by John Updike
After a brief section on Trinidad’s two hundred years as a “ghost province” within the Spanish Empire, and on its sudden, bloodless surrender to the British in 1797, The Loss of El Dorado concentrates upon Trinidad as an outpost in the young British Empire and upon the rule, disgrace, and final glory of Thomas Picton. If the collapse of Vera’s relief force epitomizes the Spanish quest, the basic symbol of the British establishment is Vallot’s jail. Jean-Baptiste Vallot, the conscientious, amiable, tirelessly cruel jailer of Port of Spain, is one of Naipaul’s prime catches in the sea of forgotten documents. Vallot, who was paid by fees for each flogging, ear-clipping, and torture by suspension, and Begorrat, the chief magistrate, who prescribed the tortures and punishments, were both French; in Spanish times, Trinidad had suffered an influx of French planters and their slaves from the more turbulent islands of Santo Domingo and Martinique. The planters had brought with them their skill at “the management of Negroes.”
… the Negro called Pierre François had been ordered to fall on his knees to hear his sentence. He was then taken to the church. He was not baptized; he was already a Christian. Prayers were read to him. He was then “heavily ironed” and the soldiers led him to where Bouqui’s headless body was tied to the stake. [Bouqui was a previously executed Negro.] Many Negroes watched. Some of Vallot’s jail Negroes were waiting with faggots. Pierre François was chained to the stake with the headless body. He was made to put on a shirt. The shirt was filled with sulphur. The jail Negroes built up the faggots. The executioner lit the fire.… The smell of sulphur and the two burning bodies drove many people out of their houses and there were some whites who feared a massacre. Begorrat and the French planters had devised the punishment and the ritual. They said afterwards it was what they used to do in Martinique.
Picton brought to his post no aversion to brutality. Instant hangings and fatal lashings were the first order of his new establishment. He signed all of Begorrat’s torture orders. The growing agitation of the “radical” English-born artisans and merchants in Port of Spain, and the intervention of Colonel William Fullarton, one of two commissioners appointed to mitigate Picton’s one-man rule, succeeded in having him brought to trial in London for a relatively innocent act—signing the order to torture Luisa Calderon, a young free mulatto accused by her lover of theft. Picton’s two trials consumed five years. Luisa and the Negro policeman who testified with her had time to learn English between the first and the second. At the first, Picton was technically convicted, on the basis that torture was illegal under the Spanish law that still obtained in Trinidad; at the second, he was acquitted. Meanwhile, Fullarton—who, a spendthrift as well as a humanitarian, had squandered the treasury surplus accumulated under Picton’s hard-headed management—fell into disfavor and died. Back in Port of Spain, Vallot’s jail, with its torture chambers, its tiny, stinking cells, its cachots brûlants (windowless hotboxes), was pulled down by Picton’s friends. No plan of it remains. Vallot disappeared; Begorrat remained a prominent planter into the 1830’s; Picton’s destiny took him into the peninsular campaign with Wellington, storming and sacking Badajoz, and on to Waterloo and a valorous death and a memorial statue at Carmarthen and the immortal good name enshrined, if you look him up, in the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The Loss of El Dorado concludes with a summary of Trinidad’s next hundred and fifty years, as a “ghost province” now of the British Empire, and touches on Mr. Naipaul’s childhood in Port of Spain, when it seemed “a place at the rim of the world.” Then, in the 1940’s, “Picton was the name of a street; no one knew more. History was a fairy tale about Columbus.… History was also a fairy tale not so much about slavery as about its abolition.” These two impressions, of history as layers of fantasy and of Trinidad as a place on the rim of the world, animate Naipaul’s zealous and intricate work of research and lurk behind his curious thesis that the New World is hopelessly “simple” and unreal. Himself a resident of England for twenty years, Naipaul voices this thesis, or suspicion, through the exiled revolutionary Miranda. “After the years in Europe, the books, pictures, and study, after the talk of liberty and constitutions, the colonial world remained, still knowing only about blood and money, cacao and tobacco, the management of Negroes and shops.… Miranda was applying the concepts of Europe as words alone, accurate but misleading, to a simpler world: the Negro-worked plantations of Venezuela, the low wooden houses of Port of Spain, the muddy shore, the rough Spanish shops, the one printery.” The reader puzzles over this “deeper colonial deprivation, the sense of the missing real world.” Is it that Europe has no muddy shores? Is greater length of history the token of superiority? Another exile, the Venezuelan lawyer Level de Goda, in Spain, is excited “to be close for the first time to the real world and real events, to be in a country that could support classical illusion.” Illusion or allusion? Naipaul’s indictment is slow to form. “It wasn’t only that the wines, the manners and the graces, the books and the art and the ideas of a living culture came from outside. The simple society bred simple people”—“too simple for lasting causes,” so simple that their revolutions are “second-hand,” “with energy but without principles,” “the imperfectly constituted society decaying into minute egoisms.” And what is the cause of this decay, which turned the Spaniards feckless, which made Frenchmen into monsters of cruelty, which sapped British liveliness and idealism? Slavery. “In the slave society … this liveliness began to be perverted and then to fade, and the English saw their preëminence, more simply, as a type of racial magic.” Inhumane laws are enacted by people “who have ceased to assess themselves by the standards of the metropolis and now measure their eminence only by their distance, economic and racial, from their Negroes.”
This was what stalled and perverted every stated metropolitan principle, French, Spanish, English, of revolution, intellectual advance, law, social drive, justice and freedom: race, the taint of slavery: it helped to make the colonial society simple.
If for “colonial” we substitute “southern,” the situation, and the truth of the charge, become recognizable. There is no denying the evidence Naipaul has resurrected concerning the cruelty and folly enacted in the provinces of El Dorado, where slaves poisoned each other to destroy the master’s wealth and ate dirt to destroy themselves. Naipaul’s sense of an evil unreality presiding over the New World makes it possible for him to sympathize on all sides, to bring into rounded life his great variety of doomed actors. “Fantasy,” with “simple,” is a recurrent word: there was the fantasy of a city of gold, and the fantasy of the underground slave life of voodoo and midnight courts, and the fantasy of bookish revolutionaries like Miranda, and the fantasy of the British that they could manipulate South American revolutions to serve their economic ends. But in viewing an entire hemisphere as a corrupted dream, Naipaul dissolves what realities there were. The Loss of El Dorado rests upon an unexamined assumption, of metropolitan superiority. In this it is like Naipaul’s last, fine but cold novel, The Mimic Men, which presented the men of the West Indies as poor imitations of Europeans. Yet were the conquistadors more fanatic and quixotic than the captains of the Thirty Years’ War? Were the English planters more rapacious and callous than the mill-owners of Lancashire? Were the South American revolutionaries more deluded or ineffectual than the French prototypes, who slew each other and prepared the way for Napoleon? Was the cruelty of slavery not an extension of the cruelty already present on the African continent? Does not the collapse of “metropolitan” values amid “simpler” conditions demonstrate their own frailty and unreality? For the fallacy of the primitive paradise, it seems to me, Mr. Naipaul wants to exchange that of the metropolitan paradise. This desire gives The Loss of El Dorado its bleak and caustic tone, yet also its persuasive sadness and the power of poetry.
Sons of Slaves
THE SULTANS, by Noel Barber. 304 pp. Simon & Schuster, 1973.
THE SULTAN: The Life of Abdul Hamid II, by Joan Haslip. 309 pp. Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1973.
One does not need to be Dr. Spock to be reminded, by such behavior, of insanely indulged children begging for someone to set “limits.” The sultans fascinate, indeed, as examples of how far human appetite will go when no obstacle to its satisfaction is posed. They are a spectacle to comfort the average deprived man. Several of them, early given the run of a harem, developed impotence; a surprising number, in a teetotalling culture, drank themselves to death. Over half of the sultans after 1600 had to be deposed! Mr. Barber, though his energetic scholarship displays itself in pages of colorful details, does not seize the opportunity to analyze the peculiarities of Ottoman kingship that shaped so preponderantly ineffective a dynasty. Rather, he offers the dark suggestion that the “unbroken line of weaklings” after Suleiman were not Othmans at all but sprang from a coupling between Suleiman’s empress Roxelana and an unknown lover. Yet the background of Barber’s perhaps too sensational and anecdotal chronicle of the sultanate contains more sociological reasons for its uncorrected debilitation. The Sultan was not only the administrator of a terrestrial empire but a holy man, the Caliph of Islam, and as such (though the claim to the caliphate was shadowy and emphasized chiefly in the latter centuries of the sultans) he enjoyed among the Muslim masses a religious prestige impervious to mortal shenanigans. Though the sultans’ extravagance and the corruption they fostered sorely burdened the empire, the need for a sultan was never questioned, and except in cases of blatant imbecility the rules of succession were followed. A second insulating factor was these rules of succession, whereby not the son but the eldest male in the family inherited the throne; the welter of intrigue this invited was combatted, initially, by the extraordinary sanction of fratricide that Ottoman law offered to the newly enthroned—“the right to execute their brothers, in order to ensure the peace of the world”—and then, in a humane modification that proved surpassingly disastrous to the health of the sultanate, by the institution of the Kafes, the Cage, a two-storied building, within the Seraglio, set aside by Ahmed I in 1603 for the perpetual confinement of the heirs to the throne. High walls surrounded it; the ground floor was windowless; here, with no company but that of deaf-mutes and sterilized concubines, the sultans’ brothers and sons awaited either the silken bowstring of assassination or the call to supreme power. Mustafa I, the first alumnus of the Cage, emerged demented; Ibrahim, who had spent twenty-two of his first twenty-four years there, proved a monster of debauchery; and Suleiman II, who logged the record of forty-five years in the Cage, had, when at last he was proclaimed Sultan, “all but lost the power of speech.” Has any other nation ever so devalued human personality as to immure its future rulers in total isolation from the workings of the world? The Ottoman Empire gave an extraordinary centrality to the institution of slavery. The Sultan was the only free Turk in the government; the rest were all his personal slaves, often converted Christians from the European realms of the empire. The Janissaries, his personal troops, were impressed Christian boys; an Albanian father and son, the Kuprilis, served as highly effective grand viziers for some of the Cage-crazed sultans; two of the most powerful of the sultanas who dominated events from the harem were the Russian Roxelana and Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, a convent girl captured by Barbary pirates. (The melodramatic annals of the Seraglio contain few incidents as tender* as the summons of Mahmud II, Aimée’s son, for a Catholic priest to absolve his dying mother in her native faith.) Every sultan was the son of a slave; and the dehumanizing designs of slavery are felt everywhere, from the rigor of the pageantry to such animate constructs as the black eunuch and the deaf-mute assassin—his eardrums broken, his tongue slit, and his life consecrated to the use of the bowstring, as that of the concubine was consecrated to a call from the imperial bed which often never came. In his world of slaves the Sultan found little resistance to his fantasies and little helpful advice. Of Abdul Hamid II, the last of the absolute monarchs and one of the few with some gift for government, Mr. Barber says, “As his terror bore increasing signs of madness, he chose the most incredible characters to guide him. His advisers included a slave he had bought in the market, a circus clown whose act he admired, the son of one of his cooks, a Punch and Judy performer, and a bootblack.” Everything, in short, but a graduate of Whittier High School.
Yet one wonders if even a continuous line of philosopher-kings or elected charismatics could have kept the Ottoman Empire from shrinking. Its reduction, in any case, was less rapid than that of the British Empire, and, unlike that of Rome, left the heartland unconquered. Even after generations and generations of being “sick,” Turkey proved capable of the heroics of Plevna. The reader, grateful for so much that Mr. Barber has unearthed from the archives of this curious despotism, regrets that he did not choose to meditate upon his basic subject—that of decadence. Do extravagance and obtuseness in high circles significantly affect the human tides that Tolstoy saw mysteriously sweeping back and forth across the surface of the globe? Or do the expansion and contraction of empires have to do simply with the technology of warfare: the Ottomans organized the first standing army in Europe and developed an artillery that, in the words of Gibbon, “surpassed whatever had yet appeared in the world.” To what extent does this kind of military vitality reflect spiritual vigor or efficacious political institutions? The Ott
oman bureaucracy of slaves, a model of efficiency in the short run, proved cumbersome and unresponsive in the long. But what possible administrative magic could have enabled the Caliph of Islam to rule forever over the Christian peoples of the Balkans as Christian Europe waxed mighty? The wonder is that the Turkish “yoke” lasted so long. One would like to know in what ways Turkish rule impinged upon the subject peoples—if present-day America is taken as an empire, would the analogy be with Puerto Rico or South Vietnam?—and, for that matter, what the sultans did all day, aside from playing pranks on their harem and holding hieratically formal audiences, throughout which the audient’s arms were pinned by two stout pashas as a safeguard against assassination.
Joan Haslip, in The Sultan, gives a portrait of Abdul Hamid II considerably more sympathetic than that of Mr. Barber, who makes the last of the all-powerful sultans a maze-loving paranoid surrounded by “incredible characters” and the drab tatters of an outlandish panoply. Miss Haslip sees him as an agile and prescient statesman, able, for the more than three decades of his reign, to play the European powers off against each other and safeguard Turkey’s survival without the entangling alliances that, once he fell, drew the Young Turks into the First World War. A runty younger brother placed on the throne by his sibling’s insanity, Abdul Hamid had some experience of cosmopolitan Europe, more knowledge of history than any sultan before him, a flair for mathematics and carpentry, an engaging fondness for the tales of Sherlock Holmes. He had in his youth enjoyed a bourgeois liaison with a woman not of the harem, a Belgian shopkeeper called Flora Cordier, and even in his reactionary old age his conservatism had the rationale of a Pan-Islamic vision, a sound instinct to salvage the empire’s Muslim East and to let the European fragments go. Abdul Hamid had the self-knowledge to exclaim, in discourse with an English businessman, “What can you expect of us, the children of slaves brought up by eunuchs?” But his story, so respectfully told by Miss Haslip, who even takes the Sultan’s side against the massacred Armenians, is a dreary one, of a devious holding action against a desperate need for reform. It is, furthermore, mere history, full of problematical conferences and détentes and peoples’ uprisings, and tells us little more than the morning’s newspaper. Whereas Mr. Barber’s less solid survey, with its idiots turned sultan and its convent girls turned into complacent concubines and its claustrophobic sense of an entire empire being crushed into a few terror-filled tiled halls, has the enigmatic depth of a dream, a dream that could tell us some truth about our natures, could we but fathom the symbols.