Swords From the Sea (91 page)

But through those eleven years that stone wall stood, and there came a time when he questioned the sense of going on with the only kind of writ ing into which he could put his whole heart-questioned even his right to do so. He sent me the outline of a purely conventional story of the type that most magazines will buy and I sent it back to him saying that thousands could do this kind of thing but that his own particular kind of work had never been done before, urging him to go ahead. I think his dogged fighting spirit needed no more than the reassurance of a single person in the "writing game" who saw things as he did. There was nothing from then on but steady plugging at his chosen work.

But there had been no mention of the Crusades. That idea, too, had been building up in him for a dozen years. In his stories there appeared with increasing frequency some "Krit," some Christian, based on the historical and much earlier but unsung Marco Polos who, by adventure more tremendous than can exist today, found themselves alone among peoples no more than myths to Europeans, their very names perhaps unknown. Several of these were Crusaders. The Mongols swept through Armenia, Georgia, and past Constantinople, crushed back the Maineluke foes of the Franks in the Holy Land, established themselves east of the Crusader strongholds, and of course Mr. Lamb went with them. The world-smashing of Genghis Khan brought about an intercourse between Europe and the East that had never before existed, so more and more Mr. Lamb met Europeans as he lived the centuries among his Asiatics. And a forefront of that Europe was Palestine, with the Crusaders finally entrenched there. More and more his interest drifted toward these European contacts on the west.

The notable fact, of course, is that he came to the subject of the Crusades from the Asiatic instead of the European point of view, one from the Western world looking with the eyes of one living for generations among those of the world to the East, and chiefly from the point of view of the Mongols, to whom both Christian and Moslem were foreigners in race and religion. An enviable approach for the historian.

When I talked to him just before he sailed for the libraries in Rome and elsewhere and for a personal examination of the scenes most involved in Crusade activity, he was keenly alive to the advantages of his position and to the opportunity it offered, but at least two years before Genghis Khan appeared that opportunity was beckoning him on. In a letter to readers he wrote:

Our existing stock of histories of the Crusades is unfortunate. The early stock was taken from the main Church chronicles and consisted of a lot of silence and a great deal of fanfare exaggerating the deeds of the Croises. Then appeared the cynical history, making much hay of the fact that the Crusaders usually fought a losing fight and were sometimes the very opposite of saints. Lastly the ultra-modern history has cropped up, making much of the superstition and ignorance of the Crusaders and tracing out with great pains the "advantages" of the Crusades in establishing contact between the East and West, introducing Asia's inventions into Europe, etc.

In decrying the exaltation of the Crusaders and in hunting out the mercantile gains from their efforts and deaths, we have somehow rather lost sight of the intimate personal story of the Crusaders-which a reading of the Arab chronicles serves to bring back to us.

So much of our history and biography and fiction, too, has been written out of prejudice or a preconceived bias. "Catherine the Great was one of the most gifted women of all time" vs. "Catherine the Great was one of the greatest wantons of all time." "Alexander of Macedonia was a superman" vs. "Alexander was mad." You know how these things shape up.

Nowadays one cannot enter a bookshop without seeing on all sides "The Truth About This" or "Outlines of That." The desire of readers to learn is real enough. The fault is with the writers, who lack both scholarship and inclination to devote months or years to finding out the truth as nearly as possible. The result is that the very modern histories are usually "outlines" right enough.

Scholarship seems to have died in the last century. Anyway, I'll wager you can't name a better story of the Crusades than Scott's The Talisman. Sir Walter admitted that he wrote from meager information-there was little to be had in his day-but he was a scholar and a conscientious student of his epoch.

History, our dictionaries say, is "a narrative devoted to the exposition of the unfolding of events." Discarding this husk of Latin phrasing the dictionary says that history is the story of what actually happened. By the way, it's interesting to notice that the dictionary ranks fiction equally with chronicle. And "unfolding" is just the word. What is history but the uncovering or unfolding of the past? The story of what certain men did-their adventures-because it's more interesting to read about what they did than what they were. And easier to get at the truth that way.

It's so absurd to sit down and start in to whitewash some individual or people and call it history. And equally absurd to assemble a few facts and draw personal conclusions from them without taking the trouble to get at all the facts.

This is beginning to wander. But it's so tiresome to look for history in many modern publications and find only personal opinions, deductions, vilification or deification, and references to faulty authorities. And so many modern "historical" novels, written by hasty Americans, are enough to make Sienkiewicz and Tolstoy walk the earth again.

Getting back to our Arab again-it's been awfully refreshing to read about the Crusaders from Arabic sources. But "The Shield" is not a story of the Crusades-the Croises figure only in the taking of Constantinople.... Also an Arab story to the effect that the sword of Roland-Durandal-was taken by the saracins, after the death of the hero, and hidden away in Asia Minor. So I'm thinking of a second tale, dealing with the search for the sword by a Crusader.

It is the scholar speaking, the very human but very scholarly scholar to whom anything less than the utmost nicety in accuracy, thoroughness, and everlasting allegiance to the real truth of the facts is anathema. He can be satisfied only when he has ferreted out the last attainable fact and, with scrupulous justice and unprejudiced mind, weighed it out to its last atom of significance. Upon the road to the truth Harold Lamb is a juggernaut to all that stands in his way or crosses his path.

But the hands on the controls of the juggernaut car are very kindly and human hands and the truth he insists upon finding is the human truth, not the mere dry clatter of statistics and facts of record. He wants to know "what kind of people they were," to meet them as humans. And, when he has learned to know them as living beings, his long fiction training enables him to pass them on to us, colorful, alive, real. The years of work have borne their fruit.

A recent letter from Rome throws a good deal of light:

I'm more than one-half drunk with color and memory of the long trips through the Constantinople region, and-just back from there-Rhodes, Cyprus, Syria, Palestine. Camped among the Arabs for weeks, going from one Crusader's castle to another, and I've never known an experience quite like that. In the interior the country and people are little changed since the medieval days, and the great citadels are finer than anything in France. It does grip the imagination.

Imagination and enthusiasm. Add these to the other qualities and we understand why The Crusades is such wholly enjoyable reading as well as being a distinguished contribution to authoritative history.

October 10, 1924: "Forward!"

Something from Harold Lamb in connection with his novelette in this issue:

I have followed the military and naval ranking as it was in Russia, 1788. The naval branch of the service was new, comparatively, and under the despotism of Catherine the Great queer grades were bestowed. The shipwrights on the Black Sea-the leaders, at least-were given commissions in some regiment of hussars. And wore the uniforms of hussars!

John Paul Jones was originally offered the rating of captain-commandant, which meant very little. He stipulated that he should have the rank of rear-admiral and got it.

He ranked every Russian and foreign officer in the Black Sea except the field Marshal, in command of all operations, and possibly Admiral Mordvinoff, who had the Crimea Fleet.

But, secretly, equal authority was given Nassau-Siegen; and the Prussian ultimately claimed credit for everything that Jones did.

Every principal character in the story is historical. The conspiracy is fact. Nassau's plot is fact. It ultimately did much to discredit Jones with Catherine. Actually, this took place after Jones's return from the Black Sea, and at his quarters in Petersburg. I have used it to show the kind of opposition Jones faced.

I have colored up the actual conspiracy against him, and the events of his journey from Petersburg to Kherson are imaginary. Nassau never came to drawn swords with Jones, but his cowardly and bitter enmity is quite in keeping with the incident in the story.

Jones's daring reconnaissance of the Turkish fleet is fact. Nassau figured in a second trip. I have put them together in the first venture. Ivak's account of the strange and unheard-of method of scouting used by Jones follows the story pretty closely. It is given in the Bibliotekia dlia Tchtenia, and written by a Captain K. A translation can be found in De Koven's Life and Letters of John Paul Jones.

Captain K. relates that he came across an old Cossack living near the Danube who related this story, and showed him the dagger, the gift of Paul Jones. The story struck my fancy and "Forward!" is the result.

As a matter of fact, the actual events-even to the tarantass and Paul Jones's position toward it-and the personalities of the people are followed very closely.

Ivak's habit of alluding to Jones as John Paul may strike you as curious, but the Russians habitually called people by their first names, and usually affixed some Cossack term of liking or disliking. Instead of General Suvarof, Ivak would have said "Little father Michael."

Jones incidentally, never shirked a duel.

November 20, 1924: "The Sword of Honor"

Something from Harold Lamb about his story in this issue:

Berkeley, California.

So far as the undersigned knows, the yarn of Paul Jones's last sea fight has never been spun-in fiction in this country. There were reasons.

The events of the story followhistory closely; with the exception of Pierre Pillon, Kalil, and one or two minor characters, these people all lived and took part in the events in the Black Sea. The characters of Prince Potemkin, Nassau, and Alexiano are not overdrawn.

Paul Jones's service in Russia and the Black Sea is significant. It represents the first experience of an American-a citizen of the United States-in the old world. Paul Jones was the first of the brood of our youngsters to adventure "East." Before this the tide had set the other way; men from the old world tackling the unknown in the new.

Harold Lamb (1892-1962) was born in Alpine, New Jersey, the son of Eliza Rollinson and Frederick Lamb, a renowned stained-glass designer, painter, and writer. Lamb later described himself as having been born with damaged eyes, ears, and speech, adding that by adulthood these problems had mostly righted themselves. He was never very comfortable in crowds or cities, and found school "a torment." He had two main refuges when growing up-his grandfather's library and the outdoors. Lamb loved tennis and played the game well into his later years.

Lamb attended Columbia, where he first dug into the histories of Eastern civilizations, ever after his lifelong fascination. He served briefly in World War I as an infantryman but saw no action. In 1917 he married Ruth Barbour, and by all accounts their marriage was a long and happy one. They had two children, Frederick and Cary. Arthur Sullivan Hoffman, the chief editor of Adventure magazine, recognized Lamb's storytelling skills and encouraged him to write about the subjects he most loved. For the next twenty years or so, historical fiction set in the remote East flowed from Lamb's pen, and he quickly became one of Adventure's most popular writers. Lamb did not stop with fiction, however, and soon began to draft biographies and screenplays. By the time the pulp magazine market dried up, Lamb was an established and recognized historian, and for the rest of his life he produced respected biographies and histories, earning numerous awards, including one from the Persian government for his two-volume history of the Crusades.