William BolithoCritiques

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.

"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.

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)

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)

"The public never buy enough old books. It is impossible that they ever should." (pg. 62)

Last June I joyously explored the obscure genius of Twelve Against the Gods, William Bolitho's uniquely-written appraisal of twelve historical personalities, including Alexander the Great and Christopher Columbus. It was like stumbling upon a forgotten lost city, covered with dust but with majesty in the architecture and treasure in its depths. However, I wasn't sure if my newly-established relationship with this long-dead Anglo-South African journalist was over before it had started. Obscure brilliance is always pleasant to unearth, but it's hard to source (especially on a budget). Twelve was Bolitho's best-known (read: only-known) book and had a fantastic concept; Camera Obscura, a collection of his journalism from 1929-30, seemed less promising, not only in its concept but because it was even rarer than Twelve. When I did acquire a copy of the book, the title wasn't even on LibraryThing until I added it manually.

Somewhat incredibly, the qualities that Bolitho displayed in his meticulous Twelve Against the Gods magnum opus are also in evidence in these short pieces. In the Preface to Camera Obscura, Noel Coward notes how Bolitho (who died before the book was published) had "a quality of grace" in his writing, "untainted by sentimentality, a gesture of recognition towards undying essentials" (pg. 2). I wrote along similar lines in my own review of Twelve, but it's even more commendable in Camera Obscura. What ought to be a dated reproduction of fifty essays and articles, written mostly in New York but sometimes in France, for the now long-since-defunct newspaper the New York World, proves instead to be a book of quiet and enduring erudition; a sort of literary turn about the garden.

Bolitho had a writing style that was slightly baroque, and while that proved to be a challenge for the reader in Twelve Against the Gods (though very much worth the effort), the shortness of the pieces in Camera Obscura allows for more agreeable doses. Each of the essays here are delicacies; you don't want to scoff them all at once, but seeing them all together makes a great impression. Bolitho writes about anything and everything here: the New York subway, the used books market, fairy tales, education, Jung, the Colosseum, the radio, the circus, Sherlock Holmes and Cro-Magnon cave art. But, while all these topics are fascinating, what is remarkable – in each and every one of the fifty pieces here – is the way in which Bolitho can take a turn into erudition that you, the reader, cannot anticipate. For that literary turn in the garden that I mentioned earlier, we prove to have the company of a groundsman who knows of every hidden copse and arbour.

One article sees Bolitho travel to the former home of the deceased Henri Fabre, a naturalist known for his study of insects. The house has become a museum of sorts and Bolitho's article is ingeniously framed as a sort of lost world (its title is 'Lilliput Lost'). Fabre's insect colonies remain, and Bolitho ends with: "for the insects, if they but knew it, far out of their sight, twenty whole yards back, hidden by the inconceivable altitude of the trees, their kindly god lies defeated by their mysteries, and dead" (pg. 146). This is just one of many examples of how Bolitho blindsides the reader with an astute observation from an uncommonly literary angle. Even when you do reasonably expect it, as in the 'Van Gogh' essay, Bolitho frames his conclusion in a way that remains highly original: "But for this stupidity of the world [in being overlooked in his own time] Van Gogh was paid, as Blake was paid, by the inestimable advantage of being, until the day he died, artistically free" (pg. 177).

Bolitho delights in providing such original flair. The article on used books remarks how "in his Elysium Homer would be pleased to know he was read in an odd volume, foxed and scribbled on by the baby of the junk dealer, with covers missing" (pg. 65). Another article remarks that we are nowadays more "helplessly dependent" on scientists "than any primitives on their rain-makers" (pg. 88). An article on Jungian archetypes sees the author draw on his personal experience at the Battle of the Somme to suggest "that there are just two sorts" of people: "those who would dig you out if you were buried alive, and the others. The givers and the takers, the fountains and the wells" (pg. 86). Bolitho admires those who behave "as it were, artistically; for ethics is a sort of art, and behaviour can be beautiful or ugly" (pg. 109). An essay on Paris tells us, in a throwaway line buried in the middle of a long paragraph, that "Man's brains have transformed the earth and the sea, but sensuality remains where it was before the flood" (pg. 159). Most writers would hang a book around such a line.

Each and every piece in Camera Obscura contains at least one choice line of the type I have cited above, and often many more. In the closest he gets to his Twelve Against the Gods content, Bolitho writes of how the French general Ferdinand Foch "was bread; not wine, to his nation and times… It is an old mastiff, a watchdog we have lost, not a hero; gratitude is not one of humanity's favourite emotions" (pg. 132). A similar critical essay on Clemenceau ('The Gray Hands') forewarns of the prospect of a Hitler figure (who was then still years from power):

"What would have happened if Germany had had another Clemenceau, opposite [in the Great War]? A dictator, that is, infinitely ruthless, utterly determined, neither to be moved by pity, without the least weakness of despair, who as long as he lived, whatever happened, whether all the chief cities and his capital were utterly destroyed, all the commerce ruined beyond hope of recovery, while a boy or man, with or without uniform, remained alive to hold a gun, would never have yielded?... Such was the gulf that the armistice covered over deep enough, certainly, not merely to cripple civilization, but to break its neck." (pg. 135)

The atomized Berlin of 1945 emerges vividly in the reader's mind – here, in this forgotten piece of journalistic copy from 1929. Reading Bolitho makes you want to shake our contemporary journalistic culture by the shoulders (if not by something more painful), that writing of this quality and perception could once be considered standard. Journalists ought to be widely-read and open-minded, as Bolitho is here; able by personal example to "pile up evidence for the revolt… against specialization" (pg. 130). When journalists are individuals (after all, "an education should be an individual thing" (pg. 97)) and opinions are cultivated rather than corporate, such people are capable of standing astride a culture, speaking as comfortably about politics as about Jung or the Colosseum or fairy tales. When Bolitho warns of "the degraded worship of naïveté… [the] knowing appearance of non-trying, which is the plague of all the arts to-day… the vanity that apes humility" (pg. 178), we see some of that surprising contemporariness that I highlighted in my review of Twelve Against the Gods. We find ourselves not only wishing he could opine on our times, but that at the very least he could have lived for longer in his own (Bolitho died suddenly in 1930, aged just 39). That way, there would be so much more of his fine writing to read. Even if we do have to search for a copy that is old and yellowed and long since out-of-print.

"What if this injustice were the very life of adventure? The man who puts his stake on the roulette board does not want justice, or his stake back unaltered. Justice for Christopher [Columbus] is a small shop in Genoa, or it may be a foot of wall in a Portuguese jail for fraudulent bankruptcy… Justice for Alexander is another dagger such as killed his father; for Casanova a horse-whipping, or a lifelong judgment of alimony. In this light, adventure is an excited appeal for injustice; the adventurer's prayer is 'Give us more than our due'." (pp96-7)

William Bolitho's Twelve Against the Gods would be an attractive read solely on its concept, but it is made even more compelling by its stylishness and the unapologetic delivery of its opinions. They don't make them like this anymore: slow but never boring – stately, rather; a book that assumes some decent level of education from its reader, rather than letting the class be held up by the slowest student; a polemic in the best sense of the word; a collection of journalism that has more flair and vigour than what passes for the name nowadays; a book with a cultivated taste, an awareness of objective standards, an unwillingness to let morality get in the way of a good story, and an appreciation of glory without glory-fetish.

Most people seem to have first heard about this book from the Tesla and SpaceX entrepreneur Elon Musk, who rates it highly, but I first heard about it from one or two mentions in the writing of Ernest Hemingway (who was a friend of Bolitho in the 1920s) and – I believe – from another of my favourite writers, George MacDonald Fraser. It's taken me a long time to get around to reading the book, and I can't remember exactly where it was I heard Bolitho in relation to Fraser, but Fraser brings to life Lola Montez in his second Flashman book, Royal Flash, and I would be surprised if he hadn't drawn on Bolitho's book – Lola is one of his Twelve – in resurrecting her.

I mention this for two reasons. One, because the Hemingway recommendation gives a better sense of Bolitho's book than Musk's does. Musk's recommendation – from a tweet in 2016 – caused demand for the out-of-print book to spike dramatically, as wannabe tech entrepreneurs in Steve Jobs turtlenecks looked for their next 'edge'. This might lead you to believe the book is one of those 'leadership' books that are all the rage nowadays – a sort of 'ten lessons from Lincoln in the art of leadership' – when it is anything but. Rather, Bolitho writes about his twelve historical figures in the way Hemingway writes about Scott Fitzgerald or James Joyce or Gertrude Stein in A Moveable Feast – as characters he has known intimately.

This leads me to my second reason for mentioning Fraser's novels: though non-fiction, Bolitho's book is essentially a study of character. He takes twelve historical figures – Alexander the Great, Casanova, Columbus, Mahomet (Muhammad), Lola, Cagliostro, Charles XII of Sweden, Napoleon, Catiline, Napoleon III, Isadora Duncan and Woodrow Wilson – and speaks of them almost as though they were his close friends. In a way, they are – Bolitho is clearly well-read and erudite, and knows his stuff – but the closeness of the book to its subjects is compelling and original, neither journalism or history but a heady mix of both. Literary criticism of the story of life.

For a book subtitled 'The Story of Adventure', some of the Twelve chosen by Bolitho might seem strange at first – Woodrow Wilson or Casanova spoken of as 'adventurers' in the same tone as Alexander and Columbus? – but Bolitho wins you over on every count. "The life of an adventurer is the practice of the art of the impossible", Bolitho argues on page 177, before going on to point out how in society, "the possibilities of human life are impregnably walled, to an intolerable minimum, by natural law, by the clockwork of determinisms of all sorts – except just where the adventurer breaks through. Where common sense is horrified, where the sign 'impossible' is raised in warning, kindness or spiteful joy, there is your exit, exactly there, prisoner; there is the door of adventure."

Each of Bolitho's Twelve are chosen to illustrate one aspect of this broad concept of adventure, as opposed to merely conquest or exploration (though those too). These are "personalities, forces, with a faint taste of allegory in their compositions, which Fate, like a common dramatist, likes to put in her best pieces" (pg. 175); those who best example the contest between the adventurer and the social man which is fought in every human heart (pg. 14). And whilst Bolitho is, in my opinion, at his best when writing about Alexander or Columbus, he is convincing even on the examples who seem, at first glance, the most dubious, such as Wilson or Lola Montez. Even Isadora Duncan, the dancer, gives Bolitho an opportunity to write powerfully about art and its relation to nature. The book is never a gimmick in the manner of a modern 'leadership' book; there is an appreciation of nuance, and an adept, laissez-faire unpacking of the theme rather than seminar-like callbacks.

Even more impressively, there is no moral judgment; Bolitho is only fascinated by the breed. I was particularly grateful for this appreciation of the "manurial virtue" of historical figures because, as I write in June 2020, statues are being attacked and torn down in both Britain and America, and not only those of slave traders and Confederate figures but the likes of Churchill and Gandhi and Jefferson (and Columbus, one of the Twelve). In seeking to explain why this is wrong, I can do no better than to turn to Bolitho: "No true biography has the power of exciting imitation; only myth has ethical magnetism. Life, that winged swift thing, has to be shot down and reposed by art, like a stuffed bird, before we can use it as a model… personality has to be simplified" (pg. 171). We have the statue of Churchill not because he was an imperialist or because of Tonypandy or the Bengal famine, but because the myth of Churchill that the statue represents – principled and uncompromising opposition to fascism, even when your backs are to the wall – is worthy of imitation in the way that his biography is not. Ditto Jefferson: in biography, he is a slave trader; in history, which is partly myth – rooted, selective, footnoted myth – he is an articulator of human rights and of measured republican government. It might smell at times, but manure is good for the soil.

I did not expect to find such vivid contemporary utility in Bolitho's out-of-print essays from 1929 (my yellowed Penguin paperback from 1939 is now practically falling apart), but then again, I did not expect anything like as much as I got from this forgotten treasure-trove. Twelve Against the Gods is a unique work: literary, erudite, stimulating and personal, drawing power from each of its twelve subjects and yet remaining entirely Bolitho. The book is best read slowly – not only because of the wealth of ideas unpicked over its course, but because of the writing style. Some sentences admittedly lose the thread – the approach to sentence structure makes me wish Hemingway had been an influence rather than merely an acquaintance – but for every line that you have to re-read, there are a dozen to be savoured.

This is a writer who, when speaking of Lola Montez, tells the story of how she acquired her surname thus: "The instrument was some anonymous male, some vague attaché or officer met and used in love as the ship crossed the Equator, with no more personal importance than the tiny wandering spider the portentous female of the species beckons to her embraces to serve for an hour and then be eaten" (pg. 130). This is a writer who, writing this well, can also bring original, perceptive ideas and élan. Who can also bring to his pages the presence of Alexander and his like. Most books bring their subjects down to earth in order to assess them – those non-mythic biographies I mentioned earlier – but Bolitho does something rarer. He lifts the reader up to their height.

Uno dei primi testi scritti negli Usa nel 1926 su Mussolini e il fascismo. L'ho letto nell'edizione originale americana, dopo averlo acquistato in una piccola libreria di San Francisco, ma è disponibile anche tradotto in italiano.

Bolitho's prose is so infectiously zesty he could write about wallpaper and it would be interesting - writing about twelve of the most flawed, fascinating people in history, he's unstoppable