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.

When Harry met Sally

 

When Harry met Sally premiered in 1989, I did not go to see it at a movie theatre. It was not the kind of movie, then, that I would have even thought of seeing. I parted ways with American mainstream movies in the early 80s – I like the 70s movies, and I liked American film noir from the 40s and 50s, and I liked other cinemas from other eras, but the turn to a more conservative and humanistic film style was really not for me.

At some point I must have seen the movie. Or I had seen clips enough from the movie to have the impression I saw the movie.

Well, I finally watched the thing last night. And though I still have many reservations about mainstream humanistic films of the 80s, I found a lot to like about When Harry met Sally.

I haven’t grown any fonder of Billy Crystal, whose pitre face still seems to me to be disastrously blank in close up. His small eyes have a certain lack of depth, a deadness. And I still don’t understand the theme of “can men and women be friends” – I suspect that this is a class and generational issue. I grew up in a household where both parents worked, and my Mom was very close friends with her boss, so I had that model I suppose. And throughout my life, I’ve always had a number of close women friends. So the issue is invisible to me. Whereas the people in the movie are evidently bound to socially upward courses, easily becoming that 80s thing, the gentrifying upper middle in the city.

Yet if the theme is bogus, I can now appreciate, from my own place as a husband and father, the interviews with older couples that punctuate the movie. It is a collage device, which is here used not to put into question the artifice of the story, but to suggest that there are happy stories of marriage. Stories of meeting enhanced in hindsight by the fact that the person met becomes essential to the person one becomes. Fated meetings, meetings of fates. The story of Harry and Sally would lose its freshness without these documentary style interruptions.

It is a very white story. I don’t believe that Harry and Sally’s New York City contains more than one or two black peeps, serving dishes or pouring coffee. No Puerto Ricans, no Dominicans, none of Spike Lee’s New York City. On the one hand, these segregated worlds definitely exist – and on the other hand, from our world since, they are much more marked. Hollywood’s diversity is often of the dumbest, ahistorical kind – throwing black extras into scenes that deny the historic reality of black exclusion because the extras provide a bit of political correctness thrown out there to the multicolored, multi-ethnic audience. Irritating – but from such irritants grow a much larger set of opportunities for black performers. Watching the almost total whiteness of When Harry met Sally now, one has a sense that there has been a change, a small change, in the ethos, which is just the thing that the current administration and its right center media want to reverse.

I don’t watch certain movies in terms of like/dislike – that little switch can be really irritating. I watched this movie hoping that it would be better than I remembered – or that I would be better than the snobby spectator I used to be – and it was and maybe I am. I was happy my boy liked it. And I was happy that my wife, who does see, unfortunately, the snobby and sarcastic idiot I sometime am, saw that I wasn’t as much. And I saw it, obviously, because Rob Reiner’s murder hurts. The affection in this movie, the sheer good humoredness of it, is so missed, now. A big hole has been torn in the side of our disposition to be good humored, to find better fates.

Which is the little corner from which I watch, with a vitiating nostalgic, films showing that American past.

Civilization falls

 

I strip. I get in the shower, normally after I’ve left the hot water run. Then I wash with the various gels and shampoos. A friend of mine, a German, once told me that she always turned the shower to cold for a final minute, since this coating of cold was good for the skin. Myself, I’m just not that Lutheran. I sometimes stand around, in our shower, while the hot water beats down on my back, and try to recollect the fragments of the plans that I devised yesterday for today, and sometime this actually works and other times, most times, I find myself thinking about something else: the news, a story I am working on, the words to a song that got caught in my ear from going to the grocery store yesterday and hearing it over the P.A. system, all the miscellania. I sometimes do think about showering cold, and I think that I would definitely do it if I lived in New Delhi and it was 112 Fahrenheit out but I’m not and I won’t. So I finish up with the hot water and turn it off and emerge to peer at myself in the mirror, and sometimes I see myself and sometimes the mirror is all misted up. The image in the mirror looks back at me, I would like to write, save for the fact that that image and those eyes don’t see. Unless I lend them a persona, unless I am poeticizing. But no, they don’t see, I see me, though, so after wiping off the mist if there is any I proceed to the grooming part, the toothpaste and toothbrush, the deodorant, hair. The last part is brushing my hair, sometimes using a bit of gel, which is something I’ve learned from barbers.

There.

Everything so far has followed the civilizing process. Agriculture is developed, writing systems are invented, the dark ages fall, enlightenment and science are emerging splendidly. And my hair is brushed.
But that is when, looking at myself, I think that this won’t do at all, and pass a hand through my hair and undo the combing.
Aqueducts fall, museums burn, traffic jams, airplane on runways fail to talk off. The civilizing process goes into reverse. Or so this gesture indicates.
In Alain Jouffroy’s essay on the sculptor Germaine Richer, he catches this gesture.
“’When I find a form, I destroy it”. I have seen her comb her hair carefully, and then, unmake her hair in order to make it something for the wind, for life, her policed hair, which in any case will be thrown off by her movements. She gets a jump on time in her work by picking it apart; she wants to become herself and consciously become her own time. All her sculptures are already what they could be in a thousand years, in the measure in which they survive fire and the pressures of inevitable cataclysms.”

That small gesture, that disturbance in the field of the mirror, is not simply an emancipation-let on the granular level, but as well, a form of longer term control. If I can get the jump on disaster (and isn’t disaster always the ambassador of death?) I can live through my death my own way. Hopelessness is my only real hope.

I have a taste for this little gesture, this little attack on closure, in the arts.

It's a (epistemological) jungle out there

 Distance is measured in spatial, temporal, cultural and even personal modes. The anthropologist Edward Hall, working in the vein of ecological epistemology that had its origin in studies done for the air force on air fighter and bomber crew reactions to the adventure of bombing the great cities of Japan and Germany even suggested a science of the near and far: proxemics. Newspapers and tv deal in various degrees of false proximity, which in itself is not a bad thing: after all, illusion surrounds even our most personal acquaintanceship with people and events Like the lovers in Max Ernst’s version of the kiss who wear bags over their heads, even at our closest we never quite know how far away we are.

This is of some relevance to discussions of the “epistemology” of journalism, the topic of a recent discussion between Chris Hayes and David Roberts. They debate, between the two of them, models of knowing – with Roberts claiming that most people don’t think like scientists, but like lawyers. Like the latter, they think of proving cases, unlike the former who, ideally, think in terms of where observation and experiment lead them..

Admittedly, Roberts concedes, this is a very positive picture of how scientists think. But he continues with his “most people” theme: “Well this is my point, it's difficult even for scientists, but of course normal people don't think like that. Even in specifically designed institutional contexts meant to encourage that kind of thinking, even there it's difficult. Most people, most of the time, think like lawyers, i.e., they have a case, they have their conclusion in hand, and they're going out, gathering information, trying to build a case for it. Most people, most of the time, think like lawyers and reason like lawyers, not like scientists.”

I read this discussion and wondered about the sacrifice that pulled out of the jungle of epistemological stances the scientist/lawyer divide. Although I know that those two epistemic models are often the only ones discussed in journalism by journalists.

Why chose these professional types? Especially as we know that “most people” are thinking in various modes of practice. They are lovers or children or parents, they work as nurses or plumbers, they go on vacations or are kicked to the curb, literally, for debt.

When I buy groceries, for instance, I don't think about a case like a lawyer. I think more like an 18th century natural philosopher, reviewing the experiments and having a very vague idea of the variables – but knowing that I must have some picture of the dependent variables in order to get the right groceries. That must be affordable and not wasted.

The experiments are composed of meals cooked and either enjoyed or rejected. Other determinants are price, variety, and time spent cooking. I repeat, these variables are not independent of each other. There’s another variable – who I am cooking for. Each person eating has a history of what they like and how they like it cooked. Plus my own history. And, as a parent, I am continually engaged in trying to get my child to eat healthily – even as I have to admit my own numerous failures to eat healthily.

This adds up to a certain impressive complexity wh/ becomes evident if, say, a stranger joins our meal. Say a foreign student. And wonders why we are eating this one thing and not this other thing, etc.

Now, consider the way “most people” in America work. And notice that most people are neither policy wonks, scientists or lawyers. I think one of the ways to think about people's epistemic lives, a way of seeing the ecology of the epistemic stances, is to look at what they do. There are comparitively few scientists and lawyers in, say, the U.S. Here's the chart of job types from 2024 in the U.S:

Largest occupations in the United States, May 2024

Occupation	Employment
Home Health and Personal Care Aides	3,988,140
Retail Salespersons	3,800,250
Fast Food and Counter Workers	3,780,930
General and Operations Managers	3,584,420
Registered Nurses	3,282,010
Cashiers	3,148,030
Laborers and Freight, Stock, and Material Movers, Hand	2,982,530
Stockers and Order Fillers	2,779,530
Customer Service Representatives	2,725,930
Office Clerks, General	2,510,550

One notices the vast number of home health and personal care workers, of nurses, of fast food and counter workers, of retail salesmen, etc. Now, everybody has a situation, everybody makes epistemological adjustments to it, but I very much doubt the lawyer/scientist model can help us understand the knowledge of the cashier at the Mcdonalds in Tucker Georgia who has been there for five years, has a child who is being raised by her mother, has a boyfriend who is employed as a temp, and has a steady stream of office workers coming in for lunch. The epistemological situation here is a bit like that studied by Hall with his bomber aircraft personnel, who are under tight time constraints, and who engage in intense activity at certain times and at others don't, as this is spaced out over the entire practice segment of their time.

It is into the epistemological jungle we have to plunge, in my opinion, to understand the way “social media” has changed us. The us being a pretty charged pronoun.

Revolution and legitimacy

 1. The active and passive revolution

"The ideological hypothesis could be presented in the following terms: that there is a passive revolution involved in the fact that -- through legislative intervention by the State and by means of the corporative organization -- relatively far-reaching modifications are being introduced into the country's economic structure in order to accentuate the 'plan of production' element; in other words, that socialisation and co-operation in the sphere of production are being increased, without however touching (or at least not going beyond the regulation and control of) individual and group appropriation of profit." –Gramsci, Prison Notebooks

There are few references or essays about Neapolitan historian Vincenzo Cuoco in English. He is known, by a small minority, for having originated the distinction between passive and active revolution that Gramsci took up in the twentieth century and used in a sense that, to an extent, seems to call out to Karl Polanyi’s hypothesis of the double movement – first the movement towards the free market, then the movement towards state intervention to preserve the private sphere from the stresses the profit taking activity had caused - within the Great Transformation to capitalism.

Cuoco (1770-1823) was the sort of figure who could easily have been cast by Stendhal in La Chartreuse de Parme. He was also the sort of figure that was easy to lose sight of, since the nuances he stood for were, in a sense, drowned in the blood of his epoch. In this sense, there is something of Benjamin Constant’s sense of the need to reintroduce Nemesis into politics, in the form of limits that would work against ‘usurpation’ and conquest. Constant’s pamphlets didn’t stop Napoleon, and Cuoco ended up, by all accounts, on the side of legitimacy after the great fading of collective energy in 1815.

He was not from Naples, but from the Molise region. By training he was another lawyer – or rather, his training as a lawyer was just part of a vaster training in the vaguer career of a philosophe, that career that is not, like that of law, institutionally recognized, and seems like no career at all to people who have short views of the amplitudes of the human soul.

He was, like all Italian philosophes, keenly aware of what was going on in Paris in the 1790s, and had, to frame his observations of these distant events, a fund of sources that included Vico. When the revolution came to Naples, his friends, like Pagano, participated in it and even tried to lead it. Cuoco took a discreter role, but even so fled the collapse and subsequent repression that put Pagano’s neck in a rope. In Milan, he published his essay on the rise and fall of the brief Parthenopeen Republic, under the guise of a philosophical history:

2. Legitimate and illegitimate fools

“In history, the custom of reporting names does more to flatter the vanity of those so named than it serves to instruct the reader. Few men know how to master events; the greatest number is its slave; he is what the time, the ideas, the moeurs and the events want him to be; when one has painted the first, what is the point of naming the others? I am firmly persuaded that if in the greatest part of history, one substituted for the proper names the letters of the alphabet, the instruction one would draw from it would be the same.”

In the event, the philosophic dislike for the personal was quickly disgarded in a history that was filled with personalities. And yet, in a sense, those personalities are as unreal in their reality as the characters of La Bruyere. Or they are real, rather, as calculators the combinations they are made of – which is to say, of that time, those moeurs, those events to which they reacted as though they had the choice to be outside of them.

2. “But to imagine a plan for a republican constitution and to found a republic are two very different things. In a government where the public will, or the law, has not and ought not to have any other support, other guarantee, other ministry than the particular will, one cannot establish liberty but in making free men. Before elevating the edifice of liberty in Naples, there was in the ancient constitutions, in the customs, in the inveterate prejudices of the people, and in the interests of the moment, a thousand obstacles that it was urgent to know and indispensable to remove.”

Thus Cuoco, pointing to the republican dilemma when a foreign army, the French, took the city and most of the kingdom.

A story.

Four Corsicans are caught in Apulia when the French army took Naples. One is a former servant, Cesare, and one is a former artillery officer and deserter, Boccheciampe. Their other two companions are, by all accounts, unemployed vagabonds. According to Cuoco, the four were fleeing to Brindisi when the came to Monteasi, a small village, and took lodgings with an old woman, to whom they told the story that they were actually fleeing nobles – Boccheciampe was the brother of the king, and Cesare (this is not in the Cuoco account, but in Pietro Colleta’s History) for the duke of Saxony. Actually, the old woman was related to the royal intendant in the village, one Girunda. According to Colleta, Girunda was taken into the secret – according to Cuoco, Girunda went to the old woman’s house, knelt before Boccheciampe, and swore his allegiance. When the four got to Brindisi, they began to issue orders and raised an army of insurgents – Boccheciampe invested the province of Leuca, and Cesare marched on Barri. The men under their command, according to Cuoco, were ‘baron’s men’, criminals, and miscreants who had escaped from one prison or another. According to Colletta, the four Corsicans were soon busy firing and hiring magistrates and emptying the treasuries of various towns and villages, while imposing fines on the “rebels” to the King.

Not only did the people rejoice in this pillage of the “patriots” – they were encouraged by the clergy, who, knowing the men were imposters, nevertheless seized the chance to proclaim them legitimate in order to set going a countryside insurgency. Even the Bourbon nobility, well aware that the King’s brother was not a rude artilleryman with a Corse accent, played along with the imposters.

And so the revolt in the countryside begins not in support of the patriots who have overthrown the barbaric remnants of feudalism in Naples, when the Republic was proclaimed, but is conducted by the people for the feudal regime, under the banner of four imposters, against Republicanism, as it is understood, itself.

…

Since Naples was the home of Vico and Bruno, there is much here for the Gnostic historian, avid for intersignes, to contemplate, especially as the glosses are supplied by an intelligence like Cuoco’s, whose form of enlightenment materialism (for instance, he attributes the heterogeneity of customs and tempers in the Kingdom of Naples to the heterogeneity of the property arrangements instituted by feodalism: “… and the feudal system, which, in the centuries which followed barbarism and preceded civilization, always varied according to places and circumstances, rendering property diverse throughout; and that diversity necessarily passed into the moeurs, which are always analogous to the nature of property and the means of subsistence”) is lit up, as well, by the darker torches held aloft by Machiavelli and Vico.

The problem of “removing” these impediments to create a new connection between the state and the people – that organic connection of happiness – seems, in the chaos of 1799, to have reached a moment of dream tension in which parts of the fabric of legitimacy – as if will later be called – peel off to reveal the form of the variable that takes the sovereign position. Here I see a place for one of my favorite motifs (motifs for the essayist being what circus animals were for Yeats’ poet): that of the odd, recurring pairing of the sage and the fool.

For underneath Cuoco’s distinction between a revolution from above – a revolution for abstractions, imposed upon the public, which receives it passively – and a revolution from below – a revolution of the people, struggling to achieve their interests, actively – is something like the trace of the odd necessity that yoked the fool and the sage together.

Oh that counter-enlightenment crewe! From Vico onward – and actually, from the witch onward, from the tales in the forest onward – there is a program, or at least a programmatic stance, even if there is no system, or even if the systems are crackpot, deviant, ad hoc – which consists in the rejection of the power of the will to truth. One finds (inevitably?) that the opposition between sage and philosopher that structures Francois Jullien’s argument in A Sage is Without Ideas eventually crystalizes about this matter, our matter, the will to truth. The sage, in Jullien’s account, does not develop a neurosis about the truth – and thus a whole intellectual culture slips the bonds and knots of a certain mastering cognitive passion, orienting itself instead with relation to the road, or way.

Jullien does not ask if the Dao is the path of pins or the path of needles – little red riding hood does not figure in his story. More curiously, neither does the fool. Unless – and here one feels Jullien’s grasp of the theme loosen a bit – that role is taken by the Daoist.

There’s something odd in the story that Cuoco tells: for the great keepers of legitimacy, the monarchists and counter-revolutionaries, are quite happy to use frauds and criminals as their instruments in the war against “illegitimate’ revolutionaries. O, this modern turn – which I doubt even its inventors understood. We have lived to see innumerable frauds and criminals lay claim to the most righteous “conservative” tradition, even as their very presence de-legitimates it.

Cuoco’s story adds a chapter to the role of the adventurer in the Great Transformation – and surely it is in the wake of the adventurer that the fool and the sage come apart as a couple. The philosophe cannot, in the end, take the fool-adventurer as a comrade. Don Quixote can no longer rely on Sancho Panza, and the narrator of Le Neveau de Rameau can only understand the tricks of the salon con man through a story he has yet to invent. Later, of course, he will. And he will call it the Phenomenology of Spirit.