Feature
The man who went to see Tolstoy
by Matt Nippert
The extraordinary story of the Auckland minister’s son who became the world’s most prolific linguist – and an eyewitness of the Russian Revolution.
Harold Williams travelled to Russia in order to meet his idol, Leo Tolstoy. He married into the losing side of Russian revolutionary politics, and he covered the fall of the Tsar and the rise of Bolshevism for readers in the West.
The most talented linguist of his time – according to The Guinness Book of Records – he was mates with H G Wells, took tea with British Prime Minister Lloyd George, and was working as foreign editor for the Times when he died early, aged 52.
It was, by any standards, a notable life, but New Zealand-born Williams isn’t as well known as his New Zealand contemporaries in sport (Dave Gallaher), science (Ernest Rutherford) or letters (Katherine Mansfield). There have been intermittent attempts to elevate him in the consciousness of his home country – historian Oliver Gillespie produced a radio documentary in 1954 and academic Irene Zohrab, then at Victoria University, published several academic articles through the 1990s. But it has fallen to another academic, on the other side of the world, to write the first reflective book on this remarkable man.
Charlotte Alston, a lecturer in history at the University of Ulster, and author of Russia’s Greatest Enemy? Harold Williams and the Russian Revolution, didn’t set out to write the biography of a hyperpolyglot; rather, she was writing her thesis on diplomatic history during the period of the Russian Revolution.
But Williams’s name kept recurring. The author of Russia and the Russians – praised by H G Wells as a “generous-spirited and understanding vision of Russia” – Williams wrote 45 front-page stories in the New York Times on the turmoil in Russia between 1914 and 1919.
“Everything that you look at – in terms of what the Foreign Office is doing, what the press is doing, Russian politics – Williams pops up everywhere,” says Alston from London.
“To be honest, it’s surprising that he’s not known in New Zealand, but it’s also surprising that he’s less well-known in the history of this subject generally – as someone who has been prominent in international affairs and actually the foreign editor of the Times. I’ve mentioned him to people who work on this period and they have no clue who you’re talking about.”
Born in 1876 at a parsonage in Auckland’s Grafton Rd, Williams was the eldest son of a Methodist minister who had immigrated from Cornwall six years earlier. The senior Williams’s missionary work took the family all around the country, and the wealth of reading material in the house sparked the young Williams’s interest in languages. Comparing translations of the New Testament, he taught himself, in short order, Maori, Samoan, Tongan and Fijian. At 16, he had a vocabulary of “The Savage Islands” (later renamed Niue) published in the Polynesian Journal.
He finished school at Timaru High School and, even though he failed the mathematics section of his University Entrance exams (his eyes were bandaged because of an accident), he secured a scholarship to study philosophy at the University of Auckland. During this period he also picked up a love of Tolstoy, the author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina, who was then at the peak of his popularity.
Especially taken with Tolstoy’s advocacy of non-resistance and vegetarianism, Williams stopped eating meat at the age of 18 and opposed the Spanish-American war on the basis of Tolstoy’s belief that “just wars” do not exist. Of the Boer War, Alston notes, Williams wrote to a friend that “England is great, but we are foolish if we think our greatness consists of a policy of the mailed fist”. In short, he became a firm believer in Tolstoy’s concept of “Christian anarchism”.
Williams honed his already-formidable talent in languages by talking to visiting sailors at Auckland’s docks, but his lack of ability in mathematics came back to haunt him: he failed his final exams and, turning away from academia, trained for his father’s profession.
Posted to Waitara on the Taranaki coast north of New Plymouth, Williams the intellectual must have cut a strange figure. His weighty sermons, referencing Tolstoy, ethics, politics and philosophy, were delivered to congregations mainly of dairy-farming families. And his superiors were scarcely bookish sorts; fearful of their judgment, Williams kept to himself his choice of reading matter, such as Alfred Wallace’s Darwinism: An Exposition on the Theory of Natural Selection.
Around this time (Alston concludes that the repressive atmosphere had something to do with it), Williams developed a stutter. He complained in a letter home that “fluency means influence in work like mine, so you can imagine how fiercely I rage sometimes against my infirmity”. But his writing did not lack for fluency; his letters showed a growing ability with words, as displayed by this passage describing a church gathering in the upriver settlement of Tarata.
“When tea time came you would have been surprised to see my staid and [sober] form careering down to the church with a flock of small girls swarming around me, clinging to my wrists, fighting for possession of a finger, hanging on to my coat-tails and generally trampling on my dignity.”
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