How do you write a history if you’re not quite sure which—if any—of your sources is telling the truth? All historians have to deal with sources who exaggerate, or mislead, or just come from differing perspectives. But my guest in this episode had to wrestle with this question on a whole different level for his newest book. Were his subjects performing miracles, or conning people with magic tricks? And in the end, does it really matter?
This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I’m Kate Carpenter, and in today’s episode I’m joined by Dr. Raphael Cormack. Raph is an editor, writer, and translator, as well as an assistant professor of modern languages and cultures at Durham University in the United Kingdom. He is the author of two books. The first, Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult in 2021 and is now available in paperback. And his newest book, out earlier this year, is Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring ’20s. In it, he follows two charismatic and mysterious faith leaders who emerged in the uncertain interwar period in both Europe and the Middle East. We talked about how he dealt with those deeply unreliable sources, why the narrative structure that came so easily to one book didn’t work for the second one, and, well, his mother. You’ll see what I mean.
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Mentioned in this episode:
- Raphael Cormack, Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult
- Raphael Cormack, Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt’s Roaring ’20s
- Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story
- Mary Beard
- Janet Malcom
- Adina Hoffman, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness
- Francesca Wade, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife
Transcript:
Kate Carpenter 0:01
How do you write a history if you're not quite sure which, if any, of your sources is telling the truth? all historians have to deal with sources who exaggerate or mislead or just come from different perspectives. But my guest today had to wrestle with this question on a whole different level for his newest book. Were his subjects performing miracles or conning people with magic tricks? And in the end, does it really matter? This is Drafting the Past, a podcast about the craft of writing history. I'm Kate Carpenter, and in today's episode, I'm joined by Dr. Raphael Cormack.
Raphael Cormack 0:36
Thanks so much for having me.
Kate Carpenter 0:37
Raph is an editor, writer and translator, as well as an assistant professor of Modern Languages and Cultures at Durham University in the United Kingdom. He is the author of two books. The first, Midnight in Cairo: The Divas of Egypt's Roaring 20s, was published in 2021 and is now available in paperback. And his newest book, out earlier this year, is Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age: A Forgotten History of the Occult. In it, he follows two charismatic and mysterious faith leaders who emerged in the uncertain interwar period in Europe and the Middle East. We talked about how he dealt with those deeply unreliable sources, why the narrative structure that came so easily in the first book didn't work out for the second one, and, well, about his mother. You'll see what I mean. Here's my conversation with Dr. Raphael Cormack.
Raphael Cormack 1:25
Like a lot of people who work in modern languages, which I feel like I kind of sit somewhere in a place where I don't quite understand between languages and history and literature. I think I really started out translating. So while I was doing my PhD, I edited a volume of Sudanese short stories. I don't think I see myself really as a particularly good translator. I don't think I'm terrible, I hope, but there are some people who really, you know, turn translation into an art form. For me, it's always been a little bit more something I kind of do to connect with Arabic literature and sort of keep my writing going. And also, yeah, I think that's how I started writing as such for a non academic audience. And then when I finished my PhD, which I have still not, turned into a book, and I guess probably never will turn into a book, though you never know. Adaptations of Oedipus in 20th century Egypt, perhaps someone's knocking at the door, but yeah, when I finished that, I was kind of, didn't really know what to do, and heard really found some incredible sources and some incredible stories of the 20th century Egyptian theater movement, and, you know, the whole scene, the nightclub scene, the pop music scene, all of that kind of stuff which had not fit at all into my PhD. But I figured there was something to be done with it. So instead of writing up the book for my PhD, I instead wrote up that book, which then became Midnight in Cairo, which is my first book about the story of 20th century Egyptian entertainment told through the lives of seven, depending on how you count, of its most prominent women, and that I found to be just a really interesting and productive and very fun, kind of, writing is never 100% fun, but sort of fun experience figuring out how to, you know, use those lives to tell a historical story in a kind of crossover academic trade way, which is sort of -- meaning, like a lot of people who you feature on your podcast, I sort of somehow try and fit into that bracket, sometimes, maybe not always, as successfully as as I could, but yeah. And then, so that's how I got interested in doing that. And then this second book, which I've just published recently, Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age, was another attempt to tell kind of a 1920s Egyptian story, at least that's kind of how it started, 1920s Middle Eastern story. But instead of cabarets, it was the occult. That one I had a lot more difficulty, or a huge number of different drafts, trying to really pull all of that together into a comprehensible story. So for my first book, it was, it was actually reasonably simple, what the structure ought to be. You have these various prominent women. They all kind of tell a different side of the story of the Egyptian entertainment scene, whether that be, I mean, just in terms of, well, the cinema and the theater and and dance, but also kind of different kinds of stories of what the life of a woman on the entertainment scene would be like. So fitting all of that together was never really the big problem with that book. Whereas, you try and start thinking about the occult, which is what I've been doing with this more recent book, which I think is a really fascinating window onto a lot of the big issues of the 20th century. But it's extremely hard to tie down into a narrative in the same way. I mean, I actually started off basically sort of saying, well, here are roughly seven, can't remember how many it was, getting different people who all kind of tell a different aspect of the occult. But it became clear that just was never going to work out, because it was being dragged off in in too many different directions. The chronology was all over the place. So in the end, I sort of really focused on two main people. In the case of this book, it was a guy, Tahra Bey, who is an Armenian turned Egyptian Fakir, who went to Europe and basically, depending on exactly how you look at it, swindled a lot of people out of money by assuming this sort of Eastern Sheik persona. And then against him, I kind of put this guy, Dr. Dahesh, so he could, he was a sort of figure through whom I told the middle eastern side of the story, which was to say, there's also this huge kind of occult boom at the same time in the Middle East. And here is a man who starts off as a Fakir, then becomes a hypnotist and then becomes a kind of religious leader. And through him, we can tell sort of the mirror image of the story of Tahra Bey and what's going on. So that eventually became the way that I figured out structuring it, but it really went through a huge number of different iterations.
Kate Carpenter 6:41
Well, I want to talk a little bit about the practicalities of how you work. So when, when and where do you like to do your writing?
Raphael Cormack 6:48
When you have a child, the way that you do your work really changes a lot. I used to just basically try and do a sort of nine to five, give or take, maybe a little bit outside of those times, but not really as much as possible. Go to the library. It's always nice to go, I used to work a lot in the New York Public Library when I lived in New York. Now I live in Newcastle. I still try and go to, that has a very nice public library in Newcastle called The Lit & Phil where you could go, and it's sort of free. It's not, collection's not quite as good as the New York Public Library, but it's still a nice place to work. But then when you have a child, and then also trying to juggle teaching and sort of academic job responsibilities alongside that, it just becomes much more difficult. And I, to be honest, my my son's only three. Now I'm not entirely sure I've found the way around it. But yeah, I think this will be a familiar story for lots of people. I try to work late at night, but often it doesn't work for me, I have very good intentions of, well, I'll just go to bed and read this book that I need to read, and I'll spend an hour or two just doing that in bed, it'll be nice and relaxing, but immediately I go to sleep.
Kate Carpenter 7:58
I fall asleep over books like that embarrassingly frequently.
Raphael Cormack 8:06
Yeah, I know, it's kind of, it's a nice trick, if you can get it to work, if that's what you want is to go to sleep. But it's sometimes frustrating when you think, Oh, actually, I should have been working on this book for a bit longer.
Kate Carpenter 8:17
How do you like to organize yourself? Are their tools that you use?
Raphael Cormack 8:19
I'm very lax on that too. I have, I've actually got some great advice previously off your podcast, although I have not put it into practice because it's always a bit too late to do it. But one of your guests said that every new project they get, they set up a new email account. So, you know, call it Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age. And then every little bit of information that you find, you think, oh, I want to come back to this. Send it to that email account, and then you can, you know, you could search it, it'll be there. That seems like a great way to organize your material. I don't do that. I've also heard William Dalrymple, who who says that he just has index cards for a new book. So every time you're, you, say you're working on a new book, and it features Cairo heavily. Every time you see a nice description of Cairo in 1920 you write out an index card, index it under that the old fashioned way. That also sounds like a great idea, but I haven't done it. I basically have a Dropbox folder into which I'm currently dropping everything and attempting to name the files. Oh, you know, this is important, read this. And same, to be honest, with with writing, I I've never actually really tried any, you know, Scrivener, or any of these things. I just use Word though. I feel like Scrivener sounds like it should be good, but you can end up kind of over complicating things. Maybe. I think the style in which I write is basically get a first draft in which you throw everything on the page and then really try and just whittle it down and whittle it down. And Word, to be honest, works fine for that. It's not the, it's not the worst tool in the world.
Kate Carpenter 10:04
You mentioned, you know, for this most recent book, there were some starts and stops and trying to kind of figure out how it should be structured. So what does that revision process look like for you?
Raphael Cormack 10:15
I'm kind of in the school of, get a whole draft out and then you can, you can deal with it once you have something on the page. And I usually send it to people to read much too early, and they sort of end up, even often, not getting back to me. But yeah, and that one, so, I mean, this most recent book, it went through at least kind of in terms of Dropbox folders, 10 full drafts, but a lot of that really looked like just taking out entire chapters, which didn't work. You know, entire sort of characters from the book had to go. And then once you've done that, you have to sort of rejig it quite a lot. But yeah, so that's kind of, yeah. I'm not one of these people who comes out with a very polished draft, one of those anyone who thinks about it a lot, who writes it down slowly, and who sort of comes up with something. I'm sort of more of the opposite, which I just throw down as much as possible, and then try and chip away at it. The Michelangelo theory of, I saw the angel in the in the marble, and then try and carve it free. So just get the marble out there, and then get things done.
Kate Carpenter 11:22
How does that look like, practically? Do you do you print a whole draft out and scribble on it? Do you just know what needs to change?
Raphael Cormack 11:29
At first, it's just knowing what needs to change. And then by the time you you sort of have something which you think is at least possible, printing out is a good is always a good way to do it. And I always, I try, although not always that successfully, to read it out too, because I think that is an extremely good piece of advice. But once, especially once you have something on a piece of paper, because everything looks very different, don't you think, like once, once it's on a actual piece of paper, you suddenly see all of the unpleasantness that you didn't really notice when it was on the screen and then reading it out, of course, just doubles that.
Kate Carpenter 12:10
What's the relationship between your research and writing? Like, do you like to get all the research done first and then write? Or do they come together?
Raphael Cormack 12:17
I probably do a bit more research than than some people might. I mean, I think it's, it's definitely true that it's only in the writing that you find out what you really need, but also it's only by doing at least some level of research that you find out what you're going to write in the first place. So, I mean, I'm just starting kind of a new project now, which is a biography of this Egyptian anti colonial activist in the 19th century, Egyptian Jewish, interesting guy who was a wrote, there's a huge number of satirical newspapers. He's called Abu Naddara or Yaqub Sanu, and he left colossal amounts of material. I mean, he published basically one satirical magazine a month, at least, sometimes more than that, for about 35 years, and they were often quite long. He left some letters too. So that one I'm really in the process of slowly just reading. I mean, I've been going at it for about a year now, probably, just reading all of these journals and really trying to figure out how to build a picture of his life before I commit basically anything to the paper. But, I mean, I'm sort of about to start writing down with that, and then the moment you start writing down, you realize that, oh, you really need to go back to the original materials again.
Kate Carpenter 13:41
Did you find, I mean, you've talked a little bit already about how the structure, the process of creating the structure, was really different between your first and second books. Did you did you find that there were things you learned in writing the first book that you applied to the second book?
Raphael Cormack 13:54
I did, but then, then they didn't work? That was, and I think it's, I mean, it really is true that that each project demands its own structure. So the first book, yeah, like I say, the first book, the structure, sort of came quite naturally. Telling stories through lives is always a kind of reasonably straightforward thing to do. I mean, if anything, straightforward, but, you know, more straightforward than other things and also the material was so biographical. In that case, most of the sources were either memoirs or they were biographical kind of tidbits in the popular press and interviews or all of this kind of stuff. So in that case, the structure just really suggested itself. And then with my second project, the Holy Men, I thought I could do the same thing again, because it had seemed so obvious the first time around. It was only by writing it that I realized I I really couldn't do the same thing again. In addition, they're kind of similar characters, occult celebrities, and you know, entertainment celebrities. They both have a lot of kind of similar aspects to their lives. They both create kind of these personae they're both involved in a kind of, at least in the 20th century, they're both involved in the kind of new capitalist modes of money making. The problem was, I think in the case of the occult figures, there's always this question of, well, is it true? What's, you know, what is the truth? Who is the real person behind all of this? And you can't, it's much more difficult to sidestep. There is always also that question of female celebrities in 1920s and 30s, Cairo, what's true? Who, you know, who are the real people behind the stage personae? But it seems a little bit easier to sort of massage those questions, whereas in the case of someone who says they are doing a miracle, turning water into wine or burying themselves alive for a few days, or whatever it might be, you kind of, the reader wants to know who, well, is it true? So I think perhaps in that way, they require a slightly different kind of structure, although, I mean, I have to say you can't answer the question, is it true? At least as a historian, you have to do something with it. Every every comment I got back, or a large number of comments that I got back at the beginning of sending drafts out to people were, well, yeah, but you know, did he really do this? And I get the impulse, but you do have to go a little bit beyond that when you are, let's say, in this case, writing a history about a miraculous and sort of metaphysically impossible things. You can't just ask whether it's true. And I don't mean… To give an example of that. So the main character of the first half is this guy called Tahra Bey, who is, I mean, really fascinating guy was a huge celebrity in the mid 1920s came from an Armenian background, sort of tinged with the the aftermath of the genocide, which he did not quite himself experience, but he was sort of, his family almost certainly did. And then he becomes this, this, this huge, mystical celebrity, fascinating and the way it plays into these stereotypes of East and West and inherited trauma and all the rest of it. But he was, I mean, he was almost certainly a fraud, as it were, in that what he said he could do was, was basically just a magic trick, as became within a few years of his career, as became like somewhat obvious. Once you've answered that question, which everyone you know, the question that you always want to know, are these miracles real? But once you've answered that question, it doesn't really seem to have shed much, have shed much light on anything actually, to say, Well, yeah, it was. He was probably a fake. So, I mean, so what's that? In fact, it turns out that's not the interesting thing about his life. It's, it's, it's more, well, what does he tell us about global movement in the 1920s, what does he tell us about aftermath of genocides, where he tell us about Orientalism and all the rest of it?
Kate Carpenter 18:05
To talk through how he brought this all to life on the page, I asked Raph to read an excerpt for us. Here's Dr. Raphael Cormack reading from the first chapter of Holy Men of the Electromagnetic Age.
Raphael Cormack 18:17
Athens in 1923 was a city in desperate need of miracles. For several months, a steady stream of refugees had been arriving at the port of Piraeus, driven out of their homes across the Mediterranean Sea. It was a depressing scene. Hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children fleeing war and ethnic violence had boarded cramped and dangerous ships, in search of new shores where they might find safety. One American observer recalled seeing these overloaded ships arriving in Greece, after being buffeted for days in the open seas. Many of the passengers had not had anything to eat or drink for days and were ‘crowded so densely on board that in many cases they had only room to stand on deck.’ Materially, Athens was unprepared for such a large influx of people. Greece had just lost a long and bloody war against the nascent Turkish state. Their ignominious defeat had cost many lives and many millions of drachmas, leaving national morale low, state finances depleted, and the country’s politics in turmoil. The Athens of 1920 had been a comparatively small, sleepy city. The population of the entire metropolitan area was less than five hundred thousand. Between September 1922 and the end of 1923, around one million refugees entered Greece, hundreds of thousands of whom ended up in Athens. Between 1920 and 1928, the population of central Athens grew by 54 percent and the population of its port, Piraeus, almost doubled. At its peak from 1922 to 1923, this crisis put the overwhelmed and under-resourced city under a strain that it could barely handle. Any available spaces were turned into makeshift dwellings, as the authorities scrambled to find shelter for the new arrivals; factories, warehouses, and schools were all converted into housing. The national theatre was taken over and the private boxes, which had once been reserved for the city’s wealthy elite, became homes to entire families. A ‘forced hospitality’ law was instituted, compelling the rich to open the doors of their large houses to those in need. Those who refused were fined, and that money was funneled back into aid efforts. Still, it was not enough. Many of the newcomers were unable to find places to stay as the harsh Athenian winter crept in. They slept on the streets, in hastily constructed tents, with barely enough clothing to keep out the cold. Accounts of the terrible situation throughout the country began to emerge. One observer from the League of Nations visited a camp in which five children had died that morning and seven children the day before from either cold or malnutrition.
Kate Carpenter 20:38
So I love this opening line. It's a small thing, but "Athens in 1923 was a city in desperate need of miracles." I think that's just great. Did you have that line right away?
Raphael Cormack 20:49
Actually, I think I basically, I might have changed it ever so slightly, because and this whole introduction came kind of late, this whole beginning bit. And it came, there's a book which I read a while ago, which probably people might know, Vivian Gornick's The Situation and The Story, a sort of writing advice book in which she basically says, in order to really tell the story, you need to figure out what it's about. And lots of people think, well, when they think of the story, they're what they're really describing is the situation. Oh, it's set in in 1920s Europe that's on the brink of destruction and all the rest of this kind of stuff. But they don't quite know what the story is. And at some point reasonably late in the writing, though not right at the end, I figured out that what is central to Tahra Bey's story is the fact that he's a refugee, and what that means and the opening line, Athens was a city in desperate need of miracles, what the kind of what the situation in post war Europe was like, and why someone like Tahra Bey, this mystic, claiming to be from the east, claiming to have lots of secrets, might have some purchase in that world. And I also wanted to connect it not only to the more commonly known story of 1920s Europe, which is Western Europe, essentially Germany and France having just come out of the First World War. I also wanted to connect it to the fall of the Ottoman Empire, which is what this whole scene basically captures, the refugee crisis after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, and to say, well, actually, this is part of the 1920s story in Europe too. That's why I wanted to start with that bit. I mean, I guess I wanted to start with that line too, just because it's a nice line also. I mean, it's a very it gets the point across quite well in a reasonably short sentence. But on on top of that, I had figured out in this case over the course of the writing, not before I did it, that that all of these things, that the fact that Tahra Bey is an Armenian refugee is central to his story, the fact that the fall of the Ottoman Empire is in some way also central to the story of this entire book. That's one thing that perhaps unites both halves of the book, is they're both stories of the aftermath of the fall of the Ottoman Empire, even though Tahra Bey ends up in Europe that is not really that affected by that. And obviously, too, I had in mind the comparisons with the Athens of about 10 years ago too, and the similarity of that refugee crisis to the one that had happened basically 100 years previously was striking.
Kate Carpenter 23:53
What went into writing this passage that really, it sets the scene for us, it kind of brings us right there to Athens?
Raphael Cormack 24:00
Writing the history of, let's say the Middle East, as Athens is not quite the Middle East, but that's generally what I do, is a slightly different prospect, I think, than writing the history of of Europe or perhaps North America, in that there are so few archival sources that you can get to. They exist, but often they're quite patchy, and often they're extremely difficult to access. So the National Archives in Egypt are famously extremely hard to get to, and you have to tell them what you want to see before you know what's there. So it's just like bizarre way of engaging with an archive and so, and the National Archives in Lebanon, for instance, recently reopened, but I was never able to get into them, and they're somewhat difficult to access too. And other countries I haven't even tried to go to. Actually, the national archives that I found the easiest to access are actually the Sudanese ones, when I was there about 10 years ago. But broadly speaking, you don't have that. It's very difficult to find letters that help set a scene. It's it's quite difficult to find those kind of archival materials that you might otherwise rely on. And so I'm getting to a point. The solution that I've come to, broadly speaking, and that quite a lot of other people have have come to too, is that the press of the early 20th century, the popular press, the newspapers, can be used in a way, like an archive, in some senses, or can be used, that's the archive that I do use now. It has problems. It's obviously a little bit unreliable, I mean, as the press is now, but I mean perhaps even more so back then, there are commercial considerations to think about. So people tend to jazz up stories quite a bit, and often, you know, they'll just make mistakes with people's names or whatever it is, but it can help a lot with setting the scene. And broadly speaking, in that passage, there's one memoir by the American who I cite, who was there, and leaves this big description of of the scene, but otherwise, it's kind of a matter of piecing together things through the press and through through the kind of newspapers which ends up and which, I think is why both of my books have essentially been about celebrities, because that's whose stories are easiest to tell if you have these kind of resources.
Kate Carpenter 26:41
You hinted already, kind of this idea that the subjects you're writing about here are a little bit slippery, right? There's the, there's the question of the miracles and whether they're real, but there's also just even sort of the small details of their lives that they told different stories about themselves and their backgrounds. Other people told different stories about them and some things they didn't even know about their own lives. So you kind of had to sift through all of that while you worked. How did you approach that challenge? Do you have sort of a philosophy of fact finding?
Raphael Cormack 27:12
I'm actually, I'm putting together some other article now about this belly dancer called Hekmet Fahmi, who is always said to be been involved in this second world war spy plot in Egypt, in which she sort of passed information, in fact, from the British to the Germans in order to get the British out of Egypt. She doesn't come out of the story, necessarily that well, but it has become this kind of mythic event, and she published a set of memoirs in which she apparently describes her role in it. I say apparently, because actually, these memoirs were published after her death, and they were based on interviews with a journalist, so it's a little bit hard to know where her voice is in all of that, actually, because she's not there to confirm or deny. But a few kind of rules of thumb developing from that ais number one, if someone says that they did something with a huge celebrity, be extremely cautious about that fact. I mean, so there's a, there's a kind of rule of thumb in philological work called Lectio difficilior potior, which is so when all the scribes were copying down ancient texts in the Middle Ages, they would, you know, go from one hand to another, one scribe would copy it down, and then 50 years later, or whatever it was. I mean, I don't know how it worked, but let's say another scribe would copy it down, and they would have this long chain. And the idea is that slowly the text would become more simplified, because if you see a slightly strange word, you think, Oh, he can't possibly have meant that. He must have meant this simpler thing. And so you put that in, and then that gets copied further down the line. And so if you come across two texts with variant readings of a particular sentence, the best thing to do is to go for the more complex one, because it's more likely that the scribe will have simplified it than that they would have made it more complex, because that seems like an odd thing to do. And in the case of stories that get passed down through the press, there's a sort of similar thing, but it includes gradually, increasingly famous celebrities will keep coming into the story. So someone will say they met the prince of Spain, and then that becomes the king of Spain. And Tahra Bey was was very well known for doing things like that. He he claimed to have performed before Mussolini. He claimed to have performed in front of King George when he was in Sicily. And King George was in Sicily, and I saw I ended up writing to someone who'd recently written biography of of King George saying, Does this sound true at all to you? And they, they poured quite a lot of cold water on it almost immediately. So, so there's that. The stories also become just closer to cliche. I think the more hands, the sort of, the more times they get told, which I think is very true of Hekmet Fahmi and the female spies in Second World War. I mean, we have so many models that that it kind of all eventually coalesces into one pretty similar story. But so that's there were a few instances, and there's actually one instance which I ended up not putting in the book, and perhaps I regret, but it's an interesting kind of debate. So Dr. Dahesh, who forms the second part of the book, he's a guy, he starts off basically as a hypnotist in Palestine. He is forced to leave Palestine because someone accuses him of stealing lots of money, and ends up in Beirut as a kind of mystic, and he founds this religious movement called Daheshism, which becomes pretty big in 1940s Beirut, and a movement that takes in the president's sister in law and various other sort of, reasonably prominent poets and some doctors and all these people. And so as it grows, opposition also grows to it. And in the 1940s there are basically two extremely passionate forms of source to consult about Dr. Dahesh. One, his supporters and himself, who are very passionately pro Dahesh, and then the other, his detractors, who are doing all they can to essentially get him expelled from the country, which they do end up managing to do. And both of these sources are kind of extreme and in a sense, unreliable. It's quite hard to weigh them against each other. I did find one instance in which you can kind of put them against each other and weigh them in a reasonably scientific matter. And that was that in one of these pro Dahesh pamphlets, which is unclear who wrote it, they had reproduced a newspaper article attacking one of their enemies, from Palestine, from from sort of five years previously, called Abdul Rahim a Sharif. And they had reprinted this newspaper article, saying, basically, oh, Abdul Rahim a Sharif, he's he's a terrible swindler. He's a terrible man. Stay away from him, something along those lines. And then his enemies had gone back and found the original article and discovered that it, in fact, says, not Abdul Rahim a Sharif is this awful, terrible swindler, but in fact, Dr Dahesh and they just changed the name, switched the names. And so here you have a two sides to one story, but one which is checkable. So I went back to the original article that they both cited from 1930s Palestine, and found out that it said Dr Dahesh, not Abdul Rahim a Sharif. So the Dahesh side was lying and the anti Dahesh side was telling the truth. And that was I, when I when I found that, I was like, great, I've got a there's a smoking gun here. Finally, I can say one side is less reliable than the other side in this particular matter. But then I didn't put it in, not for any sort of reason other than writing it up, as you might have be able to tell from telling the story is extremely long winded. You get to it and think, Well, how serious really is that? I mean, if we'd known Dr Dahesh wrote that, that seems significant, but we don't necessarily know that he had done that. It could have just been someone else copying it down wrong. Seems unlikely, but okay, it's possible, or someone else manipulating this. So what does that really tell us in the end? And I think that kind of chimes with what I was saying before about Tahra Bey, that there's this huge impulse to figure out who's lying. But then when you do find out, it actually ends up being a little bit sort of, yeah, it ends up being anticlimactic and long winded and complicated. And then you you in the end, decide, oh, actually, this is getting a bit boring. Maybe I won't put it in. I'm not sure if that was the right decision, but that was the decision that I did come to.
Kate Carpenter 34:29
At the end of this book, you ask readers a question, and perhaps you ask yourself a question aloud, which is, how can you write the history of a myth? And in some ways, the book is an answer to that question, but if I put the question to you right now, do you have an answer?
Raphael Cormack 34:43
I do. And I mean, there's kind of the answer that I then given the book, and then I sort of cite Jung for, I mean I'm not really, you know, not really a big expert in Jung, but he came along, and he seemed to sort of answer the question, what is interesting about all of these figures, Tahra Bey, Dr Dahesh, and there's a few other minor ones too. Is the way that they seem to materialize, the anxieties and the kind of and the hopes of the age really, in one figure, it's almost like they've called into being this kind of figure who stands in for everything that people are worried about and everything that people want. And I think that's actually what is interesting about the history of the occult, more broadly speaking. And yeah, this is the first book I've written on the occult. It will probably be the only book I've written on the I write on the occult because it is so slippery and difficult, but where it is really fascinating, and what makes it a worthwhile project is, at least, this is my conclusion, that by looking at the occult, you see these things, just perhaps a little bit more clearly, or extremely clearly, you see these anxieties and these fears. That's my conclusion. I suppose that's what's interesting about the occult.
Kate Carpenter 36:03
I want to shift gears a little bit and ask about your influences, and I'm going to start with a question that I am a bit embarrassed to ask. I am disinclined to ask people about their relatives, but in your case, it feels like I would be remiss not to ask. So your mother is Mary Beard, who is the renowned historian, classicist, and I'm really actually curious to know: Do you talk about writing with her?
Raphael Cormack 36:26
Yeah, I do. I do. I also my undergraduate degree was in classics too, so the apple didn't fall that far from the tree. I mean, I send her things to look at, and I think there are two things probably that I've learned from her. The first is boring, but necessary. She really instilled, I think, well, instills in people this idea that you have to do, you really have to do the work, like you can't skimp. And I remember, for instance, when I was a kid, like 18 or something, she had finished a book manuscript. And I mean, unfortunately, I don't have any or how I can do this too, but send me off to the library and said, Okay, check every single footnote in the book. Does it go to where I say it goes to, which is a necessary thing to do, but extremely unpleasant thing to do, and something that, for that reason, I think quite a lot of people don't do, and lots of footnotes are, oh, I got the number, those numbers the wrong way around a little bit, but yeah, she she's very much a stickler for doing the work. You sort of can't hide that. So that's the boring but necessary bit. And then the slightly more nebulous but interesting point is the one thing she always says anytime she reads anything of mine is, show me why anyone should care about this. And I think that, again, is is a pretty crucial thing to bear in the back of your mind when you're writing something, and it's also an extremely good thing to have in the back of your mind when you are taking bits out of a text that you have, if you can't really show why anyone ought to care about this, except for you, perhaps it might not really belong in there. I mean, she's very good at just, I mean, much, much better than me at just writing in a way that where it's like, Well, okay, this is why you should care about it. This is why it's interesting. There you go. But we all try, us lesser mortals, try and try and do it in our own way.
Kate Carpenter 38:28
Your mother aside, are there other historians who you look to for inspiration, or even other other writers, other media that you turn to?
Raphael Cormack 38:35
Yeah, well, it's funny. One answer to that is always, oh, I read a lot of fiction, which I do, but I don't, I don't feel that novelists ever say, Oh, I read a lot of non fiction. It really informs my practice. But the other kind of slightly more in depth answer to that question is, at the moment, I'm really trying to think about so one of the cardinal rules of writing with a general audience in mind is that it's got to be all narrative, and you can't have boring historiography in the background. That's what everyone always tells you, and I think to a degree, that's true. I mean, you definitely can't have this enlightened academic come in and say, well, actually, there are many views about this kind of and x has said this, but Y disagrees with that. I mean, obviously you can't do that, but I feel there might be ways. And I think people are interested in, how do we know what we know about history? And there could be ways to engage with those issues that aren't just telling the narrative, but also aren't just coming in and giving a giving a reading list. So I'm trying to read people who do that, but what I mean one person who does that very well, but is more of a journalist, is Janet Malcolm, and she turns the whole quest for the. How she finds out what she knows into the story. But there are others who do it. I mean, Adina Hoffman, who who writes, who wrote this very nice book, My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness, which is about a Palestinian poet in which she does quite well in, you know, describing the trip to the library and just describing incidents in which she does basically historiographical work, but does it in a narrative way. One example of that, so this poet is from a town called Saffuriyya , and I might be misremembering my towns, but, but there's a there's a big debate over in 1948 was this town bombed by the Israeli Air Force? And she interviews a guy who was there, an Israeli guy, and who's sort of a left wing Israeli guy, who's very anti occupation, and she doesn't think would lie about whether or not it was bombed by the Air Force. And he says, No, it wasn't. Was wasn't. Wasn't the, all these things happened, but that didn't. And then she goes into the archives and finds the piece of paper that says, Well, actually it was. And this is a sort of seminal moment in the poet's life, because he is expelled from this town and he has to go to Lebanon and sneak back into the country, but also she manages to tell the story in a way where you don't feel that she is kind of stepping out of the narrative in order to do it. Another book that kind of does that, well, that just came out is Francesca Wade's book on Gertrude Stein, at least the second half of it. It's all about, you know, turning the that's much more Janet Malcolm me and, you know, turning the academic debate into a kind of story with characters of its own. But yeah, that has as of yet, that hasn't influenced how I write, because I am still a bit scared to delve into all of that kind of stuff. But, um, I think it would be nice to try and figure out a way to do it that doesn't isn't jarring, and I think it can be done, because I've just named some people who have done it.
Kate Carpenter 38:36
Before I let you go, I'll ask you what, what's the most influential writing advice you've ever gotten?
Raphael Cormack 40:58
It's a small one, but it's one I think about all the time because it hints at something bigger. And again, another, another sort of cast iron rule of writing is don't use the word interesting, which I've, broadly speaking, always sort of followed but haven't. But there was one time when I was, I had the word interesting in the text, someone crossed it out and gave a good explanation for why you shouldn't have it, which is not the explanation that you normally get, which is it means nothing. The explanation that I was given was where it does mean something, but what it means is, look at this thing that I'm writing. Look, here's the point. It's coming up. So you're sort of, and this is very common thing in academic writing, right? You want to clear your throat a little bit. You want to say, Oh, we're about to get to the point. Now pay attention. And no one actually wants to be told, Hey, we're getting to the point. So not only do I not use the word interesting, or at least try not to use some way I do, but going back over work, trying to isolate sentences which really mean nothing, which are just signpost sentences, because we don't need them, and that's a good way, I think, to make writing a little bit more a little bit less boring.
Kate Carpenter 43:37
I love that. Well, it's probably a good place to leave us with, making writing less boring. Dr. Raphael Cormack, thank you so much for joining me on Drafting the Past to talk about your writing process.
Raphael Cormack 43:47
Thank you very much for having me.
Kate Carpenter 43:49
Thanks for joining us for this episode of Drafting the Past. At draftingthepast.com you'll find links to Raph's books and everything else we talked about in this episode. While you're there, why don't you sign up for the Drafting the Past newsletter, too? You'll get updates on the show, more thoughts on the craft of writing history, and maybe even the occasional call for pitches that I stumble across. Until next time, remember that friends don't let friends write boring history.
