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.

heidegger the stinker

 As every sentient human adult (and especially department secretaries) knows, intelligence doesn’t exclude stinkerhood. Many are the geniuses who are also stinkers.

I think these remarks are pertinent to the controversy about Heidegger’s Naziism, and its rootedness in his philosophy Way aback in 1935, Lowith wrote that Heidegger’s “lean” towards naziism was no temporary aberration, done for the sake of the university. To that kind of special pleading, I think we can all say: suck my cock! But of course in a genteel and philosophische way.

Of course, the Heidegger controversy has its political coloring. The same people who use Heidegger’s Nazi-hood to hit deconstruction or France or continental philosophy on the head – usually American academics traveling between the New Criterion and the New York review of Books circuit – have little to say about, say, Werner von Braun, or the whole flotilla of Nazis that were calmly taken up by the Americans in Operation Paperclip. They don’t, for instance, find American foreign policy in Latin America irredeemably stained by the American coddling of Barbie in Bolivia. Say what one will about Heidegger, he was not an SS commander in a concentration camp, which is what von Braun was at Peenemunde. It was Braun, not Heidegger, who was photographed with American presidents. But you very rarely see American intellectuals slagged for Braun, whereas French intellectuals are supposedly crypto-collaborationists for using Heidegger.
However the outrage, if outrageously selective, is still justified. The matter of Heidegger’s Nazism justly bothered Derrida and was justly brought up by those who criticized Derrida – although very rarely did these same bringers-uppers come up with any Derridian lean towards Naziism. The best they could do is scream that relativism relativizes the concentration camps, although they were strangely silent about the Western post-war policy of ignoring even those who built concentration camps, like Fritz der Meer, who went from overseeing IG Farben’s building of an annex concentration camp to Auschwitz to two years in prison to the Chairmanship of Bayer, Inc. A moral headache that all the aspirin in the world can’t resolve.
But to return: it is good question as to how much Naziism penetrated Heidegger’s philosophical writings, and how much Heidegger’s anti-communism contributed to his rehabilitation in a postwar world ready to usher the former anti-Judeo-Bolsheviks into the new world of anti-communism, no questions asked.
This is where the history of philosophy, as it is usually told, misleads us. As it is usually told, the history of philosophy is a pageant of heads. Here’s Plato, then his “student” Aristotle, and so on. Each great man clutches a book, and “influences” or “refutes” other great men.
This is a pitifully sad way of doing intellectual history. Great heads are as mired in their contemporary circumstances as little heads. To talk about Heidegger’s philosophy and Naziism, one has to foreground that philosophy in the tendencies with which it was contemporary, and with which it had dozens of capillary relations. A materialist history of philosophy would do away with great heads and insert innumerable small ones, looking for intellectual patterns that interpenetrate economic, political and social ones. Sein und Zeit is properly placed with, for instance, Franz Rosenzweig’s Stern der Erloesung, and with Bloch’s Geist der Utopie, and with Mann’s Betrachtungen der Unpolitische, and with essays of Simmel’s and Lukacs’. It should be put into relation to the anxieties concerning mechanization that were a commonplace of newspaper feuilletonists pre-1914 – notably Kraus’ notion of the “black magic” of the press. It means even looking at the severely marginalized, figures like Ludwig Klages. Etc. Heidegger didn’t come up with his texts in splendid isolation, after all.
In other words, we need, I think to pull apart Heidegger’s philosophy like Roland Barthe pulled apart Balzac’s Sarrazine in S/Z. This isn’t to dispute that Heidegger’s philosophical texts were often full of genius, but that it was, so to speak, the genius of the clinamen – the genius of the swerve that is left after the combinatorial elements are mapped.
In a sense, one could say of Heidegger what Nietzsche said of the New Testament – that one should read his works wearing gloves. And I think that one should read them against the grain of the author’s stinko intent. Sometimes – as in the lectures on Nietzsche, which were so full of grandiose cliches that I have never been able to finish them – stinkerism overrides thought, here, for sure.
To return to the greater themes – definitely, in the world of philosophy, something was happening that all the figures I have named were responding to. On the one hand, there was the revolution in logic that seemed to allow philosophy to be dissolved in science, and on the other hand, there was the return to the transcendental thematic – shared by Husserl and the numerous graphomaniac neo-Kantians – which seemed to offer a discursive escape route from the positivist prison – which was a species of the iron cage of modernity that Weber was writing about. In Weberian terms, the philosophers and writers I’ve named were trying to carve out a region for charismatic legitimation, and in so doing often reified charisma as something that resisted and opposed the technostructure.
Retrospectively, it is easy to see that instead of opponents, these movements were often secret allies.
But this gets me far from where I wanted to go, which is simply: yes to Heidegger as a stinker, but also yes to Sein and Zeit, alas alas.