My slang-ophilia - a history

 

For a writer with the proper equipment – an ear, curiosity enough to kill a dozen cats, and a large capacity for laziness -  Twitter, Tik Tok, blogs and the infinite cesspool of comments on Internet is all, somehow, quicksilver, full of slang mutants that often live have the half-lives of a celebrity goof on a reality tv show but that flash, in their plunge towards death, some signal from the Weltgeist. Some unutterable, utterable sadness.  The slang, the acronyms, the rapid erasures of jargon and slogan, I am in love with them beyond any ideological position.

This love of slang: it has a deep history. Before Rabelais, there were the Roman satirists, like Juvenal, and before Juvenal, Aristophanes, and before Aristophanes, the scribes of Egypt. I suppose. According to W. Puck Brecher’s The Aesthetics of Strangeness, the Japanese thematic of kyo, or madness, which generated a whole subculture in 18^th and early nineteenth century Japan, was attracted to the eccentric possibilities of slang – which seems to be paralleled by the way obscene slang became politicized under the French Revolution, particularly by the rather disgusting Hebert, the writer of Pere Duchesne, a revolutionary journal that made the word fuck a regicidal weapon. “I am the real Pere Duchesne, foutre” was the slogan of the journal. Hebert became, by one of those odd throws of the dice of history, one of Marie Antoinette’s judges, and in a glorious moment, when he accused her of incest with her boy, she appealed to all the women in attendance to help her – and they rioted.

The charge was withdrawn.

According to Charles Brunet, Hebert’s biography, the newsboys in Paris in the 1790s would sell his journal with the catchphrase, “Il est bougrement en colère aujourd’hui le Père Duchesne!” “He is bleeding angry today, Père Duchesne!” Bloody, of course, used to be more vulgar than it is now.

The love of slang in modernism – its use – was part of a double movement, on the one hand towards erudite reference, on the other hand towards popular culture: Leopold Bloom’s love of Paul de Kock, or Eliot’s love of music hall, on the one hand, the footnotes to the Wasteland on the other. Modernism, whatever it was and is, is a difficult vehicle for straightforward ideological readings. In France, Marcel Schwob, the great friend of Colette and the great admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote a famous essay on slang – argot. The connection between class, colonialism and the stranger comes out where it always does, in the metaphoric:

And it isn’t an affair, here, of the slang of the métier, the technical languages that exercize a necessary influence on the names of instruments, or of mechanical procedures ; the slang which we study is the special speech of the dangerous classes of society. An imperious necessity pushes us to produce this language. The words of our language are neither chased after nor tracked. But those of raw speech live approximately with the respresentative of social justice like the miners in Arizona with the Arapahoe Indians. Thus these miners form a young nation, vivacious, which immigrates and colonizes constantly. Slang is like a nation of miners which disembarked on our shores with cargos of immigrants. It is easy to see that these ports of arrival are divided between high society and low. At the low end, are the workers who gather the words and carry them towards the center of language. The terms so introduced are often designated in the dictionaries as « vulgar ».  

The metaphor of the miners and the Arapahoes never quite works, at least in as much as it is supposed to do conceptual work. Slang is the miner; always colonizing, always emigrating, always tearing up the land and water. But in this image, the Arapahoes are the social police – which inverts the usual colonialist hierarchy without making much sense. Schwob moves on to a more illuminating metaphor when he seizes on the miners as emigrants, making, in a sense, in their underground tunnels a movement towards the center of language.

The nearness of slang to “life” is a common trope among the slangophiliacs. Mencken took from Whitman his interest in “Americanisms” and American slang, and quoted Whitman’s wonderful demand for a Real Dictionary:

“The Real Dictionary will give all the words that exist in use, the bad words as well as any. The Real Grammar will be that which declares itself a nucleus of the spirit of the laws, with liberty to all to carry out the spirit of the laws, even by violating them, if necessary. . . . These States are rapidly supplying themselves with new words, called for by new occasions, new facts, new politics, new combinations. Far plentier additions will be needed, and, of course, will be supplied. . . . Many of the slang words are our best; slang words among fighting men, gamblers, thieves, are powerful words. . . . The appetite of the people of These States, in popular speeches and writings, is for unhemmed latitude, coarseness, directness, live epithets, expletives, words of opprobrium, resistance. This I understand because I have the taste myself as large, as largely, as any one.”

Probably Schwob knew of Whitman, since he was an Anglophile, and Whitman was a reference in the 1890s. The idea that we put the declaration of independence in our mouths anytime we speak shakes off the dead forms of Victorian British English – makes the language live. This battle is always being waged – as for instance in the battle over black English, which gets a going over in the movie American Fiction – although there the direction taken is rather the reverse of what one expects, not a defence of black English but a glance into how it becomes exoticized, commodified and neoliberalated.

Mencken was inclined to think that slang words were invented by some particular someone. And this may be, but slang dies if it is just some cute invention. It is slang because it is taken up, used and evolved. That Jack Doyle, the “keeper of a billiard academy in New York City”, invented hard-boiled may or may not be true, but hard-boiled is a mass event, as slang.  Like jokes, generally, slang is unsigned. As a philologist, one might be interested in the fact that John Marston the Elizabethan playwright invented the word “puffy” – but its manifold use is a matter of reinvention and readjustment. When I was writing my novel, Made a Few Mistakes, I had a character who founded a magazine about strip joints, and I wanted some grasp of stripper slang. I went to Tumblr, which was before it committed suicide and excluded porno, and found many stripper written sites. There I had a whole course in the argot of the metier – for instance, I learned about “rain.” For a writer, the internet is a wonderland -as is a bar, a street argument, and a group of tourists at Notre Dame.

Sometimes, it is all good.

 

 

Pain is Other

 

Buddhism came to Europe and America in the nineteenth century as a series of text, a philological affair, rather than as a set of practices, rituals, prayers, and sacrifices. It came firstly as intellectual history, rather than as history. The intellectual interest in it was charged by the eighteenth century’s rediscovery of idealism – starting with Berkeley and proceeding to Kant’s thing-in-itself, against which all philosophers and physicists have thrown themselves in vain. This, at least, gives us an outline – a semi-fictitious frame – to understand how Buddhist texts were inscribed by European and American thinkers in their own enterprises in the twentieth century. Stephen Spender said that Eliot, at the time of the Wasteland, said that he would have been a Buddhist if not for being stuck, as it were, in his own culture.

Buddhism , or at least its image, in American poetry in the twentieth century is enormously important.

In Europe, Buddhism did not have the same poetic force. It was, however, picked at by philosophers who were at the margins – neither comfortably continental, by which I mean influenced by phenomenology and Marx, nor analytic. Sages.

Cioran was, if anything, a sage. He was a sage of suicide, or rather, of the internal death drive that creates a sort of longing for the end. His journal, which was also a workbook (similar to the operational method of Emerson) is full of cries and whispers and readings. As a Sage, Ciorna was an inveterate gloss-er – it was in picking over the lines and textual bits of others that he could stake a place for his own thought.

I came across this sequence in his journal for 1962:

 

“What is impermanent is pain ; what is pain is not-itself. What is not-itself is not mine, I am not this, this is not me.» (Samyutta Nikaya)

What is pain is not-itself. It is difficult, it is impossible to be in agreement with Buddhism on this point, this very important point. For us, pain is more it-self  than ever. What a strange religion! It sees pain everywhere and it declares, at the same time, that it is irreal.

I accept pain. I cannot do without it, and I cannot, in the name of pity (like the Buddha) refuse it a metaphysical status. Buddhism assimilates appearance to pain, it even confounds them. In fact, pain is what gives a depth, a reality to appearance.”

 

I rather agree with Cioran’s response here.

The mention of “pity” brings into focus this objection to the cold metaphysical indifference to pain – to pain as not-itself – because pity does not even get off the ground if pain is, in the end, simply negative, simply the not-self. Here the dialectic applies, for pain as not-itself does not mean not-pain is itself – it means, rather, that all that is pain and all that holds the possibility of pain - all that is sentient - is not. It is the opening wedge of the Great dissolution. Cioran is in the line of twentieth century thinkers – like Unamumo – who insist that the tragic, that seemingly aesthetic category, is at the center of the moral life. I have some sympathy with that, which works against my otherwise happy American pragmatism. Without the tragic, pragmatism becomes, in my view, unhinged. It seeks out – as every philosophical instinct seeks out – an end, an ultimate, and only finds another transaction – which is why pragmatism accords so well with the cash nexus.

 

Cioran, that old reactionary, is good to read against the grain of pragmatism. Interestingly, it is this which makes me suspicious of the American poetic theme of Buddhism. It is all too much in the American grain.

The case of Ilan Pappe: free speech now, free speech forever.

 

In the midst of #metoo and black lives matter, Harper’s Magazine felt compelled to defend “free speech”. In a well known manifesto, Harper’s signatories enthusiastically agreed to the following:

 “The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters.”

It turns out that what was meant by caustic counter-speech was black face and calling women cunts. What was not meant was, well, defending Gaza’s right to self-defense, or putting in question in any way Israel’s campaign of mass murder that has so far killed, according to U.N. estimates, 7,000 plus children (the UN recently revised its estimates because at least ten thousand casualties are too blown away to categorize. And this does not include the estimated 10,000 buried in the rubble).

So, here we are, with the banning of the conference on Palestine in Berlin, the yanking away of Nancy Fraser’s appointment at a German university because she – a Jew – turns out not to be the right kind of Jew, even signing a petition against Israel’s war in Gaza (by some awkward coincidence, it is estimated that 30 percent of the academics and intellectuals who have been banned or have had their speech interdicted in Germany are Jews. Hmm). And then there is the United States, where snipers are set up at Indiana University to deal with the “dangerous” pro-Palestinian protesters, where pro-Israeli hooligans are allowed unimpeded access to attack pro-Palestinian protesters at UCLA, and so on and so forth.

The latest un-upholding of “the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech” was the detaining of Ilan Pappe, an Israeli historian critical of Israel’s policy towards Palestinians, by the FBI at the Detroit airport.

This is his account.

"Did you know that 70 years old professors of history are threatening America' national security?

I arrived on Monday at Detroit airport and was taken for a two hours investigation by the FBI, and my phone was taken as well.

The two men team were not abusive or rude, I should say, but their questions were really out of the world!

am I a Hamas supporter? do I regard the Israeli actions in Gaza a genocide? what is the solution to the "conflict" (seriously this what they asked!)

who are my Arab and Muslim friends in America...how long do I know them, what kind of relationship I have with them.

Is some cases I sent them to my books, and is some cases I answered laconically yes or no...(I was quite exhausted after an 8 hours flight, but this is part of the idea).

They had long phone conversation with someone, the Israelis?,

and after copying everything on my phone allowed me to enter.

I know many of you have fared far worse experience, but after France and Germany denied entry to the Rector of Glasgow university for being a Palestinian...God know what will happen next.

The good news is - actions like this by the USA or European countries taken under pressure from the pro-Israeli lobby or Israel itself smell of sheer panic and desperation in reaction to Israel's becoming very soon a pariah state with all the implications of such a status."

We have yet to hear from the defenders of blackface about Pappe’s detention. Most likely, they are for it. Because he’s "anti-semitic" – although an Israeli Jew. Because Netanyahu and the cops determine, now, who is a Jew and who is an un-Jew.

Creating a false equivalence (Israeli equals Jew) is doing beaucoup service, especially for the right and right-center, which now can enjoy its long history of anti-semitism while claiming, righteously, to support "Jews" - meaning Israelis. It is rather like claiming that Canada and the U.S. are anglo-saxon countries. Which claim, by some coincidence, has been exactly what the right has been pushing for forever.

 Ethnonationalism, no matter where it starts, always ends up doing one thing: killing "minorities". And this, under a supposed liberal Democratic president.

 Another wasted decade. How many can we waste?

 

On forgetting

 

Any document entitling itself 'on forgetting' ought to start with a dot dot dot.

…

I have noticed that in speaking, I often experience – my age, my it, experiences -a moment of de-concentration. It is as if my mind wanders away from a noun or, especially, a proper name. Forgetting a name is a basic politeness mistake – when I speak to X, if I forget X’s name, some taboo in the tribe of Ego and Id is touched upon. I feel embarrassed, as if I made some blunder, as if flummoxing my part in the ritual. Even though X doesn’t know what is happening under my facial expression, I feel that X is “feeling” me. Projection? Or is this the everyday ESP of our meet and greet that I am boggling. At the same time, I can remember the most esoteric of names – I remember, for instance, Sieur Lahontan, an obscure French explorer. But the name Ruth, or Jack, or Jill, will sometimes, tantalizingly, slip through the gaps.

This leads to one of those aging things: the memory revery. The X encounter might be long gone, the night will be upon us with its star and moonwork, and I will be following the clues, like Sherlock Holmes on a case, that will hopefully lead me to X’s name.

 

The routes of memory, the stimulus that creates the remembered content – a name, a date, a past certainty – becomes, as you get older, more hazardous to travel down – parallel to your skill at, say, driving a car, which also is a matter of going down routes, streets, judging distances, making turns, stopping at the lights, ignoring certain stimuli, picking up other. The speed of life within me is such that these blanks occur, as if there were suddenly too much light coming through the windshield – or too much darkness. In the heart of too much light, as your eye knows, is the pitchiest pitch. I have lived among words with a self-proclaimed affinity for them, for writing them down, for  taking them and making them do rhythmic and semantic things; when simple names escape me, I wonder if I got my life’s purpose wrong on that long ago day when I decided to become a writer. On the other hand, the scale of these defeats is not large. How often am I going to need the word “risotto”, for instance, a word that somehow keeps disappearing from my lexicon? It is not the key to my heart – I can take or leave risotto.

 

 

What we forget, Freud thought, represented forces that make us forget: the vertiginous libido pitted against the brutal death-drive. What an arcade game the human consciousness becomes! This is, perhaps, not a bad image even for the sensualist program, long preceding Freud, in which the senses carry with them anything but certainty about the data they supposedly represent – and yet that wreck of data, that ghost of the world, is what we must cling to, like victims of shipwreck hanging on the spars that still float on the surface, waiting for rescue.

Philosophy is no rescue. I have definitely come to the sage stage in life, or retirement, whatever we want to call it, and I am beginning to suspect that the calmness of the sage is just a mask for the amnesia our biology crafts, its last little trap.

 

prayer - a portmanteau history

 

1.

And the most excellent form of prayer is signified by standing, for it is written : « and Pin’has stood up and he prayed», (Talmud, Béra’hot 6b).

Like a poem, a dance, a story, I take prayer to be a form of thought. We identify certain texts, certain rituals, certain utterances as prayers – by which we mean a certain combination of word and gesture that is uttered to certain forces – and in tracing the practice back to the impulse we come to the same nous, the same entanglement of act, desire, and thought, that we see in other forms of our literary quotidien – our irrepressible narration of self and other.

2.

In the early twentieth century, Egyptologists began sorting through and translating a mass of material that came from a site near Thebes, Deir-el-Medina, which contained a large number of papyrus revealing the unique situation of the town during the age of the New Kingdom, about 1200 BC – it was a town of craftsmen, a company town, so to speak. Skilled craftsman in Ancient Egypt were often literate. It was a situation that was used by certain Egyptologists to explore the topic of “personal religion” or “folk piety” – something apart from the great instituted rituals of the court. If, that is, it existed at all.

The research program was in opposition to the more positivist program in the history of religion, which looked at religious ritual as something extremely public. It did not have, or at least for the purpose of study it did not have, any researchable interiority. Prayer, from this point of view, does not require belief. That I talk on the phone to someone else requires no belief on my part about the science that underlies telephony – I don’t have to have any belief about it at all. That a priest in Egypt or in Athens or in Rome prays does not mean that the priest believes something complex about the relation of the person to the entity prayed to. Rather, the prayer is all exteriorized.

This idea has had a powerful effect on how scholars have regarded ancient religions. At the same time, another group, more archeologically inclined, have patiently combed through excavations of oracles and burial sites and temples and private houses, finding an enormous number of relics – votive offerings, prayers inscribed on stone or pottery pieces -ostrocon - or parchment or papyrus, such as those from Deir-el-Medina – which indicate “personal piety”, as the Egyptologists put it. The villagers wove dream and spells and supplications together with consumption, work, sex, eating, excretion and death. They lived in a cosmos, an order, in which praying was a normal part. Similarly, the prayer structure accepted intercessors – we have pottery shards dislodged from the graves of loved ones where the message is about asking the dead to intervene with the gods for this or that purpose. Even in death, prayer finds a hierarchy, an ordered approach to the gods.

This tradition in Egyptology eventually spilled over into the study of ancient Greek religion. For much of the twentieth century, the idea that, for instance, the ancient Greeks had a public religion that called for certain practices without involving any particular “personal belief” (just as I can talk on the phone without any particular belief concerning how my voice is transmitted, or how I receive voices in return) was the standard heuristic by which Greek religion, as epitomized in the theses of Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion.

 

 

3.

In 1909, Marcel Mauss published Prayer, an anthropological study he never finished. It was published in book form joined to his essay on magic. Magic, superstition and religion are interestingly combined and disjoined in learned culture. Plutarch’s essay on the Epsilon at the oracle of Delphi (there were three large E-s displayed at the temple, one of bronze, one of wood, and one of gold, or gilded with gold) remarks on its meaning, giving various interpretations. The two interesting ones in terms of prayer are: that the   E stands for  if (ei in Greek), with those seeking answers to their problems at the oracle using the logic of if- then to think through the future, or that the E reflects the pattern of prayer: we pray to the god at the temple to help us choose or to choose the future that we want.

Mauss, too, thought of prayer as a way of dealing with the gods, or God. He accorded it a high place, as the uniting center between ritual and myth. Understanding the meaning and function of prayer, Mauss thought, would give us a sense of the “progress” of religion, a progress out of magico-technological view of the gods (who we try to make do our will) to an intellectually richer view of spirituality.

“Religious practices have become for the most part truly individual. The instant, the place, the conditions and the forms of such and such an act depends less and less on social causes. Just as every one acts almost under his own personal responsibility, so to each becomes the creator of his faith. Some protestant sects, for instance the evangelicals, recognize the dogmatic authority of every member of the church. The “interior god” of the most advanced religions is thus also the god of individuals.

These two processes are particularly marked in prayer. It is, even, one of the best agents of this double evolution. Firstly all mechanical, only operating by proferred sounds, it has finished up being completely mental and completely interior. After owing only a small part of itself to thought, it has finished up by being nothing more than thought and effusion of the soul. Strictly collective at first, said in common or at least following forms rigidly fixed by the religious group, sometimes even forbidden to the individual, it has become the domain of the free conversation of the individual with God.”

Mauss’s theory of prayer, though he takes evidence from the Vedas and from various Others, evidently assumes that the evolution of religion is towards a very Christian ideal of religion. Or, at least, a monotheistic ideal.

4.

Prayer, in Mauss’s essay, is a factor in the long history of individuation and interiorization that characterize the “West” – which is further characterized as the vehicle of progress in the world, or among the cultures of the world.

A common trope. I could draw a straight line from the enlightenment regard for prayer to Mauss’s essay. In the philosophe culture, prayer held a special place: it was a kind of rational exaltation, the sublime of reason. Both Voltaire and Rousseau took prayer to have a special civic and rational place, addressing the God discovered by reason and removing the dross of superstition clinging to the deity.  Voltaire in particular had a perspectival view of the cosmos, in which immensity figured as the check to all merely human – and immensely small – customs and vanities. In the Treatise on Tolerance, we find this rather magnificent relic of French rhetoric:

« Tu ne nous as point donné un cœur pour nous haïr, et des mains pour nous égorger ; fais que nous nous aidions mutuellement à supporter le fardeau d’une vie pénible et passagère ; que les petites différences entre les vêtements qui couvrent nos débiles corps, entre tous nos langages insuffisants, entre tous nos usages ridicules, entre toutes nos lois imparfaites, entre toutes nos opinions insensées, entre toutes nos conditions si disproportionnées à nos yeux, et si égales devant toi ; que toutes ces petites nuances qui distinguent les atomes appelés hommes ne soient pas des signaux de haine et de persécution ; que ceux qui allument des cierges en plein midi pour te célébrer supporte ceux qui se contentent de la lumière de ton soleil ; que ceux qui couvrent leur robe d’une toile blanche pour dire qu’il faut t’aimer ne détestent pas ceux qui disent la même chose sous un manteau de laine noire ; qu’il soit égal de t’adorer dans un jargon formé d’une ancienne langue, ou dans un jargon plus nouveau ; que ceux dont l’habit est teint en rouge ou en violet, qui dominent sur une petite parcelle d’un petit tas de boue de ce monde, et qui possèdent quelques fragments arrondis d’un certain métal, jouissent sans orgueil de ce qu’ils appellent grandeur et richesse, et que les autres les voient sans envie : car tu sais qu’il n’y a dans ces vanités ni envier, ni de quoi s’enorgueillir. »

“You did not give us a heart so that we could hate each other, nor hands so we could slit each other’s throats; help us to help each other endure the burden of this painful and brief life; may the tiny differences between the clothes which cover our feeble bodies, between our inadequate languages, between our ridiculous customs, between all our imperfect laws, our absurd opinions, between all our circumstances, so disproportionate in our eyes and yet so equal before yours; may all these tiny variations which differentiate the atoms called humans not be the triggers of hatred and persecution; may those who light candles at midday in adoration of you learn to tolerate those who simply bask in the light of your sun; may those who wrap a white cloth round their robes to express the command to love you not hate those who say the same thing under a coat of black wool; may it be equally acceptable to adore you in the jargon of an ancient language or of a more recent one; may those whose clothes are dyed red or violet and who rule over a small plot on a little heap of the mud of this world, and who happen to possess some rounded pieces of a certain metal, enjoy what they call greatness and riches without pride, and may others view them without envy: for you know that there is nothing to envy or boast about in these vanities.”

The translation is by Caroline Warmen, who led a collective of Oxford students to translate a number of French texts from the 18^th century.

Although the philosophe concept of the deity excluded a non-rational deity – one that appears in three guises, for instance, as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost – the romantic agony was already knocking on the door. The sublime of reason found its true object in freedom, that most dialectical of concepts. God, from Sade to Nietzsche, was never again so immense and so rational.

In a sense, a line could be drawn, in this history of prayer, back to the defining prayer of the Gospels. Jesus’s disciples are all very anxious to learn how to pray. This is already a symptom of the great Eastern Mediterranean culture of personal piety. Jesus obliges, and in doing so separates prayer from the public. It is a radical gesture, making prayer and the lyric self converge: “And when thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward. But when you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you.

And when you pray, do not keep on babbling like pagans, for they think they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them, for your Father knows what you need before you ask him.”

The radical nature of this critique of prayer – and of public religion – is, indeed, one of the great Enlightenment gestures. Although Voltaire might well have dismissed Jesus as a peasant, another savage outside the circle, in positioning prayer outside the temple and making it a message in plain words, Jesus was instituting a revolution in prayer – one that was doomed, of course, to failure in the institutions built under his name.

Yet there is much to say for the hypocrites. When prayer becomes associated with the lyric self, it confronts its communicative limits. And in the elite culture which picked up on the philosophe critique of religion (as an instrument in the creation of homo economicus),  prayer began to disappear as a form of thought, an impulse, a text.

Mirror mirror on the wall

 

Begin with a metaphor: that of the mirror. The novel as a mirror, the artwork. History itself.

 

The metaphor is, of course, inexact. It falls in the category of near misses. What mirror shows the consciousness? A mirror that falls cracks. And this, too, is added to the tab of the mirror metaphor.

An unblemished mirror. A communicating one. Snow White’s stepmother’s magic mirror. The mirror speaks.

 

Like all mirror metaphors, the aim is to tell us something about the real. The real and its image, which is somehow less real. Stendhal’s metaphor – which he attributes to an obscure luminary, Saint Real – of the novel as a mirror walking down the road. Stephen Dedalus’s metaphor of Irish art as the cracked mirror of a servant girl.

And if the mirror has a mouth. But it doesn’t. A voice, but it doesn’t.

 

We see. But sight does not touch. It lacks the tactile guarantee. What is in our hands, what weighs on this earth we stand on, what we feel with the tips of our fingers. What wakes us up when we play with each others sex, or simply with our own. Sight is such longing in comparison to the consummate moment.

 

The dropped mirror cracks. The shattering of the mirror: one assumes a certain violence, a certain shock. Some projectile, some violent shudder. The mirror dropped, the mirror struck, the mirror radiating silvery-white, opaque lines outward from some central injury to the tain and substrate.

 

The Wilderness of mirrors.

 

Eliot, in Gerontion. One of his high wild mercury passages - one that will have a strange career:

 

These with a thousand small deliberations

Protract the profit of their chilled delirium,

Excite the membrane, when the sense has cooled,

With pungent sauces, multiply variety

In a wilderness of mirrors. What will the spider do,

Suspend its operations, will the weevil

Delay?

 

As always in Eliot’s glorious 1920s period, suggestion and insinuation produce funhouse poetry that states and retracts and leaves you on the brink of… oh do not ask what is it, let us go and make our visit. Perhaps the excitation of the membrane here refers to the brothel, which as far as I can tell was not a known Eliot destination. The suggestion, however, of numerous mirrors, some reflecting each other, some catching the action of exciting the membrane, some noticing the spider in the corner - this is in continuity with the old man in a dry month, living down and out among down and outs.

However, a phrase so rich was not destined to stay anchored in a cobwebbed brothel.

 

In 1937, James Jesus Angleton, the son of one of those transatlantic families like the James family in the 19th century, arrived at Yale and roomed with the poet Reed Wittemore. Angleton was coming from his stay in Italy, where he had visited Ezra Pound at Rapallo. So he was in the modernist mood when Wittemore made him read Gerontion.

 

Aside: I myself loved Gerontion when I first read it in High School. I memorized parts of it and used to spontaneously, and to the irritation of all and sundry, quote them. I didn’t notice, at the time, that there was some pretty ugly anti-Jewish bits in that poem. However, these remarks could be regarded as matters of one remove, parts of the inner and outer monologue of the narrator, and not Eliot’s own. We might think that this deniability is not credible, but deniability is, I think, so built into poetry that every confession is a little lie, there.  Eliot’s weird upper Midwest bourgie prejudice against Jews. Of all the things he chose to carry with him across the cold Atlantic.

 

To return to our man Angleton – he loved the codedness of the poem. Like the sixties students trying to piece together the meaning in Bob Dylan’s lyrics, Angleton and his Yale friends liked the collage effect, the sense of a meaning hiding behind another meaning, and so on, in the depths of the poem.

 

Angleton went on to become one of the most influential CIA agents of the Cold War. He had cred, partly because he seemed hooked into a way of reading intelligence that resembled, as his biographer Jefferson Morley puts it, the New Critical practice of close reading. Morley is a journalist who has always hopped down the intelligence path – and so one shouldn’t expect too much from his attempts to bring together New Criticism and espionage However, one biographical fact that is startling: Angleton not only read Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity but met Empson himself. In this period, Angleton even started a small press magazine, in which he published, among others, Pound.

 

Angleton had a dire effect, I think it is fair to say, on American democracy, but a more major negative effect on Italy and Israel. For the latter, he almost certainly directed the stealing of material from the U.S. that helped the Israelis build nuclear weapons. The effect on the former is in front of our eyes right now: the Fascist prime minister of Italy, whose far right party was strengthened historically by Angleton’s numerous interferences in Italy’s politics, from rescuing Mussolini’s follower, Prince Borghese, who later tried to overturn the Italian state in a rightwing coup in the seventies, to creating numerous capillary lines with the far right groups that manipulated Italy in the strategy of tension in the sixties and seventies. Plus, of course, the U.S. putting its thumb on the first elections Italy had after Mussolini, which led to the election of the Christian Democrats and all that followed.

 

But to return to our mirror metaphor. The wilderness of mirrors became Angleton’s go-to metaphor for understanding counter-intelligence. He was the head of Counter-intelligence at the CIA for almost twenty-five years. In that time, he almost absolutely fucked up the spy agency’s Human Intelligence on the Soviet Union, since he was persuaded that every defector from the Soviet Union was actually a double agent – for by the wilderness of mirrors model, you had to read back into any information you received the sinister intent of the vast and complicated hive mind of International Communism. The unreliable narrator comes in from the cold. It was through the wilderness of mirrors principle that Angleton deduced that the split between China and the Soviet Union was a feint – to trick us. And so on. It was, in fact, pretty much the dreary traveling salesman anti-communism of your average John Bircher dressed up in New Critical clothes of close reading – with the cavil that Angleton couldn’t read Russian. In D.C. and Georgetown, where Angleton roamed, drink in hand, being able to quote T.S. Eliot was an intellectual feat comparable to splitting the atom – our overlords have always been pretty dull – and so Angleton gathered around himself a mystic that is hard, at this distance, to understand.

 

The mirror metaphor: it is easy, in pondering the great works, to think that they form a self-contained world. They don’t. Literature spills out of us all, every day. Biography, history, poetry, tv, video games – all mirrors. Mirrors in a maze, mirrors that show us looking into mirrors, the selfie world without end, amen.

change your life, change the old, dying society

 

In Ma Nuit chez Maud, Jean-Louis, the Catholic engineer, bumps into an old college friend of his, Vidal, who is now a philosophy professor. Jean-Louis confesses that he is still an observing Catholic; but, he says, he has his own ideas about Catholicism. For instance, he recently read Pascal and felt that if Pascal’s rigorism was Christianity, he would rather be an atheist. Vidal, on the other hand, claims that, as a Marxist, Pascal has a peculiar meaning to him. His choice of Marxism, he claims, was decided by something like Pascal’s wager about the existence of God. As Vidal sees it, there are two ways of looking at history. Either it doesn’t make sense or it does. If the first view, A, has an 80 percent sense of being true, and the second a 20 percent chance, it is still rational to bet on the second view – as it fills one’s life with meaning.

I doubt that there are many Marxists today who would say, with Vidal, that Marxism is identical to the decision to see a meaning in history. They are far more likely to explain that Marxism points to the way in which the meaning of history changes with the historical circumstances of the interpreters – which tends to undermine any objective claim to discern the meaning of history. And, to an extent, I would agree with the disabused Marxist. Vidal is the mouthpiece of a fairly common strain of rhetoric in the years after WWII, when the defeat of Nazi Germany and decolonization of the Third World seemed to be objective proof that history was ‘on our side’.

… Which isn't to say that this was the only sense one could see in history – it could be an infinite abasement, as it appears to have been seen by Cioran. By the sixties, however, the notion that there was some inevitable development in history – inevitability being one way to construe the ‘meaning’ of history – was on the wane. The notion that there was a discontinuity in history tended to make the idea that there was a sense in it seem quaint.

On the other hand, there was also positivist variant that stretches from the Rotary club booster to the University of Chicago prof, which opined that the progress of science was, in some general and vague way the progress that had brought us liberal capitalist society. In the late 80s and 90s, a variant of this idea was that capitalism as globalism was the end of history. This sounded more apocalyptic than the Babbit insistence in this snatch of dialogue from Flannery O'Connor's The Life you Save May Be Your Own:

“Mr. Shiftlet's eye in the darkness was focused on a part of the automobile bumper that glittered in the distance. "Lady," he said, jerking his short arm up as if he could point with it to her house and yard and pump, "there ain't a broken thing on this plantation that I couldn't fix for you, one‑arm jackleg or not. I'm a man," he said with a sullen dignity, "even if I ain't a whole one. I got," he said, tapping his knuckles on the floor to emphasize the immensity of what he was going to say, "a moral intelligence!" and his face pierced out of the darkness into a shaft of doorlight and he stared at her as if he were astonished himself at this impossible truth.The old woman was not impressed with the phrase. "I told you you could hang around and work for food," she said, "if you don't mind sleeping in that car yonder."
"Why listen, Lady," he said with a grin of delight, "the monks of old slept in their coffins!"
"They wasn't as advanced as we are," the old woman said.”

Marx had a strong sense of history. This, it is usually said, is his inheritance from Hegel; however, even a glance at the Enlightenment and Romantic culture of Germany would show us that history as a “force” of some kind precedes Hegel. For Herder, for the translators of the Scots like Gentz, for romantic critics like Schlegel, history as a force was already part of the intellectual equipment. And who could blame them? Looking about, it was hard to find institutions in Germany that would help overthrow the impediments to modernity - everywhere were crappy small landholders and tax collectors, peasants and pastors. History was treated as all the more autonomous as the historian was all the more feudally dependent. The peasant society of the limited good was particularly strong in the German states, and the distrust of growth was shared by peasants and Junkers alike. Faith in history as a force was the face of the modernity longed for by a section of the intelligentsia.

Marx’s original views about history were, I think, entangled with his sense of Germany’s underdevelopment. The double aspect of Marx’s description of the capitalist system – on the one hand, as the expression of the revolutionary force of the bourgeoisie, and, on the other hand, as a system that had to be overthrown – lead to a certain confusion in reading Marx chronologically. That double aspect allows Marx a lot of elbow room for his irony – and Marx always viewed irony as a high intellectual gift. I need to find that passage where he laughs about the political economist's blindness to irony. That was a fatal flaw.

It is in the Manifesto that Marx makes certain statements about history that, themselves, have a history leading up to the conversation of Jean-Louis and Vidal in Ma Nuit chez Maud. As with Baudelaire’s notion of the modern, history is obviously a bit of an intoxicant to Marx. And why not? Who has not known the sublime feeling of standing with the devil above it all, at say 6,000 feet above all human kind – although it is best not to bow down to the devil at that moment, no matter what he promises you.

“One speaks of ideas, which revolutionize a whole society; one thus only expresses the fact, that within the old society have been moulded the elements of a new one, for the dissoluton of the old ideas keeps pace with the dissolution of the old relations of life.”

The uncompromising phrase, a “whole society,” seems to infer a unilateral motion, pressing on all levels of society. Everything goes at once, for all pieces of the old relations of life are connected to each other. And we do see this. Who can’t see, for instance, that the old ways of human locomotion – mainly by walking, sometimes by horse – were so completely swept away, first by the railroad, then by the automobile, that walking in many places in the developed world – for instance, Texas – has become a minority option. The old times – the week it would take to go from London to Edinburgh – have disappeared – or exist only in the minds and careers of bums and tramps. But bums and tramps can’t simply walk across the countryside like they could in 1900 or 1800 – they are bounded by the roads they can travel, as they cannot walk besides a highway, and would certainly draw police attention if they walk along other roads. At the present time, China, in one of the greatest engineering feats ever attempted, is automobilizing its human locomotion. All over the world, the car is uprooting and changing the old relations of life.

And yet, is it true that the surface of life is so homogeneous that it can simply change like this? The romantic notion now is that beneath the crust, lifeforces still counter social changes. History has turned into Thanatos – and the lifeforce, Eros, struggles against it mightily.

 

Eros is us.

 

on Cocteau and Maurice Sachs and the twenties

 

« …. the fervor without which youth is hardly worth being lived….” – in this phrase, Maurice Sachs sums up what he felt for Jean Cocteau in the twenties. It is a phrase that could be applied to the twenties itself. It was the decade in which the modern opened up, and everything came out.

Maurice Sachs is one of the great wretches of literature – one of the purest products of the twenties mix of the demi-monde and literary culture. That culture, in all its mediums – movies, gramophone discs, dancehalls, newspapers – had more of an effect on the lifestyles of the population at large than any of the policies of the political parties at the helm in France – or for that matter Britain or the U.S. It continues to have an effect – the internet builds on the media of the twenties, obvy.

Sachs’ life has fascinated a number of writers, most especially Modiano, who has traced, in his imagination, the perfervid atmosphere of the Occupation and all of its dealers. Sachs was there. He was born Jewish. He was an outfront gay man. He also married a woman, converted to Catholicism, wrote a famous article praising Thorez, the French communist leader, changed his life during the occupation, volunteered to work in Germany for the money (a common enough move, but a strangely dangerous one for a man whose Jewish roots were no secret), became an informer for the Gestapo, and, legend has it, was murdered by outraged worker-slaves in a Hamburg prison before the end of the war.

When Sachs fell out of love with Cocteau in the twenties, he famously did this: forged a letter from Cocteau allowing him to clean out Cocteau’s objects from the apartment on Rue D’anjou that Cocteau shared with his mother.  Then Sachs sold them and pocketed the money.  

Cocteau at this time was in some financial straits. Yet he forgave Sachs, to the appalled disapproval of his friends. Sachs gave out a louche vibe, and Cocteau liked it.   

Sachs is a puzzle for those who go to aesthetics hoping to find empathy, or some answer to the question, how shall I live? Art is long, though, and both villains and saints have made it.

Sachs, that immoral shambles, cast a spider’s eye over his life and acquaintances in a number of books, including the fragmentary journal, published posthumously as In the Time of the Boeuf sur le toit. It is a reworked diary. The first encounter with Cocteau is beautifully done.

“Been to see Raquel Meller at the Olympia… Cocteau was in the concert hall. Alias introduced me: an angular figure, a black toupee on the top of his head, hands everywhere, a coat that fell to his knees, lined with red flannel. “You understand,” he said, “ she is an angel, an angel of purity, she sings in the way one writes. You never know where she is. One might think she has changed her skin, that she has left her old one on the stage like a molting snake – she is behind you, in you, you don’t know where, she’s an angel.” “Ah, my dear!” he said, leaving us and throwing himself into the arms of a very beautiful, very elegant woman, “I’ve been dying to see you but I never ever get out, ask Raymond,  never, ask Mama, I live like a prisoner; besides, I died, I nearly died two days ago, you see. I positively do not know what I had. Dalimier who treated me said it was an illness one sees in Paris only one case every ten years. It seems they treated the ambassador of China for it in 1912, without being able to heal him, and beside, they don’t know what it is. And if Coco hadn’t sent me a very very sympathetic masseur who unknotted my muscles with his feet, I would have positively died. It is a miracle that I am here!”

This is the true twenties note, caught, as well, in Vile Bodies, by Evelyn Waugh. I love it that Sachs saw his hands: “hands everywhere”.  Frederic Gaussen, in The lost children of the Twentieth Century, has a nice article on Cocteau and Sachs. Sachs lost his respect for Cocteau as an artist, in the end. He thought that he was something else:

« Cocteau, he said, was not a creator but the animator of parisian life. The Monsieur Loyal of the avant-garde. It was as a recuperator, an advertiser, that he worked, serving others for his own glory. Of his work, Sachs estimated, there will remain in the end almost nothing. Everything in him was artifice, counterfeit. »

In this judgment, Sachs showed that he had not purged the nineteenth century from his veins. In fact, post-Wagner, the art of the animator and art in general merge: Duchamp and Cocteau, Cage and Warhol, the performance as form, this is where art moved. Sachs himself survives not in his novels, which I must say I’ve never read, but in his hallucinatory autobiographies – and in the biographies and memoirs of others.

But what I really love, in Sachs’ spiderglance, is the noticing of the hands. The handiness. The wanting, separated from the Capitol of the brain, of the hands to hand, to mold, to pick. Picasso had this – in the Picasso museum there is displayed some doodles Picasso added to torn out pages from fashion magazines that show the incorrigible eleven year old school boy. The hand has its own intelligence, its own paths, its own sphere. And it is an eery thing.

 

Lawrence's Etruscans

 

I re-read Women in Love a couple of years ago and thought, I’m out of patience with Lawrence.

Then…

Then, visiting my in-law in Montpellier, I took a book from their shelf: Lawrence’s Sketches of Etruscan Places. April had not brought its accustomed heat to Southern France – instead, the days were an assortment of weathers, cold to hot, sunny to gray. This was one of the sunny days so I decided, having finished an editing job, to go into the “jardin”, which I would call, as a suburban-suckled American, a big back yard, and read a bit.

I’m all patience, at the moment, for Lawrence.

One forgets what Lawrence knew about the English language. About language. Which is that besides sense and sound, language is movement. It is urges and reticences, it is tidal or exhausted. It turns out that visiting Etruscan sites in Italy in the late twenties, when Lawrence had seen the Other from Ceylon to Mexico and back, was an excellent plan. These were the years of tuberculosis and Lady Chatterley. Years of being away from the British pack of literati and their patrons that had driven Lawrence mad.

Etruscia was, in Lawrence’s telling, versus in every instinct Rome – the Rome of our classical education and the Rome of Mussolini. Lawrence’s politics are a form of oppositional nostalgia that can veer towards the racist and the sexist, but they are far from the muscular militarism that was and is the essence of fascism.

Lawrence makes this clear on the very first page of his book:

“However, those pure, clean-living, sweet-souled Romans, who smashed nation after nation and crushed the free soul in people after people, and were ruled by Messalina and Heliogabalus and such-like snowdrops, they said the Etruscans were vicious. So basta! Quand le mâitre parle, tout le monde se tait. The Etruscans were vicious! The only vicious people on the face of the earth presumably. You and I, dear reader, we are two unsullied snowflakes, aren’t we? We have every right to judge.

Myself, however, if the Etruscans were vicious, I’m glad they were. To the Puritan all things are impure, as somebody says. And those naughty neighbours of the Romans at least escaped being Puritans.”

There I was, in the sun and cloud of Montpellier, reading Lawrence write about a wiped out people, thinking that Italy is run again by a fascist and Gaza is being wiped out bomb by bomb, and maybe it was Lawrence’s search for the Other that saved him. A search that is called “romanticism” or “irrationalism” by the bombers.

But…

But this is just the politics of a book that is constructed as a rather astonishing dialogue with the dead. The construction of the book is simple: Lawrence goes to five Etruscan sites with his friend Brewster. The sites are small towns in Italy away from the main, and Lawrence’s travels there and stays in various small hotels is the above ground part of the book. Lawrence’s visits to the Etruscan tombs is the below ground part of the book. It is another Tuscan book about visits to the other world. And it “pulses”, to use a word Lawrence loved to caress, with a vision that climbs out of those old tombs and incarnates in oddly sublime commonplaces.

There is, for instance, the initiatory encounter with a goatherder in whom Lawrence sees a faun. It is a this-world vision that prefigures the numerous descents in the tombs, and the extended ekphrasis and commentary of the murals there. Lawrence and his friend go to a cavern-like tavern for mule-drivers in Cerveteri, the first Etruscan site.

“Into the cavern swaggers a spurred shepherd wearing goatskin trousers with the long, rusty brown goat’s hair hanging shaggy from his legs. He grins and drinks wine, and immediately one sees again the shaggy-legged faun. His face is a faun-face, not deadened by morals. He grins quietly, and talks very subduedly, shyly, to the fellow who draws the wine from the barrels. It is obvious fauns are shy, very shy, especially of moderns like ourselves. He glances at us from a corner of his eye, ducks, wipes his mouth on the back of his hand, and is gone, clambering with his hairy legs on to his lean pony, swirling, and rattling away with a neat little clatter of hoofs, under the ramparts and away to the open. He is the faun escaping again out of the city precincts, far more shy and evanescent than any Christian virgin. You cannot hard-boil him.

It occurs to me how rarely one sees the faun-face now, in Italy, that one used to see so often before the war: the brown, rather still, straight-nosed face with a little black moustache and often a little tuft of black beard; yellow eyes, rather shy, under long lashes, but able to glare with a queer glare, on occasion; and mobile lips that had a queer way of showing the teeth when talking, bright white teeth. It was an old, old type, and rather common in the South. But now you will hardly see one of these men left, with the unconscious, ungrimacing faun-face. They were all, apparently, killed in the war”…

A passage that, I hope, Pasolini read. Those faun-faced boys, how Pasolini adored them, and feared them! Lawrence, as we know too well from Women in Love and other fictions, found modernity, with its great symbolic scar, the war, to be a compact and conspiracy of misery, of the exhaustion of our human resources, ruled over by whatever iteration of Romans were in power. Minos, Etruscia, the Druids, all the early people. Lawrence’s longing for the archaic was a common feature among the generation of modernists to which Lawrence reluctantly belonged. But for Lawrence it had utopian features that were part of everything he wrote, and that redeemed his too facile disgusts.

Yet…

Yet this is mindwork, and what I read in the Etruscan book, from the faun man to the wonderful mix of description and Lawrentian preaching – the one intermingled with the other – had a nicely levitating effect on me. Which is, perhaps, the Lawrence effect, to which male intellectuals in the 1960s were prone. Angela Carter testified to this in her numerous, mocking references to Lawrence in her essays. He was the writer she targeted most often, never doubting he was a worthy target, something much greater than being simply a target. Our greatest enemies, at least as writers, we want them to be great, too.

I might have more to say about the tomb to surface structure of Lawrence’s book later on. I’m dreaming of bulls and red painted men. 

Pasts that could have been - the Marxist who helped found the Republican party

 The Trajectory of the Republican party is a sad thing. It is now Trump's plaything. But did you know - kids out there - that one of the co-founders of the R party in 1854 was a certain Joseph Weydemeyer, a friend and correspondent of Karl Marx. He knew Marx from the old newspaper days in Germany, fled, like him, from the German repression, founded a Marx oriented Workers Party in Cleveland in 1851, and then helped create the Republican party in its first convention in Chicago in 1855.

To think: at one point, Lincoln's party, which Marx supported, could have become the American Labour party. Ah, the possibilities! But that spirit died with Harrison's administration, and though sparks of it flamed up in Theodore Roosevelt's - who, as a Progressive, proposed a major re-organization of the American economy, from requiring corporations to incorporate with a national Commerce department to bills that would have required all corporations that issue stock to make that stock exactly equal to earnings plus assets - no market value! One of the best ideas to be lost in the rise of the American plutocracy ever - by Hoover's day the die was cast.
Bring back Joe Wedymeyer - or Dear Weywy, as Marx called him.

Mencken's skepticism

 

“Speed knew, also, that as the constant dropping of water will wear away the hardest stone, so will the constant repetition of news propaganda and editorial comment, however silly, wear away the thin layer of common sense that surrounds the mind of the average human. He knew that the vast majority of people will believe anything if they hear it often enough.”

This is from Herbert Ashbury’s article about a short lived Hearst newspaper, the Georgian, that set itself up as the competition in Atlanta, Georgia, and failed in the end to oust the reigning Journal-Constitution.. The article appeared in Mencken’s American Mercury in 1926. This was the decade of the Mencken apogee – and Ashbury’s sentences casually nail down the credo under which Mencken ran up his flag. (sorry about the nailing down a raised flag, but what the hell).It was a credo that took as a given that the democratic premise, the public was enlightened enough to govern itself, was so much horse doodle, a rhetorical front for villains to loot the people and an entertainment industry to take them for a ride, for in their heart the public were 4/5 clown, and 1/5 sentimentalist. Outside that circle stood a few wiseasses who knew better, and who had to put up with the insufferable academics who denied the obvious.

Mencken, as someone once put it, was a whale – a uniquely American whale. The American Mercury was the great popular organ for discovering the American grain. It published the greats, from John Fante to William Faulkner. But underneath Mencken’s wisecracking persona and wonderous mixture of magniloquence and hard boiled attitude was a very very reactionary p.o.v. It was a wonder what Mencken could see and describe, and another wonder what he could not see and never bring himself, prejudices in head, to see.

There’s a great example of this in his review, in 1931, of Eugene Lavine’s The Third Degree. Here’s the terrific first graf:

“MR. LAVINE is a police reporter of long practise in New York. In a way his book proves it, for it is written in slipshod and often irritating journalese, but in another way it conceals the fact, for he deals with the police in a frank and objective manner that is very rare among men of his craft. Most of them, after a year or two at headquarters, become so coppish themselves that they are quite unable to discuss the constabulary art and mystery with any show of sense. They fade into what Mr. Lavine himself calls police buffs; that is, police enthusiasts, police fans. A headquarters detective, though he may present to the judicious eye only the spectacle of an ill-natured and somewhat thievish jackass, becomes a hero to them, and they regard an inspector with his gold badge in the wistful, abject fashion proper to the contemplation of the Holy Saints. Every American newspaper of any size has such a police reporter on its staff; there must be at least a thousand in the whole country. But they never write anything about cops that is either true or interesting, and so the literature of the subject is a blank.”

Lavine’s book is devoted, in part, to chronicling the confessions beat out of people unfortunate enough to be trapped by the thievish jackasses.

“As his title indicates, Mr. Lavine devotes a large part of his book to describing the so-called third degree. His accounts of it have the gaudy picturesqueness of good war correspondence. Blood not only flows in streams; it spouts and gurgles. He tells of criminals so badly beaten by police-station Torquemadas that they went mashuggah, and Sing Sing had to yield them to Matteawan. But he manages to get through his account without any show of moral indignation. It is very uncommon, he says, for an innocent man to be thus ill used. The cops seldom get out their rubber-hose shillelahs and lengths of automobile tire save when they have a clearly guilty man before them, and are trying to force something out of him—say the names of his accomplices—that will aid them in their art.”

Notice the shift, here, from the jackass to the discoverers of “clear guilt”.  Nowhere in the review does Mencken cast doubt on a conclusion that is ill assorted with his description of the low browed and thievish constable. If this is the general cast of the police character, you would expect (as crime statistics routinely indicate) that far from finding the guilty, from a quarter to half of crimes are not solved at all, up to and including murder. Rape, for instance, notoriously escapes their abilities, in part because the category is notoriously difficult for the male cop to get his mind around.

It is the idea that the police are able to recognize the “obviously guilty”  that makes Mencken go way off course. Like many sceptics, in fact like a whole American sceptical tradition, Mencken’s doubt goes away when it is a matter of protecting the hierarchy as it is. Which leads to the astonishing case he briefly makes for whipping criminals.

“There is here a hint for lawmakers. Let them restore the bastinado, as has been done in England, and they will not have to resort to Baumes laws and other such extravagant and desperate devices, most of which do not work. The English, when they take a tough boy in an assault with firearms, give him what, in America, would be regarded as a very short term of imprisonment, but they keep him jumping while he is behind the bars by cowhiding him at regular intervals. In consequence, there are very few gunmen in England. In the United States any such programme would bring loud protests from so-called humanitarians. But there is really no reason why whipping should be inhumane.”

Once Mencken flies off the handle, he jumps into the soup – to use the Americanese that he rather loved. In fact, of course, it is very hard to acquire firearms in Britain, whereas the tough boys in America in 1931 had an easy time acquiring tommyguns. Mencken’s scepticism combined with the idea that the guv’mint should not be banning a form of property gives birth to the humane whipping, a truly neat instance of a return to Medieval norms that Mencken would recognize if it was combined with gospel preaching in some anti-Darwinist Southern state.

Mencken and his opposite, Walter Lippman, sanctified the position of “columnist” in America: that history has still not been written. Mencken’s prose style is an American treasure, I think, but his “skepticism” has proved to be an American bane. Must be said, though, that in the twenties and through the thirties, the American Mercury was a great magazine. That it became a racist jackoff magazine in the late forties was a sad sign that the Jazz Age was truly dead.