In March 1920, John Arthur Fallows, a fifty-five-year-old former Church of England clergyman, bought a copy of the second part of My Diaries by the poet and anti-imperialist commentator Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840–1922).Footnote 1 This book, which had appeared in print for the first time the previous month, formed the final part of Blunt's chronological narrative of events leading up to the First World War, My Diaries: Being a Personal Narrative of Events, 1888–1914. After inscribing his name, address, and the book's date of purchase onto the front flyleaf (figure 1), Fallows began to read, pen in hand. On the first page of the book, he wrote a headnote: “Imperialism, pushed by Capitalists & Generals & blue gents, equally bad under V. R., Ed 7, & Geo 5.”Footnote 2 Turning to the next opening, he arrived at Blunt's entry for 3 February 1901, introducing the newly crowned king, Edward VII. Beside Blunt's discreet reference to what he called Edward's “little failings,” Fallows scrawled a list of concrete examples: “sportsman,” he wrote, “adulterer, boozer, stodger, better.”Footnote 3 On the opposite page, as a headnote to Blunt's commentary on Kaiser Wilhelm's position on the Boer War, he left the observation: “‘Daily Mail’ & Tory press cant wobbling pro and con the Kaiser.” A few pages later, amplifying Blunt's commentary on the April 1901 Hicks Beach budget designed to raise revenue to cover Boer War expenses, Fallows wrote, “blue travelling snob jingo Tories who make wars.”Footnote 4 These annotations are typical—both in their density and their exaggeratedly waspish tone—of the comments Fallows made elsewhere in the book. Altogether, he left 841 individual pieces of verbal marginalia in the main text of his copy of part two of My Diaries, totaling about 3,826 words. In addition to this, the book contains abundant underlining, vertical lines in the margins, and, on the rear pastedown, a partial manuscript index, all inscribed in a combination of pencil and pale blue fountain-pen ink.
Figure 1 John Arthur Fallows, ownership inscription in his copy of Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, My Diaries, Part 2, front flyleaf (detail). Reproduced with permission of the Betty Boothroyd Library, The Open University.
Fallows's annotated copy of Blunt's My Diaries provides an insight in the individual experience of “the wars after the war.” It shows how two antiwar radicals responded to the emerging postwar settlement through programs of reading and writing. Blunt sent My Diaries to the press believing that it could make a direct contribution to the outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. He saw the first part as a “blow” aimed against Britain's attempt to secure a protectorate in Egypt.Footnote 5 The publication of part two was similarly freighted with political ambition: “The second proofs of My Diaries Part 2 have come in,” he recorded in his notebook on 24 October 1919. “They must have an effect on the results in Egypt & perhaps Syria when the peace proposals with Turkey are brought up at Paris, if only we can get the volume out in time.”Footnote 6 Fallows did not much resemble the ideal reader that Blunt had in mind for My Diaries. He was a radical socialist, a class of thinkers that Blunt both feared and distrusted.Footnote 7 Blunt had hoped that the books would be bought by journalists and politicians who could mobilize public opposition to British territorial demands.Footnote 8 Although Fallows had a background in politics—in 1902, he had been the first politician in Birmingham to be elected on an explicitly socialist platform, winning a seat for the Independent Labour Party on the Birmingham Council—by 1920 he was living in quiet retirement in Bournemouth.Footnote 9 While Blunt anticipated that his readers would mobilize the revelations in My Diaries for direct political action, Fallows used his copy to practice his own personal form of politics. Annotating Blunt provided him with a means of emotional and psychological self-justification.Footnote 10 Writing in the margins enabled Fallows to convert his copy of Blunt's book into a site for the preservation of personal as well as political memory. At their most coherent, the annotations resolve into fragments of autobiography in miniature. Laden with a mixture of prewar gossip, scabrous social comment, and Marxian economic analysis, Fallows's marginalia superimpose a specifically radical-socialist critique of Edwardian society and the First World War onto the already ideologically freighted pages of Blunt's My Diaries.
The programs of memorialization that Blunt and Fallows engaged in are reminders of what Samuel Hynes calls “the persistence of the past” in British society and culture during the early 1920s. While the war placed enormous pressure on many aspects of the Edwardian intellectual consensus, Edwardian ideas and values retained a certain degree of currency in the postwar world and helped shape the way in which witnesses to the conflict interpreted its outcomes.Footnote 11 These ideological survivals illustrate Andrew Frayn's point that “disenchantment” and “disillusionment” were neither straightforward products of the war itself nor simple responses to the economic and social challenges of the 1920s.Footnote 12 Instead, they had existed long before 1914, percolating into and informing the dissenting response to the conflict from a range of preexisting radical, socialist, religious, philosophical, and artistic perspectives. Blunt's and Fallows's writing practices provide evidence in the very earliest years of the postwar period for the production and circulation of ideas and dissenting poses usually associated with the war-books boom of the late 1920s and early 1930s. Asking what impelled these civilian observers to perform these acts of historical remembrance, what continuities existed between their modes of inquiry and prewar forms of political dissent, and what influence these early investigations ultimately had can shed additional light on the origins of disenchantment and the forces behind its eventual rise to prominence.Footnote 13
MY DIARIES AND HISTORICAL REMEMBRANCE
On 31 December 1918, Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, seventy-eight and in chronic pain from the prostate disease that would eventually kill him, wrote a bleak assessment of the year's events in his diaryFootnote 14: “Thus ends the year 1918, a bad one for all my hopes of the peace which was to come … All central Europe is in anarchy & the Ottoman Empire is certain to be partitioned between the three chief robber powers of Christendom[,] England, France & Italy.”Footnote 15 It was not only the shape of the emerging postwar political settlement that depressed him. The Entente powers’ impending annexations in Egypt and the Middle East reminded him of his own personal and political failures.Footnote 16 “I feel that my life has been a vain one,” he wrote. “My poetry is not read, my philosophy has no disciples, the causes I have espoused have come to ruin. I have outlived my age.”Footnote 17 Within little over a year, however, Blunt's reputation and profile had undergone an unexpected renaissance. Both parts of My Diaries attracted excellent press notices, details of which he recorded in his notebooks. This reception was more than he had hoped for: “The Reviews of my book continue with a chorus of praise such as I hardly remember for any book, certainly never for any of mine,” he observed in his diary with a mixture of pride and bemusement. “I have never before had even a tolerably good press till today when I have called all the political world knaves & all the journalists fools and at last they are delighted!”Footnote 18
My Diaries was an example of a postwar literary “anti-monument,” raised specifically to counter mainstream and governmental accounts of the war's origins.Footnote 19 Official document collections, such as the British Blue Books of prewar diplomatic correspondence, were the results of a careful process of editorial selection.Footnote 20 Governments sponsored these publishing ventures because, as Keith Wilson writes, they allowed ample scope for “historical engineering.”Footnote 21 By selectively releasing parts of the archival record while withholding others, they could set the terms of reference for future academic debate about the war's causes. At the heart of this official publishing program was the question of “war guilt”: who should bear responsibility for commencing hostilities and what effect this should have on the postwar political landscape.Footnote 22 Blunt clearly envisaged My Diaries as a kind of privately produced mirror image of these official accounts. In an earlier exposé based on published diary entries, The Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt (1907), he had argued that it “is not always in official documents that the truest facts of history are to be found.”Footnote 23 Instead, the letters and journal entries of “a close and interested spectator” in political affairs could form a more candid “document for the history of our times,” no matter how embarrassing their contents might be for “persons in high places.”Footnote 24 Blunt introduced My Diaries with a similar apologia. Inside the books’ covers, he suggested, was a kind of storehouse of memory, one that juxtaposed the “Blue Books, in which essential facts are travestied” against “individual testimony … recording the words of statesmen in out of office hours, when they have spoken their naked thought … in very different language” from the official line.Footnote 25 The fact, as recorded in these private conversations, that Britain's “Imperial ambitions” had helped precipitate the war, he wrote, needs “to be remembered,” no matter how consoling a belief in Germany's sole war guilt was to British onlookers in the conflict's immediate aftermath.Footnote 26 Like other examples of late-war and postwar “anti-monument,” such as Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918) and John Maynard Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace (1919), Blunt's published diaries worked by bringing the personal and the political into a provocative dialogue.Footnote 27 The subversive potential of Eminent Victorians lies in Strachey's willingness to relate innuendo about his subjects’ private lives. Recording the “peculiarities and repressions” of Victorian society becomes, as Dominic Janes writes, a way of exposing to ethical critique a British political leadership still largely mired in the nineteenth century.Footnote 28My Diaries functions similarly. By outlining the failures of prewar British foreign policy, Blunt aims to undermine the political legitimacy of the postwar settlement, a strategy augmented by his willingness to relate damaging gossip about the personal lives of politicians and the landed elite.
Despite the careful framing work Blunt performed in the diaries’ prefatory materials, however, many of the books’ reviewers failed to completely acknowledge their contemporary relevance. Reviewing part one of My Diaries in the Observer, Philip Guedalla maintained a respectful tone and praised the volume for its “historical merit” but likened it to an “antique,” albeit one possessing “charm,” “beauty,” and “unpublished points of view.”Footnote 29 The Athenaeum acknowledged that the “political side of the diary” was “amazingly interesting” but ultimately dismissed Blunt's career as quixotic and misguided. “Mr. Blunt,” it declared, “is a knight-errant of lost causes … tilting at the giants of imperialism.”Footnote 30 Although part two's entire print run of 500 copies sold out (despite being prohibitively priced at 21 shillings), these reviews suggest that there was a substantial gap between Blunt's intentions in publishing his diaries and readers’ reception of them.Footnote 31 Would readers agree with Blunt's essential proposition that his prewar observations about allied foreign policy undermined the moral authority of the Paris peace accords? How might a sympathetic reader digest the wealth of information Blunt provided and use it for political action?
ANNOTATING MY DIARIES: ANARCHIC PARAPHRASE
The sheer profusion of marginalia that J. A. Fallows left in his copy of part two of My Diaries suggests an extraordinary degree of close engagement with Blunt's text. He was not, however, a reader who could perform the kind of political work Blunt envisaged in the book's foreword, mobilizing support for an “appeal” against the terms of the Paris accords on the “grounds of truth and honour.”Footnote 32 Instead, Fallows performed a more personal mode of politics, using the book's margins to inscribe a mixture of rumor, gossip, and sly commentary drawn from his own history of socialist political engagement. Frequent citations to other recently published radical or left-wing books show that the consumption of My Diaries formed part of a wider “dissenting” reading project during Fallows's retirement. In the discussion below, I focus on two particular aspects of Fallows's annotation practices, which I call “anarchic paraphrase” and “retrospective judgment,” showing how each enabled him to respond to Blunt on his own terms.
Through the first type of marginal notation, anarchic paraphrase, Fallows reworded Blunt in more or less provocative and subversive ways. These paraphrases allowed Fallows to distance himself from Blunt when the subject matter irritated him and to claim some degree of readerly independence from the main text. Janes argues that the inclusion of personal and sexual innuendo in Bloomsbury social critique amounts to a form of “queering.”Footnote 33 Fallows's use of anarchic paraphrase performs a similar role. Augmented by the addition of salacious gossip and abusive epithets, Fallows's provocative rephrasing enabled him to develop Blunt's relatively discreet sketches of upper-class misbehavior into lurid verbal caricatures that perform their own acts of countercultural subversion. In the second type of annotation, “retrospective judgment,” Fallows used My Diaries to interrogate Blunt's version of history, inscribing records of subsequent events into the margins to both update and assess Blunt's predictions.
Fallows's marginal rewordings frequently blur the boundary between the explicatory and the revisionist modes of annotation.Footnote 34 Sometimes they concur with Blunt's judgments, but Fallows asserts his own authorial personality by expressing them in blunter, more frankly abusive terms.Footnote 35 A remark by Blunt that Gaughin's paintings were “repulsively ugly,” for instance, is underlined, and Fallows has penciled “Cubist asses” at the top of the page as a headnote.Footnote 36 Members of the aristocracy are frequent targets for Fallows's paraphrastic invective. On 20 August 1908, Blunt records a visit from Constance (Shelah) Grosvenor, Duchess of Westminster, and being quietly appalled at the lifestyle that multiple car ownership enabled her and her husband to enjoy: “The life of both of them is a perpetual gallop,” Blunt wrote. “This sort of society cannot last, it will end in Bedlam.” Fallows vigorously underlined this passage in pencil (the word “gallop” receiving the heaviest pencil marks) and wrote at the top of the page, “silly, blue, rich, snob, extravagant, fussy, racing, rushing, empty blue, landowner endowed Drones.”Footnote 37 In other places, Fallows juxtaposes a provocatively hostile paraphrase against a sympathetic description from Blunt. A passage marking the 1906 death of James Lane-Fox, in which Blunt includes some nostalgic memories of a boyhood climbing expedition, received the baldly offensive headnote “a foxhunting blue ass endowed.” In the left-hand margin, beside Blunt's comment that Lane-Fox “passed his whole life fox-hunting, and died when he could no longer ride,” Fallows scrawled “what an ass!,” effectively subverting Blunt's indulgent eulogy into an occasion for insult.Footnote 38
Elsewhere, Fallows delights in composing abusive paraphrastic marginalia about Tory politicians and members of the British royal family and relaying gossip. The second part of My Diaries begins symbolically with the death of Queen Victoria. In the opening pages of the book, Blunt paints a quietly damning portrait of her as “a dignified but rather commonplace good soul … narrow-minded in her view of things, without taste in art or literature, fond of money … but easily flattered and expecting to be flattered.” In a headnote, Fallows more bluntly summarizes this critique as “narrow, stingy, commonplace, tasteless V. R., flattered by Tories, Revs, & canting press.”Footnote 39 To Blunt's relatively circumspect indictment of Edward VII as “a lover of pleasure” who “allowed himself wide latitude in its indulgence,” Fallows added an almost excessive catalogue of pursuits, detailing the vices that Blunt only hints at: “Ed's love of drinks, food, smoke, cards, betting, horse-racing, gambling, theatres, billiards, friends, sexual flirtations, sponging on rich friends.”Footnote 40 Some of the most gleefully abusive annotations in the book are directed at Winston Churchill. Blunt had a long, though eventually abortive, friendship with Randolph Churchill and would enjoy a similarly complex relationship with his son. The two were close in the early 1900s, even going so far as to wear traditional Arab dress together during some of their meetings.Footnote 41 By the time Blunt was preparing his diaries for publication, however, their friendship was far more equivocal. Blunt knew that some of the material in My Diaries would embarrass Churchill, but justified its printing with the thought that “it tells the truth and that can't be helped.”Footnote 42 Fallows's annotations suggest that he was an eager audience for any negative or compromising comments Blunt had to offer about Churchill. A second-hand remark reported in March 1903—seven months before Blunt first met him—that Churchill was “unscrupulous” has attracted the amplificatory headnote “unscrupulous, greedy, ambitious, conceited, gushy, canting Winston Churchill.”Footnote 43 A gloss in the right-hand margin adds the retrospective summation: “1920: now the worst jingo & capitalist blue snob Tory.”Footnote 44 Blunt's later prediction that Churchill might end up leading the Liberal Party received the dismissive marginal comment: “he went back to the Tories when he found jingoism paid better.”Footnote 45 When Blunt noted sadly in April 1908 that Churchill had lost his seat in Parliament, Fallows added the provocative rejoinder, “a pity that he didn't lose his life.”Footnote 46
An early seventeenth-century term for marginal annotation, adversaria, provides an apt way of defining Fallows's approach to Blunt's text. As William Sherman notes, the term adversaria originally stemmed from the physical placement of marginal notes: they were written adjacent to the main text. Over time, however, the meaning of the term has shifted. Readers of notes now assume that marginalia are not simply, as Sherman puts it, “opposite” the text “but oppositional” to it.Footnote 47 Many of Fallows's notes occupy this ambiguous space between incidental adjacency and full-scale opposition. Some of Fallows's paraphrases seem on the surface to endorse Blunt's judgments, but they do so by concentrating them into abusive epithets. Others, like Fallows's first note on Churchill, take a single adjective in the main text and amplify it by attaching a succession of blunter terms of Fallows's own devising. Fallows's oppositional stance extends to style as well as content. Many of the press reviews of My Diaries commented on its “qualities of style,” compliments that Blunt's notebooks show him accepting gratefully.Footnote 48 Fallows's anarchic paraphrases consciously disrupt this element of Blunt's authorial personality. In places, they reduce Blunt's fluent, conversational style to a staccato chain of abusive modifiers. The amplificatory nature of paraphrase provides Fallows with the space to inject ethical and sexual critique and indulge his misogynistic tendencies.Footnote 49 A night out with Lady Desborough, for instance, summarized in Blunt's headnote as an “Amusing evening at Stafford House,” becomes in Fallows's version, penned in above, “naughty, rowdy, gushy, excited blue snob ladies.”Footnote 50 On some pages, Fallows plays with the physical constraints the book's white spaces impose on him, positioning his marginal interventions to create maximum havoc with the text.Footnote 51 On page 381, Fallows takes advantage of the fortuitous placement of General French's name at the edge of the right-hand side of the text block to scrawl “an ass” in the margin next to his name. At the top of page 263, Fallows performs a similar act of typographical subversion, augmenting the printed headnote “General Gallifet” to read “General Gallifet a naughty jingo.”
Figure 2 Fallows, marginalia in W. S. Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two, 263 (detail). Reproduced with permission of the Betty Boothroyd Library, The Open University.
Blunt himself does not escape Fallows's castigating pen.Footnote 52 With perhaps more than a touch of envy, Fallows has added the following above Blunt's 1909 account of a pleasant visit to Newstead Abbey: “lucky blue blood, finds friends all over England, altho’ a Radical & atheist.”Footnote 53 Other notes focus more specifically on the class privilege that enabled Blunt to publish radical books yet still maintain his position among the British ruling classes. To Blunt's (inaccurate) prediction that the publication of the Secret History of the English Occupation of Egypt would “about finish me in polite society,” Fallows wrote the cynical headnote “Blunt allowed to write ‘Little England’ & exposing books, for which a poorer & less genteel man would have been fined & imprisoned.” Further down the page, he added in the margin: “blue blood covers all sins.”Footnote 54 A later headnote, appended to Blunt's somewhat glib observation that “Court people … cannot understand how I, with my position of an English gentleman and landowner, can go in for revolution in Egypt and India,” puts the objection more forcefully (figure 3).
Figure 3 Fallows, marginalia in W. S. Blunt, My Diaries, Part Two, 299. Reproduced with permission of the Betty Boothroyd Library, The Open University.
Underlining “gentleman” and “landowner” so heavily in fountain pen that the ink has smudged down the page, Fallows has written above, “An English gentleman landowner is allowed to be pacifist, Radical, critic, atheist when smaller men are boycotted hated ½ starved deported for the same things.” Later on the same page, adjacent to the word “landowner,” he wrote of Blunt “endowed lucky blue drone.”Footnote 55 Despite their shared atheism and radical politics, Blunt's continued self-identity as a Tory prevents Fallows from seeing him as a political ally. Instead, in notes like these, he implicates Blunt in the system of ruling-class hegemony that he believed had brought about the war. In structural terms, despite his authorship of “exposing books,” Fallows clearly regards Blunt as being as much a “blue drone” as Hugh “Bendor” Grosvenor, the Duke of Westminster.
Fallows's pose of outraged opposition to “blue blood” hegemony is, of course, a piece of self-fictionalization. As the son of a former Conservative mayor of Birmingham and the beneficiary of an inheritance large enough to enable him to leave an estate of £66,285 at the time of his death in 1935, Fallows was closer in class to Blunt than he was to the hypothetical “poorer & less genteel man” of the annotation on page 181.Footnote 56 Indeed, Fallows's psychological need to distinguish himself both from Blunt's observations and from Britain's prewar political and aristocratic elite more generally can be read through Michael Roper's account of “splitting” during the act of writing. Fallows's acts of marginal denigration, coupled with the freedom to judge from hindsight, enable him to assume the pose of absolute moral and historical arbiter. From this subject position, he could deny or obfuscate his own considerable economic and familial privilege. Political power and social capital in Fallows's marginalia always exist externally, projected onto other members of the British elite who prove too “silly,” “muddling,” or “schoolboy-ish” to exercise it effectively.Footnote 57 Each of these acts of projection seems to contain within it the repressed knowledge of Fallows's own thwarted political ambitions.
While the marginalia usually function as the means for disavowal or projection, Fallows does not always write himself out of the narrative. When the opportunity to inscribe insider knowledge into the margins arises, Fallows takes it. In the margins next to Blunt's description of the Indian colonial administrator Lepel Griffin's voice—“an English lisp and drawl”—Fallows adds the more precisely testimonial “an Oxonian throaty whisper.”Footnote 58 His use of Austen Chamberlain's first name, in a reference to “Those tedious mediocrities, Long & Austen, still rulers of poor England, 1920,” suggests a similar degree of personal familiarity.Footnote 59 Chamberlain was in the form immediately above Fallows at Rugby.Footnote 60 An anecdote about opium addiction moved Fallows to write “cf. Dowson” in the left-hand margin.Footnote 61 Dowson was the poet Ernest Dowson, whom Fallows had befriended while at Queens’ College, Oxford, and with whom he maintained a correspondence until Dowson's death in 1900. While the letters the two exchanged do not appear to have survived, Fallows makes occasional appearances in letters Dowson wrote to their mutual friend, the novelist Arthur Moore. On one occasion, he described listening to Fallows sing (“His voice is improved and he sang and played to me for about an hour and a half, most excellently”) and concluded “I persist in liking him ‘in my fashion’, although he is indefensible.”Footnote 62 In another letter, hearing that Moore was considering reading Edward Bellamy's just-published bestseller, Looking Backwards, Dowson urged him not to, relating how he had recently thrown his own copy of the book out a train window. The experience of reading it, he suggested, was rather like being lectured at by a lightweight version of John Arthur Fallows:
I perceive you mention “Looking Backwards.” I write to save your life. Don't DON'T DON'T read that most … of shockers. I bought it at Truro coming up on the [Great Western Railway] lately and before I got to Plymouth it had retired out the window. It isn't a shocker—it's a dreary fraud—it's J. A. Fallows at 5 st. 7 lb. Verb sap.Footnote 63
Fallows's marginalia become the instantiation of social networks, means for drawing connections between the page and personal memory, claims to a part in the narrative. Fallows's use of My Diaries to record additional pieces of rumor and gossip also fulfils this role. When Blunt described the hurried 1851 marriage of Selina de Burgh to Lord Dudley despite the fact that she was carrying another man's child, for instance, Fallows expanded the anecdote by referring to a more recent case—“cf. Blanco White & Wells’ Australian [sic] damsel, Amber Reeves.”Footnote 64 On another occasion, where Blunt covertly referred to the political influence of Edward VII's mistress Mary Cornwallis-West with the oblique phrase “the feminine side of things,” Fallows filled in the gap by recording her name at the bottom of the page.Footnote 65
These moments of mirroring, where the authorial techniques and information networks of author and annotator coincide, illustrate the degree to which Fallows's occasionally hostile outbursts against Blunt exaggerate the degree of his separation from the wider narrative. As Heather Jackson writes, “annotators like to declare themselves independent of the text, but they never really are so.” Readers find themselves “restricted in their range of reference” by the concerns of the author, their responses “governed by the original text.”Footnote 66 Throughout the notes, and despite his overt attempts to differentiate himself from Blunt, Fallows repeatedly accepts Blunt's version of history. Frequent cross-references within the annotations to other texts, meanwhile, suggest that his consumption of My Diaries in 1920 was not an isolated event but was instead part of a wider and sustained program of dissenting or anti-imperialist reading, both during the First World War and immediately afterwards. Fallows's very first piece of marginalia in the main text is a reference to Keynes's Economic Consequences of the Peace, used to gloss Blunt's contention that “the terms imposed by the allied governments at Paris” were “ungenerous.”Footnote 67 Crudely anticlerical abuse aimed at Theodore Roosevelt in the marginalia may well have been influenced by Keynes's theological critique of Woodrow Wilson's thought processes.Footnote 68 “Conceited, swanky, bluffing Sunday-School sermonising by R.,” Fallows wrote, adding further down the page the observation “all Yankees must joke, or none would listen to them.”Footnote 69 This pattern of bibliographical citation continues throughout the annotations. At various points, Fallows alludes to J. N. Brailsford's War of Steel and Gold (1915), E. D. Morel's Red Rubber (1905) and Truth and the War (1916), Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians (1918), and Robert T. Reid's How the War Came (1919).Footnote 70 Taken together with My Diaries, these texts provided Fallows with an oppositional interpretive framework for explaining the war's origins and the shape of the postwar settlement.
ANNOTATING MY DIARIES: RETROSPECTIVE JUDGMENT
Writing in his notebook on 7 April 1918, Blunt judged that the second part of My Diaries “forms a very complete picture of how the war was brought about.”Footnote 71 The forewords to both parts provide further indications of how Blunt wanted his readers to interpret that picture. “Among the many contributory causes leading to the final catastrophe of the great World War of 1914,” he wrote in the foreword to the first part, “our obstinacy in retaining Egypt, notwithstanding all our promises, must be counted as one of the foremost.” The war, in other words, had not been “thrust on England through no fault of hers”; “it was not at Berlin that the first steps were taken in the direction of world-wide conquest.”Footnote 72 By framing his prewar diaries in this way, Blunt was consciously resuscitating the terms of prewar radical dissent against British foreign policy and injecting it into a new context where, he clearly hoped, it would gain a new relevance.Footnote 73 Reflecting the pervasive cynicism about Foreign Office motives common in prewar radical circles, My Diaries represents the 1904 Anglo-French and 1907 Anglo-Russian ententes in starkly imperialist and self-interested terms. The “Anglo-French Convention,” Blunt wrote, was simply an agreement “whereby the two Governments agreed to divide Egypt and Morocco between them.”Footnote 74 The Anglo-Russian entente, meanwhile, “seems to amount to a partition of Persia.”Footnote 75 Blunt's conviction that the Triple Entente was little more than a vehicle for imperial conquest was heightened in early 1918 by the publication in Britain of the so-called secret treaties. Based on Russian Foreign Office documents released by the new Soviet government, these appeared initially in excerpt form in the Manchester Guardian in January and February 1918 and then in full in F. Seymour Cocks's Secret Treaties and Understandings.Footnote 76 Confiding privately in his notebook in April 1918, Blunt wrote,
I remember reading the text of the Secret treaties which shows the scoundrel action of our Foreign Office in conjunction with those of France, Russia & Italy in dividing up the Ottoman Empire between them. … If there is any justice in the world, it will be the British Empire that will be partitioned at the war's end.Footnote 77
It was obviously impractical for Blunt to state his opposition to British imperialism this starkly in the pages of My Diaries. Nevertheless, Blunt effectively assimilates the “secret treaties” into the text, appending references to them in brackets where they support his earlier suspicions about Entente motives.Footnote 78 In order to frame these developments in the most linear fashion possible, Blunt concludes part two of My Diaries with a section titled “Chronology of Events”. This, Blunt wrote in the foreword, was for “the benefit of those who would follow the logic of events leading to the Great War of 1914” and would be “of use to them in forming a correct historic judgment.”Footnote 79
Fallows accepted Blunt's “logic of events” with little question. He clearly relished the chance to participate in Blunt's revival of the prewar radical critique of British imperialism. Although the second part of My Diaries concludes with the outbreak of hostilities, Fallows has essentially written both the war itself and the emerging postwar settlement into the margins, using hindsight to show how subsequent history had borne out the substance of Blunt's predictions. In his entry for 5 May 1902, Blunt suggested that a division of Islamic states among European imperial states was “nearly certain to happen some day.” In such an event, he wrote, “I suppose France will be given Morocco; Italy, Tripoli; England, Egypt; Germany, Syria and Asia Minor; Austria, Constantinople; and Russia, Persia.” Fallows, as Blunt clearly hoped his readers would do, accepted the implied invitation to test the diary's predictive power. In the right-hand margin, he has written, “1917) England[:] Mesopotamia Palestine Persia; Syria to France &c.” At the top of the page, he summarized this entry as, “secret treaties of blue rulers grabbing Mahometan land.”Footnote 80 Mobilizing his library of cross-references, Fallows glossed a reference to the Moroccan Crisis of 1904 with the marginal note, “one of the causes of the war (cf. Morel).”Footnote 81 A suggestion in September 1907 that “the partition of the whole of Asia is in the programme of our Foreign Office” has a post hoc endorsement appended to it: “now / 1920) Curzon grabs Persia for English Oil-pluts … Arabia Mesopotamia Palestine 1920 / French to grab Syria.”Footnote 82 News of Blériot's Channel crossing in July 1909 has been shadowed with the retrospective observation, “few realised what a curse aëroplanes would be to this world in war.”Footnote 83 Blunt's 1911 observation that “[i]t is impossible to run high Imperialism on the cheap” has had written beside it the post hoc confirmation “Our monstrous Budgets of 1920 & 1919.”Footnote 84 A reference to “our stupid English generals” in 1905 receives the approving headnote “our muddling generals” and the observation at the bottom of the page that “they failed at Gallipoli & Kut & vs. the Bolsheviks.”Footnote 85 An earlier prediction that “personal freedom and strict legality would … suffer” in Britain as a result of Boer War restrictions has been annotated “DORA [Defence of the Realm Act] 1918” with the accompanying head note “Dictators & ‘Dora’ in war-time.”Footnote 86 Blunt's report of a meeting with Herbert Spencer in 1903, during which Spencer had warned, “[t]here is coming a reign of force in the world, and there will be again a general war for mastery,” received from Fallows the simple note “1914” in the margin.Footnote 87
These moments of acquiescence, where Fallows literally underwrites Blunt's authorial intentions, resemble what Jackson refers to as “mimicry.”Footnote 88 They reflect the centripetal force that a particularly persuasive text can impose on its annotators. But they do not, as Fallows's tendency towards anarchic paraphrase shows, represent the entirety of his marginal engagement with My Diaries. Fallows embraced aspects of Blunt's text because they reinforced his preexisting opinions about armed conflict and its place in history. Reading it with pen in hand gave him the opportunity to indulge in a kind of rhetorical nostalgia for the terms of Edwardian and late Victorian radical-left critique. Blunt's posthumous critique of Cecil Rhodes as a “lucky speculator,” who made money “at the expense of a war and ruin for everybody else” moved Fallows to write the scathing headnote “rascally Rhodes, who faked war vs. Matabili in order to grab their lands, & helped to force England to war vs. Boers to get Capitalist profits & grab S. Africa.”Footnote 89 This piece of marginalia closely parallels an article Fallows wrote in the Christian Socialist journal the Pioneer in July 1899, while the South African wars were still unfolding:
[W]e hold that we must not grab any more land … We oppose all forward movements, initiated by ambitious “prancing pro-consuls” for the sake of titles, honour, and money … by capitalists and shareholders, who want big dividends to be earned at the expense of the nation … by Tories and plutocrats, who wish to persuade the gullible mob to shout for glory … to revere the rich and titled, and to remain blind to the great economic injustices.Footnote 90
In other places, marginalia arise out of acute disagreement with the text. Blunt's suggestion that British “working class” jingoism had “made the war” in South Africa, for instance, received a forthright piece of marginal dissent from Fallows: “workingmen make no wars; they're all made by a few blue & plutoc[ratic] rulers who then instruct press to tell folks it's nec[essar]y.”Footnote 91
Both of these responses to Blunt—affirmation and disagreement—gave Fallows the chance to inscribe elements of his own history of political engagement into the book. In this way, the marginalia become a kind of mirror image of the main text. Blunt positioned his prewar diary as an implicit commentary on both the war and the ongoing peace settlement. Fallows uses the margins of My Diaries to revive the radical critique of British foreign policy he himself had wielded in the prewar years. The surprisingly sober observation that “we need a Parl[iamentar]y C[ommit]tee for Foreign Affairs, & no treaty or war sans Parl[iamentar]y consent” echoes a similar suggestion that Fallows had made in his Independent Labour Party penny pamphlet, The Story of German and English Relations (1911), issued as part of the party's “sustained propaganda campaign” for armament reductions in 1910–11.Footnote 92 Other marginalia, ostensibly prompted by Blunt, also have close parallels in Fallows's earlier writings in the socialist press. An annotation to Blunt's discussion of the deaths of several British officers at Gumburru in Somalia in April 1903 reads, “blue Tory snobs’ sport of war.”Footnote 93 The editorial to the first issue of the Pioneer derides “the follies of the upper-class game of war.”Footnote 94 A dismissive account of Winston Churchill's escape from Pretoria in the second number of the Pioneer suggests that Fallows's antipathy to him was long-standing: “Another young Churchill is being trotted out by the local Tories,” he wrote, in order “to catch the silly mob by fresh heroics of jingoism.”Footnote 95 The headnote and index entry “stupid landlords,” written in the context of Irish home rule, recalls a long, vituperative column on the “landlord class” that Fallows contributed to another issue of the Pioneer, one which closely resembles the critiques of Tory aristocrats with which he peppered the white spaces of his copy of My Diaries: “the great mass [of landlords] are and always have been useless drones … wasting time in idiotic parties … in sports and slaughter, in jingoism, eating and boozing, betting and gambling.”Footnote 96 The manuscript index that Fallows compiled for My Diaries show that these same terms continued to supply him with a personal lexicon for describing Britain's ruling classes long after he had ceased to be active in the labor movement: written on the rear pastedown is a succession of entries referring to “silly blues” (four entries), “rushing [car-driving] Drones” (two entries), a “rowdy dance,” “jingo pressure,” and “jingo Churchill.” Writing about Fallows's campaign in the 1902 Birmingham Council elections, the ILP News commented on his “amazing candour of … utterances” and “alarming” refusal to be “discreet.”Footnote 97 Marginal annotation enabled him to direct that same “candour” silently onto the page, each pen or pencil stroke offering him the opportunity to revisit the politics of the past.
CONCLUSION
Both Blunt and Fallows saw the immediate postwar period as a moment at which radical politics might become relevant again and each attempted to insert himself into current events through acts of writing. Yet ultimately each was a form of vanity publishing—literally in the case of Blunt, who covered the full cost of printing My Diaries himself, £470 for part one alone.Footnote 98 Blunt failed to recognize the extent to which his pre-Edwardian anti-imperialist critique of British politics had become obsolete by 1919–20. Given the strength of its bargaining position at the Paris Peace Conference, coupled with its desire to maintain imperial unity, Britain was not about to make territorial concessions on moral grounds. Fallows, too, despite the pugilistic tone of many of his annotations, was engaging in his own form of readerly vanity. There is no indication that he had any sort of contemporary readership at all. The marginalia are best read as acts of emotional and psychological self-justification. Anyone perusing the annotations now will look in vain for original interpretations of the conflict or indications that it brought about any shift in his intellectual framework. Their major impression is to confirm Fallows's marginality as a historical actor. This does not necessarily mean, however, that Fallows's annotations in his copy of My Diaries are of marginal interest as historical records. They provide evidence for readership practices within the politically dissenting communities that defined themselves in opposition to mainstream values in Britain, both during the war and into the first years of peace. Older radicals like Blunt and Fallows may have been, as Stephen Badsey puts it, “a small and un-influential minority.”Footnote 99 The narrative of disillusionment that gained prominence in the late 1920s and early 1930s was, however, formed in part within the discursive crucible of prewar and wartime dissent. Material traces left by civilian observers like Fallows provide evidence for the evolution, origins, and relative popularity of the “rejectionist” position in the immediate postwar period.
For Fallows, the war itself was not an immediate source of disenchantment. Instead, his opposition both to the conflict and the postwar settlement stemmed from a set of existing political commitments, reinforcing Andrew Frayn's observation that “challenge[s] to … officially sanctioned discourses” relating to the war tended to be “made from an already dissenting position.”Footnote 100 Reading, pen in hand, within a canon of oppositional texts provided a form of “psychic relief,” enabling Fallows to position the war within an ethical framework and assign blame for conflict to the “landlords” and conservative politicians he had been agitating against since his time at Oxford.Footnote 101 Imitating the authorial strategies laid down by Blunt and Strachey, he was able to draw together the personal and the political into a form of ethical critique against the British establishment.Footnote 102 His marginalia both endorse the rumor and personal gossip provided by Blunt and extend its reach with the addition of further slurs and damaging details.
Writing about the relationship between books and readers, Andrew Stauffer likens texts to “textiles, woven creations of material and semantic content.” During its lifetime, he writes, any book that encounters use becomes “an historical record,” its pages picking up “traces of its many social interactions and its long journey into our hands.”Footnote 103 Fallows's copy of part two of My Diaries exemplifies this process in action. The “complete redemption” of the world along socialist lines that Fallows had predicted in the Pioneer in 1900 had not materialized.Footnote 104 Neither had war between Britain and Germany been averted by the Independent Labour Party's campaign for arbitration, in which Fallows participated through The Story of German and English Relations. In the wake of these thwarted histories, the subversive account of those events that had occurred documented in My Diaries provided an attractive alternative. Although he himself maintained a deep distrust for socialism, Blunt's insistence that the war's causes lay in conspiracies among Europe's ruling classes to gain access to territory and resources had an obvious appeal for a socialist readership. The ways in which a socialist reader could interpret Blunt's diaries against the grain is exemplified in Fallows's headnote to Blunt's “Chronology of Events.” Whereas Blunt wanted this appendix to reveal to readers the “logic of events” that led to the war, Fallows interprets this “logic” in explicitly Marxist fashion. The “Chronology,” in his words, “shews how the blues & pluts, ruling all the European states, have been grabbing land & make wars & secret alliances all the time / Capitalist Imperialism.”Footnote 105 Blunt's denial, on the final page of the diary, that Britain had fought the war to defend liberty has been similarly rephrased to fit a left-wing intellectual framework. Whereas Blunt had written that Britain was “saved … from supreme disaster by the fighting tenacity of our ignorant boy soldiers, who believed what they were told, and throughout the war pretended, that it was one for liberty waged in the defence of weak nations, and to set the whole world free,” Fallows has written at the top of the page “a deluded Nation of workers, soldiers, & taxpayers.”Footnote 106 For Fallows, the white space around the text block became the territory for his own form of radical political self-assertion, one that essentially converted the book into a piece of Marxist historical explanation. By doing so, he was able to transform his own copy of this already heterodox text into an enduring record of a lifetime of political dissent.
