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On Fabricating Facts

Writer's picture: Adrian J. BoasAdrian J. Boas

My novel, The Sulphur Priest (Wheatmark 2021) is set in a medieval castle. It has mystery and action, a couple of deaths, and so, though not a detective novel, it shares something with Umberto Eco’s wonderful The Name of the Rose, a story that took place in a medieval monastery some 56 years after my story (and some 601 years earlier as well, as my novel is in fact two interlocking stories that took place in the castle, 657 years apart). In writing The Sulphur Priest I was undeniably inspired by Eco, and though I did not imitate his story, I did do one thing that he did, and that was to add a short preface in which I, the author, explained how the story came into my hands. Eco titled his introductory piece – ‘Naturally a manuscript’. In my case I might have called it, naturally a manuscript, a field diary, and a police report, but that sounds rather too clumsy.


In Eco’s opening, he describes a convoluted tale of how he supposedly got hold of an eighteenth-century copy in neo-Gothic French of a lost Latin manuscript written in the fourteenth century by his protagonist, Adso of Melk. He then translated it into Italian, but lost the copy  when, after  fleeing Prague during the Soviet invasion of 1968, his travelling companion walked off with it. Seeking the source of this manuscript he finally and unexpectedly discovered references to Adso’s work an Italian version of a Georgian book on the use of mirrors in chess that he comes upon in in a bookshop in Buenos Aires of all places. Of course, this introduction is a fiction, and it adds a clever additional layer to his tale, as it is presented as if it is not fiction, and consequently makes it seem as if the story that follows, being based on an earlier source ‘discovered’ by the author, must be true, though the sensible reader is of course aware that it too is a fiction (the use of mirrors in writing, one might say).  


Discussing his introduction several decades later, Eco noted that 'the topos of the rediscovered manuscript has a venerable pedigree' and referred to it as a 'game of Chinese boxes' that 'gives the story the aura of ambiguity.' (Umberto Eco, Confessions of a Young Novelist, London 2011, pp. 30-31) It was just one more of the many little complexities of his novel, alongside the naming of his fourteenth century hero that hints at a well-known nineteenth century detective story by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, or the use of those old-fashioned prompts at the beginning of each chapter, to tell the reader in advance what he is about to discover - 'SEXT In which Adso admires the door of the church, and William meets Umberto of Casale again', which inevitably reminds us of A.A. Milne - 'CHAPTER SEVEN In which Kanga and Baby Roo come to the Forest, and Piglet has a bath'.


Like Eco’s, my preface is also a fiction, though not entirely so, for there is quite a bit of truth mixed in with fantasy. And like Eco’s, it is a little story in itself, and a bit of an adventure. But I want to make clear that in writing it I was not imitating the Italian writer. In fact, the idea had come to me long before I ever read The Name of the Rose. Rather, it had come from having read, as a student, a brief introduction by Leo Allatius, a sixteenth century scholar and theologian, to a text that he had translated from Greek into Latin. It was an account by his fellow Greek, Joannes Phocas, of a pigrimage to the Holy Land in 1185. The text was published in English translation, but reproduced Allatius' preface, which was actually a letter to his friend, the German scholar, Barthold Nihusius, in which Allatius described how, while visiting his hometown at Chios he obtained Phocas’ account and determined to translate it, but then lost possession of it through preoccupation with other business. It was only many years later when he was in Rome where he served keeper of the Vatican library, that he recalled the manuscript. He then wrote to the friend who had given him the manuscript, ‘begged and prayed and even offered rewards’, but to no avail. After having given it up as a lost cause, another friend arrived from Chios bearing the copy of Phocas’ text,  'dropped as it were from the skies.' Overjoyed, 'as if I had found a treasure,' Allatius was then able to  produce his translation.


When I, in turn, came across this introduction, I too was, well, perhaps not overjoyed, but certainly captivated enough to immediately decide that I would use the idea one day as an introduction to a story set in the Middle Ages, should I ever write one.


Here is my preface to The Sulphur Priest


 

The curator had given me directions: a door behind the first row of display cases on the left wall as you enter the southern gallery, then a spiral staircase within the wall, exiting on a ledge high above the gallery, and at the end of the ledge, another door.


It sounded simple enough, but when I emerged from the staircase onto the ledge, I immediately had misgivings. To be honest I was horrified: the ledge was no wider than two feet, with no railing, and at least fifteen feet above the gallery floor, which, for someone like myself who suffers from a fear of heights, might as well have been fifty feet. I eased out and flattened myself against the wall. Perhaps if I took it slowly, and didn’t look down…


I don’t know how I got across. I opened the door and literally threw myself into a dark, musty room, not much more than a cupboard. I found a light switch, surprised that it actually worked, and looked around. There was no furniture of any kind. Against the walls were stacks of cardboard boxes; a number of them had collapsed and fallen apart, the papers spilling out onto the floor. The room had probably not been entered in decades. I blew dust off the labels and read the names marked in faded ink. Then I found what I was looking for: a box marked – Montfort Expedition – 1926. Excitedly I leafed through the papers in it. Halfway through, I found the field diary, a thick exercise book with a decaying cloth binding. Its grey front cover was printed with the words - LYONS DIARY - 1926 - HALF A PAGE TO A DAY. Lyons & Co., Jaffa Street, Jerusalem. Telephone 1631.


I had seen it once before, about twenty years earlier when I was a student. The archive of the British Mandate period was still located in a room off the library stacks on the ground floor of the Museum, under the reading room. Going down there for something else I had chanced upon the Montfort box. Curiosity had got the better of me and, for well over an hour, I had sat leafing through the yellowing papers. A fascinating story began to unfold before my eyes, and I forgot completely what I had come for. The librarian came looking for me and being a stickler for the rules, made me replace the papers and get on with whatever my legitimate task had been. Several months later when I was again at the library, I furtively sought out the box, but it was no longer there.


As a second-year archaeology student at the Hebrew University I had already come across an item related to Montfort. A friend visiting the office of the Palestine Exploration Fund in London had somewhat covertly obtained a copy of a short text, only about thirty printed pages, prepared in 1898 for the unpublished fourteenth volume of the Palestine Pilgrims’ Text Society. This was the translation into English, from the Latin original, of an account by a brother of the Teutonic Order named Hermann, who had been at the German house in Acre in 1271, two decades before the fall of that city, and had witnessed the siege of Starkenberg Castle (the German name for Montfort) in that same year. This text was translated and partly edited by M.L. Shaw from a manuscript located in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris; this had been purchased by the library in 1836 from an anonymous private owner, and a colophon records that it was a copy made by a monk named Thietmar in 1356 in the scriptorium of Lorsch Abbey. Although not a long text, it is remarkably detailed, bringing the period alive so effectively that I felt as if I myself had been in the city and the castle. In the following pages I have simplified its language somewhat to make it more congenial to the modern reader, while remaining faithful to its contents.


In the years that followed other interests occupied me. Eventually I recalled the expedition papers and asked the archivist what had happened to them. She inquired on my behalf. It was thought that the box had been taken from the room when the heating system was replaced, but no one seemed to know where to. Almost a year went by, and I had all but forgotten the matter when one day I received a phone call from the archivist saying that she had traced my box. And now I was sitting on one of the sturdier cartons in the little room, my feet on the floor’s thin layer of dust, the field diary open on my knees. Most of the entries were fairly mundane and laconic: “Weather fair. Work commenced at six o’clock. Clearing of the large vault below the hall. No exceptional finds…” or “Stormy weather all day. Workers sent home…” Some entries were more detailed, mainly describing the various finds and making a few personal references, nothing remarkable, but as I leafed towards the end I realised, to judge from the stubs of torn out pages, that almost half of the diary was missing. The final entry consisted of just three lines dated 12 April - “Returned to work in the afternoon with four of the men in the area west of the keep…” The rest of this page and all of the following pages had been ripped out. Only a single blank page remained before the end-cover.


The abrupt ending left me disappointed. I wondered if this was the same diary that I had seen on that first occasion: although many years had passed, I found it hard to believe that my fascination with the material could have been founded on this single, insipid, epigrammatic account. There must have been something more. So, what had been torn out and why? I did not recall having seen missing pages, but it was, after all, a long time since I had first seen the diary.


As I closed it, I noticed something else that I did not recall having seen before. On the back-cover board was an inscription written in black ink, in a different hand. It read: “continued in new field diary.” I looked through the materials in the box but there was no other diary and no trace of the missing pages. Nor did a systematic search through the other boxes—the small room filling with dust – yield any results. The only other material from Montfort was a few pages of salary lists stamped with the finger impressions of the workers from the village of Malia.


With this unsatisfactory glimpse into the Montfort expedition my interest might well have lapsed again. But in 1997 the third piece of the puzzle came into my hands. Attending the international medieval conference in Leeds, I met a young historian from London University who, in a chance conversation, informed me that the grandfather of a colleague of hers had played a role in the 1926 excavations at Montfort. Returning to London I phoned the number she had given me, and a few days later I met with Mr Peter Palmer at his flat just off Russell Square. His grandfather, he told me, had been the assistant of John Riley, the head of the Montfort Expedition, and while I waited in the neat sitting room of his flat, he went to look for material he had put aside to show me, returning a few minutes later with a shoebox. In it were a handful of photographs, mostly of a man in his late twenties, some taken on the steps outside the British Museum where he stood dapper in his town clothes beside an attractive young lady of slightly oriental appearance. In others he appeared in uniform; several were taken at Montfort, and in these he was in a semi-military outfit, but wearing a trilby, and standing next to a tall, elegantly dressed and considerably older man, whom I assumed was Riley. Below the photographs were a few letters, some hand-written, others typed on yellowed tissue-thin paper, and then two things that made me catch my breath: a faded, typed carbon copy of a ten-page Palestine Police report dated 30 June, 1926 entitled “Captain Peters’ Report on the Investigation into Activities and Death of Mr. Lawrence Walker at Qal’at al-Qurain”, and with it what I had hardly dared hope to find but recognised immediately; the grey cover with the printed words – LYONS DIARY. It was the missing second field diary. It continued, as my memory served me, from the last entry in the first diary before the missing pages. The handwriting was that of Mr. Robert Palmer, the same as on the hand-written letters.


It was while I was attempting to find out more about Captain Peters that I came upon the final and in some ways most exciting piece of this puzzle. In the archives of the Mandate period Palestine Police Department in Oxford, I obtained with surprisingly little effort the original copy of this investigation report. Attached to it with a rusted paperclip were the missing torn-out pages of the first field diary, folded and somewhat crumpled but easily recognisable as having the same form as the printed dates in the diary pages, and I immediately recognised the handwriting of the first diary although here it was in pencil.


I now had, more-or-less, the complete story. I had uncovered two narratives; the first, a medieval account written by a squire of the Teutonic Order, and the second, a description contained in the now complete diaries, letters, and other documents relating to an early twentieth-century expedition to the very castle where events recorded in the medieval account had taken place. Each of these quite dissimilar stories might well be worthy of publication on its own, but it occurs to me that there is a compelling connection between them. I have taken two considerable liberties with this material. The first is to intertwine the narratives as alternate chapters in a single volume (if so inclined, the reader can ignore this imposed form and skip the pages of one account or the other). The second, and perhaps more extreme liberty is my decision to write these accounts in the form of a work of fiction. If the reader is so inclined, he or she can of course search out the original material in the archives.

A. B. Jerusalem, 2020

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