Putting the Smoke Back in the Gun (Sort Of), pt. 3

As mentioned previously, there does remain one intriguing parallel between The Secret Gospel and The Mystery of Mar Saba: the resemblance of the clause in Smith "I was gradually reconciling myself to my worst expectations" with that in Hunter "I was prepared to leave Mar Saba, reconciled to the negative results of my search".  The parallels are:

--"I was"
--"reconciling/-ed"
--"my"
--and the fact that both accounts happened at Mar Saba.

These resemblances are real, though somewhat slim.  Nevertheless, the use of "reconciling/-ed" is a little striking, and may deserve attention.  However, I would like to present an alternative account of how both Hunter and Smith could have used the same phrase in similar contexts.



Hunter almost certainly would have read Curzon's Visits to Monasteries in the Levant, which we know Smith himself read (Clement of Alexandria, p. 288).  Curzon himself visited Mar Saba, though with far less satisfactory results than either Smith or Hunter's fictional characters.  Curzon also visited other monasteries in his account, including Meteora (though not really in "the Levant"!), which Smith would likewise visit in the 1950s. Among the Greek monasteries Curzon visited was that of Caracalla.  There, he describes his work of manuscript-hunting:

I found upon the ground and upon some broken-down shelves about four or five hundred volumes, chiefly printed books; but amongst them, every now and then, I stumbled upon a manuscript. (Visits 1983, p. 365)

Now compare to Smith's description of manuscript-hunting:

I went through volume after volume of the books and manuscripts piled every which way on the floor and in the bookcases that lined the side walls of the topmost room.  I first cleared one shelf of a bookcase and then began lining up there the printed books I had inspected.  When a volume turned out to contain manuscript material, I set it aside.  When I had found three or four manuscripts we called it a day. (The Secret Gospel, p. 11)

The parallels are:

--books on the "ground/floor"
--hundreds of books/volume after volume
--"shelf/shelves"
--"printed books"
--"volume/volumes"
--"manuscript/manuscripts"
--occasional finds of mansucripts

Thus we have as many, if not more, parallels between Smith and Curzon as we find between Smith and Hunter.  If some of the parallels between Smith and Curzon seem trivial, are not some of the parallels between Smith and Hunter just as trivial?

And yet, we have no reason to doubt Smith's account of the library at Mar Saba.  No one (to my knowledge) is claiming that he made up the entire account of his 1958 stay at the monastery, nor is anyone accusing him of fraud in cataloguing the Mar Saba library in general.  Nevertheless, his account of that cataloguing work closely resembles Curzon's efforts in the Greek monastery of Caracalla one century earlier.

Now, there is nothing of course to preclude the possibility that Smith used both Curzon and Hunter in crafting his account of the discovery of To Theodore.  And indeed, my efforts here might seem at first to vindicate Watson's methods.  I have found parallels between a work Smith almost certainly read, and Smith's own writings, suggesting there was an influence.  Doesn't this imply that any parallels between Smith and Hunter are equal evidence that Hunter influenced Smith?

However, I think that once we know Smith read Curzon and may have unconsciously imitated his style, we might be able to eliminate the remaining Smith/Hunter parallels.  Curzon's account is written in the first person; so is Smith's.  Thus we eliminate the first-person parallels between Hunter and Smith, leaving only one remaining syntactical parallel: the resemblance between "reconciling" and "reconciled".

But this phrase can be found in Curzon as well, and right where we might expect it.  We have established a link, whether conscious or subconscious, between Curzon's description of his efforts at the monastery of Caracalla, and Smith's efforts at that of Mar Saba.  Reading further in Curzon's account, we learn that he finds a loose leaf of a unical of the Gospel of Matthew.  Inquiring of a monk whether he might take it with him (in a somewhat infamous passage), Curzon is horrified to see the monk happily offering him more material by slicing out part of a quarto with a knife.  Curzon jokingly writes,

I ought, perhaps, to have slain the tomecide for his dreadful act of profanation, but his generosity reconciled me to his guilt, so I pocketed the Apocalypse. (Visits 1983, p. 366)

Here we find just the word in question, "reconciled", and only a few short paragraphs after the other parallels between Curzon and Smith.  Indeed, Curzon's usage is arguably closer to Smith's than Hunter's, for Hunter uses only the past participle "reconciled" to introduce an adverbial phrase, whereas Curzon and Smith both use the reflexive verb: "reconciled me" (simple past tense) in the case of Curzon, and "reconciling myself" (progressive present tense) in the case of Smith. 

There might be one last parallel between Hunter and Smith's similar usage of "reconciled/-ing" to express disappointment at a failure to find an undiscovered manuscript, rather than in the unique manner that Curzon uses it (i.e. forgiving the monk for his carelessness).  But this may just be due to the fact that both Hunter and Smith would have also been mutually familiar with Tischendorf's famous account of his discovery of the Codex Sinaiticus.  In that account, Tischendorf relates how, during his third visit to St. Catherine's monastery, he prepares for departure empty-handed:

I told my Bedouins, on the 4th of February, to hold themselves in readiness to set out with their dromedaries for Cairo on the 7th, when an entirely unexpected circumstance carried me at once to the goal of all my desires (When Were Our Gospels Written?, 1866, p. 33)

He then goes on to relate the famous story of the monk who hands him the remainder of the codex.  Hunter deliberately models his novel on this account. 

However, unlike Hunter's characters, Tischendorf does not say he had given up on his search; he merely says he gave himself only two more days of searching before giving up.  And, that is what Smith did as well--he discoveres the Mar Saba manuscript not after giving up his search, but some days before the end of his visit: "one afternoon near the end of my stay" (The Secret Gospel, p. 12).  This detail is not found in Hunter: it is found in Tischendorf.  Suggesting that Smith is not modeling his account after Hunter: he's modeling it after Tischendorf.

Again, I realize one could simply add Tischendorf to the growing list of authors whom Smith most likely read and perhaps influenced him one way or another (Allegro, Curzon, etc.)  This list could still include Hunter.  But what explanatory role is left for Hunter?  It seems that Allegro, Curzon, and Tischendorf explain all the syntactical similarities between Smith and Hunter.  Considering that Hunter also would have read Curzon and Tischendorf (though not Allegro), this is not altogether surprising.

I recognize that on the surface, the similarity between the way Hunter's character was "reconciled" to his failed search, and the way Smith was "gradually reconciling" himself to his own failure, may still seem unusual.  And it remains true that both write in this manner of a discovery (one fictional, the other real) at Mar Saba.  But perhaps all Hunter and Smith did is bring together these two elements--Curzon's use of "reconcile", and Tischendorf's vain searches--in a similar manner.  The similarity of location is mere coincidence (and I have already covered this in a previous post).  Is this really all that unlikely?  At any rate, surely the evidence remaining is highly circumstantial, and nothing to base claims of forgery on.  If we knew Smith's discovery to be real, we would easily wave aside this very small detail or two as a chance coincidence between the works of two authors who would both have been familiar with the same sources.  One thought of monasteries in the Levant and wrote a novel about it; the other thought of them and visited them to make a real discovery.  This is not at all implausible.

One could of course discount all of this and insist that the resemblance between Smith and Curzon is trivial and accidental.  But if that is so...then any resemblance between Smith and Hunter is equally trivial and accidental.