Backhouse completes two manuscripts and
gives them to Dr Hoeppli, who is so horrified and fascinated in equal degree by
their contents that he deposits copies in three major academic libraries around
the world, with instructions that they are only to be opened and made available
to the public after his death. Decadence
Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, is the first
volume, made public for the first time in 2011, in an exceptionally well
produced edition by the Shanghai-based publishing house, Earnshaw Books.
Part 1: The
China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse
Memory,
fond memory, when all things fail we fly to thee…
Rabindranath Tagore
So what is it about the book that so
shocked and gripped Hoeppli? Backhouse had been in Beijing off and on since
1898, had been an eyewitness to the fall of the Qing and the early days of the
Republic of China, had had dealings with the first post- Qing government, had
managed to lie low during the uncertain warlord era, and was generally a
fascinating Old China Hand. He was also a well- known author, and a linguistic
genius, fluent in Mandarin, Mongolian, Manchu, Russian and Japanese, as well as
the usual European languages, and of course Greek and Latin. His linguistic
gifts had been made use of by just about all interested parties in the scramble
for China. He was also an English Baronet, and openly gay. All these elements
form the heady elixir of his text.
The
China Memoirs consist of 19 chapters – their
ordering is uncertain - covering a narrative arc that extends from 1899 to
1908, with flashbacks right back to the early part of Empress Dowager Cixi’s
life, and a final chapter set in 1928. Backhouse details his experiences in the
gay brothels and bathhouses of Beijing. He details his nuits d’amour and love affairs with actors and sing-song boys in
graphic detail. He claims to have been the lover of several prominent Princes
of the Manchu dynasty, to have enjoyed relations
intime with many of the eunuchs of the court, including the chief eunuch Li
Lien Ying. Most controversially, however, he claims to have been the secret
lover of the Empress Dowager Cixi –despite his homosexuality and her advanced
age- and gives an intimate portrait of the Old Buddha, as she was called, and
her circle, with detailed descriptions of orgies in the Forbidden Palace. We
learn for example, that Cixi was endowed with an abnormally large clitoris,
which she liked to stimulate by placing in Sir Edmund’s anal crease, simulating
penetration. Perhaps too much information. But Backhouse holds nothing back.
The prose is a repository of languages, an
artifice of code-switching between English, French, Chinese, including
ideograms and Wade Giles Romanization, Latin, Greek, some Italian, some German,
some Russian; embedded within it are quotations from Horace, Virgil, Lucretius,
Confucius, Mencius, Chuangtzu, The Dream
of the Red Chamber, The Book of
Changes, Dante, Shakespeare, Tennyson, Buddhist sutras, and references to classical
and modern European and Chinese history. Sometimes these references are
highlighted in the text with quotations, sometimes they form part of the very
fabric of the syntax, in the use of collocations or phrases borrowed from
Shakespeare, Wordsworth, or Tagore, for example. Backhouse’s language is a
treasure house of learning and culture that embraces Eastern and Western
civilizations, and moves effortlessly between them. It is also unabashedly erotic
and transgressive. Here is a ‘menu’ of services available at the gay brothel
‘The Hall of Chaste Joys’:
Then Mr Tsai
explained to me the tariff: simple or unipartite copulation with the pathic
costs Taels 30; reciprocal copulation costs Taels 45; P’in Hsiao 品簫(flute savouring, an
allusion to the shape of a Chinese flute which resembles the male organ) or fellatio is Taels 10 extra if limited to
the pathic; Taels 15 if practiced by the latter on the client; irrumatio or ciotio per buccam is Taels 30 inclusive of Feuilles de Rose, or what we call “Cinnamon Leaves”, Kuei Yeh 桂葉
if applied by the client to the pathic’s anal, pubic, and perineal region but
if the client requires this labial business on his verge, posterior etcetera, he must disburse Taels 45…
This is not just a case of an English text
embroidered with a few French and Chinese words. At a rough estimate, foreign
languages make up between a quarter and a third of the entire text, with
Chinese taking up around half of that, with the rest distributed among French
and Latin, and a sprinkling of German, Russian, Greek etc. Even the work’s
title is bilingual. But don’t worry, everything is footnoted and translated:
the editing is impeccable.
Backhouse’s earlier book China under the Empress Dowager covers
much of the same period as that covered by the China Memoirs. The earlier book gives a more acceptable version of
events, a more conventional, historically oriented version of the life and
death of Cixi; while Backhouse’s memoir gives a more private and intimate – in
a literal sense- of the same person and events. Taken together, the two books add
up to an amazing record of an amazing era: a double vision, one public, one
private.
We can see how this works by looking at one
chapter in detail. In The Mantle of
Cagliostro, Backhouse accompanies Cixi and the two eunuchs Li Lien Ying,
and Tsui Te Lung to a fortune teller, where Cixi is given glimpses of the future
in a crystal ball. But first, she is
given 12 scenes of the past, as the seer says, in order to establish the
veracity of his predictions. If his visions of the past are accurate, then his auguries
of the future can also be taken as true.
Each scene reveals some key incident in the
Empress’s biography, and at the same time stands as a symbol of the divergence
of vision between the two texts. Space precludes us from comparing in detail all
the scenes offered by the seer with the same incidents described in China Under the Empress Dowager, but comparison
of a small selection will suffice to show what I mean.
Three Visions in a Crystal Ball
·
The fourth vision seen in the
crystal ball describes the death of Cixi’s son, the Tongzhi Emperor, who was
held to have died of smallpox in China
Under the Empress Dowager, but is revealed in The China Memoirs, to have died of syphilis.
·
In the fifth scene, the death
of the Tongzhi Emperor’s widow is described. Here, it is revealed that she had
been murdered on Cixi’s orders, and the foetus of the late Emperor’s child untimely
ripped from her womb. China Under the
Empress Dowager, however, reports her death as a suicide, although that
text does note that court and city were awash with rumours that Cixi had had
her poisoned.
·
In the eighth scene, Cixi sees
the death of her Co-Regnant, the Eastern Empress Dowager, and confesses that
she herself had poisoned her with arsenic to avenge the murder of her favourite.
In China Under the Empress Dowager, the
death of the Eastern Empress Dowager is attributed to a sudden and mysterious illness only, and there is no suggestion of
foul play.
Most controversially, however, is the
description in chapter 17 of The China Memoirs
of the deaths of the Guanxu Emperor, and of Old Buddha herself, who had both died
within one day of each other. Backhouse writes here that he had heard the real
story of their deaths from Chief Eunuch Li, who claimed to have been present.
According to Li and Backhouse, the Emperor had been strangled to death on the
orders of Cixi herself, and then Cixi had been shot point blank with a pistol
by Yuan Shih Kai the next day in the throne room. The official version given
out at the time – and the version given in China
Under the Empress Dowager - was that both had died peacefully in their beds
(both at 3.00 in the afternoon) surrounded by family members and retainers.
What all these scenes from The China Memoirs have in common, and
what differentiates them from the earlier China
Under the Empress Dowager, is the presence of the lurid, the fantastical,
the horrible, the bizarre, the salacious, the outrageous. They also incorporate
elements that might have originated in local gossip. Naturally, after these
incidents, Beijing was alive with rumour, scandal and hearsay, most of which
would have been unknown to the foreign community, but which someone like
Backhouse, with his knowledge of Chinese and his intimate relations with the
locals, would have heard.
Backhouse and
the truth
Before the scenes with the crystal ball, Backhouse
gives a preamble in which the theme of truth is highlighted. What I am about to describe may seem
incredible, he begins, then refers to Confucius, Saint (‘doubting’) Thomas,
difficulty of belief in the doctrine of
the Resurrection, and the god of death Yen Wang. He refers to his own
impeccable bona fides, and the
presence of the two eunuchs as witnesses to confirm his version of the events,
and ends thus: I know that my record is true.
While ostensibly, this preamble refers to
the specific context, to the possibility that the seer was fraudulent, and that
the visions in the crystal ball merely the result of tricks with smoke and
mirrors, it can also more generally refer to the status of truth within the
whole text.
In 1976 Hugh Trevor-Roper, aka Lord Dacre, published his
fascinating account of Backhouse’s life, The
Hermit of Peking: The Hidden life of Sir Edmund Backhouse, exposing him as
one of the most accomplished con men and hoaxsters of the early 20th
century. Among Sir Edmund’s many cons, two concern us here, the case of the
diary of Ching Shan, on which his book with Bland was heavily based, and his
presentation to the Bodleian Library in Oxford of a trove of Chinese documents
and books.
Con 1: The Diary of Ching Shan
One of the great selling points of China Under the Empress Dowager was the
inclusion of a large section of a diary of an official in the Forbidden Palace,
Ching Shan, which Backhouse claimed to have found in the house where he was
staying, and which he translated for the book. Rumours about the doubtful
authenticity of the diary had been started soon after the book’s publication by
G. E. Morrison, the Times correspondent in Peking (who knew absolutely no Chinese,
and was dependent on Backhouse for information he then passed off as his own
scoops). Backhouse rigorously denied that he had forged the document, but Morrison’s
insinuations stuck, damaging Backhouse’s reputation among the foreign community
in Beijing. Although the diary, long the subject of controversy, has now been
conclusively revealed as a forgery, historians are still in disagreement about
whether Backhouse forged it himself or not; and if he didn’t, the question
remains whether he knew it was a forgery at the time he used it for his
collaboration with Bland.
Con 2: The Bodleian Bequests
In 1913 twenty nine crates of manuscripts
and books arrived at the Bodleian Library, a generous donation of material, which,
Backhouse claimed, came from the Palace
Library in Beijing. In the turmoil after the collapse of the Qing the year
previous to the donation, the Chinese were selling off their treasures, and
Backhouse – and others- had no compunction about buying them up and moving them
abroad to safety. Although the provenance of the material was vague, its
quality was not. Contemporary sinologists were overawed by the condition and
rarity of the documents, and the Chinese collection of the Bodleian Library was
now declared the best collection in Europe. In 1914 another cache of priceless
documents arrived from China, and in 1918 another, followed in 19919 by yet
another. However, now Backhouse was receiving payment for his ‘bequests’ and
was offering ever more tempting goodies for ever higher prices. To cut a long
and complex story short, questions about the provenance of the library began to
be raised, and an enquiry into the authenticity of the documents was set up,
the result of which was that the same experts who had enthused over the quality
of the bequest now declared that the later purchases were forgeries. Backhouse
insisted on their authenticity; and scholars today are still undecided on the
question of whether the forgeries were by Backhouse or someone else, and if the
latter, did Backhouse know they were forgeries at the time he sold them to the
University.
Three things are important in these two
cons. First, if Backhouse himself forged them, it proved that he was a literary
genius in Chinese. The quality of the
calligraphy and the contents of the documents were regarded as examples of the
highest literary art by the experts of the day, and even now their status is
uncertain but their quality – as real documents or later forgeries- is not.
Second, long before the time of writing The
China Memoirs Backhouse’s reputation had been irredeemably tarnished by both
controversies, and since the end of WWI he had been rejected by the foreign
community in Beijing as a prankster, a madman and a mischief maker. Third, is
the problematic nature of the truth both as it regards events and texts.
These controversies are reflected in the
text of The China Memoires by an
insistence on the truth of the revelations contained in it. In the author’s Forward to the Reader, Backhouse writes:
I… hereby positively affirm on my honour
and on that of my respectable family…. That the studies which I have
endeavoured to write for Dr Hoeppli contain nothing but the truth, the whole
truth and the absolute truth. He refers directly to the Ching Shan diary
episode, and emphasizes repeatedly Ching Shan’s artless but truthful narration. He refers constantly to his
credentials, his bona fides as he
calls them, and to his relationship with the great and mighty, Lord Grey in
particular, citing a letter he claims to have received from the peer testating
to its recipient’s learning and honesty, the original of which letter is now
lost, but a copy of which is helpfully included by Backhouse in his text. He
also takes the opportunity to castigate his enemies, especially Morrison. He is
careful, whenever he presents some particularly salacious or outrageous piece
of information, to present its provenance, although, characteristically, as Trevor-Roper
pointed out, the provenance he refers to is usually in the form of documents
which have now been lost, or to witnesses who have long since died. (The loss
of his library forms a consistent minor chord in the text.)
Trevor-Roper’s considered opinion,
delivered after due textual analysis of the manuscripts, was that the details
they contained, of Backhouse’s relationship with Cixi and of the revelations
contained for example, in the Cagliostro chapter, and the chapter on the deaths
of the Emperor and Empress Dowager were not true. He wrote: I was able to satisfy myself that the
memoires were not merely erroneous here
and there, not merely coloured by imagination in detail but pure fantasy
throughout – and yet fantasy which was spun with extraordinary ingenuity around
and between true facts accurately remembered or cunningly bent to sustain it.
(296) He concluded that The China
Memoires was the last explosion of a
repressed and distorted sexuality.
In order to further understand the complex
nature of the truth of Backhouse’s text, it is necessary to turn to the only
full-length biography of Backhouse that has so far appeared, and I offer now a
review within a review of this work.
“Hermit of
Beijing: the hidden life of Sir Edmund Backhouse” by Hugh Trevor-Roper
At first glance, Trevor-Roper appears to be
right. After all, he is Lord Dacre, and Sir Edmund’s text is simply too
fantastical to be regarded as literal historical truth. But in his excellent
introduction to the text, Derek Sandhaus gives an important and much needed
corrective to Trevor-Roper’s assessment of Backhouse’s life and work. Sandhaus
points out the connections between The
China Memoirs and the lively gay scene in turn of the century Beijing,
emphasizing the accurate, realistic aspects of Sir Edmund’s descriptions. He
emphasizes the way that The China Memoirs
situates itself in Chinese literary genres of gay life and love, of which there
is a rich tradition, both classical and contemporary with Backhouse. And he
dwells on Backhouse’s early association with Oscar Wilde and the circle of
Decadents at Oxford, and his reaction to Wilde’s fall from grace. He argues
most plausibly that it was the shock of this scandal- Backhouse was directly
involved in raising money for Wilde’s defence - that motivated Backhouse’s
self-imposed exile from British life – as it did many other gay men of the time-
and his subsequent wariness of the British.
Sandhaus is right to point out that
whatever Backhouse was, he was certainly not a ‘repressed’ homosexual; a better
description might indeed be a ‘rampant’ homosexual. The China Memoirs flaunts its author’s sexuality –indeed it rubs
the reader’s face in it. Likewise, Backhouse in his life made no secret of his
proclivities, finding Beijing’s gay scene highly liberating, and it was this
openness, this refusal to live by European, or most especially Anglo-Saxon hypocritical
sexual mores, that scandalized the foreign community in Beijing, and led to
Backhouse’s rejection by this community, along with the scandals of the
fraudulent diary and Oxford bequests.
Why does Trevor-Roper call Backhouse a
repressed homosexual? He does so because
in his mind and language, the adjective ‘repressed’ always goes with the noun
‘homosexual’. Trevor-Roper belongs to that class of person who thinks that
homosexuals are abnormal, that homosexuals are always repressed by their very
nature, but good people, nonetheless. Trevor-Roper’s judgment is motived by
unstated prejudices, both sexual and class. Trevor-Roper’s brother was openly
gay, and one of the chief witnesses in the enquiry that lead to the Wolfenden
Report, which argued for and eventually achieved the decriminalization of homosexuality
in Britain in 1957. It’s safe to assume, surely, that the involvement of
Patrick Trevor-Roper in the enquiry placed unwelcome scrutiny on the whole
family. Trevor-Roper was a relentless and unscrupulous social climber, and although
he was given a peerage three years after his book on Backhouse appeared, his peerage was for life only, while Sir Edmund’s was
hereditary. Someone of Trevor-Roper’s stolid middle class arriviste background would find it hard to resist the temptation to
disapprove of the aristocratic insouciance with which Backhouse swindled and
forged his way through the antebellum world.
Another gulf fixed between biographer and
subject is the misunderstanding between the long-term expat, and the
stay-at-home, in which both sides regard the other as losers in the business of
life: the expat regards the stay-at-home as provincial and parochial, lacking
in breadth of experience, while the stay-at-home regards the expat as someone
rather beyond the pale, corrupted by foreignness, a betrayer of the values of
home, someone, perhaps, who can’t ‘make it’ at home. For the long-term expat,
of course, the concepts of ‘making it’ and ‘home’ have completely other
meanings.
Trevor-Roper calls Backhouse a ‘hermit’, and
his life ‘hidden’. To be sure, the
historian is referring to Backhouse’s hoaxes and cons, but what of them? Are
they really so reprehensible? No one
died or was injured as a result of them, and all they did was to leave some rather
pompous businessmen, academics and other self-appointed guardians of propriety
with egg all over their faces. So a hermit in what sense, then, and hidden from
whom? Only in the sense that Backhouse did not associate with foreigners, and
there is no record of what he was up to for most of the years in Beijing. He
lived there off and on for nigh on 45 years. What did he get up to? There is no
reason to assume that he did not have a full social life, like any other
person, and a wide circle of friends and acquaintances - among the Chinese, who
of course were invisible to the foreigners. In fact, Backhouse tells us about
these friends: My friends not
infrequently ask me why I am nervous during electric storms… DM9
Photographs of Backhouse in his old age show
a dignified old man in Chinese garb. Underneath all the Sage-like hair is the
rosy healthy face of a kind old uncle, apple cheeked, dimpled and with smile
creases around the eyes and a friendly, somewhat vaguely mischievous glint
therein. It is not the wild, ascetic, lunatic face of an eremite crazed by
solitude that Trevor-Roper’s portrait conjures up. Trevor-Roper’s characterization of Backhouse
as roguish, sly, in love with money, not to be trusted, up-to-his-old-tricks-again
is couched in exactly the kind of language that British commentators had used
to describe the Chinese right back from the start of their dealings with them. In artifice, falsehood and an attachment to
all kinds of lucre, many of the Chinese are difficult to be paralleled by any
other people… wrote George Anson, captain of the 60 gun man-o’-war HMS Centurion, who arrived in China in
1743. This description could well summarise Trevor-Roper’s portrait of
Backhouse.
Calling Backhouse a hermit is rather like
the modern parallel of the press accusing Pynchon of being a recluse, and
Pynchon retorting he’s not a recluse, just that he doesn’t want to talk to the
media, who thereupon call him a recluse…
Also, Sir Edmund’s linguistic gifts and culture vastly
outweighed Trevor-Roper’s own. Backhouse
wrote this work sitting in a hospitable bed, remember, with no access to
reference works or a library, quoting copiously in about 9 different languages including
Chinese characters- from memory. Trevor-Roper
writes with disapproval of the ‘ideograms’ Sir Edmund had so liberally sprinkled through his work. For Trevor-Roper, these characters
have no purpose, they are merely an inconvenience, an added printing expense;
he is blind to the layers of meaning and flavour they give the text, uninterested
even, as to what they might represent. Trevor-Roper never even went to China to
research his biography (admittedly difficult in the midst of the Cultural
Revolution, but not impossible), and his acknowledgements page -incredibly for
a book about someone who spent their whole adult life in China -includes not a
single Chinese name (although an improbably named Laetitia, Lady Lucas Tooth,
is thanked) and showed in his book no understanding of Chinese culture or the
aspects of it that might have attracted Backhouse, an astonishing omission,
given the fact that Backhouse devoted his life to China and her culture.
Everywhere in Hugh Trevor-Roper’s biography,
then, this disapproval and incomprehension of his subject and his subject’s
work and milieu comes through. Most damagingly, however, is the historian’s
incompetence as a literary critic, and it is to this which we now turn.
Link to part 2
Link to part 2
1 comment:
I'd be surprised if there is real evidence that Backhouse really did speak Russian, Japanese, Mongolian, Manchu, Latin and Ancient Greek 'as well as the usual European languages'. To think that he might have shows a lack of understanding of how difficult this is. It's no doubt put down to 'linguistic genius'. The reality is that these linguistic geniuses lived in a era before these things were investigated and documented.
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