by Ian Buruma
Well, that was war. Thesiger might be a cold fish, but that is no reason to condemn him. It is when the killing becomes highly personal and is justified by a kind of warrior code that I begin to feel queasy. The Bedu, nomads of the Arabian desert, represent the kind of life and manners Thesiger most admires. He decided to live with them, to share their hardships and, above all, their comradeship. “I knew I could not match them in physical endurance, but, with my family background, Eton, Oxford, the Sudan Political Service, I did perhaps think I would match them in civilized behaviour.” He admits, though, that even he could not live up to their impossibly high standards.
On the next page we are informed that
inevitably these Bedu had little veneration for human life. In their frequent raids and counter-raids they killed and were killed, and each killing involved the tribe or family in another blood-feud to be settled without mercy—though in no circumstances would they have tortured anyone. I soon acquired the same attitude, and if anyone had killed one of my companions I would unquestionably have sought to avenge him: I have no belief in the “sanctity” of life.
This is where Thesiger’s romanticism, to me, becomes objectionable. To hell with materialist civilization, where men are protected by law and fight out their differences in parliaments; to hell with those “fat little gourmets,” those weak townsmen who choose “that easier life of lesser men”; hurray for the “warrior race,” the “handsome race,” the “savage crew,” the always “happy and cheerful” comrades and their “wild and lawless lives.” What Thesiger admires in his tribal comrades is not simply their colorful customs and friendly disposition, but their worship of physical power. Thesiger is in love with racial macho.
When racial macho dovetails with ideals of racial purity, as it inevitably does in a certain strain of nineteenth-century romanticism, things become truly sinister. Here is Thesiger on the sixteenth-century Muslim invasion of Abyssinia, the country of his birth:
For the first time for more than two thousand years Abyssinia had been invaded, though not conquered, by an alien race. The inhabitants of the country had been decimated, their land ravaged, much of their unique ecclesiastical heritage destroyed; but as a race they had not been mongrelized.
Thesiger’s admiration for this great race knows no bounds. Their former emperor, Haile Selassie, whose reign was not without blemish, is described in the worshipful tones of a true believer (the memoirs are dedicated to his memory). Haile Selassie thought he was the Elect of God. His power, in other words, was based on magic. This is not especially unusual. Nor, alas, is it particularly unusual for Western pilgrims to worship such power. But it is the kind of naïveté (let us assume that that is what it is) that lends support to ghastly abuses, famines and massacres.
His emperor-worship aside, Thesiger is not a very emotional writer. Nor is he especially interested in politics—given his love for ancient tribal ways, he probably detests politics, for it smacks of that lesser life of the cities. He does get excited about some major issues, however, and his sympathies are entirely predictable. The treatment meted out by Mussolini’s forces to the Abyssinians, quite rightly, enraged him. He is equally emphatic in his condemnation of the “intolerable rule” of Jews in Israel. “Seldom,” he tells us, “can a greater wrong have been inflicted on an innocent people.” That Palestinians were not the only innocent people who had been wronged is not worth mentioning. There is one passing reference to a lot of “hysterical Tunisian Jews with the Star of David sewn on their clothes.” Why they were hysterical is left to our imagination. But then the Jews are a mongrelized race, and Israel has built the kind of society Thesiger loathes—all those airplanes, schools and so on.
Thesiger rather disapproves of schools, at least where his tribal comrades are concerned. Eton, of course, was a very fine thing, for him. But Marsh Arabs, we are told, only learn to be discontented with tribal life. Education spoils them forever, for they are no longer people who “know no world other than their own”—one of Thesiger’s conditions for true comradeship.
What, one wonders, was the real nature of this comradeship? Was it sex? After all, the Middle East was favored as a playground by upper-class homosexuals who felt that the price, in guilt or social disgrace, for sex at home was too high. Thesiger disclaims any interest in sex. It is true that, especially in The Marsh Arabs, he shows great enthusiasm for dancing boys and concern for the private parts of young men; he was a master of circumcision, a service much sought after in the Marshes, which he performed with relish. Still, it is entirely possible that sex per se is indeed of little interest to him. Comradeship comes in many forms. British warriors, particularly of the Victorian and Edwardian age, often liked the company of young lads (think of Gordon of Khartoum and his school for runaway boys), without actually, as it were, having them.
One thing is clear: Thesiger has little interest in women. They hardly figure in his writing, or pictures, at all. And when they do, it is often in a derogatory way. Mostly they are passing figures in the background. He describes, in a throwaway line, how women were treated by some of his favorite people, the Amhara in Abyssinia: “The slave woman who brought us food was rewarded with a handful stuffed into her mouth by her master.”
The odd thing about Thesiger’s native comrades is how little his prose brings them alive as individuals. This is especially true of his memoirs. He tells us that he felt deeply about these people—more deeply than about any white men—but he confines his descriptions to the splendidness of their racial stock, their capacity to take hardship and pain (a clue, perhaps?), their always cheerful disposition and so forth. We hear very little about what they were actually like. Maybe the author is being discreet, but a similar discretion, happily, is not applied to fellow English eccentrics.
The extraordinary Lieutenant Colonel Orde Wingate, who helped defeat the Italians in Africa and the Japanese in Burma, is described with a vividness lacking in Thesiger’s sketches of his native friends. Wingate, we learn, would issue orders while brushing his body hair with a toothbrush. Even in the intense African heat, Wingate never washed, but he would sometimes “lower his trousers and cool his bottom in the occasional waterholes, from which, incidentally, others would have to drink.”
Thesiger doesn’t mention the nineteenth-century German novelist Karl May among his favorite authors. Being English, he may not have heard of him, but Thesiger bears an uncanny resemblance to a Karl May hero revered by millions on the European continent: Old Shatterhand. As a child, I used to read about Old Shatterhand’s Wild West adventures in Dutch translation. He seemed a splendid fellow, were it not for the annoying detail that he was German (annoying, that is, for a reader born in the shadow of World War II). Like Thesiger, Old Shatterhand was an eccentric loner; he felt comfortable only in the company of his trusted Indian comrade Winnetou. Like Thesiger, he was happy to help his native friend in killing things. And, like Thesiger, he saw most white men as corrupters of the noble native soul. Old Shatterhand, also, took a voluptuous pleasure in hardship. And, just as Thesiger evokes Eton, Oxford and his proud family lineage as his tribal colors, Karl May’s readers are left in no doubt that Old Shatterhand’s qualities are good German qualities.
May’s romanticism falls well into what the French called the malaise allemand. (His personal malaise took a mystical turn: he invented an imaginary paradise called Dschinnistan, a spiritual Eden without a trace of industry or materialism.) Gordon Craig, in his study The Germans, quotes Nietzsche’s description of this German malaise: “a barbaric and enchanting discharge of ardent and gay colored things from an unrestrained and chaotic soul … an art of exaggeration, of excitement, of antipathy to anything regulated, monotonous, simple and logical.” In other words, something rather like Thesiger’s barbaric splendor, savagery, color and throbbing drums. An even more Thesigerian note is struck by the writer Ludwig Tieck: “Human beings must learn to kill each other. That is nobler than falling through destiny.… Honor, fame, etc. are the warrior’
s pleasure and life.… The desire for death is the warrior-spirit. Romantic life of the warrior …”
Craig explains the German disease as an essentially bourgeois phenomenon. Romanticism served as an escape from the feeling of political impotence. Hence its decline in the heady run-up to the 1848 bourgeois revolution, and its reemergence after the failure thereof. Ultimately, these German dreams culminated in the nightmare of the Third Reich.
Thesiger’s dreams, though related to the German movement, differ in one important respect. The origins of his romanticism, I believe, are not bourgeois but aristocratic. His remark about family, Eton and Oxford infusing him with the standards of behavior that might match those of the Bedu people is revealing. As is his observation that Eton taught him a lasting respect for tradition and a veneration for the past. There is also his interesting comment that he could never convert to Islam, not because he believed in Christianity but because of his family tradition. Most revealing of all is his relationship with the Druze in Lebanon during World War II. Thesiger was “conscious of their pride as a warrior race … I saw myself as their leader rather than their commanding officer.” The Romantic Wandervögel becomes a tribal chieftain.
Thesiger is indeed one of the last of his kind, an aristocrat who has seen his kultur disappear in a world of grubby politicians, vulgar tradesmen, and narrow engineers—in short, the world of those lesser men he so despises. Thesiger has lost his Herrenvolk. The airplane, the tourist and education for all (those ghastly lesser schools) are symbols of the drab uniformity of the modern world, no doubt, but also of the loss of feudal power, of tribal magic and aristocratic droit du seigneur. Happily for Thesiger, he can still find remnants of that old world among the Herrenvolk of Africa and Arabia. The distance from the playing fields of Eton to the hunting fields of the Samburu or the Danakil is not so great after all.
So by all means let us admire Wilfred Thesiger, his adventurism, his crisp prose and his photographs. He is a gifted and courageous explorer and a more than competent writer. But we can still stop short of admiring what he stands for.
1988
Baden-Powell
BOYS WILL BE BOYS
In the famous eighteenth-century Japanese document entitled Hagakure, there is one passage I find particularly arresting. The author, an elderly samurai named Yamamoto Jocho, advises his readers, presumably young followers of Bushido, or The Way of the Samurai, always to “carry rouge and powder with one,” for “after rising in the morning, or after sobering up, we sometimes find that we do not look very good. In such a case we should take out the rouge and put it on.” This, he went on, is especially important when going out to do battle, for one must be beautiful even in death.
Yamamoto wrote this tract setting out the rules of warriorhood at a time when Japanese warriors had little else to do but worry about rules, appearances, style, for the major battles had been fought and the time was set for almost three centuries of uninterrupted peace. The old samurai was evidently worried that peace would sap the manly virtues of the warrior caste, and wished to make sure the young retained their vigor through constant training of body and mind. The inevitable happened: warriorhood without wars was soon reduced to a set of stylish postures, adding another form of theatrical behavior to a period already so rich in dandyism. No wonder Mishima Yukio admired it so.
Lord Baden-Powell, affectionately known as B-P, hero of Mafeking and the World Chief Scout, approved of Japan and of the samurai spirit in particular. There was nothing unusual about this, for many Edwardians found much to admire in a Spartan code that extolled such virtues as self-sacrifice, obedience, bravery and comradeship. The Russo–Japanese war of 1905, when the great Russian bear, so it was thought, was defeated through sheer Japanese pluck, elicited considerable enthusiasm in Britain, and B-P was especially impressed by the way Japanese soldiers were prepared to blow themselves to bits for their emperor and country.
In this, as in so many enthusiasms (building empire, disciplining boys, shooting animals, etc.), Baden-Powell was a man of his time. Less common, perhaps, though by no means completely eccentric, was his love of acting in drag, which he called skirt-dancing. Possibly related to this, and if not then certainly in Yamamoto Jocho’s philosophy, was a curious personal habit noted in Tim Jeal’s superb and exhaustive biography The Boy-Man: The Life of Lord Baden-Powell: even during the partly self-inflicted rigors of roughing it in the African veldt, B-P insisted on using scented soap in his collapsible bathtub.
It is a small detail, but it seems so at odds with B-P’s cultish adherence to what he called “the flannel-shirt life,” that peculiar predilection of hearty English gentlemen to revel in discomfort, and at such complete variance with his often stated fears of effeminacy, that it makes one wonder. Is there a point at which machismo turns into its opposite? And, if so, did B-P, like Yamamoto’s samurai (not to mention Mishima), cross that line?
Jeal’s notes on the Chief Scout’s acting career suggest that he did—rather often, in fact. Baden-Powell was essentially a man of the theater. His was a life of poses, fancy uniforms, strange oaths, flowery speeches, medallions, mottoes and jamborees. The most famous Boy Scout maxim, “Be Prepared,” reflected the Chief’s narcissism. Great military men are often great poseurs, which doesn’t necessarily make them closet sissies, but there does seem to be a lot of muscle-flexing for the benefit of mama. (As in B-P’s own case, there is usually a great mother hovering closely behind our great heroes.) Certainly, skirt-dancing is a venerable masculine tradition in Britain, still carried on in some very rough pubs. And yet, to one not raised in that tradition, some of B-P’s theatrical roles suggest a strong feminine streak in the old scout which, combined with an equally strong fear of females, could help one to explain, without wishing to be too Freudian, his general attitudes to life and politics.
B-P’s theatrical talents were already in evidence as a schoolboy at Charterhouse. His role as the termagant Mrs. Bundle in Charles Dibdin’s ballad opera The Waterman was so much admired that the butler in his house saved part of his dress. In the army one of his more romantic roles, in a production of William Brough’s The Area Belle, was as a guardsman named Tosser who falls in love with Penelope, played by a young officer by the name of Kenneth McLaren, whom B-P judged a “wonderfully good lady.” Tim Jeal’s description of the play is one of the more amusing passages in his book. “I’d choose to be a daisy if I might be a flower,” sang Penelope, as she entered the stage. “Where can Penelope be?” exclaimed the love-struck Tosser. “I am longing to embrace her.” One can be sure that much hearty fun was had by all.
B-P took McLaren under his wing, and would henceforth refer to him affectionately as “the Boy.” This relationship might well have been the closest he ever enjoyed with anyone apart from his mother. When the Boy was captured by the Boers, while B-P was holding the fort at Mafeking, B-P wrote to him daily (such still were wars in those days) and consoled himself by looking at photos of the Boy on his desk. It is hardly surprising, then, that when the Boy finally decided to get married, his wife found little favor in B-P’s eyes. And when B-P himself, after years of procrastination, got married at the age of fifty-five, his bride, Olave, declined to invite the Boy to their wedding. The arrows of jealousy will find their target, even if those of Eros are denied.
Which begs the inevitable question: Was B-P a closet queen? The question has been raised so often, about so many imperial old boys (Kipling, Lawrence, etc.), that this angle has become a bit of a cliché. Still, in B-P’s case the pointers are hard to ignore.
Henrietta Grace, B-P’s mother, was by all accounts rather a monster, who commanded, and duly received, her sons’ absolute devotion, as well as a considerable chunk of their incomes to keep her in the style to which she had accustomed herself. Her main aim in life was what she called “getting on.” Jeal begins his chapter on Henrietta Grace, aptly entitled “That Wonderful Woman,” with a quotation from her most famous son: “The whole secret of my getting on lay with my mo
ther.”
Getting on in British society, then as now, meant doing battle in the class war: in the case of the Baden-Powells, battling to move from middle to upper class. This in itself involved a large amount of theater. The family name, for example: Powell was changed by H.G. to the more distinguished-sounding Baden-Powell (that all-important hyphen) by attaching her husband’s first name, Baden, to his surname. Baden had the added advantage of sounding vaguely Germanic—an advantage because of the German connection of the royals and the then fashionable association with Teutonic vigor. When this association lost its shine later in the century because of Germany’s increasing rivalry with Britain, more stress was laid on the Powell side. H.G. even laid claim to a bloodline that went back to Athelystan Glodrydd, prince of Fferlys, whoever he may have been.
Getting on meant living beyond the family means, but since Mrs. Baden-Powell was absolutely “determined not to make any new friends unless very choice people indeed,” this sacrifice had to be bravely borne. The house in London—indispensable for wining and dining the choicest available—was maintained at vast expense, severely cramping the styles of H.G.’s sons for most of their lives. But it must be said in H.G.’s defense that her strategy paid off: the family, particularly through the efforts of B-P, got on—at the price, of course, of a permanent social neurosis, but that is a common British condition to this day. B-P’s fondness for camping out in Asian deserts and African veldts was a welcome and, in his time, customary respite from the class war back home.
