Panu Rajala
The flag, goblet and the cruel gun
How Waltari gathered the materials for his eastern novels
Of Finland´s novelists, the most widely known and translated internationally is Mika Waltari; 2008 marks the 100th Anniversary of his birth. Waltari´s most successful work Sinuhe egyptiläinen (The Egyptian) was also seen as a Hollywood movie in 1954. Ph.D. Panu Rajala, currently preparing Mika Waltari´s biography, was asked by the editors to write an article for our magazine describing some of the ways Waltari obtained the materials for his books.
From where did Mika Waltari obtain his exhaustive factual knowledge for his historical novels? It is well known that he read vociferously and "burrowed", as he himself put it, as calmly as a mole during a period preceding his writing of a novel. Besides reading, this "burrowing" required travel, visits to museums, as well as the perusal of collections, visual stimuli, sculptures and paintings, old currencies and often seemingly random objects.
The best introduction to Waltari´s working methods is his travel diary Lähdin Istanbuliin, published in 1948. At that time he gathered materials for what would eventually become a 5-year working period that produced four novels. Of these Mikael Karvajalka (The Adventurer) (1948) and Mikael Hakim (The Wanderer) (1949) form one entity, the other consisting of Johannes Angelos (The Dark Angel) (1952) and the prequel Nuori Johannes, posthumously published in 1981.
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The landscape of Waltari's best-known novel Sinuhe (The Egyptian); a sand-covered Sphinx in C. Pancoucke's work Description de L'Egypte. Paris 1823.
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Waltari traveled to Istanbul through Paris, Rome and Venice. He operated on three temporal planes: the recollections of his youth, the present, but more deeply in his thoughts, the 1500s. For his source materials he required rarities that could not be found in any of Helsinki´s academic libraries. Writing to his friend Jalo Sihtola, he also dared to complain about the Helsinki University Library. Important sources were not even found from Parisian antiquarian bookshops lining the Rue Bonaparte or St. André des Arts. It was only in Geneva, thanks to the publisher Jeheber´s permission to use his bookstore´s own channels for inquiries, that Waltari found the works he required. What they were precisely remained unexplained in his travel account.
A publisher´s guest of honor
The first time, Waltari traveled with his wife Marjatta to Paris, from where he continued to Istanbul on his own. On the way he passed through Switzerland, where Waltari´s main purpose, besides searching for books and visiting museums, was to meet the local publisher of Sinuhe. The University of Helsinki´s long-time French-language lecturer Jean-Louis Perret has translated the novel into French at his own risk, and had finally found, thanks to the elderly and respected Jeheber, a publisher in Geneva.
The publisher´s hospitality raises the trip to a new level, and the narrator does not neglect to praise the meals enjoyed at Swiss restaurants. The best is served at an old mill, Aux vieux Moulin, amidst yellowish green vineyards. It seems as if there had never been a war. Only the determined publisher Hans Jeheber´s upset stomach dampens the mood, but even for that situation, the narrator invents a simple solution along the way. He confirms that Jeheber´s Finnish wife Marghareta, an old friend of Marjatta now in the advanced stages of pregnancy, can drive a car if necessary: "Wine always has an emboldening effect, and in my mind I imagined that in the worst case we could bury Hans somewhere by the side of the road, where otherwise crosses can be seen here and there, and continue to Bern as a trio."
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Putnam & Co published Naomi Walford's translation of the novel Johannes Angelos in London in 1953. Jules Gotlieb illustrated the cover.
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Counselor Jaakko Leppo, well known for his work as a propagandist during the war years, takes the Waltaris under his wing in Bern, and the hospitality only improves. An Italian marquis is arranged as a morning host, at the lunch served at the stone tower of the restaurant built at Käfigturm, Leppo serves them like a prince "and above us fell part of his halo". Luxurious hotel rooms and chauffeured car trips compensate multifold for the ordeals endured in strike-torn Paris. There is also a climb up the foggy Jungfraujoch, where Waltari catches cold, much as he did in his youth on his train trip through the Vienna Alps. He is able to describe his random travel phases with the same mild self-irony as the unsuccessful mishaps, of which there are an ample number. Among Finnish writers, there were no others at that time - except perhaps for Göran Schildt recounting his sailing adventures - with anything equivalent to say. This is however only the external shell; only after seeing his wife off at the Zurich Airport for her trip back to Finland via Sweden is Waltari free to continue with his journey´s actual purpose.
Studying the artillery
Waltari was particularly interested in the workings and history of missile launching devices and artillery pieces. Photo of Kalervo Huuri's doctoral dissertation Zur Geschichte des Mittelalterlichen Geschütswesens aus orientalischen Quellen (1941). Huuri was the cousin of Waltari's wife.
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As he visits the museums and bookstores of Bern, Waltari more closely reveals his working method to his readers. Isolated objects - an old flag, decorated silver goblet, or cruel gun - could awaken "a profuse flow of ideas" that bring an entire epoch to life. In the Gutenberg Museum he is enchanted by the art of printing´s early achievements, when wooden typefaces were used to print anything as beautiful as what was subsequently created in the field. The researcher´s reflections approach the journey´s focal point, the confluence of the arts of ordinance and book printing. At the same time that communications became possible for increasingly broader segments of society, the carrying power and potency of weapons of mass destruction also grew in the same proportion. In Waltari´s mind this could not have been a coincidence.
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The inference was intuitive, not based on scientific observation. Waltari had his own theory about how momentously the development of catapults into firearms and movable artillery had influenced the course of world history. At times his enthusiasm for guns and their casting borders on the monomaniacal. He whipped through museums, first studying the guns´ operating principles and even planning his itinerary to ensure that he would be able to visit Europe´s best collections of firearms and artillery pieces.
One of his points of departure was "Zur Geschichte des Mittelalterlichen Geschütswesens aus orientalischen Quellen", a doctoral dissertation published in 1941 by his wife Marjatta´s cousin Kalervo Huuri, in which the development of medieval firearms was studied with a particular reliance on eastern sources. Waltari had discussed the subject with Huuri in Helsinki and Hartola, becoming aware of certain details that captivated his imagination. As if by fate Kalervo Huuri´s promising scientific career was cut short his own research area. Shortly after the completion of his thesis, the Russians´ modern "missiles" killed the lieutenant during the Battle of Salla in November 1941.
Waltari had another specialist as a source, E. A. Gessler, the Director of Zurich´s Historical Museum, whose research focused on the leather guns - subsequently proven useless - invented during the 1600s. Waltari had expected a productive meeting, but heard to his dismay that Gessler had died the previous spring. Now he had to continue his research on his own. His exhaustive immersion in the workings of artillery attracted so much attention in the museum that a technical expert, the conservator of guns, was appointed to assist him. Gradually Waltari developed into perhaps one of the most profound experts on this aspect of arms technology on the continent. He however points out the differences between scientific inquiry and his own methods:
"An author searches for material differently than a scientist. He searches for the underlying motives behind people´s actions, the exceptions, the quirks, while on the other hand the scientist´s aim is universality, principle, the leading thought. But historical research is a bottomless sea; every answered question opens any number of new questions, and intentionally or unintentionally, the author is forced to sift through a great deal of material that will never have to be used subsequently. In a certain sense, historical research on the basis of preserved formal evidence is the most exciting type of detective work that gives flight to the imagination and a kind of hot-headed intensity when one really becomes enthusiastic about it. I tried to keep a cool head, attempting the entire time to think about the people concealed behind every one of the museums´ rusted and antiquated murder weapons. Perhaps the significance of the insight does not at all depend on what or how much is seen, but above all on the degree of one´s receptivity and creativity. The same intoxicating adventure can be experienced by walking the streets of a strange city, an old tower, worn crest, or light green water flowing under a bridge possibly awakening a distant memory, activating the imagination, immediately clarifying your view of a great deal of what was considered trivial, or what has remained as intellectual ballast at the bottom of the soul. The same creative adventure can also be experienced by absent-mindedly glancing through an old book and finding the eye drawn to a stain or scribbled annotation that some unknown reader has left on the yellowed paper one hundred or two hundred years ago."
From Zurich Waltari traveled to Milan, his purpose to examine Venice more closely before continuing to his destination Istanbul. He had visited the country in his younger days in 1931, but only now Italy "hit like an overpowering intoxicant".
Mika Waltari's literary output has been presented in several exhibitions. Photo from the Finnish Jerusalem Institute's exhibition mounted in 1995.
Photo: Raija Majamaa
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Waltari´s diary of his train trip to Venice was written like a novel in which the Italian mentality and pervasive corruptibility, a dining car conversation with a Balkan diplomat, an explanation of Finland´s political position after the wars, as well as warnings of the debilitating effects of grappa and women are blended into an enjoyable whole. One of the Finnish author´s missions was to convince disbelieving questioners how well Finland - never occupied - had survived the Second World War despite the fact that it had been the only country in Europe that had fought against the Soviet Union and Germany. The faithful propagandist continued to disseminate factual information concerning his native country.
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The Count´s memoirs and Barbaro´s diary
Waltari graphically describes his arrival in Venice, where he does not appear to have a clear research program. A minor mishap, the forgetting of a book in a railway carriage, reveals the kind of reading for which Waltari had scoured the antiquarian bookshops of Paris: Count de Bonville´s small book of memoirs, in which a disgraced war chief turned renegade recounts anecdotes of Venice and Turkey, is a direct precursor of Mikael Hakim´s future experiences. As if by a miracle, the book is recovered at the Venice Train Station; sometimes the reader wonders how much Waltari has fabricated and how many tales worth telling he encountered on his journeys. It should be kept in mind that his travel account is subtitled "Truth and Fiction in Europe 1947".
In the world of his future novels, Waltari stops to dwell in the Piazza San Marco, gazing upon the resplendent spoils of war from the time of the Crusades, but at the same time pointing out that in the end Venice was the only western state that sent aid to Byzantium in its battle against an overwhelming siege by the Turks. The fall of Byzantium also meant the collapse of Venetian power.
On this trip to Venice or the next, Waltari ascends the steps to the National Library of St. Mark along the Piazzetta opposite the old Doge´s Palace. He has read a printed version of the diary written by Niccolo Barbaro, a participant in the battle, describing the Siege of Constantinople, but now he wants to see the original manuscript in its original decorative leather binding. He reads the 67-page diary, hand-written in the calligraphic script of its time, in which a young Venetian patriot describes the tragic phases of the siege. An unknown commentator´s marginal annotations in red ink provide Waltari with his most cogent insights. This is just what Waltari has maintained - of greater importance to the author are often the footnotes and minor details, not always the broad strokes. When Niccolo Barbaro accuses the Genovians of embezzlement, written on the page is "Angelo Zacaria, Greek embezzler for the Turks."
Johannes Angelos is born and begins to grow as the novel´s main character. Simultaneously the form of the future novel - a dairy - is found. Waltari is already in a rush to his destination, Istanbul.
Ph.D. Panu Rajala is an author, literary researcher and the Deputy Chairman of the Mika Waltari Society.
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Relief: Walter Runeberg
"The months and years roll by and fall to oblivion, but the memory of only one beautiful moment illuminates one´s whole life."
Franz Grillparzer
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