"The public never buy enough old books. It is impossible that they ever should." (pg. 62)

Last June I joyously explored the obscure genius of Twelve Against the Gods, William Bolitho's uniquely-written appraisal of twelve historical personalities, including Alexander the Great and Christopher Columbus. It was like stumbling upon a forgotten lost city, covered with dust but with majesty in the architecture and treasure in its depths. However, I wasn't sure if my newly-established relationship with this long-dead Anglo-South African journalist was over before it had started. Obscure brilliance is always pleasant to unearth, but it's hard to source (especially on a budget). Twelve was Bolitho's best-known (read: only-known) book and had a fantastic concept; Camera Obscura, a collection of his journalism from 1929-30, seemed less promising, not only in its concept but because it was even rarer than Twelve. When I did acquire a copy of the book, the title wasn't even on LibraryThing until I added it manually.

Somewhat incredibly, the qualities that Bolitho displayed in his meticulous Twelve Against the Gods magnum opus are also in evidence in these short pieces. In the Preface to Camera Obscura, Noel Coward notes how Bolitho (who died before the book was published) had "a quality of grace" in his writing, "untainted by sentimentality, a gesture of recognition towards undying essentials" (pg. 2). I wrote along similar lines in my own review of Twelve, but it's even more commendable in Camera Obscura. What ought to be a dated reproduction of fifty essays and articles, written mostly in New York but sometimes in France, for the now long-since-defunct newspaper the New York World, proves instead to be a book of quiet and enduring erudition; a sort of literary turn about the garden.

Bolitho had a writing style that was slightly baroque, and while that proved to be a challenge for the reader in Twelve Against the Gods (though very much worth the effort), the shortness of the pieces in Camera Obscura allows for more agreeable doses. Each of the essays here are delicacies; you don't want to scoff them all at once, but seeing them all together makes a great impression. Bolitho writes about anything and everything here: the New York subway, the used books market, fairy tales, education, Jung, the Colosseum, the radio, the circus, Sherlock Holmes and Cro-Magnon cave art. But, while all these topics are fascinating, what is remarkable – in each and every one of the fifty pieces here – is the way in which Bolitho can take a turn into erudition that you, the reader, cannot anticipate. For that literary turn in the garden that I mentioned earlier, we prove to have the company of a groundsman who knows of every hidden copse and arbour.

One article sees Bolitho travel to the former home of the deceased Henri Fabre, a naturalist known for his study of insects. The house has become a museum of sorts and Bolitho's article is ingeniously framed as a sort of lost world (its title is 'Lilliput Lost'). Fabre's insect colonies remain, and Bolitho ends with: "for the insects, if they but knew it, far out of their sight, twenty whole yards back, hidden by the inconceivable altitude of the trees, their kindly god lies defeated by their mysteries, and dead" (pg. 146). This is just one of many examples of how Bolitho blindsides the reader with an astute observation from an uncommonly literary angle. Even when you do reasonably expect it, as in the 'Van Gogh' essay, Bolitho frames his conclusion in a way that remains highly original: "But for this stupidity of the world [in being overlooked in his own time] Van Gogh was paid, as Blake was paid, by the inestimable advantage of being, until the day he died, artistically free" (pg. 177).

Bolitho delights in providing such original flair. The article on used books remarks how "in his Elysium Homer would be pleased to know he was read in an odd volume, foxed and scribbled on by the baby of the junk dealer, with covers missing" (pg. 65). Another article remarks that we are nowadays more "helplessly dependent" on scientists "than any primitives on their rain-makers" (pg. 88). An article on Jungian archetypes sees the author draw on his personal experience at the Battle of the Somme to suggest "that there are just two sorts" of people: "those who would dig you out if you were buried alive, and the others. The givers and the takers, the fountains and the wells" (pg. 86). Bolitho admires those who behave "as it were, artistically; for ethics is a sort of art, and behaviour can be beautiful or ugly" (pg. 109). An essay on Paris tells us, in a throwaway line buried in the middle of a long paragraph, that "Man's brains have transformed the earth and the sea, but sensuality remains where it was before the flood" (pg. 159). Most writers would hang a book around such a line.

Each and every piece in Camera Obscura contains at least one choice line of the type I have cited above, and often many more. In the closest he gets to his Twelve Against the Gods content, Bolitho writes of how the French general Ferdinand Foch "was bread; not wine, to his nation and times… It is an old mastiff, a watchdog we have lost, not a hero; gratitude is not one of humanity's favourite emotions" (pg. 132). A similar critical essay on Clemenceau ('The Gray Hands') forewarns of the prospect of a Hitler figure (who was then still years from power):

"What would have happened if Germany had had another Clemenceau, opposite [in the Great War]? A dictator, that is, infinitely ruthless, utterly determined, neither to be moved by pity, without the least weakness of despair, who as long as he lived, whatever happened, whether all the chief cities and his capital were utterly destroyed, all the commerce ruined beyond hope of recovery, while a boy or man, with or without uniform, remained alive to hold a gun, would never have yielded?... Such was the gulf that the armistice covered over deep enough, certainly, not merely to cripple civilization, but to break its neck." (pg. 135)

The atomized Berlin of 1945 emerges vividly in the reader's mind – here, in this forgotten piece of journalistic copy from 1929. Reading Bolitho makes you want to shake our contemporary journalistic culture by the shoulders (if not by something more painful), that writing of this quality and perception could once be considered standard. Journalists ought to be widely-read and open-minded, as Bolitho is here; able by personal example to "pile up evidence for the revolt… against specialization" (pg. 130). When journalists are individuals (after all, "an education should be an individual thing" (pg. 97)) and opinions are cultivated rather than corporate, such people are capable of standing astride a culture, speaking as comfortably about politics as about Jung or the Colosseum or fairy tales. When Bolitho warns of "the degraded worship of naïveté… [the] knowing appearance of non-trying, which is the plague of all the arts to-day… the vanity that apes humility" (pg. 178), we see some of that surprising contemporariness that I highlighted in my review of Twelve Against the Gods. We find ourselves not only wishing he could opine on our times, but that at the very least he could have lived for longer in his own (Bolitho died suddenly in 1930, aged just 39). That way, there would be so much more of his fine writing to read. Even if we do have to search for a copy that is old and yellowed and long since out-of-print. ( )