CLASSICAL CORNER
253: RUNCIMAN-IA
Ignore the sniffy academics. Longæval (1903-2000) Steven Runciman (from Rouncieman = dealer in packhorses) was the 20th-century’s supreme Byzantinist, above all for his famous trilogy on the Crusades, summed up by him Trump-style as BAD!
Now (2016), Minoo Dinshaw’s opulent (768 pages) Outlandish Knight: The Byzantine Life of Steven Runciman provides meticulous documentary detail and personal attestations that afford much grist to the FT mill.
An early anecdote has him and sister Margie playing at divorce (field-day for psychologists?) with their toy monkeys, later burying these, when decomposed, with full ritual.
A close boyhood friend was ‘Puffin’ Asquith, son of the famous Margot, the first woman to smoke publicly in England, later provoking a Romanian riot by lighting a cigar in a cinema, also provocatively attending a school occasion in Harem Pants. Steven and ‘Puffin’ were independently elected third best scholars for Eton and Westminster. He detested all dairy products, whereas best Eton chum George Orwell secretly manufactured cheese in his room – How?
Steven and George jointly broke the leg off a voodoo doll to punish a school bully – latter promptly broke his leg in an Eton Field Game and soon died of leukæmia. This was not his last such accurate death prediction, one dooming his grandfather, another the successor to his Cambridge rooms, branded as a “philistine mathematician”. Runicman had a life-long fascination with the occult, being (e.g.) convinced a particular chair and a woman’s ring were haunted and believed the female acquaintance who claimed she had regular trysts with Shelley’s shade.
Much later, he would acquire the nailclippings of notorious Oxford classicist Maurice Bowra in order to bewitch him. Runciman was also fascinated by the ancient annual virginity-restoring Canapus spring (Pausanias, bk2 ch38, para2), disappointedly remarking: “I have never been able to persuade any of my lady friends to see if the magic still works.”
They were taught French by Aldous Huxley, whom Orwell defended against class-ragging: “A neat image: the prophet of Brave New World shielded by the creator of 1984 – perhaps a little too neat” – Dinshaw.
Classics were handled by ASF Gow, absurdly claimed by Brian Sewell ( Outsider II: Always Almost: Never Quite, 2012) to have been the Cambridge Spies’ ‘Fifth Man’. Talking of whom, Runciman was dislikingly acquainted with Blunt, and his star pupil was Guy Burgess.
Another Eton master, Andrew Robinson, encapsulated his life thus: “He played piano duets with the last emperor of China, told Tarot cards for King Fuad of Egypt, narrowly missed being blown up by the Germans in Istanbul, and twice hit the jackpot on slot machines in Las Vegas.”
As a Cambridge undergraduate, Steven in full Brideshead mode drew attention with his lipstick and rouge (when I met him late in life, he still wore full-slap – one thinks of Quentin Crisp), dresses, and pet parakeet Benedict, albeit Byron had long ago outshone him with pet bear Bruin – the dons found no anti-ursine regulation.
All on show in cover-picture by Cecil Beaton, the ash from whose tossed-away cigarette ignited the straw hat of a lady passing below. This is outdone, though, by his (with Princess Alice and classicist Stewart Perowne) dropping hot wax onto the bald spot of the later Field-Marshall Montgomery.
Various Byzantine exotica intervene. We have Krum the Bulgar with his goblet made from an emperor’s skull, Constans II assassinated with a silver bucket or soap-dish in his bath, and Irene who usurped her son’s throne by blinding him – Runciman mischievously claims her as a prototypical feminist.
His many lady friends ranged from Queen Marie of Romania, whose extraordinary boudoir featured a bed made from a Byzantine iconostasis (“perhaps a wee bit blasphemous”), to Lady Petersen who served guests dog biscuits with the cheeseboard. A distinctive non-human acquaintance was Giro, the terrier dog of Nazi Leopold von Hoesch, electrocuted – How? – in 1934, whose statue is said to be the only surviving one in London of any Hitler diplomat. Hoesch also features in a gallery of homo- and bi-sexual Nazi luminaries, being the most notable for his affair with Wallis Simpson.
Sex features prominently, from millionaire Neil McEacharn, “whose sex life had made unwise his continued residence in the Lowlands,” to Honor Philipps’s two husbands, the first wellknown for addressing House of Lords gatherings as “My Dears” and a fourweek marriage, begun by a honeymoon “attended by a sailor” – what exactly were his duties? Her second spouse was the Chairman of Sotheby’s, “whose sexual preferences were ambivalent, but he was more tactful about them.”
Runciman himself was flamboyantly and unabashedly homosexual. Dinshaw devotes one specific chapter to this side of things. Names and episodes abound, but carnal details are rightly passed over in discreet silence. Indeed, the book’s one lubricious moment concerns Blunt and Burgess: they would not have been lovers, since both liked only the passive position.
Runciman spent a good deal of his life on the Hebridean island of Eigg and the family’s Northumberland family pile, Doxford Hall. The former had seen two bloody massacres. In 617, St Donna and followers were burnt alive on the beach by the local Pictish queen as sacrifice to her pagan deities. In 1577, a raiding party of MacLeods, their minds on the local girls, after being driven out by the MacDonalds, returned and burnt 395 of them in a cave (still pointed out), the island’s entire population, minus one old crone.
Runciman disrelished Doxford Hall, as James Bond did Skyfall, one reason perhaps being the 1900 episode in which the incumbents were forced out when their neighbours from Ellingham Hall poisoned their drinking water by dumping a dead horse in the well – cue Adele for a followup ditty.
One point may have to be conceded to Runciman’s academic detractors. He is frequently accused of being fanciful to the point of fabrication. There appears to be no evidence for his claim that King Zog of Albania died in a brothel and was subsequently represented in public by an imposter double.
An engineer helping Constantinople’s defence in the fateful siege of 1453 was a certain Johannes Grandi, dubbed German by contemporary Greek and Latin sources. Runciman, however, convinced himself, if no one else, that he was actually a Scot called John Grant. By now, our historian was a fierce Caledonian champion, perhaps determined that this famous event (to which he devoted an entire book) did not get off Scot-free...
“It may be that the general style of architecture upon the moon is Byzantine...” – Fort, Books, p432