Musings on Rafael Sabatini’s writings - 2

Recent experience of exhaustion roused memory of serious food-poisoning over four decades ago, and the hallucination it caused.  Which memory said to me: The Gates of Doom.  On a less trying day I looked up one of my favourite Rafael Sabatini novels.

As usual, Rafael credited a memoir as his source, that of Dr. Emanuel Blizzard.  As usual, that’s baloney!  So where did Rafael get all that he put into his account, from Harry Gaynor’s hanging to his resuscitation?  Did he ever experience hallucinations during illness?  Or hear all about one from an acquaintance?  Or read something similar?  The same questions arise about Dr. Blizzard’s treatment of Harry.

I suspect that my fondness for the novel arises chiefly from the endearing Dr. Blizzard.  When reading and re-reading for the writing of Romantic Prince, I returned often to the novel for some detail or other, and then found myself stopping at the part where the good doctor finds Harry awakened from a long, healing sleep, continuing to read until Harry bids him farewell.  Rafael comments:

They parted the best of friends in the world, and, after the Captain had gone, that lonely anatomist realised for the first time in all his absorbed and studious years that his house in the Gray's Inn Road was dingy, dull and dismal.

For some reason, that sentence moves me.

Rafael wrote strikingly about another kind and memorable doctor – in Fortune’s Fool.  Dr. Beamish is one of the reasons for my liking the novel.

We are most unlikely to learn why Rafael put these words into the good doctor’s mouth, and not even the necessity of persuading Sylvia Farquharson to work in the shelter for plague sufferers explains all that he says.  So I think.  They are inspiring words at any time, to anyone willing to think about them.

“It is in helping others that we best help ourselves," he explained. "Who labours but for himself achieves a barren life, is like the unfaithful steward with his talents. Happiness lies in labouring for your neighbour. It is a twofold happiness. For it brings its own reward in the satisfaction of achievement, in the joy of accomplishment; and it brings another in that, bending our thoughts to the needs and afflictions of our fellows, it removes them from the contemplation of the afflictions that are our own."

*

“You might do it because you conceive it to be a debt you owe to God and your fellow-creatures for your own preservation. Or you might do it so that, in seeking to heal the afflictions of others, you may succeed in healing your own. But, however you did it, it would be a noble act, and would surely not go unrewarded."

*

"I do not wish to force you into any course against your will. If the task is repugnant to you—and I can well understand that it might be—do not imagine that I shall on that account forsake you. I will not leave you helpless and alone. Be sure of that."

Another striking remark in the novel is Rafael’s description of plague-stricken London as Randal Holles sees it:

Last of all, but perhaps most awe-inspiring, as being the most eloquent witness to the general desolation, he saw that blades of grass were sprouting between the kidney stones with which the street was paved, so that, but for those lines of houses standing so grim and silent on either side, he could never have supposed himself to be standing in a city thoroughfare.

These are some of the touches that – for me – distinguish Rafael Sabatini’s novels from those of writers who received a better press then and now.  Why is it incumbent on most of those expressing an opinion of this writer’s novels, whether they are themselves writers, or critics published in journals, broadsheets, and periodicals, dictionaries or whatever of fiction and so on, or the generality writing on their own websites, to make negative comments, draw unfavourable comparisons, dismiss with the lazy term ‘swashbuckler’?  When I had the time and justification for re-reading Rafael’s novels, I would come across things I had not noticed before, and be delighted, while surprised at having missed them earlier.

Ruth Heredia is the originator and holds the copyright to all material on this blog unless credited to some source. Please do not use it or pass it off as your own work. That is theft. If you wish to link it, quote it, or reprint in whole or in part, please be courteous enough to seek my permission.

Musings on Rafael Sabatini’s writings - 1

Nota bene: These musings arise from an amalgam of my own reading, reflection, and intuition, after decades of acquaintance with Rafael Sabatini’s writings, and long years of research into his life, together with much reading.  But set down in much weakness of body, in my 71^st year, when memory is not what it once was.

Israel Suarez is a Jewish moneylender, a character in the novel, The Gates of Doom, a favourite Rafael Sabatini novel.  He made so vivid an impress on my mind that I can no more forget him than I can forget the leading trio of characters.  Dismiss all thought of “stereotype Jewish moneylender”.  This man is so wonderfully different; his character is striking because of its forcefulness more than for his eccentricities..

Read what Rafael Sabatini writes of him, instantly spurning the stereotype, then in typical Rafael fashion mocking the stereotype by seeming to concede it only to negate that emphatically:

Israel Suarez was none of your gabardined, bewhiskered, cringing Jews, over-conscious of belonging to a despised race. Himself proud of his Jewish blood, he had naught but contempt for those who despised it. Being enormously wealthy and knowing the power of wealth, he used that power remorselessly, and upon none so remorselessly as upon those who dared to show their scorn of him on the score of race. To these he repaid contempt with contempt, insult with insult; and since he had the power on his side, his contempt and his insult usually proved the more hurtful and crushing in the end.

In appearance he had almost the air of a man of fashion, saving perhaps that with his natural taste for Oriental splendour he rather overdressed the part.

. . . this Spanish Jew was a somewhat extraordinary and compelling personality. . . . Obviously he was not a man with whom it would be safe to trifle. Save for a trouble with the aspirate, the "w" and the "th," his English was fluent and good. [my emphasis]

The name, Israel Suarez, is not uncommon, as an online search will show.  But why did Rafael come up with an Iberian character?  Not all Jews settled in England came from Iberia.

Home in 1886 was Rua do Mirante 9A.  In 1886 the Liceu Particular do Porto, at Rua da Conceição 64, had for its director Jacob Bensabat, teacher of English, French, and Italian (author of ‘teach yourself’ textbooks for these, and possibly co-author of a similar book for German). This liceu was a short walk away from the Rua do Mirante, which may have been a reason to enrol Rafael in it.

In 1888 the Sabatinis lived at Rua Cancela Velha 15, a street renamed Rua Guilherme da Costa Carvalho (after the 1974 revolution). This street adjoins the Câmara do Porto, and is in the centre of the city.

Although there was another liceu, the Liceu Nacional do Porto at Rua São Bento da Vitória 14, it was much further away from the Rua do Mirante for Rafael aged 11.  By the time he lived at Rua Cancela Velha 15 he was a little older and may have made his way an even greater distance to the Liceu Nacional. (But was it necessary? Will we ever know?)

Why do I prefer to connect Rafael to Jacob Bensabat?  Because in his novel, Columbus, he gives a minor character the surname for no discernible reason. Unless it be that revisiting childhood memories in his old age, he recalled the name Jacob Bensabat.  It may be, only just may be, that remembering him earlier still, 'Jacob' led to 'Israel'.

Other thoughts floated into my mind as I reflected on Bensabat the fictional character.  He is made a tailor. Rafael's paternal grandfather had a tailoring establishment. *Jesse Knight, in Jesi/Iesi for a Sabatini event in 2001 was told that a local notion (without proof to substantiate it) held that the Sabatinis were descended from Spanish Jews fleeing in the persecution begun by Torquemada.

Rafael would seem to have put stereotyped Jewish characters into Scaramouche the Kingmaker, but that is a case apart.  The moneylender ‘brothers’ calling themselves Frey were historical characters who may have been Jews as they claimed, both scoundrels.  In the novel they had to be simplified not to add another complication to an already very complex plot.  These characters, whether in history or in the novel, could not be more different from the memorable Israel Suarez, a person to be respected, as Lord Carteret does.

* Jesse F. Knight 3/3/02 Mailing List

From ‘Israel’ and ‘Jacob’ to ‘Emanuel’ even if spelled shorn of the double ‘m’.  Dr. Emanuel Blizzard is another striking name, and the surname was probably used as early as 1901 in the rejected & lost story The Resuscitation of Jack Haynes, rewritten and published in 1907 as The Risen Dead.  (Rafael tended to hold on to some names, not always remembering not to overuse them!)  That story grew into The Gates of Doom.  -  More in the next instalment.

Ruth Heredia is the originator and holds the copyright to all material on this blog unless credited to some source. Please do not use it or pass it off as your own work. That is theft. If you wish to link it, quote it, or reprint in whole or in part, please be courteous enough to seek my permission.