"...these
creatures, which came upon us from the void, these children of a nightmare had
not troubled in the very slightest to imitate the Lord of Creation. They were
unmistakably, undeniably, insects." (The Polyphemes)
F. Hernaman-Johnson's
'The Polyphemes: A Story of Strange Adventures Among Strange Beings (1906) is
an early sci-fi novel in the jingoist idiom. Here a south Pacific race of black
ants set out to conquer the world, and advance to the stage of bombing Europe
using their sophisticated (for the time) dirigibles. Westerman's first novel
was published in 1908; his first airship novel, The Flying Submarine, in
1912.
The fear of invasion,
a source of concern for any British government since Napoleon's failed
attempts, was a source of inspiration for Westerman, and he, like several of
his contemporaries was influenced by Erskine Childers' classic 1903 novel 'The
Riddle of the Sands.' Here the Germans are preparing an invasion fleet of
barges in the Frisian Islands, planning to land them in East Anglia. The plot
is discovered by two young Englishmen on a sailing holiday -- a combination
that Westerman was to adopt and use repeatedly in his early novels.
Exoticism is not
always beyond the horizon. While Westerman liked the volatile republics of
South America and lost islands in the Pacific, he did use domestic settings. In
the early 20th C Great Britain hadn't shrunk to the point where mystery was
impossible, loneliness expunged in a sprawl of urban chatter. Planes could land
in a field, hide in a barn, or submarines hijacked as they left the shipyard,
raid the merchant lanes... and boys could sail to Heligoland, fight the Hun and
come back men. The arc of technology was increasing, space shrinking, yet
everything was still visceral, hands-on, still within the control of the pilot,
not the robot. And all this evolution came from the sea, the art of sailing, of
navigation, the play of the wind and the stars.
So there's a sense of
control, both of the individual's fate, and of moral responsibility, whereas
today robotics have rendered us passengers with no responsibility except to
consume. Decisions are made for us, cybernetic paternalism rules, and we're
just along for the ride. The self-reliance that is characteristic of
Westerman's heroes and villains a hundred years ago has diminished to the point
where actions are prompted by traffic lights and computer apps. His world is an
analogue world, closer to the elements, anthropomorphic and classical.
Self-discipline is paramount, decadence impossible (except in those lazy,
off-white tropical cultures beyond the anglo-saxon horizon).
Sometimes his
technology seems far-fetched, yet it nearly always conforms to the operational
equipment of the day or can be excused as an experimental model for the
near-future. The Achilles heel of the airship -- the highly inflammable
hydrogen gas, which in fact brought an end to the airship era with the horrible
crashes of the R-101 in France en route to India (1930), and the Hindenberg in
New Jersey at the end of a flight from Rio (1937) (although the 'hydrogen
industry' now claims it was the aluminium hull coated by iron oxide that was at
fault) -- is addressed by new discovery and invention. Safe "Helia" gas in The
Flying Submarine and Helia or 'super-helium' in The Airship Golden Hind. In The
Dreadnaught of the Air (1914) Whittinghame's airship is a 800 foot behemoth
built in four interlocking sections that can detach and reform independently
even in the air, a concept that takes the safety architecture of airtight hull
sections in the battleship designs of the day one or two steps further. So
Westerman uses speculative fiction to advance a few ideas to improve upon
existing technologies without abandoning realism... which is why, perhaps, his
use of coincidence, luck and virtue-rewarded appear exaggerated, as everything
else in the Westerman world is fairly normal.
Today, his writing can
be criticized for its archaic wordiness, that Victorian hangover of
circumlocution that both exasperates and dazzles. The pomposity of it emerges
as poetry despite itself, despite the redundancies and prevarications. In fact,
it's only the early novels from his Edwardian youth, those fantasies that
recast Verne, Henty and Rider-Haggard as flashlight stories, that this dead
rhetoric might be problematic for some readers today. But he gets better: when
the Great War starts in 1914, the language becomes more disciplined, more
authentic as evidenced in The Dispatch Riders, Wilmshurst of the Frontier
Force, The Sea-Girt Fortress and others... and curiously, after the War ends,
some novels (such as The Airship Golden Hind) revert to the stagey poetics of
his pre-War apprenticeship. It's as if there's a relaxation of reality, where
hardship and death fade back into the shadow world of the theatre or narratives
specifically spun for the innocent.
But Westerman does
eventually evolve into the leaner, more secular style of modernism. For most
writers, it was journalism and science that led them there; for Westerman, it
was technology. At times, his descriptions read like a surveyor's report, as if
he sees everything in terms of science, with distances, angles and logic. One
of his best novels, The Black Hawk (1934), is completely modern with a plain
narrative structured like a film scenario. It's obvious that after twenty plus
years that he has escaped the effete calligraphy of the Victorian
style.
Burroughs vs.
Westerman
Another contemporary
of Westerman's who had it in for the Hun was the American, Edgar Rice Burroughs
(1875-1950).
Burroughs, who writes
in the rhetorical style of Sir Walter Scott, but thinks in the bizarre dream
mode of Jonathan Swift, has the same cultural preferences, the jingoism and
scientific romanticism ('a thousand years of osculatory memoirs portending')
(Chessmen of Mars). Burroughs has repeated flashes of metaphoric eloquence --
both in language and in imagery -- while Westerman often uses redundant
rhetorical flourishes. Both authors operate on a level of subliminal parody,
like children dressed as adults, although Burroughs is more likely to submerge
into dream and Westerman to sustain naturalism. Westerman is political, his
plots more like government intelligence reports of events imagined, whereas
Burroughs is inclined to detach entirely from the natural world, i.e. his
Barsoom/Mars series, where Earth is just a memory and Mars an alternate world
of animal evolution. True, his Tarzan novels are implicitly political -- of all
the animals in his jungle, the Hun remains the most dangerous -- but the
message never interferes with the action, and the adventure carries
on.
In 1912 Westerman
published 'Captured At Tripoli', an adventure novel which has two British
youths and a war correspondent captured by some Bedouin allied to the Ottoman
Empire. Eventually they escape and during their flight through the edges of the
Sahara they come across the skeleton of a Crusader in a suit of armour, which
in turn leads them to discover a 'lost city' populated by the descendants of
some European knights. While you might think of Rider-Haggard, it's interesting
to note that in Edgar Rice Burroughs' "hate the Hun" novel 'Tarzan Untamed'
(1920) Tarzan discovers the skeleton of a Conquistador in a jungle ravine in
West Africa, and later, the lost city of the Maniacs, themselves mutant
descendants of some unknown explorers. Coincidence or rip-off? Or working
within a genre (the 'lost world') perhaps. Rider-Haggard's King Solomon's Gold
Mines (1885), She (1886) and Allan Quatermain (1887) are the benchmarks, and
you can bet that both Westerman and Burroughs read Rider-Haggard, along with
Kipling (The Man Who Would Be King) and Arthur Conan Doyle (The Lost World).
Popular culture demands popular thinking, and 'old Africa, land of mystery' was
part of the popular imagination by the end of the Victorian era, and this
extended into the twentieth century. While it might be part of the ancestral
echo, it was certainly an extension of Egyptology. The cult of Egypt inspired
not only art and industrial design, it also opened the door to the unwritten
history and culture of Africa south. For Burroughs, it was to be a Darwinian
festival, and he rose to the occasion with Tarzan the Apeman, an English
aristocrat gone rogue in the jungle, a brilliant meld of the European superman
and the prehistoric caveman. For Westerman, it was the politics of colonial
competition, of war, technology and the spread of the anglo-christian ethic.
But both Westerman and
Burroughs enjoyed a rumble, enjoyed asserting the superiority of the modern
civilized warrior over the beast. Tarzan wrestles a panther to the death, a
British soldier strangles a lion with his bare hands, and when all is said and
done, both men speak English, even if one eats his meat raw and the other
cooked. It's absurd, yet the gap between what we are and what we were, is
always a measurement of the absurd.
Burroughs is more
inclined to symbolism. In the city of the Maniacs (Tarzan the Untamed), the
mutant population worship and humiliate an old English woman whom they've kept
prisoner for sixty years, as if she's a supernatural Queen Victoria rather than
what she really is, that is, the kidnapped daughter of a British missionary.
The idea owes something to Rider-Haggard's white warrior race ruled by two
sisters in 'Allan Quatermain', although Burroughs is implicitly a humourist, as
degradation is part of his poetic cynicism. Westerman can be cynical too --
witness the occasional inserts about the state of the Royal Navy and outmoded
protocols -- although his cynicism is mostly political rather than rooted in
his view of the human condition. For example, when he wants to put the boots to
someone, he follows the party line:
'...and the
German, whenever he is confident that he is on the winning side, exhibited all
the brutality and cruelty of his Hunnish ancestors. Attila was a scourge; his
modern descendants are simply imitators, who, having their veneer of
civilization, combine science with the bestial brutality in their methods of
waging war' ('Wilmhurst of the Frontier Force' 1918)
If Westerman has a
failing, it's probably that he has no good Germans and few reasonable ones.
While he often characterizes Latins as lazy and incompetent, he does admit
their occasional genius. For example, in his early work, The Flying Submarine
(1912), Don Miguel O'Rourke is a sophisticated inventor who uses an old Cornish
tin mine as a base to develop and test his submersible airship, then flies it
back to his home country in South America where he uses it to depose a corrupt
dictator, become president himself, and win a war against a bordering
country... all this with the help of a standard Westerman hero, Sub-lieutenant
Holmsby, as Don Miguel -- while a genius -- has moments of paralyzing fear.
Even the Japanese are favored, as in Rounding Up the Raider (1916), where a
Japanese liner is sunk by a German raider and the passengers cast adrift
without mercy... but of course the Japanese were our allies then. But
Germans... they're swine, and are to blame entirely for the first Great War. As
Peter Barcroft the writer -- proscribed by the Kaiser -- says in Billy Barcroft
R.N.A.S (1918), the point of this war is to gain "a lasting peace built on the
ruins of German militarism". Naive optimism, as we now know, but nevertheless
the statement is an accurate reflection of the British thinking of the time.
Prussian militarism was to blame. Their later industrial revolution and the
consequent population explosion and the fact that Germany was largely a
land-locked country doesn't come into it. The natural competition between
nations and cultures doesn't come into it, except as a casting for good and
evil. The threat is existential, the eye of history jaundiced.
You might well wonder
if Percy F. Westerman was a paid political propagandist or recruiting agent for
the British government of the day. It's possible, although his name doesn't
appear on the list of writers contributing to Lloyd-George's War Propaganda
Bureau, set up in the fall of 1914 under the stewardship of Charles Masterman.
Some participants will be familiar to readers of British literature: Arthur
Conan-Doyle, Ford Maddox Ford, Thomas Hardy, John Masefield, G.K. Chesterton,
G.M. Trevylan, Rudyard Kipling, H.G. Wells, et. al. Certainly Westerman thought
of himself as worthy; in Billy Barcroft R.N.A.S the Kaiser dispatches a
Zeppelin to Lancashire to abduct Billy's father because of his written insults
against the Fatherland. The Zeppelin makes a night landing in a field near
Barcroft Snr's cottage, but wouldn't you know it, the snatch-squad kick in the
door and grab a visiting neighbour by mistake, a man who is in fact a German
spy. This incident is probably a humorous admission by Percy F. that his
anti-German war novels would have his name on any proscription list the Kaiser
might have.
The Bureau was revived
as the Ministry of Information for WW 2, and many writers contributed. Of
particular interest is H.V. Morton's 'I, James Blunt', a "what if Hitler
occupies England" novella published in 1942 as commissioned war
propaganda.
There's nothing unique
about this, either for WW 1 or 2 or any other war. Artists were hired to paint
propaganda posters or design camouflage decor for military weapons, and writers
did their bit. Captain W.E. Johns, the author of the popular aviation Biggles
novels, wrote for the government during WW 2, and Johns is the natural
successor to Westerman in the adolescent action novel genre. While they do
overlap, Westerman was writing and publishing long before Johns, and in fact
his aviation cop Standish precedes Biggles as an 'air policeman' (Standish of
the Air Police 1938 vs. Sergeant Biggleworth 1950). It is interesting to note
though that both these writers wrote their most vital and authentic stories
about the Great War -- Westerman, at the time, and Johns later, although he
wrote from combat experience and Westerman didn't.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
certainly had in for the Hun -- consider the opening lines of 'Tarzan the
Untamed' (1920):
Hauptmann Fritz
Schneider trudged wearily through the somber aisles of the dark forest. Sweat
rolled down his bullet head and stood upon his heavy jowls and bull neck. His
lieutenant marched beside him while Unterlieutenant von Goss brought up the
rear, following with a handful of askaris the tired and all but exhausted
porters whom the black soldiers, following the example of their white officer,
encouraged with the sharp points of bayonets and the metal-shod butts of
rifles.
There were no
porters within reach of Hauptmann Schneider so he vented his spleen on the
askaris nearest at hand, yet with greater circumspection since these men bore
loaded rifles -- and the three white men were alone with them in the heart of
Africa.
Not bad for someone
who was reportedly Stalin's favorite author. In Burroughs, the brutal law of
the jungle is observed with the dispassionate eye of Thomas Hobbes (life in the
state of nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short") or -- if you
prefer -- with the naive eye of Henri Rousseau the painter. The imagery is as
precise as it is primitive.
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