What I Am Reading: "Black Lamb and Grey Falcon" by Rebecca West

This book is the behemoth that has been lurking on my reading list since the early autumn. A thousand years ago, I read a brief interview with Neal Stephenson in the Boston Globe, and when asked what he was reading, he said he was working his way through a pile of interwar travelogues. When I was inspired by the Outside Magazine list of best adventure books to revisit this sub-subgenre, Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon was the primary, lauded example.

West was a British novelist of whom I had never heard. Her interest in Yugoslavia was stirred by the 1934 assassination of its king, Alexander I, on a state visit to France. West, hospitalized at the time, was affected by this invocation of her generation's memories of the previous Balkan assassination, that of Franz Ferdinand, that lead to the First World War. West made several trips to Yugoslavia, and this book largely chronicles her last, made shortly before the war began.

This very long book contains broad swaths of Balkan history intermingled with the travel stories, and notes on art and architecture (including an eye for furniture). I find both aspects interesting; as I am fairly weak on Balkan history and I also appreciate the slice-of-life notes from the '30s, even in a country I am unfamiliar with. West and her husband made the trip, guided by the pseudonymous Constantine, actually the Jewish Serbian poet Stanislav Vinaver. Constantine, who also works in the government's press bureau, is a larger-than-life character, moody, tempestuous, and grandiose. With a chip on his shoulder from the bad hand his country had continuously been dealt by the larger European powers, he spends the entire narrative going to great, sometimes comically overblown lengths, to prove the impressiveness of the Yugoslavian people. Yugoslavia was a country created in the aftermath of World War One, combining those Slavic Balkan principalities, Serbia and Montenegro, that were already independent, with those that were newly freed from the Habsburg and Ottoman Empires: Slovenia, Croatia, Macedonia (technically freed during the Balkan Wars earlier in the decade), Bosnia, and so on (all of the Balkans except Albania and Greece). The country was fractured between the different nationalities and religious and ethnic groups, and was largely dominated by Serbia.

Each nation of course had its own ethnic and religious make-up, and each had had its character shaped by its history in relation to its conquerors. West's journey into Yugoslavia is a hipster undertaking, as she goes in search of a masculine and rural authenticity that she finds lacking in interwar Britain. Her entire book is extremely laudatory of the Slavs, and the Serbs in particular. Even their worst leaders are grand and terrible, and all of their misfortunes are at the hands of others; whether their direct oppressors, the Austrians, Hungarians, and Turks, or the liberal westerners who failed to save them (other than the well-remembered Gladstone, of course). I tried to remain somewhat skeptical, but West brings a considerable amount of passion to the writing, and there are many occasions on which you get carried along with her viewpoint.

Her journey started in Croatia. In the medieval era (my forthcoming history will be very shallow, fair warning:) Croatia was continuously passed back and forth between feudal rulers and countries due to treaties and inheritances, and West seems to think that this element of their history made the Croats into the "warlike, thriftless, bucolic intellectuals" (p. 51) and lawyers that they ended up as. Eventually they were pushed into the orbit of the Habsburgs; to this house they were extremely loyal, but were never rewarded with any level of self-governance or favor. The Croats are largely Catholic, leading to tension with the Orthodox Serbians. In fact, at this time the Croats had a very tense relationship with the Serbs, as they viewed themselves as junior partners as the Serbs steered the ship of state. They thought that the Serbs favored their own people and region too much, and brought about a bloated and corrupt government. In turn, the Serbs found the Croats disloyal and recalcitrant partners. In Croatia, West was shepherded not only by Constantine, a strong booster of the state of Yugoslavia, but also by Valetta, a young intellectual who favored Croatian liberation from the Yugoslav yoke, and Georgevitch, an older revolutionary who viewed the mere existence of Yugoslavia as the fulfillment of many lifelong goals (and not a work in progress). These contrasting views illuminated the Croatian situation, which was additionally complicated by the Clerical Party, arch-Catholics receiving Italian funding and encouragement to stir up trouble.

After the cafes and bistros of Croatia, West, her husband, and Constantine proceeded to Dalmatia. This coastal region was contested for centuries by Italy and other powers. The only benevolent foreign rule came briefly during the Napoleonic period, when the lauded Marshal Auguste de Marmont governed the region, and tried to rule fairly and invest in the land. The area had at the time been deforested for centuries by the need for shipbuilding, a situation the Yugoslav government was working to ameliorate. These centuries of colonization left the Dalmatians as professional oppositionists, which carried over into the Yugoslavia era. One of the interesting sites that West visited was Diocletian's Palace near Salona, built for the Roman Emperor in the 4th Century (West’s partisan note: apparently the most effective Roman emperors were of Illyrian blood). The palace was abandoned after the Roman fall, but was inhabited by the evicted townspeople of a nearby burnt city, and the complex was turned into an ingenious urban warren where people lived, worked, and conducted commerce.

There were other points of interest on the Adriatic coast as well, such as Ragusa (formerly Dubrovnik), formerly an independent city-state that out-politicked and raided the commerce of fellow Catholic powers while allying with the Turks. Next on the itinerary was Herzegovina, which had been Ottoman territory for many years until they and Bosnia were handed to the Austrians in the 1870s by the Treaty of Berlin. This was the site of some rather shoddy tourism by West, as the keepers of a Turkish vizier's house ran a tawdry simulacra, complete with harem. They proceeded into Bosnia; West says that the territory was willingly annexed by the Ottomans after the Catholics had launched several campaigns to clear out the dominant Bogomil schismatics in the early middle ages. This region, predominantly Muslim of course, is the site of one of the most interesting scenes in the book, when the Muslim population of Sarajevo donned their finest Ottoman regalia to receive the Prime Minister and Defense Minister of Turkey on a state visit, only to have their memories of glory finally finished off by the disappointment of the secular, Westernized Turks of Mustapha Kemal's regime.

Sarajevo of course also brings a long passage of then-modern history (interestingly, the historical timeline progresses backwards as the book proceeds) on the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. This is portrayed as the slapdash efforts of a bunch of students, not expected by anyone to succeed. It did succeed, of course, and the rivalrous empires of Europe went to war as a result. Ferdinand is portrayed as a pretty unpleasant guy, mediocre and unimaginative, with any reformist tendencies he had motivated only by personal dislike for the Emperor and Court; which had ruled that his children, resulting from a Morganatic marriage, would not inherit the throne. West meets a local official who was present on the day the Archduke made his ill-timed state visit; Ferdinand went to city hall after a car in his motorcade had been bombed, and was shot upon his departure. Everyone at the event, a typical political grip-and-grin, knew he was doomed; he had already had a bomb thrown at him, and no new security precautions were being mobilized. After his end, the story turns to the martyrdom of the sloppy assassins, most of whom were executed or abused in prison. West does meet a sister of one, who describes him as a fairly normal, passionate boy.

West's opinions of the Muslims in Bosnia, as with all of the descendants of the Turks, is complicated. She sees a lot of beauty despite the oppression and neglect, and it is clear that she appreciates the Turkish element in the culture of various constituent states. She says late in the book that they brought ferocity and voluptuousness, as well as courage and beauty. Overall, however, the Balkans stagnated and bled under Turkish rule, and much of their existence was defined in opposition to it. The Bosnian Muslims were also favored by the Austrian rulers, under a divide-and-rule theory.

Next comes Serbia, the Yugoslavian driver's seat. Belgrade was a growing city, and the Serbs were still agrarian peasants adapting to urban life; resulting in sickly indoor children and underpaid teachers (teachers played an important role in the decades of hearts-and-minds battles for influence in the region). West hypothesizes that the country's new economy is being taken advantage of by too many financial "adventurers;" and also that the government is somewhat mediocre because all of the best people are engaged in commerce at this point in a new country's life, not politics. As a case in point is Constantine's boss, Prime Minister Stoyadinovich (Stojadinović in modern spelling; I am mostly using West's archaic spelling for names). On one hand, West is a bit soft on Stoyadinovich, and thought he was less authoritarian than people claim. The people would turn out to be right; Stoyadinovich wasn't quite a fascist collaborator, but it wasn't for lack of trying. He tied the country's economy closer to Germany's, and was not trusted to govern when tensions heightened. In this part of the narrative, when visiting modern Serbia, West covers more recent Serbian history - the country became free of the Ottomans in the early 1800s. The country won its freedom through clever politicking and bold military maneuvers, but later monarchs were reeled back in through incompetence and despotism toward their own people; and the country fell under heavy foreign influence as the century went on. One important step along the way was to win greater feudal autonomy from the Ottoman throne; and when this happened, the King at the time decreed that his royal estate would be broken up into peasant smallholdings instead of being passed to other nobles, giving the country a largely peasant character.

The monarchy traded back and forth between two noble houses (who actually never acted directly against each other), and this phase of intrigue ended in 1903, when King Alexander Obranovich was overthrown and replaced with Peter Karageorgevich, who led a strengthened and organized Serbia into the Balkan Wars, where they formed a coalition to outfight the Ottomans and Bulgaria. In West’s telling, World War One resulted from Austria’s saber-rattling, with the Serbs too worn out to provoke anything. They fought off the initial invasion, but were eventually hit by overwhelming force, and the Serbian army had to retreat through rugged, hostile Albania to the sea in order to be evacuated by the British. They returned as the military situation reversed itself, and in 1918 Peter I declared himself the King of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (side note: Slovenia is not visited and barely mentioned in the book, beyong being arch-conservative Catholics and having been under Habsburg rule).

Peter's successor, Alexander I, became king in 1921. He would rather have ruled over a kingdom of Greater Serbia, or perhaps taken advantage of the Russian Revolution to pursue a Slav empire. However, Yugoslavia was the hand he was dealt, and he governed fairly normally until the late '20s, when Stefan Raditch, a Croatian separatist-turned-monarchist cabinetmember, was assassinated. In the ensuing crisis, when everyone mistrusted the King despite his fondness for Raditch, Alexander assumed dictatorial powers, and instituted a repressive regime. Violence in Croatia led to increased clampdowns, which led to more violence and hatred. It was during this era that the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes changed its name to Yugoslavia, meaning the Land of the Southern Slavs. West stresses repeatedly that the Slavic national character holds the nation together, despite the national and religious differences that eventually ended it within my lifetime. Alexander I ruled until Mussolini's agents contrived his assassination in France, the event that triggered West's interest in Yugoslavia.

Despite Italian ill-intentions, the country allegedly rallied together after their leader was killed, and became incrementally more cohesive. After Serbia, West travels to Macedonia, a region that was freed from Turkish control during the Balkan Wars of 1912-13 for strategic reasons. The region is poor and agrarian, and was "frozen in time" by centuries of Turkish rule (though they allowed many towns to thrive, and built many noteworthy pieces of architecture). Macedonia was prey for many years to brigands, and terrorists funded by Italy and Bulgaria, agitating to stake a claim on the territory. At this point in West's trip, their party was joined by Gerda, Constantine's wife. She is a very unpleasant German, constantly looking down on the Slavs as an inferior race. She brings out the worst in Constantine, who as a Jew felt psychologically pressured to debase himself in order to win her approval and fit into her worldview, in West’s analysis. West hates, HATES Gerda, and it would be funny if she weren't the harbinger of encroaching Nazism. One interesting incident in Macedonia is the visit to the German war cemetery in Bitolj, a town that was besieged during the war. This memorial looms as a fortress over the town, and has little to say about the deceased German soldiers. Gerda is filled with patriotism, but West and her husband enrage her by pointing out the monument's negative nature. Constantine again embarrasses himself in taking Gerda's side.

In Macedonia, the Slavs were forced to cluster together to defend themselves against bandits, and their villages reflect this. Thus, farmers were able to have a thriving social life, and drove their livestock to pasture outside the village every morning, returning at night. As she did in other locales, West deeply admires the folk art these peasants produced, in the forms of embroidery and other fabrics. The area is also jam-packed with historic churches. The whole book is jam-packed with churches in fact. West visits churches and monasteries and describes their history, art, and residents. Most of them do sound like gorgeous tourist attractions.

She describes this area, as well as Serbia and Old Serbia (coming up), as strongly influenced by the Byzantine and Orthodox tradition, outside of the West and the Enlightenment. Orthodox religious practice focused less on writing and the finer points of theological debate, and more on the perfection of the mass as a mysterious and magical experience, and on the visual arts through their frescoes. West believes that this is because they saw their doom approaching in the form of the encroaching Turks, even while they were at their cultural apotheosis.

West calls the next segment of the trip Old Serbia, and it is the region around Kosovo today. The area is described a spoor and agrarian, without any of the grand architecture or bustling towns of Macedonia. The main focus for this area is the Battle of "Kossovo" in 1389, where the Serbians were defeated by the Turks. This brings me around to the reason the book has its name; according to an old Serbian poem, the Serbian king at Kossovo, Tsar Lazar, allegedly was offered the choice between creating a kingdom on Earth and a kingdom in Heaven. He chose the latter, losing the battle and condemning his people to centuries of occupation and oppression. West analogizes this to a rock she is shown as a sacrificial altar where lambs are slaughtered. She believes that the liberal west has internalized the incorrect idea that they must choose between being the slaughterer or the lamb; and have decided that since it is so gruesome to kill, they can only be the lamb, and must let the grey falcon that Tsar Lazar saw in the poem end their civilization. West's thesis is that the liberal powers of Europe, Britain and France etc., must reject this false dichotomy. They must not choose the kingdom in heaven.

On the travel front, after the powerful and desolate battlefield, West visits a mine that is run by a Scotsman, and sees some of the country's industry being put to work. This leads to an interesting incident with Constantine, who was at that point in the trip, despite Gerda's departure, starting to fall apart to some extent. He brandishes a newspaper and slyly says that this mine, which West was very taken with, might have foreign subterfuge behind it, and could be shut down. At this point, a passer-by notes that this newspaper is a German-funded rag, spreading slander, and asks why Constantine, in his capacity as government censor, is letting it be published; Constantine vehemently claims he is trying to suppress it. He was unable to resolve the contradiction, as he was unable to resolve other contradictions - his relationship with Germanic Gerda, his country’s fractious priorities and needs, and so on.

Back to Serbian history, this time medieval - West is constantly analogizing aspects of the situation to British scenarios that her British readers could understand, and she thus compares Serbian medieval kings to their English counterparts, with the brutal but strong Stefan Milutin compared to Henry VIII, and the steady-hand-on-the-tiller of Stefan Dushan compared to Elizabeth I. After this extended jaunt through Serbian history, West heads to Montenegro, described as the land of Homeric heroes dwelling in the mountains, monotonous in their bravery. They resisted the Turks in their mountain redoubt for many centuries.

At this point, as their trip nears its end, the party figures out that some of the obvious German agents and sympathizers they have encountered have been stationed along the Albanian border, and that the Italians must be up to something (I thought it would be the Italian invasion of Albania, but it turned out to be some kind of purge of enemies). From Montenegro, West must journey home, as her husband's work needs bring the trip to an end. In her long epilogue, West reiterates her views that England and France must wake up to the German threat, and reject the dichotomy of the black lamb (noble prey) and the grey falcon (evil predator). The English and the Slavs had made great civilizational strides, and engaged with the universe instead of simply shutting it out; their civilizations deserved to live.

This epilogue was written during the early phases of the war; France had been overrun and London was being bombed. The Austrians who brought so much oppression to Yugoslavia also produced Hitler, as Vienna was unable to reconcile itself to its reduced state (as well as the killings perpetrated by Engelbert Dollfuss; in the front of the mind of a current events writer, but not often mentioned by historians - a positive feature of checking out this sort of primary source). Yugoslavia, of course, was invaded too; after Stoyadinovich's successor agreed to the capitulationist terms of Hitler's treaty (as Hungary and Romania had previously), the country overthrew him and their Regent in a brief coup d'etat, and installed the underage Peter II as King. Thus, the romantic Slavs that West had continuously lauded them as, the Yugoslavs went down fighting, and (according to her) served the strategic purpose of allowing the British enough time to defend the Middle East, so that Hitler did not have a side route into Russia, and had to do things the hard way.

This is written too early to catch some interesting history. The Yugoslavian resistance was centered first around the mostly royalist Chetniks; but after they were unable to make much headway, the allies switched their support to Tito and the Communists. This led to a multi-sided civil war, including the collaborationist and fascist Croatian state. One goal for those backing the French resistance was that things not go as poorly as they went in Yugoslavia. After the war, of course, the Communists took over, and the non-Stalinist Tito forged his own rogue path. This book was definitely a product of its time, both as a literal recounting of the Yugoslavia that West found and an application of the problems that plainly faced Europe. West is not an unbiased observer, and has a passionate love for the Slavs. I can feel that. I am a Slav (a West Slav though: a Wend? Will look into). Yugoslavia was a very interesting country, formed almost as a bizarre social experiment. "We will take some Slavs who lived under the Turks, plus some Slavs who lived under the Austrians, plus some who lived under the Turks THEN the Austrians, plus some who were free for a couple centuries, and see how their amalgamated country goes!" West has other biases as well - she is clearly anti-urban, she thinks the "urban proletariat" are the main threat to the West in the form of Fascism, and she has kind words for Stalin. Constantine, likewise, is a character with his strengths and weaknesses; he seems very boisterous and amusing, full of enthusiasm for his homeland, but often (in my mind) crosses the line into being an asshole, both personally and politically. I probably passed along this negative impression of him in my narrative, but he really does have a lot of good moments; he is constantly introducing West to the important personalities they run across, and has boastful tall-tales about every aspect of Serbian and Yugoslavian life, and about his own life and wartime, intellectual, and sexual escapades. The dichotomy reminds me of many of my friends. The real Stanislaus Vinaver did survive the concentration camps.

This book was heavy and dense, and I could have taken pages and pages of notes on it. I focused on the history and cultural notes, but there was a lot of art history and architectural commentary as well. The book was exhausting, in a good way. It deserves its high reputation as a travelogue and as a book on the Balkans and on Yugoslavia.