Trust Me On This : A Balkan Byzantium

“Only part of us is sane. Only part of us loves pleasure and the longer day of happiness, wants to live to our nineties and die in peace, in a house that we built, that shall shelter those who come after us. The other half of us is nearly mad. It prefers the disagreeable to the agreeable, loves pain and its darker night despair, and wants to die in a catastrophe that will set back life to its beginnings and leave nothing of our house save its blackened foundations.”

Rebecca West wrote these words after visiting Yugoslavia in the late 1930s. She grew so intoxicated by its diverse people, culture and history that she devoted the next four years to writing about it. Her 1941 book, “Black Lamb and Gray Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia,” is widely considered her literary masterpiece.

Like most great books, “Black Lamb and Gray Falcon” transcends its subject, embracing issues that are as urgent today as a half-century ago. The reader soon realizes that West isn’t just writing about some ancient Balkan tragedy, but about the primal violence that lurks beneath all civilization. One can’t read her observations without thinking of Hitler, Pol Pot, Somalia’s man-made famine, the Los Angeles riots . . . or, for that matter, contemporary Yugoslavia.

Sadly for that country, little has changed since West’s visits 60 years ago. The independence negotiated after World War I and the communism of Gen. Marshall Tito after World War II now seem only brief respites before the violence that reigned for a millennium engulfed the Balkans once more.

Today, with so much of the country in flames and rubble from the two-year civil war, we can only thank the prescience that propelled West to the Land of South Slavs 51 years ago. Many of the cathedrals, mosques and villages she described in such precise, at times exhaustive detail are gone. Her impressions of the languid sensuality of Sarajevo, where Bosnian Muslims, Croats, Albanians and Serbs lived in relative peace for centuries, seem today like “Paradise Lost.”

West was mesmerized by the raw intensity of Yugoslavia and its people, who had endured centuries of domination by foreign empires without losing their spirit. After the overly polite, industrialized world of upper-class Britain that West called home, Yugoslavia was like a bracing draught.

“Is it so wonderful there?” her husband and travel companion Henry Andrews asks in the beginning of the book, anticipating a question from the contemporary reader. “It is more wonderful than I can tell you,” she answers. “But how?” he persists. And she muses: “I could not tell him at all clearly. I said, ‘Well, there is everything there. Except what we have. But that seems very little.’ ”

The writer, whose real name was Cicely Fairfield, was a feminist long before the term became fashionable. West not only embarked on an affair with novelist H. G. Wells at age 19 but also scandalously bore him a child. She brought the same fearlessness to her writing, elucidating the Byzantine rivalries of the Balkans with such clarity and depth of perception that hers may be the only 50-year-old road map to Yugoslavia that isn’t out of date.

West found a religious and ethnic mosaic of a country, hastily stitched together by the Allies after World War I to unite Croats, Serbs, Macedonians, Montenegrins, Slovenians, Bosnians, Herzegovinians and other feuding minorities. The nascent Yugoslavia was also split by religion: The Muslims--descendants of the Ottoman Turks and their converts--distrusted the Croatian Catholics, who in turn couldn’t get along with the Orthodox Serbs.

West introduces the reader deftly to the new nation’s complexities via the Serb and Croat friends who met her Zagreb train: “They are standing in the rain, and they are all different and they are all the same,” West writes. “They greet us warmly, and in their hearts they cannot greet each other, and they dislike us a little because it is to meet us that they are standing beside their enemies in the rain.”

She marvels at the “raging polyglot intellectual curiosity” of artists, playwrights and poets at a Zagreb cafe. She eulogizes the “terrible stony strength” of Macedonians who could “outlive the winters when they were driven into the mountains, who could survive malaria and plague, who could reach old age on a diet of bread and paprika.”

In Yaitse, she is taken by moonlight to meet the sister of Nedyelyko Chabrinovitch, the young Sarajevo printer who made the first attempt on the life of Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand, whose assassination in 1914 sparked World War I. In Skoplje, she admires a Gypsy couple who, “shapely as gazelles arrayed their coffee brown beauty . . . in garments . . . which were so clean that they made the very sunlight seem a little tarnished.”

Yugoslavia’s paradoxical nature is crystallized for West in the Bosnian Muslim woman who pulls back the black veil of Islam to reveal a visage “completely un-Oriental, as luminously fair as any Scandinavian.” And when she stands on the killing fields of Kosovo, where the Serbs were defeated by the Ottoman Turks in 1389, launching 500 years of slavery, her skin prickles with the ancient desolation of this land, “crowded with the dead, who died in more than their flesh, whose civilization was cast with them into their graves.”

“I had come to Yugoslavia,” West writes, “because I knew that the past has made the present, and I wanted to see how the process works. . . . Were I to go down to the market-place, armed with the powers of witchcraft, and take a peasant by the shoulders and whisper to him, ‘In your lifetime, have you known peace?’ wait for his answer, shake his shoulders and transform him into his father and ask him the same question, and transform him into his father and ask him the same question, I would never hear the word ‘Yes,’ if I carried my questioning of the dead back for a thousand years. I would always hear, ‘No, there was fear, there were our enemies without, our rulers within, there was prison, there was torture, there was violent death.’ ”

While masquerading as a travel book, “Black Lamb and Gray Falcon” in fact defies genre, blending history, social commentary, religion, philosophy, politics, cuisine, ethnography, anthropology and agriculture. Within its 1,181 pages, one learns about the Bogomil heresy, the doomed Roman Emperor Diocletian, Byzantine icon-painting, Dalmatian sailing techniques and Serbo-Croatian poetry.

If you are swept away by West’s vision, as I was, you will want to devour this book whole. But it is also enlightening in small doses, especially as a primer for current events. Many times this year I have thumbed through my dog-eared copy to reread the history of Dubrovnik, the thousand-year-old Medieval fortress city that survived the Roman Empire, the Napoleonic Wars, plunder by the Ottoman Turks, World War II Axis occupation and Communism, only to be threatened now, in the last decade of the 20th Century, by man’s incomprehensible folly.

West wanted to reclaim the tarnished image of the Balkans, which many of her day dismissed as dark, primitive and violent, but which she perceived as rich in civilization and incandescent with human potential. Her most sharply drawn portrait is that of Constantine, the brilliant poet and government official who became her guide and fell into unrequited love with her. As much as West admired Constantine, she was repelled by his German wife Gerda, who in the book comes to personify Nazi evil. Their mismatched alliance vexed West, but symbolized the complexities of Yugoslavia--whose residents both loathed and loved its Germanic conquerors, and nursed a dangerous inferiority complex alongside a fierce Slav nationalism.

Touring a French World War I memorial in Macedonia, Gerda sneers, “Think of all these people dying for a lot of Slavs.” Later, a Gypsy dance makes her tremble with rage. “Why are they allowed,” Gerda asks, her voice “hoarse with indignation.” “They should be driven out.”

By the time West sat down to write in 1940, “civilized” Europe had plunged again into the savagery it had once condescendingly attributed to the Balkans. Her book conveys how fragile our most sublime achievements are when pitted against our capacity for destruction.

West blamed Yugoslavia’s ethnic troubles almost solely on centuries of conquest, tribute and enslavement by the big powers. The Austro-Hungarian Empire, the kingdom of Venice and the Ottoman Turks were, in her view, archfiends. The Yugoslavs were noble, long-suffering, courageous even unto death, and Western Europe had the South Slavs to thank for preserving it from Ottoman rule. West wasn’t politically correct, or even objective. She wrote from her heart and she especially admired the warrior Serbs. In 1941, as Nazi bombs fell near her London home, she wrote: “Often, when I have thought of invasion, or when a bomb has dropped near by, I have prayed, ‘Let me behave like a Serb.’ ” What would West--who died in 1983 at age 90--think of the warmongering and ethnic-cleansing policies of the Serbs today?

“Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” makes me nostalgic for a Yugoslavia I only glimpsed briefly in the 1980s on train trips elsewhere. The land was fecund, the cities charming, the South Slavs generous. When someone on the train began blasting U2’s “Sunday Bloody Sunday” as we chugged through Bosnia, it seemed utterly at odds with the peaceful scene. Today, when photos of Bosnian prisoners in Serb-run concentration camps evoke our horror the way the photo of a naked Vietnamese girl running from a napalm fire did in an earlier undeclared war, I wish I had spent more time in Rebecca West’s land of the South Slavs. Now I have only her book. “To my friends in Yugoslavia, who are now all dead or enslaved,” West dedicated “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon.” The year was 1941, but it could have been 1389, 1915 or 1992.

On the road from Sarajevo to Travnik in 1937, West noted how the villagers stood at stern attention and saluted her big black car as it passed, believing that important officials from Belgrade rested inside. “Look at their faces,” Constantine told her. “They think that all the time they must die for Yugoslavia, and they cannot understand why we do not ask them to do that, but that now we ask another thing, that they should live and be happy.”

Trust Me on This is an occasional feature in which writers make a case for that forgotten, obscure or unsung book that they put in everyone’s hands with the words: “Read this. You’ll love it. Trust me on this.” “Black Lamb and Grey Falcon” is available in a Penguin paperback.