I came across a
German book with a pretty good schtick –
it consisted of an account of every day in 1913 through the diaries and letters
of artists, writers, politicos and nobodies. I love such mosaics, even if the
selection process inevitably favors the articulate diarist rather than the
storytelling streetcleaner, drunk in the Stube, all a flow of words that go up
into our infinite heaven of voices, lost there save for the audience of angels.
Wer, wenn ich schriee, hörte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen indeed.
I like the schtick so much I’ve thought about taking a week
and seeing, with the materials on hand, whether one could patch together a
mosaic of that week from newspapers, letters, novels, diaries, etc. The spirit
of the week. From many perspectives. I looked around, I bethought myself, I wondered
if I needed a shave, I wondered if I needed coffee, I wondered what time it
was, I sucked on a pencil, and then I rather arbitrarily picked January 1 –
7 1933 because it began on a Sunday and
ended on a Saturday. Classic!
So, herewith, the following
long barrage.
1.
On January 1, 1933, a Sunday, we find Evelyn Waugh
recuperating from Saturday’s New Year’s eve
bacchanal in Georgetown, Guyana. Waugh was restless in the early
thirties, after the easily foreseen collapse of his marriage to Evelyn Gardner
(the two Evelyns – too cute). On New Year’s Eve he had just returned from his
trip into the interior, the jungleland of upper Amazonia. There he’d gathered
material that he put to use in Handful of Dust, my own favorite Waugh novel,
which would be published in 1934. The hapless protagonist of Handful of Dust,
Tony Last, is also flummoxed by divorce, and also seeks to drown his sorrow in
traveling. He ends up crashing feverishly through the underbrush in South
America and collapsing, to wake up in the home of his rescuer and, it turns
out, his captor, the eccentric Dickens fanatic, Mr. Todd. The very name. In his
diary entry, Waugh sums up recent events with his genius for the outrageous and
eccentric. The party in his hotel, the previous night, was a “Scottish orgy” which took place around an elderly man
sprawled on the floor but apparently conscious. At about one a.m. Waugh, who’d
gone back to his room, was visited by a “hectic” troupe, including “fwo fine
tarts”, but ‘they all seemed too dumb and drunk” so he went back to bed. He woke up in time to attend mass at 7 am,
then swallowed a large dose of chlorodyne, which knocked him out for 11 hours.
Waugh fans will remember that the chlorodyne habit haunted our novelist until
the crisis recorded in The Ordeal of Gilbert Pinfold in 1957, in which the
protagonist, GP, suffers hallucinations due to excessive chloral use that make
his cruise on the beautifully named SS Caliban a nightmare.
One notices that another character, modeled on the author to an extent – as in
Handful of Dustt – is once again a captive of an enclosed space – the cruise
ship – and is tormented by audio hallucinations which take the shape of a jazz
band. Not top form Waugh, but interesting to conjoin with the Georgetown,
Guyana entries.
2
On January 1, 1933, we find T.S. Eliot in Claremont,
California, disembarked ostensibly to give a lecture at Scripps College (the
whole of the 1932 to 1933 Eliot itinerary in the U.S. is devoted to lecturing
and fees for lecturing); as well, though, and more important for our Prufrock,
he was met (at 6:27 am) at the train station by Emily Hale.
Hale has been a recent discovery of Eliot scholars, in that
tradition that combines gossip with high theory – not that I’m complaining. She
was the love of his life when he was at Harvard. Then he went overseas, and in
an act of true folie a deux got married to Vivien Haigh-Wood. They made each
other miserable, and perhaps that was a cultural good in the end – imagine a
happier Eliot penning the Wasteland! In 1933, he and Vivien were separated, but of
course by then Eliot had found an even larger cross for himself in the Catholic
Church. In any event, the lectures he had agreed to included one at Scripps,
where Hale taught theater.
He took the Santa Fe
railroad cross country, so he was able to see the Dustbowl struck Midwest for
himself – although he does not mention this in the letter he wrote to Geoffrey
Faber while crossing the great state of Kansas. A mighty fur piece – I can
testify, having once crossed its immense flatness myself in a vehicle, a ride
where even the least bit of hill was a lifesaving relief. In a letter from December 1932, he told his
brother that he had bought a Christmas present for himself – a camera. Surely somewhere in the world there is at
least one photograph of the countryside passing through the window of that
Santa Fe train.
Eliot, of course, found California to be “a nightmare”. California,
on the other hand, found Eliot to be modern, and California was for modern. He
lectured in LA and Berkeley too, collected fees, crossed back across the
country, lectured in Saint Louis and no doubt cast a glance at the Mississippi (I do not know much about gods; but I think
that the river/
Is a strong brown god—sullen, untamed and intractable …) and was back on the
East Coast by the second week of January. Eliot stayed in the States until summer.
3.
It is difficult to establish when Emily Hahn arrived in
London in 1933, but it was likely enough in the first week of January.
Emily Hahn was a striking woman, a beautiful Jazz age naiad,
and cohabited with the larger spirit of the 1920s as her own personal muse,
sweeping away any tradition of female subservience, any mere taboo relics from
the personal life. At the University of Wisconsin, she heard a professor say
that women were inherently weak at math – which made her change her major to
geological engineering, which had enough math to count. In fact, you could
count the number of women who had geological engineering degrees on one hand,
most likely. She then did this and that, much of which did not demand a
geological degree, and by the end of the 20s she ended up in New York City, to
begin writing pieces for a new humor magazine that had just come out: The New
Yorker. She published, under the aegis of that house style (in which the god and
oracle was Dorothy Parker) a little succes d’estime entitled Seductio ad
Absurdam, a volume that made a splash but not much money. She also went to parties, naturally. At
one of those she ran into Patrick Putnam
– of the Putnams, an old rich New England family. Patrick Putnam was an
anthropologist – although a rather wild kind. In general, people found Putnam
to be semi-mad. But these people were in a society that found Putnam marrying
an African semi-mad, and we now call those people racist. Putnam persuaded Hahn
– who was looking for adventure – to go to Africa. She did. She went to his
compound in Africa and found that Putnam sexually exploited native women and
beat the woman he supposedly wanted to marry. Furious with Putnam, and fed up
with having nothing to do but learn a dialect of Swahili, she parted ways and
made a 250 mile journey by foot to Uganda. By the time she took a ticket for a
boat and sailed to London, she was nearly broke, but she was rich in the materials
that went into her 1933 book, Congo Solo. But first those materials went
through the publisher’s lawyers, which took out references invidious or even distantly vidious to the
Putnam family, which meant that the book was often a bit incoherent. As the
participants in that scene have all died, a new edition of Congo Solo was
issued in 2011, which included lost material and the key to the characters
mentioned.
A side note: down and out in London in January, 1933, Emily
Hahn and a friend went to a bar. At one table there were two women, holding
hands and obviously in love. At another table there was a group of African
students, speaking in Swahili about the lesbians holding hands. Emily Hahn told her friend what the Africans
were saying, and the friend dared Emily to say something in Swahili to them.
Emily did. And that was the seed from which sprang her friendship with one of
those African students, Jomo Kenyatta, the future father of Kenyan independence
and, later on, a Kenyan dictator. Fate was always a series of cute meets for
Emily Hahn. But you have to be a certain person, have a certain sensibility, have
a lessened sense of the seriousness of who you are to be capable of cute meets,
perhaps.
4.
On January 2, the Hamburger Correspondant reported that 3
political murders in Berlin occurred on Saint Sylvester’s Day, December 31. One was a sixteen year old Nazi – killed in a
fight with communists. One communist, age not disclosed, killed in a fight with
Nazis. And one communist killed by a rando Nazi motorcycle rider in a worker’s
section of Berlin.
5.
One of the Christmas bestsellers of 1932 was George Bernard
Shaw’s A black girl in search of God. In the first week of January, a member of
the Wexford Bee Keepers association, of which Shaw was also a member, arose to
put forward the proposition that Shaw, the writer of a book that was from start
to finish a complete blasphemy and against all Christian principles, be
expelled from the association. Newspapers around the world reported that Shaw
was actually expelled – in truth, the head of the Wexford Bee Keepers stifled
the one member’s proposition. However, since the matter had been raised, the
Irish government banned the book in March. Shaw might well have been amused by
all of this ruckus. He was at the time with his wife on board the Empress of
Britain, a Canadian Pacific liner making a round the world tour. They left from
Cherbourg on December 3, 1932, and they were to return there on April 19, 1933.
In the first week of January they were making their way down the Suez canal,
headed for Bombay. In a letter to Rabindranath Tagore, Shaw excused himself
from travelling across India to see him, since, Shaw said, at the age of 76 he
was too old to fold himself comfortably into a series of Indian railroad
trains. During the cruise, Hitler became Chancellor of Germany, which Shaw
would have read about on board. And being a white bearded man who considered
himself a kind of foreteller, one wonders if he was visited with the ghosts of
those who died when the ship was attacked by German bombers on October 27, 1940,
and finally sunk by a U-Boat on October 28. It was a defeat-victory – at least
the British navy managed to rescue the vast majority of the passengers – 643 of them to be exact. Only 45 drowned. Captain
Sapsworth was generally commended for his valor – as the planes attacked, he stood
in full view of them on the bridge, encouraged the anti-aircraft gunners to
bring them down.
6.
Trotsky had come to Copenhagen in the Winter of 1932 over
the objections of the Danish Royal Family, who considered him a murderer of the
Russian Royal Family, to whom they were tied by the usual intricate diagram of incestuous
weddings. They were seconded by the
Danish communists, not usually allies of the Royals. The Danish communists were
making the Stalinist rightturn. Nevertheless, Trotsky came, and was sheltered –
at first in the rented house owned by a famous danseuse, and secondly, in a
more secure location found by a member of his entourage. Trotsky made a speech,
his last as a public orator. He was photographed by Robert Capra. The hope was
that Trotsky could find a haven in Denmark, but the state gave him a very
limited visa, and no pleading moved them. He left on December 2, taking a boat
to Belgium. There, he was greeted by a great troop of soldiers and gendarmerie,
and hustled onto a train, which took him to Paris. The plan was to go to
Marseilles for a week. Trotsky did go to Marseilles, but French authorities
tried to put him on an empty boat in the Marseilles harbor, which was supposed
to take him to Italy. He fought against this; fortunately, Mussolini’s
government showed more mercy than the French and gave the Trotskys a travel
visa. This is how Leon and his wife saw Venise for the first time.
By the first week of January, he was back on the island of
Prinkipo off the coast of Turkey. Trotsky had been reading and fishing on his
exile island before the Copenhagen interlude. He’d made friends with a fisherman,
who’d taught him how to throw nets and weights so as to “bring lobsters into
traps’. Those poor beasts, with their outsized claws! Did Trotsky ever think of
them in their traps as emblematic of his own
powers – of organization and mind and speech - and existential weakness?
It was in the second week of January that the news came from Berlin: Trotsky’s
daughter, Zinaida Volkova, had committed suicide. The old man’s face, a comrade
reported, changed overnight.
Trotsky stopped visiting with the fishermen.
6.
On January 4, 1933, a review of Trotsky’s autobiography was
published in The New Republic. The writer was Edmund Wilson – who was
the big man at the magazine at this time. Wilson was a beautiful reviewer, with
a talent for finding the explicatory conjunction, the narrative turn, the
little heroisms: “By the beginning of
the new century, he [Trotsky] had been banished to Siberia, where he read Marx,
brushing the cockroaches off the page.” Which, I have to say, is either the
best or the worst way to read Marx. What obviously attracted Wilson was
Trotsky’s combination of a literary intelligence of the highest order with Napoleon’s
talent for organization. That Lunacharsky found Trotsky “rather offensively
elegantly dressed for a revolutionary exile” was all the better for Wilson,
toying with modernism as both an aesthetic style and a political project.
Wilson at this point had already written Axel’s Castle, as well as spending the
early years of the Depression traveling around the country and reporting for his
magazine. This was the material that
went into the American Jitters.
About two weeks after the Trotsky review appeared, Wilson went
out drinking with Scott Fitzgerald, his old Princeton friend, and Ernest
Hemingway. Fitzgerald had come to NYC “to
get drunk and swinish”. They all met at the Plaza. Fitzgerald did get drunk. According
to Wilson, he 'put his head down on the table between us like the dormouse at
the Mad Tea party – he lay down on the floor, went to the can and puked…”
After these shenanigans, Fitzgerald pulled himself together
for his next literary confab, which was with T.S. Eliot in Baltimore at a
reading at Johns Hopkins. He presented Eliot with a copy of The Great Gatsby,
inscribed.
7.
The New York Times has a short item on another English writer,
or a married couple of writers, who arrived in New York City on January 5,
1933, disembarking from the SS Bremen, a German liner built on state of the art
lines, which could cross the Atlantic in five days. According to the reporter
who interviewed them, the couple were in the United States on a cross country
lecture tour. The lecture topic: marriage. The couple: Vita Sackville-West and
her husband Harold Nicolson. Their son, Nigel, compiled a rather devastating
account of their marriage in a book that appeared in 1973, his analysis of these
two circling around her own “confession” written in 1920. Vita Sackville-West
was attracted to women, Harold Nicolson was attracted to men, and both formed an
exemplary Bloomsbury household.
These Bloomsburians stayed at the recently rebuilt Waldorf
Astoria. On the sixth they dined with Charles and Anne Lindbergh. Anne was
pregnant. Both were still in emotional shock from the kidnapping and murder of
their boy. It would be another year before
the police captured Bruno Hauptmann. My grandfather, who worked for Smith
Corona typewriter company at this time, once told me he had been called on by
the police to exam typewritten material in this case. I can’t find any mention
of his name, however.
Vita Sackville West went, the next week, to give a lecture
at Yale. This too was reported by the New York Times. She said, in part, that ‘the
criticism of novels in England and America was inferior to criticisms or analyses
of sports events.”
8.
In Paris, the Nouveau Revue Francaise for January 1, 1933
came out with an excerpt from a new novel by André Malraux: La Condition
Humaine.
There were six subsequent excepts in the magazine, and the
book became the sensation of that year, with Malraux -after a vigorous campaign
– winning the Goncourt.
Malraux and his wife, Clara, had spent the better part of
1932 travelling – in China and in the United States. In a manuscript of the
book, he indicated that he had also written it in Japan and Paris and the Peira
Cave (which I believe is in Italy). At
this point in his life, Malraux’s great source of income was from providing
dubiously sourced Asian artpieces to galleries and various patrons of the arts.
In 1923, Malraux had gotten into a jam with colonial officials in Cambodia when
he was caught pillaging a Buddhist temple some 20 km from Angor Wat. He was 22
at the time. In the decade afterwards, he had become more… prudent. And he’d
also become a writer. Under the Gallimard imprint, working for a Gallimard art
gallery, Malraux was connected. Apparently he was still working on his novel
during the last week of December, just before that excerpt appeared.
Like Clara, André was a polyamorist. The couple resided on
the rue de Bac, close to Gallimard
headquarters. It may have been in the first week of the new year that he ran
into a sometimes painter named Louise de Vilmorin at a soiree given by the
Vicomtesse de Lestrange (“one ought not to pronounce the “s” north of the Loire”),
who was related to another writer/adventurer, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. Malraux
fell for de Vilmorin, and supposedly convinced her to lay down her painting and
take up writing, which she did. Malraux at this time was quite handsome,
everybody said, and when he was excited his hair would flop down into his eyes
and he would put it back in place with a sweep of his hand. A simple gesture,
very attractive in some quarters.
The affair between Vilmorin and Malraux flickers out over
time. There are wars, there is Malraux’s association first with Communists and
then with Gaullists, there are other lovers. For Vilmorin, one of them, in 1945 , is the English ambassador, Duff Cooper,
whose wife, born Diana Manners, was considered by Evelyn Waugh, among others,
as the ultimate society beauty. She had served as a model for his Mrs. Stitch
in Scoop. Diana spent a lot of time comforting Vilmorin, who was
insanely jealous of another of Cooper’s mistresses, the ever so mean and ever
so fashionable Daisy Fellowes, and would sometimes need to cry on Diana’s
shoulder. Diana had seen it all before. And she, too, detested Daisy.
8.
Shanghai. Maulraux’s novel was in part a manual for urban
guerrilla warfare, based on the Communist organized uprising in 1927 – which
was defeated with a great but uncertain
amount of killing. Some estimate 1,000, some estimate 10,000 persons. Mere
numbers now.
The city, in the 20s and 30s, was absolutely alluring for a
certain type of internationalist adventurer. It was divided into different
sections controlled, more of less, by the mandate of the treaty of Nanking that
ended the opium war. The English had a piece, the French had a piece, the
Italians had a piece. And so on. All very complex. In 1933, there was a
significant expatriate presence, all leftleaning, centered around the Zeitgeist
bookstore at 435 Bubbling Well Road. The bookstore was the distant offspring of
the impresario of the Komintern, the wondrous Willi Munzenberg, who – back in
Berlin – presided over a media empire, with at its center the Berlin based Arbeiter Illustrierte Zeitung. The AIZ was a
sort of herald of modernist communist layout – the kind of thing that rejected,
in Rodochenko’s phrase, “the belly button view” of the world. The view of the
bourgeois, ground level, all planar and shit.
In January 1933, the AIZ was still up and running. It would
be closed down by the Nazis in Berlin on March 5, 1933. The staffers fled to Prague
and other points east and west. Munzenberg found refuge in Paris. He immediately
set about discrediting the Nazi account of the burning of the Reichstag. Among
his stable of writers was Arthur Koestler, who described Muenzenburg in The
Invisible Writing:
“Willy was bom in Thuringia of working-class parents; as a
youngster he had been a worker in a shoe factory for six years. When I met him
he was forty-four —a shortish, square, squat, heavy-boned man with powerful
shoulders, who gave the impression that bumping against him would be like
colliding with a steam-roller. His face had the forceful simplicity of a
woodcut, but there was a basic friendliness about it. His broad, cosy
Thuringian dialect, and his simple, direct manner further softened the powerful
impact of his personality. He was a fiery, demagogical, and irresistible public
speaker, and a born leader of men.”
The heroic age of Communism lived and died with Muenzenberg.
Recently the subject of two scurrilous anti-communist biographies. The cold war
backwash. An era of reaction, typical of modernity since the French revolution –
first the red terror, than the white terror. Unsurprisingly, delegitimating the
struggle against fascism, the immediate concern of a coterie of post-Cold War writers,
has paved the way for the recrudescence of fascism. So it goes.
Among the faithful
attendees at Zeitgeist bookstore sponsored gatherings was the American
journalist, Agnes Smedley. Here’s how
PBS patriotically describes Smedlley:
“Agnes Smedley, a triple agent who worked for the Soviets,
the Chinese Communists, and the Indian nationalists, was one of the most
prolific female spies of the 20th century. Unlike most agents of the
day, who were reasonably erudite, Smedley lacked a formal education and came
from a poor, undistinguished family.”
The smell of the FBI used to be around all mentions of
Smedley from her death in 1950 onwards. After the Cold war supposedly ended,
the revanchists were delighted to string together Venona transcripts to out the
traitors. But a funny thing happened to the picture of America as a light upon
a hill. People, Americans, began to wonder if that light was somehow corrupt.
One of the currents of the new historiography – feminism – saw Smedley not as a
sneakthief traitor, but as a feminist.
The rise and fall of reputations.
What was unsaid among the anti-communist crewe is the simple
fact that Smedley might have helped save the world from Naziism. And, in
particular, save the Allied side in WWII. A side containing that Stalin.
Smedley came to Shanghai after the massacres of the Shanghai
uprising: in 1928. She was a progressive who’d forged her beliefs in the
crucible of the struggle between the Communists and the Nazis in Germany –
having witnessed it on the streetlevel as a journalist in Berlin – and was
naturally attracted to the Germans around Frau Wiedemeyer, who set up the
bookshop. O these essential women and their bookshops! One thinks of Sylvia
Beach in Paris, the essential link in the publication and distribution of
Ulysses. One thinks of Virginia Woolf in London packing up books for her
Hogarth Press, which printed the Strachey translations of Freud. Smedley found the society on Bubbling Springs
road congenial.
And then a Mr. Johnson came into her life.
Mr. Johnson was the cover name of Richard Sorge. Sorge has
been called the most successful spy of the 20th century. Was that
quote from Ian Fleming? Myself, I love
spy stories but think spying is generally a con game. However, Sorge was, by a
concantenation of circumstances, the
real thing – hard drinking, polyamorous, a genius at gladhanding and hanging
around the right people, absorbing gossip and transmitting his findings to the
fourth section of the Soviet military.
Here’s the story: “The evening he arrived Johnson (Sorge)
drove by taxi to a small restaurant on the Nanking Road. He ordered champagne
and started reading the New York Times. A few minutes later a woman left the
bar and went over to his table.
You must be American,” she said. It was a statement rather
than a question. “Mind if I join you?” Johnson smiled. “Of course not. Sit
down. You were right first time. I am an American. Got in this afternoon and
came right up here. A friend of mine in the States warned me about food in
China and told me this little place would educate my stomach in easy stages.
Have some champagne?”
The woman laughed. “No, thanks. I’ll have a gin sling, if I
may. And if you want to keep expenses down you had better drink the same while
you are here. Champagne is expensive stuff, you know. Incidentally, my name is
Smedley.” Spy business. Sorge had been
instructed his contact would come to his table and order a cocktail. Smedley
had been told that her contact would come into the bar and order a bottle of
champagne. In the cold light of history, the story seems a little too together,
too movie-like, to have gone like that. But spies do funny things. For
instance, Whittaker Chambers buried a bunch of material he received from spies
in D.C. in a pumpkin patch. Colorful lives seek colorful scenes.
Thus, Sorge and Smedley meet in The Man with Three Faces,
Otto Meissner’s biography of Richard Sorge. However they met, they soon became partners
and lovers. Yet when Sorge left Shanghai in the first week of January, 1933,
for Moscow, Smedley wasn’t even there – she was staying with friends in
Beijing. It was other people who reported that Smedley was in love, and in love
with a man who she clung to while riding a motorcycle up and down the streets
of Shanghai. Love, sex, the cause.
Smedley’s contribution, in the end, to winning the Second
World War was introducing the Japanese journalist, Ozaki Hotsumi, at a
Zeitgeist reading group. His story came out to his jailors and torturers in the
weeks before he was executed on November 7, 1944 in Japan. He was from a
samurai family, and perhaps it was in that spirit that he opposed the
militarism of the Japanese regime. Communism was a disguise under his disguise
which ultimate hid the spirit of traditional Japan.
Sorge, on the other hand, was born in the Baku oilfields to
a German mining engineer and a Russian woman. He was modernity, armed – wounded
in WWI, converted by the awful overthrows of those futile battlefields to the
international cause, and using his wits and experience to spy in the hotspots.
It was in Tokyo that he signaled the Soviet Army that Japan was not going to
attack in coordination with Hitler, allowing the Soviets to free up troops and
arms from the Manchurian border.
Sorge was hung for spying in Japan on November 7, 1944. The
end of that rarest of things, a useful spy.
Smedley, back in town in February, 1933, when she hosted a
party for George Bernard Shaw, His cruise liner, the Empress of Britain, docked
in Shanghai at 10:30 a.m. “A large crowd including Chinese and foreign
journalists and Madam Sun Yat Sen greeted him…” He answered a question about
urging revolution on the oppressed people of China by cautioning that he was
not urging attacking the police, “who were armed with pistols like robbers. You
don’t attack a robber head on.”
As an amusing side note to this collection of notables in
Shanghai, we should include one Roger Hollis., another Jazz Age Runaway.
Hollis was noted in Evelyn Waugh’s
diary of 1924 as a good bottleman at Oxford.
This, apparently, did not secure him employment after
Oxford, so he travelled around in the 1920s. He was a journalist when he went
to Shanghai – not a very lucrative
profession, but he could find cheap digs in the international section. And soon
he found a more important position as the representative for the British
American Tobacco company. It was the kind of position that would lead, surely,
to upward mobility in the office hierarchy. Still, he kept his pals in
journalism circles. He even met, or might have met, Agnes Smedley. Perhaps he
went to Agnes’s party for George Bernard Shaw.
It was that supposed connection that was seized on by a
number of ex-MI5 officers and a number of far right anticommunist journalists
as a trampoline for hypothesizing a shadow career for Hollis as a dedicated
Communist spy. If true, that would have been a coup, since he rose, after
joining British intelligence in 1938, to become the head of counter-intelligence
in the UK – MI5.
Counter-intelligence is an almost perfect bullshit job,
consisting of spying on spies while the state pays the tab. Just as art, for Clement Greenberg, was driven
by an aesthetic logic to become art about the materials of art, spying, another
modernist invention, was most perfect when most useless, a close reading of
other spies trajectory. After all, the molehunter in chief himself, James
Angleton, at this point in the century (1933, remember) still a pigeon-faced
adolescent, 16 years old, whose family at that point lived in Milan (while he
himself was boarding in an English school, a Boise Idaho boy far from any
identifying marks even then), went on to publish an avant garde journal, Furiosa, when
he was at Yale. He even scored a coup with the magazine: he published an Ezra Pound
poem. They both shared an enthusiasm for
Mussolini, it is said.
When a journalist for the Daily Express, Chapman Pincher,
made the accusation, in 1981, that Hollis was a double agent, it was the
beginning of another enjoyable – or cringeworthy, depending on one’s distance
from these events - skirmish on the fold between espionage and journalism. The
mole industry was then at full throttle. Thatcher admitted in 1979 that Anthony
Blunt, the Queen’s curator of art, had been a communist spy, one of the ring
around Philby. For these reasons, circumstances utterly posterior to anything
going on in the first week of 1933, the
accepting a party invitation in Shanghai in1933 was not such an innocent act as
it might have seemed to the “bottleman” enjoying his first big job in Shanghai;
that this could lead to years of funfilled speculation and political scandal in
1981 would surely have struck him as bizarre! Chapman Pincher’s accusation still haunts the
field of espionage-ology. Do we care? I do, but only as a royal exercise in the
novelist’s imagination. For a good
analysis and severe whacking of the Chapman Pincher hypothesis we recommend turning to Tony Percy, who on his Coldspur web
site has a habit of extensively comparing accounts of intelligence ground out
by journalists and the like to the evidence of the files. The journalists come
out looking like liars and exaggerators. To be fair, I, too, incline to
mendacity and exaggeration. I do try to keep it in check, though.
9.
William Empson, who was teaching at the University of Tokyo
in 1932, finished the year by publishing a small essay on Mrs. Dalloway in the
Japanese journal Eigo Saigan. That Empson was teaching in Japan was due to an
academic misdemeanor – when he was found to be in possession of a condom in
Cambridge – and a culturally important fact – his book, Seven Types of Ambiguity,
was published to much celebrity and fame in 1930.
The discovery of “various birth control mechanisms” occured when
his things were moved into Magdalene College, where he had just been made a
fellow. This prompted a meeting of the Dons in which the condom was solemnly
presented (the kind of material to make a very comic scene in a very English
novel), and his name was even expunged from the book. “Needless to say,” one of
the people at the meeting wrote later to Empson’s mentor, I.A. Richard, “the
possible parallel of Shelley and Univ. was brought forward.” Empson was a not
one to hide his sexual inclinations for man nor woman. Later, in Tokyo, he was
nearly jailed for propositioning a taxi driver. In a review of a book on the
psychologist Adler from 1929, Empson wrote of Freud: “It is of no use at all to
say that he must be wrong because his mind is saturated with sex; you might as
well say that a plumber must be wrong because his mind is saturated with piping;
he might not know the price of the furniture, but he is certainly competent to
know where the pipes go.”
I’m not sure this comparison does justice to Freud’s metapsychology,
but it does tell us something about a
very twenties view of sex as a matter of piping, which could only disturb the
old boys and clergymen who were deciding things in Cambridge at this time.
In a letter from March of 1932, Empson wrote that he asked
his students whether the ending to Mrs Dalloway was ironic, and that some
students afterwards came up to him and said they didn’t want to write it
“because it might be connected with politics." Perhaps Empson was experiencing
a kind of international vibe along with Virignia Woolf, who also associated
militarism and a certain hypertrophic form of masculinity. The chauvinism that
was running through his students as Japan stepped up its military activity in
China sickened him. In the essay, which he was probably revising in January, 1933,
in his rooms at 529 Shirokane Sankocho (“an absurdly expensive two storey
European style house” in an expensive quarter) he deepened a trope concerning
one of the accusations against Virginia Woolf herself: the snobbery, which
could be directed against Mrs. Dalloway: “At the end, at the triumph of her
party, her assertion of the same order of her tribe, she hears of the suicide
of the man who thought of himself as Christ and a scapegoat, and feels that her
sense that she might have done the same is a sort of proof that she is genuine;
she feels herself outside of her snobbery because she can understand him…”
Which is a marvelous shorthand concentration of the intersection of upper class
liberalism and the Other – an ethical threshold in which the liberal is, as it
were, stuck.
10.
On January 6, Friday, the papers report a wondrously
cinematic crime: the robbery of movie star Betty Compson at her “palatial
Hollywood house”. Compson had a friend over, a Mr. E.D. Leshin on the morning
of January 4, and they were playing cards when a Western Union messenger rang
the doorbell. He quickly revealed that he was not, in fact and however, a Western
Union messenger but a robber. He told her: Now listen. I know my business, and
if you make any squawk I’ll burn you both down.” A sweet line. Then he tied the
two up and gagged them with tape, took the jewels and left. While doing so,
Compson observed that he dropped some scissors and a ring from a pocket – the
scissors having been employed to cut the cords that he tied the two up with.
When he left, like a truehearted moll, Compson ‘by squirming around, … managed
to get the scissors in my tied hands, and after much effort succeeded in
snipping through the piano wire with which Mr. Leshin’s hands were bound.”
Perhaps Compson learned her moves from the crime movies she played in – like
the jewel thief in Paths to Ponder (1925). Compson had survived the brutal cut the
ensued with the end of silent films, since her voice was in good shape.
Compson’s greatest
silent film, the one that was a cut above the B movies she had begun to star in
to pay for housing and jewelry, was Docks
of New York, directed by Josef von Sternberg. Sternberg, in 1932, directed, after much controversy with the
studio, Blond Venus, a Marlene Dietrich vehicle. This was the film on
offer on the first week of January in many of the cinemas of Paris. Dietrich
was written up by Image, the French film star magazine, which described
Marlene’s choice of pants (“rejecting the skirt!) in New York society (“the
evening where, for the first time, she appeared as a man!”) accompanied by
Josef von Sternberg. In Sternberg’s memoir, Fun in a Chinese Laundry, he
reports that Ayn Rand experienced a sexual frisson vis a vis the incomparable
Dietrich, citing the film “The Shanghai Gesture (1941), telling him that “
rarely had any film so impressed her, and when I asked why she spoke of a scene
that was unforgettable to her: “the way the wind blows through the fur-piece around
Marlene’s shoulder when she sits on the back platform of the train!” Ah, films,
where all your fetishes spring to life!
Marlene spent most of 1932 in a diva dance, one Hollywood
has made familiar: threatening the
studio that she would walk out on filming Blond Venus if they fired Josef von
Sternberg, being driven around in a
limousine chauffeured by a man named Briggs who “had two revolvers strapped to
his legs and a splendid jacket with a mink collar draped about his shoulders” and
in general making her presence as the new European star known.
11.
The Viennese movie journal, Mein Film, boasted a filmfan
article in its January 1st issue about one of Ernst Lubitsch’s
regulars, Harry Liedtke, in the form of a letter to the magazine from Liedtke’s
wife, Christa. The picture accompanying
the article showed the two men with two
actresses before the window of a cottage. There’s Lubitsch, heavy lidded, his
grin somehow displeased, nestling under the arm of his actress, his hat held
before him at his belt buckle. It was
Liedtke who introduced Lubitsch to the charming springs of Pieskow-Saadow, a
good hour’s drive from Berlin. Lubitsch was so struck that eight days into his
visit in 1932 he bought land and had a house constructed here. “Lubitsch
himself has never lived in his house since, shortly after it was finished he
had to go to America. He hardly recognized his house when he visited it [with
Liedtke] during the present holiday. But
he did rediscover his love for Pieskow, and after his present European trip he
plans to go back and take a few days off here, and go out on the golfcourse.”
A tiny plan, a tiny future pleasure. In the event, Lubitsch
left on the S.S. Bremen – the same ship that Vita Sackville West and Harold
Nicholson had travelled on – for New York on January 6, 1933. Nota bene: the
date that the boat dropped off Sackville-West and the date Lubitsch embarked
would give the Bremen merely two days to have made its ocean crossing. A glitch
in world history? A mistake in newspaper reports? In any case, Lubitsch, a Jew,
never found time to rest in his house. He never went back to Germany. He became
an American citizen with a German accent.
Who took over Lubitsch’s house? A question for a detective.
We know, though, what happened to his friend, Harry Liedtke.
He kept working. He made the necessary connection with high placed Nazi
functionaries. Then the war came. Then the German Reich around him collapsed. Here,
according to a Der Spiegel story of 1949, is what happened to Lubitsch’s former
friend: “As the Russians were occupying Berlin, Liedtke… suffered a horrible
fate. In his house at Bad Saadow, just when he came out of the basement of his house, he threw himself protectively
before his wife, who was under attack, and then he was beaten to death with a
beerbottle.” His house, eventually, was inherited by his first wife, a well
known German actress, Käthe Dorsch.
And we know what happened to the S.S. Bremen. On the night
of March 16, 1941, it caught fire and sank in Hamburg’s harbor. A 17 year old
cadet confessed to setting the fire as revenge for a physical punishment
inflicted on him by one of the ship’s officers. He was sentenced to death and
hanged by the Nazi court.
12.
Infinities beckon, for the writer of this at least, and must
be resisted. End with the sad story of Harry Stanley. On night, in Denver Colorado, in 1917, when he
was still known as Glenn Smeeman, he went out for a ride with a girl and her two friends,
males. The night ended with the police stopping the car and taking in the
passengers. The car proved to be hot. Smeeman was sentenced to three years,
even though he didn’t know the car was stolen, nobody told him. He felt he
should not have been judged like the others. He looked for a chance. He finally
escaped from a chain gang, a literal chain gang, made his way to Ohio, and started a new life
in Cleveland, a good one with a good job. As bad luck would have it, he ran into the
girl in Detroit in October, 1932. The
girl saw her chance, and demanded money. He gave her 26 dollars. She told him
she could get 50 dollars for turning him in. All of this took place while, in
the movie theaters, they were running I
am a fugitive from a chain gang. Art or life? On January 17, he was sent
back to Colorado to serve the rest of his sentence.
We’ll ring down this week with the final bit from I am a
fugitive. Paul Muni plays James Allen. Helen Vinson plays Helen. The shadows
play the shadows.
James Allen: I had to take a
chance to see you tonight. Just to say goodbye.
Helen: It was all going to be so
different.
James Allen: It is different. They've made it different. I've got to go.
Helen: I can't let you go like this. Can't you tell me where you're going?
Will you write? Do you need any money?
…
But you must, Jim. How do you live?
James Allen: I steal.
Exit into the shadows. Exit into
the shadows of 1933. Exit all.
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