirst for blood. And the master-slave relations between senior boys and their “fags” have an erotic charge that I’m not sure Hughes intended, but I certainly felt as a boy, without quite grasping why.
Here was a world of perfect order, with a clear hierarchy and a moral code. Like a prison, it was a cloistered universe, governed largely by the senior inmates, a boys’ Utopia, with its own language, customs, rules, and government. Villains, like Flashman, threaten to upset the social order, but heroes, like Tom, always prevail. To me, Tom’s world was at once vivid and fantastical, like all great romantic epics. The adults are peripheral, or, like the Greek gods, they influence the actions of mortals only from the distance of their Olympian heights. Nothing is better designed to appeal to an insecure, rather philistine schoolboy whose longing for freedom is matched by a need for rules, a code of behavior, and heroic role models. The fact that this boyish Utopia was English was an added bonus.
I loved Tom Brown’s School Days because it was a story about good and evil in a boys’ world. But for me it was more than a moral parable. I took an almost anthropological interest in Tom Brown’s Rugby. I wanted to decode it, know all its rituals and customs. Accumulating useless expertise about English schoolboy life was a way to distinguish myself from my peers. Arcane knowledge was a way to be different, to hold a kind of power, even if the others didn’t know it. Just as American geography—Memphis, Nashville, Route 66—can take on a sexy, iconic significance for European lovers of rock and roll, the names of public schools had a magical ring: Marlborough, Winchester, Charterhouse …
Long after the magic had worn off, on a bleak December day in 1996, I actually went to Rugby. I parked my car opposite the school library, where a pale statue of Thomas Hughes stands guard, holding a flamboyant piece of headgear, rather like a cowboy hat. The grass on the rugby field was frozen hard. An icy wind was blowing in a gray sky. My mind drifted back to the interminable football games I had to endure as a boy, mostly inactive, far from the ball, my hands numb with cold. My friend Victor also took part in these games, but he was faster and warmed by action. Near Thomas Hughes, on the edge of the playing field, was a small hill. The librarian, Mr. Maclean, a friendly, bearded man, dressed in jeans, told me this was called the Island. There used to be a moat around the Island. In 1797, the year of the French Revolution, the Island had been the scene of a minor rebellion.
The school was a brutal place then, under a headmaster called Dr. Ingles. There was a portrait of him cut into the stained glass windows in School House: a long, aquiline face, a feeble mouth, and small, humorless eyes. He was loathed by the boys and not much liked by the masters. Terror and an ever-expanding number of rules were his tools for keeping order. Beatings were frequent and administered with unusual ferocity.
So the rebellion against his regime must have been the result of a long string of grievances. The particular incident that sparked it off, however, was a small explosion outside the school gate. One of the boys had let off a firecracker. Dr. Ingles heard about it and accused the culprit of making his own explosives. The boy denied it and said he had bought the cracker at a nearby shop. The shopkeeper, who supplied the school, naturally claimed innocence, and the boy was told he would be expelled.
The senior boys were furious. It was too unfair! The “Beak” was a brute! Something had to be done! And so the rebellion began. The Island became the rebel campaign headquarters. The masters found convenient excuses to look the other way. Dr. Ingles, screaming with rage, was left to handle the incident himself. When the boys continued to occupy the Island, Dr. Ingles, reduced now to a state of babbling hysteria, called in the local militia. The armed townsmen, glad to show off their prowess against the haughty young gentlemen of the school, read the Riot Act—the last time this was done in British history, according to Mr. Maclean. When the boys still refused to move, the moat was forded, guns went off, and bones were broken. That was the end of the Rugby rebellion. The boy was expelled, and Dr. Ingles stayed on.
Rugby School is fairly typical of its kind: a mishmash of Victorian Gothic buildings around a quadrangle, porridge-colored walls, and a towering redbrick chapel by Butterfield, the specialist in this kind of thing. It was the chapel I had mainly come to see. For I wanted to stand on the spot where, in 1883, Pierre, baron de Coubertin, Rénovateur of the modern Olympic Games, fell on his knees on Dr. Arnold’s tomb and had his extraordinary vision. By promoting the régime arnoldien, by teaching French boys to play cricket, by making French schools more like Eton, Marlborough, or Rugby, he, Pierre de Coubertin, would “rebronze” French manhood and thus reinvigorate the French nation, which was badly in need of rebronzing after its humiliating military defeat against Prussia in 1871.
Inside, the chapel, with its predominance of orange and brown tiles, looked a bit like a jar of marmalade. The milky light outside barely penetrated the stained-glass window above me, which depicted the Resurrection, in memory of the old boys who had fallen for Queen and Empire while putting down the Indian Mutiny of 1857. Mr. Maclean showed me Dr. Arnold’s tombstone set in the marble floor: a small, gray granite square with nothing but the doctor’s name engraved on its shiny surface. According to his own account, the sight of this unremarkable slab brought the French baron to a state of rapture. He heard a young boy, “blonde with the face of a cherub,” sing psalms, as two older boys, dressed in white flannel suits, stood by, listening in silence. He raised his eyes to Dr. Arnold’s monument, an overdecorated Gothic affair, in the center of which was a marble sculpture of the doctor’s corpse, his hands fol
ded in prayer. Coubertin was in ecstasy as he gazed at the hands—“large, thin, nervous” hands, “which were not made to be cast in rigid stone.” Here he was at last, in the sacred heart of the place where the English gentleman was made, here, in this school, by this great man, Dr. Arnold. Effortless Anglo-Saxon superiority was molded by his magisterial hands. Worshiping at the doctor’s tomb with one more lingering look, Coubertin fancied that he saw in front of him the “cornerstone of the British Empire.”
Next I was shown the place where Flashman roasted Tom Brown half to death by pressing him to the mantelpiece over a fire. And I saw the slender tower where the doctor flogged the most mischievous boys in the privacy of his study. We passed the cricket ground, where Tom, on the last day of school, captained School House to victory. And I was shown the old wooden desk tops, the color of dark beer, with the names of countless boys carved in them. I noticed the name Chamberlain and later saw the words “Peace for our time” written on the wall of the school museum, as though they were heroic words.
We ended up at the museum souvenir shop, where Mr. Maclean took his place behind the cash register. There were postcards and copies of Tom Brown’s School Days and poetry books by Rupert Brooke (an Old Boy), but nothing by Salman Rushdie, who had been unhappy at the school. I could buy rugby football shirts with the school colors and striped neckties with the school coat of arms. There were Rugby School pencils and Rugby School fountain pens. A tea towel with the Rugby football rules. And Rugby School teaspoons. It seemed a sensible way for the school to make some extra money. But, for me, after all these years, the mystery had gone. Once these items would have contained magic. Now they were just souvenirs, like the usual tat on sale at English Heritage or National Trust venues.
I returned to London, where I had to pick up my daughter from her North London school. She was waiting for me, dressed in her school uniform: blazer and school badge, school tie and gray flannel skirt. The school was a typical product of the Thatcher era: a few enterprising women had started it in a few rooms on the second floor of an office building in Tufnell Park, to provide traditional English education. About half the girls were Jewish or of Indian origin, but they all sang hymns. To foster competition in sports, and in the classroom, the school was divided into houses, even though there were no houses. Silver cups, named after Old Girls whose parents had sponsored them, were awarded for academic and sporting achievements. The largest cup, for “creative writing,” was donated by a tabloid reporter who had made his fortune exposing scandals in the royal family.
All the trappings of British school tradition, so painstakingly re-created by the entrepreneurial headmistress, were familiar to me. And yet, as I stood up after the Christmas play, together with the other parents, to sing (or pretend to sing) “Jerusalem,” I never felt more like an outsider in a society that manages, generation after generation, to mimic itself.
CHAPTER
EIGHT
A SPORTING MAN
PIERRE, BARON DE COUBERTIN (1863–1937) CAME OF AGE at the height of the gentlemanly cult. His idea of reinvigorating the French through a regime of cold baths and cricket was unusual. But the fortunes of France were low and Britain seemed invincible. Coubertin was not the only French Anglomane of his time, nor perhaps even the most influential, but his particular ideal of the English gentleman as the great sportsman ruling the world became a model that lasted, in many different places, to this day.
Coubertin was the first organizer of the modern Olympic Games, hence his unofficial title of le Rénovateur. Without him, there would be no Olympics. He founded the International Olympic Committee, consisting mostly of gentlemen with fancy titles eating their way through rich and interminable dinners. I was present at the Olympic games in Seoul, in 1986, and remember seeing the various national Olympic Committee members, and other sporting grandees, hanging about the restaurants of the fancier hotels. And I noticed something odd: the poorer the country, the fatter and more expensively dressed its representatives would be. And I noticed something else: all the grandees, the sleek, gold-Rolexed Bangladeshis and Ugandans, as well as the more modest Swedes and Japanese, were dressed like stage Englishmen: blue blazers, club ties, brown suede shoes. Some of them ruled their countries; all of them pretended to be ruling the world.
Coubertin was born in Paris on New Year’s Day 1863. The Coubertin hôtel at 20 rue Oudinot tried hard to live up to the pretensions of a family with noble bloodlines stretching to the early fifteenth century: huge rooms, fine Louis XIV furniture, the well-thumbed Almanach de Gotha readily to hand, and large historical paintings on the walls. Some of these were by Pierre’s father, Charles Frédy, baron de Coubertin. There was in the hall a great tableau painted by him of an illustrious sixteenth-century ancestor offering a marble Laocoön to Pope Leo X. (Pierre’s nursery was more modestly decorated with English sporting prints.)
By the time Pierre arrived in this world, the grandeur of the Coubertins was largely a matter of presentation. The old baron was not a man of great consequence, but his appearance was splendid: tall, blue-eyed, bearded—the sort of man who looked good on a horse. Pierre, on the other hand, was unusually small, with piercing dark eyes in an oddly lopsided face, whose symmetry was hardly restored by his luxuriant mustache. The mustache, which protruded from his face like two foxtails spliced together, made him look even smaller. You could have mistaken him for an Italian ice-cream vendor.
Baron Charles Frédy had some modest success as an artist: an honorable mention at the Salon of 1861; commissions from various churches; a sale to Napoleon III, whom he detested as a vulgar upstart. He went in for grand historical or religious themes, celebrating nobility, the classical heritage, and the Church. The titles give us a flavor of his work: “Promenades of a Roman Cardinal,” “The Pontifical Cortege,” “The Martyr’s Last Mass.”
Pierre’s mother, Agathe, was even more pious than her husband and made sure that her four children were perpetually surrounded by images of bleeding martyrs. As toys for the children, she selected chalices and altar candles. Hers was an aristocratic and deeply conservative Catholicism. Much attention was paid to good works in the spirit of noblesse oblige. From the family château, she dispensed her homemade medicines to the deserving poor, who lined up at the door, holding up their ragged children for her inspection. This practice came to an end, however, when a “radical” young doctor with modern ideas denounced her as a quack.
It was a sign of changing times. Professionalism was replacing patronage. And the Coubertins were not born to be professionals. Pierre’s ambition in life was always to be a patron. But even as a child his parents’ views struck him as antiquated. They were so conservative that Agathe’s uncle, a priest, was considered beyond the pale for being a disciple of a liberal cleric named Félicité Robert de Lamennais, whom the family regarded as a dangerous free-thinker. After his death, the uncle’s letters were burnt, and the family fasted in atonement for his sins on the anniversaries of his birth.
Of course the Coubertins were staunch legitimists. That is, they prayed every day for the return to France of the Bourbon pretender, the count of Chambord, whose throne had been usurped by Louis Philippe, duc d’Orléans, in 1830. Louis Philippe, the “Citizen King,” was swept away by the 1848 revolution and succeeded on the throne by Emperor Napoleon III, after a coup d’état in 1851. The count of Chambord, whom the Coubertins insisted on calling King Henri V, had been living in exile in Austria since 1830, brooding over the twin evils of the French Revolution and constitutional government. His birthday was observed religiously by the Coubertins.
When Pierre met the exiled count, in 1879, any chance of a comeback had been ruined by the pretender’s insistence that he should be welcomed as an absolute ruler under the Bourbon fleur-de-lis, and not the detested tricolore. Pierre was sixteen at the time. The Coubertins had traveled all the way to the village of Frohsdorf, in the Austrian Tyrol, for an audience with “le roi.” Visiting grandees was to be a lifetime occupation for Pierre
, but this occasion proved a disappointment. Pierre thought the count had the “face of a melancholy and resigned Flaubert.” The morose pretender, cursing the republican age, was pathetically out of touch, overtaken by history, without a role to play, but then so in a way were the Coubertins, and indeed most other French aristocrats.
Pierre grew up in the sour and violent atmosphere of national humiliation. Napoleon III had been foolish enough to declare war on Prussia in 1870. This fit of imperial hubris was quickly punished. The French army was crushed at Sedan, Napoleon was taken prisoner, mobs flooded the streets of Paris, and a republic was proclaimed once more. Peace was exacted in 1871 on German terms, only to be followed weeks later by the uprising of the Paris Commune. The people of Paris rebelled against the monarchists, who still dominated the Assembly. British tourists peered through their lorgnettes at the thrilling sight of the Louvre and the Tuileries on fire. Two generals were lynched in Montmartre. And after a last stand against government troops at the Père Lachaise cemetery, twenty thousand Communards lay dead. Monarchists and bourgeois liberals were happy to see order imposed, but royal restoration failed to materialize, and the Republic became more republican by the year. By the time Pierre went to college, the nobles had nothing left but memories of old glory, usually sweetened by enough cash to hang around the Jockey Club and keep their mistresses from the Folies-Bergère in some style.
Pierre reacted against his aristocratic breeding by being a bit of a rebel himself, even though in many respects, not least in his taste for pomp and pageantry, he would remain true to his roots. He became fascinated by his great-uncle, the unmentionable priest, and laid flowers on his grave. Agathe was outraged. And when he suggested they celebrate the unmentionable’s birthday with a mass, there was a family crisis. Pierre also secretly took up boxing, an unusual sport in that it was both English and distinctly proletarian. And his politics, too, were designed to provoke his parents. Pierre proposed that Léon Gambetta, the radical republican who became minister of war after the Germans arrested the French emperor, was a patriot. Worse than that, Pierre refused to rule out a glorious future even for a republican France.
