Portia Podsnap

[Counter-Currents edition, slightly redacted, is here.]

When Colin Wilson sat down in 2006 to write his own history of the “Angry Young Men,” it was mainly a matter of settling accounts. There had been at least two other similarly named books on the subject, and they were informative and entertaining[1]. But they mostly retold familiar tales that had run in the London press, from 1956 onward, usually with Wilson himself as a central figure. Here we have a final, synoptic gospel where the popular old prophet himself is doing the telling, and there aren’t too many people left to contradict him.

The book was published in 2007. As Colin died in 2013, he did us a signal service in getting these confusing and often pointless stories sorted out and down on paper while he had the time and energy.

I’m talking about well-worn Angry Young Man tales that got recycled in the press, mainly in 1956-58, ones that usually turn out to more silly than substantial. For example, there’s that Royal Court pub brawl. It seems that in early 1958 Kenneth Tynan and friends loudly walked out on a new, and rather bad, play. It was a play by Wilson’s friend Stuart Holroyd and was having its first (and maybe only) night at the Royal Court Theatre[2]. There was a fracas afterwards. Not only did it make the London morning papers, the story found its way to New York, even turning up in Time magazine with the headline, “Sloane Square Stomp.”

It was hardly a brawl, in Wilson’s telling. Holroyd, Wilson and friends simply repaired to a pub for some chatty drinks after the play. Someone told them that Kenneth Tynan, Christopher Logue[3] and other miscreant theatre-leavers were at a drinking hole nearby. So Wilson et al. traipsed off to that nearby pub, where Holroyd’s wife grabbed Logue by the throat and knocked him off his chair. Whereupon the pub’s landlord told them to leave.

They went to a friend’s nearby flat, where Bill Hopkins telephoned his brother and other newspapermen around town. Colin Wilson heard him in the next room. “Is that the Daily Mail? Have you heard about this brawl outside the Royal Court ? … Well there was Stuart Holroyd, Colin Wilson, Bill Hopkins…”[4]

Not much of a story, is it? But newsworthy, if you make it so. I first heard these recollections from Bill Hopkins and Colin Wilson thirty-odd years ago. It was like being a little kid overhearing turn-of-the-century scandals about Aunt Petunia. It all made very little sense to me.

But the Royal Court brawl story reminds me of something Bill Hopkins told me much later. He was walking through Covent Garden with a girlfriend a year or so later when they passed a familiar face: that selfsame Christopher Logue. Reflexively Bill said hello. Logue said nothing and passed on. The girlfriend hissed in Bill’s ear: “He hates you!”[5] Well, Bill was oblivious. The idea of someone holding a grudge because of a facetious media-event was beyond him.

Rather like the tales of how Colin Wilson often slept rough in Hampstead Heath, and spent his days writing and researching at the British Museum’s Reading Room. His Hampstead Heath days were pretty much behind him by this time, but Life magazine quickly assigned a crack photographer to follow Wilson around with a Rolleiflex, catching him on his bicycle, posing with a mug of tea in his bedsit, and reading a book on the Heath while half snuggled-up in his “waterproof sleeping bag” (which he now had little need of as he was now a successful writer living in cramped accommodations in Notting Hill). Colin was happy to comply, but somewhat puzzled by later accusations that he was a fraud because he no longer slept rough in Hampstead Heath.

Another thrice-told tale is the one about Kingsley Amis receiving a bottle of whisky from Colin but refusing to drink it because (he said) he was scared of Wilson and feared it might be poisoned:

I was too afraid to drink a bottle of whisky Colin Wilson once gave me, and there it stayed on my shelf till an intrepid psychiatrist pal guzzled it with no ill effects, or none but the usual.[6]

According to Wilson, the whisky was a gift from him back in 1957 when he and then-girlfriend, future wife Joy Stewart were on the run from the press, and Joy’s parents (who had literally tried to horsewhip the brilliant young author of The Outsider). While they eventually ended up in Cornwall, where they lived for many years, they stopped for a bit at Amis’s house in Swansea, where Amis was then teaching. Wilson assures us the whisky could not have been poisoned, as obviously the seal had not been broken.

Kingsley Amis, and his lifelong friend Philip Larkin, figure hugely in The Angry Years, which came out when both had been safely dead for a decade or more. (Amis died in 1995, Larkin in 1985.) Amis is a neurotic who doesn’t drive and is afraid to fly. He gets his inspiration for his novels’ sex escapades from Larkin’s masturbatory fantasies and real-life adventures.

I see here a good argument for living to a ripe old age, or at least to one where your potential enemies are dead and you won’t be contradicted.

Wilson sets us up at the beginning with a synopsis-outline “Analytical Table of Contents” of what the chapters are going to be about. This front-of-book apparatus lets you home in on what you’re looking for, as you slide back and forth in his narrative. No doubt this began as the author’s own aide-memoire (as in, what do we write about next?). And then decided, once his typescript was almost done, that it would be quite as readable and useful for the general audience, and thus included it at the front of the book. The format a great guide for any biography or popular history, and I’d like to see more of it.

Anyway, here is a smidgen of that outline. From an early chapter that mainly describes, or disses, Kenneth Tynan:

2. He That Plays the King

Tynan at Oxford. ‘Have a care for that box, my man – it is freighted with golden shirts.’ His taste for masturbation and female posteriors. He begins to write theatre reviews. His pornography collection. ‘Just a thong at twilight.’ He marries Elaine Dundy. She objects to being flogged. His career as a director stalls…

Tynan, of course, was long passed from the scene by this point (died in 1980, age 53, of emphysema) and couldn’t object to this.

Wilson has a lot of fun with Tynan’s famous concluding puff on the John Osborne play:

I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back in Anger. It is the best young play of its decade.

Ridiculous, of course. Kenneth Tynan did not love much of anything besides showing off, and smacking young ladies’ bare bottoms with canes. Tynan’s career, at Oxford and after, mostly consisted of sneering and lambasting whatever he saw on stage. Now Tynan was praising this new playwright to the skies, not because he loved Osborne’s talent but because it gave him an opportunity to get back at all the actors and theater managers he had offended, people who had got him sacked from the newspapers he was reviewing for.

At least that’s Colin Wilson’s reading, and it seems plausible enough.

Notes

[1] I recommend both of the other book I know, which are both available at the Internet Archive. I link them here. The first was Kenneth Allsop’s The Angry Decade: a Survey of the Cultural Revolt of the Nineteen-Fifties (1958), a book that Colin Wilson liked, though he remarked that it should really be called The Angry Eighteen Months . . . since Allsop got it out in a hurry! In such a hurry that Allsop greatly revised it six years later, when there was a lot more news to tell. Allsop was a silver-haired, silky voiced, very handsome television presenter on the BBC in the 1960s. He made such an impression on the young Tom Wolfe that when Wolfe was journeying in England in the mid-60s, Allsop briefly appeared in one of Wolfe’s Sunday-supplement articles in a London weekend paper. It seems some snooty Cambridge lads were watching Allsop on the telly and one remarked that poor Allsop would “never get the Midlands out of his voice.” Allsop was actually from Yorkshire. The article appears as “The Mid-Atlantic Man” in Wolfe’s The Pump House Gang, 1968. Besides being a television talking-head, Allsop was also a readable and prolific journalist and literary critic who published over 15 books before dying in his early 50s from a barbiturate overdose.

Humphrey Carpenter’s The Angry Young Men: A Literary Comedy of the 1950s (2002) gave Colin Wilson less pleasure, as a lot of it is exploitation pop history. For example, Carpenter refers to Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd as Wilson’s “satellites,” and smacks his lips over the fall of Wilson’s shooting star after the dismal reception of his sequel to The Outsider, Religion and the Rebel. Carpenter takes gratuitous slams over some lines in Wilson’s Introduction, writing, “He concluded this opening chapter with what seemed to be a sinister promise that he would soon emerge as a new Oswald Mosley: ‘I am not necessarily a writer. The moment writing ceases to be a convenient discipline for subduing my stupidity and laziness, I shall give it up and turn to some more practical form.’” A bizarre put-down suggesting that Carpenter regarded Colin Wilson as a nostalgic joke, never mind that he was very much alive and well. Humphrey Carpenter had also written biographies of J. R. R. Tolkien and Dennis Potter, who by the time Carpenter got around to them were safely dead. “Totally out of sympathy with the writers he was discussing,” is Wilson’s summation in The Angry Years:

For Carpenter, the really significant movement of the mid-century was the satire trend that began with Beyond the Fringe and the television series That Was the Week that Was. By comparison…the ‘Angry Young Men’ were beneath serious consideration.

[2] The Royal Court Theatre often comes up in Angry Young Man stories, as it was the venue for Look Back and Anger and many other plays of that era, and many since. But is impossible to imagine if you don’t know it, as it is in an oddball location. Instead of being in the West End, by other legitimate theaters in London, it is at Sloane Square between Chelsea and Belgravia. For that reason, or whatever, it has always attracted offbeat, non-touristy productions. It appears in the Woody Allen movie, Match Point, because aspiring actress Scarlett Johansson is supposed to be auditioning there.

[3] Christopher Logue (1926-2011) was a poet, playwright, contributor to Private Eye, and sometime actor (according to Wikipedia he played a spaghetti-eating fanatic in Terry Gilliam’s Jabberwocky).

[4] Colin Wilson, The Angry Years.

[5] Postcard from Bill Hopkins, c. May 1993.

[6] Humphrey Carpenter, The Angry Young Men.

I’ve been trying to figure out how George Orwell fits into that 1950s literary phenomenon, or cult, called the Angry Young Men. The Angries, as a movement, were partly an invention of the popular press of 1956-58. Some writers who are included among them, notably Kingsley Amis, rejected the label and got counted in only because they were new young writers with an irksome attitude. Others, e.g., Colin Wilson, treated the whole concept whimsically or dismissively but used it as a publicity tool.

The “Angry Young Men” expression first arose in 1956 when a 26-year-old playwright named John Osborne staged his controversial (but successful) play called Look Back in Anger, and 24-year-old Colin Wilson published his controversial (and also successful) book of essays on philosophy and literary criticism, called The Outsider. Osborne and Wilson had little in common otherwise, but they both made good copy, with their attractive looks and tumultuous personal lives. So they got grouped together with other newsworthy young writers, mostly male, and got called Outsiders or the Angry Young Men. Of course, the latter handle won out. Others counted among the Angries include Wilson’s friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd, filmmaker Lindsay Anderson, and novelists John Wain, John Braine, Alan Sillitoe, and sometimes Doris Lessing and Iris Murdoch.[1]

The connection between Orwell and the Angries seems intuitively obvious today, at least to me. They have many points in common, so that some of the Angries—in public persona if not in writing—might be considered School of Orwell. However, these Fifties writer seldom commented on Orwell at the time. He had only been dead a few years, after all. The big Orwell industry, with its fat biographies and criticism, didn’t get underway until the 1980s, mainly due to copyright restrictions imposed by Orwell’s widow Sonia.

So here is my list of parallels:

The scruffy-autodidact affectation. This was sort of a fetish for Orwell when he devoted himself to writing in his 20s. To get source material, he pretended to be down and out in Paris (where his mother’s sister lived in bohemian comfort) and London (where he put on rags so he could review the various “spikes” or doss houses where hobos spent the night). He went hop-picking amongst tramps in Kent and hung out with nighttime derelicts in Trafalgar Square (all background for A Clergyman’s Daughter). Otherwise he dressed in worn tweed coats and flannel bags, and smoked rollups of cheap shag tobacco. Even after he published a few novels, this look continued to be the Orwell brand. The grey, oppressive atmosphere of Keep the Aspidistra Flying (out of cigarettes; out of razorblades; landlady is watching you) was transferred almost intact to the setting of Nineteen Eighty-Four. Moving on to the post-Orwell 1950s, we get Colin Wilson sleeping rough in Hampstead Heath while spending his days in the Reading Room of the British Museum. He shares scruffy houses in Notting Hill with Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd, and even after he’s famous for The Outsider, he and his second wife Joy occupy a cramped bedsit, which they show off to visiting news photographers: a single table-cum-desk, cluttered with books, typewriter, papers, teacups, remnants of old meals. Joy’s parents barge in one evening and horsewhip Colin with an umbrella and a…horsewhip. They have found his notebooks among Joy’s things and imagine that Colin’s notes for a perverse novel are his own sexual confessions. (The newspapers just lapped that story up!)

Perhaps the most dismal and Orwellian passage in Tom Maschler’s Declaration anthology is Lindsay Anderson’s opening to his own contribution, “Get Out and Push!”:

Let’s face it, coming back to Britain is always something of an ordeal. And you don’t have to be a snob to feel it. It isn’t just the food, the sauce bottles on the café tables, and the chips with everything.[2]

Orwellian, except Orwell himself much approved of having the sauce bottles on the dinner table. Not only that, I seem to recall he reprimanded his first wife for removing the outer paper wrapping to Worcestershire sauce; it should remain on the bottle, as in a working-class café.

No Uni Education. This is not true of all the Angries. Kingsley Amis, John Wain and Lindsay Anderson were all at Oxford, Amis became a fellow at Cambridge and visiting fellow at Princeton. But quite true of John Osborne and maybe his alter-ego Jimmy Porter in Look Back in Anger; and of Colin Wilson, Bill Hopkins, Sillitoe, Braine and others. Not going to university had been less of a class marker for George Orwell because he’d been through Eton, though he nevertheless felt barred from the quality-lit circles because he’d gone into the Indian Police instead of Oxbridge. But for the Angries without much formal education, it tended to cause them to be portrayed as novelty acts, rosebushes growing upon a dungheap. In The Angry Decade[3], one of at least three good books about the Angries (Colin Wilson himself wrote another) Kenneth Allsop makes the opening argument that for all the noise they made at the time, the Angries left little movement or imitators behind them. They were a fad that came and went. This was very different from the Satire Boom crowd of the early 1960s (Beyond the Fringe, Private Eye, etc.), where the principals went on and on for decades, in entertainment and publishing, and spawned endless imitators. But the Satire Boom people were Oxbridge, many of them from public schools before that. The Angries, for the most part, were not.

Victor Gollancz. Gollancz published Orwell for a while in the 1930s, but they fell out over Orwell’s anti-Stalinist Homage to Catalonia. In the 1950s Gollancz published Colin Wilson’s and Kingsley Amis’s early books. Gollancz was an Oxford graduate, of Polish Jewish background, a sometime teacher and editor who prospered in the book trade in the 1930s, first with his own publishing imprint, then with something called the Left Book Club. For a subscription fee, Left Book Club members agreed to buy, at deep discount, Gollancz’s book-of-the-month. Orwell’s The Road to Wigan Pier was an LBC offering in 1937. Victor Gollancz books were readily recognizable by their yellow covers with stark, unadorned type. After the War, Gollancz turned away from Leftist politics. He’d lost out, after all, on Orwell’s Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Gollancz continued as a successful mainstream publisher, with titles by Daphne du Maurier, J. G Ballard and John Updike, as well as Wilson and Amis.

The Fascist Taint. From the 1940s onward, it was a commonplace among those of the far-Left that George Orwell was some kind of “Fascist Trotskyite,” and was not to be trusted. (I don’t have a citation for you; I heard people of a certain background say things like this when I was young, because they themselves had heard it while growing up in the Forties and Fifties.) This was Stalinist cant, basically, but it had the effect of normalizing such expressions when thrown at dissident or liberal writers in the 1950s and 60s. Only in recent years, with the resurgence of Antifa groups, has it become common to see “Fascist” used unironically as a slur. But in the 1950s, when Colin Wilson and friends Bill Hopkins and Stuart Holroyd were accused of having Fascist sympathies, it was easy to dismiss it all as a joke. This was so, even though Wilson and company were known to be friendly to Sir Oswald Mosley and his revived Union Movement—a public association George Orwell most certainly would have avoided!

Notes

[1] A “definitive” list of the Angries is sometimes considered to be the list of contributors to Declaration, a 1957 anthology of essay manifestoes by: Lindsay Anderson, Kenneth Tynan, Stuart Holroyd, John Osborne, Doris Lessing, Colin Wilson, Bill Hopkins, and John Wain. Seeking at least one female contributor, the publisher sought out Iris Murdoch, who declined but suggested Doris Lessing.

[2] From Lindsay Anderson, “Get Out and Push!,” in Declaration, edited by Tom Maschler. London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1957.

[3] Kenneth Allsop, The Angry Decade, revised edition. (London: Peter Owen, Ltd.) 1964.

When did Eric A. Blair, a/k/a George Orwell, lose his virginity? Most biographers haven’t wrestled much with this particular issue. But then came along John Sutherland, a retired academic who published an entertaining book called Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography, back in 2016. (I briefly described this cute volume in a 2019 end-of-year Favorite Books wrap-up.)

John Sutherland, bless his soul, spends about half his book reconstructing the carnal history of E. A. Blair. He dredges up hints and testimony from various friends and unrequited loves. But some of the best clues come from from Orwell’s novels and autobiographical passages. One of them is a painful memory recalled in the second half of The Road to Wigan Pier. Orwell is thinking of the time when he was in the Imperial Police in Burma, and one of his sub-inspectors was beating a suspect. An American missionary was nearby, looking on.

The American watched it, and then turning to me, said thoughtfully, “I shouldn’t care to have your job.” It made me horribly ashamed. So that was the kind of job I had! Even an ass of an American missionary, a teetotal cock-virgin from the Middle West, had the right to look down on me and pity me!

“A teetotal cock-virgin from the Middle West”! That’s such a wonderful, Orwellian, sneer. Full of anger at the hick holy-joe missionary, who by rights should be a couple of rungs down the status ladder from Orwell…and yet he deigns to pity him. After all, Eric Blair, Old Etonian and young officer of the Imperial police, has good reason to believe himself a man of the world. He can hold his liquor and almost certainly is no cock-virgin.

Orwell doesn’t give us a date for this encounter with the missionary but we can be certain he was in his early twenties. The timeline of his Burma career is pretty clear. He sailed out there when he was 19, passing from Rangoon to Mandalay for training; then returning to the Rangoon area two years later at the end of 1924, when he was twenty-one. In early 1928, not quite twenty-five, Orwell returned to England on leave and decided to “chuck” his awful job in Burma.

Writes John Sutherland in Orwell’s Nose,

[Orwell] confided to his Eton friend Harold Action in later life that in Burma he had got all the sex he didn’t get in England: from the “Jewish whores with crocodile faces” in Rangoon, one supposes, to exquisitely aromatic doll-like live-in concubines in remove up-country stations. [1]

Where does this “Jewish whores with crocodile faces” actually come from? Sutherland is imputing it from Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days. An imputation I find credible. The protagonist stand-in for Orwell here in the novel is Mister Flory, an employee of a timber firm. Orwell’s mother’s family, as it happens, were teak merchants in Burma. And Flory, like Orwell, sailed to Burma when not quite twenty:

His first six months in Burma he had spent in Rangoon, where he was supposed to be learning the other side of his business. He had lived in a “chummery” with four other youths who devoted their entire energies to debauchery. And what debauchery! They swilled whisky which they privately hated, they stood round the piano bawling songs of insane filthiness and silliness, they squandered rupees by the hundred on aged Jewish whores with the faces of crocodiles. [2]

Therefore we might conclude that Superintendent E. A. Blair of the Imperial Police may have first “read the book” (as the old expression went) with an “aged Jewish whore” in Rangoon.

Granted, age perception is variable and subjective. And a wench of thirty-seven with a thickly painted face might look pretty old when up close to a lad of twenty. Regardless, this story from Orwell’s first novel, Burmese Days, seems to explain a mysterious and intrusive episode that suddenly appears in his last, Nineteen Eighty-Four.

There we find thirty-nine-year old Winston Smith, writing in his diary and remembering a whore he once picked up n the street. Supposedly this was just a few years before. But it seems more like an callow young man’s early adventure than the idle wandering of a married man in his mid-thirties.

It was three years ago. It was on a dark evening, in a narrow side-street near one of the big railway stations. She was standing near a doorway in the wall, under a street lamp that hardly gave any light. She had a young face, painted very thick. It was really the paint that appealed to me, the whiteness of it, like a mask, and the bright red lips. Party women never paint their faces. There was nobody else in the street, and no telescreens. She said two dollars. I —

He drew his breath and went on writing:

I went with her through the doorway and across a backyard into a basement kitchen. There was a bed against the wall, and a lamp on the table, turned down very low. She —

…He seemed to breathe again the warm stuffy odour of the basement kitchen, an odour compounded of bugs and dirty clothes and villainous cheap scent, but nevertheless alluring, because no woman of the Party ever used scent, or could be imagined as doing so… In his mind the smell of it was inextricably mixed up with fornication…

She threw herself down on the bed, and at once, without any kind of preliminary in the most coarse, horrible way you can imagine, pulled up her skirt…I turned up the lamp. When I saw her in the light —

…What he had suddenly seen in the lamplight was that the woman was old. The paint was plastered so thick on her face that it looked as though it might crack like a cardboard mask… She had no teeth at all…

When I saw her in the light she was quite an old woman, fifty years old at least. But I went ahead and did it just the same.

Here Orwell offers us the eroticism of bad smells and insalubrious surroundings, which I am reliably informed have a mysterious appeal for certain people. The toothlessness of the harlot doesn’t seem to jibe with my mental picture of Rangoon crocodile ladies, who I naturally imagine shoud have had big sharp teeth. But maybe one of Orwell’s early good-time girls had “taken her teeth out”? Or crocodilian appearance meant something more to him beyond sharp, protuberant dentition? Bony jaw, leathery skin, maybe?

It doesn’t matter. This pairing of the whores in Orwell’s first and last novels, Burmese Days and Nineteen Eighty-Four, would be no more than an idle whimsy if Orwell’s writings regularly dealt with ladies of the pavement. But his writings do not. Neither do the known facts of his life. In his last fifteen years he was married to two attractive, genteel and educated women (Eileen O’Shaughnessy, a graduate of Oxford and London University, who died of a botched hysterectomy in 1945; and afterwards Sonia Brownell, a subeditor at Cyril Connolly’s Horizon). In his bachelor days he’d been known to make the occasional furtive pass at a female acquaintance, but there are no reports of him consorting with prostitutes, after his early days in Burma, with the crocodile ladies. Therefore I conclude that the ancient prostitute in his last novel, Nineteen Eighty-Four, is no more than reincarnation of the one, or ones he recalled in his first novel, Burmese Days.

Notes

[1] John Sutherland, Orwell’s Nose: A Pathological Biography. London: Reaktion Books Ltd. 2016.

[2] George Orwell, Burmese Days. First published 1934. Online here.

George Orwell is one of those authors well worth stealing, as Orwell famously wrote of Charles Dickens. I am not the first person to start an essay like this. While rummaging through my memory files I recalled a cover piece in the January 1983 Harper’s, and 40 years later I am astounded to discover it begins almost exactly the same way. It is called “If Orwell Were Alive Today,” and is written by Norman Podhoretz, of all people. Poddy, I guess, is stealing him for the cause of Commentary-style Neoconservatism.

High comedy, but an irresistible bit of self-puffery. Many have succumbed to the idea that “Orwell was a lot like me!” Some of these claims on Orwell are baffling, others are repulsive. A bit over 20 years ago Christopher Hitchens did a book called Why Orwell Matters (or, Orwell’s Victory, in England). [1] It’s nice, light reading, a rhapsody over twice-told tales about the youth and career of Orwell, but shoddy with the facts. In the introduction we have Hitchens lamenting that “Orwell died early and impoverished before the age of austerity gave rise to the age of celebrity and mass media.”

Well actually, Orwell/Blair—he signed his cheques Eric Blair to the end—died a paper millionaire, or a paper dollar-millionaire at least, having produced two bestsellers in four years, and selling them both to the Book-of-the-Month Club (with a 400,000 initial press run for Nineteen Eighty-Four). Furthermore he was hoping to take a trip to America in a year or so, at least to visit his colleague and soulmate Dwight Macdonald, formerly of Partisan Review and now of Politics. We can trust that any public talks Orwell might have given in the early 1950s would be standing-room-only, rather like Mark Twain in 1900, doubling or tripling his wealth and fame. The fact that he suddenly died in January 1950, in a London hospital room, with no staff looking in—and this was just two or three days before he was booked to fly on a chartered plane to a Swiss sanitarium—is unfortunate. Also suspicious. [2]

Much more impossibly, a few years ago someone packaged a book of excepts from letters, diaries, and journalism, titled Orwell on Truth.[3] And the introductory essay by Adam Hochschild is thoroughly crass and wrongheaded. You may recall Hochschild as the author of King Leopold’s Ghost, in which he revived the canard that Leopold II, King of the Belgians, maintained a profitable rubber business in the Belgian Congo by means of cutting off the hands and feet of his Congolese employees when they underperformed. (The truth of the matter is that the Congolese amputated dead and live extremities of their tribal enemies on a regular basis. But let’s not ruin a good story.)

Moving on to Orwell, Hochschild says in his Introduction:

Could we have a better guide to Donald Trump’s America? When a senior aide to President Trump talked about ”alternative facts” at a time when the real ones (a low turnout for his inauguration, starkly visible in photographs) were embarrassing, what is that but the twisting of truth into propaganda that Orwell described so chillingly in Nineteen Eighty-Four and elsewhere? In a 1943 essay excerpted in this book he wrote, “Nazi theory…specifically denies that such a thing a ’the truth’ exists… if the Leader says of such and such an event, ‘It never happened’—well, it never happened. If he says that two and two are five—well, two and two are five. This prospects frightens me much more than bombs.” Is this not the universe that President Trump, surrounded by embarrassing facts on all sides, would like to live in?

Too much to unpack here, but let me digress into some factual detail. First, President Trump’s inauguration was heavily barricaded on January 20, 2017. You couldn’t drive into Washington, DC. Streets were blocked because of Antifa threats to bomb the Inauguration. (Antifa rioters did in fact wreck a few storefronts and automobiles.) DC Metro stations near the Capitol and Mall were closed. If you rode into the city on the Metro, you had to walk about two miles just to find a place at the Mall. Unlike the Obama inaugurations, which made a special effort to bus in thousands of extras from hither and yon, the Trump inauguration was prevented from letting most of its supporters show up. With all these obstacles, it’s really a wonder the Mall was half-full.

Hochschild gives an extra twist to his knife by suggesting that Nineteen Eighty-Four and the “alternative facts” remark (it was actually Kellyanne Conway’s) describe “Nazi theory.” Actually the passage quoted above comes from a 1943 Orwell essay called “Looking Back on the Spanish War,” in which the real culprits were not Nazis or “Fascists” whom the Leftists were all ostensibly fighting, but rather the Reds, who were far more concerned with killing and imprisoning Orwell’s POUM colleagues and other non-Stalinist militia groups on the Left.

When people like Hitchens and Hochschild try to enshrine Orwell as an all-wise guru, or use him as a cheap and available club to beat their political bogeymen with, I sense that they’re basically tone-deaf to the sort of writer Orwell really was. As a political writer he was first and foremost a most subtle and seductive propagandist. As an example I’m going to take another essay that he wrote about the Spanish war, shortly after he and his wife Eileen escaped from the Communists in Barcelona.

It’s called “Spilling the Spanish Beans,” and it is a masterpiece of weasely propaganda. Published in two parts, in the New English Weekly in July and September 1937, it may be regarded as a sort of “teaser” for the Homage to Catalonia memoir he was working on. Orwell often begins essays with digressive, conversational observations and then circles down to his main point. In “Spilling the Spanish Beans” he opens with a bad, tasteless joke, but one intended get a smile and a nod from the reader. He is mocking Right-wing press reports of Leftist atrocities, dismissing them as propaganda:

The Spanish war has probably produced a richer crop of lies than any event since the Great War of 1914-18, but I honestly doubt, in spite of all those hecatombs of nuns who have been raped and crucified before the eyes of “Daily Mail” reporters, whether it is the pro-Fascist newspapers that have done the most harm.

This is a nugget tossed out to entice the Leftist, anti-Nationalist crowd, and to assure them that the writer is of sympathetic mien. But he’s also setting us up for some serious swipes at the Left, beginning with the next sentence:

It is the left-wing papers, the “News Chronicle” and the “Daily Worker,” with their far subtler methods of distortion, that have prevented the British public from grasping the real nature of the struggle.

And now Orwell, master propagandist, proceeds to lay into the Left-wing press and politicians for having deep-sixed the Loyalist cause in Spain. The war isn’t over yet, not by a long shot, but he advises us that the Leftist side in the conflict—also sometimes called the Republicans, or the Popular Front—hasn’t a chance of winning. The best outcome, as he sees it, is that “the war will end with some sort of compromise,” which suggest that perhaps Catalonia and central Spain (including Madrid) will continue on with their Popular Front “social democracy” regime, while the rest of the country will be ruled by the assorted nationalist factions united under Generalissimo Franco. Orwell isn’t prognosticating here, he’s just offering tepid conventional wisdom from mid-1937. Perhaps he really expects all of Spain to go up the Fascist spout in a year or so, but doesn’t dare say it.

But whichever, he has a very convoluted explanation of how certain fake-revolutionary Leftists conspired to do Spain in. He paints a picture of the conflict as mainly one between “true revolutionaries” (e.g., his POUM militia) and the Communists. And he says the bad guys are not just the Communists, but the Liberal bourgeoisie and the Right-wing press, who he claims are in league with them. They’re all working together conspiring to stifle the “true revolutionary” innovations that sprang up at the outbreak of war in 1936:

[I]n the early days of the revolution the Spanish workers … took the opportunity of seizing land and factories and setting up the rough beginnings of a workers’ government by means of local committees, workers’ militias, police forces, and so forth. They made the mistake, however… of leaving the Republican Government in nominal control.

Is this naïvete or casuistry? Maybe a bit of both? The whole purpose of the war, from the Leftist or Popular Front point of view, was to preserve that “democratically elected” government of the Republic, and prevent a takeover by the Francoite Nationalists. Orwell himself signed up to fight in Spain to defend that government. (He initially tried to join a Communist brigade in England, but got rejected as politically suspect.) But now here he’s telling us that the proper custodians of Spain’s future should have been workers’ militias and local committees. It’s a very delicate balancing act that Orwell is pulling here. He wants to denounce the Communists and bourgeois politicians (who were guilty of asking the Soviets for aid, thereby leaving the door open for a complete Stalinist takeover of the Left), but needs to show us a better alternative, so he tells us about the lost opportunity Spain had, with all those ragtag bands of ineffectual workers’ clubs. With this far-fetched hypothesis, Orwell gets to pass himself off as an honest socialist, maybe a True Revolutionary, a Man of the Left in full—albeit a very impractical one. Alas, he tells us, no one in England understands him, or “the real nature of the struggle”:

It is unfortunate that so few people in England have yet caught up with the fact that Communism is now a counter-revolutionary force; that Communists everywhere are in alliance with bourgeois reformism and using the whole of their powerful machinery to crush or discredit any party that shows signs of revolutionary tendencies. Hence the grotesque spectacle of Communists assailed as wicked ‘Reds’ by right-wing intellectuals who are in essential agreement with them.

A “grotesque spectacle”? Rightist opposition to the Popular Front governments in Spain and France, 1935-39, was hardly opportunist. It was constant and consistent. The Popular Front was an initiative by Stalin and the Comintern to find common cause with the various social-democratic parties, whether they styled themselves as moderate or revolutionary. Part of their “sell” was depicting the Popular Front as a, well, people’s front against “fascism.” Bolshevists wisely chose to call conservatives and nationalists “fascists” rather than “national socialists” because the latter sounded too damned attractive. National Socialists were building Autobahnen and giving everyone a job, with paid vacations: the very sort of sparkly promises that Popular Front socialists liked to offer their voters. “Fascists” sounded vaguer and sinister: generic bogeymen, oppressive and mean.

Conversely the policies and goals thrown up by the various Leftist factions were hopelessly inconsistent. For the most part these factions began as social democrats, sometimes Marxist but officially anti-Bolshevist. Then most of them aligned with the Reds because during the Popular Front days of the mid-1930s the Reds were promising to play nice. But during the Spanish war the Reds ceased to play nice, and damned all those anti-Stalinist socialists and anarcho-syndicalists and Marxist deviationists as “Trotskyists” or “Trotskyites.”

Orwell, the Man of the Left, may have been oblivious to the scam of the Popular Front. There were blind spots in his judgment and vast lacunae in his knowledge. Regardless he had to cheer on the mainstream social-democratic Left to preserve his literary viability. His main book publisher at this time had been Victor Gollancz, an erudite Polish Jew who’d been to St. Paul’s School and Oxford, and founded the Left Book Club. Unfortunately the post-Spain Orwell, with his complaints about how the Reds wanted to murder him in Barcelona, wasn’t simon-pure enough for Gollancz, who needed to keep the Comrades happy. Orwell moved on to a different publisher.

But to the end of his life, he continued to be slippery and evasive when writing on political matters. Animal Farm, for example, is based upon a most deceitful premise: that the Bolshevik Revolution was a Good Thing to begin with; but it was defeated, tragically, by corrupt Capitalists and Fascists. (The Revolution Betrayed! No wonder the Reds called him a Trotskyite.) With Nineteen Eighty-Four he never really came clean and admitted that the dystopic setting was a Stalinistic regime of terror and brutality. Instead he took refuge in that evasive Partisan Review term, “totalitarianism,” a word that originally described Mussolini’s corporativist government, but by the 1940s had no precise meaning beyond “powerful, cruel, slave state.” Orwell and his publisher even put out a press release in June 1949, denying that Nineteen Eighty-Four was about Communism and Stalinism. The Commies weren’t fooled.

Notes

[1] Christopher Hitchens, Why Orwell Matters. New York: Basic Books, 2002.

[2] See my conspiracy-minded essay, “Who Killed George Orwell?”

[3] George Orwell, Orwell on Truth. Introduction by Adam Hochschild. New York and Boston: Mariner Books (Houghton Mifflin), 2019.

Shaggy notes on previously saved draft!

Popcult Humor from Wilmot Robertson

Remembering Wilmot Robertson
(April 16, 1915 – July 8, 2005)

Margot Metroland

In the early 1980s I was involved with the startup of a “humor magazine” that never went anywhere after its colorful-but-vague pilot issue. Apart from a couple of National Lampoon veterans, we were mostly post-collegiate types, full of quirky, off-the-wall ideas from our own days at colorful-but-vague college humor mags. It was around this time that one of my colleagues mentioned, as a bit of curious arcana, that he had heard that somewhere out there was a racist humor magazine.

No! You don’t say! I said. Or something like that. I didn’t ask the magazine’s name because that would have been showing untoward interest. Furthermore, the colleague in question was the same guy whose mother raised her kids to believe that if you bought Welch’s Grape Juice you were funding the John Birch Society. Thus he was a great source of whimsical urban legends with little to back them up.

Knowing the name of the periodical was beside the point. The point was that this rumor existed, and that notion was funny in itself, because you could just imagine what sort of wild, rancid crap might be in there. It’s like today when you tell aging midwits that there are White Nationalist media outlets out there, and they go, “Oh! Stormfront?” Something they heard about twenty-five years ago but would never want to investigate further. They have an idea what it’s all about, and that’s good enough for them.

In this case the unnamed “racist humor magazine” was presumably Instauration, and the rumored “humor” must have referred mostly to its silly/incisive/tiresome cartoons of Willie and Marv. (Willie was a gloriously afro’d 1970s negro holding a boombox, while Marv was a snide, stoop-shouldered Jew in a cardigan.) A few years later, after my startup humor rag was long dead and buried, I ended up contributing odd cartoons and text squibs to Instauration—just to keep my hand in, you know. A little later, editor Wilmot Robertson retired the by now very dated Willie and Marv.

Beyond that, I can’t think of an awful lot of straight-up funny business going on in the pages of that beloved magazine. Overt attempts at humor were mostly snarly and leaden. For example, the snooty-bitch “society column” written by someone calling himself Cholly Knickerbocker, serving up plausible-looking newsbriefs mixed in with off-color fantasies about miscegenation, AIDS, Jewish supremacy and other variants in degeneracy.

Or the November 1983 cover photo of Anthony Blunt, former knight, former Surveyor of the Queen’s Pictures—sweetly captioned OLD FAG ANTHONY BLUNT, Of Stalin’s Snobbish Spy Network.

Confusingly enough, two issues later our cover boy was Michael Whitney Straight, “Majority Renegade of the Year.” Scion to wealth and onetime Cambridge Red, Straight’s main claim to fame, or greatest sin, was that he was the one who shopped his old friend Sir Anthony to the American and British intelligence services. (But surely that was a good thing?)

Like the quasi-Leftist critic Dwight Macdonald, Instauration had a reverence for High Culture, particularly that which was somewhat obscure. No room here for kitsch, or Macdonald’s “Masscult and Midcult.” If there was an article about sculpture, it would probably be on Praxiteles—or, better yet, Arno Breker! If Instauration had a composer on its cover, it might be Carl Orff—who, it was emphasized, stayed put in National Socialist Germany and didn’t run off to Hollywood. Or perhaps Percy Grainger, another “folkish” composer, one who specialized in writing pastiches of Morris dances and Irish reels.

This leaden stuff is why the letters pages, known as “The Safety Valve,” were such must reading and remain so today. You got big laughs, lots of venom, and—best of all—occasional mention of things that were happening in the present-day Real World. Movies and TV and sometimes even sportsball. Pop culture.

From what I knew of Wilmot Robertson, the ventings excerpted in “The Safety Valve” were more reflective of his personality than most of what appeared in the magazine. The fact is, people who wrote for Instauration didn’t have much to say about popular culture because they didn’t follow it or read about it. Mainly they read things like…well, like Instauration…and heavy tomes on history or philosophy. But ever once in a while, a discussion of old-time showbiz or society personalities would find its way into the magazine.

One of my favorite exchanges with W.R. concerned the late, great Ethel Merman. Now, especially in her latter years (that would be anytime after about 1940) she had a memorable look and loud, brassy personality. Because of that, and the fact that her real name was Ethel Zimmerman, a naive person could easily assume that she was Jewish. But, of course, she was not. Merman’s ancestry was Scots and German, going way back, and she was raised in a churchgoing Episcopalian household. On the other hand, Wikipedia informs me that when young she modeled her voice and persona on Sophie Tucker and Fanny Brice, amongst others, thus she was deliberately molding herself in that direction, not Doin’ What Comes Naturally. So, maybe so.

Anyway, I shot a little note off to Instauration and got back a reply (was it a letter or phone call?) from the man himself. “Madame,” W.R. said, drawing himself up to his full 6’2” height (or so I imagined), “if there is an archetypal Jewess anywhere, it is most definitely Ethel Merman.” A few weeks later a longer, less jocose reply appeared in the magazine’s “Safety Valve” letters section (June 1986).

It turns out I had actually written in to correct a columnist who’d referred to the late, great Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich as Jewish, and I tossed in Ethel Merman as another example of the same misapprehension.

So far as high-class popular-culture criticism goes, it’s hard to beat “King Cole,” a beguiling analysis of Cole Porter’s musical oeuvre that appeared in Instauration, August 1977.

“The Majority composer who never sold out.” That’s the kicker.

The author briefly alludes to Cole’s often louche and debauched private life, but he puts it in the context of the times, beginning with an expatriate life in the midst of people like the Murphys and Fitzgeralds:

Porter was a member, at home and abroad, of various, and admittedly somewhat dissolute, “sets.” What would have made him a phenomenon in any group was his dedication to composing. Even in the early 1920s, when he affected the outward lifestyle of an expatriate playboy, he was working hard; and he had some success in Paris in 1923 with his score for a modernistic ballet—since revived—Within the Quota. (The settings and story line were provided by Gerald Murphy, who had been Porter’s friend and sponsor at Yale. A truly archetypal expatriate, Murphy was also a friend to Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, and served as a model for the hero of the latter’s 1934 novel, Tender Is the Night.) Deciding that his metier was writing songs for the musical theater— he had long been “crazy” about Gilbert and Sullivan—Porter steeled himself to deal with its minority entrepreneurs and set to work.

Minority entrepreneurs. Well, you know what that means. For most of the previous century, popular-song writing and publishing had been dominated by second-, third-, fourth-generation Ulster Scots and Irishmen like Dan Emmet, Stephen Collins Foster, Harrigan & Hart, Chauncey Olcott, George M. Cohan, Walter Donaldson. But by the 1920s, Tin Pan Alley—an actual place, a block of West 28th St.—had gained quite a different cast. In that context Cole Porter’s work was inevitably unique, rather weird in fact. With his Gilbert and Sullivan influence, he tended to default to complicated patter songs and “catalog” numbers that recited an endless litany of people and places. (E.g., “Chinks do it, Japs do it, Up in Lapland little Lapps do it”; or, “You’re the top! You’re the great Houdini! You’re the top! You’re Mussolini!”)

Elsewhere in the topic of showtunes, in the November 1999 issue we get an incisive, if somewhat sour, takedown of Irving Berlin, a one-man schmaltz-and-standards machine for a half century. Instead of laboring over unusual key shifts and Gilbert & Sullivan-style patter songs about society, Berlin kept his melodies simple and singable, usually in the pop-standard key of E-flat, which happened to be the only key Berlin himself could play. (The author here, “Wolfgang Keller,” garbles that factoid to say that Berlin composed all his songs on the black keys!) And Berlin kept his lyrics firmly aimed at the cheap seats. I find this passage particularly hilarious:

His 1913 song, “Snooky-Ookums,” is an example of the sort of tripe he was churning out at the time: “She’s his jelly elly roll/ He’s her sugar ugey bowl.” Presaging the inanities of MTV-style music videos, his 1946 musical, Annie Get Your Gun, featuring noisy Jewess Ethel Merman, had virtually nothing in common with any true form of musical theater. In its original production it had no discernible story-line and was more like a series of unrelated vaudeville sketches than anything else.

(Oh look! It’s that erroneous Ethel Merman trope again!)

As to the issue of Annie Get Your Gun’s disjointed plot structure, this was because Berlin was under the gun to crank out a bunch of rollicking songs, very quickly, for a proposed Annie Oakley musical that was due to be mounted in a few months, but which so far had a very sketchy book. It seems the perpetually busy Rodgers and Hammerstein had been sought out originally to do the music and libretto, but they hadn’t the time. But they agreed to produce this spindly notion of a show, though someone else would have to write the songs.

And so they called in…Jerome Kern…finest melodist of his time…to do the score for Annie Get Your Gun. But then Kern dropped dead! Truly. Right there on the sidewalk! A brain hemorrhage.

What a cursed production!

Last-gasp step: they brought in Irving Berlin, who thereupon cranked out “No Business Like Show Business” and a few other standards in a couple of days, the way you or I might slap together a cheese-and-cracker board. The whole production often looked like a mistake, but with all these last-minute efforts it became a money-maker, a bountiful hit. Critics panned it for having little plot and being little more than a collocation of hummable songs…but it’s songs that live on and on, not drama.

Now we move onto something that was supposed to be a shocker in 1984: The Cecil Beaton Scandal of 1938. This was derived from Caroline Seebohm’s recently published The Man Who Was Vogue: The Life and Times of Condé Nast. Irving Berlin peeps in again here, or rather his wife Ellin Mackay does, in tiny scrawled rumblings about society figures, in Beaton’s wonderfully amateurish pen-and-ink drawings.

What was scandalous about these illustrations was that they showed newspapers filled with gossipy columns about Hollywood and society “kikes,” as Beaton called them. (“Mr. R. Andrew’s Ball at the El Morocco brought out all the damned kikes in town.”) Beaton had penned in these remarks in minuscule letters, so small that one might need a magnifying glass to read them.

This February 1938 issue of Vogue was already out on the stands before someone spotted Beaton’s prank. Walter Winchell screamed about it in his own gossip column, and then the house fell down on Cecil Beaton. Condé Nast himself sadly called him in and fired him.

One of the few all-out popcult endorsements from Instauration came in 1988, a couple of years after The Bonfire of the Vanities was published. FOUR-STAR SATIRE! it was called.

It’s not top criticism, but a very favorable review of the Tom Wolfe book, and one of the few notices Instauration ever gave to contemporary bestsellers. You should read it here, though maybe not if you’ve read the actual novel. Because it’s impossibly naive and silly. An accurate picture of “Zoo City,” Robertson rejoices, not having been in New York for many decades, but gleefully imagining it from his perch in Frog Hollow, North Carolina. Except that it was the city Tom Wolfe had chosen to live in, and had spent most of his life in. Surely a town with a Tom Wolfe can’t be all that bad.

For a while it seemed Tom Wolfe had written the Great American Novel. Then the movie came out, and it was supposedly a stinker, and people didn’t rave about the book anymore.

This was not Tom Wolfe’s first appearance in Instauration. He was in the very first issue in 1975. The subject of a cover story, in fact, about his book on modern art criticism, The Painted Word. Headlined “Berg, Berg and Berg,” the article wittily summarizes the story of how Abstract Expressionism and other nonsensical art fads of the 1940s, 50s and 60s were encouraged among painters and imposed upon the public by three critics, all Jewish, named Clement Greenberg, Harold Rosenberg, and Leo Steinberg. Almost certainly, this review was written by Wilmot Robertson himself. But, like Wolfe, Robertson leaves out the interesting but inconvenient fact that the real progenitor of this venture, the political theorist who goaded Greenberg and others to propagandize for obscurantism in modern art, was a non-Jew and non-art critic I’ve mentioned before: Dwight Macdonald. Macdonald wasn’t being destructive or mischievous; he’d just come to regard most representational art as old-hat, “Masscult” stuff, stuff that pandered to the public. Too much Grant Wood, Norman Rockwell, Thomas Hart Benton. Macdonald wanted High Art, and that to him meant basically inaccessible. But that’s another story for another time.

Margot Metroland

Deborah Cohen
Last Call at the Hotel Imperial:
The Reporters who Took on a World at War
New York: Random House, 2022

Kathryn S. Olmsted
The Newspaper Axis:
The Press Barons Who Enabled Hitler
New Haven: Yale University Press, 2022

Did you ever have to write a book review, but when the time came you really weren’t that into it, so you decided to wing it, and just write a few thousand words on some tangential subject that was mostly unrelated? I’ve never dared to do that myself, but it sounds like something George Orwell would do on a bad-hair day. Or better yet, the windy, orotund Thomas Babington Macaulay. [1]

Anyway, foreseeing a long day at the courthouse, I brought along a copy of the London Review of Books to sit out the waits. It’s a pretty good issue (January 19, 2023). I had already devoured John Lahr’s piece about his father’s friend Buster Keaton, as well as a massive, irresistible Geoffrey Wheatcroft review of the scandalous diaries of Sir Henry “Chips” Channon (three big doorstop volumes!). But there was still plenty of meat left on the bone. I settled in with a review of two intriguing books about 20th century journalism. One is called Last Call at the Hotel Imperial, a group biography of mostly American foreign correspondents, 1920-1960. The other is The Newspaper Axis, ostensibly about “press barons” who were isolationist or Nazi-friendly, but really a denunciation of nationalist journalism in England and America, from about 1900 to the recent age of Brexit and Donald Trump.

However the reviewer, an LRB staffer named Deborah Friedell, chose not to really review the books at all, but rather to spend 4000 words gushing about Dorothy Thompson, a character who has a small part in Last Call. Sometime wife of Sinclair Lewis, Dorothy Thompson was one of the highest-paid, most controversial columnists-broadcasters-social crusaders of the era. Dorothy interviewed Adolf Hitler in 1931 for the Saturday Evening Post, and seemed rather to like him, while sagaciously predicting he’d never come to power. “When the article was republished as a short book [I Saw Hitler] it included Thompson’s suggestion, barely veiled, that Hitler was probably gay,” writes reviewer Friedell. Perhaps she was peeved that Adolf didn’t make a pass at her. To continue: “When she returned to Berlin in 1934, she knew better than to expect a warm welcome from the new chancellor.” She settled in at the Hotel Adlon for a few weeks and filed a few local-color stories. Then a courteous young Gestapo guy in a trenchcoat met her at the hotel and handed her an order to leave Germany within 24 hours. Dorothy assumed this was all Goebbels’s doing. But no, this turned out to have been ordered by Adolf himself. “By the time she got back to the US, Thompson had been transformed into the most famous anti-Nazi writer in the country. She made a thirty-city lecture tour and began a column in the Herald Tribune, opposite Walter Lippmann.” [2]

A large-bodied, boisterous woman rather in the Eleanor Roosevelt mold, Dorothy seemed for years a flaming liberal, decrying “fascism”—she gave her husband Mr. Lewis the background and inspiration for It Can’t Happen Here. She raised money for Jewish refugees, taunted America Firsters and Bundists. By Pearl Harbor, though, she was calling herself a conservative, and at war’s end she was denouncing the Morgenthau Plan and blaming the war on the Jews. And that’s how she faded out. But she’d had a good run. Dorothy Thompson may have her points as a historical curio, a popular punchline in gag cartoons [3] but she appears, in passing, in only one of these two books being reviewed. I suppose reviewer Friedell has read a lot of books on Dorothy, maybe is writing one herself, and chose to go with her strengths. I don’t think she gave either book more than a cursory flip-through. This is too bad, because it shortchanges the other nine or ten  characters in this book, most of them stars in the (mostly) American journo firmament in the interwar and war years…yet mostly forgotten today.

There’s John Gunther, with his 25-year series of geopolitical bestsellers, perennial cash-cows for the Book-of-the-Month-Club (Inside Europe, Inside Europe Today, Inside Asia, Inside Russia Today, etc. etc.); his wife Frances Fineman, a diminutive, neurotic Jewish blonde with serial enthusiasms for Indian nationalism, Jawaharal Nehru, and the violent Zionism of Vladimir Jabotinsky; as well as the Gunthers’ son, Johnny, the Deerfield Academy student who died of galloping brain cancer in 1947, thereby giving his father subject matter for the classic Death Be Not Proud (the only John Gunther book still in print). Then there’s John Gunther’s fellow University of Chicago alumnus James Vincent Sheean, known as Vincent to family and booksellers, otherwise invariably called Jimmy; the preeminent journalist/spy of the era, and the only one to have a memoir (Personal History) turned into a Hitchcock movie (Foreign Correspondent, starring Joel McCrea, whom Jimmy slightly resembled till he lost his looks through boozing). Then H. R. Knickerbocker from Texas, who moved to Munich to study psychology, published several books in German, and eventually got in tight with the Nazi hierarchy, at least until they got tired of his jokes and gave him the heave-ho. And Wiliam Shirer, the bespectacled, mousy, longtime CBS correspondent from Paris and Berlin. And of course Dorothy Thompson and her sometime husband Sinclair Lewis; Rebecca West the libertine and her longtime paramour H. G.Wells; and Wilhelm Stekel, the platitudinous Viennese psychoanalyst (whom the unctuous Mr. Antolini in The Catcher in the Rye memorably quotes to Holden Caulfield before he tries to seduce him). Minor characters include Sigmund Freud, Clare Boothe Luce and husband Harry; Harold Nicolson and his brother-in-law, the sinuous aesthete Eddy Sackville-West, who apparently had a fling with Jimmy Sheean; Ben Hecht, H. L. Mencken, Putzi Hanfstaengel, and a dozen other distracting cameos.

If it seems the author of Last Call, Deborah Cohen, has bitten off more than can be comfortably chewed and digested, well, that is a fair estimate. But she is trying to give a portrait of a forgotten age and idiom, along with her mostly forgotten cast of characters, who were often longtime colleagues, friends, rivals and cuckolds. When they weren’t getting drunk, or drying out, or having breakdowns, or filing their foreign-correspondent stories for their newspapers in Chicago, New York, Philadelphia or London, these people were usually sleeping with their friends’ wives, husbands, and spare lovers. I suspect Last Call at the Hotel Imperial will be mainly useful as a reference book, particularly for screenwriters and novelists who want to recreate the flavor and idiom of the celebrity-correspondent world during the 1920s through 1950s.

Much more approachable and better organized is the other book, Kathryn S. Olmsted’s The Newspaper Axis. It has a much more limited cast (mainly the McCormick-Patterson cousins, W. R. Hearst, Lords Beaverbrook and Rothmere), and all the characters are intrinsically interesting, and politically powerful too. They do more than get drunk, sleep around, and scribble nasty columns (though they do those things as well). In addition Olmsted has an insight or two that will warm the heart of any researcher who spends a lot of time with old newspapers. Our knowledge of journalism and popular opinion from the 1920s-50s is limited and skewed because only a few major newspapers—the Washington Post, the New York Times, maybe the Times of London—have been adequately digitized. If you wish to research a lively and opinionated paper such as Cissy Patterson’s Washington Times-Herald, you have to find a library that has it on microfilm spools, and spend hours and hours scrolling—whirr-whirr-whirr-whirr—through the scratched and blotchy page images. [4] Eugene Meyer’s Washington Post bought the Times-Herald many decades ago in order to take over its features and put it out of business. There’s no question that the Times-Herald was a far better paper, so i have to wonder if WaPo is not at least partly responsible for pushing the Times-Herald–the biggest paper in DC during the 30s and 40s—down the memory hole. When WaPo reviewed this book, they accompanied it with the ugliest (no doubt heavily retouched?) photo of the 57-year Cissy Patterson they could come up with. Old grudges die hard.

Alas, The Newspaper Axis is made unnecessarily lurid on a number of levels. There’s the name, which Olmsted apparently took from Marshall Field III’s far-Left newspaper in New York, PM. In the early 1940s, PM would refer to the Patterson-McCormick papers (NY Daily News, Chicago Tribune, Washington Times-Herald) as the “Newspaper Axis” … because they were purportedly pro-Axis! Then there’s the cover, an impossibly lurid design of a newspaper-strip swastika against a background of garish, Blutfahne red. So over-the-top it put me in mind of Alan Coren’s Punch collection, Golfing for Cats, back around 1974. I gather the publishers decided this was all a bit much, so they removed the swastika for the Audible and Audio Books versions.

But there’s more. The author addresses us in a insistent, hyperventilating manner. On just about about every page she’s denouncing antisemitism or calling someone an antisemite. She manages to do this even though there are practically no Jews whatever in the whole book. This sort of obsession should always be a red warning light to the reader.

On the other hand Olmsted makes a pretty good case for some of these personalities, as lovable, opinionated eccentrics. Jolly old-fashioned, upper-class Jew-wise raillery runs like a thread through the whole book. Newspaper proprietor Eleanor “Cissy” Paterson being introduced at luncheon to a Jewish guest: “Oh I know all about Jews, I was married to one for four years!”—while her friends sit and cringe. Reputed to be a mean drunk and a bully, she made a lot of enemies before and after she became a “newspaperman” (as she described herself). She was quoted telling TIME, “The trouble with me is that I am a vindictive old shanty-Irish bitch.” Cissy was once married to an Austrian-Polish count who beat her and then kidnapped their daughter (William Howard Taft and the Tsar had to intervene to get the child back), after which she bought a ranch in Jackson Hole and became an avid hunter. She was easily the most interesting person in her family, though followed close behind by first cousin “Col.” Robert Rutherford McCormick of the Chicago Tribune. The Colonel liked to practice his polo shots on a mechanical horse at the top of the Tribune Tower, all the while lecturing his senior editors. Then there’s Cissy’s older brother Joseph, who wrote pro-socialist novels before founding the NY Daily News with part of the family fortune, and making it the biggest newspaper in America in five years.

When she got to age 48, Cissy persuaded her friend William Randolph Hearst to let her edit one of his failing Washington DC newspapers, the Herald. She took it and turned it into the liveliest, most popular daily in town. Some years later, nearing bankruptcy, Hearst sold both his Washington papers to Cissy. She merged them into the Times-Herald and ran them until her death in 1948.

Hearst himself is sort of the odd man out here, as no one ever accused him of being anti-Jewish, and he spent much of his career presenting himself as a populist progressive. Apparently he makes the team because he was a) a nationalist, b) a non-interventionist in the prewar period, and c) paid both Mussolini and Hitler to write columns for his papers. The columns, generally ghostwritten, weren’t very good and often arrived late, but for a while Hearst was paying them $1000-$2000 a shot. Il Duce supposedly used the money to buy himself a summer estate in Romagna.

The English press lords, literally Lords, don’t really qualify for Olmsted’s swastika badge either. Max Aitken, Lord Beaverbrook, gets slammed mainly because he was “pro-appeasement” and anti-intervention in the late 1930s. And because his biggest newspaper, the Daily Express, continued to be anti-Europe long after he died, so that when the Brexit vote succeeded in 2016, that paper cheered and credited the shade of old Max. Harold Harmsworth, Lord Rothermere, was basically just a buffoon, despite his slavish praise of Hitler, and his cheers in the Daily Mail for Sir Oswald Mosley and company in 1934 (“Hurrah for the Blackshirts!”).

Much more amusing is Lord Rothermere’s connection to “Princess” Stephanie Hohenlohe, a Viennese adventuress whom Rothermere kept on a fat retainer as a go-between to Nazi hierarchy and other European notables. Stephanie was Jewish, a fact that apparently did not bother Rothermere (or Hitler either). Olmsted doesn’t mention that (could she not know it?) even though she gives Stephanie a lot of ink. But it surely is relevant to the denouement of this story. After some years, with war clouds gathering, Lord Rothermere ended the retainer, whereupon Stephanie decided to blackmail him by threatening to expose all the smarmy letters he had written to the Führer. Rothermere didn’t give in, so she sued for breach of contract. Stephanie ended up losing the suit; it turned out she didn’t really have access to that embarrassing correspondence. However, always a gentleman, Lord Rothermere paid her court fees.

Olmsted often misses out on a good side story because she doesn’t think the tale would be of interest or more likely because she’s missing information. Just a few examples here:

She repeatedly mentions a 1930s foreign correspondent for the Chicago Tribune named Donald Day, and excoriates Col. McCormick of the Tribune for employing him as the paper’s representative in Eastern Europe. She tells us again and again that Mr. Day was sympathetic to the German National Socialists, and even became a propaganda broadcaster in Berlin toward the end of the war. But what’s equally intriguing, and what Olmsted leaves out, is that his sister was Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker. So here we have two siblings, both resourceful and idealistic radicals, marching to somewhat different drummers. [5]

Then you have the story of John O’Donnell, longtime “Capitol Stuff” columnist for the New York Daily News and Washington Times-Herald, whom Lefties variously called a pro-Nazi, a Naziphile, and an antisemite. One of his fiercest enemies was a newspaper publisher named J. David Stern, who roundly slandered O’Donnell in a Philadelphia Record editorial after O’Donnell reported in 1941 that Navy and Coast Guard ships were being used, illegally, to guard convoys of food and equipment going to Britain. This name-calling led to $50,000 libel suit against Stern, which O’Donnell eventually won, though the judgment was whittled down to $8000 after five years in litigation. Olmsted completely leaves out Stern’s name and the tale of the libel suit, which was big news at the time. [6] This looks to be deliberate, and dishonest.

Then there’s the story about Cissy Patterson and the comic-strips war. The Washington Post went bankrupt in 1933 and was sold at auction to Eugene Meyer (father of Kay Meyer Graham). Cissy’s family owned the Chicago Tribune – Daily News syndicate that distributed some of the most popular strips in the Post. (They actually concocted some of the most legendary ones in-house, eg Little Orphan Annie and Dick Tracy.) However the Post‘s bankruptcy voided the syndicate contract—according to the syndicate. So Cissy picked up these strips and ran them in her paper, the Herald. Meyer meanwhile insisted the Post still had valid rights to them, and sued. So for the next year and a half these rival papers in Washington were running the same comic strips, while a bitter legal battle went on. Finally a settlement was reached, with Meyer winning the rights to run the syndicate’s comic strips. Olmsted skips over most of these details, but is careful to tell how the furious Cissy reacted: she sent Meyer a gift box with a pound of meat inside. But it was more exciting than that. It was a hunk of hamburger meat gift-wrapped like an orchid, with a card that (allegedly) said “Here’s your pound of flesh, Shylock.” [7]

Olmsted makes errors that a quick check in reference books, or even an internet search, would have avoided. In discussing Col. Robert McCormick and his cousin Joe Patterson she mentions they both went to Groton and Yale, and while doing so she reveals that she is under the impression that the Groton School is in Connecticut. Which is pretty funny, seeing as this book is published by Yale University Press where, as I recall, they used to have fact-checkers and proofreaders. (There is indeed a place called Groton, Connecticut, but it is renowned for submarines, rather than Endicott Peabody’s austere boarding school in Massachusetts). And once or twice she refers to the Independent Labour Party in Britain as an offshoot of the regular (or “Parliamentary”) Labour Party. No, it’s quite the other way around: Keir Hardie’s ILP came first, and the other Labour Party came about a decade later, in the early 20th century.

But now I am just being pedantic and paying too much attention to this enjoyably silly book.

Notes

[1] Macaulay once chose to review a three-volume Ecclesiastical and Political History of the Popes of Rome, during the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1840) by the German scholar Leopold Ranke. He wound up writing a 16,000-word essay on a subject that had almost nothing to do with Ranke’s book. Macaulay disposes of Ranke’s work in short order (“It is hardly necessary for us to say that this is an excellent book excellently translated…”), then jumps onto his hobby-horse, which is, basically: “Why is Protestantism failing us? Why does the Catholic Church keep growing, and why do they nurture their eccentrics and enthusiasts so much better?” This was during the time of the Oxford Movement, so the question was very much on the mind of Macaulay, a vaguely Evangelical low-churcher who found both High Anglicanism and Catholicism suspect. Macaulay almost certainly didn’t read all three of Ranke’s dense volumes about 16th and 17th century popes—he was in the government at the time, as War Minister—but this busy fellow nonetheless managed to turn out a mighty monograph on a distantly related subject; and I don’t know that anyone ever complained.

[2] Because I have a subscription, I can share this archived LRB review with my friends: here you go. You might also check out this piquant bit on the Red Lewis – Dotty Thompson marriage in the zombie-like revival of SatEvePost revival:”‘What a Woman!’ The Story of Dorothy Thompson and Sinclair Lewis.”

[3] I recall Thurber’s angry-man-at-typewriter, with his wife going, “He’s giving Dorothy Thompson a piece of his mind.” Or another cartoonist’s gag, with the doctor telling his middle-aged patient in the examining room: “And no more Dorothy Thompson!” Some real knee-slappers!

[4] Tom Tryniski at fultonhistory.com has done a valiant one-man job of digitizing old 19th and 20th century newspapers from New York State and elsewhere. But the lacunae are vast and deep. I tried to search for Washington Times-Herald and mainly got denunciations of the Patterson-McCormick “triumverate” (Times-Herald, NY Daily News, Chicago-Tribune) from 1942 issues of the crazy-Lefty PM newspaper. No Times-Herald itself.

[5] Donald Day also joined the Finnish army for a while, much against the objection of the Tribune.

[6] I wrote about this feud back in 2015, in my series on Fortean Society weirdoes. Stern was one of the society founders, while O’Donnell was a friend of the eccentric 1940s chairman, novelist Tiffany Thayer. Almost Fortean!

[7] Women’s Wear Daily, Oct. 26, 2011: https://wwd.com/business-news/media/the-art-of-accuracy-5334867/#!

Céline . . . and Houellebecq.

You don’t have to dig too deep through the past two decades of reviews to find that the French novelist-critic Michel Houellebecq is often compared to the late Louis-Ferdinand Céline. Some of the reasons are facile and superficial, but we have some reasonable ones too. Both writers are provocateurs. They’re both anti-Leftist, suspicious of democracy and progressivist cults, though neither slips neatly into any recognizable category of Right-wing. Both have a penchant for getting themselves in trouble with the law—or more precisely, with the political faction in control of government and information channels.

After the Second World War, the exiled Céline was sentenced in absentia to a fine and imprisonment (though later amnestied) for anti-Jewish writings and (rather sullen) collaboration during the German occupation.

In a curious parallel, Houellebecq was accused and tried for racial hatred in 2001, for supposedly expressing anti-Muslim sentiments in a novel and press interview. He was acquitted and, like Céline in the 1950s, went on to greater notoriety and literary success.

Two literary martyrs . . . almost!

7 Jan 2015 cover of Charlie Hebdo.

At the time of the Charlie Hebdo massacres in January 2015, it was Houellebecq himself who was caricatured on the cover of that fortnightly comic as a sort of Nostradamus. You see him here predicting that he’ll lose his teeth in 2015 . . . and celebrate Ramadan in 2022!

And then the massacre happened—killing all the Charlie cartoonists except this cover artist “Luz” (who soon resigned).

Houellebecq kept his teeth (I believe) but went into hiding, under police protection.

This was an unlikely plot-twist worthy of his novels. His just-published book, Soumission (Submission, reviewed here), described the eager and willing Islamicization of the French ruling caste. Though set in the distant future of 2022 (!), it cut just a little too close to the political reality of the moment. The story’s target was not Muslims but rather the parties of the French Left, who in this not-too-unlikely dystopic fantasy would rather usher in Sharia Law than endure a nationalist government under Marine LePen.

Getting back to Céline, here is another parallel between him and Houllebecq. Both have done a lot of interviews, but they treat them as performance art. Talking to their interviewers, the characters “Céline” and “Houellebecq” are essentially fictive creations, complete with pseudonyms, as though speaking through puppets. The real self isn’t the pen name, it’s the puppeteer behind, who won’t reveal more than he wants to. Céline’s puppeteer was a physician named Louis-Ferdinand Destouches, while Houellebecq’s is a fellow named Michel Thomas, who took his grandmother’s maiden name as a nom-de-plume. They both like to tease and outrage their interlocutors, acting out the more inflammatory aspects of their fiction. [1][2]

And as my montage at top suggests, Houellebecq looks more and more like Céline as he gets old and gnarly. I tell myself this can’t be accidental. And yet—now that I’ve dragged you this far—it appears Houellebecq doesn’t have a particularly high regard for Céline at all.

He doesn’t diss him, exactly. But in his recent book of essays, Interventions 2020, Houellebecq makes a penetrating observation about our modern regard of collabo writers of the early 1940s. We cut them slack. He thinks the collabos‘ reputations are overestimated:

Don’t get me wrong. Céline is not without merit, he’s just ridiculously overrated. And Brasillach’s Poemes de Fresnes are very beautiful, surprisingly beautiful even in such a poor author. But all the others . . . Drieu, Morand, Felicien Marceau, Chardonne . . . a rather lamentable raggletaggle of mediocrities, after all. Well, it seems to me that their strange overestimation stems from a perverse emphasis on the aforementioned adage, which could be worded as: “If he’s a bastard, he’s probably a good writer.” [3]

What’s being criticized here is not politics or opinionatedness, but clarity of style. The fact is that Robert Brasillach, Pierre Drieu La Rochelle, and definitely Louis-Ferdinand Céline (I don’t know about the others) can be very hard going to begin with, whether you’re translating them or just trying to read them in the original. Houellebecq doesn’t think they’re good writers, and I’m going to guess this is because they don’t take care to state their case and develop it in simple declarative sentences. This isn’t a 1940 problem, so far as I can see; it afflicts French journalism and criticism to this day. If Houellebecq sees it too, we have to take his word for it.

Meantime, Houellebecq’s own prose is crystal-clear, a breeze to read in French and in English translation. So clear that this sort of transparency must a major determinant of his style. Houellebecq doesn’t like evasion, muddy thinking. He comes up with a phrase or observation, and it is often so blunt that it looks like a provocation. But meanwhile he draws you in.

Interventions 2020, just published in English translation a few months ago, is a mixed bag, mainly interviews, published criticisms and essays, and an awful lot of funny little pensées that Houellebecq scribbled into a notebook and then triple-distilled into something you and I can easily read.

Thus the first essay in Interventions 2020, a mere three pages, is titled, “Jacques Prévert is a jerk.” That’s it. That’s the title. Looks the same in French or English. The rest of the text merely develops this theme. It appears that, as with French classes in America, French literature classes in France cram this shallow pop poet/lyricist down kids’ throats. Because he sort of . . . non-controversial?

Or at least they did in our day, back in the 1970s . . .

If Jacques Prévert writes, it’s because he has something to say; that’s all to his credit. Unfortunately, what he has to say is boundlessly stupid; sometimes it makes you feel nauseous. [4] [5]

Attacking Jacques Prévert, the shallow schoolroom poet, is small potatoes. It’s way down in the book that you realize you’re being trolled. Or somebody’s being trolled. If anyone’s reading this book in fifty years, it’ll be for the premier essay, “Donald Trump is a good president.”

What does he say? Nothing that a gilet jaune or Charles DeGaulle himself could ever take issue with:

Donald Trump was elected to defend the interests of American workers; he is defending the interests of American workers. We would have liked to see this kind of attitude more often in France over the past fifty years. [6]

*   *   *

You could say Céline began his writing career as a medical student, doing his required dissertation on Ignaz Semmelweis and the crusade against sepsis in hospitals. Foul, disgusting disease and decay always riveted his attention, as a writer and as a doctor who usually worked among the poor. Reviewing his memoir Castle to Castle a few years ago, I noted how fantastically grotesque was his imagination, describing in detail how a hotel lobby’s toilet was forever overflowing, with rivers of urine and excrement flowing down the stairway. For visceral disgust there’s no one like Celine (except maybe Orwell at times).

Houellebecq started from a different imaginative world entirely, that of the science fiction he enjoyed in his youth. He particularly liked H. P. Lovecraft’s dystopias of multiracial fearfulness. His first published book was H. P. Lovecraft : Contre le monde, contre la vie (1991). And therein lay the template for most of his fiction since.

And non-fiction, too. In Interventions 2020 he recalls the time twenty years ago when he learned he’d won a prize for his first book of poems—the Prix de Flore!

So there he is, down in Saint-Germain-des-Prés . . . sitting in the Café Flore, very revved up . . . waiting for the prize festivities to start . . . and he imagines he might want to give a little speech when he takes the award. Something like: poetry has been asleep—but now it’s “emerged from its brutish slumber.” “Iä Iä Cthulhu fhtagn!” (Cthulhu awakens!) [7]

He accepts the award, but never gives his Cthulhu talk. He goes to the post-awards party and thinks his life will be much calmer from here on in.

Notes

[1] Chloé Chourrout, Performing Authorship: The case of Louis-Ferdinand Céline and Michel Houellebecq. MPhil thesis, 2014, University of London. URL: https://research.gold.ac.uk/id/eprint/31764/1/ENG_thesis_ChourroutC_2022.pdf

[2] Chourrout, above, cites a typical article from The Independent (London) by John Lichfield in 2002: “Michel Houellebecq:  Drunken racist or one of the great writers? . . . Prophet;
pornographer; fascist; racist; trouble-maker; drunk; nihilist; moralist; self-publicist;
misogynist; martyr to freedom of speech; one of the greatest living writers. Which is
the real Michel Houellebecq?” 

[3] Michel Houellebecq, “Emmanuel Carrière and the problem of goodness,” in Interventions 2020. Translated by Andrew Brown. Cambridge, England and Medford, Mass.: 2022.

[4] Houellebecq, “Jacques Prévert is a jerk,” in Interventions 2020.

[5] The Prévert craze began in the latter 1940s, and presumably annoyed Terry Southern, who was then taking a potted course in French Culture & Civilization at the Sorbonne on the Gl Bill. Southern’s Doctor Strangelove script has the Keenan Wynn noncom accusing Peter Sellers’s RAF Group Captain of being a “prevert.”

[6] Houellebecq, “Donald Trump is a good president,” in Interventions 2020.

[7] Houellebecq, “I’m normal. A normal writer,” in Interventions 2020.