For Daniel Ellsberg

The background story to the Pentagon Papers started out with a payment of 6,742 dollars. That is how much the U.S. government, in its majesty, decided to shell out to the family of Thai Khak Chuyen, who was a Vietnamese “translator and informant” who worked with the Green Berets in Laos. That the Green Berets were in Laos was, itself, a rather iffy proposition – who authorized that? And who authorized the torture and murder of “Mr. Chuyen”?

The first question is answered, in various stories about this incident, with the phrase: “covert mission.” In the semi-democracy of the United States in its Cold War phase, “covert missions” could emerge, with no traditional legal warrant, at the whim of the executive branch, and be carried out with the compliance of a Congress that took on the role of the blindfolded observer, the Daddy warbucks who passed the bills doling out money to intelligence agencies who worked for the “Defence Department”. In the end, as the Nixon regime battled to pull out with “peace and honor” from Southeast Asia, some Congress peeps even sought to exert some control over executive whim.

The Cold War foreign policy struggle was ultimately won by the Cold Warriors – Truman through Bush, the whole lot.

The second question, though, was a story now pretty much forgotten. Highlights: Mr. Chuyen appeared, or so it was thought, in a secret photo that showed him talking with a North Vietnamese officer. But he was suspected, as well, of being a channel to the South Vietnamese, to the government of Thieu. And the Central Intelligence Agency, which was ultimately pulling the strings in Laos and in much of South Vietnam, wanted to control the information that went to Thieu’s government.

Thus, Mr. Chuyen, unconsciously, was at the center of both a geopolitical and interbranch conflict.

At the same time, Mr. Chuyen had made friends with some of the Green Beret’s he was interacting with. One of them, a sergeant, Alvin L. Smith, went to Saigon with Mr. Chuyen, Phem Kim Lien, his wife, and Lien’s sister. “He was always going to Saigon with Chuyen for one thing or another. But it didn’t seem wrong until afterwards,” his Captain, Robert F. Marasco, testified.

At some point in June, 1969, questions arose about Chuyen. These questions were circumscribed by the situation of the Green Berets, who, under the indirect direction of the CIA, were part of something called Operation Gamma. Operation Gamma was enacted outside the purview of American law, and involved hazy incursions into Cambodia and Laos.

Smith “decided that because he was the only enlisted man, a non-commissioned officer, involved in the Chuyen thing, that we did not trust him and would kill him,” according to Marasco, who also said that was “ridiculous.” It might be the case that Smith had seen how killing could be done to not seem like killing – how a man could be told to head down a trail, for instance, by people who were pretty sure he wouldn’t come back. It might not have been so ridiculous.

Even for an American. For Chuyen, what happened was: the Green Beret’s arrested him, hooded him, took him to an island prison camp, pumped him full of sodium pentothal and for six days interrogated him, depriving him of sleep. But they couldn’t get him to confess.

At a certain point, then, the question was elimination, or what other people call murder. Consulting with their CIA contact in Saigon, they got an ambiguous answer. The CIA wasn’t opposed or for. They were tossing the question back to the Green Beret group. They weighed letting Mr. Chuyen go, but then, what if he spilled the beans, dread thought, to the Saigon government? Fighting for a democracy that had never been a democracy was one thing, but telling the government in Saigon what the Americans were doing was something else.

The solution came out of the Green Beret discussion, in which the options were: drop him out of a plane over the Sea, land him in Taiwan and let the secret police disappear him, garrot him, or do the right thing, the only thing – put two bullets in his head and dump the body.

Captain Marasco did the shooting. Then they dumped the body in the sea, wrapped in two iron chains. And then their consciences began to work on them.

Meanwhile, in Saigon, Ted Shackley, the CIA head, decided that they shouldn’t eliminate Chuyen. So he asked the Green Beret unit to put him in touch with Chuyen. The unit responded that he’d gone back to Cambodia. Shackley knew what that meant, so he laid the matter down with General Abrams – making it an army matter. The army investigated, questioning the CIA contact in Saigon, who said: “I advised Major Crew that eliminating Chuyen couldn’t be approved. However, I did say it was the most efficient course of action.”

The wheels grind. The Green Beret unit is arrested on the charge of murdering Chuyen. And this is where politics enters in. Nixon’s people were advised by the CIA that if it really came to trial, they might have to testify about Operation Gamma – essentially, blowing the cover on their illegal operation. Nixon’s people did not want the cover blown on Gamma. Nixon’s people were all about delivering a hard body blow to the North Vietnamese and their allies so that Nixon would have time to withdraw with “honor” from Vietnam. But Nixon’s Defence Department was, after all, at war as well with the CIA. The Defence Department said that at the trial, they would call CIA agents to the stand.

Helms said no. No agents could be called to the stand. The Defence Department, on September 29, announced the trial couldn’t be held, and the men were free. The headline in the NYT read: ARMY DROPS BERETS’ CASE AS C.I.A. BARTS ITS AGENTS FROM TESTIFYING AT TRIAL.

The Los Angeles Times had a similar headline. It was read that morning by Daniel Ellsberg in Malibu. He had had been moving towards the decision to leak the documents he’d been copying, and that story decided the matter for him.

Mr. Cuyen’s murder was a small thing in that murderous war, and it is just its smallness that should make us wonder about Nemesis and her instruments. Out of that murder arose the decision that resulted in the publication of the Pentagon Papers. And out of that leak arose the decision to stop leaks, leading to the formation of the White House Plumbers Group. And out of that group arose a number of decisions – the burglary of Daniel Ellsburg’s psychiatrist’s office, for instance – that led up to the Watergate burglary. And out of that fifth rate affair, as Nixon called it, arose the investigations, the Senate and House Committees, and the resignation of President Nixon.

On December 29, 1972, Edward Lorenz gave a talk to the 139th meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science with the title: Predictability: Does the Flap of a Butterfly’s Wings in Brazil set off a Tornado in Texas. Scientists don’t dicker with nemesis. Novelists do. Yet at that date, all unconsciously, the splash of a weighted body being lowered into the South China Sea one June night in 1969 was causing, in its small way, the overthrow of the American emperor. Who had just celebrated the biggest landslide victory in twentieth century history.

cormac

 

To sic James Wood on Cormac McCarthy is unfair to the sensibilities of both writers. The New Yorker obit/review of the two last McCarthy book tries for the sweeping overview, but Wood is permanently not in the mood for McCarthy - hence his elevation of The Road, surely one of McCarthy's minor novels, as the major work over Blood Meridian, against which Wood tosses such howlers as: "Of course, his earlier novels explored “themes” and, in their way, ideas; an academic industry loyally decodes McCarthy’s every blood-steeped move around evil, suffering, God or no-God, the Bible, genocidal American expansion, the Western, environmental catastrophe, and so on. But those novels did not purvey, and in some sense could have no space for, intellectual discourse. These books were inhospitable to intellectuals, with their characteristic chatter." For Wood, an intellectual must either work at the New Yorker or teach at some respectable Ivy League school. They wear an I badge. But anybody who reads Blood Meridian and encounters the Judge encounters intellectual talk as high placed as that iof the figures in Moby Dick. The inability to see ideas in ordinary life - in ordinary American life - marks Wood's odd relationship to American letters.

Dwight Garner, god bless him, is much better in the NYT obituary. He gets McCarthy's oddness right. McCarthy's world is marked, like the world of Melville's Pequod, by a startling absense of women, of the feminine in general. But the homoerotic bonds don't find their hetero places as friendships - male friendship is as passing a state as, say, marriage. These are books essentially about loners and their disastrous effect on those about them. The Border Trilogy is McCarthy's exploration of what it might be like not to be a loner, but there is a certain static in that exploration, a certain sacrifice of narrative magnificence.

The truly American torture is solitary - something visited upon thousands of men every day in that God forsaken land. It is an extension of, a sort of diabolical parody of, individualism - that strange and very hetero fantasy ideology, which suppresses the mother role entirely, which seriously holds, among people whose lives were spent, as babies and children, eating free lunches, breakfasts and dinners, that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Taking that asociality into the wilderness - or its shadow, the backwards culture of pre-Civil Rights Dixie - is what makes McCarthy fascinating. It is also what makes McCarthy repulsive - especially to someone like James Wood, who can't "see" it.

This, from the great - or in Woods' view, unsound- Blood Meridian. The Judge is sketching and writing things in a notebook:

"A Tennessean named Webster had been watching him and he asked the judge what he aimed to do with those notes and sketches and the judge smiled and said that it was his intention to expunge them from the memory of man. Webster smiled and the judge laughed. Webster regarded him with one eye asquint and he said: Well you’ve been a draftsman somewheres and them pictures is like enough the things themselves. But no man can put all the world in a book. No more than everthing drawed in a book is so.

Well said, Marcus, spoke the judge.

But dont draw me, said Webster. For I dont want in your book.

My book or some other book said the judge. What is to be deviates no jot from the book wherein it’s writ. How could it? It would be a false book and a false book is no book at all."

 

Nathaniel Mackay's oppositional nostalgia, and mine

 

The poet Nathaniel Mackay wrote a brilliant, manifesto-like  essay in 1987 entitled “Sound and Sentiment, Sound and Symbol” that begins, as most American poetic manifestos do not begin, with a consideration of anthropological fact. Mackay begins with the belief about sound and music – bird music, wind music – of the Kaluli of Papua New Guinea. Kaluli myth – rather like Greek myth – locates the origin of music in the moment in which a human being is transformed into a bird. Philomela of course has left her mark on modern poetry – jug jug to dirty ears/so rudely forced. In the Kaluli case, a boy and his sister are catching crayfish. The boy begs some of the crayfish from his sister. She refuses. He puts a crayfish over his nose, which becomes a red beak. Then he spouts wings and flies away as a muni bird. Rather like the Grimm’s tale, the Juniper Bush, in which the soul of a murdered boy becomes a bird that sings an accusatory song, the muni bird’s song goes: "Your crayfish you didn't give me. I have no sister. I'm hungry . . .”

Mackay begins in Papua because he wants to make a point about the world.

 

“One easily sees the compatibility of this musical concept of the world, this assertion of the intrinsic symbolicity of the world, with poetry. Yeats's view that the artist "belongs to the invisible life" or Rilke's notion of poets as "bees of the invisible" sits agreeably beside Zuckerkandl's assertion that "because music exists, the tangible and visible cannot be the whole of the given world. The intangible and invisible is itself a part of this world, something we encounter, something to which we respond.” Victor Zuckerkandl is the musicologist whose story of the Kaluli is sampled by Mackay.

Which brings us to the question: isn’t this all just pre-scientific nonsense?

Mackay’s argument, his poetics, begins with the rejection of the overarching positivism that poses that rhetorical question and comfortably answers it with an “of course”. But Mackay doesn’t want to reject that positivism for some reactionary theology. Instead, in a wonderful coinage, Mackay calls for an “oppositional nostalgia.” Mackay’s essay is centered on black music, the orphaned boy’s song, but moves widely among a number of texts, including Toomer’s Cane. “Cane is fueled by an oppositional nostalgia. A precarious vessel possessed of an eloquence coincident with loss, it wants to reach or to keep in touch with an alternate reality as that reality fades.”

My own sense of politics is absolutely in touch with Mackay’s poetics. My mature life has coincided with the fading of all the postwar social democratic institutions. And I have seen the left hamstrung by a rhetoric and conceptual structure that, while useful to the making of those institutions, seems at a loss to defend them. I’ve seen that especially lately in France, where Macron’s killing of the social security system is opposed by the vast majority, which is an opportunity that the left does not know how to take advantage of. But this is an old story, as old as my twenties, the years of Reagan and Thatcher. The reification of revolution only gives us a past to break from. But a larger perspective shows us the need for an oppositional nostalgia – for the reference landscapes of childhood, for instance – those landscapes that have been decayed and attacked by our petrochemical treadmill of production, to the point that they are turning against us.

There are many levels of oppositional nostalgia. I think I have moved within that term, without knowing it, my entire life, and I think I know some of those levels.

The reference landscape and the big fire

 

It is hard to keep hold of an emergency feeling when the urgency is sliced and diced by the news cycle. We know that the past twenty years have been crucial. We know that once, in the old days at the end of the Cold War, we – we meaning the developed economies of the world – actually acted to prevent the ozone hole from eating us up. And we know since, we have done squat as we watch through our windows, on our nature specials, on our vacations, the world as we know it undergo what fire historian Stephen Pyne calls “the spectacle of unremitting loss.”

As the atmosphere emergency drifts South and West, the focus turns to the usual trivia. Well, naturally. Still, a good time to read Pyne’s essay in Aeon.

 An excerpt:

“I see the world through a pyric prism. In the reforging of Earth, I see fires, especially those burning fossil fuels, as a cause. I see fires, mutating into megafires, as a consequence – and fires everywhere as a catalyst. The Anthropocene is, for me, a Pyrocene, as humanity’s fire practices create the fire-informed equivalent of an ice age. But fire, and even the charred landscapes it can leave in its wake, is more than an issue of human health, busted ecosystems, creaky institutions or bad behaviour. This is also a matter of aesthetics.

This thought came to me during a field trip to the Jemez Mountains in northern New Mexico in 2014. Three years earlier, the Las Conchas fire, part of a wave train of conflagrations, had blasted across the Pajarito Plateau and into the Los Alamos National Laboratory. When its plume collapsed, the fire sent hot air across forested mesas and through gorges, like the pyroclastic flow from a volcano. The flames culled woods, dappled the forest with blowouts and, in some sites burned down to bare rock, not even blackened stumps remained. Craig Allen, a fire researcher with the US Geological Survey, was our docent, and as we scanned the still-scorched countryside, he described not so much the scene before us as the scene that the fire had taken from him – a vision of the land restored to its precontact state.”

The contact – a term which has displaced the old Eurocentric term, “discovery”, but which has still not found its poetic bearings. The warmer climate has been thought of in terms of mounting ocean levels, and it is that. But so far are we from the trees that have sustained us, that we don’t see the fires mounting up, just for us.

"Lord Krishna said: The universe (or human body) may be compared to an eternal tree that has its origin (or root) in the Supreme Being and its branches below in the cosmos. The Vedic hymns are the leaves of this tree. One who understands this tree is a knower of the Vedas. (15.01)

The branches of this eternal tree are spread all over the cosmos. The tree is nourished by the energy of material Nature; sense pleasures are its sprouts; and its roots of ego and desires stretch below in the human world causing Karmic bondage."

Werner Sombart,  an early twentieth century historian of capitalism – a man of the right, I should say – saw how the trees were necessary for the ships that formed the logistical core of imperialism and trade up until the late nineteenth century. Da steht ein Baum – well, Rilke’s Orpheus was smarter than he knew. Marx’s economic enlightenment came about when he discovered changes in the laws on gleaning wood in the land around Koeln. The Russian novelists depict feckless landholders whose wealth is measured by the forests that they sell to entrepreneurs. Set the Dead souls to one side, it was the trees from Russia that went into the great liberal era in Europe.

Another excerpt from Pyne's essay:

"Yet I wondered what my grandchildren might see if they were present. I recalled a comment by Bertrand Russell who said that what most people mean when they speak of returning to nature is really a desire to return to the world they knew as a child (or, I would add, the world they knew when they came of age). What existed then seems natural. Whatever comes next – new species, new habits, new machines – seems intrusive, disturbing and alien.

That childhood world – what we might call our ‘reference landscape’ – is the marker by which we measure the present and coming world. It’s how we judge the new world as welcoming or hostile, lovely or marred. A reference landscape might be personal, but it might also be shared by a society or nation. When the world itself is being overturned, personal grief can become intergenerational."

Our reference landscapes are coming apart. Russell, a product of the nineteenth century industrialized Britain that produced, among other things, the first diagnosis of allergy, had a reference landscape that was already radically different from that of his eighteenth century ancestors.  I think of Shelley's reference landscape and how the seeds, in the coming storms, will be all burned to a crisp:

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Cain's papers

 

Few writers have seen their best sentences become their death sentences. Morris Markey, though, was one of those few.

Lawrence Morris Markey. He is best known, if known at all, as an early New Yorker writer. He wrote novels too – about Dixie. His wife was related to Margaret Mitchell, but he married her before the latter became the author of Gone With The Wind. That must have peeved him – he’d been the one to leave Atlanta behind and make it in New York and the big time. The big time dwindled in Hollywood, in Holiday Magazine, in writing radio spots.

As well, while Mitchell went in for 19th century prose, Markey’s reporting on murders, vagabands and riff raff was very much Neue Sachlichkeit, the American version.

Markey is associated with two engrossing articles about murders, some of which are still recycled for the mystery and the podcastery in them. One was the murder of Starr Faithfull, whose body was tossed up on the shore of Long Beach, Long Island on June 8, 1931. The other murder, also of a flapper, was of Dot King, who was found murdered in her “love nest” on the 15th of March, 1923. Both murders have generated books and websites.

The second paragraph of the Mysterious Death of Starr Faithfull  begins as follows:

“It lies within the very nature of a mystery story that it must be told backward. The only possible beginning is the corpse. And then things are learned and told about the corpse and the creature that existed before it became a corpse…”

Did I say that Morris Markey and James Cain were friends?

Of course, the corpse is definitely a given, but it need never be discovered, or it can be discovered within the elastic schedule of the writer’s telling.

However, I rather like it, gruesomely, that Morris Markey, who left an imprint on the Cold Blood genre, was a creature who left a mystery with his corpse himself, one that the coroner left open: suicide, accident or murder.

On July 12, 1950, the Atlanta Constitution published a story that began: “Gunshot kills L.M.Markey, ex-Atlantan: Lawrence Morris Markey, 51, former Atlanta newspepr reporter, died Monday night of a gunshot wound in his home in Halifax, Virginia.”

And thus, the corpse with the small .22 entrance wound behind its ear.

In the Constitution story, Markey was found “in a downstairs hall and that a .22 caliber rifle lay nearby, one cartridge fired from it.” It doesn’t tell us if a relative of Margaret Mitchell was in the house.

The coroner relied in his account on the testimonies of those in the house, but he must not have relied entirely, since he does leave the case open. A question mark that could be seen as an accusation against someone in the household.

In his biography of James Cain, Morris Markey holds a considerable place. Markey introduced Cain to Harold Ross at the New Yorker.  When Helen Markey called him up and told him Morris was dead, and invited him to the funeral, Cain went. Oddly “Helen had not said how Markey died, and it was not until Cain reached Petersburg and bought a Richmond paper that he learned Morris had been shot.”

Truly, here’s the set up for a short story. Cain, the author of Double Indemnity, goes to Halifax Virginia and spends a few days snooping about, hearing stories about the death of his friend. Cain heard the tale from Morris’s brother, Marvin Markey.

“On the day before his death… Sue [his daughter] had driven to a store and along the way had seen four little puppies on the side of the road, where somebody had abandoned them. Deciding they should have a merciful end, she took them hom, got out the family .22, and shot them. When she went to bury them, she left the .22 in the hall.”

The family agreed that Morris, drinking and depressed, had jammed the gun against his head from behind and shot himself, presumably to make it look less like a suicide and more like an accident. Insurance reasons. But it made it look like somebody shot him from behind.

Cain, according to Hoopes, wrote this all down in a letter he sent to Laurence Stallings, a mutual friend.

And, to make a true mystery writer’s death  true mystery, the letter has not, as far as I know, been published. It is among Cain’s papers.

Which is a potential title, no? Cain’s papers.

Lead dogs: Kriegszittern and the post-war

 

Kafka being an expert on work related accidents was called upon, in World War I, to use his talents in Prague’s Temporary Psychiatric Hospital for shell shocked soldiers. He wrote a publicity sheet for the Hospital that rather disconcerts his biographer, Reiner Stach.  Far from Kafka the response of the Dadaists, which was to spit on the war. Instead, this is how the sheet begins: “Fellow Countrymen!  The World War, in which all human misery is concentrated, is also a war of nerves, more so than ay previous war. And in this war of nerves, all too many suffer defeat. Just as the intensive operation of machinery during the last few decades’ peacetime jeopardized, far more than ever before, the nervous system of those so employed, giving rise to nervous disturbances and disorders, the enormous increase in the mechanical aspect of contemporary warfare has caused the most serious risks and suffering for the nerves of our fighting men.”

 

This is written for a good purpose, because returning shell shocked soldiers – the famous Kriegszitterer – were definitely in need of care. But it is clothed in the average middle class patriotism of a good Kakanian citizen. Nothing here leads one to doubt the systems at play – they are the given.

 

Of course, at the same time Kafka’s feeling about these systems flowed into such stories as the Penal Colony, where the functionaries of the system that destroys its victims themselves submit to its machinery – but only, note, because there was some bug in the machine, some fault.

 

It is interesting to contrast the end of World War I and the end of World War II. In the second case, the end led to what the French call the “thirty glorious years” – a Keynesian capitalism subtended by extensive social democratic institutions, which were funded, the latter, by heavy taxes on the wealthiest. The former ended with a vast global spirt of liberalism – in the U.S., taxes on the wealthy were halved, and regulations were loosened, while in Britain and France, the movement was to gold standards and financialization of capital.

The currents of the collective psyche are murky. Contemporaries can dive in there, but they come back with doubtful impressions. It is even worse diving into the collective psyche of eras past. However, I do wonder if, after bombing had extended the trauma to civilian populations, the fauna of the urban postwar in the twenties – the crippled, the Kriegszitterer spastically selling pencils on street corners, the literally defaced, all of which became part of ordinary life without really pushing society into a more pacifistic and socialistic system – I wonder if the memory of this worked on the good people streaming away from the onset of the Soviets, cleaning up the rubble in Berlin and London, figuring out the balance of treachery and resistance in Paris, etc.  – I wonder if this memory worked as a powerful incentive to the social insurance put in place in the late forties and fifties. The fate of the mustard gassed veteran from World War I was now no stranger to the firebombed or V2-ed citizen of any European urb.

 

The shell shocked did not only include veterans – in Germany, in particular, it led to an art of shock, of outrage that included in its scope not only the leaders but the led, the frustratingly led. The led who never woke up, who spoke in an already outmoded feudal trance.  There’s a poem of Kurt Tucholsky that has this spirit of outrage in it – Lead dogs. Actually, Tucholsky’s entire work contains this demon of outrage, but this one is short and sweet.  It was published under one of his pseudonyms, Theobold Tiger, in the Weltbuehne in 1921.

 

 

Clever dogs lead the tip tapping blind through the streets

Knowing how to find the right ways, scent and seek.

Once, you sightless, others lead you for four and a half years.

They growled and howled and made living men fear.

 

Once, blind ones, wolves led you into filthy pits,  

Put you in chains and foddered you with bits.

They ran away when it all collapsed. Following their bloody feasts

they skipped over the border with the liability round their necks   . . .

Carefully, your dog quivers at the end of his lead.

His look is faithful, ears cocked, watchful for your need.

 

You, blind men! None, none, of your puffed up, pimped up

Leaders stands so human and high before God as your pup!

 

 

 

 

Beggars and billionaires

 

The beggar and the billionaire bookend neoliberal culture. During the era of the social democratic exception, from the mid forties to roughly the eighties, homelessness – and vagabondage – fell considerably. Not that this was an unmitigated good – from the mental asylum to the housing project, coercion, violence, despair and underfunding were endemic. But the effect of state cuts to welfare and to the general withdrawal of the state from housing, mental health care, and retirement funding had effects that were seen throughout the developed economies.  In Les gens de rien: l’histoire de la grande pauvreté dans le France du XXe siecle, Andre Guesclen traces the decline of vagabondage and homelessness during the thirty glorious years and their return at the end of the century. The same story was told, in 1991, by Joel Blau in The Visible Poor.

The visible poor, an excellent title.

I have a media knowledge of billionaires. How could I not. They populate telenovelas, like Succession, are featured extensively in the business and political press, have groupies and fans, and in general are all around us as parts of the celebrity phantom tribe we think we have a relationship with.

I have an experiential knowledge of beggars. Beggars are not the stars of popular telenovelas, are not extensively interviewed or featured in the business and political press, are not influencers on Instagram or in any way part of the celebrity phantom tribe. But for any urban dweller, they are ghosts of another sort, flesh and blood ghosts. They sleep on doorsteps or in tents or in sleeping bags or in improvised nests of trash. They prostrate themselves in pedestrian heavy areas, with plastic or paper cups by their sides for the stray coin. They choose their spots – outside grocery stores or by ATMs – where, by some perhaps shared convention, they know that people have loose change  on them. They get drunk, or they get stoned. They preach, or they scrawl signs, they favor parks, they tell stories of hunger on subway trains and trams.

On the whole, my experience with beggars is much like anyone else’s. That is, if they anyone else has some money somewhere. Sometimes I give, more often I don’t. I have a sort of tally in my head, and if I haven’t given for a while, I give more. Never a lot. Mostly I say no, no thanks, sorry, etc. No, no thanks, sorry, etc. constitutes, for the most part, the conversation between the beggar and the non-beggar population.

A couple days ago I tossed out my “non” to a man accosting me on Rue Charlot. However, he aimed a few words at my back that made me turn around. I don’t remember what they were. I approached him. He was a short black man of beggar’s age – that is, anywhere from 30 on up. Living rough has a way of erasing the middle class marks of age and registering new ones. This man had a hat. He held in his hand a booklet of some sort. As I came closer, he showed me what it was: song sheets. And he explained that he was a singer, that he sang for his money, but that he was too tired to sing today.

I gave him some Euros, and went on. A singer.

Where the media culture does feature the beggar, and there in abundance, is in poetry. In song, Gypsy Davy still steals the wife of the landowner. The hobo rides the rails, and Beau Jangles will dance for you in worn out shoes.

Why song and poetry has the beggar in its heart, and not the billionaire, is of some interest. Song and poetry is as servile as other media – it has long celebrated kings and warriors. But it has never celebrated the bourgeoisie. Other supposedly non-poetic objects – a note about plums on a table, a bright particular chameleon – have roused the poetic consciousness, but the bourgeoisie have been turned over and over by novelists, who found them dramatic in exact proportion to the scandals that de-bourgeois-fy them, and been ignored, mostly, by the poets. True, the sitcom is the glory of the bourgeoisie, and that is no mean thing in the history of art. However, I don’t quite know how to measure this.

Beggars have attracted some  attention on tv, but mainly in shows that are framed around the police. The Wire, even, is framed around the police – although I remember seeing the first shows of the first season of the Wire and crying, because finally, finally people in a housing project were being seen. The visible poor were being made visible. Of course, they were visible as part of a larger plot, but still.

That singing beggar rang a lot of bells for me. We live near a park named for a singer and songwriter, Beranger, whose songs were sung by beggars on the street in 19^th century Paris. Baudelaire, who lived around here  (it is hard to find a spot in Paris that is not near where Baudelaire, a most homeless man, lived for a while), wrote a poem that is still unloved and very analysed, La Mendiante rousse, about a redhaired beggar clothed in rags that barely covered her – much as, today, beggars in real desperation sometimes clothe themselves in such plastic sheeting as you find at construction sites, a costume that parodies the gaudiest bride’s gown.

Blanche fille aux cheveux roux,
Dont la robe par ses trous
Laisse voir la pauvreté
Et la beauté.

The poverty and the beauty. A combination we have lost. Bo Jangles is deader than a doornail.

 

The Forseeable third: Albert Thibaudet and the Sybilline Prophecies

 

Albert Thibaudet was a ferociously learned man, which was both his glory and his great fault. When he would travel from the towns in which he taught – Abbeville, Amiens – or from the town in which he was born – Tornus, a wine town midway between Dijon and Lyon – to Paris, he’s carry one valise with his clothes and toiletry, and a heavier valise with his books.  He was the type of man to whom nothing exactly happened: born to a wealthy landowner, he went through the university system in the late 19^th century, became enamored of Mallarme’s writing and wrote a book about it, was published by the thick magazines and ended up at the NRF under Gide, and wrote more books, articles, letters to the mandarins (Valery, Gide, Maurras, Barres, etc.), all of whom he knew.

This life of nothing happening was interrupted by World War I. He was in his forties, but he enlisted and was put in a company that built roads and structures for the soldiers – and even buried a few. These were happy years for Thibaudet. He stayed, even though he could have pulled strings to get out, all the way from 1914 to demobilisation, in 1919. He discovered the “people”, and this was a wonderful discovery for him – it kept him from the natural arc towards the right. He was always suspicious of xenophobia, and the Action Francaise attacks on romanticism, the Germans and the Jews.

About the latter: Thibaudet seems to have had the tepid anti-semitism of his upbringing, but in general he was opposed to anti-semitism. This opposition took a strange form: he believed that anti-semitism was a media thing that peaked during the Dreyfus affair (during which he took no sides, barely noticing it). Thus, after the war, when he did his greatest work, and even wrote some still readable books about the history of French politics, he didn’t see what was happening before his eyes. He died in 1936, in Switzerland, and thus missed the events that crawled out of his blind spot.

Like Ford Maddox Ford’s character Christopher Tienjens, Thibaudet was a humanist – albeit not of the martyring Tory type. He marched off to war with three books in his backpack – Montaigne, Virgil and Thucydides. After demobilization, he collected the notes he made on Thucydides into a book: Campaigning with Thucydides. Thibaudet definitely had the Greek for it – in some ways, he is like Leo Strauss with his sense that the classical writers had, in a sense, foreshadowed the modern era. I like the book for its beginning.

“One knows the story. One day the Sibyl brought nine books to Tarquin; in them was contined the future and Rome. She demanded a considerable sum for the books. Tarquin, a careful man, refused. The following year she returned, told the king that she had burned three of the nine books, and offered him the others for the same price. Tarquin took her for a crazy woman and chased her away. A year later, he saw her again. She had burned three more books, and she wanted the same sum. Then Tarquin, be it that he was given good advice, be it that his own inspiration,  recognized her for a sage, counted out the money to her and conserved the three books in the Capitol: the Sibylline  books.”

It is a story like one of Jesus’s parables in the Bible, and like the great parables, it is the story of a deal.  Thibaudet approaches the story as a symbol of the intersection of history and politics.

Historians, thinking of “six lost books, can reflect that the proportion of a third in our possible knowledge of the future was nearly normal, and proportioned to human intelligence.

“The study of history might also lead us to conclude that there are laws and there is what will be. It can thus lead us to think that the historic duree is as unforeseeable as the psychological duree, and that history represents an incessant import of the irreducible and the new. These two arguments are equally true and face each other like Kant’s antinomies. But given a long experience, we receive the impression that in reality, the two orders is mixed together indiscernibly, and that what is reasonably foreseeable exists, penetrated at all points by what is not, by what is, in its essence, inexistant, and that human intelligence, applied to the practical, must ceaselessly find the mean between the two tableaux, and that that proportion of the foreseeable third constitutes a healthy pragmatic belief…

“This foreseeable third, founded on the regularity of the laws of the universe, suffices, when we know to exploit it, for our action and the almost reasonable enchainment of our individual and social life. Without it we could not live. But without the unforeseeable two thirds we couldn’t live either, or rather, we would live as machines. The Sibyl could have sold even more dearly a premonition of the three nineth than of the nine nineth to the King of Rome. A complete foreseeing of the future would take from our action all its human, living, tragic character.”

Underneath Thibaudet’s rather brilliant exposition of this fragment of Roman history, one sees one of the questions of Jesus, known in the homiletic literature as the “foolish exchange”: “For what is a man profited, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul? Or what shall a man give in exchange for his soul?”

The Roman notion of virtue fled from the touch of the absolute, and bargained for the foreseeable third. It was not by some vote, some consciousness, that we – we humans, all of us rock n rollers – decided on the nukes, on the hole in the ozone layer, on the heat waves and acidification of the oceans, on the inequality and the squalor. These things happened as man writ large decided to go for curtain number one, the World.

Two traditions. It is a funny thing how little we remember, we who lived through it, the 00s. I do remember them. I remember how, in the invasion of Iraq and its occupation, the magical thought, cheered on by journalist and politician, was that there was no “then” there – that by magic, by some spontaneous generation, democracy and peace would descend on what was a cold blooded act of aggression and violence – since of course the responsible parties could never be held responsible for their cold bloodedness, their ignorance, their aggression, their violence. And so it has actually been – those acts were knotted, so to speak, into what came after. All was forgiven, the torture tapes were burnt, our attention spans were invited to other venues, and a culture that deserved, by any measure of justice or simply practicality, to be cancelled, wasn’t. In the aftermath, it was so tender about cancelling that even a comedian masturbating before his workstaff was considered to be martyred if he didn’t make his next 100 million.

Cancellation, though, has been the fate of maybe a million Iraqis. And will be the fate of millions in the heat and the floodwater to come. The cancellation is coming like God’s own planet sized hammer.

There are many stories in the books that the Sybil burnt. This is one of them.

A cat must have three different names: Eliot as a young critic

 

Cynthia Ozick wrote a famous reckoning with  T.S. Eliot – and his problem with the Jews – for the New Yorker in  1989. The beginning of the essay is marred by the “impression journalism”that identifies Ozick with the proto-cultural warriors, always on the lookout, then, for the decline in Western Civ. Ozick claims, without any references whatsoever, that Eliot is no longer taught in the colleges and the universities, and that he is only remembered for Prufrock. This, at the end of a decade in which the longest running musical on Broadway was called Cats. Ozick, like her soulmates on  the conservative cultural magazine of that decade, the New Criterion, dispenses with providing evidence as though that, itself, were some persnickety politically correct trick. Thus,  there is no grubby looking through actual college catalogues to prove her point, or looking at Anthologies to see if Eliot has so palpably dwindled. In this kind of journalism,  impression quickly reduces to fact and one can move on to nostalgic evocations of better times. While Ozick did not  debase herself by going to actual anthologies, I did.  The 2003 Norton Anthology includes The Wasteland, Prufrock, and one of the Four Quartets. I am almost positive the edition in the 80s included the same material.

Cultural warrior stuff always turns out to be a dinner table impression among emeritus professors viewing the youth with the usual bitter eye.

However, Ozick, while ticking off the cultural warrior boxes – the decline of high art, the substitution of “equal opportunity for minorities” rather than canonical reading lists that include Shakespeare and Jane Austin, etc. – does see two things about Eliot: the anti-semitism and the Prufrock-ery of the “impersonality” urged on the poet – the latter a canonical motif among the New Critics. For coming out foursquare against Christian nationalism, Ozick probably earned some demerits from her rightwing comrades.

Good for her.

It is true, though, that English departments in the fifties and the sixties were crammed with people who thought “real” literary criticism began with Eliot’s collection, The Sacred Wood, 1920. However, the young bucks in the English departments in the seventies had access to and enthusiasm for a whole buncha translated material – and here I don’t just mean the French theory tribe. Bakhtin and Benjamin opened people’s eyes to the 20s. Bold spirits, who went on to found October Magazine, also discovered the Russian formalists and futurists. In the light of, say, Skhlovsky’s Art as Technique from 1917, T.S. Eliot’s once admired The Perfect Critic from 1920  looks positively provincial.

Partly, this is a matter of style. The great essayists of the 1920s, Wyndham Lewis, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, all brought a voice to the essay. From Montaigne’s essays on down, the voice has made its uneasy truce with history (personal and suprapersonal) in the essay. Musil, at the time Eliot was writing, was brooding on how the essay was working its way into the novel.

Eliot brought into the essay his prestige as a great poet and his vocational uncertainty – or rather, the uncertainty of where, outside of poetry, he fit. He was not a teacher, but he adopted the teacher’s tics in the essay. Thus, there is a rumble of great names, often for effect; there are adages that would make good witticisms, but are poor proofs; there is Eliot’s conflicted sense of the modern, and his resolve to close down all those uncertainties with doctrine.

How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot. Indeed.

The Perfect Critic begins with a quotation from one of Eliot and Pound’s enthusiasms of the time: Remy de Gourmont.  de Gourmont’s heavy fan, Pound, made large claims for him that have no corresponding echo in France, or elsewhere. Eliot, like Pound, seems entirely oblivious of Mallarme. Gourmont was a member of the Mercure clique, until he fell out with Rachilde, the wife of the editor. Still, he was a considerable figure in the symbolist circle around the Mercure. The Mercure, In October, 1935, devoted most of an issue to Gourmont, while acknowledging that after World War I, he was not a much quoted man. “Remy de Gourmont, who had enchanted the friends of letters by the openness of his mind and because he joined boldness to clairvoyance and the sense of ideas to that of language, was soon cast aside. His name is not forgotten, but when young litterateurs cite him, they distance themselves from him with a summary judgment that shows that they know neither his work nor him.”

If I had world and time, perhaps I would know Remy de Gourmont and his work – but I know enough of it to know that Eliot’s yoking of Aristotle and Gourmont in his essay was, to say the least, ill-judged. Although since Eliot takes Aristotle on such general terms, perhaps it was the best he could do for Gourmont. Nothing, to me, is more embarrassing in Eliot’s essays of this time than his presentation of major “Western” figures in a sort of powerpoint way, evoking their greatness but forgetting to explain their pertinence. The pertinence of Aristotle to Eliot’s own sense of criticism seems to consist of the fact that Aristotle analysed tragedy. And you can too!

Such is the spirit.

Eliot was very concerned to exhibit his disaffection with the modern era, that age of disintegration, but his essays in the twenties bear the mark of the twenties. For instance, the decade’s appetite for record making: most homeruns hit, fastest Transatlantic plane time, etc. In that spirit, Eliot likes to begin by giving you the recordholders.

“Coleridge was perhaps the greatest of English critics, and in a sense the

last. After Coleridge we have Matthew Arnold; but Arnold – I think it will

be conceded – was rather a propagandist for criticism than a critic, a popularizer

rather than a creator of ideas.”

The paltering “perhaps”, the “I think it will be conceded” – no wonder Eliot “overlooks” Hazlitt, or Ruskin, or the romantic critics – de Quincey, the Keats of the letters, Shelley – who would put down ‘Coleridge was the greatest” if they felt it was, and would dare to be damned assertively. “I think it will be conceded” is the kind of pleading one leaves to the family soliciter, fudging the will.

What Eliot is pleading for, in this essay, is a criticism that takes its objects “objectively” and without “emotion.” Now, it is true that the emotion of a geologist finding an unusual rock compound must be separated from the compound itself, though it may be a clue to its rarity or the surprise of its being where it is. But there is little reason to think cultural products are best viewed in that same light – or even that they can be viewed in that same light. The argument that even texts with which one violently disagrees can be understood formally is true. But we distinguish criticism from a lesson in grammar by something other – which is what I would call voice. Eliot knew his voices – the Wasteland is full of them – but he didn’t know what voice to do literary criticism in. Woolf inherited her right to literature, and Lawrence fought for his. Eliot, on the other hand, writes as though he were turning it in for a grade.

Which is unkind. Eliot, like any other freelancer, had to make his way around a literary scene in England that was either avant-garde and run on the trust funds of some rich heirs – and made by Wyndham Lewis types who were cadging drinks and dwelling places and counting their pence, without any retirement plan. Eliot, one feels (oh, I am doing it!) always had a retirement plan.

Eventually, of course, Eliot gave up the notion that criticism must, done right, be done without any passion and plumped for the “sensibility”, a word that can encompass instinct and intellection without too much question.

Whenever I think I am being too harsh on the T.S.E I love as a poet, I return to his essays and find things like the following, the first paragraph in an essay on Hamlet:

“Few critics have ever admitted that Hamlet the play is the primary problem,

and Hamlet the character only secondary.  And Hamlet the character

has had an especial temptation for that most dangerous type of critic: the

critic with a mind which is naturally of the creative order, but which

through some weakness in creative power exercises itself in criticism

instead. These minds often find in Hamlet a vicarious existence for their

own artistic realization. Such a mind had Goethe, who made of Hamlet a

Werther; and such had Coleridge, who made of Hamlet a Coleridge; and

probably neither of these men in writing about Hamlet remembered that

his first business was to study a work of art. The kind of criticism that

Goethe and Coleridge produced, in writing of Hamlet, is the most misleading

kind possible. For they both possessed unquestionable critical

insight, and both make their critical aberrations the more plausible by the

substitution – of their own Hamlet for Shakespeare’s – which their creative

gift effects. We should be thankful that Walter Pater did not fix his attention

on this play.”

That last line sticks its thumb in the whole massive buttocks of this opening. Poor Coleridge and Goethe, to be condescended to by such a prick! However, perhaps this made them laugh at the high table – and Eliot so thirsted and hungered for the high table. Later, in the high Cold War, when Eliot men were nestled in their English departments, probably somebody who also wanted his seat at the high table made heavy weather of this Hamlet, Coleridge and Goethe business.

Eliot himself, to give him a bit of credit, latter cut his Hamlet article for an American edition of his essays, pronouncing it callow.

Callow, the fidgety flitigy filtering cat.

 

 

  

 

 

 

defining hatred, deflating hatred

 

Yeats is the great poet of defining hatred – the hatred that makes the self definite to itself.  He is the great poet of the moods of this hatred: he understood, as well, what sacrifice it coerces from the heart, what a burden it is to perpetually carry around an enemy’s list. Of course, being a Tory of the ultra kind, he saw hatred as being a property of the Left. Being a poet, though, he suspected it was a property of being Yeats.

In the Prayer for his Daughter, there’s a marvelous, a legendary account of this:

My mind, because the minds that I have loved,
The sort of beauty that I have approved,
Prosper but little, has dried up of late,
Yet knows that to be choked with hate
May well be of all evil chances chief.
If there’s no hatred in a mind
Assault and battery of the wind
Can never tear the linnet from the leaf.

An intellectual hatred is the worst,
So let her think opinions are accursed.
Have I not seen the loveliest woman born
Out of the mouth of Plenty’s horn,
Because of her opinionated mind
Barter that horn and every good
By quiet natures understood
For an old bellows full of angry wind?

Of course, we know Yeats’s circus animals, and this loveliest woman born has a name and a habitation and a place in the revolt against the British and the Anglo-Irish elite. But it is Yeats’s grudging and not fully uttered sense that his love of a “sort of beauty” has become an excuse for a free-ranging hatred, a justification for failure and bitterness – the failure, indeed, to avoid the bitterness of age.

I’m of an age, myself, when many of my hatreds, at least in the realm of the beautiful and the ugly, are disappearing. Disappearing not through my conscious effort, but because…. Partly this is having a young son whose gothic tastes are so different from mine that I long ago gave up arguing, and partly this is because the nursing of hatred is a thing that goes counter to my bent. Or rather, if I hate, I want to do it enthusiastically. My hatreds are political and existential and pop out of me in that way. But as for aesthetic hatreds…

I remember, when I was in my twenties, that my Dad once said something about how he liked Dylan. This shocked me to my soul. My teens were devoted to Dylan’s music, partly out of love, and partly because my parents hated it. How can you like the music your parents like? That at least was the era of teenhood in which I grew up. Admittedly, helicopter parenting was unknown in the  suburbs of Atlanta at that time. The kids scattered and played and came home from the streets and the little bits of wood that the developers hadn’t gotten around to bulldozing, and the parents never kept a close tab on it all. An unimaginable laxity, from the p.o.v. of the 21^st century.

As part of that teenworld, you expected complaints from your parents about the music you played. Those complaints helped define you.

I wonder if this happens anymore?

So, I was naturally shocked by my old man’s comment. How could such things be? Had it been a game?

Well, of course it was a game. Now I’m older than my Dad was then. And I surprise myself. When I was a teen, I had distinct and fierce hatreds, especially for the faddish music of my high school peers. Elton John? Are you kidding me? Z.Z. Top? Southern rock in general? Myself, I found this stuff hugely offensive to who I wanted to be. And yet, decades later, I am watching a movie, Almost Famous, about that seventies teen-rock scene, and the sound of some Elton John song slithers out on the soundtrack, and I have only, only … recognition. What a strange thing that is.

The teen I was is caught in the parent I am. And all I can say to the acned glare of that distant pup is: An intellectual hatred is the worst. And so they go, into the dark…