about “The Sleepwalkers: How Europe Went to War in 1914” by Christopher Clark

Why did World War I start? I did not think I cared much about the answer until reading The Sleepwalkers.

It is a big book—over 550 pages—but it is so well written and organized that I read it all, even though my interest in the subject was passing and my appetite for reading in-depth long-form non-fiction on my own time had dwindled. Every page shares colorful details.

The reasons for The Great War go far beyond the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, heir to the shrinking Austria-Hungary throne.

The Sleepwalkers is a deep study of the communications and documented thoughts, the sequencing of events and decisions, and the pressures on European statesmen—the kings, prime ministers, diplomats, and generals—as they footed through the years and through their assumptions into one of the deadliest conflicts in history—a war in which about 9 million soldiers died, with 23 million more wounded along with 5 million civilian casualties.

I was interested to learn about the boiling tensions in the Balkans—especially Serbia and the violent streak of nationalism that organized the conspiratorial network, The Black Hand. Serbia was independent, but Slavic populations lived within Hapsburg land, and the plotters imagined the assassination could lead to a united Serbia.

I was also interested to learn about how the colonial interests of the major powers affected their relationships on the continent. In addition to the Balkans, colonial considerations included far east Asia (although Japan was rising as a major regional power), North Africa, South Africa, areas around the Aegean, Mediterranean, and Black seas, and more options opening up with the decline of the Ottoman Empire.

Christopher Clark depicts decision-makers going to war as if it were inevitable, as if narratively driven and somehow unable to imagine the death and destruction that would follow.

The Sleepwalkers impressed the hell out of me—a masterful treatment of a difficult and complex subject. Here are some quotes.

On explaining why Serbian nationalists assassinated Franz Ferdinand:

The archduke made no secret of the fact that he intended to restructure the imperial system after his accession to the throne. The key objective was to break or diminish the Hungarian hegemony in the eastern part of the monarchy. For a time, Franz Ferdinand favoured strengthening the Slavic element in the monarchy by creating a Croat (and, thus, Catholic-) dominated ‘Yugoslavia’ within the empire. It was his association with this idea that so aroused the hatred of his orthodox Serbian enemies. By 1914, however, it appears he had dropped this plan in favour of a far-reaching transformation by which the empire would become a ‘United States of Great Austria,’ comprising fifteen member states, many of which would have Slav majorities. [108, British styling in the book]

On some of the pressures facing the men in charge of Europe:

The press entered into the calculations of policy-makers in many different ways. It was never under their control, and they were never under its control. We should speak rather of reciprocity between public opinion and public life, a process of constant interaction, in which policy-makers sought intermittently to guide public opinion in a congenial direction, but were careful to shield their own autonomy and to protect the integrity of decision-making processes. On the other hand, statesmen continued to view the foreign press as an indicator not just of public opinion but of official views and intentions, and this meant that uncertainties about who was inspiring or licensing which utterances could further complicate communications between states. More fundamental—and more difficult to measure—were shifts in mentality that articulated themselves not in the calls of chauvinists for firmness or confrontation, but in a deep widespread readiness to accept war, conceived as a certainty imposed by the nature of international relations. The weight of this accumulated readiness would manifest itself during the July Crisis of 1914 not in the form of aggressive programmatic statements, but through the eloquent silence of those civilian leaders who, in a better world, might have been expected to point out that a war between great powers would be the very worst of things. [238-9, British styling in the book]

A book recommendation:

In a brilliant study of the US entry into the Vietnam War, Andrew Preston shows that while Presidents Lyndon B. Johnson and John F. Kennedy were reluctant to wage war and the State Department was largely opposed to intervention, the smaller and more nimble National Security Council, which strongly favoured war and operated beyond congressional oversight, narrowed down the president’s options on Vietnam until war was virtually unavoidable. (240, British styling in the book)

And the book’s excellent final words:

... the protagonists of 1914 were sleepwalkers, watchful but unseeing, haunted by dreams, yet blind to the reality of the horror they were about to bring into the world. (562)

Notes:

- Sophie Chotek, the Archduke’s wife, was assassinated along with her husband. She was a Czech noblewoman. Prague was part of Austria-Hungary. Their marriage was unlike many other marriages among royalty and power—Ferdinand loved Chotek, and his marriage to her cost him favor in Austria, and cost him favor with his uncle, the King.

-Christopher Clark is a professor and historian.

about Augusten Burroughs’ “Running with Scissors"

Running with Scissors, published in 2002, describes an especially noxious and wild period in American writer Augusten Burroughs’ youth. As the story goes, Burroughs’ parents, who fight loudly, frequently, and then violently, divorce. Burroughs, a smart, resourceful 13-year-old who is gay and neurotically image-conscious and clean, stays at first with his mother. But she starts to suffer an identity crisis, and her long-simmering mental health issues snowball. She sends her son to live with her psychiatrist, Dr. Finch, who is clearly insane and lives in a dilapidated Victorian house. Also living there is an assortment of people that includes Finch’s children (some possibly adopted), apparently a wife, and sometimes live-in patients and drifters.

The large house is the home of a repulsive, squalid chaos. It is without rules, without discipline, without sanity.

 

Although initially repulsed by the set-up, Burroughs assimilates. He even forms a close friendship with Finch's daughter, Natalie, who is one year older than he is. Meanwhile, though, Burroughs’ mother gets much worse under Finch’s care.

 

The book is run-through with darkness and disturbances. Like, a sick 33-year-old squatter named Neil rapes the 13-year-old Burroughs; then the two carry on a bizarre sex-power relationship for two years afterwards. Everyone, including Dr. Finch, knows. That is just one of the book’s rape and assault episodes.

 

Burroughs and Natalie eventually leave the house together, but their friendship dissolves after Burroughs fails to take Natalie’s father’s side when Burroughs’ mother accuses the doctor of rape. The book ends with Burroughs’ decision to move to New York City to try to become a writer.

 

A blurb on the dust jacket of the edition I read (St. Martin’s Press, 2002) affected how I read the book. Haven Kimmel, author of A Girl Named Zippy, commented: “Harrowing and hilarious. I haven’t laughed this hard since David Sedaris’s last book.” I understand the reference, but reading this is not like reading Sedaris.

 

Some parts of Running with Scissors are funny—I laughed when I read about Finch’s self-described office masturbatorium, a room in which he rubs one out between appointments. But that is an easy laugh; Sedaris is a smug laugh.

 

Also, Sedaris writes tight prose and can be beautifully sentimental; the prose in Scissors is unremarkable, and Burroughs never sounds sincere.

 

Moreover, Scissors just seems unbelievable. I assume Sedaris exaggerates, possibly straying at times into fiction. He’s a storyteller and humorist. Burroughs, I suspect, goes further and more frequently into fiction that he admits. He writes in Scissors about a time when he and Natalie, both young teenagers, pulled out a window from a pantry room and tried to fit it in a big hole they cut out of the roof. I just do not think that happened. And apparently the irresponsibly, undeniably crazy Finch, who readily tells patients about his masturbatorium and goes through a prolonged phase in which he divines in his own shit signs from God, stays licensed and practices for decades, thinking that the only threat to his practice is back taxes.

 

Burroughs ardently claims his work is "entirely accurate" and insisted the book remain marketed as a memoir during a 2005 lawsuit filed by the family of the real Finch, Dr. Rodolph H. Turcotte, who alleged defamation of character and invasion of privacy. The lawsuit was settled, and afterwards Burroughs reportedly said “what I wrote is the truth” and “it's still a memoir, it's marketed as a memoir, they've agreed one-hundred percent that it is a memoir.”

Notes: 

Running with Scissors spent eight weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. 

Running with Scissors was published in 2002; the defamation lawsuit was filed in 2005; the film was released in 2006.

 

something about "Dry" by Augusten Burroughs

I was underwhelmed by Running With Scissors, his much-ballyhooed memoir and debut, but I still tried Dry, another autobiographical work by American writer Augusten Burroughs. Supposedly Dry was written first. I stopped reading it about halfway though.
 
I enjoyed parts of Running With Scissors and understood it to be a memoir when I picked it up. But as I read, I grew deeply skeptical about its truthfulness and quickly learned after reading that the people depicted in the book also disputed the accounts. This soured me.
 
Dry includes in the beginning this author’s note:

This memoir is based on my experiences over a ten-year period. Names have been changed, characters combined, and events compressed. Certain episodes are imaginative re-creation, and those episodes are not intended to portray actual events.

So the story is no memoir. And I guess Burroughs's lawyers were also skeptical of this recovery tale and wanted to head off more lawsuits.

Besides this, the story is repetitive, and the prose did not alleviate my frustration.

Dry supposedly describes the author's battle with alcoholism. In the story, Burroughs is a fairly successful advertising copywriter but gets hammered frequently and eventually his colleagues and boss decide to stop giving him a pass.
 
He goes to rehab, gets out in 30 days, and resumes life somehow, succeeding against his urges. Totally real.