I was in Innsbruck when war was declared, taking notes for an article on the Archduke Ferdinand’s Wunderkammer at Schloss Ambras. I knew the United States would fight with the Allies, and hurried to Berlin. Through the influence of my grandfather I became a citizen of the Reich.
My reasons for choosing Germany were aesthetic. I believed that war is Man’s supreme aesthetic experience and that only the Germans and Japanese understood this. Only they understood the texture of war: it was unthinkable to fight on the other side.
Not that I or my friends expected to win. We never shared the hysterical optimism of the High Command. We fought for’ reasons inexplicable to those opportunist parvenus: for us, Bolshevism and National Socialism were facets of the same phenomenon. Nor did we fight for the Fatherland. We fought only to fight. We fought, in fact, to lose. Aesthetically, it is always safer to lose.
In Berlin I made friends with Ernst Gruenwald, the Secretary of the German-Japanese Friendship Society. He had lived thirty years in Japan, ten of them in the Daitoku-ji Monastery in Kyoto. He alone in the west understood the quality in art the Japanese call ‘wabi’. Literally the word means ‘poverty’, but applied to a work of art it means that true beauty, ‘the beauty that breaks away from this world’, must rely on the use of its humblest materials.
I went to live with Gruenwald at his country house near Eberswalde. That summer, intoxicated by the scent of late-flowering lindens, we practised Zen archery while, outside the gates, tanks rumbled along the road to Poland.
In December 1940 I joined the 24th Panzer Korps; in the following summer we invaded the Ukraine. I could squeeze few luxuries into my tank, but did manage to take my Purdeys, some volumes of Voltaire and my smoking jacket. My friend Rainer von Hagenburg and I had agreed to attend the first night of the renamed Bolshoi Ballet in civilian dress – a performance we knew would never take place.
No aspect of the invasion disappointed me: the excellence of wildfowl shooting in the Pripet Marshes; the oxyhydrogen flares of the flame-throwers; the yellow shield of a dead Mongol’s face; the Soviet loudspeakers blaring the Budenny March over long-abandoned wheatfields; the drawn but happy faces of the aristocrats who greeted us after twenty-four years of living death.
On 12 September 1942, at our assault on Stalingrad, a bullet caught me in the groin. Laid out on a field stretcher I removed the final ‘d’ from my name. And yet I recovered from the operation. Von Hagenburg even recovered my Voltaire and my Purdeys. I returned, an invalid, to Berlin.
The next summer found me in Finland in my capacity as expert on the fracture of ice. At Rovaniemi I met Vaino Mustanoja, a man whose tastes corresponded so precisely with my own. His description of the Patagonian glaciers fired me with longing for the Far South. I envied his collection of Eskimo artefacts.
Mustanoja had built a Doric pavilion in the forest. Inside and out were painted black and stencilled with silver tears in memory of the room decorated by the regicide St Just at Rheims. Here, with the light of white nights flickering through the birches, we dined on gravlax, smoked reindeer fillet and cloudberries, our conversations unexhausted by the morning. Here also I witnessed his sad end.
As late as November 1944 the Führer was importing porphyry columns from Sweden, doubtless intended for some monument to himself, doubtless unaware that Swedish porphyry is not an acceptable substitute for Egyptian. His geologists were incapable of choosing stone of good quality. My services were accepted. I left for Stockholm, taking with me the finest pieces of the Gruenwald Collection, saving them from certain destruction. Through an intermediary I gave the Crown Prince a stem cup that had belonged to the Emperor Hsuan Tsang. I was granted asylum. The cup was no loss: it was, in my opinion, the only lapse in Gruenwald’s taste.
In 1945 I became an Argentine citizen and under the pseudonym of Mills began my academic career as a glaciologist. Eventually I returned to the United States, where, from minor colleges, I assembled a portfolio of pointless distinctions.
I began work on my ‘refined Thebaid’ in the southern summer of 1947-8, believing at the time that nuclear war was inevitable in the Northern Hemisphere. In the years that followed I spent at least three months in my valley, but by 1960 inflation, the cost of freight and the blackmailing demands of Chilean and Argentine officials had eaten into the capital I had placed in Swiss banks.
I met Estelle Neumann in the Peabody Museum in 1962 as she was admiring a case of glass flowers. She said she came from Trenton, New Jersey. I was surprised, neither by Trenton nor her admiration for the flowers. I found in her an ideal mixture of brilliance and incredible stupidity. No original thought entered her head, yet she did have the wit to appropriate each one of my suggestions as her own.
But now my schemes have not turned out as planned. I am writing this memoir in a tin shack in the Atacama Desert. My water is running low. I had intended to settle for ever in my valley; I have left it for others to pillage. I have left my young companion. I have left my things. I, who with bedouin rigour abolished the human form from my possessions ... I, who did everything to protect my retina from the visual affronts of the twentieth century, now I too am prey to hallucinations. Women with red faces leer at me. Wet lips slaver over me. Monstrous blocs of colour smother me. Je dus voyager, distraire les enchantements assemblés dans mon cerveau. One particular colour continues to torment me: the orange of Estelle Neumann’s anorak the second before I pushed her.
1979
BEDOUINS
... and dwell in tents that ye may live long in the land where ye are strangers.
Jeremiah
He was travelling to see his old father who was a rabbi in Vienna. His skin was white. He had a small fair moustache and bloodshot eyes, the eyes of a textual scholar. He held up a grey serge overcoat, not knowing where to hang it. He was very shy. He was so shy that he could not undress with anyone else in the compartment.
I went into the corridor. The train was speeding up. The lights of Frankfurt disappeared into the night.
Five minutes later he was lying on the upper bunk, relaxed and eager to talk. He had studied at a Talmudic Academy in Brooklyn. His father had left America fifteen years earlier: the morning would reunite them.
He and his father disapproved of America. They mistrusted the Zionist mood. Israel was an idea, not a country. Besides, Jahweh gave the Land for his Children to wander through, not to settle or sink roots there.
Before the war his family had lived in Sibiu in Romania. When the war came they hoped they were safe; then, in 1942, Nazis set a mark on the house.
The father shaved his beard and cut his ringlets. His Gentile servant fetched him a peasant costume, black breaches and a smocked linen shirt. He took his first-born son and ran into the woods.
The Nazis took the mother, the sisters and the baby boy. They died in Dachau. The rabbi walked through the Carpathian beech forests with his son. Shepherds sheltered him and gave him meat. The way the shepherds slaughtered sheep did not offend his principles. Finally, he crossed the Turkish frontier and made his way to America.
Now father and son were returning to Romania. Recently they had a sign, pointing the way back. Late one night, in his apartment in Vienna, the rabbi reluctantly answered the doorbell. On the landing stood an old woman with a shopping basket.
She said, ‘I have found you.’
She had blue lips and wispy hair. Dimly he recognised his Gentile servant.
‘The house is safe,’ she said. ‘Forgive me. For years I pretended it was now a Gentile house. Your clothes are there, your books even. I am dying. Here is the key.’
‘All houses are Gentile houses,’ the rabbi said.
1978
III
‘THE NOMADIC ALTERNATIVE’
LETTER TO TOM MASCHLER
24th February, 1969
Dear Tom,
You asked me to write you a letter about my proposed book on nomads. I cannot provide a history of nomads. It would take years to write. In any case I want
the book to be general rather than specialist in tone. The question I will try to answer is ‘Why do men wander rather than sit still?’ I have proposed one title – The Nomadic Alternative. We obviously won’t use it. It is too rational a title for a subject that appeals to irrational instincts. For the moment it has the advantage of implying that the nomad’s life is not inferior to the city dweller’s. I have to try and see the nomads as they see themselves, looking outwards at civilisation with envy or mistrust. By civilisation I mean ‘life in cities’, and by civilised those who live within the ambit of literate urban civilisation. All civilisations are based on regimentation and rational behaviour. Nomads are uncivilised and all the words traditionally used in connection with them are charged with civilised prejudices – vagrant, vagabond, shifty, barbarian, savage, etc. Wandering nomads are bound to be a disruptive influence but they have been blamed out of all proportion to the material damage they cause. This blame is rationalised and justified by false piety. The nomads are excluded; they are outcasts. Cain ‘wandered over the surface of the earth’.
The first chapter might ask the question – Why wander? It could start with the Greek legend of Io and her compulsive wandering, and be called ‘Io’s Gadfly’ (if that’s not too trite). The word ‘nomad’ comes from words meaning ‘to pasture’ but it has come to apply to the earliest hunters as well. Hunters and herdsmen shift for economic reasons. Less obvious are the reasons for the nomad’s intransigence in face of settlement even when the economic inducements are overwhelmingly in its favour. But the mutual antagonism of citizen and nomad is only one half of the theme. The other is much nearer home – ESCAPISM (a good personal reason for writing the book). Why do I become restless after a month in a single place, unbearable after two? (I am, I admit, a bad case.) Some travel for business. But there is no economic reason for me to go, and every reason to stay put. My motives, then, are materially irrational. What is this neurotic restlessness, the gadfly that tormented the Greeks? Wandering may settle some of my natural curiosity and my urge to explore, but then I am tugged back by a longing for home. I have a compulsion to wander and a compulsion to return – a homing instinct like a migrating bird. True nomads have no fixed home as such; they compensate for this by following unalterable paths of migration. If these are upset it is usually by interference from the civilised or semi-civilised half-nomads. The result is chaos. Nomads develop exaggerated fixations about their tribal territory. ‘Land is the basis of our nation. We shall fight!’ said a nomad chief of the second century BC. He cheerfully gave away his best horse, all his treasure and his favourite wife, but fought to the death for a few miles of useless scrub. This obsession for tribal land lies behind the tragedy of the Near East. The High Seas do not invoke quite the same emotional response, and territorial waters lie close to land. Sailors’ emotions are directed towards the feminised ship that carries them and their home port.
Looking at some of today’s studies of animal and human behaviour, one can detect two trends ...1. Wandering is a human characteristic genetically inherited from the vegetarian primates.
2. All human beings have the emotional, if not an actual biological, need for a base, cave, den, tribal territory, possessions or port. This is something we share with the carnivores.
Chapter II will deal with the omnivorous weapon-using ARCHAIC HUNTERS. They can be traced from the lower Palaeolithic to the present day. They follow their food supply; they return home to base. They take, gratefully, what nature offers (chapter title – ‘Predators’?), but make no practical effort to propagate their food supply, except by ritually identifying themselves with animals or inanimate objects in their environment. Living for the moment, they are distinguished from us by having a radically different concept of time and its significance, though differences of this kind are matters of degree rather than kind. Their lives are not one long struggle for food, as many imagine. Much of their time is passed in gross idleness, particularly the Australian Aboriginals whose dialectic arguments know no bounds of complication. Though capable of bouts of intense concentration while actually getting their food supply, they do not take kindly to manual work. The leaders lead; they do not coerce. The whole point of receiving a gift is to give it away; a pair of trousers given to an Aboriginal will pass rapidly through twenty hands and end up decorating a tree. Vendetta is a private rather than a public affair. If they kill one another, it is usually for ritual reasons. Mass extermination is a speciality of the civilised. The ‘Neo-barbarism’ of Hitler was Civilisation in its most vicious aspect.
Chapter III will be a discussion of Civilisation (as something to escape from). Chapter title – ‘The Comforts of Literacy’. ‘Put writing in your heart. Thus you may protect yourself from any kind of labour’ – Egyptian scribe to his son c. 2400 BC. The triumph of the white-collar worker was achieved over the backs of sweated labour. The Civilisations of the Old World crystallised in river valleys where the soil was fertile but the choice was ‘Make dams or be swept out to sea’. Note the hero’s medals offered posthumously by a grateful Mao to those ‘human dams’ drowned while blocking the Hwang-Ho in spate. Diffusionism is unfashionable but I believe (with Lewis among others) that Civilisation as such was an accident that happened once and once only in the very peculiar conditions of Southern Iraq, and that the consequences of this ‘accident’ spread as far as the Andes before Columbus. This proposition is highly debatable. On it hinges the question ‘Is Civilisation something natural – a state to which many different cultures have irrevocably led?’ ‘Are those that did not failures – or are they alternatives to Civilisation?’ ‘Or is Civilisation an anti-natural accident?’ If so, the evolutionary analogies, of Darwinism and the survival of the fittest, are misapplied when used with reference to human cultures. In any case writing develops hand in hand with specialisation, standardisation and bureaucracy, and with them a stratified social and economic hierarchy, and the repression of one group by a ruling minority. The first written tablets record how much the slaves are bringing in. Literate Civilisation freed some for the higher exercises of the mind, for the development of logical thought, mathematics, practical medicine based on scientific observation rather than faith healing etc. But in Mesopotamia the two highest gods were Anu (Order) and Enlil (Compulsion). Breasted writes of the ‘dauntless courage of the architect of the Great Pyramid’. However, the 2.5 million blocks were hauled up by fettered labour. Civilisation was lashed into place. We inherit the load.
Chapter IV ‘Herdsmen’ (or ‘Pastoralists’).
The herding of domesticated animals was one of the technical advances that led towards the formation of Civilisation, but it was always combined with some sort of agriculture, and was, therefore, always reasonably settled. True pastoral nomadism, with herds on the move all the time and no agriculture, was not a stage towards Civilisation. It developed as an alternative to it. It was directly in competition with it, especially in border regions. The art of riding provided the means of mobility; it was the ‘tip-over’ factor that enabled some groups to abandon agriculture and be permanently on the move. The pastoralist had much in common with the hunter – they believed in a mystical bond between animal and man. But from Civilisation they learned the idea of the unity of the State, and from the techniques of herding and killing domesticated animals, they discovered those of human coercion and extermination.
This is a long chapter and perhaps best divided into two. I will then trace the origins of the great nomad cultures, the Scythians, the Huns, the Germanic ‘waves’, the Dorian Greeks, the Arabs, the Mongols and the Turks, the last (semi)nomadic people to aspire to world conquest.
There will be an account of nomadic life; its harshness and intolerance, its illiteracy and obsession with genealogies; the comparative lack of slavery, though that did not prevent nomads from being the most successful slave traders; the renunciation of all but the most portable possessions in times of emergency; the failure to appreciate civilised standards of human life balanced by a natura
l adjustment towards death, which the super-civilised have lost; the communality of property and land within a tribe. ‘All are God’s guests. We share and share alike’ (Bedou chief); the position of women (remarkably emancipated, particularly in Northern Asia); the sanctity of the craftsman etc.
Chapter V will continue the story of the nomads in face of a triumphant agricultural and then industrial Civilisation. I may call it ‘ “Civilisation or Death!” ’ the cry of the American frontiersman. This will be a record of the hard line towards nomads, its rationalised hatred and self-assumed moral superiority. Nomads are equated with animals, and treated as such. I will discuss the fate of the Gypsies, the American Indians, the Lapps and the Zulus, also nomads within highly civilised societies, tramps, hobos etc. I would give an account of the Beja in the Eastern Sudan, the Fuzzy-Wuzzies of Kipling. They have been able to resist all civilising influences, since they were first mentioned in Egyptian annals some three thousand years ago, only because they are prepared to tolerate the lowest level of personal comfort. They are sensationally idle and truculent as well. Most of the morning for the men is taken up by a fantastic mutual coiffure session (grooming urge?). There is also the depressing moral and physical effect of Civilisation on the Arab. ‘Law and order have settled in like a blight on Sinai and Palestine’ (G. W. Murray, The Sons of Ishmael).