William Bolitho (1891–1930)

A run-of-the-mill piece from an otherwise extraordinary writer, Overture – 1920 is a disappointing coda to William Bolitho's now-antique body of work. Of course, it was never meant to be this way; Bolitho was taken ill a mere month after visiting London to arrange a stage production of this play, and died at age 39 with his life and his work incomplete. Overture, published posthumously, therefore feels unfinished and lacking the refinement which was the singular characteristic of this writer.

As even the most ardent Shakespeare purist knows, even a 'finished' play is never really finished, as each production alters and leaves its own stamp on the written clay. And, while in a previous review I dubbed Bolitho a sort of "journalistic Shakespeare", he is, on the limited evidence of Overture – 1920, not (alas) the Shakespeare of playwrights. This is a rather pedestrian piece, set in the industrial and political disputes of Weimar Germany in the early 1920s – a state of affairs Bolitho had himself covered as a newspaper correspondent during the Versailles conference.

It sounds exciting: a group of well-intentioned socialists – including a pair of star-crossed lovers – pose an ultimatum to their local government not to implement an unjust law. When this is refused, the socialists and the citizenry storm the building and seize the reins of power, only to be overthrown in turn by a military force sent in to quell the rebellion. This arrest leads to some difficult choices for our doomed romantic couple.

However, in practice the play is rather routine; you can see each step coming and there are no real surprises in the drama. None of the characters step out of their templates and express their individuality, and the dialogue is functional and slightly melodramatic. All of this leads to a pleasant if uninspiring reading experience, but the main disappointment is that it lacks depth. One of the finest characteristics of Bolitho's other writings – his journalism and his other essayistic non-fiction – is his depth (and his eloquence while digging). But in Overture the characters don't say anything to us beyond their stated political function, and no deeper theme is addressed, either overtly or within the warp and weft of the drama. Perhaps Bolitho would have worked on the play more had he lived but, in its current form, Overture – 1920 is regrettably not capable of exampling the brilliance of the man, and we must rely on Twelve Against the Gods and Camera Obscura to do so.… (plus d'informations)

"The Fascists are not ashamed of violence. It is an essence of the idea, avowed, professed." (pg. 29)

Compiling a series of articles William Bolitho wrote for the New York World in December 1925, to provide an "outline of Fascism" (pg. 129), Italy Under Mussolini lacks the dash and brilliance that he was later to provide in Camera Obscura, another more diverse collection of articles from the World. Fascism in 1926 was essentially a Mussolini personality cult, and it is the judgement of the man who would later write Twelve Against the Gods that the Duce is "a great gambler" (pg. 61) but "neither a Napoleon nor a Mohammed" (pg. 2). And after the depredations of the Great War, with its "12,000,000 dead, atrocity revelations lack even the thrill" (pg. 2).

Bolitho's book, then, does not have the flair one would expect from this writer. Nor is it an in-country chronicle – though Bolitho travelled there, there is little observation on daily life in Mussolini's Italy beyond the summation that the people fear to speak out. Bolitho intends a "rigid impartiality" in discussing the topic, and while there is an intermittent "flavour of condemnation" (pg. 129), the book is not an emotional excoriation of Fascism or a polemic. Bolitho is definitely opposed to Fascism, in which "old evils that every one thought dead were revived" (pg. 94), but in 1925 and 1926 the creed was merely a curious and distasteful oddity and one that people were only beginning to wrestle with. Bolitho was one of those wrestlers, and while nowadays he can be remembered as the author of Twelve Against the Gods, a forgotten exemplar of the critical and journalistic art, he limits himself in Italy Under Mussolini to dry and often abstract reportage, with little of the rage and hostility that one now knows should be directed at the forces that were just then bubbling up.

What, then, recommends the book beyond a sense of completism for readers such as myself? Many of the book's limitations are only evident in retrospect. It is strange to us now to hear Fascism spoken of entirely in terms of Mussolini, with a firebrand Austrian named Hitler scarcely more than a glint in a Munich jailer's eye at the time, and perhaps not even on Bolitho's radar. Nevertheless, the book stands because its observations, critiques and conclusions would prove to ring true even after German Fascism eclipsed its Italian forebear, which now seems tame and ramshackle in comparison.

For example, Bolitho notes the dearth of literary style in Fascist writings – "All is pretension, looseness, uncritical, desperately wordy" (pg. 46) – at the same time that Hitler was busy writing his own contribution to such garbage. (Anyone who has had the misfortune to read the dreck that is Mein Kampf will recognise the truth in Bolitho's dismissal.) Bolitho speculates how anti-semitism could become a unifying sentiment across Fascists in different countries (pg. 120), years before Hitler would burn much of Europe down with the aid of this poison. Bolitho also warns that the rise of such a malignant Fascism, in whatever country, would lead to "an exterminatory war… which would amount to putting an end to our civilization" (pg. 122). Many people in 1926 were of course vaguely fearful about an upcoming war which would be even more devastating than the last, but Bolitho in Italy Under Mussolini is beginning to see the fog clear from the disturbing path ahead. Recognising how Fascism is simpatico with Socialism – something many people even today are unwilling to acknowledge – Bolitho even notes the credibility of an alliance between the Fascists and the Soviets (pg. 76), more than a decade before the Nazi-Soviet Pact blindsided many thinkers in the West.

This, then, is what ensures Bolitho's forgotten book maintains respectability, even though it has long been superseded by time and events. At this early hour, Bolitho recognised Fascism's contemptibility, its malignancy and its bloodlust; "an unphilosophical energy clawing out for a Doctrine" (pg. 42), but there is "no more a doctrine of Fascism than a doctrine of smallpox" (pg. 51). He has its number, even if he does not appreciate its terrifying importance (nor would he – Bolitho would die three years before Hitler came to power). At a time when many were accommodating it, or ignoring it, Bolitho recognised Fascism as a disturbing legitimisation of social violence and oppression; in its political posturings "nothing but bad faith and practical manoeuvres" (pg. 50). While a book on Fascism that pre-dates Hitler has limited utility nowadays, the essential durability of Bolitho's observations inspire us to look on our own times with a critical and uncompromising eye, and to seek the same independence of thought that Bolitho deployed in his.… (plus d'informations)

In my review of Camera Obscura, William Bolitho's 1930 collection of articles from the New York World, I expressed my surprise that this long-out-of-print book was much more than a dated reproduction of newspaper articles, instead proving to be a mesmeric selection of pieces possessing great literary quality. Bolitho, at his best, is a sort of journalistic Shakespeare: able to find things that others cannot, and bring it out through language. Leviathan, however, an earlier collection of articles from 1923-4 – also mostly pulled from the New York World – does not possess this magic with the same consistency.

Bolitho here is still working out his style and his tone. When it works, it works well, and some of these essays – throwaway pieces, remember, for a daily newspaper – read as complete short stories ('Epinard Loses' being one good example). Another of the more successful articles, 'Old Man Bender's Orchard', is the story of a gruesome piece of true-crime that anticipates his book Murder for Profit. There is little information about Leviathan to be found online, but I found the Wikipedia summary that this book is primarily about international politics to be false. There are essays on the politics of the time here, including a noteworthy one about German hyperinflation ('An Empire's Funeral in the Strand'), but my impression was of varied, perhaps even eclectic, contents. An article on the people who use dating agencies to find a partner ("all of those outside of the universal law that nothing is made in vain" (pg. 160)) shows that the dating scene hasn't really changed much in one hundred years, even if it is all on apps now. The women "beckon innocently for the man they dreamed of in the schoolroom, 'dark, pale, tall, with a thousand pounds a year, and affectionate'. He has been long coming, they are tired and a little peevish at his delay" (pg. 159).

Because Bolitho is still honing his approach in this, his first published book, there are a few moments where it sags, a problem exacerbated by Bolitho's ornate writing style. But there is always enough to bring you back: a turn of phrase, an insight of literary quality, a successful turning of an unpromising topic into something you are eager to indulge. While Camera Obscura and Twelve Against the Gods remain the best of Bolitho, Leviathan has enough in it to bring forth the same response: a rich joy, a feeling of possessing wealth, followed by a bafflement that writing of this quality has become so obscure, so entirely eclipsed, and ending with an acceptance, cultivated by Bolitho's own worldview, of "the ruin that lies in wait for human effort" (pg. 60), however undeserved that ruin. To describe Bolitho as journalism's Shakespeare may seem absurd, but even in the lesser of his works – which is what Leviathan is – he can write a strangely gripping account of something as mundane as an after-dinner speech and create a line that sounds like a minor attendant reporting the outcome of a battle to a doomed Shakespearean lord. One of the dinner's speakers, trying to salvage the night, is babbling in a vain attempt to fill the awkwardness at the table with words. Enter Bolitho, to find the art in it: "Cold, not fatigue, conquered him at last; the extreme and freezing ice of those absent-minded smiles, that stuck unmelted on those red, honest faces with the persistence of plaster." (pg. 22)… (plus d'informations)

I am a great admirer of William Bolitho's writing style, which, once understood, possesses a richness that has rarely been attempted (and never nowadays), and even more rarely achieved. Twelve Against the Gods and, more surprisingly, Camera Obscura, are forgotten gems, waiting for those rare few readers who would alight upon their riches and receive the same thrill that Howard Carter felt, when he breached an unpromising piece of stone and saw his candlelight flicker on Tutankhamun's gold. Murder for Profit, an earlier piece, is stylistically akin to those other two titles mentioned, but the refining process of its gold seems to have been less successful, and retains traces of the base metal.

Murder for Profit is a sort of dry run for Bolitho's later Twelve Against the Gods. In a series of essay-like chapters, the author holds court on a number of prominent 'mass-murderers' (what we would now call serial killers): their crimes, their psychological makeup and the societal context. It's interesting, of course (true crime always is), but Bolitho's regal style is less suited to the five shabby criminals of Murder for Profit than it is to the twelve historical figures of Twelve Against the Gods. It is not always clear what Bolitho is trying to achieve by his analysis, and, unlike his other books I have mentioned, any contemporariness in the book is bled out by his choice of topic. Of the five murderers, only Burke and Hare (taken as one) remain infamous today. It makes it hard to follow the stories of Troppmann, Smith, Landru and Haarmann when not only does the author have a wider scope in mind (Bolitho's not a straight storyteller, nor is he concerned with penny-dreadful curiosity), but knowledge of those crimes hasn't endured into our own times. Bolitho assumes a familiarity with their cases (some of which would have been remembered, on Murder for Profit's publication, as headlines just a few years old) that a modern reader just isn't going to have.

That said, there is more than enough of Bolitho's style and prestige in the book to make it a worthwhile read. But who would read it? True crime readers will be frustrated by the lack of focus on the crimes themselves; those who thirst for writing of literary calibre would be better served by Twelve and Camera Obscura. Bolitho is so obscure nowadays that it is unlikely that many – if any – would stumble across him by chance, like all those generations of Egyptians who walked across the desert sand not knowing a tomb of undiscovered gold lay beneath their feet. So who is left? Only myself, and I have read it – and preferred his other works. Bolitho deserves better, and so perhaps all I can do now is drag to the surface just one example of his unique brand of lyrical wealth, and show it to the world, before the tomb collapses back into its unjust obscurity. Referring to the prospect of cannibalism in the case of Fritz Haarmann, Bolitho elegantly ties its dread emergence into his wider themes of society's responsibility for crime and the general desolation after the Great War:

"In Germany at any rate, socially the most advanced State in our civilization, the war series, from band-music to man-eating, was thus actually completed. In four years' action of the State, guided by statesmen whom it would only be a paradox to call criminals, in the strict observance of the most banal political morality, the days of werwolves and anthropophagi were brought back in Europe." (pg. 180)… (plus d'informations)