scorned by Slightly Foxed

Reading can be like dressing. Some people like camouflage, others prefer to stand out. Holiday reading, in particular, is a matter of taste. I enjoy allowing the sympathetic surroundings of a pleasant holiday to be reflected in the books I take.

In the case of The Sicilian Vespers, by Steven Runciman, I did not take the book, but was taken. I was staying for the first time at the chateau of old friends in south-west France. Or so I had expressed it to myself before arriving, and had accordingly brought a stash of Nancy Mitford biographies. But my destination confounded this amiable but irredeemably eighteenth-century selection. It was perhaps the idea of a ‘chateau’ that had misled me. The house turned out to be not the expected classically prettified, politically gelded arrangement, but a medieval Archbishop’s seat that added to the grandeur of a palace the integrity of a stronghold. When not enjoying a local aperitif, Floc – like the sky, earth, wheat, cows, tans, and slugs, it was a heady yellow-gold – I gulped down Nancy as amuse-gueule and found myself still in need of a plat principal. I mounted a tolerantly winding escalier, stencilled with articulated griffons gules, to the bibliotheque.

That bibliotheque was the most comprehensible as well as the most beautiful library I had seen. So it remains, for though university was then ahead for me, on this score if on few others it would provide me with only anticlimax. I hurried to the history of Western Europe; and within that, France – and within that, it was almost disappointing to realise, not feudal demesnes or revolutionary departments, but the alphabet. My hosts’ spoken, written, and, evidently, read English was some way ahead of mine, and it was not long before I spied a familiar name – that of Steven Runciman.

My knowledge of Runciman’s life was about equivalent to what is perhaps still remembered – that he wrote A History of the Crusades. When I was a small child, my mother pointed out a dapper figure with the reptilian neck of fabulous old age, in the lobby of the Roxburgh Hotel, Edinburgh, as Sir Steven Runciman, the great medievalist. On that basis he was hardly distinguishable from a neighbour of ours in Oxford, Sir Richard Southern, who, his wife explained, no longer cared to recall facts beyond the fourteenth century (I have since discovered that both gallant knights would probably have been appalled at this juxtaposition – Southern thought Runciman a populist charlatan, Runciman Southern a parochial bore).

At school I became more aware of Runciman’s oddity and quality. When set reading for History purported to be a couple of hours of Geoffrey Barraclough, it was as well to find three spare hours for stolid digestion. With Runciman’s History of the Crusades, you could count on a carefree evening; the set chapters would speed by in minutes. Unless, that is, you were tempted to read ahead; and though only Runciman’s first volume was required for our curriculum (strictly First Crusade only), I soon found myself requisitioning its successors.

While working on a biography of Runciman, I have interviewed various scholars who shared this fervour as schoolboys. Christopher Tyerman, author of God’s War, remembered that ‘if as a sixteen year old you were reading Elton and then you came across Runciman, you thought, gosh, this is actually rather exciting.’ A relative of Runciman’s shamefacedly dissented, complaining that the History of the Crusades ‘has too many people called Baldwin’. I couldn’t have disagreed more, and tore through Kings Baldwin I-V of Jerusalem, Baldwin of Alost who went astray at sea, the hapless Emperors Baldwin of Constantinople and many another Baldwin besides.

I had come to see any Runciman index as a compendium of implicit historical dramas. Runciman does indeed abound in proper names, and the reader who accepts them as bounty rather than burden is sure to profit. In his preface to The Sicilian Vespers, Sir Steven advises his audience that

The canvas is wide; it has to stretch from England to Palestine, from Constantinople to Tunis. It is also crowded with characters; but a historical canvas is necessarily crowded, and readers who are afraid of crowds should keep to the better-ordered lanes of fiction.

The principle Runciman expresses here – that there is something fishily neat about fictional as opposed to historical narrative – has lately found support from a surprising source. Pádraig Mac Carron and Ralph Kenna, of Coventry University’s Maths department, produced a study that purports to distinguish between myth (the Iliad, Beowulf) and fiction (Shakespeare, Tolkien), and to claim more historicity for myth, on the grounds that its casts link up in a less convenient manner; Mac Carron summarises, ‘In the myths but also in real social networks, you tend to have sub-communities who do not know anybody else. In fiction, everyone tends to be completely connected with each other.’ By this criterion, Runciman himself could be condemned to fictional status. Throughout the twentieth century, he knew everybody.

I hope to enlarge elsewhere on Steven Runciman’s congenial but contradictory existence, his combination of frenetic social activity with feline distance. For now it suffices to say that his preface’s stern warning, categorising The Sicilian Vespers as messy truth rather than tidy artifice, is characteristically disingenuous. For Runciman also liked to say the opposite, that good history relies on the same imaginative power that sustains great fiction.

The Sicilian Vespers, when first published in 1958, attracted some scholarly criticism. Helene Wieruszowski, an expert in medieval Germany and Italy justly furious at being elided from Sir Steven’s snappy bibliography, nonetheless missed the point of his technique - ‘It would have helped the reader if Runciman had concentrated on the results rather than every phase and detail of earlier developments.’ It is obvious that Wieruszowski was a better scholar than storyteller. Every narrator since Homer has known that epic – which, rather than history or fiction, was Runciman’s true genre – concerns itself with the journey, not the harbour, the argument, not the conclusion. As Constantine Cafavy in his great poem Ithaka has it:

Hope the voyage is a long one.
May there be many a summer morning when,
with what pleasure, what joy,
you come into harbours seen for the first time;
may you stop at Phoenician trading stations
to buy fine things,
mother of pearl and coral, amber and ebony,
sensual perfume of every kind—
as many sensual perfumes as you can;
and may you visit many Egyptian cities
to gather stores of knowledge from their scholars.

Keep Ithaka always in your mind.
Arriving there is what you are destined for.
But do not hurry the journey at all.
Better if it lasts for years…

Sicily and its Vespers, the massacre of 1282 that triggered the island’s rebellion against the French prince Charles of Anjou, serves Sir Steven admirably as such an Ithaka, and his approach to the conspiracy and the uprising is just as leisurely and rich as Cafavy prescribes. The book is properly a mini-epic; if A History of the Crusades was Runciman’s Paradise Lost, then The Sicilian Vespers can be interpreted as Paradise Regained, a compact, enigmatic coda full of independent charm. In epic style, Runciman employs stock epithets. His favourite terms of praise are ‘brilliant’ and ‘glamorous’. By ‘brilliance’ he refers to intellectual ability, by ‘glamour’ to beauty and elemental attractiveness (only men possess glamour in Runciman’s view; female beauties must content themselves with being ‘lovely’). Unlike Milton but like Homer, Sir Steven possesses an underrated and powerful sense of humour:

[King Peter of Aragon] had had some disquieting personal experiences. While he was halting at Milazzo, there came to him by night a ragged old man…who told him to beware of Alaimo of Lentini, the gallant Captain of Messina, who had already betrayed King Manfred and King Charles in turn. And worse than Alaimo was his wife, Machalda…

…Next evening he remembered the old man. He intended to spend the night at the village of Santa Lucia…there he found the Lady Machalda waiting for him…She had decided that the post of Royal Mistress would suit her and now tried to put her scheme into effect. King Peter had an acutely embarrassing evening. He only escaped by talking at immense length of his loyalty to Queen Constance. It was not an argument that the Lady Machalda found attractive.

Sir Steven does not fail to satisfy his readers as to the fates of such piquant minor characters. We are later permitted a final glimpse of the flirtatious Machalda –

The emir, Margam ibn Sebir, was imprisoned in the castle of Mategriffon at Messina, where he soon had the Lady Machalda for company. She shocked her gaolers by her gay and immodest dress when she went to play chess with him.

Returning to the library where I first found the Vespers, I was unable to find it, and realised with some embarrassment that I had probably filched it years before. As a medieval Sicilian proverb quoted by Runciman goes – ‘If someone tells you that your nose has gone, put up your hand to see.’