The New Criterion

As an ardent reader of Jeevian literature—those sorts of parlor novels where a crisp and efficient butler repeatedly saves his master’s hide—I’ve often wondered if the mental acuities of real-life servants were central to their employer’s success. I confess to liking the idea—the heroic, string-pulling majordomo for whom the job well done was its own reward, the onus of discretion and undetection being a special challenge of the game.

Any literary work that features a butler is apt to feature a bumbler, and this historical account of the Earl of Kinnoull’s travails as a diplomat in Constantinople—with his man Samuel Medley by his side—is no different. The marked departure is that Medley decided to document his observations in a diary, a pursuit normally as distant from the ways of a butler as tossing white gloves aside and making a bid for a peership. For starters, he’d have to educate himself, which entailed raiding the master’s library, and stepping out of his station.

The diary is a recent literary form—there was little sociological precedent or impetus to write one’s thoughts down on the pages of a personal journal, save for some utilitarian purpose (perhaps as a record of how many cows had been bought and sold or a shopping list for the greengrocer). It wasn’t until the publication of Samuel Pepys’s diaries in 1825 that a private pursuit morphed into a literary fad.

Remarkably, Samuel Medley began his record in 1733; as Nigel and Caroline Webb note, he was more reporter than judge, careful to avoid adjective and adverb in discussing his master’s conduct and coming off as a bemused straight man fully aware that absurdity looks all the more absurd when each incarnation is documented with utter passivity. The excerpts we get from Medley’s diary have a constant tone: The wheels flew off this cart a long time ago. No sense fussing over it. Ah, the next round of lunacy has commenced. I shall document this one too.

The Earl was a born loser, but in the Webbs’ account it’s tough not to sympathize with him, as he was hardly put in a position to succeed. Dispatched to Constantinople as chief intermediary for the Levant trade company, mostly because the government wanted him out of England, Kinnoull was immediately out of his depth. A fund-squandering, high-living, epic-drinking rakehell, he also happened to be a Jacobite sympathizer—a big English no-no. Worse (so far as his job went), he was goodhearted, a condition that was easy to exploit in the rat’s den that was Constantinople’s Sublime Porte, a fantastically misleading name for the district where Europe’s ambassadors went about the nasty business of diplomatic double-dealing.

The majority of the Webbs’ history centers on the Porte, which isn’t so much a setting as some grand literary mash-up. We get eyefuls of that comic, rapid-fire violence you might have thought unique to Candide, plus espionage lessons that would make SPECTRE take notice, and plenty of depressingly naive soldier-of-fortune tales that might as well have come from Rimbaud’s final writings. The Earl suffers, the butler observes. Sebastian Beach is not coming to anyone’s rescue. A sea captain fires a salute after dark, which results in the Grand Vizier holding Kinnoull responsible and calling for blood; the plague rages; vital documents take four months to get where they’re going in the mail, if they get there at all; interpreters mistranslate messages when it suits their own purposes; and seemingly everything catches fire. There is so much fire in this book that it’s a wonder the Earl and Medley themselves didn’t spontaneously combust while strolling about the city. On the subject, Medley’s writing is wonderfully clipped, like the broken cadences of a Stevens poem, with a hint of Burns:

on the 10TH towards moring was seen a Great Body of fire—wch Broke In two—toward the G Seraglio—In appearance.

In other instances, elemental poetry gives way to bodily realities:

His Ex-y Indispo—haveing the Hemrodys—a Rany day.

Naturally.

Kinnoull is ultimately relieved of his duties, His Majesty having come to the conclusion that the Earl was in bed with France. The Webbs emphasize Kinnoull’s refusal to break with his favorite translator—despite orders from England—a hothead with a knack for offending everyone but the Earl, his retinue, and the French. And then there are the disputes over money, with the Earl ever in need. If you wanted to get anywhere in Eastern diplomacy, you had to become a briber. Gifts, booze, passes, black market goods—enticement was the watchword of Constantinople’s diplomats. But reading Medley’s diary, there’s little doubt the Earl went beyond the call of duty, and if one could trade government secrets while getting soused, all the better, since it seems that little business was conducted in the morning anyway.

A replacement turns up, and the Earl, his career in tatters, and with no money to his name, is ordered back to England. Medley himself becomes, if not depressed, then cer- tainly less energetic. His diary entries dwindle to a line or two as the lives of both men stall. Kinnoull remains in Constantinople for well over a year after being sacked, behaving as if he still had crucial business to tend to. This was not a man skilled at disengagement. Upon returning to England, he griped about his outlay of money as a diplomatic party-giver for the rest of his life, eventually getting a charitable stipend as an envoy who, in theory, had done his best by England. Kinnoull likely had no idea that his butler had made the decision to chronicle their years abroad and was thus spared the specter of posterity: a mercy on Medley’s part, and tactful buttling to boot.