What to read if...the music's stopped

Musical Chairs: Part Two

So now the dust has settled, the revolving door has spun - and we are where we are. It's possible (OK, unlikely) that there's been wild dancing in the street; probable, moody staring into the bottom of a glass wondering how it all went so wrong; most likely, a sense of relief at having exercised a democratic right, accompanied by feverish mutterings of “Least worst! Least worst!” like a mantra, whilst contemplating the results. Whatever. This is what - wherever we are - we have to work with. (And, if we're being topical, a shout-out to Bolivia for reminding us - by successfully fending off a military coup - that, with all its faults, modern democracy really is the least worst option. After all, 5thc Athens, its apotheosis, wasn't perfect - women; slaves. So.)

What happens next? Well, Miklós Bánffy offers some clear-eyed observations in The Writing on the Wall: They were Counted:

The atmosphere in Budapest was just as stormy as it had been…The members of the coalition now in office were still delirious with pleasure at finding themselves in power and clinging desperately to their election promises insisting that no matter how they, and only they, would bring about the independence of the banking and customs systems and the national integrity of the army commands. But it was not to be as easy as the coalitionists imagined…

Soon,

In the House the different parties were still seated as they had been in the winter after the elections, but the atmosphere was not at all the same. In the seats occupied by the victorious opposition, the camaraderie and friendliness, the mutual congratulations and warm hand-shakes that had united the different factions…had completely evaporated. Now the members looked bitter and cross, and the conflict of interest between each section had made them all as wary of each other as they had been before their victory at the polls. The divisions were there for all to see.”

Mired in political infighting, entrenched in solipsism, their limitations aren't just exposed - they create disastrous political outcomes:

No one had thought that they would do the opposite. Such was the political naïvety, and the disappointment at what had actually happened, that they at once assumed that they were the victims of a conspiracy. They saw enemies everywhere, not realizing that all nations were governed by their own interests and that the skill with which these were grasped and developed was the true basis of a nation’s peace and prosperity. From this distrust of anyone who did not agree with them sprang the division within their own ranks which would lead, eventually, to…disintegration…No one present at this disastrous session of the Budapest Parliament foresaw [what]…would be opened up…

One of Bánffy's points - that politicians are often highly unsophisticated politically - is particularly worth noting, because it's an aspect of political careers and activities that's so often ignored. Modern politicians, after all (democracy understood), as elected delegates of power, are simply the man or woman on the street whose focused political opinions (convictions?) have turbocharged them out of the pub (bar/café/circle of elders/whatever) onto a platform - again, something that's often overlooked in our current repetitive references to political “elites”; and frankly baffling descriptor of the electorate as “the public”: which makes it sound like the audience for an end-of-pier act (not entirely inaccurate) - but ultimately, disenfranchising.

Of course, cries of “Infamy, infamy, they've all got it in for me!” also conform to a tried-and-trusted formula for refuting political failures - it wasn't us or our policies - it was the other lot:

That's the trouble. Only that. It is they who have spoiled everything. If it hadn't been for them, the King would certainly have yielded. If course he would! The King’s only too anxious to expand the army. It's his passion. Only this lot have spoiled it all.

But - Bánffy intimates this with great clarity and subtlety - this fundamentally self-limiting “defence” (especially allied to such a limited range of perception), is not only the definition of political short-termism, it has far-reaching - and inevitable - consequences that political posturing cannot refute. That solipsism, pettiness, internecine squabbling and short-sightedness are all sparks which light the torch which ignites the conflagration of the First World War: looking back from the late 1920s, Bánffy is clearly able to see this, just as his characters are unable to, caught in the meshes of their own little worlds.(Interestingly, domestic politics often seem to make the world smaller; even actively seeking to reduce it by rejecting what are termed or perceived as pernicious outside influences: as Bánffy makes clear above.) But that point of clarification is when politics become history, the swirling protons coalescing to take on a form we can recognise and understand. If politics can be defined as the activities undertaken to achieve, wield and retain power, history is the narrative we seek to extrapolate or impose on those activities.

In which case, our first port of call should be the radical historians, W.C. Sellar and R.J. Yeatman, authors of that immortal (never out of print) work 1066 and all that: A Memorable History of England, Comprising All the Parts You Can Remember, including One hundred and five Good Things, Five Bad Kings and Two Genuine Dates, which, conveniently, encompasses pretty much all one needs to take into account when considering history as a discipline. Brief, dense, cogently argued - the “Venomous Bead¹” jostles against Robin Hood and his Merrie Men

Will Scarlett (the Scarlet Pimpernel), Black Beauty, White Melville, Little Red Riding Hood…and the famous Friar Puck…[who became so fat] that he declared he could put his girdle round the Earth².

- in an exuberantly millefeuilled tranche of history. It is, of course, very very funny: but it also emphatically represents the kind of funniness we can take very seriously indeed. A contemporary critic quoted on the book jacket (it was first published in 1930), Alexander Woollcott, says that “this slim and cockeyed history of Great Britain…is a dazzling guess at what remains in the average Englishman's [sic] mind of all the history he studied at school,” which is true enough; but infinitely less than the dazzling brilliance actually offered in 1066. In their Compulsory Preface (This Means You), Sellar and Yeatman, explaining that their work is “the result of years of research in golf clubs, gun-rooms, green-rooms etc.” state firmly that

This is the only Memorable History of England, because all the History you can remember is in this book.

Moreover, although

Histories have previously been written with the object of exalting their authors. The object of this History is to console the reader. No other history does this.

Too right. (Nor do most histories - even allowing for more risible moments - make you howl with laughter on every page.) Finally, the extraordinary and revelatory assertion that

History is not what you thought. It is what you can remember. All other history defeats itself.

In a few sentences, Sellar and Yeatman have offered a definition (and implicit methodology), a context for the “lessons” of history (actual and philosophical), a modernist epistemological perspective, (post-modernist, too); a little light flirtation with structuralism (managing to give that self-limiting critical genre meaning) - all while making us laugh. If what we remember is what remains - what actually happened? and how do we interpret it? How do we engage with “history” and its “lessons” - both what we learn (and are taught, they may - will, as this book makes clear - differ) and what it supposedly teaches us? How do we define history? Hence recollections of the Venomous Bead, and a mish-mash of English literature/folklore in attendance on Robin Hood. In joking about things, Sellar and Yeatman embody the Socratic ideal of questioning everything; offer social and political commentary; engage with text and metatext in a way that prefigures far later “modern” historical (and literary) approaches; provide a snapshot (and amused criticism) of a system of education - but primarily have fun.

The first date in English history is 55 BC, in which year Julius Caesar (the memorable Roman Emperor) landed, like all other successful invaders of these islands, at Thanet. This was in the Olden Days when the Romans were top nation on account of their classical education etc.

King Alfred was the first Good King, with the exception of Good King Wenceslas…(it is not known what Wenceslas was King of) Alfred ought never to be confused with King Arthur, equally memorable but probably non-existent and therefore perhaps less important historically (unless he did exist).

Alfred had a very interesting wife called Lady Windermere (The Lady of the Lake) who was always clothed in the same white frock, and used to go bathing with Sir Lancelot (also of the Lake) and was thus a Bad Queen. It was also in King Alfred's times that the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle³ was published: this was the first English newspaper and had all the news about his victories, Lady Windermere, and the Cake⁴, etc.

The War with the Americans is memorable as being the only war in which the English were defeated, and it was unfair because the Americans had the Allies⁵ on their side. In some ways the war was really a draw, since England remained top nation…After this, the Americans gave up speaking English, and became U.S.A. and Columbia and 100% etc. This was a Good Thing in the end, as it was a cause of the British Empire, but it prevented America from having any more history.

Good Kings, Bad Things, the Olden Days; the jostling to be “top nation”; the integration of myth (and active myth-making) in the political discourse that results in the national historical narrative - stripped of their idiosyncrasies and specificities, this is the same narrative that Bánffy exposes (“all nations…governed by their own interests”). In anatomising the metabolisation of collective narrative - an exuberant synthesis of malapropisms, myths, playful orthography, received ideas, cultural impedimenta and more - Sellar and Yeatman reveal (and offer both explicit and implicit commentary on) the corpus on which the current (circa 1930) national identity is formed. Like any body, it can change (as they make very clear, in, say, their commentary on the American War of Independence, above); or

The withdrawal of the Roman legions to take part in Gibbons’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire…left Britain defenceless, and subjected Europe to that long succession of Waves of which History is chiefly composed.

[T]hat long succession of Waves of which History is chiefly composed, pretty much sums it up. There are Waves of Justifiable Wars and Spheres of Interference.

It was during these wars that Spheres of Interference were discovered: these were necessary in all countries inhabited by their own natives.

The first of the Spheres was Egypt. Egypt was under the Duel Control of England and France, and was immediately declared bankrupt.

Or

Joan of Ark, a French descendant of Noah, who after hearing Angel voices singing Do Re Mi became inspired, thus unfairly defeating the English in several battles. Indeed, she might even have made France top nation if the Church had not decided that she would make an exceptionally memorable martyr.

As we can see, the English (although keen on territorial expansion) aren't terribly good losers - but then, turning to Bánffy - what nation is? (“Only this lot have spoiled it all.”) One could extrapolate from this a broader truth: that the political (and consequently the historical record) is always defined, at some level, by the personal - because political acts are committed by people (individuals or acting in concert) - “history” becoming its own spin doctor: “justifiable” wars and noble slaughter. Which raises the further question: does history repeat itself (as the truism assures us) - or are we simply seeing the repeated expressions of human behaviour, aligned to an overarching narrative? Bánffy draws attention to this, in the resigned clarity with which he depicts the political process:

the debates, with their endless trivial argument and the substitution of political slogans for constructive proposals, bored him to death. It seemed that no one would ever put forward any positive plan to solve the country's problems. All they did was repeat, over and over again, what had been said before.

And, of course, repetition leads to repetition.

A man who tried to see every side of every problem, who bent over backwards to take a fair and equitable view, was a suspect animal in the world of politics. What, to most politicians, could be more equivocal and therefore not to be trusted than someone who admitted that those with contrary opinions might also be right?…

Thus it was, is now and ever shall be!

Or, as Sellar and Yeatman encapsulate brilliantly in their test question (the narrative is seamed with invented Test papers) -

What convinces you that Henry VIII had VIII wives? Was it worth it?

- dazzling in its multilayered questioning of the historical narrative, whilst preserving its comic integrity.

This integrity leads us to another question (as it should, you’ll say, of course - we’re talking about history): how funny is this for someone whose frame of reference isn't based around English history - and culture - in general? The Test papers, with adjurations such as “Do not on any account attempt to write on both sides of the paper at once” and

3. Which came first, A. D. or B.C.? (Be careful.)

4. Has it ever occurred to you that the Romans counted backwards? (Be honest.)[;]

the plaintive corollary question “Does it matter?” - reflect a universal examination experience. Similarly, the jokes about how we perceive history - Waves, Justifiable Wars, Good Things, Bad Things - don't require any insider knowledge. Nor, probably, do rugby and football jokes.

The All-Black Prince, who very romantically “won his Spurs” by slaughtering one third of the French nobility. His father the King had betted him a pair of hotspurs that he could not do this.

Puns, homonyms and malapropisms might call for a nodding acquaintance with the English vernacular and a few shreds of school Latin - “Rufus: a Ruddy King” - but not necessarily:

Shortly afterwards Henry died of despair on receiving news that his sons were revolting.

No gloss required.

You do need to know something about English history to appreciate the succinct brilliance of the Cavaliers who are “Wrong but Wromantic” unlike the Roundheads who are “Right but Repulsive”; or the Arthurian legend that inspires “the same white frock” (gown of white samite) worn by the Lady of the Lake, alias Lady Windermere (conflated with Oscar Wilde’s Lady Windermere's Fan and Lake Windermere); definitely, to relish the sublime “Sir John Nox, the memorable Scottish Saturday Knight⁶”; but, more often, even though the narrative is enriched by acquaintance with the historical detail, it works anyway:

Alfred noticed that the Danes had very long ships, so he built a great many more much longer ones, thus cleverly founding the British Navy. From then onwards, foreigners, who unlike the English, do not prefer to fight against long odds, seldom attacked the British Navy.

Top nation competition and favoured myths of national identity leap out, even without a backstory. Even more straightforward are

One of the most romantic aspects of the Elizabethan age was the wave of beards which suddenly swept across History and settled upon all the great men of the period.

and

The Old Pretender…only famous for being late for his own Rebellion⁷.

But America, empire and the struggles to be top nation represent universal tropes of the political narrative and the expression of power; and it's this universality - never out of print - that has sustained 1066’s existence. You don't have to know anything about Magna Carta to understand - and enjoy - what's important about the following;

There also happened in this reign the memorable Charta, known as Magna Charter…this was invented by the Barons on a desert island in the Thames called Ganymede⁸. By congregating armed to the teeth the Barons compelled [King] John to sign the Magna Charter which said

1. That no-one was to be put to death, save for some reason (except the Common People).

2. That everyone should be free (except the Common People).

and so on, culminating in the rousing

Magna Charter was therefore the chief cause of Democracy in England, and thus a Good Thing for everyone (except the Common People).

Which is, of course, recognisable pretty much everywhere; as is:

During these Wars many very remarkable discoveries and inventions were made. Most memorable amongst these was the discovery (made by all the rich men in England at once) that women and children could work for twenty-five hours a day in factories without many of them dying or becoming excessively deformed. This was known as the Industrial Revelation and completely changed the faces of the North of England.

(Again, universally applicable - and what's changed, you might ask.

Yet, 1066 is also completely a product of its time - its playful modernism, metatextual dexterity, vigorous and constant questioning - all these express the period immediately after the First World War, when most people wouldn't buy the old lies (Dulce et decorum est9 et al.) anymore. Both Sellar and Yeatman served in the War; and Sellar’s degree is aegrotat (a pass degree awarded in exceptional circumstances on grounds of ill health): it's not difficult to join the dots there. Instead, with infinite good humour and political acuity, they survey the scene - “Meanwhile at home the War was being helped on a good deal by the famous remarks of the politicians” - interpreting the old world and its dubious certainties from the acknowledged instability of the new one (stability doesn't exist, of course, change being the one certainty of existence). They have no illusions: in the last chapter, they refer to “The Peace to End Peace” (perfect summation of the Treaty of Versailles, further elucidated - “There were several battles in the War, but none were so terrible or costly as the Peace which was signed afterwards in the ever-memorable Chamber of Horrors at Versailles” - supremely generous good-humour from two veterans staring down the barrel of another war); saying, because America becomes the new top nation, “History comes to a .” Test V covers the period “Up to the End of History.”

History, both as the illuminating comet’s tail of collective experience and the ongoing narrative of collective memory, constantly renews itself - and 1066 reveals this, constantly; as well as demonstrating Edmund Burke’s assertion that

Society is indeed a contract…The State is a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead and those who are to be born⁹.

No-one imagines - especially not Sellar and Yeatman - that history ever comes to a full stop. “Fate,” as Lorelei Lee so sapiently observes in Anita Loos’s Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, “keeps on happening.” (Whose history - and whether it will continue to flow through collective channels or become more fragmented and personal - is another matter. More immediately, the vulnerability of digital records to disappearance is worth considering. Maybe we can anticipate a future revival of oral epic poetry.) But as long as we're capable of consciousness, our history (ies) is part of our DNA - and so is the responsibility that gives us.

One of WTRI’s favourite Horace Walpole aphorisms is “This world is a comedy to those that think, a tragedy to those that feel¹⁰,” which, in its elegant polarisation, sums up the two primary interpretations of human experience (although most of us, of course, can veer between the two). The problem with so many politicians - supposedly representative makers of charters and instigators of “Justifiable Wars” - is that they don't appear to think and are apparently incapable of feeling: limitations to both their humanity and their ability to genuinely represent their fellow human beings. (They are, of course, human - just seemingly insulated to an almost sociopathic degree. And, obviously, not all politicians. Some of them even have principles, WTRI believes.) This seeming divorce, too often results in political discourse being reduced to a stylised call-and-response performance, while political activity is reduced to an executive reflection of this - a Hall of Mirrors-Chamber of Horrors - rather than an executive of by the people, for the people, for the common good; “real life being a thing apart from politics” as Bánffy comments, despite the fact that, of course,

All life is politics; and I don't just mean party politics. It is politics when I keep order on the estates and run the family properties. It's all politics. When we help the well-being of the people in the village and in the mountains, when we try to promote culture, it's all politics, I say, you can't run away from it!

Bánffy's character is speaking from a patriarchal, semi-feudal aristocratic perspective, but even extrapolated to a modern welfare state, his argument holds good.

Sellar and Yeatman, despite having survived the horrors of the First World War, are not insulated: instead they’ve chosen the supremely civilised, regenerative - and subversive - power of laughter. With such an example, whatever our electoral outcomes, maybe we can do the same, giving the new line-up the benefit of the doubt while they're “still delirious with pleasure at finding themselves in office and clinging desperately to their election promises” (Bánffy): we can display the exquisite manners of Edward III to a beleaguered lady at a court dance, as described by Sellar and Yeatman, because “Honi soie qui mal y pense,” which, of course, translates as “Honey, your silk stocking’s hanging down¹¹.” Let's at least give the other lot/whichever lot the chance to hitch it up.

1. Venerable Bede, early English monk, author, (later) saint, wrote an ecclesiastical history of the English; came up with the heart-rending metaphor of life as a sparrow’s flight through the great hall: “from winter to winter.”

2. Conflating Friar Tuck with Shakespeare's Puck, A Midsummer Night’s Dream.

3. Early record of English history.

4. King Alfred, reputedly encountering one of his subjects while disguised as a commoner, failed to impress her with his cooking skills by burning her cakes.

5. Nifty conflation of American War of Independence with First World War

6. John Knox, 16thc fundamentalist Presbyterian demagogue, particularly disliked women (trademark phrase: “monstrous regiment of”); so emphatically not a good time, as you can imagine - but with a misspelt “Nox” as a homophone for the Latin (night) and a title… Rather pleasingly, nox is a feminine noun.

7. This should definitely enter the political lexicon: “He’d be late for his own rebellion,” perfectly describes a certain type of politician.

8. Runnymede; Ganymede was a beautiful young Trojan man; probably (mythologically) Zeus’s cup-bearer and catamite.

9. Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)

10. Letter to Sir Horace Mann (31 Dec. 1769); recently quoted on Substack by (I think)

Poetic Outlaws

.

11. Honi soit qui mal y pense (Evil be to him who thinks evil of it): motto of the Order of the Garter, the chivalric order founded by Edward III who “had a very romantic reign which he began by confining his mother in a stronghold for the rest if her life…”