Hell Before Breakfast by Robert H. Patton

Author:Robert H. Patton [Patton, Robert H.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-90890-2
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2014-04-28T16:00:00+00:00

Returning from Central Asia to Paris in late 1873, MacGahan set to work expanding his Khiva article for the American Geographical Society into a full-length book. The result, Campaigning on the Oxus and the Fall of Khiva, an engaging narrative of arduous travel, exotic culture, and colonial war, brought MacGahan renown as “the Cossack Correspondent” when it was published in 1874. But as with Henry Stanley’s best seller about finding Livingstone, it didn’t endear him to Bennett, who, apart from disliking his minions gathering fame for themselves, was annoyed that in four hundred pages of narrative, his name wasn’t mentioned once.

MacGahan’s Herald pay was suspended while he worked on the book. He complained to the paper’s representative in London, John Russell Young, but the best Young could do was offer to serialize the manuscript as its parts were completed. MacGahan’s wife counseled her husband not to sign the contract; she was sure the book’s success would finally free him from the Herald yoke. Young was disappointed. “I knew him fairly well,” he later said of MacGahan. “I liked him very well.”

The book’s excellent reviews praised its humanizing portrait of Muslim nomads and its denunciation of Russian brutality. “As fascinating as a novel,” said Harper’s magazine. “It is worthwhile to know what romance and adventure and personal hazard are involved in making the daily paper we read so quietly at our breakfast table.” Sales were good, but the lapse in MacGahan’s salary was hard to make up. And Varia’s money anxieties were worse than ever now that she was pregnant again after miscarrying a year earlier. She complained about her husband’s love of nightlife and generosity to his faraway family. Recently he’d declined with regret a relative’s request for a loan. “I would pawn the watch Bennett is going to give me,” he wrote, “if I had it.” The watch never came.

He did get a medal from the Russian army in recognition of his contributions at Khiva. He wanted literary respect, however. He tried writing a play, but his attempt to dramatize his experience in the Paris Commune fizzled. Strapped for money, he finally accepted a Herald assignment to cover unrest in Spain, where the so-called Army of the Pretender was trying to topple the government. Glad to have him back, Bennett flattered MacGahan by giving him a byline on his dispatches.

Spain’s Carlist rebellion of 1873–76 revived MacGahan’s romantic notions of people versus kings, republicans versus royalists—except now his sympathies were flipped. The self-professed Communard utterly fell for the flashy charisma of the revolt’s leader, Carlos VII, strutting heir to a long line of claimants to the Spanish throne. Don Carlos’s case to become king was based on sketchy blood links of generations earlier, Roman Catholic stridency in the face of secular liberalism, and the age-old enthrallment of Spanish peasants by grandiose royals. “The Carlists,” MacGahan declared after meeting them, “have a flag, a faith, a belief, and the republicans have not. Call it religion, fanaticism, bigotry, ignorance, the fact remains that men with positive ideas, who know what they want, usually carry the day.

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