Edmund Trelawny Backhouse - perhaps quite the maddest book on China ever written by a foreigner. Truth or fiction, Backhouse’s trysts with Qing dynasty prostitutes, eunuchs and Empress Cixi in ‘Decadence Mandchoue’ are definitely strange

Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, Décadence Mandchoue: The China Memoirs of Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, Earnshaw Books, 2011.         

In 1898. a young Englishman walked into a homosexual brothel in Peking and began a journey that he claims took him all the way to the bedchamber of imperial China’s last great ruler, the Empress Dowager Tz’u Hsi. Published now for the first time, the controversial memoirs of Sinologist Sir Edmund Backhouse provide a unique and shocking glimpse into the hidden world of China’s imperial palace, with its rampant corruption, grand conspiracies, and uninhibited sexuality. Backhouse was made notorious by Hugh Trevor-Roper’s 1976 bestseller Hermit of Peking, which accused Backhouse of fraudulence and forgery. This work, written shortly before Backhouse’s death in 1943, lay for decades forgotten and unpublished in the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, dismissed by Trevor-Roper as nothing more than “a pornographic novelette.” But Décadence Mandchoue is much more than that. Alternately shocking and lyrical, it is the masterwork of a linguistic genius—a tremendous literary achievement and a sensational account of the inner workings of the Manchu dynasty in the years before its collapse in 1911. If true, Backhouse’s chronicle completely reshapes contemporary historians’ understanding of the era and provides an account of the Empress Dowager and her inner circle that can only be described as intimate.


Murr :
http://thelectern.blogspot.hr/2014/02/decadence-mandchoue-china-memoirs-of.html
Link to part 2


Joyce Lau:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/books/decadence-mandchoue-by-sir-edmund-trelawny-backhouse.html

HONG KONG — There are things we know about Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse, 2nd Baronet, of England: He was one of few Europeans to live among the Chinese in the early 20th century, and his writings greatly influenced the way the West saw Peking. Then there are fuzzier facts, like his claim that he had affairs with both Oscar Wilde and the Empress Dowager Cixi.

At the peak of his career, Backhouse was a respected expert in the field of Orientalism. He worked for The Times of London as a researcher and translator, and his books on China were best sellers. Two works he wrote with the British journalist J.O.P. Bland, “Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking” (1914) and “China Under the Empress Dowager” (1910), shaped 20th-century views of the empress. But some of his sources and claims have since been proved fraudulent (he was roundly criticized after it was discovered that a diary he quoted turned out be a forgery), and historians are divided on the significance of his contribution to Western understanding of Chinese life — and whether it is significant at all.

Next week, two Hong Kong companies will release English and Chinese versions of a previously unpublished manuscript by Backhouse that purports to be a memoir. The sexually explicit “Décadence Mandchoue,” written in 1943, when Backhouse was 70 and dying, recounts his time as a young man as he explored Peking’s gay haunts and what he described as wanton practices within the Imperial Court.

Set largely from 1898 to 1908, the book starts in the ironically named House of Chaste Pleasures, where princes and other high-ranked officials buy the services of young men.

The memoir will primarily be distributed in Hong Kong, with a limited number of copies also available in the United States and Europe, but not widely in mainland China. Beijing has not explicitly banned the book, but the publishers are reluctant to do battle with censors.

Bao Pu, the head of New Century Press, which is publishing the Chinese translation, said there had been an attempt to contact mainland publishers.

“They were all fascinated, but they would have to cut out of the sex parts, and that’s a third of the book,” he said.

Backhouse (who claimed his name was pronounced “Bacchus”), however, is a footnote in history. The real figure of historical interest in “Décadence” is the Empress Dowager Cixi, the de facto ruler of the Middle Kingdom for 47 years.

According to Backhouse, he met the aging empress after he helped restore looted works to her palace. He was then called in for a private audience, during which the empress complained about the barbaric behaviors of foreign diplomats.

While there is documentation linking Backhouse to political life in Beijing, it is not known whether he actually returned treasure or had this conversation.

What seems really far-fetched is an alleged affair that began when Backhouse — or the Backhouse-like character in this book — was washed and perfumed by eunuchs and called up to the 69-year-old Empress’s bedchambers to perform like a slave girl in a harem. According to his manuscript, the liaison lasted until the Empress’s death in 1908 at the age of 73.

“Décadence Mandchoe” was written several months before Backhouse died. His Swiss physician, Reinhard Hoeppli, commissioned the memoir, but then never published it.

The manuscript was eventually passed to the British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper, who also chose not to publish. Instead, Trevor-Roper wrote his own biography, “Hermit of Peking: The Hidden Life of Sir Edmund Backhouse” (1976), which cast Backhouse as a fraud and which has, until now, been the last word on him.

Backhouse’s original texts from 1943 gathered dust on a shelf at the Bodleian library in Oxford until Derek Sandhaus, the chief editor of Earnshaw Books, which is producing the English-language edition of “Décadence,” found them while researching another book.

“There are two reasons the manuscript was never published,” Mr. Bao of New Century Press said. “The first is that Trevor-Roper destroyed his reputation. The second is because of the greasy paragraphs about sex.”

Trevor-Roper had called Backhouse’s memoirs “worthless historic documents,” as well as snobbish and pornographic.

In the first paragraph, Backhouse manages to drop in Shakespeare, Wilde and Verlaine. He is a writer who will never say “rickshaw” if “charrette chinoise” will do. The famously multilingual author uses a mish-mash of French, Latin and Chinese, rendering a few parts hard to read, even if one has a background in those languages.

As for its historical merit, even the new publishers admit that the book may not be entirely true. Instead, they say, its value comes in its details of that era.

“These descriptions are historically significant because these accounts are not found in other sources,” Mr. Sandhaus said. “While there may be some inconsistencies, it is fundamentally based on fact. Even if he didn’t experience everything personally, this book may have been a way for him to relay things he had heard.”

“No Chinese living then paid much attention to, or bothered to document, the details of daily life — certainly not like an outsider living among them,” Mr. Bao added. “On the other hand, no Westerner lived quite in Backhouse’s situation.”

Bret Hinsch, a history professor at Fo Guang University in Taiwan and the author of “Passions of the Cut Sleeve: The Male Homosexual Tradition in China,” added that documents about gay life in that period were scarce.

“Compared to Japan, where there are hundreds of books documenting homosexuality at this time, there’s very little such material from China,” he said. “Writing personally about sex was seen as improper, even shameful, especially if one was describing an emotional dependence with the socially inferior, which is what these relationships were between rich patrons and the young opera singers who worked at these places.”

Ultimately, “Décadence” does not clear up confusion over whether anything Backhouse wrote was believable.

“It’s not an easy book to classify,” Mr. Sandhaus admitted. “Is it autobiography, fiction or non-fiction?”

The same question could be asked of most of Backhouse’s work. When he was writing, there was little information about China available in the West. Backhouse, who was fluent in Mandarin, Manchurian, Mongolian and Japanese, had a certain amount of clout — and it was almost impossible for his readers to verify his claims.

The critical modern reader would probably see “Décadence” as a fictionized memoir, with accurate details drawn from real life, but an outrageous plot. Backhouse knew full well European stereotypes of China — as an exotic, and erotic, fantasy world of empresses and opium smoke — and he gave his readers exactly what they wanted.

“Why were Westerners so willing to believe these outrageous stories?” Mr. Hinsch said. “Would anyone believe a Chinese guy who said he went to England and had sex with Queen Victoria?”

JOYCE LAU

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/31/books/decadence-mandchoue-by-sir-edmund-trelawny-backhouse.html

There are lots of great lines in Sir Edmund Trelawny Backhouse’s “Decadence Mandchoue.”
Derek Sandhaus, the book’s editor, says one of his favorites is the description of a palace eunuch named Lien whose “eyes were luminous: lust and passion radiated from them like twin candles shedding their beams in a naughty world.”
Shedding beams on a naughty world is also a fair description of Backhouse’s book, which launches this weekend in Shanghai. The author tells detailed stories of his own liaisons with gay prostitutes, court officials and the Empress Dowager Cixi. How much of that world was observed by Backhouse living in late Qing Dynasty Beijing and how much he simply made up is the source of ongoing debate.
Fact from fictionReviewers for “The New York Times” and “The Telegraph” have written that the book probably includes fictional elements, and Shanghai-based historian Paul French calls it “perhaps quite the maddest book on China ever written by a foreigner.”
There are some aspects of Backhouse’s life, however, that we know to be true.
He arrived in Beijing in 1898 and quickly became fluent in Chinese. He worked as a translator for “The Times,” assisted the British Foreign Service and, in 1903, became a professor of law and literature at the Imperial Capital University, today’s Peking University.
In 1910, he co-authored a book called “China Under the Empress Dowager,” which was widely read and established his reputation as an expert on China. However, the same book later tarnished his reputation when Backhouse’s biographer, Hugh Trevor-Roper, claimed one of its key sources, the diary of Ching Shan, had been forged by Backhouse.
Trevor-Roper came across “Decadence Mandchoue” during while researching Backhouse, but he dismissed it as a “pornographic novelette”. After rediscovering the text in Oxford’s Bodleian library, Sandhaus, the Chief Editor of Earnshaw Books, thought that assessment was worth revisiting. Bringing history to life
Some of the book’s episodes do seem unlikely.
Perhaps the hardest to believe is Backhouse’s tryst with Empress Cixi, which begins when she invites him to the Summer Palace, feeds him a powerful aphrodisiac and so makes the then 32-year-old, self-identified gay man sexually interested in a 69-year-old woman.
The text also contains some non-sequiturs and implausible motivations that read like the contrivances of a porn video. At one point Cixi travels in disguise to a bathhouse where she demands to see various homosexual acts performed, supposedly for her edification.
Yet the accuracy of individual events isn’t the only reason to read “Decadence Mandchoue.”
Backhouse lived in China for more than 40 years before writing the book and he offers a wealth of unusual information. His command of Chinese is impressive, and he clearly enjoys relating the poetic Chinese terms for both anatomy and sex acts.
In the first chapter, Backhouse visits the Hall of Chaste Pleasures, a brothel where a range of deeds like “flute savoring” and “turning the bun” are described, and their prices are given.
“There’s definitely information in the book that’s useful to a historian,” says Sandhaus. "For one thing, Backhouse preserved a large portion of this naughty vocabulary that’s slipped out of use."
A third way to read the book, as neither a historical narrative nor a source of historical details, is purely as entertainment. Backhouse’s writing can be florid or outmoded, and he often switches gratuitously between languages.
One pivotal sentence includes English, Chinese, French, Japanese and Latin. Yet there’s real energy and humor in “Decadence Mandchoue.”
“I think it would be worthwhile as a work of fiction,” Sandhaus says, “but I’d definitely publish it in a different way, shorten it by a couple of chapters. There are a few parts that are important from a historical perspective but not for advancing the plot. But we had to get it all out there so people could make their own decisions.”
The decisions readers might want to make include both how much of the book to believe and how important that belief is to their enjoyment of the book. - Sam Gaskin
http://travel.cnn.com/shanghai/play/original-sexpat-sir-edmund-trelawney-backhouse-951972/

December 1942 Beijing. With the Japanese occupation of Beijing, Edmund Backhouse takes refuge in the various foreign legations, first in the compound of the British Legation, then in the French Hospital of St Michael, where he is attended and befriended by Dr Reinhard Hoeppli, also a long term expat, former medical intendant of the Peiping Union Medical College, and now acting Honorary Swiss Consul for the duration. Realizing that Backhouse – now 71- was the co-author of two of the most influential and widely read books on China of the first half of the century -China under the Empress Dowager published in 1910, and Annals and Memoirs of the Court of Peking published in 1914 - Dr Hoeppli commissions Backhouse to write his memoirs, primarily as a way of occupying him, and as a way of giving the proud old man financial assistance without insulting his poverty.

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.

The Double Vision: ‘The China Memoirs’ and ‘China Under the Empress Dowager’

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 20^th 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

http://thelectern.blogspot.hr/2014/02/decadence-mandchoue-china-memoirs-of.html