In the last two or three weeks I have been mightily impressed
by the work of two artists, the one a novelist, the other an historian, who could
reasonably be called mid-Atlantic intellectuals. Both Alan Furst, the novelist,
and Amanda Foreman, the historian, have solid links through either birth,
education or residence with Europe and the United States and both seem to have
benefitted personally and professionally from these links.
I have recently read two of
Furst’s 14 novels about what he calls “near history”, the period from the
access to power of Hitler in 1933, to the end of the Second World War in 1945.
In both of them, his main character was a journalist, who became a spy, and the
setting in both was the slightly murky world in which, in those days, political
activists who opposed the powers animating the onrush of war were forced to
live. Furst calls himself an “historical spy novelist”, but many reviewers,
amazed by the seeming fidelity of his descriptions of the atmosphere of the
time, have rather considered he should be listed as a pure novelist. In each of
the books I read, Paris, a city Furst has described as “the heart of
civilization,” plays a prominent role as the place to escape to from the
oncoming terrors of Fascism and Communism.
Before he began to write novels, Furst moved to France, where he taught
for some time at the University of Montpellier, and he later lived in Paris for
many years, an experience that has clearly marked him and that has probably
given rise to the engaging and sometimes terrifying way he has portrayed the
world that was overcome by Nazism.
Dr. Amanda Foremen, who is the
animator and author of a BBC series called The
Ascent of Woman has an even more markedly mid-Atlantic background than
Furst. She is the daughter of the famous Hollywood screenwriter Carl Foreman,
who was halfway through working on the movie he wrote, High Noon, when he was called before the Un-American Activities
Committee of the US Congress where he admitted to having been, in his youth a
member of the Communist Party but to whom he refused to name any members of the
party. Thus he was declared an uncooperative witness, subject to a boycott by
the major studios, and he took off for England, where, eventually Amanda was
born in 1968. She was educated in England, then at University in the United States,
and finally at Oxford University. When she was 30 she turned her doctoral
thesis on Georgiana, the Duchess of Devonshire
into a book which became an international bestseller in hardback, paperback and
on re-issue nine years later. Her next
book was A World On Fire, a history
of the American civil war from the British point of view, of which one reviewer
said “it resembles nothing so much as War
and Peace”; and the Wall Street
Journal reviewer offered the opinion that she was such an engaging writer
that readers might find even her 958 page volume too short.
Just as Alan Furst’s experiences
in Europe must have added to his sure touch in his drawing up the political and
social atmosphere in his novel The
Foreign Correspondent (2006) about an anti-Fascist who got a job in Paris with
Reuters and was simultaneously editing a dissident journal distributed inside
Italy, and in Dark Star (1991) whose
hero is a Pravda correspondent stationed in Paris who gets mixed up in the
baleful atmosphere of Nazi-run Berlin, and is trapped by the German invasion of
Poland, so too Dr. Foreman’s extensive experience in Britain must be attributed
to her sure touch, as exhibited in her series on the BBC. I confess I have seen
only one of the four programmes, but it was done with such authority, with such
a sense of commitment to the cause of women, and revealed such fascinating
information about early women writers and historical figures who would be
called feminists in today’s world, as to be completely captivating. Indeed, it
was exciting o watch a programme carried off with such aplomb and surety. She
did not bother us with any of the standard feminist arguments that might put
off some members of her audience: she simply went straight to describing what
her subjects had done, against what terrific odds they had succeeded, and to
what extend even women today should honour them for having played their
significant role in the liberation of women from the severe strictures they
were under before, during and after the Renaissance (and as she made clear by
including a devastating brief argument by a striking Turkish woman writer) they
still are.
This was what I call ideal TV in
that it was educational, compelling and left one reeling with a sense of all
the things one should have known, but never had. Who, for instance, had ever
heard of the Empress Theodora, who began life as a prostitute and street
performer, gained the acquaintance of the heir to the throne, and when he
succeeded to his title, married him, and succeeded in having legislation
adopted gaining protections for women. This in the sixth century!
I had never heard of Hildegaard,
a nun, an advocate so powerful that the Pope was forced to allow her to form her
own monastery, from which, in her writings, she went so far as to describe the
female orgasm. Dr. Foreman, with an engaging smile, put this freedom about sexuality to a
present-day nun, a very comfortable-looking middle-aged woman, who said that
sexuality was part of human life, and therefore had to be taken into
Benedictine life, and “has to be dealt with by natural means.” (I took this to
be the closest we are ever likely to come to hearing a nun confess to
masturbating.) All this in the twelfth century!
Similarly a woman called Roxelan,
who began as a sexual slave kidnapped from the Ukraine, and became a member of
the Sultan’s harem. In those days the Sultan was not permitted to marry: the
practice was that each of his favourite women could give birth to one child,
and then fade into the background, creating a sort of competition among them to
produce the heir to the throne. Roxalan fell for Sulieman the Magnificent, and
he for her, and she so shattered the prevailing rules that she married him, and
bore him five sons and a daughter. Thereafter she ensured that one of her sons
succeeded to the throne by killing one of his half-brothers, also the Sultan’s
vizier, and a couple of others. On her death in 1558, the succeeding years have
become known as the Sultanate of Women.
Carl Foreman did write some fine
films (Guns of Navarone, Home of the
Brave, Champion, Cyrano de Bergerac, Bridge on the River Kwai), but I would
venture to say that his finest production of all was this superb historian,
writer, communicator and artist, his daughter Amanda.
Readers should look out for her next book, to be published
next year, The
World Made by Women: A History of Women from the Dawn of Civilization. And Alan Furst’s
new book is to be called A Hero In France,
also to be published next year. I would say both would reward readers.
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