Surviving

by Henry Green

  When we had had enough we raised the nozzle. We played our jet farther away. In under a minute we were breathing air, a little more and the leader was visible again, attended by three others. Smoke is in a hurry to get away, all we had to contend with now was steam, the smoke was whirling off that wreckage and coming back above our heads, we were clear. He asked us to keep our water still farther off while he got down to find out if he could still hear the man below. It was plain he did not think that he would get an answer. He got into the hole and the smoke. He disappeared, it was deeper than I had thought. His companions crowded round, shining their torches down on the rising well of smoke and steam. He called out, incongruously, ‘Can you hear me, Mr Jonas?’ We waited.

  ‘He’s all right,’ he called back to us, ‘but we’ve got to be quick.’ The others climbed half way down. The torches made it seem as though these men were fighting, half drowned, against a source of water, the smoke came up so solid there.

  They began handing back single pieces of wreckage to others by me whom I had not seen come up, bits of wood, slats, part of a chair. They talked about where to shine their torches. They were all coughing again. They worked in silence for some time. Then the leader said, ‘here, here.’ Then he said, ‘careful now, up here.’ Then he said ‘towards that light.’ Another man said ‘a bit to the left, take it easy,’ and I saw a bald head, then khaki shoulders. He was not coughing. He was getting up alone. Then I saw he was smothered in dust. He was bone dry. It was Mr Jonas. As he came up and out, almost without assistance, we all began talking to him, telling him where to tread. He said absolutely nothing. He climbed right into that archway and disappeared. Coughing, the Rescue men climbed out. They thanked us. There were no more victims below. They also went out through the arch by which we could hear, but not see, others getting Mr Jonas off. Then we were alone.

  Then the firing began again overhead. And then we settled down to the next four hours we reckoned it would take us to put the fire out, or, if not to extinguish it, to leave the job in such a state that it would not break out before we could be relieved. But in spite of anything we could do it spread. In half an hour the deep corner, out of which they had got this man, was a mass of flames. By morning forty pumps were on the job. After twelve hours we were relieved, at half-past nine in the morning. When the other crew took over we had fought our way back to exactly the same spot above that hole out of which, unassisted once he had been released, out of unreality into something temporarily worse, apparently unhurt, but now in all probability suffering from shock, had risen, to live again whoever he might be, this Mr Jonas.

  APOLOGIA

  (Published in No. 4 Folios of New Writing, 1941)

  No discussion of the best, that is the magnificent in written English, is complete without reference to a master of the language, the genius Doughty.

  In 1888 C. M. Doughty published Arabia Deserta, the story in 250,000 words of his travels alone in that country. In an introduction, dated 1921, T. E. Lawrence writes: ‘I have studied it for ten years, and have grown to consider it a book not like other books, but something particular, a bible of its kind.’ He goes on to praise the knowledge shown, the distances covered, and the courage with which Doughty met his difficulties. As the greatest expert on the country, Lawrence continues: ‘When his trial of two years was over he carried away in his note-book (so far as the art of writing can express the art of living) the soul of the desert. . . .’ And towards the end of the introduction he adds: ‘It begins powerfully, written in a style which has apparently neither father nor son, so closely wrought, so tense, so just in word and phrase, that it demands a hard reader. It seems not to have been written easily, but in a few of its pages you learn more of the Arabs than in all that others have written, and the further you go the closer the style seems to cling to the subject, and the more natural it becomes to your taste.’

  Part of the object in quoting Lawrence is to place the way he put his sentences together in direct contrast to this, the opening passage of Arabia Deserta:

  A voice hailed me of an old friend when, first returned from the Peninsula, I paced again in that long street of Damascus which is called Straight; and suddenly taking me wondering by the hand, ‘Tell me (said he), since thou art here again in the peace and assurance of Ullah, and whilst we walk, as in the former years, toward the new blossoming orchards, full of the sweet spring as the garden of God, what moved thee, or how couldst thou take such journeys into the fanatic Arabia?’

  On the five hundred and thirty-ninth page, two paragraphs before the end, we read:

  When the sun was going down from the mid-afternoon height, we set forward: a merry townsman of Mecca, without any fanaticism, and his son, came riding along with us. ‘Rejoice,’ said my travelling companions, ‘for from the next brow we will show thee Jidda.’ – I beheld then the white sea indeed gleaming far under the sun, and tall ships riding and minarets of the town! – My companions looked that I should make jubilee.

  This at the end of one of the great journeys and great escapes of history. He has no word of relief or even of farewell. His last line simply reads:

  On the morrow I was called to the open hospitality of the British Consulate.

  In considering Doughty’s writing, it is necessary to examine his circumstances. He started with no more than two large saddlebags, in one of which was a little money and a stock of medicines which he sold. He went into the heart of a country in which it was held a merit to kill Christians for their faith and fair sport to murder any traveller, whatever his religion, for loot. He set out with no other protection than a revolver and to the last retained a fixed determination, amounting to mania, never to say the few words, no more than ‘There is no God but Allah,’ that would have spared him from this people’s fanaticism. His money he spent, or had stolen from him, before he turned homewards, and while he was yet some weeks away from the safety of the coast, he was destitute, being offered work as a herdsman.

  “ ‘Abide with me, Khalil, till the Haj come and return again, next Spring.” “How might I live those many months? is there food in the khala?” “You may keep my camels.” “But how under the flaming sun, in the long summer season?” “When it is hot thou canst sit in my booth, and drink leban; and I will give thee a wife.” Hearing his words, I rejoiced, that the Arab no longer looked upon me as some rich stranger amongst them!’

  A man’s style is like the clothes he wears, an expression of his personality. But what a man is, also makes the way he writes, as the choice of a shirt goes to make up his appearance which is, essentially, a side of his character. There are fashions in underwear, for the most part unconscious in that we are not particularly aware of how we dress. It is possible to date almost any paragraph within fifty years by the use and juxtaposition of words in it. The more mannered the way of life, as in the eighteenth century, the harder it is to break through the convention to the man beneath. But with Doughty the man’s integrity is such that he writes on his own, if the dates were not available it would be hard to say when. What might be held affectation, his pleasure that he was no longer taken for a rich stranger amongst them, is found to be the expression of a great need he had to get away unnoticed, for, unlike almost any traveller, he had no love for those whose company he chose, so far from the habitation of those others whom, sitting before their coal fires in the month of June, although he never says so, he liked no better, this monumentally lonely man.

  After twelve months, half starved, he gets to Hayil, the stronghold of the Prince Ibn Rashid. No professing Christian had ever reached it, he was the first. Inside the castle building he finds the Emir ‘lying half along upon his elbow, with leaning cushions under him, by his firepit side, where a fire of the desert bushes was burning before him’. After a while the prince desires him to read from a book: ‘ “Where shall I read?” “Begin anywhere at a chapter, – there!” and he pointed with his finger. So I read the place, “The king (such an one) slew all his brethren and kindred.
” It was Sheytan that I had lighted upon such a bloody text; the Emir was visibly moved! and, with the quick feeling of the Arabs, he knew that I regarded him as a murderous man.’ At a later interview when, as he says, ‘full of mortal weariness, I kept silence’, Ibn Rashid was offended, he ‘spoke to me with the light impatient gestures of Arabs not too well pleased, and who play the first parts, – a sudden shooting of the brows, and that shallow extending of the head from the neck, which are of the bird-like inhabitants of nomadic Nejd, and whilst at their every inept word’s end they expect thy answer’.

  Here is none of that adulation with which lesser travellers seek to enhance the extraordinary in a visit to the ruler of the country they have reached. But, with words that exactly describe the awkwardness and the scoundrel in this presence, he gives us a living account of a call on a savage. This use of words is even better illustrated by his version of how he explained telegraphy to the Prince:

  ‘It is a trepidation – therewith we may make certain signs – engendered in the corrosion of metals, by strong medicines like vinegar. ’ Emir: ‘Then it is an operation of medicine, canst thou not declare it?’ – ‘If we may suppose a man laid head and heels between Hayil and Stambul, of such stature that he touched them both; if one burned his feet at Hayil, should he not feel it at the instant in his head, which is at Stambul?’

  In as miraculous a way Doughty puts words together which, entering by our ears if they are read out loud, or slipping by our eyes if they are scanned in print, express their meaning in our bones. And this is not so much by conscious art as by the constraint of his adventure, and is thus created by the character this adventure, this finding of himself, built up in him, who, as a sort of second thought, was the composer of great prose.

  At first sight Doughty’s style seems to be habit. But in his preface to the third edition, in 1921, he says of Arabia:

  We have some evidence, that it was peopled by men even from the beginning of the world, in paleolithic flints chipped to an edge by human hands; which have been found in the flint gravel, at Maan, in Edom.

  The fall in rhythm of the last sentence he would never have attempted in Arabia Deserta. Thus, more than thirty-three years later, he had not lost the idiom of his genius. In this fragment of a hundred words he has added to it.

  Much may have been due to his study of Arabic. But there is little in the writings of others who knew the language to suggest this. T. E. Lawrence, Gertrude Bell and Wilfrid Blunt have an elegance that is too easy but which has in it some notes of that noble phrasing of which we catch echoes in almost any translation from The Arabian Nights, even if it be in eighteenth-century French. We shall not know until we have learned the language. But this much is certain, that Doughty had read deep in the Bible. At the same time he might be writing in Latin. Also, when he passes on a tale, he treats it as a man will granite that he has to fashion.

  There was an holy man who passed the days of his mortality in adoration; so that he forgate to eat. Then the Lord commanded; and the neighbour ants ascending upon his dreaming flesh, continually cast their grains into the saint’s mouth and fostered him.

  He has no elegance, that is, no ease with which to treat of a universal theme. When he mentions women, which he does but seldom, it is with little more than the same reverence and wonder with which he will treat camels.

  She went freshly clad; and her beauty could not be hid by the lurid face clout: yet in these her flowering years of womanhood she remained unwedded! The thin-witted young Annezy men of the North, who sat all day in their skeykh’s beyt, fetched a long breath as oft as she appeared – as it were a dream of their religion – in our sight; and plucking my mantle he would say, ‘Sawest thou the like ere now!’ This sheykhess, when she heard their wonted ohs! and ahs! cast upon them her flagrant great eyes, and smiled without any disdain. – She being in stature as a goddess, yet would there no Beduwy match with her (an Heteymia) in the way of honourable marriage.

  Of camels:

  The bereaved dam wanders, lowing softly, and smelling for her calf; and as she mourns, you shall see her deer-like pupils, say the Arabs, standing full of tears.

  It is impossible, in a short notice, to give sufficient examples of the richness of his prose, its variety, the way he rings the changes, or to dispel a suspicion that his style may have been habit, as with George Moore it did so become in later years.

  There are many who read less for the story than for the mind and feelings of the being who created the book they have chosen. It is not hard to break through Doughty’s convention to the character of the man beneath, indeed his style is so perfectly the expression of his personality that he stands out as though in the harsh sunlight he describes. When Lawrence was out there he found that Doughty was remembered. Writing too easily, he says:

  They tell tales of him, making something of a legend of the tall and impressive figure, very wise and gentle, who came to them like a herald of the outside world. . . . He was very patient, generous and pitiful, to be accepted into their confidence without doubt.

  The question is, why did Doughty ever go to Arabia, in other words, what founded the style, the great edifice of prose which is his mausoleum?

  He was an untrained archaeologist. One of the merits of his book is that he finds almost nothing, certainly nothing of any value if we except, perhaps, the stone at Medain Salih. There are no petty discoveries in his travels, no objets trouvés. The answer must be that he had such a quality in him that he had to get away. And once he was well into the country he could not get out. The last part of his tale, and the most absorbing, is one long recital, between the lines, of growing exhaustion.

  ‘I am slain with weariness and hunger,’ he writes to a friend Kenneyny when stranded at Aneyza, that town outside which, half dead from fatigue at the journey, he had ‘heard then a silver descant of some little bird, that flitting over the desert bushes warbled a musical note which ascended on the gamut! and this so sweetly, that I could not have dreamed the like’. Earlier he had praised ‘the high sweet air of the Nefud’, but he was soon too tired, even by his long halt in the fever-ridden Kheybar. It was in that place that he was befriended by Amm Mohammed en-Nejūmy, of them all the one Arab he respected.

  Amm Mohammed – endowed with extraordinary eyesight – was more than any in this country, a hunter. Sometimes, when he felt himself enfeebled by this winter’s (famine) diet of bare millet, he would sally, soon after the cold midnight, in his bare shirt carrying but his matchlock, and his sandals with him: and he was far off, upon some high place in the Harra, by the day dawning, from whence he might see over the wide vulcanic country.

  Surely Doughty, impatient at the perennial hypocrisy in England, did in his fashion as that Arabian did, and in so doing built himself a prose all writers must venerate. He is harsh, simple to a point of majesty, and not clear, that is his sentences meander. After living many years with the book a suspicion is borne that it was intended to be read aloud. If this is so then it is a fault, for Doughty had so much more than eloquence. There is in it what Henry James has called ‘The effort really to see and really to represent, [which] is no idle business in face of the constant force that makes for muddlement.’ For this reason he makes no heroes of his Arabs, indeed he treats of them as treacherous, fanatical, and light headed. Yet they and their country made him, because they satisfied a need he had, and the combination made this the great book he gave us.

  His style is mannered but he is too great a man to be hidden beneath it. It does not seem possible that future generations will be able to date one of his paragraphs, he seems so alone. His style is constant throughout, seems to be habitual, but, on analysis of this last, is found to vary with his subject. He is often obscure. He is always magnificent.

  A question is asked us by his work. Now that we are at war, is not the advantage for writers, and for those who read them, that they will be forced, by the need they have to fight, to go out into territories, it may well be at home, which they w
ould never otherwise have visited, and that they will be forced, by way of their own selves, towards a style which, by the impact of a life strange to them and by their honest acceptance of this, will be pure as Doughty’s was, so that they will reach each one his own style that shall be his monument?

  Then, if they do learn to write in the idiom of the time, as Doughty without doubt wrote in the idiom of the real Arabia, and not of Araby, can we at last have the silence of those Sunday reviewers to whom, of his generation, we can almost certainly lay the charge that he was not reprinted for thirty years, and from whom, in our own generation, we resent the patronage they extend to us in phrases which, like those sung from the minaret on the last page of the Seven Pillars of Wisdom, have, from constant repetition, only a limited meaning even to those so deaf as to be able to hear, and none at all to those who, on reading the words, sigh recognition of the old trick it was on the part of Lawrence to close his book in that fashion, remembering how there is not one such in all Arabia Deserta?