REVIEW OF EUROPE IN THE LOOKING GLASS

TOM'S REVIEW

EUROPE IN THE LOOKING GLASS

 by Robert Byron (1926)

EUROPE IN THE LOOKING GLASS is Robert Byron’s account of his travels with two right Charlies, the reckless David and the melancholic Simon, across Europe in the summer of 1925. Robert may be an Eton graduate attending Merton College, Oxford, but he is also a 20 year-old on a road trip in an unreliable car experiencing a rite of passage we’ve all either been on, or wished we had, especially to the places Robert sees at a time when local character and old-world charm did still abide.

Not that Robert much appreciates either. He is quick to scoff at custom, keen to drink more than he can handle and happy to commit acts of petty vandalism. He and his mates are a mash-up of the Bullingdon Club and Dorothy Parker’s Vicious Circle. Robert has high praise for the Sitwell siblings—renowned for their literary, artistic and sexual iconoclasm—and disdain for conventional opinion about almost every city he visits, including Berlin, Munich, Innsbruck, Salzburg, Venice, Florence, Rome and Athens. Not surprisingly, he saves his highest praise for two places not on the traditional tourist map, Ferrara and Revenna. But he also has a precocious appreciation of art and architecture, and he heaps praise on the things he likes, including some that are iconic and time-honored.

Mixed with the Bullingdon Club and the Vicious Circle, though, is a good measure of Beavis and Butthead, namely in the chums’ acumen with routes, car mechanics and relations with locals. David is forever going off-piste onto single-track mountain roads and into dry river beds, where he blows out tires or clogs carburetor jets before receiving help from the local citizenry whom he later pisses off and whose wrath he barely escapes, usually by taking a single-track mountain road that ends in a dry river-bed. But he manages to outdo himself before the trip even begins when, without consulting the most basic travel resource, like a map, he decides that Patras should be the port of destination on the boat ride from Italy to Greece because it just sounds better than Piraeus. Patras in 1924 is a desolate backwater in westernmost Greece, while Piraeus is the port of Athens. Cue calamity: loading the car onto a boat barely bigger than the car in the Italian port of Brindisi; crossing the Ionian in an undersized boat with what must be balsa for ballast; offloading the car in a town with a stevedoring harness Archimedes would have sent to the dump; and discovering that there are no roads from Patras to, well, anywhere. Calamity is a time-honored source of comedy, but I have to draw the line when it’s the product of willful stupidity by Oxbridge Etonians who have the means and connections to avoid any serious consequences. 

While it’s tempting to dismiss this book as a mash-up of BRIDESHEAD REVISITED and DUDE, WHERE’S MY CAR?, this book has stood the test of time, both as a prelude to Byron’s consensus classic THE ROAD TO OXIANA and as a travel book that manages to cross the path of history. For Robert Byron hits Italy during the budding of Fascism, which he dismisses as the post-WWI sour grapes of bitter aristos, thugs and cranks, while not actually condemning it outright. Indeed, he would later befriend the Mitfords and attend the 1938 Nuremberg rally with Unity just as her sister Nancy was hoping for a marriage proposal from Byron that was never going to come (and not because of their political differences). While he did not share the Mitford’s views on the merits of the Third Reich, you might conclude by the company he kept that his antipathy toward Fascism was as tepid in 1938 as it was in 1925. Ironic then that he died in 1941 on a ship torpedoed by a German U-Boat. Or karmic. 

3 stars

REVIEW OF HER PRIVATES WE

TOM'S REVIEW

Her Privates We 

by Frederic Manning

Frederic Manning was a professional poet most of his life and a volunteer soldier in His Majesty’s infantry from October 1915 to February 1918. In 1928, a literary colleague, citing the large public appetite for books about the Great War, urged him to write a novel about his wartime experience. The result was Her Privates We, a title (and the best pun I can remember) taken from dialogue in Hamlet that is the book’s epigram:

Guildenstern: On Fortune's cap we are not the very button.

Hamlet: Nor the soles of her shoe?

Rosencrantz: Neither, my lord.

Hamlet: Then you live about her waist, or in the middle of her favours?

Guildenstern: Faith, her privates we.

Hamlet: In the secret parts of Fortune? O, most true; she is a strumpet.

Each chapter then begins with a passage from Shakespeare, not the pithy aphorisms found in Bartlett’s Book of Quotations but obscure lines with difficult syntax that force the reader to study each word and still wonder at the precise meaning. The passages form perfect companion pieces to a literate memoir that describes war with lyrical dispassion. There is no plot, only an unfolding of events. There is abundant absurdity, but it is the opposite of funny. Death is not the least bit heroic, and there is no glory. 

Reading this book is often a slog, just like the war it describes. The narration can be pedestrian for pages on end, but then Manning will produce something that zeroes in on what makes the soldier’s life unique. Two examples stand out for me. The first appears midway through the book when the main character Bourne is home on leave and is asked if he has a friend among the men. He replies, “In some ways, good comradeship takes the place of friendship. It is different; it has its own loyalties and affections; and I am not so sure that it does not rise on occasion to an intensity of feeling which friendship never touches. It may be less in itself, I don’t know, but its opportunity is greater. Friendship implies rather more stable conditions, don’t you think? You have time to choose.” The second appears in the prefatory remarks that Manning wrote after he had finished the novel and should be inscribed on every war memorial everywhere. “War is waged by men; not by beasts or by gods. To call it a crime against mankind is to miss half its significance; it is also the punishment of a crime.” 

Perhaps the biggest revelation of Her Privates We, though, is the dialogue. Soldiers in 1914 sound just like men in 2014. They make liberal use of the F-word, the C-word and slang that is still alive. There is a school of literature that says an author should never attempt accented vernacular, but Manning has done it in a way that, if not exactly accurate, pinpoints his characters by class, region and temperament. 

Frederic Manning’s lone novel received an initial printing of 500 copies and was credited to “Private 19022.” Manning was not identified as the author until a second printing in 1943, eight years after his death from a respiratory ailment when he was just 52. The novel garnered high praise from Ezra Pound, T.E. Lawrence and Ernest Hemingway, all of whom, it is presumed, read the first printing. Hemingway called it 'The finest and noblest book of men in war.' Make that finest, noblest and truest. 

Five stars