Nobody likes political correctness

 Nobody likes political correctness. Which puts us in the position that it isn’t correct to defend political correctness. It is like picking your nose or flashing in a park – not the kind of thing you want to be associated with.

I think the phrase – and its villainizing character – goes back to a Cold War liberal discourse, in which the Communist figures as an authoritarian personality and the Western liberal figures as a groovy dialoguer. However, it occurs in a few places before World War II. Arnold Bennett submitted a novel of his to Lord Beaverbrook, who looked it over for “political correctness” – as Bennett’s diary puts it. However, I think this simply meant that it was realistic with regards to the political processes and political characters that it described.

Political correctness jumped majorly into the major outlets of the media with the civil rights movements and the New Left. The media, which had subserviently gone through the anti-Communist 50s with nary an op ed by a communist or a reflection on the merger of American foreign and domestic policy with anti-communism was jolted by the New Left attack on that monolithic ideology. It was an attack that, as was quickly seen, had a weak spot: for how about the “line” that the New Lefties themselves followed? The inner attitudinal policing – which, as all groovy liberals knew, was all to reminiscent of Big Brother and Communism itself. This made political correctness a great and bountiful phrase. All good things could be reaped from it.

One of the good things is humor. The groovy liberal was ever liable to laugh and joke, while the political correct policeman only knew how to sulk and snarl. This is put well by Erica Jong (who, author’s note, I adore) in an interview in Cosmo in 1978, explaining the lesbian scenes in her novel, How to Save Your Own Life.

“The chapter is the broadest parody- a humous takeoff on that whole period in the women’s movement when everyone I knew felt compelled to have an affai rwith a woman because it was chic… And, as a satirist of my society (which I assuredly am), I have the right (possibly even the duty) to spoof the fads of my day. That doesn’t mean I’m antilesbian or antiwoman or that I don’t support the very legitimate demands of gay activists for equal rights. But as a writer and humorist, I refuse to toe a party line and to inhibit my satire because certain humorless, sullen people think political “correctness” is more important than laughter. The fact is, even if a writer wanted to be politically correct, she couldn’t be. What pleases one group alienates another. So a writer really has no choice but to write books to please herself… Laughter and poetry may, perhaps, transcend their time. Politics never do.”

I think that Erica Jong’s comment about political correctness hits all the buttons – it is encyclopedic and at the same time brief. It idealizes the writer’s desire – what she wants – as an expression of freedom that she is compelled to – since any expression will alienate some group. It is a defense of humor – which is given a transcendent cast (along with poetry) – against the political part of political correctness – we don’t, in other words, read the Divine Comedy to get our bearings on the Guelphs, and Swift’s sticking it to the Whigs is, as any Professor of English Lit in the 1950s could tell you, representative of questions about human nature itself and the perennial questions thereunto. And political correctness is attributed to a power that is based in public opinion in America, but that is merely a click away from becoming a totalitarian bureaucracy – of the left, of course.

It is the latter supposition that is curious. Feminists in the 1970s, like antifascists today, were a protesting minority. The majority and the vested power of the Establishment – the makers of laws, the runners of corporations, the judges and cops – were not enforcing politically correct rules about feminism, but were busy being almost all male and all white. Their allergy to being attacked for being all male and all white was to say that the attackers were authoritarians who, by some astonishing accident, had almost no power at all, and who were showing what they would do if they had power with their attitudinal policing, which makes it a good thing that power rest in the hands that hold it.

This is one way of looking at the picture. Another way is to see in, say, movement feminists a possible future – a political one. In fact, for the “everybody” that Jong knew, that future turned out to be bright. Upper middle class women have gone from triumph to triumph since 1978. They have broken glass ceilings – an interesting goal, not exactly aimed at by those leftist feminists who combined feminism with some Marx-y notion of working class power. Perhaps those were the very feminists who were most humorless. Humor among those who see a bright future is, perhaps, a different thing from humor among those who feel, with every instinct, that they are going into the garbage.

Parties

 

The part about parties

The party existed in the 19th century. Go to, say, the Chicago Tribune society page and read this, from 28 January 1877:

“A social event which will long be remembered by those who were so fortunate as to participate occurred Frida evening at the residence of Mrs. Whitman, no. 1777 Wabash avenue. The compliments and best wishes of the party were tendered to Mr. and Mrs. Ed Sturtevant, whose appreciation of the “surprise” was made manifest during an entire evening of unmingled entertainment.”

These social events were often “functions” based around some purpose, but as the Whitmans and the Sturtevants could testify, they often involved unexpected visitors, drinking and fiddle playing. As the gilded age got ever more gilded, among the New York millionaire set parties became essential monuments of conspicuous consumption, running rampant through show girls and ice sculptures.

But I would contend that it was technology – notably the phonograph and the radio – that really goosed the twentieth century party into existence. Its democratization, its youth, adventurousness, dancing,music and hip flasks really came together in the twenties, les années folles, any account of which must be an account, in part, of parties. The novels of the twenties bear ample witness: Tender is the Night, Vile Bodies, the Unpossessed, Party-Going, Mrs. Dalloway, and even Women in Love – set in the boho set that was all proto-twenties – require parties as organizing plot elements. They are as it were correlates of the plot itself. In Proust or Musil, on the other hand, the freewheeling party element is subordinate to the banquet or function principle. Here, conversation in the clubbish sense tracks the event. They lack the pot-luck aura of the Anglo-American scene. Once never has the sense that the Guermantes are ever going to jump up and jitterbug.

The other great party decade, I think, is the sixties, that cousin to the twenties. One of the social events of the decade was Truman Capote’s masked ball, an appropriately camp event that Delillo shrewdly used as an important symbol of Cold War culture – and its coming apart – in Underworld. Of course, Delillo had long been a party writer – parties are key to, say, Running Dog, at the center of which is a film of a mythical party/orgy in Hitler’s bunker – an apocalypse party.

Looking over the party-strewn sweep of my own existence in the 20th and 21st centuries, the patter is predictably middle class. Between the 20s up to the late 30s, parties were “adventures” in Georg Simmel’s sense, intersections between the real life and the dream life. – or nightmare life, depending on the depth of disaster into which the party descended. The parties I went to or, more rarely, gave were about dancing, drinking and taking drugs. Conversation was very un-Musil like, shouted over the music into ears. The development of a thought, in the party, was always in the service of a joke, a come-on, or a personal argument. These parties were often heralded by invites, but the invites were labored over to make them seem like parodies of invites. This was because the party mocked the ritual of a party, of the type that is so organized that people are invited to it. Most of the best parties definitely attracted a number of non-invitees, which, in certain of the most out of control ones, were people in trouble. These parties built up their multi-cellular, mutant structure without any center. Breakups and hookups were party phenomena. After the thirties, in my muddle passage, parties are no longer adventures, and are no longer meant to be. The Covid age has definitely been a giant blow to parties, and I have a vague sense of depressed youth around me – although I expect parties to become much wilder for the youth in the next coupla years. Out of self-defense, we have gone out to few parties lately. The ones we have gone to for the past several years are almost always adult afterparties of children’s parties or wedding receptions. The soundtrack of the former is all chatter – no music plays, even in the background. The latter are the last remnant of a vast archipelago, in my life, of dancing. I loved to dance when I was a younger man – it was an important part of growing up, emotionally, for me – but I am less tolerant, I suppose, of looking ridiculous. Apparently in the States, the 20 something bourgeoisie can no longer get married without first boarding a party bus in Nashville and leaving behind a trail of to-go cups with a little vodka in the bottom of them, in which a few cigarette butts float. I don’t know if this is a happy or sad thing, really.

The party novel has recently reappeared – to good examples are Sally Rooney’s Conversations with Friends and Rachel Kushner’s Flamethrowers, although in Kushner the parties are nostalgic curiosa from the 70s art scene. In my case, my parties have miniaturized themselveves into scattered bits of prose, full of cod-learning, such as one might hear from a bore at a party, shouted into your ear.

“‘Oh, Nina, what a lot of parties.’

(. . . Masked parties, Savage parties, Victorian parties, Greek parties, Wild West parties, Russian parties, Circus parties, parties where one had to dress as somebody else, almost naked parties in St John’s Wood, parties in flats and studios and houses and ships and hotels and night clubs, in windmills and swimming baths, tea parties at school where one ate muffins and meringues and tinned crab, parties at Oxford where one drank brown sherry and smoked Turkish cigarettes, dull dances in London and comic dances in Scotland and disgusting dances in Paris—all that succession and repetition of massed humanity. . . . Those vile bodies . . .)”

Flirting and modernity

 

In the 18^th century, English essayists expressed a lotta anxiety about female reading.  The “new” genre of the romance fiction already created its problems for the classically trained, who rightly suspected that the prevalence of literacy was having a massive, unpredictable effect.  

As Samuel Johnson wrote:

“In the romances formerly written, every transaction and sentiment was so remote from all that passes among men, that the reader was in very little danger of making any applications to himself; the virtues and crimes were equally beyond his sphere of activity; and he amused himself with heroes and with traitors, deliverers and persecutors, as with beings of another species, whose actions were regulated upon motives of their own, and who had neither faults nor excellencies in common with himself.

But when an adventurer is levelled with the rest of the world, and acts in such scenes of the universal drama, as may be the lot of any other man; young spectators fix their eyes upon him with closer attention, and hope, by observing his behaviour and success, to regulate their own practices, when they shall be engaged in the like part.”

When the adventurer is a bit of a scoundrel or a woman, the hypnotic effect upon the female displaced another bit of the hierarchy – which is why it was necessary to supervise female reading especially. There was a copious literature about just that necessity, which has been culled by many feminist literary historians.

But that scene of literacy and reading in Britain looked a bit differently to intellectuals from less developed lands. Georg Lichtenberg, an anglophile whose visit to England was, perhaps, the most dramatic adventure of his life, was one of them. For him, a woman reading a newspaper was the very image of civilization. And, he suspected, it was a scene lodged in the superstructure, underneath which there was a material infrastructure that was dissolving the old separation between private and public, a structure that held women prisoners of the household. Although you would never know it from today’s “war of civilization” Western press, in which the Moslem world’s veiling of women is a throwback to the stone age, in Europe up through the 19^th century there were very strict rules that applied to women in public. They were not supposed to be there. The flaneur might be an outlier – the flaneuse was an outlaw. We imagine city streets in the nineteenth century in the image of 21^st century costume dramas, but in reality, the streets were for men. The women who appeared on the street was subject to an initiation that had much to do with the assumption of her sexual availability. To be appropriately covered was a norm for women that was extremely hazardous to broach.

A French novelist, Pierre Senges, has recently written a novel that proposes to view Lichtenberg’s Suedelbucher – Waste books – as fragments of a novel. Lichtenberg himself was a reader of novels and a thinker about the genre. He wrote in a sort of proto-Kittler style about the connection between the novel, modernization, and women, using the English cityscape and mode of transportation as motives to novel-writing – taking up the challenge of the “levelling of adventure” that made the (female) reader a potential heroine and seeing in it a freedom from the old ways.  

Lichtenberg tutored English students in Gottingen, and first visited England in 1770. Those features that worried the Tory moralist as well as Whig feminists, like Mary Wollstonecraft. Wollstonecraft wanted education and emancipation, but was not happy about thrusting women (the bourgeois female subject) into the public sphere:

“Females are not educated to become public speakers or players; though many young ladies are now led by fashion to exhibit their persons on a stage, sacrificing to mere vanity that diffidence and reserve which characterizes youth, and is the most graceful ornament of the sex. 

But if it be allowed to be a breach of modesty for a woman to obtrude her person or talents on the public when necessity does not justify and spur her on, yet to be able to read with propriety is certainly a very desirable attainment: to facilitate this task, and exercise the voice, many dialogues have been selected; but not always the most beautiful with respect to composition, as the taste should very gradually be formed.”

Lichtenberg, however, saw female publicness as the inevitable accompaniment of modernization. He observed in England that the house scheme was such as to individualize the residents, the family members. While in Germany children and adolescents doubled up in their rooms, and the communal air of the household extended to watchfulness about the comings and goings of all the members, especially the girls, in England the house plan allowed for individuals to “own” their rooms, and the houses were situated so as to give multiple access to the outside. In 1965, a demographer named John Hajnal proposed that the early modern period saw a splitting up of European marriage patterns, with the “West” – notably England and some of France – adhering to a new pattern of family residence.  He  called the Western pattern the simple household formation, in which one and only one married couple were at the center of the household; in the East, you had what he called a joint household formation, in which two or more related married couples formed the household. Hajnal claimed that in the sixteenth century, the Western type of household was new, and characterized by a demographic shift in which marriage occurred significantly later in life. For women, for instance, the average age moves from 20 to 25. Meanwhile, in the East, the marriage age remained very young, and so a married couple of, basically, teenagers remained in a household with an older couple, usually the husband’s family.

East and West, here, name Cold War entities that don’t fit Hajnal’s data. Spain and Italy south of Tuscany is “Eastern”, and Bohemia is Western. Nevertheless, if Hajnal’s theory is right, it says very important things about Early modernity – namely, that the discovery of youth – the extended time before marriage – and of “individualism” are entangled.

Lichtenberg definitely had something like that entaglement in line with his notion that novel reading was connected to such things as the greater chance for eye to eye contact between men and women that came about in a modernized carriage system – to which he attributed enormous adventurous, and thus novelistic, importance. The comparison with the “virtuous” German system of uncomfortable coaches, potholed roads, and subpar defence against the elements against the English system brushes back the moralist’s scolding tone: “Furthermore, the seed of episodes are laid in the all too good society of comfortable Post carriages in England, that are always full of well clothed women and where, a situation that Parliament shouldn’t tolerate, the passengers sit so that they look at each other face to face, from which can arise a dangerous confusion of eyes, and even more a highly scandalous confusion of legs, which leads to laughter and after that sometimes an indissoluble confusion of souls and thoughts, so that many an honorable young man traveling from London to Oxford will often be traveling to the devil. Something like this is, thank heaven, not possible with our Post Carriages…”

The mark of modernization: flirting. What Lichtenberg describes humorously and with sympathy is found to be slightly wrong even by such authorities, 120 years later, as Freud, who in some text decries American “flirtation”, which takes the seriousness out of the erotic.

here we are now - interchange us

This is a paragraph from an essay Musil wrote about Bela Belazs’s famous book about film, Visible Man:

The observations that I will add in the following concern these contact and luminal surfaces. The question of whether Film is an independent art or not, which is the entering point for Balazs’s effort to make it one, incites other questions that are common to all the arts. In fact film has become the folk art of our time. “Not in the sense, alas, that it arises from the spirit of the folk, but instead in the sense that the spirit of the folk arises from it,’ says Balazs. And as a matter of fact the churches and the cults of all the religions in their millennia have not covered the world with a net as thick as that accomplished by the movies, which did it in three decades.”

As is so often the case with these Viennese intellectuals, Musil is astonishingly sensitive to the changes being wrought by modernity – with the wisdom; of nemesis perched on the apocalyptic battlements. His reference is shrewdly to religion, rather than to other forms of art – that is, his reference is to the community of souls. The soul as Musil knew was dying out as an intelligible part of modern life. Modernism – or perhaps one should say the industrial system, under the twin aspects of the planned economy and capitalism – operated as a ruthless commissar in the great purge of interiority- and in that purge, killed, as a sort of byproduct, the humanist notion of art. In retrospect, the whole cult of art stood on the shakiest of foundations. What was really coming into being was something else – the entertainment complex. Film’s effect was not some technological accident, but a phenomenon in the social logic that was bringing us to where we are today, when the primary function of the subject is not to think – that antique cogito – but to be entertained. Here we are now, entertain us – Nirvana’s line should have a place of honor next to cogito ergo sum in the history of philosophy, I am entertained, or I am not entertained – these are the fundamental elements of subjectivity. God himself, within these parameters, is nothing other than the first entertainer, world without end. 

post-dogma

 

Commentaire, the French magazine (a thick journal, to use the Russian phrase), was founded on the idea that communism in France, and more generally Marxism, required gravediggers. The last phrase of the Cold War was, intellectually, a mop up operation, destroying the utopias of the postwar years in the “West” – as the loose coalition of nation states, from Germany to Australia, were called by the Cold Warriors. The name and concept was wrested out of a conservative historiography that had left its sad mark in Germany. The “West” of course called for an “East” – and in due time a South and a North.

I’ve been reading its back pages, and came upon Jacques Revel’s introduction to a rather obscure French philosophe of the early 19^th century, Theodor Jouffroy (1796-1842), whose essay, How Dogmas Finish, had a little cult following of rather disparate figures since it was published in The Globe on May 24, 1825:  Sainte-Breuve, Louis Aragon, and a communist clique that included Andre Thirion.  Jouffroy’s essay is an attempt, after the restauration, to sort out the good and the bad from the French revolution and, in general, the modernisation of the 18^th century. It is a project that attracted the great Liberals of the 19^th century, with Jouffroy’s essay striking notes that one hears, as well, in John Stuart Mill’s much more famous essay on Coleridge. For Revel, of course, the “dogma” in Jouffroy’s title – an obvious reference to the Church – was applicable to communism in the 20^th century. As Communism, according to the Cold War liberals, was the heir of the negative side of the French revolution, one wanted a history to show how it went so wildly bad – how it became the God that failed. The mopping up operation in the 1980s, when the failure of communism, embodied in the Soviet Union, was pretty much a given on all sides, required some larger historiographic framework. Of course, the framework at hand, totalitarianism versus authoritarianism (the latter justifying putting Pinochet’s Chile, the junta’s Argentina, the death squads of El Salvador and the dictatorship in South Korea and Taiwan in the “Free world” camp), was being given a good workout by the Americans. Yet it did not accord enough energy to classical liberalism.

Theodore Jouffroy is recognizably a contemporary of Stendhal – his French has that malleable structure, like, famously, Napoleon’s letters to the troops. The thesis Jouffroy pursues is about the “post-truth” era of a systematic belief system begins the process of the system’s loss of power – its hold on the masses. This elevates the intellectual to a high place, one in which the discovery of truth, for instance, about the facts of the Christian religion, leads from desire for truth itself to a strategic power position in a society whose rulers want those facts obscured.

“… if the beliefs by which power lives and reigns are destroyed, power will fall with them, and with power those who held it; the power will pass to new doctrines; it will be exercised by their partisans; in a word, the revolution of ideas will bring in its train a complete revolution in interests; everything that is will find itself threatened by everything that will be.”

Jouffroy accords a strong place, in his schema, to ridicule and mockery. Here I think his essay still has a certain pertinence. In the era of media penetration of all spheres of private life, mockery and ridicule have a political potency that has not been properly theorized. John Stuart Mill was too English to go here. In French culture, however, ridicule has a strong place in the mix of reasons to hold a belief. To welcome ridicule is the move of either a saint or a fool. Ridicule arisesas a consequence of the subtle detachment of passion from belief. To belief passionately becomes ridiculous. This is the trap set by the philosophe for the devout. It is a dangerous trap, however, since it can catch the philosophe as well – after all, why be so passionate about the truth as to set about discovering it? “Thus the people despair of the truth. They only see tricksters around them. They become defiant towards all, and think that in this world the unique business is to be as little miserable as possible; and that it is crazy to lend an ear to the beautiful discourse and big words of the truth, of justice, of human dignity; that religion and morality are only means to catch them and to make them serve projects that hardly touch them. They become skeptical about everything, save their own interest; and passing from indifference for every dogma and for every party, that value as best only that which costs them least.”

The social costs of enlightenment – a theme that we are riding down in our own era of dying dogmas.

Jouffroy's essay was translated in the 1840s by George Ripley. His Ethics was translated by Emerson's friend, William Channing. I'm sure that Emerson comments in his Journals about Jouffroy somewhere. 

 

 

The Clock Repairman's gesture

 
In his essay, A kaddish for Austria: On Joseph Roth, W.G. Sebald zeroes in on a bit of personal trivia (one of those bits that operate as signatures of some nameless process) that he gets from Roth’s biographer:

“Bronsen reported that Roth collected clocks randomly; and that fooling with clocks in his final years grew into a mania. What fascinated Roth with clocks was condensed into his last piece of published prose in the first weekend of April, 1939  in the Pariser Tageszeitung.”
The essay – one of those feuilleton of which Roth was one of the great masters – was entitled “At the clock repairs shop.” Sebald takes the piece as revelatory of something essential in Roth’s conception of the artist – or storyteller:

„Thus he sat, like the clock repairman, with a magnifying glass stuck in place before his eye, and looed into the broken wonderwork of wheels and gears, “as if he gazed through a blackframed hole into a distant past”. The clock repairman’s hope, like that of the writer, ist that by a small turn of the wrist [durch einen winzigen Eingriff] he can bring everything back to the beginning to restart it all in its correctly intended order.”

That’s a powerfully nostalgic and hopelessly anachronistic image of the power of the writer. Especially given the historical circumstances in Paris at the time, the Paris in which Roth was drinking himself to death, sensing the mass death to come. Our own sense of the mass death to come has now been sucked into the mass media and banalized as a zombie apocalypse, which is also, in its way, something Roth foresaw – or rather saw about his own time. In an essay that Michael Hoffman has not, I believe, englished, “Self-critique”, from 1929, Roth described his realism as the realism of the irrealism of his time – a time in which the self has hollowed itself out. The artistic response to this, Roth wrote, was to bring the reader face to face with that most difficult of all things to represent: boredom. The essay begins on a typically hard to measure sentence: “It is in some ways painful to deal with an extraordinarily good writer, such as myself, without severity and blame.” Roth goes on to say that his book, Right and Left, has hardly any beginning, really no end, has no characters and no psychology. It is not that he feels that there are no books with beginnings, ends, characters and psychology – the 19^th century epic novel up to Proust has them – but Roth believes that this is no longer possible in the world in which he and the reader exist. The substance of the reader’s grandparents is of a different type from the substance-lessness of his contemporaries.

„But I have attempted – on the contrary – to produce in my reader a certain feeling of boredom, which is a necessary consequence of linguistic precision and the effort to portray the hollowness of the present not convexly, not to present the insubstantability of our contemporaries as “tragic” or “daemonic” but instead to precisely mirror the hopelessness of this world.”

One could say that Roth is enjoying a little too much his stay at the Hotel Grand Abyss. He was a man who knew Europe’s hotels, eventually making his circuit of the sleaziest among them. Still, there is something in the connection between boredom and Roth’s sense of the impending pogram. Perhaps the boredom is the necessary preface. It is a boredom that emerges from the planned system of excitement, which had its model, in the twenties, in the hypermodernity of Berlin. And which is now our wonderful world.

Or so says one mood. Another mood is: fuck that. Expropriate that boredom. Use it against the military-industrial perpetual entertainment complex. Stand up.

Deep (trance) state

My latest cold war story. The whole thing is at Medium, here. I fear this story might be too long and too disconnected to all but CIA mooks. But I had to write it as it jazzed outta me. I'm a victim of my muse.

 - You begin by drawing circles around names. You draw lines connecting these circles. You make the lines into arrows. In this way, you build up a profile, a diagram, a secret history. Everyone is interested in a secret history. Secret, put it in the subtitle, market the fuck out of it. That history is like the aether in physics, it fills up the space of history, it mediates between events, mysteries, cases, disappearances, suicides, cries in the asylums, the low watt shadows in solitary. You sit in Langley, to which you have moved from the old hq in D.C., and you are James Angleton, piecing together the great conspiracies over time and place, putting your finger on Nosenko, the false defector, the one you have always expected. Or you are Mark Lane, in a London Hotel, feeling the heat coming in from Swingin’ London, becoming a celebrity yourself just like Paul McCarthy, who had actually called you up on the phone, half satisfied/half afraid that you were finally sticking it to the man on a big scale, leafing through eyewitness testimonies and notes gathered from the Citizens Committee of Inquiry. You are overlaying discrepancy on discrepancy, feeling that the Warren Commission’s tropism towards a predetermined conclusion is itself a clue. “I’m just a patsy,” Oswald tells the reporters. A slogan for our time. The conspiracy theorists out in the street, among the hippies, paranoids in the Movement and beyond, were in a parallel universe to those others in offices at 2430 E Street Northwest, the great Manichean fifties, where everything was an association, an informants tip, a hint at the greater picture of Communist conspiracy. The officers looking at the “brainwashing” of American troops in Korea, or Cardinal Mindszenty in Budapest. The ones collecting files from Wehrmacht Intelligence, 1941–1945. Hiring experts in interrogation, behavioural control. The ones who did the experiments at Dachau. The ones who developed toxins at Auschwitz. The scientists from Unit 731 in Manchuria. Bring them to America, set up labs, tap their knowledge. It was war.

- Everything after World War II was a war. The war on cancer. The war on poverty. The war on communism. The war of circles and connecting arrows.

- “On the subject of being noticed, there is an inverse point that should be noted. At times tricksters have reason to credit, or accuse, some imaginary person with what has been done. A natural mistake is to describe someone of a form, and of actions, which are unusual and striking. It usually is easy to ascertain that no such person has been in the vicinity. The proper description will be of a person average in size and coloring and normal in features, but — and this is a very essential point-having some minor oddity such as the first joint missing of the little finger of the left hand, or a large mole close behind his right ear.”

Goodbye Mr. Thornhill, whoever you are.” — North by Northwest.

2.

- “It wasn’t felt necessary really to go into a lot of detail as to exactly how they were handling the subjects. In general, patients would be of low interest.”

- The man I am after: M.A. and his “derogatory associations”. The face, the voice, the experience, the traveller and desk hound under so many redacted documents. I go into the documents I can find, the ones online, the ones released. I go into the books, in which the stories grow stale, the referent tugs free from the reference, haunts the dreams of the abused. His hasty entrances and puzzling exits, his presence at the fringe of recovered memory. I go to the State Department directory for 1945 to get my bearings.

- M.A. — “b. Washington, D.C., Mar. 6, 1910; Central High Sch. Grad.: Devitt Prep Sch. Grad.: George Washington U., 1927–1940; with U.S. Govt., 1929–1938; investigator, Civil Ser. Commn., 1938–43; U.S. Navy, 1943–46, lt., overseas service; app. Asst. security officer, CAF-12, in the Dept. of State Mar. 12, 1946; married. — CON.” Slots light up on the board. This guy.

- He emerges into the light in small ways, in out of the way places, but his life, his profile, is sketchy at best. GWU — 1927–1940? Really? How is he with the U.S. Govt. all of this time as well? I have the GWU yearbooks, 1934–1938. I search, I find his picture in the Hatchet. Did he know Bob Bannerman, also at GWU in those years? Bob, his boss at State, his boss at the CIA. Bob, though, wasn’t a presence. He was never chaplain of his frat. He doesn’t seem to have had a frat. Went to night classes there.

- The photographs that exist in the old D.C. papers — they are of the “juvenile dancer”, the prodigy from the Hoffman and Hoskins Dancing school. Specialty: the cymbal dance. Dressed up as a young Russian — or Cossack.

- D.C. is a small town. Among those donating money to the Hoffman and Hoskins Dancing school: Mrs. Allen Macy Dulles, mother of Allen Dulles. M.A. enters into the Dulles circle early.

3.

- What did the Agency psychologists make of the childhood? A dancer, this kid. And the sexual connotations thereof. Not your refined Ivy League type, not your beefy FBI type, but of a kind generally unmentioned in the literature — the D.C. type, the GWU type, the type whose father or uncle or mother is in government service. It is as natural to a D.C. kid as coal mining is to a kid in Marshall County West Virginia. But behold, such zigzag routes!

- His dad, Emmet his Mom Una calls him, his dad gets his law degree in Iowa, where he no doubt met Una. He does some post-grad work in Michigan. He gets the call to go to Washington D.C., where he gets a position at Treasury. Or is it Labor? The couple get a house, Emmet calls it their “villa”, out on the Northeast edge of the District. Where the streetcar tracks, newly laid down, promise to solve the problem of getting downtown. Una has her Daughters of the American Revolution projects, her church projects. Emmet makes small investments on the side.

- In 1952, M.A. has moved from the sketchy Project Bluebird (was it all about torturing informers, double agents, communists for what info load they could lay down?) to Project Artichoke. What was Artichoke? Department heads were asking. Some wanted a piece of the pie, some were disturbed by what they heard from their people in the field. A Doctor, no less, was sent in by Technical Services — Ray Treichler’s domain — to assess Artichoke. The assessment that came back was scathing. “[redacted], the present team chief, is an investigator of twenty years experience with Civil Service. He has been thoroughly trained in the use and limitation of the polygraph, received four days of instruction from a professional non-M.D. hypnotist in New York City, and has read extensively in the overt material on hypnosis. He has had no scientific background other than that that dealt directly with his work in criminology. He has had extensive contact with the communists in this country and knows their methods. It is not known whether he has a college degree.

“He is not an unusually intelligent man but has a vivid imagination that would be most valuable in the pursuit of this project. He has on several occasions created antagonism in his co-workers because of tactless management. He tends to be cautious and cons3ervative. His long government service has soundly grounded him in the ramifications of intra-Agency politics.” I read this assessment with a pang for M.A. “It is not known whether he has a college degree.” The old farts, retired, often complained of the kind of Ivy League snobbery they bore the brunt of. An image of the multi-lingual, dashing espionage agent, for public consumption. M.A. is not even dashing — cautious and conservative. A Joe Friday. A Dragnet cop.

“He has apparently become a rather able hypnotist, but is hampered in his efforts by his lack of confidence which it is felt stems from his scientific void.”

“It is suggested that the Medical Office with the support of I&SO recommend [sic] that a high-level control of the project be set-up, to consist of civilians with no service affiliation, who are scientifically well-qualified, and who would be full time, to coordinate, evaluate and direct the ARTICHOKE PROJECT.”

- His star routine as an Indian dancer, performed in the Hoffman-Hoskins Kiddies Revue in Washington D.C. at the age of 13. Performed in New York City, where he won a prize for his age class. At that time, Gertrude Hoffmann herself called him “one of the most clever juvenile dancers in America.” But our childhood is an elaborate cut-out, no? It passes, interest wanes, a few pictures (b & w) are put in the album, which falls from the hands of M.A.’s mother, Una, sitting in her cane chair on 131 R street in 1934, dying. “I don’t feel well, Emmet”, she says. But Emmet is always out. He’s got his fingers, or his clumsy hands, in pies. Developing land in the suburbs. Retired from the stats department under Hoover. Her boy at the time was dating that girl named Dotty, whose family seemed nice — but could they trace their heritage back to one of Iowa’s premier pioneers? Back to the Revolution? A DAR girl. Marry a DAR girl, Emmet would say to their son, at the dinner table, big jovial wink. Una dies, and M.A. marries, a year later, in Baltimore.

• Dot: her childhood house on T. Street. Did she meet M.A. when he was fourteen, struggling with pimples and sexual urges, at the streetcar stop, the Eckington Station. Getting off at 13th street, still a little afraid entering the world of Central High. Or was it later?