The pornographic snuffbox maker and Kant

 

In Leslie Stephen’s Studies of a Biographer there is a passage about the transmission of Kant’s philosophy to Britain that rather warms my populist heart. I like an intellectual history to have detours, eccentricities, and coincidences – and certainly the fact that one of the main capillaries of Kantianism in London was a pornographic snuffmaker hits the spot.

The snuffmaker in question is a man named Thomas Wirgman. Wirgman’s father owned a “fashionable” toy shop on St. James Street, which is known in Johnsoniana due to the fact that Samuel Johnson bought his silver buckles there, when he had need of silver buckles. Wirgman himself appears not only in the few books that examine the spread of Kant’s name in England in the 1790s, but also in legal history.  In 1812, he was arrested for offering for sale a toothpick case “containing on the inside lid thereof one obscene, filthy, and indecent picture representing the naked persons of a man and women in an indecent, filthy and obscene situation, attitude and practice.” According to Augustus de Morgan, Lord Brougham was his counsellor and somehow got him off. We go from legal history to philosophy in an anecdote about Wirgman visiting the great Brougham years later. Brougham at first thinks that his former client is in the soup again – but it isn’t that at all. Wirgman is now a Kantian, and he wants to propound the doctrine at the new University of London, with which Brougham is associated.

Wirgman visited Augustus de Morgan too, in 1831, to talk Kant. “I’m an old brute of a jeweler”, he said. “And his eye and manner were of an extreme jocosity…”Now”, he said, “I’ll make it clear to you. Suppose a number of goldfishes in a glass bowl – you understand? Well, I come with my cigar and go puff puff puff puff, over the bowl, until there is a little cloud of smoke. Now, tell me, what would the goldfishes say to that?” “I imagine,” said I, “ that they would not know what to make of it.” ‘By Jove, you’re a Kantian,” said he, and with this and the like he left me…”

Truly, an anecdote that would have made George Bernard Shaw think of the theatrical possibilities.

Wirgman, it seems, was converted to Kant when a German water colorist friend named Richter took him to see a lecture by a man named Nitsch in 1795 in London. The London of 1795 – the London of Blake, of radical mechanics distributing copies of Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man. As well of anti-Catholic/anti-Irish bigotry, bucks and whores and small children crippled in the chimney-cleaning trade. Philosophy, outside of Edinburgh, was not in great shape in Britain. But it was sneaking in from Germany in the oddest ways. Wirgman taught himself German to read the great Kant. He became a persistent disciple. He corresponded with Dugald Stewart, but Stewart was too old, too ensconsced in sensualism, to get it. He corresponded with James Mill. He met Madame de Stael when she came to England, and wanted to talk with her about the reference to Kant in De L’allemagne. In his small way, Wirgman got his goldfish to think about things – although Stephen doubts that one can connect Wirgman to Coleridge’s interest in Kant. It was Coleridge who got to the goldfish.

In a fragment written at the end of his life, Coleridge remembered the “rough crowd” of “Crown and Anchor Patriots,” who included Wirgman, Nitsch, and Blake’s acquaintance, Thomas Holcroft. Kant in the London nightlife – I like to think of it.

 

 

Two chamisso poems

 

Postcard to Gerard Nerval

 

Is this “crazed packrat of esoteric lore”

worth the finding after

the bandages are thrown off?

 

Labyrinthian hoarders my brother my sister!

Every wall opening

Egyptian eyes to stare at you.

 

The unmedicated, unmediated soul

Is the pyramid pressing down on

your ache-mixed body.

 

The soul  swallows

shit and ambrosia indifferently

while shakes mug the victim

 

and this ransom demand

in scrawled on a torn off newspaper page

-- ALL OF POSTERITY.

 

Yeah.

Good luck with that.

2.

 

On Rue des archives

 

The infinitely heavy night

far older than this bauble world

falls weighted by moons on street-bound me

and I go under and out with it.

As though some pot bellied Greek god

raping for rape’s sake thrust his snout

into my very roots.

And so I play, bottom-feeder me

 

With the roots of the Indo-European

tongue.

“Tupp (cock) named for its crest, comb”

“skoli young dog, kale bitch”

 

Night, ex-lover, bill collector, bummer

Swims in the muddy puddles

Where my face, the face of summer

dimly huddles.

 

Baudelaire, Rops and the Modern

 

1. Baudelaire.

I was walking home one evening, recently, going down Rue Fauburg St.-Denis, thinking of chores to do and as well, as one does, as absorbing proprioceptively the whole organism of Paris,  I came upon an advertisement video on one of those screens that you find hung up poles on well trafficked streets, flashing pictures of pouty women advertising lipstick or smiley women advertising cleaning products or boys with fey, distant looks in their eyes advertising sports wear. In the repertoire of these advertisements changing one after the other there was one that showed a face that was neither pouty nor smiley nor ephebe, a face I knew., a face I was rather shocked to see. The face, in fact, of Charles Baudelaire, from the famous Nadar portrait. And there were words superimposed on this image. The words did not advertise an exhibit, or a new book, or anything like that. The catch here was a public service announcement warning about STDs. Baudelaire, it informed us, was a victim of syphilis. Don’t you be too!

Baudelaire, in the latter stages of whatever medical condition it was that put him down, was a paranoid sensitive to begin with. He knew, as he walked the street in second hand clotes, that he  was being talked about – but in his wildest dreams I cannot image he ever thought his image would grace a public service announcement about STDs. It is like some awful, posthumous verdict. One that he foresaw. Here was the spirit of his disease revealed, and it was: modernity itself.  Here was the poet as butt. Every jake and jill could feel superior. Could pass by. Laughing.

“There is a softening of the brain, that is evident”, wrote his mother in a letter she sent from Brussels, Hôtel du Grand Miroir, where her son lay speechless after a severe seizure.

The Baudelaire on the screen of the public health advertisement is appropriately spectral. He seems to float there.

‘Ce voyageur ailé, comme il est gauche et veule !

Lui, naguère si beau, qu’il est comique et laid ! »

2. They all went to whorehouses. Those high modernists, those adventurers, those I-otherers.

3. I remember reading Baudelaire in high school and having an immediate case of identification fever.  I didn’t understand the poems in the Penguin paperback translation I read, I was just in high school and had little idea who Andromache was or what she had to do with a construction project but I did understand the spirit, the impossible combination of sleaze, gallantry, and that madly self-subverting oppositional spirit,   because I was an American teen and felt like one, which is to say, I hated teenhood. Seventy years before I picked up that book, in enclaves of literati and artists around the world, there was a Baudelaire cult. In Britain, in Russia, in Japan, as well as in Francophone countries. The extreme, perhaps, was reached in Russia, where a symbolist named “Ellis” (aka L.L. Kobylinsky) suggested, during the Russian revolution, that the solution to Russia’s problems was Baudelaire, writing to a Menshevik senator in the Duma that Baudelaire “was the greatest revolutionary of the nineteenth century, in comparison to whom the Marxes, Engelses, Bakhunins and the rest of the brotherhood they created  are nothing.” In Ellis went so far as to dress himself to look like Baudelaire. In Adrian Vanner’s Baudelaire in Russia, he cites the even more extreme case of a poet named Bagritsky who “was so captivated by Baudelaire’s personality that his face and his entire attitude began to recall Baudelaire: the dark eyes, the lips pressed together, bitterly and scornfully,” which were “an exact reproduction of the picture of Baudelaire” he had found in a book.  

Ah, the Imitatio Baudelaire. Even as I was reading my Baudelaire, in the general culture the cult had moved on to Rimbaud. It was Rimbaud’s name that was dropped by Bob Dylan and Patti Smith. Baudelaire’s cult status has dropped to an STD warning for the kids.

4. We owe a fine and finely grained account of Baudelaire’s bitter sojourn in Brussels to another Baudelairian, Maurice Kunel, who interviewed various people who met Baudelaire and went through the documents available to produce Baudelaire en Belgique in 1912. Through his books on Baudelaire and, later, Felicien Rops, Kunel achieved that blessed thing, bibliographic immortality. While his book, Baudelaire en Belgique, might have a micro-audience today, one can’t really write a biography of Baudelaire – or Rops – without referencing him. An exoplanet circling around a distant star: which we infer, us terrestrials,  from its infinitesimal gravitational pull on the star as we track it night after night.

It is to Kunel that we owe the scenes in the Hôtel du Grand Miroir,  where Baudelaire holed up during his time in Brussels, alternately dodging the landlady and her demands for rent and sortying out in borrowed shoes that were  too tight. It was to this chamber that was brought from when he had his cataclysmic attack in Naumur, touring the Eglise Saint-Loup in the company of his friends, Felicien Rop, the painter, and his publisher, Malassis, who put him on board a train and tried to understand him when he kept telling them to open the door. The door was opened. It dawned on the two that he meant close the door. He could not remember the word, close. Or rather, the word was occluded, in his brain, by the word open – the latter supervened on “close”.

His friends eventually took Baudelaire to a hospital, where he spent 15 days, his condition worsening. When he left, the doors of the entry suddenly and violently slammed shut. According to Kunel’s source, the sisters, stupefied, fell to their knees on the flagstones of the courtyard and prayed to God. “In order to banish their anxiety, an exorcist was summoned. Dressed in a white robe, waving an aspersorium in his hand, the priest sprinkled holy water and prayed out loud, conjuring away the spirit of evil from the room that had been abandoned by the invalid.”

A scene from a B movie. A giallo.

 

5. Felicien Rops met Baudelaire in Brussels. They were introduced by the publisher, Auguste Poulet-Malassis,  who had found, in Belgium’s lax enforcement of censorship, an incentive to publishing all the erotic material he wanted,  all the notorious French writers, and even the most cursed of poets. Poulet-Malassis had been arrested during the 1848 revolution – he’d been caught, armed,  on a barricade  – and one of the men he was marched off with “was shot and killed before him’ on Rue Racine before the garde national brought him to prison. A man being shot before you cools a man’s spirits. The publisher admired Louis Blanc - he admired Proudhon – and for their sake, partly, and partly his ideals, and partly his youth, he was in prison for six months until he was released. He hopped it back to his home town, Alencon, in Normandy, where he took up publishing. When he next tested the air in Paris, the 2^nd Republic had dissolved, and the writers he hoped to publish were subject to a regime of censorship that was too cumbering for his ambitions. So he hopped it again, this time to Belgium, and as we said.  Here, the very incompetence of the police was an aid to the promotion of culture, especially if that culture included drawings of naked women and men, and sly or even frank presentations of fucking. As Rops once said, « Les anciens ne reculaient pas devant un bel accouplement et ils « avaient raison. Il y aura de tout. »  Like many a lefty publisher before or since – Girondias, Al Goldstein -  he printed political pamphlets for his conscience and porn to make a living. It is a long tradition, this overlap of wankery and advanced views.

5. Rops was living well from his inheritance. He’d founded a newspaper and found a wife, Charlotte Polet de Faveaux, who came with a castle: the Chateau de Thozée in the small town of Mettet. The newspaper did not take off, given that it made too many demands on Belgian literati, but at least the writing of Rops friends and his first caricature saw the light of day, and those who made it their business to know, knew.  Charlotte had a child, who died, and another, a boy, Paul, who survived. Rops threw himself into caricature, illustration and painting. And, to Charlotte’s dismay, into being a general cocksman. That eventually undid the marriage: they separated their properties in 1875. Charlotte lived long after that, dying after Paul did, in 1929.

Her last letter to Felicien, in part: “You don’t want to see me anymore, Felicien, and so be it. You will never see me again ! ... It is you, yourself, Félicien, who ought to have demanded a separation many years ago. Your life at the moment is certainly far from that which you have been preparing for two years, with so much patience and cruelty, but it seems to me that it must be a comfort for you to be free and not lie to me ceaselessly. This last horrible liaison, the eighth that I ‘ve known of since our marriage, has been a punishment for you for the others, and it has killed me! Since you don’t want to see me anymore and have asked me not to write to you, I want my last words to you to be a pardon. My love for you was too pure and too great for me to ever feel any feeling of hatred, or of  a vengeance unworthy of me. “

The Gavarni of Belgium. The Daumier of Brussels. Plaudits he was accorded.

7. Baudelaire, when Rops met him, was busy and down at heels. The Baudelarian blues. The usual thing.  It had started off, as many of Baudelaire’s fugues did, with feverish plans, worthy of a Balzac character. Of Rastignac.  Putting out the book of translations of Poe, writing a new book of poems, giving a series of lectures. “Je veux travailler à Bruxelles comme un Démon”.  He’d conjured up the demonic, and he knew all too well what that meant.

Baudelaire had come up  on the train to Brussels in 1864 with his friend, Nadar. Nadar was not only a photographer, but also a aeronaut. He was going to Brussels to make an ascent and fly to the coast and maybe over the channel. He invited Baudelaire to come along on Le Geant, his balloon. Baudelaire decided not to, but he did observe the pumping the air into the balloon. Nadar took with him a M. Georges Barrel  instead of the poet.  Baudelaire watched the Le Geant lose its anchor and drift up skyward from the Jardin Botanique. A shape in the sky above Brussels. The  shape that came down at midnight, that same day, near Ypres, never making it across the channel.  

Baudelaire went back to his plans. Always the poems, always the letters to Mama, always the money. The Flowers of Evil had been published, had been fined for lewdness (300 francs), had been censored and re-published and been not reviewed by Sainte-Beuve. A slight that Baudelaire overlooked. His plan for a lecture series on the current state of the arts in France. Like Mark Twain’s Duke and Dauphin in the wilds of Arkansas, Baudelaire took the view that the yokels of Belgium would enjoy a little splash of up to date culture. Paris culture. Gautier. His maître. In the event, they didn’t show up.

8. Rops had run into Poulet-Malassis on one of his jaunts to Paris. All of his life, Rops was a traveler. He went to Lapland. He went, in the 1880s, to New Orleans, with the two women he lived with. Had children with. Sisters, Leontine and Aurelie Dulac . Eventually, their mother moved into the nest.  

He went to the Côte d’Azure and Tyrol. In Lapland, he caught malaria.

Poulet-Malassis fell in love, in a way, with the “beautiful Fely.” Rops was two years younger than Baudelaire, but already knew of him – as anybody would who was in the business of caricature and engraving. Baudelaire had written of Gavarni and Daumier – perhaps he would write about Rops? Baudelaire made a laborious joke at their meeting, but Rops understood that the joke was more than a joke – it was an initiation. He responded with the kind of gravity, carrying the joke along, that Baudelaire appreciated.

Specifically, when the waiter asked what they would take, Baudelaire had responded: I think a bath. And Rops had said, a bath sounds good. They didn’t laugh. It was funnier not to laugh. They were kin spirits in that non-joke joke.  Even if Baudelaire’s own Rabelaisian side, his fun boy side, had long been sloughed from him by disease and circumstance. The Baudelaire who had walked around the Ile St. Louis in his pyjamas had been forgotten, buried under debts, affairs, and the continual drama with his mother and her uncomprehending husband, and the poems, and the apocalypse, and Swedenborg and Joseph le Maistre.

Rops later wrote: “… we found each other through a strange love, the love of the first crystallographic form: the passion for skeletons.”

In a letter from Brussels, Baudelaire, in his eternal bitch mode, wrote: “As to conversation, that great that unique pleasure of a spiritual being, you can go all around Belgium but you’ll never find a soul who speaks.

Rops spoke. And there was a spark.   Rops and Baudelaire were spiritual descendants of the left hand of John Webster. A Baroque sub-vibe. As Eliot puts it:

“Webster was much possessed by death

And saw the skull beneath the skin;

And breastless creatures under ground

Leaned backward with a lipless grin.”

 

 

Leaning backwards in the throes of passion or the cataclysm of death – and weren’t these surrenders similar?

 

9. Rops was the child of a prosperous factory owner in Namur Belgium. The product? Printed cloth.  Felicien, the only child. His mother died. His father died. He was left, at twelve, to the care of an un-sympathetic uncle.  A story told of all artists, in all times, all orphans. Even those whose parents died well after the point that the artist had left the broken shell of the egg. He left the moeurs of his forefathers behind as soon as he discovered sex and drawing,  but he did appreciate the textiles his whole life through. He once wrote that his painting “arose out of brocade and the sewing machine”. Like Mallarme, he adored women’s fashions, he adored the peripherals, the fans and shoes. He bordelloed up the female kit, as he saw it, in certain of his drawings and paintings. He was a man with an eye for stockings. And a man with an eye for stockings is never going to live up entirely to Baudelaire’s credo of the shock. The fetishist domesticates the shock, finds scenarios for it.

 A curiously feminine strain in beautiful Fely. We should put in the balance as we ponder the sheer misogyny that you can’t get away from in the high mercury modernist field – that field that held itself to be opposed to the established values of the bourgeois social order, to the virgin and the mother, while continually stumbling over the virgin and the mother, inverting them, running from them. Never getting over the virgin and the mother. While interpreting the emancipation of women solely in terms of the emancipation of hetero desire. While continuing the tradition of a two step objectification: of taking the look of a woman away from the woman, first step – the male gaze is always a colonizer - a step of compliments and striptease; step two, cramming that look down her throat. Aggression, hypocrisy, what hetero man among us would escape whipping?

Among Rops’ Satanic works that attracted the notice of the aesthetes, wankers, bibliophiles and cops was one entitled Pornokrates. It is a famous aquarelle, showing a Rubenesque woman, bare bum and bosom and her naked pubis – no figleaf -  but wearing stockings and a sort of hat. She has a band over her eyes, while she holds a leash attached to a pig.  Rops was pleased with this image: « I took the occasion to see and to kiss the black silk stockings, with red flowers, of a beautiful girl whose lover is in Monaco. I made her nude like a goddess, I put a long pair of black gloves on her beautiful long fingers, which I kissed, and I put on her hair one of those great Gainsboroughs in black velour, with gold trimming, which gives to the girls of our epoch that insolent dignity of the women of the seventeenth century. And there it is ! my Pornocratie.

We get it.

Rops, from years of working on caricatures for magazines and newspapers and illustrating books, was inclined to art that has a “we get it” moment. Usually, what survives is mystery: we don’t get and we will never get Mona Lisa’s smile. But Rops, fortunately, cannot be summed up by the “we get it” moment. This is overlooked by those who snob the curiosa. The monstrous is simply, for him, an aspect of the most attractive.

Another anecdote about Rops, about the desire-become-flesh for the flesh-become-fetish. About experience. It is told by Camille Lemonnier in his memoir of Rops. Lemonnier was fleeing in the face of the armies mobilized in the Franco-Prussian war. Rops, a Belgian national, followed the French armies as an artist-reporter. They met after the battle of Sedan, and shared a meal, and then a blanket, in a poor hut. This is what Lemonnier recalls of Rops’ conversation.

“What a book one could make about this! Yes, that plain littered with human brains, the dead lying in the grass, making dung for the harvests of tomorrow, the almost voluptuous smell of the vast “pourrissoir”[a combination of pissoir and pourri – rot], giving me the impression of the earth in rut… And to illustrate that, like a vast fresco of a cemetery, with the cute mortal rictuses on the faces of all the stiffs… Look, it is one of the affectations of our old sensibilities not to see what is comic about death, what makes it a cold, bracing, terrible comedy. Well – I saw three stiffs in a patch of woods, fallen with their noses in the air, with the black holes of their nostrils in contrast with the greenish pallor of their faces, like clown makeup; with their hands and limbs awkwardly bent under them, just like clowns in a circus farce. Man, even so, I’m getting goosebumps as I talk about this.”

One imagines Rops’ vision in dialogue with the vast fresco that was really made – or in a sense produced, like a movie – by Anton von Weber in Berlin. A panorama of the battle of Sedan that was analyzed by Dolf Sternberger in his book, Panorama, or Aspects of the Nineteenth Century, which came out of Nazi Germany like an odd escapee – published in 1937 in Frankfurt. Sternberger, the student of Adorno’s, who was accused by Walter Benjamin of ripping off his own work in progress, Passages.  Von Weber’s panorama is a proto-cinematic attempt at the immersive experience, minus the scent of the earth in rut, minus the fields strewn with viscera and beshitted uniforms.

10. Baudelaire, in conversation with Courbet, exaggerating his anti-nature polemic:"...speak to me of the always changing Parisian skies, which laugh or cry as the wind wills, without ever allowing their changes of heat or moisture to profit the existence of stupid cereals.”

11. In Calasso’s eccentric book, The Baudelaire Folie, Rops is only mentioned once. Manet is mentioned often, but never centered – instead, Calasso chooses to center Ingres, Baudelaire’s anti-thesis. Calasso mentions the famous phrase in Baudelaire’s letter to Manet – a letter Manet was proud of: “You are but the first in the decrepitude of your art.”

The code word, here, is decrepitude.  From crepitus, to creak, to croak. The sound of a crow – or Raven. Poe’s Raven, like a heraldic symbol, certainly lies underneath this phrase, in a letter written from Brussels and Baudelaire was working on getting out his Poe translations.

12. At the end of his life, Rops, living with blindness and the two Dulac sisters, was working on an autobiography, culled from bits of his correspondence. He proposed calling it: “Memoirs to ruin [nuire] the history of art of my time.” One could line up similar references to the anti-creative impulse running through modernism. A phrase from a letter by Rops’ friend, Stephane Mallarme – and lifted from that letter to entitle a very good recent book about Dada from Jed Rasula:

“My work was created only by elimination, and each newly acquired truth was born only at the expense of an impression which flamed up and then burned itself out, so that its particular darkness could be isolated and I could venture ever more deeply into the sensation of Darkness Absolute. Destruction was my Beatrice.”

STOP THE SHITKING'S WAR

 STOP THE SHITKING'S WAR!

stopping: an aesthetic

 1. Kracauer saw his first film - ›Film als Entdecker der Schönheiten des alltäglichen Lebens‹ - at some period before 1906, according to his biographer. Much, much later, from a point in his war scattered life that he felt the need for some unity, he wrote: “[…] what moved me so deeply was just a normal suburban street, filled with lights and shadows, that the film transfigured. Some trees stood around, and in the foreground was a puddle, in which otherwise invisible house facades and a piece of the sky were mirrored. Than a breeze disturbed these shadows, and the facades as well as the sky began to sway. The trembling overworld in the dirty puddle – this image has never left me.“

The trembling overworld in the dirty puddle is not only a look into the mechanical magic of the moving picture – it is an image ripped from a distinct vein of literature. From Blake, from Nerval, from Novalis – the sense that there was more to dreams than something to be forgotten at waking.

Yet Kracauer’s film, and the films that became sound films and color films, seem increasingly to be one phase in a larger cinematic block, one that was not imagined in the twenties, when cinema’s cleverest critics – Bela Balaczs, Jean Epstein, Eisenstein – were thinking through the combinations, gamblers holding their dice, prepped for another throw.

2. 1980 is not a bellweather year. Hostage crisis, inflation, campaign between Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, these are the faint associative chimes that ring out for the American goof. But it was quietly decisive in one way for the arts, for that was the year in which the VCR entered the American consciousness as more than just a hobbyists item mentioned in Popular Photography. True, Betamax had come out in 1975, and there were expensive alternatives on the market, but it was roughly around 1980 that a critical mass had been achieved. Meaning that you didn’t have to explain what a VCR was. In 1981, Jack Valenti, stooge of the movie industry, said: "I say to you that the VCR is to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone." It is the ritual of technological dissemination that the corporations it seems to threaten throw their lobbyists at it, and then they figure out how to capture it and use it for themselves. Money money money.

What was decisive, it seems to me, was the ability not so much to record film, but to stop it.

This is reflected in the way film was written about. Before the VCR, film exhibition was generally a public thing that the writer on film had to experience like everybody else – that is, as a continuous, forward moving reel. A reel that you could not stop and rewind, unless you were in a very special environment. In this sense, it fulfilled that cliché about the book whose pages “you can’t stop reading” – except that this magic book would, indeed, have become something unheimlich if you really couldn’t stop reading it, if the pages refused to turn back or to stop.

The VCR put an end to that for the masses. Or, rather, it divided up the cinematic universe. All so subtly.

3. Jean Epstein, writing in the 1920s, had a prevision that film had yet to be understood in its true metaphysical and lexical glory – the words had to be invented for it, and so did the concepts:

“The Bell-Howell is a brain in a standardized, factory made, commercially distributed metal box, which transforms world exterior to it into art. The Bell-Howell is an artist and only behind it are there other artists: the director and the operator. Finally, you can buy a sensibility and you can find it in the marketplace and pay a tax on it as you do for coffee or an Oriental rug. The gramophone is, from this point of view, a failure – or simply remains undiscovered. We must find what it deforms or where it choses. Have we registered on a disc the sound of the street, of motors, of railroad stations? Some day perhaps we will see that the gramophone is made for music like the cinema is made for theater – that is, not at all, and that it has its proper way. For we must use this unhoped for discovery of a subject which is an object, without a conscience, that is without hesitation nor scruples, without venality, no smugness, nor possible error, an entirely honest artist, exclusively art, the artist type.”

Epstein was an imaginative film writer and maker, like many in the 20s. What he gives us is a machine that is an artist in as much as it transforms the world exterior to it. But what he doesn’t give us is the crucial moment when that machine stops. It stops, and the subject and object fall apart again. Or… perhaps not. Certainly they don’t fall apart again in the traditional way, where reason is the differand – not stopping. We don't have a metaphysics, or perhaps I should say the aesthetics, of stopping even now.

I have not had the infinite amount of time necessary to research my thesis, but I do think that we have all too lightly jumped over our ability to stop, to rewind, to fastforward film. A breeze has passed through the Overworld. The way Kracauer and Jean Epstein saw movies and the way I do exist in different aesthetic worlds, go on ‘different paths”, to use Epstein’s phrase. I rarely see a movie on TV – or, I should say, on the computer screen, which is where I download them – without at some point stopping it, for this or that reason, or even rewinding a bit (I didn’t get that, I say), which removes from films the magical, irresistible thrust forward which was the experience of Kracauer, of Epstein, of the movie as something one must sit with, endure, in a theatre, which must be run on a reel, to see. Film has become readable for the mass consumer in another way, and perhaps the way it was read in the past, perhaps the former conditions of its production and viewing, hold us in the most tenuous ways when we go to the theatre to see the movie. Something that I can hold onto in Paris, with its hundreds of movie theaters, a bit more forcefully than I can in, say, Atlanta Georgia, with its maxiplexes. The future does have a way of destroying the past that is most marked in our aesthetic lives, the lives of the senses, the real core of our lives.

Missing, 1930: a story

 

Missing, 1930

A story

I. The year starts off with the disappearance of an English solicitor.  On January 16, Mrs. Phillips, the wife of Davis Moses Phillips, visits the police office in Boulogne-sur-Mer to inquire about her husband. Mr. D. M. Phillips had taken the train from London on December 20 to go to Paris, by way of a channel crossing boat. He had an appointment to meet a certain Frank Samuel James, who resided in the neighborhood of Passy in Paris. Mr. Phillips apparently arrived from the boat from Folkestone and presented his first class ticket, no. 32,222, to the official at his disembarkation. He was wearing a chestnut brown suit, and he had a grey felt hat on his head. He held the handle of his valise in his hand. The valise had his initials on it: DMP.

It was rather odd that Mrs. Phillips had not begun her investigation into her husband’s disappearance earlier. He didn’t come home for Christmas. Did they have a fight? Did she prefer not to mention domestic difficulties?

Or was his disappearance connected to the mysterious deaths of Mrs. Wilson and Miss Daniels, two cases that were still open, as was asked by the reporter for Le Matin? Mrs. Florence Wilson, an English nurse, had been “savagely assassinated in the dunes of Touquet on the evening of Saturday, May 19, 1928.” Miss May Daniels, another English nurse, had been discovered, dead, in a field near Boulogne in April 1927. Their commonality with Phillips was of the vaguest – all were English.  Excelsior reported a twist in the tale on January 17 – apparently, another woman, calling herself Mrs. Phillips, had already been snooping around Boulogne, and had asked about the solicitor using the precise number of his ticket to identify him. Who was she and how did she know the ticket number? A question that goes out there on some frequency, and is never answered. So often, this is the case with the questions.  Did the newspaper somehow end up on the wrong end of the stick? Was this a rumor?

On the 25^th of January, Anatole France died and the police in London announced that Mr. Phillips’ valise had been sitting, all the time, in the lost and found department of the Waterloo train station in London; which posed a problem – would Mr. Phillips have actually made his way all the way to France without his valise? Wouldn’t he have felt it important to retrieve it? Unless he was carrying the valise only to disguise his real intention, such as it was. A double photo of Mr. and Mrs. Phillips is published on the front page of Le Matin. Phillips is wearing owlish glasses. He looks very young. The photo is badly retouched. Mr. Phillips is holding his hand under his chin, but the hand looks squashed and pulpy, the retouching job somehow failing here. This is not uncommon – as newspapers incorporated photographs in the 10s and 20s, they often felt compelled to edit them, retouch them, with spooky results.  Beside her husband with his odd hands, Mrs. Phillips shows up as not a bad looking woman, sporting a fashionably short hair cut that tells us – well, that Mrs. Phillips went through the 1920s like many another woman, taking her advice from her coiffeuse.

The newspapers had their fun with him, and then disappeared him as a story. No body, no money missing. “The case is of the type we often see. When an Englishman takes a fugue,  the port where he embarks for the Isle of Cythera is always Boulogne, Le Havre or Calais; everything happens as if the essential thing, for him, was to have at last quit the virtuous soil of Great Britain for our land of love and liberty.”

II. The great disappearance of the year, on the Continental side, happens in February: the storied, the legendary disappearance of General Alexandre Koutiepov. This happened on the frosty morning of January 26, and was witnessed by a nurse,  Auguste Steinmetz, who was working at the Saint-Jean-de-Dieu clinic facing Rue Oudinot in Paris.  Probably smoking a cigarette, taking a breather, staring out the window. The time : 10 :45. He witnesses a muscular, moustached man, accompanied by three persons, two men and a woman wearing a beret. They all get into a grey car with smoked windows. Steinmetz turns away from the window and goes back to work. Later, he tells what he has seen to the police. It is not much to go on.

The bluff man with the moustache had been waging war on the Soviet Union since 1920. He was the “commander” of the White forces, such as they were, in Western Europe. His command, it should be said, was a nominal and disputed thing, but he nevertheless had used his authority to direct several sneak attacks within the Soviet Union itself.  A grenade tossed into the Central Club of the Communist Party on the Moyka River in Leningrad? That was his plan. The failed attack on the Lubyanka in 1927? Ditto. There were other White Russian monarchists who aligned themselves with other Dukes and Princes, but nobody was as active in the resistance as General Koutiepov.

Disappearing him was quite a coup for the Soviets.

Who were the two men? The story published by the Echo de Paris, and believed by prolific spy journalist Nigel West, is that one was a GPU agent named Leon Borisovich Helfand, while the other was some available gorilla named Ellert, first name not given.  Marina Grey, the nom de plume of Marina Antonovna Denikina – the daughter of another famous White Russian general, Deniken – tracked down the details until she had a fairly complete picture of the event, writing the definitive book about it, which came out in the 80s. The Soviet plan was to chloroform the general and hustle him out of France. They used the grey car as a diversion, switching to another car while the grey car proceeded to Normandy, as though to put the General on a Soviet boat.

But in the back seat of the other car, after chloroforming General Koutiepov, they discovered that he was in precarious health. The chloroform killed him. Though they took him to a private clinic on the outskirts of Paris, run by a sympathizer, and tried to revive him, he died there.

III. 1930 was an excellent time to disappear if you were a speculator. When Charles V. Bob flew from Chicago to New York on October 10, he did not arrive at the time scheduled. “A patron of aviation exploration”, Bob had financed the Byrd Antarctic expedition. He’d also made millions in selling mining shares. As the lateness of his plane turned into the disappearance of Mr. Bob, it was discovered that he’d been actively removing money from his personal bank account and cashing in shares from his Metals and Mining Company on October 10. On October 22 Bob called his home in Akron Ohio to say he was alive. On the same day, Phoenix newspapers reported he’d been seen in Phoenix. On the same day, the assistant Attorney General, Mr. Washborn, told the boys of the press that combing through the records he’d found an “astonishing number of women” had invested in Bob’s companies and lost their money. Bob’s friends declared he’d probably left the country. Mexico seemed pretty likely.  On  October 28 his partners declared bankruptcy and his creditors had declared that he had absconded with their money. Not an uncommon story in the aftermath of the stock crash.  A picture of Bob was printed in the pages of various newspapers, under the caption: Missing promoter. He looked placid, blond haired, groomed, soft eyed. He did not look like a tough mining engineer. He did look like a nice young man. This appearance might have been a selling point. On November 19, Charles V. Bob gave himself up to District Attorney Crain in New York City and told the boys of the press that the losses in the company amounted to $6,000,000 dollars. His brother also surrendered to the authorities. They got out on $35,000 bail. Assistant Attorney General Washburn, included Bob’s story with those of other bucket shop speculators in a book, High and Low Financiers (1932). Bob got a chapter to himself. So did “the Reverend Fenwicke Holmes, who preached and had great followings which others of his clique sold stock issues to”; and so did “Harold Russell Ryder, the Broadway playboy who lived  a $500,000 a year pace and who is now in Sing Sing.” Bob had more fight in him than those grifters, and won suit after suit; but in 1939 the Feds finally hung a charge that stuck in court: mail fraud and conspiracy. Seven years in prison. But the unkindest cut was that the atlases took his name off the mountain range in Antarctica that had been named after him by Byrd.

IV. Another Englishman, this one in Marseilles, disappears on July 5. He closed up his desk, he locked up the combinations for the safe, as per usual. The Vice Consul, Reginald Arthur Lee. A dull name, rather enlivened by the many newspaper and magazine accounts about his disappearance, in which the name is given sometimes as Arthur Reginald Lee, sometimes as Sir Reginald A. Lee, and so on. Like the myths of the Greek gods, which come down to us from various sources in various versions, or like the dream mechanism that Freud had discovered at the turn of the century, where censorship and condensation produce our monstrous, odd, and sometimes pleasing dream images, newspapers collectively often pass down stories with a load of mutations, so that one has to … well, be clever. Part Sunday historian, part oneirocritic.

Arthur Lee, as we will call him, is 35. Apparently, the foreign office had determined that he was just the man to parachute into various warm water ports – Havana, Savannah (Georgia), Marseilles. Ports where gambling, prostitution and smuggling are not uncommon career paths. Places of melodrama and police on the gangster’s payroll.

There are differing accounts of when the vanishing happened. This is a structural element in all vanishings – the last moment. Often clocked with absurd exactitude.  Esse est percipi, George Berkeley’s ontology, rules over the missing, with their lifestory unrolling in the media and in memory, and their fleshly life as being, themselves, percipients of whatever disorder they have gotten themselves into, for whatever reasons, happening anyhow.

In this case the clock, officially, starts on July 10. At the consulate, Rue d’Arcole,  they are now worried. Arthur Lee’s desk is in order. They’ve found, finally, the combinations to all the various locks, and the book with the codes in the safe for dispatches. But Lee has not been heard from. This gets into the papers. His face graces the front page of the story about his missing-ness in the Marseilles paper, Le Petit Provencal, on the 11^th. This photo shows a bald man with a large forehead, a rather bushy moustache, and wire framed glasses. It was evidently taken for Identification purposes – hence Arthur Lee’s blank stare. One tries to place this face at some Havana terrasse, sipping rum cocktails,  but it doesn’t quite click.  “Aimable et bienviellant” is the judgment about Lee in the office.

The Marseilles police are on the case, under the direction of Detective Cals.

On the 13^th, Lee’s mother arrives in Marseilles and offers 13,000 francs for information leading to the discovery of her son and heir. Already, a story is out there: “Police have not been able to get confirmation of the report that an international drug ring” is involved in the disappearance.

Some rather fantastic scenes unroll in the search for Lee. Most notably, the sensational story about a man in pink pyjamas, reading an Arthur Conan Doyle novel, The Lost World, drinking whiskey next to a valise on one of the rocky promontories that jut out into the Sea in that region east of Marseilles called the Calanques. The Calanques are best approached by the water, as they are high and rocky and only at their peaks is there a twisting road. A report comes in that one Jacques Dessouny, who was hiking the Calanques, actually saw a man in the pink pyjamas, wearing a grey felt hat – and when he returned later, that man was gone. In the event, the valise was found. In the valise was found a strange note: “I am comitting suicide. Noone is too blame.” The evident mistakes in spelling imply that the note did not emanate from some University trained Englishman. Later, Lee’s part time maid identified the pyjamas in the case as Lee’s. Then she retracted the story. Detective Cals, though, was not certain. A cadaver was found floating in the waters of the Calanque, but to everyone’s disappointment, it was a woman.

Then the discovery of Lee’s lover, or at least his idée fixe:  an 18 year old Swiss miss, the daughter of one of the receptionists at the consulate: Ida Bucher. Who, when tracked down, claimed not to have seen her suitor in some time. A matter of breaking up.

In  Detective, the magazine edited by Joseph Kessel, the story of the Missing Consul is published under the Conan Doyle-ish heading: The Rule of three. It is written, or narrated, by a man named Ashton-Wolf. A Scots-American, educated in Europe. A man who has rubbed elbows with Conan Doyle (who died in the very week that the English Vice-Consul disappeared, and was buried on the 14^th of July in a strange, spiritualist ceremony).  There is, indubitably, a cloud of Doyle-ishness over this whole incident. Ashton-Wolf, according to Detective Magazine, has been roaming the dock area, drinking in longshoremen’s bars, listening to chit-chat. 

A true crime writer, Sophie Masson, has written an appreciation of Harry Ashton-Wolf from which I gather a few facts: Born in the American West to a Scots immigrant, he was sent to prep school in Cannes at the age of 14. Then he went to Heidelberg to study at the University. Then he came out and decided to be a detective. He became, at least in his own account – which often seems too fanciful to be real - an assistant to certain of the great criminologists:  Berthillon, for instance, who came up with the fingerprint idea technique. He wrote best selling books with titles like The Thrill of Evil. He was a great mixer of pulp fiction and real life – an inclination shared by the public itself, discovering the heightened life in movies and magazines. Ashton-Wolf likes to work the combination of gritty street smarts and science – he sees himself as a Sherlock Holmes, with a more American pragmatic bent.

Ashton-Wolf’s books go out of style, but he has his rather rarified posterity. Rayner Heppenstall, the Francophile English novelist, quotes him with approval in one of his books on French crime.

Ashton-Wolf, of course, has a casual acquaintance with Inspector Cals. Good man. But is he on the right track?

The rule of three, according to Ashton-Wolf, is a rule he learned from Conan Doyle’s detective: who profits from the crime? Find the woman. And look for your clues in the victim’s past. Looking for the woman seems to have been the immediate thought of Inspector Cals as well. He finds two “respectable”  girls from the English colony in Marseille, girls who have danced with Lee at various soirees, and who claim to have seen him on July 5 at the railroad station, Gare St. Charles.

Ashton-Wolf is sceptical of the whole direction of the investigation.

For the Detective,  Ashton-Wolf writes:

“21 July – M. Cals and his men are convinced that the man in the pink pyjamas was M. Lee.

I have not lived as an intimate of the great Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, without having penetrated a bit into his methods: permit me, then, to find all this story a bit lame.

Where did M. Lee hide himself from the fifth to the seventeenth?

Where does the valise and pyjamas come from, since M. Lee took nothing from his apartment?

Why was the name of the tailor cut so carefully from his garments?”

Questions to which Ashton-Wolf could find no good answer. Following Sherlock Holmes’ methods, Ashton-Wolf suspected foul play by drug dealers.

In August, the inspector, Cals, announced that he was ending the case because he had concluded that the disappearance was a mystification. Arthur Lee, he announced, was being deployed by the British Intelligence elsewhere, and so they had put on this pretty game.

In England, Arthur Lee’s mother was distressed by this conclusion. She had her own suspicions. According to the Times of London, she said that ever since he’d been made a prisoner in the war, he’d been nervously strained. He complained in his letters of being lonely. He’d had a nervous breakdown once, and suffered from his heart – which could mean physical stress, or could mean romantic despair.

His friend, the Vice-Consul in Toulon, thought Lee suffered  from a sudden bout of memory loss.

On July 30, 1931, news of the case came from an unexpected source: a newspaper in Osaka, Japan. A certain Kitada had been taken in by the Japanese police on suspicion of being a largescale narcotics boss. Under interrogation, he told this tale: Kitada had hooked up with a certain Tsunamitsu in Turkey to sell a large amount of opium. In November 1929, Tsunamitsu had arranged for it to be delivered to Marseille, from which it was supposed to be taken to Hamburg. Lee, however, had somehow got wind of this, and with the Marseille police seized the shipment.  For this reason, Lee was killed and his body tossed into the sea. Then the drugs were recovered and shipped to Hamburg.

If this story were true, it implied that the Marseille police allowed the drugs to be recovered after the Lee killing.

The Marseille police responded to the story by dismissing it entirely. Lee had never given them information on a delivery of opium, nor had they seized anything from Tsunamitsu.

The fate of Lee is unknown.

V. Judge Joseph Crater is in the hall of fame of missing persons. He was last seen exiting from Billy Haas’s Chop House on the evening of August 6, 1930.

Judge Force Crater was not a famous legal mind. He had risen, like many another lawyer, in conjunction with the Tammany Democratic Party machine. He’d been appointed, recently, by Franklin Delano Roosevelt, then Governor of New York, to his post. As it happens, the metro pages of the papers that hot summer were reporting about various scandals involving the Tammany Democratic Party machine, which had had a fine time of it under Mayor Walker. Walker was one of the most flashy mayors of the era now closing, the Jazz era, the Bootleg era, the burlesque era, the gangster era. One of Crater’s acquaintances, former judge W. Bernard Vause, was on trial in August, charged with mail fraud – that is, selling fraudulent financial instruments through the mails.

Judge Crater that night had dined with a lawyer friend of his at the Chop house. The lawyer friend was sitting with a showgirl, Sally Lou Ritz.  In his wallet, Crater had about five thousand dollars. Earlier in the day he’d had an assistant go cash two checks for him that came to that amount. In Richard Tofel’s book on the case, Tofel puts Crater’s cash flow, investments and life insurance under the microscope. Tofel’s theory is that Crater’s wife, Stella, who is at the vacation home in Maine, came back to the city and went to Crater’s apartment when he failed to show up after a week went by from that fatal August 5 night, and found four envelopes with his finances arranged in a drawer of his desk. She read them, and slipped back with them to Maine. After the story of the missing Judge hit the papers,  the apartment was tossed by the cops. Stella Crater remained in Maine while the investigation was going on, and the grand jury was out. Conveniently beyond the subpoena power of the Grand Jury. She finally returned on January 18, 1931, when she ostentatiously “found” the envelopes in the apartment. The envelopes have always been a mystery – why didn’t the cops discover them? Tofel’s conjecture is a good one. Stella always claimed that Crater was murdered for “political reasons”, which is why she might have avoided going back to the city while the cops were investigating her husband’s absence – she didn’t want to be forced to testify about anything. If some political figure out there did have her husband rubbed out, all the more reason to stay clear.

Stella moved to Florida.

So what happened to Crater? Tofel finds a clue in the memoirs of Polly Adler, the owner of a famous jazz age whorehouse in New York City. In Tofel’s retelling, Crater left Billy Haas’s Chop house and, perhaps with visions of Sally Lou Ritz in his head, decided to give himself a treat at Polly’s. From what we know about Crater, he was a cocksman. He went to bed with one of the girls, and as he was on top (or on bottom) at the “height of pleasure”, he suffered an enormous heart attack: too many years of too many chops, too many drinks, too little exercise.

Adler, of course, was in a pickle, with a dead judge in one of her rooms. She called in a favour with a gangster friend, who “provided the whole cement-coffin burial in the Hudson River.”

A story unproven. A story ludicrous enough, dirty enough, to be true. From the point of view that the truth is always nasty. Always in the down low, the down frequencies. The Twenties boom was unceremoniously tossed into the river; and the Judge Crater vanishing is how Judge Crater is remembered. The man who never came back.  

VI. A reporter interviews the legendary Kriminalrat, Ernst Gennat, in a story about Germany’s innovative “Missing Person’s Central” in Berlin. You have, perhaps, seen an imitation of Gennat – he was used by Fritz Lang as the model for Inspector Lohman in M. He was a large man – so large that the police force ordered a special car for him to be chauffered around in, with an expanded back seat.

The subhead of the article in Der Abend reads: “13 people go missing in Berlin every day – and 12 of them are found again.” This is a quote from Gennat.  Although Gennat does not claim credit for the system, for which he has a great amount of awe.  Credit is perhaps due to some lower level functionary or functionaries, or perhaps to some commission, or perhaps the deal is that within the organisation of the police department, hints and practices gradually hooked up, evolved as it were on its own, into a division that dealt with a day to day headache. The genius of the system is to treat missing persons as data that can be distributed by various categories in a system in which other data are also in circulation, independent variables looking for a home. 

“The 13 functionaries note down the missing person cases, here, sieve and sort them according to the kind and presumed idiosyncrasies of the cases, inquire at the hospitals, oversee communication with other state and local missing person divisions, make index cards for missing persons and corpses, alert police offices, send reports to the German Police Blotter and maintain contact with the Federal Missing Persons Center in Dresden.”

Questions?

“Who saw the person last? Why might the person have disappeared? Are there family problems? Have there been physical injuries? Is there a tendency to wandering? Infidelity? Are there pleasure fugues outside of marriage? If a girl of a certain age, fear of punishment? Is there an out of wedlock child? Are there debts, are there creditors the missing person might have deceived? If a child, is there fear of school? Is there fear of a particular teacher? Has the missing person been sad? Is there a love problem? Or depressed by unemployment and lack of money? Has the person expressed thoughts of suicide, and when, and to whom? Or, in the case of unforeseen accident, is the person young? Fragile? Sick? Cretinous?  Does the person have money with him? Has the person prepared by consulting travel bureaus or ticket offices? If the person is carrying money, could a robbery have happened? Could this be a kidnapping, or a torture case? Could the person have committed a crime himself? For example, taking someone’s life, assaulted someone, raped someone? Or is it a child between seven and ten years old? Here we must fear sexual assault and even murder.”

The thoroughness of the questions, the thoroughness of the procedure, and the oddity of the presumptions. When a person is reported missing, it sets in motion a procedure as rigorous as the instructions for the ritual sacrifice of horses in the Vedas.

VII. The Lost Son Bunko. The Daily News reports that Joseph Williams and Joseph Fuller were arrested for mail fraud. The pair would comb the papers for news items about sons being missing. Finding one, they would telegraph the parents, claiming to be their son, and asking for money to come home.  1930. People were on the roads. People were hitching, people were hopping freights. The Great Depression. The Dust bowl. Side hustles proliferated. People had to scrape by, one way or another.

VIII. The Hamburger Anzeiger, on June 11, 1930, reported the following story.

In London, a 67 year old man by the name of Seymour Mahon passed away. The office that issues the official death warrant found that this man had been declared dead twenty years before, after which he had been buried. His sister gave the officials a curious story. Twenty five years before the man had deserted his wife and child. About twenty years ago, in the neighborhood of his family’s home, the corpse of a man had been discovered and his wife swore she recognized her husband in the features of the corpse. Seven years ago, the missing man had suddenly shown up in London, going to the house of his sister. When he learned what had happened, he decided to let his wife continue to believe what she believed. In this way, he could covertly use the money he had made in Canada for himself. Only by his death did the authorities find out his incognito.

Like an outlaw draft of Hawthorne’s Wakefield, if you substitute, for the untold intentions in that story, its existential atmosphere, other intentions, those of greed and malice. From Hawthorne to Raymond Chandler – a history of moral progress. Of a type.

IX. A man of God, Reverend Phillip Lindsay, came to Buenos Aires with some news from Tristan da Cunha.

Reverend Phillip Lindsay was the pastor of a small colony of about one hundred located on the remote island, a wind-blasted place that, along with St. Helena, had been claimed by the British.  It was eight miles wide. A New York Times story in 1962, written after the island was evacuated due to a volcanic eruption, notes that there are only seven family names on the Island:

“The Glass family takes its name from a British soldier, Corporal Glass, who remained there with his colored wife when the British garrison was withdrawn in 1817. The Greens are descended from a Dutchman, Peter Groen, who was shipwrecked there, the Hagans from an American who left his whaling vessel to remain there, the Lavarellos and the Repettos from two shipwrecked Italians; and there are Swains and Rogerses.”

In 1929, Queen Mary gifted the community with an organ. It was received gratefully – unfortunately, nobody knew how to play it.

The island had at that time two councils to govern it, one composed entirely of men, the other entirely of women.

Reverend Lindsay was actually the lay assistant who had come to the Island in 1927 with the Rev. R.A.C. Pooley  on the SS Suveric. Lindsey left in 1930, before the island had someone who could play the organ. In Buenos Aires, he announced that he had witnessed the Danish training frigate, København, sailing in the waters off the island. It seemed deserted. “I examined the ship through strong binoculars,” he said, “and could not see a sign of life aboard.” She came within 400 yards of the shore. He described the vessel as having five masts, with a white band painted around the black hull, and apparently unmanned. He declared that her foremast was broken.

The København was the largest sailing vessel in the world. Its five masts stood up 195 feet tall. The side of the boat extended 430 feet. It was built in 1898 for the Det Østasiatiske Kompagni – the East Asian Company. After World War I, it had become a training ship for the Company. When it set out from Buenos Aires on December 14, 1928, under Captain Hans Ferdinand Andersen, it was manned by 60 cadets, boys 14-20 years old, from elite schools in Denmark. It was headed for Melbourne. It had done the Southern hemisphere before. It was equipped with a wireless, which Andersen used sparingly. On December 17, the steamer Arizona spotted it. On December 21, the City of Auckland contacted it.

And then there was nothing. It didn’t dock in Melbourne. It wasn’t seen in the sealanes of the South Atlantic, nor was there a single radio signal, nor was there a lifeboat. On September 8, 1929, she was declared lost, and an extensive search over the South Atlantic area was made. When Reverend Lindsay popped up, several newspapers carried stories about “the phantom barque”. The correspondent from the Times (London) wrote to Reverend Lindsay when he returned home to Liverpool requesting an interview. The correspondent mentioned that in 1928-29, the “Roaring Forties” – the ocean below South Africa – experienced an unusual amount of iceberg activity. “… the four-masted Herzog Cecelie and the full-masted ship Grace Harwar” had narrow escapes from the bergs. The correspondent mentioned the Finnish ship, Ponape, which was in the Tristan’s vicinity at the time. A four-masted vessel. In the great search for the København, somehow nobody had landed at Tristan to take soundings.

Reverend Lindsay wrote back to the Times: “That I actually saw the end of the København is absolute rot; but there is not much doubt about the ship I saw. Long before I knew that the ship was missing I could describe her fairly accurately. She was fivemasted but her fore or main mast was broken… It was on January 21 last year that she passed. The course she was taking was due north, and as she was roughly in the middle of the island she would in the ordinary course of events have struck our beach where the settlement was. However, when still a long way off (possibly 7 ½ miles) she seemed to be drifting to the eastward… The sea was rough for our boats, which are made only of canvas, and so we could do nothing but watch her gradually crawl past and run inside the reefs to the west side of the island.”

After she was out of sight, Lindsay assumed she struck a reef. It was an inaccessible side of the island. For a while boxes washed up on the beach – and then a 30-feet flatbottomed boat.

The correspondent for the Times finds Lindsay’s story credible. And he also finds credible the fact that the ship’s ultimate fate was unwitnessed by the Islanders, given the nature of the terrain. The correspondent has, himself, cruised among these isolatos.

“I have not been ashore on Tristan, but I have visited several other islands in that belt – Cambell, the Aucklands and the Macquaries.  They are surely among the bleakest and most inhospitable places on earth.  At Campbell Island there are four harbours, and yet there is a stretch of coastline that no one can see from anywhere on the island.  It is hopelessly inaccessible. When I visited the island on a Norwegian whaling steamer returning from  the Ross Sea in 1924, we found five young New Zealand shepherds who had been there for 15 months.  They told us they had never seen this coastline.  For weeks on end it was often impossible for them to see anything.  Whenever they went out from the hut to look after their sheep they were accustomed  to take a week’s food with them and some dry wood and a tent, in case they could not find their way back to the hut again in the fog.”

These solitaries! Lost like the lint and grit in the bottom of the world’s great pocket. The wool sewn into jackets from those Campbell Island sheep were surely paid for in madness and panic. We’ll never repay them, they will never get back what was taken. The fog, the hut, the sheep, the thousands of miles from any other human face, the ghost frigates, the cadets in the face of some horror, a sudden wave, a looming berg, the lost toted up by index card and blank stares. As the fog closes in.  

Love and the electric chair

 It is an interesting exercise to apply the method of the theorists to themselves. For instance, Walter Benjamin, who was critiqued by Adorno for developing, in his later years, a method that was at the crossroads of magic and positivism – the power of inferential juxtaposition, learned from the surrealists, and the method of dialectical materialism, learned from … well, kinda Marx, more probably Eduard Fuchs.

I myself like that idea – Adorno’s scorn for magic is part of the package of his own positivism. It is a high calling – methods are high callings, ideals – and Benjamin’s Arcades project, in its final state of gigantic ruin, shows how hard it is to follow.

I’ve been reading some of the fragments contained in volume 6 of the GW, and it is an interesting, rather vertiginous experience, as is any experience in which one finds oneself continually stumbling, continually knocking against the cracks. For instance, the fragment entitle On Marriage, which begins with a wonderful juxtaposition of the mythical and the tabloid:

"Eros, love moves in a single direction towards the mutual death of the lovers. It unwinds from there, like the thread in a labyrinth that has its center in the “death chamber”. Only there does love enter into the reality of sex, where the deathstruggle itself becomes the lovestruggle. The sexual itself, in response, flees its own death as its own life, and blindly calls out for the other’s death and the other’s life in this flight. It takes the path into nothingness, into that misery where life is only not-death and death is only a not-life. And this is how the boat of love pulls forward between the Scylla of Death and the Charybdis of misery and would never escape if it weren’t that God, at this point in its voyage, transformed it into something indestructible. Because as the sexuality of love in first bloom is completely alien, so must it become enduringly wholly non-alien, its very own. It is never the condition of its being and always that of its earthly endurance. God, however, makes for love the sacrament of marriage against the danger of sexuality as against that of love.”

One has to pause here. First, to listen to what Benjamin is doing – juxtaposing the prose of the “death chamber”, which comes from Police Magazines and tabloid newspapers of the 20s and 30s - adoring the rooms where the bloody corpse of some victim was found and, as well, the gas chamber or electric chair where the murderer was murdered by the state – to Greek myth, and then to a very Biblical God. And then one has to ask whether, indeed, death more often befalls lovers than befalls wives and husbands. Here a bit of positivism, a bit more tabloid knowledge, would relegate the Wagnerian Tristan and Isolde to the margin, and the more common family murder to the front. For the marriage that “God” gives us against the unleashed forces of death and sexuality is all too often a scene of violence. Engels definitely knew this. Benjamin surely, in part of himself, knew this too. The criminologists, who now call it “intimate partner homicide”, were on the case in the 20s and 30s. The mythological correlative is not Homeric, but rather the Maerchen of Grimm, where intimate partner violence is a constant companion of princesses and peasants.

However, then, I dispute the point, from the positivist, statistical viewpoint, I grant the power of the forces of sexuality and death, from the magical viewpoint. Benjamin’s surrealist genius in taking from the press the “death chamber” and inserting it into the myth of the labyrinth is in the best high modernist tradition of violently superimposing the archaic on the contemporary. This is a tradition that is moved, obscurely, unsystematically, to protest the allochronism – that long colonial time – which names it the “modern”. But to rescue the archaic by turning to the God of our Fathers means succumbing to a fundamentally reactionary impulse, which fails the test of historicity, and locks marriage into a form that it can’t sustain.