IT'S YOU AGAIN by Lydia Syson

Coming to the end of every book I’ve written, I always find myself regretting that I’ve not had more time to get to know some of the people I’ve encountered on the way.  It’s a bit like all those unfinished or unhad or too-fleeting conversations you’re left with at the end of a good party – there are always other guests you wish you’d spent more time with, or who vanished just as someone promised to introduce you.  And you hope to run into them again.

The funny thing is how often you do.  So it has been with the Vizetelly family, who popped up last month in Michael Rosen’s Radio 3 beguiling Sunday Feature, ‘Zola in Norwood’.

This programme told the story of the French novelist’s period of exile in England in 1898-9 when he fled in cognito to escape persecution during the Dreyfus affair, and Ernest Vizetelly looked after him.  As well as a familiar South London landscape – one painted by Pisarro when he fled France to avoid fighting in the Franco-Prussian war nearly twenty years earlier - I enjoyed the voices of two actors I’ve loved since my teens – Anton Lesser (I first saw him in an unforgettable Hamlet in 1982 at the Donmar Warehouse and fifteen year olds never forget) and Harriet Walter (who stood out the same year in All’s Well That Ends Well) – not to mention the radio drama debut of the brilliant translator Sarah Ardizzone, who was also responsible for a shocking, never-before translated passage you can hear from the novel Zola wrote in London, Fecundity.  But I’m digressing already.

Reproduced from BBC website

Ernest Vizetelly was the slightly less brilliant translator and editor who took the photograph above - Zola is hard at work on the manuscript of Fecondité - and who told this story himself in a book speedily published in 1899: With Zola in England: a story of exile. (He assures readers he only undertook the task just in case circumstances prevented Zola from getting round to telling the story himself.)  His father Henry, the first publisher of Zola’s novels in English, suffered three months in prison and bankruptcy following an obscenity trial in 1889 which centred on his publication of The Soil (La Terre), branded by the solicitor-general as a work of ‘bestial obscenity’, after which Ernest took over the reins.  He brought out Zola’s later works in translation as fast as Zola could write them, editing them heavily for his own safety as he did so.  That landmark moment in the history of literary censorship is another story – summarised extremely well here and well worth exploring, not least for the light it casts on what I'm about to tell you about Ernest.

I first came across the Vizetelly family from two directions at once, and I still can’t quite work out quite what to make of the ever enterprising Ernest.  Unsurprisingly, the novels of Zola were an incredibly rich source for me while writing Liberty’s Fire, which is set during the Paris Commune of 1871. I shamelessly pillaged the extraordinarily detailed descriptions of Les Halles in The Belly of Paris, backstage life in Nana and the laundries and pawn tickets of The Assommoir, never mind the final scenes of The Debacle.  (I thoroughly recommend Colette Wilson's gripping analysis of how Zola’s novels relate to his experience of the Commune Paris and the Commune, 1871-78: the Politics of Forgetting.  As this review rightly observes, one of her book’s strengths lies in the decision to look at the clear presence of the Commune even in works that did not directly address l’année terrible.) But though these are the out-of-copyright freebies that pop up on Kindle, I quickly realised that I was best off avoiding all Vizetelly translations, senior and junior.  This is partly because of the expurgations (despite Henry’s resistance to ‘bowdlerising . . .the greatest works in English Literature' I believe he was cautious even before the disastrous trial, although I may be wrong) but mainly because they’re really not very well written.  They seem to me dashed off, dated, and fairly clunky in style.  I became slightly obsessed with tracking down the very best alternatives, which was how I discovered Mark ‘Cod’ Kurlansky’s brilliant version of The Belly of Paris and also Lydia Davis’ Madame Bovary. (And discovered this useful resource.)

But back to those Vizetellys, of whom there were many – grandfathers, uncles, brothers and cousins, newspapermen and wine connoisseurs, printers and war correspondents and even a well-known lexicographer.  This is what old Ernest looked like in 1914, when he finally published his own accounts of first the Franco-Prussian war and the Siege of Paris, and then of the Commune itself. 

Frontispiece to My Days of Adventure

How I wish I knew what he looked like in 1871.  At this point he was a seventeen-year-old junior reporter, rushing around revolutionary Paris with his father and brother, gathering material for the Illustrated London News.  He reminds me of a character from a G.A.Henty novel, politics included, and I can imagine his exploits inspiring awe in boys like Oswald Bastable - though I'm sure Noel would have had reservations.  Residents of the French capital since 1865, Ernest and his father were as talented at drawing and engraving as they were at journalism.  They were besieged during the Franco-Prussian war and dispatched their reports back to England by balloon-post, making the most of the quickly developing art of photography to send the pictures of their pictures and copy in duplicate by successive posts to be certain of delivery.  A decade later, in the book Paris in Peril (1882), father and son collaborated in a vivid portrayal of life in beleaguered France during the war, but dealt with the Commune and its terrible demise in just a few condemnatory paragraphs: ‘The reprisals were certainly terrible; but the provocation had been very great. The Commune was crushed.’

Ernest returned to the themes in 1914, publishing in separate volumes My Days ofAdventure: The Fall of France, 1870-71 and then, just after the outbreak of World War I, My Adventures in the Commune.  The title is misleading.  Consummate journalist as he is by then, elderly Ernest rarely clear makes the difference between his own adventures and those of others.  Although he criticises other reporters who cheerfully sent alarmist dispatches about certain events (like the destruction of the Vendôme column) before they even happened, he is pretty cagy about what he actually witnessed himself and what material he draws from other sources, let alone what those sources might be.

Engraving by Arthur Boyd Houghton

This is a boy who learned his journalistic skills and nous at the knee of a father who in his own autobiography cheerfully confessed authorship of one of the great travel hoaxes of the nineteenth century: Four months among the gold-finders in Alta California, being the Diary of an Expedition from San Francisco to the Gold Districts supposedly by J. Tyrwitt Brooks, (M.D.).  Henry Vizetelly concocted the fantastic adventures of a mythical gold-hunter in the hitherto unknown foothills of the Sierra Nevada so convincingly that he was hailed by The Times in 1849 as ‘a gentleman who knows all about it!’  After all, how many people could actually contradict him? 

Ernest’s family nickname was ‘The Eel’.  When writing about Louise Michel, probably the best known of the Communardes then and now, and famed in the political clubs held in so many churches in Paris, he is certainly slippery:

Louise Michel in the uniform of the
National Guard, Paris' citizen militia,
guardians of the Commune

‘If I remember rightly, I once heard Louise Michel speak at the club held in the church of Saint-Jacques.  I have referred previously to this so-called Red Virgin of the Commune. . .Towards the end of the Empire she began to pay attention to public questions, and expressed the most advanced political and social views. [NB ‘advanced’ is not exactly a compliment here, as you’ll see in a moment.]  At the advent of the Commune she was almost swept away by enthusiastic fervour.  I can picture her as a woman of eight-and-thirty, with an angular figure, a pale face with prominent cheekbones, a large mouth, and dark glowing eyes.  She assumed the uniform of the National Guards, participated in more than one of the sorties, and was wounded whilst assisting in the defence of the much-bombarded Fort of Issy. . .’

There’s nothing to suggest that young Ernest ever actually set eyes on either Louise Michel or three other Communardes he says frequented this particular political club.  But he’s happy to paint them in the grotesquely stereotyped terms which characterise so many such accounts by writers hostile to the Commune, borrowing the scandalous reputations of these women to colour ‘his’ adventures.  Ernest describes one woman, just as if he’d seen her,

Engraving by Arthur Boyd Houghton

‘who. . . during the Bloody Week [the week in which the Commune was brutally crushed by Government army, leaving as many as 20,000 dead on the streets of Paris]. . .went about, sword in hand, in a state of hysterical fury, which she strove to assuage by decapitating any corpses that she saw lying in the streets, and this although they were for the most part those of National Guards. At the club this creature raved frantically, her face wearing the while much the same expression as that which may be observed on the countenances of militant suffragettes when they are hurling choice imprecations at police-magistrates and others.  She was doubtless of much the same breed – the breed of the possédées de Loudun [possessed nuns made famous in a 17^th century witchcraft trial] and the convulsionnaires de Saint-Médard.  Among her club-companions was a former fortune-teller who was almost as violent, and an ex-ragpicker who, perhaps, even surpassed her as a virago. This woman, called, I believe Marie Gougeard, attended the assassination of several of the hostages . . . and as the vicims fell to the ground lifeless, waved a red flag and shrieked, “Vive la Commune!”’

From The Communists of Paris, 1871: Types,
Physiognomies, Characters by Bertall

The working women of the Commune get a pretty bad press from Ernest throughout his narrative, though he does attempt an odd version of gallantry, insisting that the fires which raged through Paris were, contrary to rumour, mostly the work of men rather than women. The pétroleuses -  ‘hundreds of women wandering about with their little supplies of mineral oil, and setting fire to one and another place in a haphazard way, are gross exaggerations’ - he dismisses as a legend nurtured by imaginative journalists. Yet discussing a vast explosion at a cartridge factory, whose cause has never determined, he says it can’t possibly have been caused by a Government shell:  ‘It was due, probably to the carelessness of one or another of the scores of women who were employed in the works.’  Of course Ernest was hardly alone in his attitudes to women: such views were obviously widespread at the time.  But it’s a pity that a hundred years and more later, historians of the period such as Alastair Horne and Rupert Christiansen continue to trot out the most misogynistic and formulaic portraits of the Communardes without qualm or query. 

In the preface to My Adventures, Ernest assures us that he has drawn on his diaries of 1871.  There are certainly moments when the narrative comes alive and you sense he really was there.  It’s easy, for example, to picture this nimble teenager sliding through the crowds to get to the front as the Emperor-topped column in the Place Vendôme came crashing to the ground:

‘I do not remember whether my father and my brother followed me, but, eel-like, and in spite of the fact that some of the Commune’s “cavalry” rode up to hold the crowd in check, I wriggled through the throng, and at last, on a great bed of dung, I perceived the French Caesar lying prone – decapitated by his fall, and with one arm broken.’

From My Adventures in the Commune

Other stories, particularly about the final days of the Commune, also ring true.  He records meeting a plumber at the Gare Saint Lazare who is trying to get home to a wife about to give birth.  Just at that moment, they are caught in crossfire, and the shot proves fatal for this man.  He and his brother and father were on the Place de la Concorde at the moment when the arcaded façade of the Ministry of Finance collapsed in flames and they had to run for their lives, stopping only to pick up a few of the hundreds of charred and burning documents that began to rain down on the area.  I certainly drew on Ernest’s description of watching Government forces as they attacked on the Elysée Palace (used by Napoleon III to meet his mistresses) during the last ‘Bloody’ week of the Commune’s existence.  Many of the most enduring images of the Commune are photographs – barricades before the final week, ruins afterwards, but when it came to the fighting and action shots, camera technology still lagged behind the speed of the pencil.  Ernest knew how to get the images the Illustrated London News was after:

‘From the 6^th floor balcony of the house in the Rue de Miromesnil where I was living with my father and my brother Arthur, one could see a part of the palace, notably the guard-house at the corner of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré and the Avenue de Marigny.  Awakened at a very early hour by the sounds of firing, we repaired to the balcony in question.  We were the only tenants in the house, the Chateaubriand family, which had left Paris before the German siege, not having returned since thern.  The sixth-floor rooms were chiefly occupied by their servants, but the concierge of the house had a key which procured us admission to some soubrette’s little chamber, whence we speedily reached the balcony.  From that point of vantage, as from the gallery of a theatre, we looked down upon an episode in the great tragedy of war.  I had brough a sketch-block with me, and resting it on the balcony railing, after taking a chair, I was able to make in all comfort a sketch of the defence of the Elysée guard house, which the soldiers were attacking.”

(You’ll notice Ernest dismissively sexualises even the absent maid whose room he invades.  Perhaps he would have done the same at the age of seventeen.  But something makes me hope not.)  On this occasion, he had plenty of time to observe the military operations, for it took quite some time.  First “the soldiers had to carry a mansion belonging to one of the Rothschilds where a considerable party of insurgents had, so to say, entrenched themselves.  Moreover, all the movements of the military were very cautious.  They glided along the house-fronts, took refuge in every recess, stole into houses and fired from garret-windows and roofs, seldome, during the whole of the street-fighting, carrying a barricade by direct assault. . . . The end of the affair came, I remember, very suddenly.  The attention of the insurgents was still directed towards the lower part of the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, whence they were being attacked, when all at once a body of troops came stealthily but rapidly along the Avenue de Marigny.  By this means the Communalists were taken in the rear and all chance of escape was cut off.  A few men who tried to resist were at once shot down.  The rest dropped their weapons and surrendered.  The same kind of thing occurred repeatedly during the street-fighting.  The insurgents were outmanoeuvred, outflanked; and even their biggest barricades, bristling with ordnance, were of no avail to them. 

‘Paris had changed since 1848.  Here and there, of course, as is the case even today, some narrow and more or less winding streets still remained, but the greater part of the city offered nothing like the same facilities for defence as had been the case in pre-Haussmanite days.’ 

In 1967, a Chichester wine merchant called Russell Purchase was interested enough in Henry Vizetelly to track down Ernest’s son Victor, who gathered together the family letters, photographs, drawings and other memorabilia so that Purchase could write a biography.  Purchase died before he could finish it, and all this material is now fills 17 boxes in the University of Sussex Library.  One day, when I have time, I may not be able to resist going to look at it so that I can meet Ernest again.  Of course what I'm really hoping for is a photograph or sketch of his adventurous seventeen-year-old self.

(You can find more background on the Paris Commune in this post I wrote last November, and you probably haven't heard the last of it yet. . .)

The Original Hackers, by Clare Mulley

Last week I was delighted to meet Ruth Ive, ‘the woman who censored Churchill’, as she is styled in her memoirs.[i] As a war-time telephone censor, Ruth is probably the last person still with us who once listened in on conversations between Churchill and Roosevelt, but then we still don’t know for sure exactly who else was party to the great men’s conversations. For those who have been surprised by recent phone tapping and state surveillance revelations, it is sobering to remember that hacking has been a recognized policy since a least the Second World War.

Ruth Ive in the 1940s
when she worked in the Postal and Telegraph Censorship

In 1942, Ruth’s shorthand skills led to her being picked out of her job at the postal-censorship offices for a role monitoring the Transatlantic radio link between Britain and America. For three and a half years she worked long shifts, tucked into a small office in a partly destroyed building in St Martins Le Grand. Here Ruth listened in to conversations between the dispersed members of European royal families, a ‘rather bad-tempered’ Mme Chiang Kai-shek, and senior political and diplomatic staff including Churchill and Roosevelt, or Mr Smith and Mr White as they were known over the phone. Ruth’s job was two-fold; to note down everything that was said, and to pull the plug, literally, on any conversation that might in any way compromise the Allied war effort if overheard.

Churchill was ‘a natural telephoner’ Ruth told me over tea and sandwiches in her North London care home, ‘very effusive with Roosevelt and often unguarded in his comments’. Listening down the line, she felt that she never knew what he might say next, and she suspects that Roosevelt did not either. Their conversations might start with a description of Churchill’s dinner, or Roosevelt’s polite enquiry after his opposite number’s family, but would soon develop into often quite passionate discussions. Churchill ‘didn’t hide his emotions’, Ruth remembered. Although he was always confident about ultimate victory, ‘he did not have that clipped, buttoned-up quality’. On one occasion, when he was distraught at the devastation caused by a V2 that had landed near Holborn Circus, Ruth had to cut the line on Churchill twice in quick succession, for fear he would reveal the exact location and extent of the damage caused. And yet the PM only spoke to Ruth directly once, demanding ‘what did you do that for?’ when the line went dead unexpectedly. Ruth had to explain that this time it was her US counterpart who had cut the line on Roosevelt – something Ruth was never allowed to do herself. The only consistent thing in the calls was the way that Churchill always signed off saying, ‘Kaye Bee Oh’. Eventually, unsure how to transcribe this curious farewell, Ruth asked her boss who told her it was K.B.O. for ‘Keep Buggering On’.

The room where Churchill made his Transatlantic calls.
The outside door was disguised it as a toilet,
with a sign that could be moved from 'Vacant' to 'Engaged'.

Ruth knew that all her shorthand notes on the Churchill/Roosevelt conversations were shredded once she had transcribed them and in any case, she told me, a few days later ‘no one could read them, not even me’. After the war, in October 1945, Churchill was asked to attend a US Congressional hearing with the longhand transcripts, and responded that they, too, had been ‘destroyed’. It seemed that that was end of that. Ruth married soon after the war and raised two sons and, having signed the official secrets act, she never spoke about her work listening in to the hottest British hotline of the war.

Ruth's July 1945 reference, noting that she was 'the best censor'
and 'highly recommended for work requiring tact and discretion'.

Fifty years later Ruth was ‘horrified’ to learn about the existence of a German listening station at Valkenswaard, near Eindhoven in the Netherlands, where Philips electronics are based. Up till then she had imagined that her role had been little more than a necessary war-time precaution. ‘If I had had any proof [that the Germans were listening] at the time, I would have just laid down my pencil and made a run for it’ she told me laughing. Looking back, however, she has become fascinated by just who, besides herself and the American phone censor, was eavesdropping on ‘these two old men, talking to each other’.

In 2004 Ruth travelled to the Netherlands to search for the Valkenswaard listening station. Major Tony Bayley, of the British Battalion of the Irish Guards, had introduced her to members of the military team who, just after the war, had found the abandoned Dutch farmhouse that had once served as the German listening station hidden away in some woods. Sadly the building had already been stripped, and all the equipment either thrown into the nearby river or evacuated with the staff. Visiting nearly sixty years later, Ruth found the building was still standing and used as an Arts Centre, but she met ‘a blanket of silence’ when she began asking questions at the Valkenswaard Heritage Centre and other official archives. ‘You imagine that the Dutch are liberal’ she sighed, ‘it is shocking that this happened there’. However she did meet a man who remembered the high security around the building when he was a local teenager during the war.

Post-war Valkenswaard
The former German Intelligence Centre disguised as a Dutch farmhouse.

The American historian, David Khan, has written about the German facilities at Valkenswaard, describing the underground bunker where the technology was kept, and the radio masts hidden among the trees.[ii] Here the thirty-five staff, all fluent English-speakers, lived in comparative luxury, with comfortable bedrooms, an on-site kitchen preparing fresh meals, and a lounge with an open fireplace. ‘Apparently, the quality of the reception was good too’, Ruth added ruefully as we spoke, thinking about her own cramped office, lack of lunches, and sometimes terribly static lines.

On her last day in Amsterdam, ‘this little man turned up on the doorstep’ Ruth told me. Hans Knap was a retired TV journalist who had written a history of official postal monitoring dating back to the end of the nineteenth century.[iii] While researching Valkenswaard he, too, had also drawn a blank with the Dutch authorities. Nonetheless Knap’s research led him to conclude that ‘after forty years of German-Dutch colonial co-operation, German engineers listened to the “hot-line” of Churchill and Roosevelt with the help of the facilities of the Dutch PTT and Philips Electronic Industries’. David Khan, who has looked at records in the USA and elsewhere, even asserts that translations of all the Churchill/Roosevelt talks landed on the Fuehrer’s desk within hours of the calls being made.

Now in her 90s, Ruth is still a woman with a mission. ‘I’ve had a lot of fun’, she told me, ‘and I’ve got very irritated and very angry…’ In a way though, she says, it did not matter that the Germans were successfully listening in. Given the coded nature of the conversations, and her own and her American counterpart’s quick action to prevent any sensitive information from being discussed, she feels sure that they ‘gained little original intelligence’ from the Transatlantic radio line. However, her memoirs tell just one side of a conversation, she explained, and she would still like to know just who these ‘original hackers’, as she calls them, were. ‘I am surprised at people now – that the authorities were so amazed by the recent hacking’, she told me as we said goodbye. ‘Why was it a scandal? We’ve all been doing it for years.’

Ruth Ive's book, The Woman Who Censored Churchill
(The History Press, 2008)

---

[i] Ruth Ive, The woman who censored Churchill (The History Press, 2008).

[ii] David Kahn, The Codebreakers: The Comprehensive History of Secret Communication fro Ancient Times to the Internet (Scribner, 1996)

[iii] Hans Knap, Forschungsstelle Langeveld: Duits afluisterstation in bezet Nederland (De Bataafsche leeuw, 1998)

WHAT'S IN A NAME? CENSORING THE PAST by Eve Edwards

What's in a name?  Quite a lot, according to one of my publisher's website (Random House US).  I suppose it is funny but, last year, when I tried to answer a question about novelists that inspired me, I found my mention of Charles Dickens and Fanny Burney censored to Charles ****ens and ***** Burney.  I hope Blogger can cope with my obscenity.  Spare a thought for a guy called Dick Cockfoster or a girl blessed with the name Frances (commonly known as Fanny) Titmouse.  I imagine their emails get put straight into spam.

To be fair to Random, I should point out this entry was made on a site for teen readers so the duty of care is higher for the owner, but still, our modern censorship does seem to be overly strong in all the wrong areas.  We are very lax elsewhere.  As the women's groups appearing before the Leveson Enquiry on 24th January pointed out, we live in a society which thinks it is OK to feature naked women in papers at child-eye level and put rape victims on trial in the way their stories are reported.  I wouldn't mind a bit of blanking out of that but wouldn't it be so much better if editors realised that it is sick to do so?

Everyday I come across the problem of modern censorship in writing historical fiction.  Let's start with self-censorship.  We are not all going to agree, of course, on the depiction of sex and levels of violence and language when writing for a younger audience. My own personal guide is a connection to the parallel world of cinema certification.  Would this be OK in a PG-13 (UK 12A) film or does it deserve a higher rating?  It does not stop me writing a no holds barred piece if I wished but I wouldn't put it on the teen or children's market.

However, there is undoubtedly a tension with the desire to be true to the historical period where what we think is going too far would not have raised any eyebrows.  For the Tudors, marriage at 12 was allowed, as was burning of religious martyrs and torture - all tricky things to depict for young readers if they are to have a convincing and honest treatment.  For my Cat Royal books set in Drury Lane (under the pen name Julia Golding) my heroine lives in what was the red light district and prostitutes worked the theatre audience.  I dealt with that by not dwelling on it, in the same way my character would find it all part of her 'normal' so not needing comment.  I've also written about the issue of the slave trade and had to be very careful with the language used about black people as that era had no problem belittling Africans and using the term Negro, all of which now sound extremely insulting.  Bearing in mind these books are going to be read by children as young as eight, I bear a responsibility for what I expose them too.  I strove to tone down the language where necessary without hiding the brutality of that system, because I believed that was the point that needed to be made.  The injustice of the slave trade is the underlying obscenity that fuelled the more superficial words and attitudes.  No doubt others would draw the line elsewhere but I can only say that 'I did my best'.

German edition of The Other Countess
 - I wonder how they translated the rude words?

Now I come briefly to the censorship of others.  It has an illustrious history: Shakespeare had to submit his plays for approval by the Master of the Revels, though his problems hinged on politics and blasphemy rather than sexual innuendo and language that occupies the modern wielder of the blue pencil.  Down at my much humbler level, I have found it frustrating and amusing at times.  I have kept an email exchange with my editor at Puffin where we debated how I might refer to the male sex organs in a way that respected the spirit of Tudor bawdy.  I was allowed cod piece (old fashioned so passable) but not cock (too sharp).  I argued.  I gave in.  The ghost of Thomas Bowdler still haunts us.

I would be very interested to hear what censorship my fellow writers have experienced and what you, as a reader, think about all this.  It reveals our own period's manners and mores more acutely than perhaps any other subject, does it not?

Eve Edwards

P.S.  I hope I haven't offended you...