İsmail Habib Sevük’s Together with Atatürk (Atatürk’le Beraber) (1)

“Let us see what the Pasha will do”

I read books according to a fairly systematic plan. Yet I do not want to become confined within this system of my own making or allow it to tie my hands completely. For this reason, I treat the time I set aside for reading before going to sleep as a kind of “free reading hour”. I place no restrictions on the subject matter of the books I read during that time. These are books I have bought thinking, “I ought to read this one as well”, but which fall outside the reading plans I have drawn up.

The latest book I read during these free reading hours was İsmail Habib Sevük’s Together with Atatürk (Atatürk’le Beraber). The book was prepared for publication by Lütfü Tınç. My copy is the tenth printing, published by Türkiye İş Bankası Kültür Yayınları.

Let me make one thing clear at the outset: in this series of articles, I shall not attempt to offer a comprehensive assessment of the book. I make no claim to compare Sevük’s account with historical sources, examine the book’s literary qualities or explore every aspect of the author’s intellectual trajectory during the National Struggle and the Republican period. I shall simply quote a number of passages that I found important, interesting or worthy of discussion as I read the book, and share with you the thoughts they prompted in me.

What will emerge, then, is not so much a tightly structured book review, with its beginning and end mapped out in advance, as a loosely woven series of articles. Let us begin, then, not with the book itself but with the foreword.

An unsupported assertion and an unfortunate error in a name

In his twelve-page foreword, entitled “İsmail Habib Sevük’s Articles on Atatürk”, Lütfü Tınç states that Orhan Koçak described Sevük in one of his articles as “the most sincere voice of the National Struggle” (p. xvii).

Yet Tınç provides no source for this quotation. In which of his articles did Orhan Koçak use this phrase, and in what context? Where and when was the article published? Where should a reader wishing to read Koçak’s assessment in full look for it? The foreword tells us none of this.

Of course, there is no point in treating every failure to provide a source as a major scholarly scandal. Yet when the book in question has reached its tenth printing and is published by a well-resourced publishing house, one cannot help but pause. It is strange that no editor or attentive reader should have noticed this omission over the course of the previous nine printings. If it was noticed, why it was not rectified is another question.

At the end of the foreword, an even more unfortunate error awaits us: the name of Lütfü Tınç, who prepared the book for publication, appears in capital letters as “LÜTFÜ TUNÇ”. One cannot help thinking that it would perhaps have been rather optimistic to expect an editorial process that failed to notice even that the name of the person who wrote the foreword was wrong to pick up a quotation for which no source was given.

Even so, there is no reason to become unduly sceptical. Orhan Koçak did, in all likelihood, make such an observation about Sevük. Moreover, as someone who has so far read only this one book by Sevük, I have no objection to the assessment attributed to Koçak. The İsmail Habib Sevük we encounter in Together with Atatürk is indeed a remarkably sincere, passionate and enthusiastic voice of the National Struggle.

İsmail Habib Sevük

I would, however, like to make a small addition to this description: Sevük is not only one of the most sincere voices of the National Struggle but also an admirer of Atatürk through and through. Naturally, in his accounts of the years before the Surname Law, this admiration is directed towards Mustafa Kemal.

I am not saying that he “regards Mustafa Kemal as being in the right”, “appreciates him” or “supports him”; I deliberately use the word “admirer”. For the attitude we encounter in the book goes far beyond discussing the reasons behind particular historical decisions and concluding that they were correct. Whatever Mustafa Kemal does, Sevük regards it as the best possible course of action. Whatever he says, Sevük regards it as the best possible thing that could be said.

When he becomes angry, his anger is justified, measured and appropriate; when he remains calm, his composure demonstrates the extraordinary self-command of a great statesman. If he persists in an idea, this is proof of his foresight; if he changes his mind, it shows that he has grasped the new circumstances before anyone else. When he needs to act harshly, his harshness is praiseworthy; when he needs to act gently, his gentleness is equally worthy of praise. In short, even two wholly contradictory forms of behaviour can be equally right and admirable when it is Mustafa Kemal who displays them.

Without labouring the point any further, we may sum up Sevük’s approach by slightly adapting the famous lines of Erzurumlu İbrahim Hakkı:

“Let us see what the Pasha will do-
Whatever he does is well done!”

Admiration of such intensity made the book all the more interesting to me. Of course, I cannot say that this admiration lent Sevük’s narrative vitality or, at times, great literary power. Sevük is certainly no detached observer seeking to understand and explain the historical figure before him. He looks at the man he admires and describes almost everything he sees through the lens of that admiration. Yet the very attitude that makes the book interesting also made it, for me, almost intolerable at times. As a reader, I could never feel any affinity with Sevük or warm to him. I am sure that, as a writer, he would not have been particularly troubled by so great a distance between himself and a reader like me.

Even so, this does not make the book any less worth reading today. On the contrary, it makes the book an interesting historical document in its own right. We should remember that Sevük not only tells us about Mustafa Kemal but also shows us how one of the intellectuals of the period viewed him. In other words, how Sevük tells his story deserves historical scrutiny just as much as what he tells us.

The passages I shall quote in subsequent instalments are worth reading in this light too.

To be continued