A Review: H. G. Wells, The Food Of The Gods
December 22, 2021
A Review
The Food Of The Gods
by
H.G. Wells
by
R.E. Prindle
Texts:
Wells, H.G. The Food Of The Gods.
Wells, H.G. In the Day Of The Comet
Wyndham, John: The Midwich Cuckoos
Wyndham, John: The Day Of The Triffids
Movie: The Village Of The Damned (based on The Midwich Cuckoos)
The Food Of The Gods is one of the Wells novels included in the Omnibus titled Seven Science Fiction Novels of H.G.Wells Of the seven the three most read are The Time Machine, The War Of The Worlds and The Island Of Dr. Moreau. Within the lesser read three are The Food Of The Gods and In The Day Of The Comet.
While I have had a copy of Seven Science Fiction Novels ‘forever’ I first read Food only about fifteen years ago, (I’m eighty-five.) I’ve thought about it frequently over the years, but had it sharply called to mind within the last few days by an incident that occurred in India.
Apparently a dog killed a monkey. One wouldn’t consider this a matter of Darwinian natural rejection but it probably is. As we all know the human population of the globe now nearing eight billion is expanding rapidly preempting the land leaving little room for other species. I thought then that the monkeys that had always shared the land amicably with the humans are now finding their living space impinged upon.
When the human population that was only 250 million when the British arrived in the eighteenth century is now fast approaching a billion five hundred million almost equaling China. Elephants and tigers and probably otherspecies are facing extinction in the wild. Perhaps monkeys and dogs are facing competition in more settled areas.
Other species that haven’ yet been exterminated or nearly so are also crowding the landscape. At any rate, the monkeys were so enraged at the unjustifiable monkeycide that a turf war between monkeys and dogs has begun. Up to this writing monkeys have exterminated a confirmed kill of two hundred fifty dogs.
Their method of murdering the dogs, since they don’t have guns or atom bombs is to carry the dogs to high places and chuck them over. Now this is systematic, so the monkeys have apparently evolved a plan, that is that they got together and communicated with each other. In addition it is possible that the monkeys have also begun to kill human children. Would it be possible to label these killings as race wars?
Not knowing the circumstances around the first killing I can’t confirm that the monkees reaction is justified. Isn’t it possible that a monkey tried to steal the dogs’ food and the dog retaliated appropriately? If true this would be an inter-species matter to be adjudicated in court.
The form of execution used by the monkeys struck me as odd. They mainly attacked puppies. If so this may indicate a genocidal war to exterminate dogs. The Jews in WWII proposed to castrate all male Germans in a massive genocide. But perhaps the monkeys have come up with a more devious plan. That of killing off the younger generation, more easy kills for monkeys, thus leaving the older generation to slowly die off. Are monkeys capable of devising such a plan and acting in unison? Apparently so. Having been quietly observing the behavior of humans for a few thousand years who knows what curiosities of behavior they may have ingested.
So, genocidal monkeys led my mind back to Wells’ novel The Food Of The Gods. Wells was well up on evolutionary theory having studied under Thomas Huxley. Wells hypothesized that the Gods introduced a super food that developed a new advanced human super species that upset the social balance much as has happened in modern times.
Those infants raised on the stuff, something like Bulwer-Lytton’s Vril from his novel The Coming Race, are exceptional in all ways, physical and mental with IQs off the scale. This of course creates a problem because it makes the intelligence of all other races look stupid, stupid to the point of non-competitiveness. Thus those who benefited from the food of the gods are not allowed to propagate, there won’t be room on the planet for all the races. Quite clearly the losers of the contest will be the smaller less intelligent old races.
Genocide of the new race is the only solution. Life does have its problems doesn’t it? The story then concerns how the New Race can be protected because, after all, they are the most beneficent of Nature’s creatures, the most highly developed. Humanity Fifth Gen.
As the story has it the Earth has been fully occupied. In the old days the New Race could have moved away from anti-New Race settlements much as the Whites must obviously have done when they evolved from the Africans somewhen, as modern ideology would have it. This situation then creates the debate of what to do. Listen to Wells as the Superhumans discuss the issue.
Quote:
What then? Will this little world of theirs be as it was before? They may fight against greatness in us who are the children of men, but can they conquer? Even if they should destroy us, every one, would it save them? No! For greatness is abroad not only in us, not only in the Food, but in the purpose of all things. [Evolution toward a goal.] It is in the nature of all things; it is part of space and time. To grow and still to grow; from first to last, that is Being, that is the law of life. What other law can there be.”
“To help others?”
“To grow. It is still, to grow. Unless we help them to fail…”
“They will fight hard to over come us.” said a voice.
And another, “What of that?”
“They will fight,” said young Redwood. “If we refuse these terms, I doubt not they will fight. Indeed, I hope they will be open and fight, after all if they offer peace, it will be only be the better to catch us unawares. Make no mistake Brothers, in some way or other they will fight. The war has begun and we must fight to the end. Unless we are wise, we may find presently to have lived only to make them better weapons against our children and our kind. This, so far, has only been the dawn of the battle. Some of us will be killed in battle, some of us will be waylaid. There is no easy victory—no victory whatever that is not half defeat for us. What of that? If only we keep a foothold, if only we leave behind us a growing host to fight when we are gone!”
Unquote,
So, the problem of evolution is that the less evolved must disappear. That is genocide to make room for Nature’s best. That is evolution. The monkeys may have realized that. There is no room on this planet for both dogs and monkeys, say the monkeys. The only good dog is a dead dog. The dilemma plagues mankind. There is no room on the planet for eight billion people consuming resources as fast as they can. If we continue on at this pace resources will be consumed and mankind will collapse in on itself resulting in fierce race wars…unless the world collapses on us first.
Interestingly Wells inspired a mid-twentieth century writer by the name of John Wyndham who was writing away unsuccessfully until when rereading Wells he discovered that he could lift plot and all directly from Wells and by altering the details the stories would be unrecognizable to the casual reader who may not have read Wells thus having nothing to compare. His first attempt was a major sci-fi success. He called it The Day Of The Triffids and that was a retelling of The War Of The Worlds.
Then he had a great idea. By combining The Day Of The Comet and The Food Of The Gods he had a terrific story. This resulted in his novel The Midwich Cuckoos which, unfortunately was a wretched title. The novel came off much better, and that’s saying a lot, in its movie version The Village Of The Damned. Terrific movie.
In Comet Wells postulated that a comet passed through the Earth’s atmosphere [this was the time of the return of Halley’s Comet] trailing a green gas that enveloped the planet. The gas was some sort of ether type gas that put everyone away for a few hours. When the sleepers wakened it was a brand new world and the peoples of the Earth were transformed into virtually a new species and everything was…perfect.
Wyndham borrowed the gas bit from Comet so that in Midwich the women of child bearing age fainted for a spell and while unconscious invisible extraterrestrials impregnated them. Sort of like a hypnotic drug. When the women awoke they remembered nothing but all the women in Midwich were pregnant at the same moment so that their children were all born on the same day. In their wombs were a generation of super intelligent tow heads [Great White Beasts] who might perhaps have been mistaken for Nazi’s at first glance. Perhaps the movie The Boys From Brazil might have received some inspiration from Midwich. In Boys, ten boys were boys were cloned from Hitler’s DNA. That movie involved tracking the boys down and murdering them. Sort of a variation on the idea of going back in time and murdering Hitler in the womb.
Wyndham then borrowed the gas bit from Comet so that certain women fainted for a spell and were impregnated by invisible extraterrestrials. In Comet the women and men woke up to a world of free love.
I think you have an idea of the solution of the problem of the Towheads. Yep. Genocide. These kids had to be exterminated lest they take over the world and eliminate all the rest. There is no explanation of why this would be a bad thing. Perhaps it would be an improvement. Maybe they were peaceful extraterrestrials sent by Klaatu, if you’ve seen The Day The Earth Stood Still you will understand.
We’ll never know because their extinction was successful and total. There had been three colonies. One in Siberia, one in Australia and the one in Midwich. The other two had been discovered and exterminated also. It is now up to England, which has always welcomed fugitives from oppressed peoples, to protect the dumboes and destroy the super-intelligent. Something like what’s happening in the US at the present time.
The easiest method would have been to off them in their sleep but, given a choice between the easy way and the hard way humans will always choose the hard way. A teacher had been selected to make these small kids well informed, educated to post-PhD standards.
What to do? A suicidal mission by Teach. He loads his briefcase with dynamite which is a start. The kid geniuses are not only intelligent but telepathic. They can read minds. Charlie, our teacher, determines on an expedient of imagining a brick wall. He does, the students detect the wall and directing powerful beams from their eyes begin to demolish his mental wall. A brick flies out, then another, a small hole created, than a larger. Too late. The leader, perhaps modeled on Hitler, shouts “It’s a b…. One more successful genocide. And thus the world was saved from intelligence and left for the dumbasses.
An excellent book it was a great movie. Very memorable. Rotten Bananas gives it 100%. And I do too. My own recommendation for the world is to relax. The world cannot possibly survive eight billion people and rising. Even if we all are going to die the world will be left to…THE HAPPY FEW.
Far Gresham’s Dilemma: A Short Story
January 24, 2018
A Short Story
Far Gresham’s Dilemma
by
R.E. Prindle
Pages torn from the memoirs of Far Gresham 12/25/1981
Edited by R.E. Prindle
My troubles had been increasing. I struggled to avoid what I knew would be the inevitable conclusion. I had seen the situation developing itself, had done my best to avert it by taking evasive actions years before, but the juncture and collision of the two forces were unavoidable. When the collision occurred I knew, I hoped that I wouldn’t, but I knew that I would buckle and collapse before the concentrated hatred of my enemies. My probable reaction had been impressed into my psyche decades before. I knew this, but I, as we all are, was powerless to resist this old imprinting. Coinciding with the objective phenomena had been the gradual disintegration of my personality. Self-analysis had cleared me of nearly all deleterious psychological reactions but now I was faced with trying to exorcise the central external factor which controlled my psyche; which compelled reactions in me which were irrational and beyond my control.
I was now approaching forty-two. Over the years as I had peeled back the layers of the onion seeking that core which would liberate me from my thralldom and allow me to face the world with a clear mind and cohesive purpose. I had resolved many aspects of my personality but this one remained beyond my grasp. All my efforts to convince myself to deal with this central problem had been rebuffed by my subconscious mind. I thought I had come close on several occasions, but fear always held me back. I had convinced myself that the event was of minor importance. I believed that, while this occurrence held me in thrall, that, while it had humiliated the child I had been, this terrible happening would turn out to be insignificant. I was both right and wrong.
I was too late to alter the outcome of my objective situation but I did find salvation for my subjective situation. The latter was of the greater importance to me. The period was one of very troubled sleep. I had had several successive weeks of disturbing dreams. They did not frighten me. I knew that negotiations were being undertaken by my conscious and subconscious selves. The violence of the dreams only indicated the significance of the matter under consideration. The dreams occurred every night and seemed to last through the whole night. Obviously a climax was imminent.
The revelatory dream, that dream that liberated me from the enthrallment to the traumatic circumstances was preceded by a brief little dream that set the stage for the major revelation. The dream was a quiet little dream, merely a vignette. It was a peaceful little dream set in a scene that was potentially terrifying. Strangely, it was not.
I became conscious of looking into a darkened warehouse filled with rows and rows and stacks and stacks of boxes. In the aisles there was a man searching frantically and desperately through the boxes in the gloom of the shadowy warehouse. There was no light. I didn’t know how he expected to find anything. But he continued to search in a manner approaching frenzy.
Aroused by the noise, a guardian appeared to investigate. I recognized him immediately; it was Death. Death had not the fearsome, ugly appearance as he is usually depicted. He was a kindly looking avuncular old man with an understanding expression on his face and a shock of gray hair. He had come out to investigate the noise. He found a Burglar in the House of Death. I recognized the Burglar too. It was me. I wondered what I was looking for.
The information was immediately forthcoming, for Death, without approaching the Burglar asked him what he was doing.
The Burglar was very distraught, his expression revealed a deep distracted anguish. He replied: ‘I’m looking for my dead self. My first personality was murdered and taken from me. I need him to make myself whole again.’
Death looked at the Burglar with some amazement: ‘Are you dead?’ he asked.
‘No.’ replied the Burglar, ‘It’s my original self who was murdered. I’m looking for his ghost.’
‘If you’re not dead then you can’t be here. Death told the Burglar in a kindly manner. ‘You must leave now or stay forever.’
But the Burglar was too distraught to comprehend his danger and blurted out: ‘But you don’t understand, I can’t leave until I find my original self.’
Death seemed to be amused rather than angered by this impertinent reply. He emitted a low warm chuckle: ‘I don’t understand? Ha. Ha. I don’t understand! If you have misplaced it or allowed it to atrophy then you have come looking in the very wrong place. You should search your own pockets first.’ His voice lowered to a tone of stern rebuke: ‘Leave now and bother me no more until I come for you.’
Darkness closed in from the edges until the middle disappeared. When I awoke I enjoyed a certain calmness amidst my general disturbance. I relaxed in a state of excitement. I knew what to do but I didn’t know how to go about it. I actively tried to compel my conscious to vex my subconscious to make it give up the secret. It was very reluctant to do so. One night in this long period of stormy dreams my subconscious presented me with a new metaphor to see if I could interpret it correctly.
When the dream took form I found myself in the playground of a grade school with another boy who was looking to me for guidance. The ground rose in three slight equal gradients to the school building which was perhaps a hundred yards in the distance. It was daytime but there was no light. No grass grows on a playground and there were only a few tufts around the occasional tree in this one. In the distance just outside the building stood a figure pointing something in my and this other boy’s direction. Taking time to get a clear look at this figure, who was a mere shadow, I discerned that he was pointing a rifle at me. This other boy said: ‘What is that red spot on your chest?’
I looked down and saw the red dot from a laser rifle centered on my heart. I immediately leaped to the side to get the dot off my heart knowing that with the laser beam on me the rifleman couldn’t miss. He stood stationary, but, now aware of the laser beam I rolled around on the ground, adopted stooping and standing postures, but no matter what I did the laser beam remained on my heart. Although I was clearly in his sights the rifleman didn’t pull the trigger. All this time the other boy kept advising me to be calm, that the rifleman wasn’t shooting. Good calm advice but the laser beam wasn’t aimed at his heart.
Finally, convinced that no shots would be fired, I ran from the schoolyard and headed for some city streets lined with middle class houses. I rushed toward them and was actually among the houses when a sentry who was stationed in a guard house which I had already passed commanded me to come back to him. I was beyond his reach and ought to have kept going but the sense of guilt which had pervaded my life prevented my continuing. I returned to the sentry box. I stood before the sentry awaiting his decision. I had broken into a nervous sweat, as had been my habit, and stood twitching guiltily. He did and said nothing. Ignored me.
Astonished at his lack of interest in me I began to wonder what this dream might mean and how it was related to my central childhood fixation. While I was standing there in my consternation my subconscious, deriding my inability to grasp the meaning of the metaphor, decided to show me the central fixation of my life, the one situation that controlled my responses to everyday life and all personal relationships. But this was no easy task. For I resisted. For this intense shame, humiliation and debasement had encased the memory behind a stout concrete block wall, or so it was represented in my dream. Perhaps the method of penetrating this wall had been suggested to me by an old movie I had seen years before, the name of the movie was The Children Of The Damned.
In this movie several intelligences from outer space had been sent to Earth to assume control of Earthmen. They were in the form of babies, the movie was produced in the wake of the Nazi Era so the babies, soon to be children, were blond and blue eyed. Obviously a thinly disguised simile for the ‘Blond Beast’. They were very aggressive. As eight-year olds their intelligence surpassed all but the most learned Earthmen. Earthmen soon grasped their danger and set out to destroy the super intelligent aliens. But the children’s penetrating intelligence, which was able to read minds, detected every plot against them. Finally a noble Earth martyr carried a brief case loaded with dynamite, a few years later he would have been able to fill his pocket with plastique, into the classroom. In order to foil the intelligence of the alien children he concentrated his thoughts on a brick wall. The children, standing in a semi-circle around him, directing their intelligence to shattering his wall, which was graphically portrayed in the movie. As the wall was destroyed bricks flying everywhere the martyr’s thoughts of the briefcase shown clear, of course, the children were too late. The bomb exploded blowing eight space kids and one noble martyr back into outer space.
So, as I stood in terrific anticipation, my subconscious directed an energy against the wall which separated me from my dead self; the assassinated child of my youth, the murdered child of another time; the hope of another universe. The concrete wall was disintegrating before my eyes. Fragments flew in every which way. As the hole in the wall was enlarged the object of the search by the Burglar in the House of Death revealed itself. Its full horror was exposed to my view.
My mind’s eye received the image. It was a scene, a snapshot. I can see this still photograph of my degradation today, now, just as it was presented to me on that night, in that dream. I was unable for several weeks thereafter to comprehend the scene. I could see the picture but try as I might I could not actually remember the sequence of events. Still my mind began to slowly reconstruct the situation.
This period of my life, from four to eight, had always been jumbled In my memory. I had never been able to arrange events of that period into chronological order. I was now able to unfold those years and reconstruct my life of that period.
The picture I was shown was simply this. A group of twelve children, we would all have been six or seven in the second grade, were standing in a semi-circle around a child in frozen motion on one foot in mortal terror and a cold sweat. Elsewhere on the playground, this was during recess, stood twelve other children in disarray. This was the incident that shaped my reactions to life, that directed my responses against my will.
There was still no memory. The scene was not brought to life, converted from a single snapshot into a cinematic motion picture. Nor has it since. The memory was and is too painful. Yet I have been able to reconstruct that terrible moment and the steps that led up to it.
Partially I did this from memory; partially from research. I never contacted any of my former classmates. I went back to the Valley and collecting the name of my classmates from the school archives and examining the archives of the Valley Star around those years I have been able to reconstruct the following account. As in all wars there was an ante-bellum period. It begins actually, before I was born.
My mother had never wanted me. In her family the eldest female cousin was given the rights of primogeniture. As I was the first born child of my mother and her three sisters, she had desperately hoped for a daughter so that she could leap to being chief among her sisters. Her disappointment when I was born was severe. She never forgave me for not being a girl, nor was she prepared to assert my rights against my female cousin born four years later. It is just as well that she abandoned me for I can never forgive her for having abandoned my rightful role as eldest cousin in my extended family. My cousin, Danielle, when she was born had displaced me. This early abandonment in favor of my cousin has also left its mark on my character. My mother was no mother to me.
She, while in high school inadvertently set in motion the animosity directed at me in the second grade. Such is the unpredictability and uncertainty of life. She, while in the twelfth grade, accepted a date with a boy by the name of David Hirsh. David Hirsh was the son of Solomon Hirsh who owned Hershey’s Department Store. I do not know what my mother’s parents did but I do know that they were not well to do, nor were they ever of the social station the Hirshes enjoyed. Well to do boys only date girls from a lower social stratum for one purpose. Perhaps my mother was too naïve to know this, or perhaps she flattered herself that this rich kid might actually fall in love with her. He, on his part, being a rich kid, expected to score. Go all the way as they expressed it in those days.
Cars had not attained the universality in 1936 that they posses at the present. David Hirsh had a car of his very own which he could drive to school and park for all to see. His status at school was very high. Picking my mother up in his new automobile he employed a trick that undoubtedly antedated cars. He drove her a few miles out of town, parking the car in a grove of trees by the side of the road he quite bluntly told her to put out or get out. My mother would not be intimidated by a boy who threw off the disguise of a knight in shining armor and announced he was nothing but an arrogant rich cad in a shiny automobile. She got out. Dismayed at this rejection of what he considered a low class broad who should have been grateful for his attention, he shot off a few uncomplimentary remarks about my mother’s national antecedents. Now, from 1900 to, say, 1940 when immigrant nationalities were still in process of acculturation, national antagonisms were high. Even in the thirties, after immigration had been closed down in 1924, foreign accents were common and ethnic traits still persisted. My mother while not having an accent could still be identified as a Pole by her vocal rhythms. She still clung to certain Polish articles of dress. She still had a romantic attachment to the Polish babushka, or kerchief worn over the head and tied beneath the chin. Thus in this ethnic jostling racial and national slurs were commonly expressed. Fist fights occurred over national differences. Immigrants were stopped on the streets by natives and compelled to recite the pledge of allegiance of kiss the American flag.
Therefore the following passage in historical perspective should not be alarming. It is history. It is the way it was. Hirsh knew that my mother was of Polish ancestry. Everyone knew everyone else’s national antecedents. It was important. Now, irritated to the point of distraction by my mother’s refusal of his improper proposal, mixing nationalities freely he called a dumb Polack and a stupid Bohunk. Either he was ignorant of his geography or in is frustration he lost touch with who he was talking to. Perhaps in his sexual rut he saw double. I don’t know.
There is an old saying: People who live in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones. This old saying applies to everyone but it especially applied to David Hirsh. For, as his name indicates, he was Jewish. One of the many nationalities with representatives in the United States. In a world of immigrant antipathies there are pejorative nicknames for every group of people. My mother’s mind was well furnished against any contingency of name calling.
As David Hirsh inched slowly along just behind my mother shouting these derogatory national epithets, as well as others even more personal, my mother absorbed in her disappointment was oblivious to everything else. Then regaining some composure she began to hear what he was saying. Taking umbrage at this very unjust conduct, she returned a few sharp epithets. She used words like ‘kike’ and ‘sheeny.’ Words that have all but lost their meaning today.
Disappointed in love, his heart filling with rancor at what he later described as that ‘arrogant Polack bitch,’ Hirsh heard those words flung back at him and his heart in turn became cold. With that marvelous ability that human beings have of disregarding their own provocative words and actions, David Hirsh immediately forgot his insult of ‘Put out or get out’ and the ethnic slurs he had first hurled at my mother. Swallowing hard he decided that he had been rejected because he was Jewish and my mother was an anti-Semite. He gave the car the gas, drove off in a shower of gravel and left her to walk home.
The matter might have rested there except for the fact that Hirsh was prone to dig his own grave. He would always be an adept at self-embarrassment because of his vindictiveness. Hirsh had boasted to his friends who he was going to date, what he was going to do to her and where he was going to do it. In those ancient times before macadam and concrete had completely altered the landscape as we knew it, the roads were graveled, especially in rural and semi-rural areas. As the Valley is very wet, deep wide ditches ran along each side of the road to drain the fields. Three of Hirsh’s friends, out to watch the action and verify Hirsh’s boasts, witnessed the whole thing from within a ditch. The next week at school Hirsh was not allowed to forget or even accept responsibility for his action. ‘She’ had done it to him. She must pay.
Two years later my mother married my father. As they say, I was the result of that union. Four years later my mother divorced my father. We went to live with her parents. While we lived there I entered Kindergarten at Emerson Grade School. At five I had not yet heard of class consciousness. I was apparently the only innocent in the room. At Emerson the classes were all of about twenty-five students. My room divided into two social classes. There were twelve students in each group, that I will call after one of the two classes in H.G. Wells’ story of the Time Machine, the Eloy. There were twelve students in the group I denominate Morlocks, plus myself. I remain uncomprehending of class differences to this day.
Amongst my classmates was a boy named Michael Hirsh. Michael was the son of the same David Hirsh who had dated my mother. David Hirsh had not forgotten the consequences of his unfortunate behavior. Thus the biblical heritage expressed itself as the ‘sins’ of the Mother shall be visited on the son.
Michael Hirsh, as I now believe, on his father’s instructions, set about to humiliate me to avenge his father’s humiliation of himself. Kindergarten was not a happy time for me. I was rejected by the Eloy and seeing the abject disposition of the Morlocks, I had no desire to take a place with them. Rejected by my mother because I was a boy, I was now rejected by my classmates.
I was a lonely boy and perhaps consequently a difficult one. Thus the year passed. I played alone in the schoolyard and remained ignorant of my situation.
Did I mention there was a war on? Yes, this was 1943 and 1944. Hitler and Tojo were out to conquer the world. Millions of men were in uniform. Industrial manpower was in short supply. Prior to the wars the Valley did not have a large Black population. Blacks were encouraged to migrate North to work in the factories as the White boys had been drafted for the war. Thus racial antagonisms were added to immigrant national antagonisms. I’m not bragging. Many times I have wished that I wasn’t that way, but I believe in equality before the law and fair play. Laugh at me if you will. It’s my way and I’m not going to change, can’t, won’t.
One day in Spring, just before summer vacation, as Kindergarten was drawing to a close three little Black kids were introduced into our midst. Here is where the direct meaning of my dream begins. A tremor went through the class. Today you can search the country over without finding a person who will admit that they were ever prejudiced against Black people. David Hirsh was no exception. Hirsh stayed as well informed as a busybody. Aware of the Black kids time of arrival he instructed his son Michael what to do when they arrived.
Michael, who had a habit of emphasizing his opinions with his projected index finger, shook it at each of us and told us that under no circumstances were we to fraternize with the Black kids. I thought this was wrong, but, already an outsider, I wasn’t going to make it worse for myself by objecting.
On the way to recess Michael Hirsh re-admonished us. Once outside, however, he added a new condition. He demanded that the Black kids sit on the edge of the sand box and not move during recess. This was going too far. I took offence. As I played alone I was not averse to the Black kids having to play alone, but I could not condone their not being allowed to play within themselves.
By coincidence I was standing between the Black kids and Hirsh who stood there shaking his finger at them. Hirsh stood before the Eloy who were gathered behind him. I have never been overly keen on fighting. I was always small for my age. Hirsh was a good two inches taller than me. I told Hirsh and the Eloy that I didn’t think it was right to make those kids sit there during recess. He told me that was the way it was going to be. I said, No, I might refuse to talk to them but I couldn’t allow this. I exhorted the Black kids to get up and fight with me against the injustice. Hirsh was dumbfounded. No one had ever challenged his authority before. I was not only challenging him I was offering to fight him. Those little Black kids left me hanging out to dry. They wouldn’t budge. Fortunately Hirsh was a coward. He had already stepped back into the protective pocket of the Eloy. I had envisioned Armageddon but now Hirsh and the Eloy had melted away.
I thought it was over. I had no idea of the seriousness of my crime. Michael Hirsh went home and bawled to his father. His father had not anticipated that his son would be challenged. He had failed to provide his son with the appropriate response. Michael Hirsh’s self-confidence was shattered. I had no idea what I had done. As my mother, by standing up for herself, had humiliated David Hirsh, so now I had likewise humiliated Michael Hirsh. David Hirsh was enraged. Failing to see the injustice of his cause, a second time, he determined on revenge.
After school the next day Hirsh padded up behind me and hissed into my ear: ‘We’re going to get you.’ I did believe he meant what he said. But the year was over and it would have to wait till next year.
At just this time my mother made her first attempt to abandon me. She arranged for me to go live with a family named Smith. The Valley straddles the River and is therefore divided into two distinct towns with two distinct characters; The East and West sides. The East Side was gradually claimed by the incoming tide of Blacks. The Whites moved out into the hamlets, or West Side. The Smiths lived on the West Side of the River. I transferred from Emerson to Thoreau. I was relieved, for I knew that had I remained at Emerson Hirsh and the Eloy would have their vengeance.
Except for the longer minutes with which childhood is endowed my relief was short lived. In May of that year the Smiths informed my mother that I could no longer stay with them. My mother, still unwilling to accept me, found room and board for me with a family named Johnson. On the East Side. In the Emerson school district. I was terrified. I returned to Emerson in the mid-First Grade. There was an electric shock amongst the Eloy as the message ‘He’s back’ flashed from mouth to mouth.
By this time I had forgotten the reason for my persecution. I was so concerned about the enmity of the Eloy that I never thought to reason why. My offense was certainly a justified one, or what I would have thought my so-called offence to have been. Actually Hirsh and the Eloy didn’t consider their action against the Blacks as unjust. Therefore, in their eyes, my offence consisted of an act of insubordination; a refusal to keep the place they had assigned me. The Eloy were unrelenting; I was harassed continually. The Morlocks either actively followed orders to interfere with me or were too timid to resist. The teacher acquiesced in the attitude of the Eloy. Perhaps David Hirsh put pressure on her after Michael informed him I was back. Authority is always week kneed. It will always accept the position of the stronger. Justice is not a factor in its decisions.
Taken by surprise, David Hirsh, his son and the Eloy could not obtain a revenge that would gratify their desires during the four remaining months of the first grade. David Hirsh thought long and hard on the matter. The Biblical answer was an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. The punishment must fit the crime. David Hirsh’s thoughts roved back to the celebrated Dreyfus Affair in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Dreyfus, a Jew, had been convicted of spying. Part of his punishment was a brutal degrading. He had been compelled to stand before his assembled brother officers as he was stripped of the insignia of his association with the French army; had them torn from his uniform and thrown in the mud. Ruminating on this famous cause celebre he associated it also with his son’s embarrassment. For as difficult as it is for me to conceive, Michael Hirsh took my objection to his injustice in the same manner in which I will describe my humiliation. In his mind David Hirsh sought to avenge both Dreyfus and his son on me.
Hirsh formulated his plan, instructed and drilled his son and the Eloy in the procedure. I remained with the Johnsons in a state of agony, fearing the approach of September.
I know that winter had not arrived as the leaves were still on the trees, so it is possible that I was gotten on the first day of school. I still do not know exactly what happened. I am only surmising from an interpretation of the photograph I was shown in my dream; or perhaps I am drawing up information reservoirs my subconscious still denies me access to. I have thought that my punishment was the requirement imposed on the Black children two years previously in Kindergarten. But in reality it was the ‘punishment’ I had had unknowingly imposed on Michael Hirsh. David Hirsh had instructed his son what to do. His son executed perfectly. At recess the Eloy arranged themselves in a semi-circle around me. The worthless Morlocks, who were excluded from all Eloy intercourse hung listlessly in the background where they belonged. In Kindergarten Hirsh had encountered me in the point position. Exposed, he had retreated into the protection of the Eloy behind him. His lack of character at that moment was the crime with which I was charged. Now, as the keystone in the arch surrounding me, protected deep within the pocket which enclosed me, from within which authority always works, coward that he was, all authority is cowardly, he was prepared to deal with me. I ha no problem with fear. I would have fought if challenged. I might have fought if Hirsh had been on point as in Kindergarten. Maybe the movie of the Alien Kids acted as a mild solvent, loosening the cover on my suppressed memory which decades later allowed me to recover a souvenir of this incident, for just as the Space Kids glared hatred at the Noble Martyr only to break his reserves too late, so the Eloy gathered around me and glared hatred into my soul. If they had all set upon me physically the result could have been borne, but I could not resist their cumulative concentrated hatred. I crumbled beneath the projected blizzard of hatred. David Hirsh achieved more than his goal. He not only humiliated me he killed my soul. Michael Hirsh, in the keystone was shaking the customary finger at me. He told me that I was to take a step toward him and stop when he told to stop. I raised my foot and he said stop. In that awkward position I was told to remain for the duration of recess. Thus I was substituted for the Negroes in Kindergarten.
I hope the reader doesn’t think badly of me. I don’t know that I am ashamed today although I resent myself for having complied. I know in my heart that they would have backed down if I had resisted.
Hirsh must have been the shadowy figure in my dream. His finger must have been the laser rifle, or perhaps the laser beam was a symbol of the hatred projected on me. The figure never fired because the laser beam represented a hatred that would never cease.
The memory of the event was immediately suppressed by me. I died at that moment. As Abram became Abraham and Jacob became Israel, so even though my name remained the same I became a different person, a stranger in a strange land. I therefore did not give an appropriate response to my punishment. David Hirsh had expected me to go the Michael Hirsh and the Eloy and beg forgiveness for my original sin, accept my punishment and go forth and sin no more. They were disappointed for I felt, not remembered, only their rejection. While I would never have asked their forgiveness, I might have tried to correct the matter.
Throughout the second grade I endured the active resentment of the Eloy joined with the passive acquiescence of the Morlocks, for they were forbidden to speak to me. They were powerless in their self-accepted mortification, useless in their ineffectuality. The symbol of authority, the teacher, without ever seeking my side of the story, said that I had been justly chastised. Authority lacks integrity completely.
I became a very distraught little boy.
As the second grade ended my mother informed me that I would be leaving the Johnsons. After the emotional wrench of leaving the Smiths I had prepared myself for further disappointment by making no attachment to the Johnsons. My only question was, where to next? I knew it was serious when she kneeled down to address me face to face. It’s always serious when an adult lowers themselves to a position of equality with the child.
She told me that she wanted me to enter the Children’s Home. The Municipal Orphanage. I went numb. First, I had a mother, or thought I did. Second, I had passed the back fence and stared horrified at the inmates. I didn’t know then that she meant to abandon me entirely but I subconsciously feared such a thing. I resisted stubbornly although I saw that no matter what I said she was going to put me there anyway. Finally, in an attempt to save face, I asked her if I would still have to attend Emerson. She said the Children’s home was in the Longfellow School District. Only have trusted this perfidious woman I severed myself from humanity and entered the House of the Distraught. The boys dorm was on the fourth floor. But my experience in the Orphanage is not germane to my story and I return to the war against me by the Hirshes.
Beset by psychological distresses before I entered the Orphanage, my emotional anxieties increased a thousand fold. I have often compared the sensation to an excess of electrical current passing through a transformer. All fuses blew. Wires broke loose and flashed fire to the skies. There was a loud hum, a boom, and then silence. I do not know how I survived and recovered even though that recovery would take forty years. As shattered as I was I received no mercy from David Hirsh.
I was now eight. The two wars, the European and Pacific had ended. The Japanese Empire and the Axis Powers had gone down to defeat. The enormity of the Nazi policies became apparent after the war. The impression of the American people was incalculable. The terrific inhumanity of the Nazis was difficult to comprehend. The wholesale slaughter of people for which they had no use, both within and without the borders of Germany the murder of as many intellectuals as they could get their hands on, the slaughter and debasement of the Polish nation, other Eastern and Central European Slavs and, of course, the attempted extermination of the Jews were staggering to the American mind. The single mindedness of the Nazis in the pursuit of their goals was incredible. The human mind changed from the shock of recognition.
The destruction of the Jews created a feeling amongst the Jews comparable to my own upon entering the Children’s Home. For the five years after the war, the American Jews were devastated. They had suffered no discomfort in the US but the ant colony had been disturbed, all ants were affected. They began to see Fascists everywhere. They trembled in fear that it might happen, would happen, in the United States. A Jewish writer, Ben Hecht, stated the feeling most poignantly when he stated the feeling simply as: The Jews struck out.
David Hirsh took it very hard. For the Jewish immigrants America had been a land of unexampled opportunity and freedom from the national conflicts of which they had been a part of in Europe. Their history had been one of conflict. Prior to the nineteenth century they had been in conflict with Catholicism. After the French Revolution when the influence of Catholicism had waned they began a pan national confrontation with the Pan Germans and Pan Slavs. As they butted heads with the Slavs in particular it became apparent that the Slavs would not bend to the Jewish will. By mid-nineteenth century the conflict had become bloody. A group of French Jews decided that the only recourse was to remove the Jews from Slavdom and colonize elsewhere. The Jewish Colonization Association was formed. Beginning in 1860 it was begun to transfer the entire Jewish population from Slavdom to colonies ranging from Argentina to Canada. The majority came to the United States. The difference between the Pale of Settlement in Eastern Europe and the United States was as between night and day. A transition from the rural routes to Coney Island. From medieval technology to a land of scientific marvels. From the attentive supervision of the Russian government to the complete indifference of the American government. They arrived as opportunity became a byword for America. Most stayed where they landed in New York City. Solomon Hirsh, David’s father, who was not without resources, or at least had contacts with men with resources, looked West, staked out the Valley as his personal duchy and built up a successful department store.
David Hirsh, born in 1918 in the Valley knew nothing of Eastern Europe. His life had been a life of plenty when plenty was enough for anybody. Good clothes, good food, good cars, good social position. David Hirsh had never known any more discrimination than Poles, Italians, Greeks, Lithuanians or any one of dozens of nationalities. He had known less. So in those fifty years or so of immigration he as well as a great many Jews had grown lax in their attention to the religion of their fathers. A great many would probably have become lapsed Jews but for the events in Europe during the thirties and especially in the wake of the European war. Nazi atrocities reversed the trend and confirmed them in their commitment to Judaism. David Hirsh was one of these.
It didn’t happen here. David was now twenty-eight heading into the power years of his thirties and forties. He was rich and influential in the Valley community. Always good looking, tall and well proportioned, the weight one always gains with age had filled out his form and features admirably. He had married well. He had married the former Linda Webster, an Episcopalian. By so doing he had joined two Valley fortunes. The Hershey Department Store money and the Webster Coal Yard money. He had three lovely children, well, two plus Michael. The Department store and the Webster coal yards still prospered, although the increasing chain store competition after the wars would undermine the base of the department store and the Webster’s assumption of the continued use of coal didn’t foresee the switch to gas and oil would see the coal yards and department store sit idle and empty. Still David Hirsh had everything. Family, position and the money to buy anything he could conceive. He was an American citizen in the best of all possible worlds.
Always of an imperious temper and a vindictive mind he now brooded over the European disaster of the Jews, as did all Jews and knew not what to do. As usual he wanted revenge, which meant against all the goyim; for he believed the whole world was responsible as he and the Jews believed it had sat idly by and let it happen. His grief distorted his perception of reality; although to a certain extent he was right. For, while no one but the Nazis would have attempted such an atrocious deed, still the world had been rather indifferent to the fate of the Jews.
But if all the goyim were guilty he was faced with too many targets. Unable to find satisfactory victims for his anger, he turned to child abuse and directed this additional hatred to me. He didn’t exactly remember why he believed it but he believed that my mother was an anti-Semite because of her rejection of his rude advances. He projected his own inadequacies on me and in his mind made me the future father of a nation of anti-Semites. The memory of his humiliation because of his frustrated designs on my mother still rankled in his mind. It mattered not whether he had caused his own embarrassment. Reversing responsibility came easy to him as it does to most people. It only mattered to him that he had suffered humiliation, and from an inferior bitch in his mind. He always sought to avenge his thwarted crimes, to heap injury on injury, to add insult to insult.
I had not begged for forgiveness after my humiliation so he believed that I had not been hurt, that I had stood there In jest. His natural vindictiveness now augmented by his rage against the world, Hirsh had planned a nasty reception for me as I entered Third grade. However I had evaded his net that year by transferring from Emerson to Longfellow. He was unaware that he had already hurt me as much as mortal man can be hurt; for myself had died of remorse on that September morn. He had murdered my self-esteem and I could not continue in life. I carried my dead self around with me and my walking body was half dead. It would be forty years before I could retrieve my dead self from the House of Death and begin to re-integrate my personality.
But the challenge to Michael Hirsh’s dignity by my rebellion had been severe; although I neither knew nor cared. He was being groomed to be an ever victorious man of affairs; for some reason my revolt had shattered his self-confidence and lowered him in the esteem of the Eloy. He was never to attain the same kind of self-confidence as he had enjoyed in Kindergarten again. For this I was blamed although Michael was only of mediocre talent and authority and would have had and did enjoy much lesser stature in a world larger than his Emerson class.
It didn’t take the Hirshes more than a month to locate me in the Orphanage and at Longfellow. One day in late October I saw Michael Hirsh conferring with a third grade classmate, one of the Websters, although I didn’t know the connection at the time. I knew I was in for more trouble. I was but it wasn’t that bad. The kids of the Children’s Home were kept a separate group at Longfellow. The old two class Eloy-Morlock division was broken up. The Orphanage insulated me from direct vengeance. David Hirsh watched, he stalked. He was unhappy and frustrated. He brooded and planned. A thirty year old man, acting anonymously, waged his war against a defenseless eight year old boy. The third grade passed. Hirsh planned his move for my fourth grade.
In the fourth grade I understood why the Eloy-Morlock division had disappeared. As I was turning nine the organization of the world began to become apparent. I began to see more tings. There were probably two third grade classes at Longfellow but if so I was ignorant of the other. In the fourth grade there were definitely two different class rooms. One upstairs, in a large bright airy room where the Eloy were assigned and another in a half basement, the windows level with the ground, to which we of the Children’s Home were assigned as well as others who were not fortunate enough to be assigned upstairs.
Our teacher was a woman named Miss Marks. She was a very old miss. Miss Marks was a Sephardic Jew. Her ancestors had arrived from Brazil in 1654 in the first contingent of Jews to arrive in the United States. Her name as she pointed out to us several times had been Marques in Portuguese. Her ancestor who had landed as Marques turned up several years later as Marks. She was very international in her outlook. Our study program revolved around readings about children of other lands.
As improbable as it may seem, David Hirsh devoted great gobs of time to divining his next plan to wreak vengeance on me. The plan he devised was complex, requiring the involvement of dozens of people and the complicity of hundreds. Thus, should it fail his reputation would be placed in jeopardy. David Hirsh started his campaign in the spring of my third grade, just before the humidity of summer. He was powerful amongst the Jewish community and very influential among goys. His wife Linda, nee Webster, was equally socially and politically active as her husband. She was of top standing among the women of the town. Enlisting supporters they, together, began a campaign to separate the kids from the Children’s Home from their own on the reasoning that as a class of social lepers or ‘white niggers’ we were detrimental to their childrens’ welfare. They worked hard to have a separate facility assigned to us. Failing that they wanted that, at least, we might be made to attend classes within the walls of the orphanage as, in fact, was the case with the Catholic Orphanage down the street. We were to be contained so that we might not contaminate their children. This separation might have occurred in democratic America except for the almighty dollar, God bless it. The expense could not be justified. There was seemingly no real objection to the deed.
Frustrated in their ambition, driven by their vindictiveness, the Hirshes foolishly adopted Plan B. Incredibly it succeeded if only temporarily. But for one woman its success might have been permanent.
Hirsh still thought that I had merely sloughed off my lesson in the second grade. Thus in his mind I had not only humiliated his son in Kindergarten but had done the same thing in the second grade. I had been accorded he dignity of a rebuke by Michael Hirsh himself. There was a certain dignity to that that ought to be appreciated. Handled properly by myself I might have gained honorary admission to the Eloy. Now I was to be treated to the same indignity that the Black kids had endured. I was to be their ‘nigger’ forever.
The Hirshes now sought to separate their children from we of the Orphanage within the class. Miss Marks made the orphans sit together along one wall. The Hirshes influence in town was so great that the School Board was persuaded to prevent us from playing, not only with, but playing on the same playground with the parented kids. During recess Miss Marks was compelled to separate the Orphanage kids from the parented kids. We were compelled to sit on benches and watch the parented kids play. If an additional participant was needed one of us was called up.
As we stood before Miss marks while she, suppressing her embarrassment, explained this to us, it all seemed vaguely familiar. I couldn’t remember my ritual murder but I did remember Kindergarten. For many years I thought the fourth grade incident was the only revenge attempted. I saw through the attempt immediately. The notion was repugnant to Miss Marks, as it should have been to any honest and fair person. She implemented the requirement but reluctantly. Inadvertently I defeated the Hirshes in a minute. My victories over them were always Pyrrhic.
As recess began Miss Marks instructed us in the new program. Whether I remembered Michael Hirsh and the Blacks or whether I was as indignant in the fourth grade at such nonsense as I had been in Kindergarten, I don’t know. The others from the Orphanage sat down obediently. I grabbed a ball and ran off to play by myself in another part of the playground. As I couldn’t quickly persuade any of the others to follow me, I left them. Immediately there was a chorus of ‘You’ve got to sit down.’ It came from both groups. My reply was a very aggressive ‘Make me.’ No one was riding point that day. They never do when a fair fight is in the offing.
Then a ruse was attempted. Someone of the parented kids left the field and a substitute was needed. One of ours was called off the bench to come and tell me that I was selected as the replacement. I wish I could say that I said a witty or trenchant thing but angry people seldom do. I was angry. I just said ‘no.’
David Hirsh and Michael Hirsh had been parked in a side street facing the yard looking at the scene through their windshield expecting to enjoy my humiliation. They both stared in disbelief as their efforts were foiled again. David Hirsh’s head sagged to the rim of the steering wheel. Mechanically he turned the key in the ignition and angrily shifted into first. Both David and Michael’s faces twisted into expressions of chagrin. Their brows hooded their eyes, their mouths gaped as the edges turned downwards. Their perfidious design had failed again. Another bitter pill.
Miss Marks was overcome with shame and remorse. She had tried to recover her self-respect by offering me the role of substitute. A role I rightly took as another insult. Her Judaism was offended by such criminal discrimination. Unlike Hirsh she suffered from the restrictions which had been placed on her people at other times in other far places. Her Portuguese ancestors had been lucky to escape the Inquisition. They had found a refuge in Brazil only during the short period of Dutch control of the colony. When the Portuguese regained Brazil her ancestors fled to the Dutch colony of New Amsterdam, later to be called New York. She remembered, or knew this only too well. Rather than inflicting punishment on innocent others for remembered conflicts she sincerely wished to remove injustice from the world.
The second day of the segregation was too much for her. After school that day she informed the Principal of Longfellow that she would have to resign if the segregation continued. As the Hirshes, the instigators, were well known for their wish to segregate we orphans and they attended the temple together, so that David was well known to her, she then went immediately to him to whom she offered her unwelcome opinion. Nor was she kind or diplomatic. She vented her full indignation and threw her own guilt at his feet. David Hirsh was abashed. The next day the order of segregation was rescinded. She was a courageous woman. She acted as an individual, not as one of a collective.
The repercussions of the failure of their plan were very serious. The whole concept of what America stood for had been violated. In the aftermath the reflection on the consequences of their action caused many embarrassed faces in the Valley. As the prime movers, the Hirshes bore the brunt of the blame. The two lost some fair credibility. The concern was not so much the justice or injustice of their crime, for, in society the only concern is whether one succeeds or gets away with it. The credibility was lost because the Hirshes displayed poor judgment. While misjudging their own chances of success they had humiliated all the other people that they had involved. That is a cardinal sin. They never were to enjoy the same confidence again. Hirsh, as was becoming his habit, sacrificed a great deal to his vindictiveness. He was becoming his own worst enemy.
Hirsh was not one to learn from experience. Conscious of his loss of credibility which he now blamed on me, he now made two quickly and poorly conceived efforts to destroy my reputation, such as it was, and credibility, such as any enjoyed by orphans.
The far sides of the streets surrounding the Orphanage were lined with rows of fine mature maple trees. The branches spread over the streets and yards. There were a number of men, homosexuals and perverts, who stood near the tree trunks in the shade hoping for a little short action. We were prime targets. Deprived of love, denied respect, both sexes were susceptible to minor blandishments. My mother had always advised me not to talk to strangers so I always walked by them like they were not there.
Hirsh had determined to influence the direction of my future life. As the twig is bent, so the tree inclines, he said. So he got two social rejects, men who had made a life of doing dirty deeds dirt cheap in order to be associated in any capacity with the successful rich, to wait for me along the back fence. On that day I happened to be walking back from school with Richard Grainger. They mistook Richard for me.
One said to Richard: ‘Hey, you little bastard. Youi know where you’re going? You’re going to be a criminal and die in the electric chair. You’re a thief. God hates you and you are going to spend your life in prison.’
We were young and small, at the impressionable age for imprinting. Richard was terrified and took the man’s curse literally. I had watched. Now forming my opinion I began to curse them as old bums and failures. Just as I had begun the other man realized their error and said: ‘Uh, oh, I think you nailed the wrong one.’ They had. They had also destroyed Richard’s life for he believed them, took their suggestion in, and fulfilled their prophecy.
Hirsh had failed again. He tried once more. The fall and winter had passed. Spring burst out once again. Hirsh had learned my habits. In those days before super markets and convenience stores there was an old dilapidated rundown little grocery store every few blocks. There was one two blocks from the Orphanage. We used to take our money gained from the deposits of beer bottles and whatever there to buy candy.
There, one Saturday, I found Michael Hirsh and thee of his friends waiting for me. I asked Hirsh why he was out slumming. Badinage passed between us. I went into the store to buy some candy. I was followed by Hirsh and his friends. They jostled around me while I paid. I elbowed back. Taking my candy I left the store followed by the Hirsh gang. Outside they gathered around me. But Hirsh reaching into my back pocket pulled out a candy bar and said: ‘Hey, Gresham, what’s this?’ He had placed a candy bar in my back pocket while jostling me in the store. In later years he would have been astute enough not to have taken it out of my pocket himself. He was young and inexperienced.
I said, ‘Looks like a Butterfinger.’
‘Yeah? Did you pay for this? Looks like you’re a thief, doesn’t it Gresham?’
‘That candy bar’s not in my hand, Hirsh. It’s in yours. Looks like you’re the thief.’ The grocer, seeing the candy bar in my back pocket as I left had come to the door.
‘Hey, mister,’ I said, ‘Michael Hirsh here stole this candy bar from you. Better make him pay for it. He’s got lots of money.’
Hoisted by his own petard again, Hirsh turned shamefaced, threw the candy bar down and he and his friends stalked off. His witnesses witnessed against him and Hirsh forfeited his hoped for role of a leader forever. The Hirshes would never learn.
What might have happened next remains unknown. I turned ten. At ten we were farmed out to foster parents. The Wardens took me way to the other side of town.
The Hirshes had been instrumental in the formation of my personality. My character was beyond their reach.
My dream had revealed the controlling fixation of my life. In the process my personality had completely disintegrated. The personality that had sustained me in place of my dead self was gone. I stood exposed and naked to the world while I groped to re-integrate my personality. It was a long row to hoe before my subconscious released the past to free me by a dream.
Henry Ford And The Jews 3
August 2, 2014
Henry Ford And The Jews
Remembering The Amalekites
Breitman, Richard and Lichtman, Allan J.: FDR And The Jews, 2013, Belknap Harvard
To quote, p. 184:
Theodore N. Kaufman
In early 1941, Theodore N, Kaufman, the Jewish proprietor of a small advertising firm in Newark, New Jersey, self-published a small book that called for sterilizing all German men and women, [NB: this is a plan for the genocide of the German people.] and dividing up Germany among neighboring states. [Thus completely erasing Germany from the face of the earth.] An alert corps of Nazi propagandists saw in Kaufman and his book the perfect foil for myth making. They transformed this obscure self-publisher into the precedent of a bogus “American Peace Federation”, a leader of ‘international Jewry,” and a close associate of Judge Samuel Rosenman, FDR’s speechwriter and confidant. On July 24, 1941 the headline of a front-page story in the central Nazi newspaper, the Volkisch Beobachter, blared: A Monstrous Jewish Extermination Plan: Roosevelt’s Guidelines.” The story claimed that President Roosevelt had inspired Kaufman’s Germany Must Perish, and personally dictated key sections. Two months later the Nazi propaganda ministry published a pamphlet that cited Kaufman’s book as proof of an international Jewish conspiracy to exterminate the German people, abetted by Roosevelt and Winston Churchill. It said that Germany faced a stark choice with an obvious answer: “Who should die, the Germans or the Jews?”
This is a very interesting paragraph from B&L’s very interesting book. While trueish on the face of it, it does distort the reality. It is interesting that Kaufman came from Newark as did our time’s own Philip Roth with his book, The Plot Against America. Roth of course repeated Kaufman’s themes in his book. Newark’s Jewish colony seems to have been quite insular incubating strange notions about Jews and Whites.
As to the absurdity of Kaufman’s insignificance and his possible collaboration with, if not Roosevelt’s administration at least, elements within it, possibly including his Secretary of the Treasury, Henry Morgenthau, it may be more plausible than B&L’s coyly laughing it off. Kaufman’s ‘Germany Must Perish’ closely resembles Morgenthau’s post-war plans for Germany which may be a total coincidence, of course. Nevertheless there it is.
While Kaufman may have been an obscure nutter he appears to have been fronting for some not so obscure people. Contrary to B&L’s assertion that the Germans ‘transformed this obscure self-publisher into the president of a bogus “American Peace Federation”‘, it appears that Kaufman, a criminal, who was arrested along with his father for robbery in 1934, in 1939 did form an American Peace Federation. In the same year he argued in a pamphlet against American interventionism. The pamphlet contained this remarkable passage:
A possible plan to Congress…Have us all sterilized….If you plan on sending us to a foreign war, spare us any possibility of ever bringing children into the world- into this country of ours.
By 1941 apparently having re-considered ‘our’ being sterilized he transferred his anxiety to the Germans. Nor was his book Germany Must Perish a futile self-publishing effort. Several newspapers reviewed it in their columns as well as the pre-eminent national news magazine the mighty Time of Henry Luce itself. Nor was the review unfavorable. If the Germans picked up on Kaufman’s book it was most likely because of the Time review, which once again, was not unfavorable or condemnatory.
Time’s review must have been encouraged from someone from within the administration, possibly Rosenman as the Beobachter suggests, or Henry Morgenthau. It is not impossible then that the Beobachter was correct in suggesting that FDR himself had an interest in the project, or in suggesting that Rosenman was involved. After all Nazi spies were said to be in the administration, not that any have been identified by name.
As is absolutely clear, in 1941 Kaufman was demanding the extermination of the German people as well as the effacement of Germany from the Earth.
Is the Beobachter’s claim then that there was an ‘international Jewish conspiracy’ to exterminate the German people as ridiculous as B&L suggest?
The Beobachter posed the question: “Who should die, the Germans or the Jews?” If that was the choice then in the so-called holocaust the Germans employed the favorite Jewish device of the pre-emptive strike and therefore are guilty merely of getting the first lick in, in a war that was begun in 1933 when the Jews declared war on them and then through Kaufman announcing a plan to exterminate Germans. Why wouldn’t the Germans kill the Jews first? Where is the injustice in that?
Of course, the Jews lacked a military arm of their own so it was necessary for them to find someone big enough to knock the Nazi bully down for them. In this instance they chose Roosevelt and the US. Now, the Jew Irving Berlin chose at this time to introduce his song God Bless America in which he adjures his Jews to ‘stand beside her [America] and guide her’. What is Irving Berlin talking about? He’s talking about the same thing: Germany Must Perish and the US is going to do the dirty work guided by the Jews.
Noel Ignatiev- Harvard Genocidist
Now, moving ahead to the present. The Jewish program as proclaimed by the ‘nutter’ Noel Ingnatiev, at the time a full professor at Harvard University, is that ‘Whiteness’ must be eliminated from the earth. So, moving from Germans to all White people the Jews are calling for the genocide of all Whites. Once again, they haven’t the population to do this while to act would destroy their credibility and possibly, although I doubt it, bring destruction of the Hitler kind down on their heads. For the task of destroying ‘Whiteness’ they have enlisted the Negro population of the US as their shock troops. Although the paramilitary actions of Negroes against Whites are suppressed by the media which are owned by the Jews daily paramilitary actions are being carried out somewhere in the US.
Thus, from the Wilson administration to the present the Jews have followed a carefully orchestrated program of destruction of Whites as Henry Ford indicated in his articles of the International Dearborn Independent. You can see why the Jews wanted Ford destroyed. If he had gone on from strength to strength rather than being emasculated the course of history might have been very different. Stand by Henry Ford.
Reconstruction- Phase Two
April 3, 2013
Reconstruction- Phase Two
by
R.E. Prindle
Reconstruction is America’s unfinished revolution….
-Eric Foner
Reconstruction was not just something that happened after the Civil War; it was and is a program, a policy, a desideratum of the Left. Now that we are well into Barry Obama’s second term impersonation of a president of the United States we have to ask ourselves, is the increased social unrest of Negro on Aryan crime and inexplicable increasing frequency of crazy Whites shooting up schoolrooms and movie theaters coincidental? Or is it evidence of a second phase of Reconstruction. The changing of America from White to Black?
It should be obvious that the American Civil War only used Negro slavery as a pretext to continue the English Civil War of the seventeenth century. The participants were the same- the Roundheads of New Anglia and the Cavaliers of Wessex.
The Roundheads had never shown an aversion to slavery at any other time in their history. Indeed, during the East Anglian interregnum the Anglian leader, Oliver Cromwell, rounded up tens of thousands of Irish and sent them to the West Indies to live and perish as slaves cheek by jowl with the Negroes from West Africa. Irish slaves were especially profitable as they cost nothing while the purchase of Negroes from their African chiefs was a costly enterprise limiting profitability.
From the other side of the Atlantic it was those enterprising New Anglian Yankee traders who bought from the African chiefs and foisted their surplus cargo on the American colonies. Let us never forget that Negro slaves were bought and sold in the Anglian colonies of New Anglia while White slaves, politely called Indentured Servants as they hadn’t been purchased were prominent in all the colonies.
So slavery was not all that repugnant to the Roundheads of New Anglia; what was anathema to them was their old Cavalier enemy from England in the South.
By 1865 the Anglians ranging across the entire Northern tier of States had been become sanctimonious.
It was not to end slavery they fought but to exterminate their Southern Aryan adversaries. Thus the draconian measures taken in Reconstruction to make the Negro supreme over the Aryans. Thus Thomas Dixons post-Reconstruction plea to the Anglians to remember that the Southern and Northern Whites were Aryans and to pledge never to slaughter each other again for the benefit of Negroes. The Anglians took every possible means to subordinate Whites to Negroes. True savagery rather than an attempt to actually reconstruct society on an equitable basis- whatever equitable could mean in the circumstances.
The majority of American Negroes were imported after 1800. A great many from say 1820 to 1860. That means they were fresh from the jungle, mere savages, with no familiarity with civilized procedures and conditions, such as for instance, freedom. They had always been slaves, always. Freedom was a strange White condition so foreign to them that they didn’t actually know what it meant. They had no idea what freedom meant except that Whites appeared to have it. Enfranchising such people on a basis of equality with civilized people then was an egregious crime.
Indeed, while enfranchisement was being forced on Sourthern Whites, States of the Anglian North such as Michigan and Ohio and most others legally excluded Negro enfranchisement by new laws. Ever the hypocrites, Liberals.
From 1866 to 1877 then, Southern Whites fought a continuation of the Civil War to preserve their freedom from Negro-Anglian domination. With help from Northern sympathizers they were successful in this as official Reconstruction was terminated in 1877 while Jim Crow was established to preserve Aryan supremacy.
Oh, I know, Negroes, Anglians and some others find the notion of White Supremacy as repulsive. But, there are others who find Negro Supremacy, Jewish Supremacy and what have you just as repulsive, perhaps Judaeo-Negro Supremacy even moreso.
The point is: there will always be the Top Dog. There is no reason that the Top Dog shouldn’t be White rather than Black or Jewish piebald.
Now, the Civil War did not end in 1865 nor did Reconstruction actually end in 1877. As Eric Foner expresses it they were unfinished revolutions, still in progress today. Both efforts just went underground.
The Negroes still long to be Top Dog which the Anglians, now Liberals, long that they should be. The Southern White has been replaced by the Aryan as the adversary that is to be destroyed. If one accepts that Jim Crow was fully operative by 1900 then the Negro-Jewish-Liberal counteroffensive began in earnest at that time.
During the next fifty years from 1900 to 1950 the effort was to erode and destroy Jim Crow. This effort effectively succeeded in 1954 with the Supreme Court Brown vs. The Board Of Education decision. The decision of the Court was the opening shot of the Second Civil War of Jews, Liberals, and Negroes against the Aryans; hence the Anti-Aryan Hate Laws to disenfranchise the Aryan male.
These laws are unconstitutional as they violate the right to equal protection of the law. As it now stands all other races and classes are protected against the apparently all powerful White male but the Aryan male is legally unprotected on a basis of inferiority in direct violation of equity and the Constitution.
Thus the Aryan male is deprived of the right of self-defense much as was the Negro Slave. So far the Aryan male has chosen to suffer the indignities rather than right the wrong. This was not always the case. In a situation perhaps more dire than today the Aryan males of Louisiana chose to protect themselves and theirs. As William A. Dunning in his Reconstruction, Political and Economic of 1907 relates the story, pp. 248-49:
Quote:
The conservatives (Renamed Domestic Terrorists by 2011) of (Louisiana), large numbers of whom were organized in semi-secret and military societies known as White Leagues, had been quiescent since Grant’s formal recognition of Kellogg in the spring of 1873. The radical government maintained a formal existence, but with no moral and little material support from the White population. In September of 1874, Kellogg undertook to seize a lot of arms which the White Leagues of New Orleans had purchased. The result was a pitched battle between the league and the police, mostly Negroes, who were organized and equipped as soldiers. The police were totally defeated and dispersed, and the radical governor took refuge in the custom house and protection of the Federal troops.
Unquote.
That appears to be the situation we’re headed into now as the Negro government of the United States has bought and distributed billions of rounds of ammunition and millions of automatic weapons with the apparent intent of subduing the legally unprotected Aryan males while beginning the attempt to disarm them.
If the Negro government expects less from current Aryan men than the response of the men of New Orleans he may wish to re-examine his intentions. Let history be the guide. History has shown the futility of force to achieve social goals. One deplores the possibility of armed defense by the Aryans but one is guilty of weakness of mind to suppose they will docilely submit to being enslaved which is the next step down from disenfranchisement.
I advocate nothing, no massa I just be speakin’ trut’ to power, humbly, massa, ever so humbly, o’ cose, but due caution in provoking what history shows to be the inevitable result should be considered. Not even the Soviet Union with all its brutal power could maintain itself against the justified will of its subject peoples. Remember Mussolini and his lamp post, Hitler and his bunker. Vengeance is mine says de lawd.
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Revolt Against Civilization
January 12, 2013
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Revolt Against Civilization
A Review Of
Lothrop Stoddard’s Eponymous Title
by
R.E. Prindle
Lothrop Stoddard
Stoddard, Lothrop: The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace Of The Underman, 1922, New York, Charles Scribner’s Sons, First Edition.
In the name of our To-morrow we will burn Rafael
Destroy museums, crush the flowers of art,
Maidens in the radiant kingdom of the Future
Will be more beautiful than Venus de Milo.
Quoted by Stoddard p. 202
A perennial problem in Burroughs’ studies is what did he believe? Was he a racist? Was he an anti-Semite? Was he an irredeemable bigot? Shall we just say he was not of a contemporary Liberal frame of mind. If you listen to Richard Slotkin author of Gunfighter Nation and a professor at Case Western Reserve at the time he wrote his book a couple decades ago, Edgar Rice Burroughs was an evil man responsible for all the evil in the US from 1912 to the present. Slotkin even sees him responsible for the My Lai massacre of Viet Nam.
Himself a Communist Slotkin can overlook all the crimes of the Soviet Union in which tens of millions were exterminated to find the ultimate evil in the killing of a few dozen people in Viet Nam.
Slotkin, who rampages through his history disparaging any non-Liberal writers as atavistic bigots firmly attaches Burroughs’ name to two scholars, Madison Grant and his Passing Of The Great Race of 1916 and Lothrop Stoddard and his historical studies of the twenties. He considers the two hardly less evil than Burroughs. To someone less excitable, perhaps, or lessLiberal, the two writers have written responsible and astute studies. I certainly think they have.
When I first read Slotkin I rejected the notion that Burroughs had been influenced by either. Ten years on I have to retract that opinion. It is now clear that Burroughs read both while being heavily influenced by Lothrop Stoddard, especially his 1922 volume, The Revolt Against Civilization. While the studies of both Grant and Stoddard would at best supplement Burroughs already developed opinions The Revolt can easily be seen as a template for Burroughs’ writing after he read it. While the study complemented his own developed social and political opinions I am sure that Stoddard’s explication of the history provided Burroughs with many new facts. Based on its opinions that appeared in ERB’s novels I would place the reading somewhere about 1926 or 1927.
Contrary to what some admirers want to make him ERB was what today would be considered a very conservative man, today’s Liberals would be anathema to him. He was decidedly anti-Communist, a Eugenicist, while not bigoted he was not a Negrophile or Semitophile. He was essentially a man with a social and historical outlook that was formed before 1900, a pre-immigration outlook formed while the Indian wars were still in progress. In short he was a man of his times.
Thomas Dixon Jr. to whom he is often compared was one of the most successful writers of the period who carefully examined both the Civil War and Reconstruction as well as the growing Socialist/Communist movement. He was not a bigot as he is always construed but a man of his own people. Burroughs was influenced by his work and thought well of him. He did not abhor him. ERB read many of Dixon’s novels and admired the movie based on his books, The Birth Of A Nation. He sympathized with Henry Ford in his struggle for the welfare of America and read the Dearborn Independent, Ford’s newspaper. In short, Burroughs was a stand up guy.
Now, what evidence is there he read The Revolt Against Civilization: The Menace Of The Underman? Let’s begin with this quote, p. 34 et seq.
Quote:
Down to that time the exact nature of the life process remained a mystery. The mystery has now been cleared up. The researches of [August] Weisman and other modern biologists have revealed the fact that all living beings are due to a continuous stream of germ plasm which has existed ever since life first appeared on earth and which will continue to exist as long as any life remains. This germ-plasm consists of minute germ cells which have the power of developing into human living beings. All human beings spring from the union of a male sperm-cell and a female egg-cell. Right here, however, occurs the basic feature of the life process. The new individual consists, from the start, of two sorts of plasm. Almost the whole of him is body plasm – the ever multiplying cells which differentiate into the organs of the body. But he also contains germ- plasm. At his very conception a tiny bit of the life stuff from which he springs is set aside or carefully isolated from the body-plasm, and forms a course of development entirely its own. In fact, the germ-plasm is not really part of the individual; he is merely its bearer, destined to pass it on to other bearers of the life chain.
Now all this was not only unknown but even unsuspected down to a short time ago. Its discovery was in fact dependent upon modern scientific methods. Certainly, it was not likely to suggest itself to even the most philosophic mind. Thus, down to a generation ago, the life stuff was supposed to be a product of the body, not differing essentially in character from other body products. This assumption had two important consequences. In the first place, it tended to obscure the very concept of heredity, and led men to think of environment as virtually all important; in the second place, even where the importance of heredity was dimly perceived the role of the individual was misunderstood, and he was conceived as a creator rather than a mere transmitter. This was the reason for the false theory of “the inheritance of acquired characteristics,” formulated by Lamarck and upheld by most scientists until almost the end of the nineteenth century. Of course, Lamarckianism was merely a modification of the traditional ‘environmentalist’ attitude: it admitted that heredity possessed some importance, but it maintained environment as the basic feature.
Unquote.
Now there you have the argument of God in Tarzan And The Lion Man of 1933 nearly word for word. I hink it unlikely that ERB actually read Weisman who published following 1900 and who ERB may never have heard of, so his source was in all probability Stoddard.
Stoddard’s presentation nicely straddles the change of consciousness from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. It sounds a trifle naïve to our ears but was cutting edge at the time. Weisman’s theories were a big step in the direction of the discovery of DNA a short 26 years after Stoddard’s study.
It is important though to remember that more than fifty percent of the US population today rejects the concept of evolution while being more Lamarckian in outlook than might be supposed. We are as a whole not quite as advanced as we think we are.
As a quick affirmation of the influence of Stoddard on ERB on pages 95-96 he gives an account of the famous Jukes family of degenerates that appeared in ERB’s 1932 novelette, Pirate Blood.
Stoddard was well aware of what was happening historically and presently and one can see that he passed that understanding on to ERB. Almost as though writing today, on page 237 Stoddard writes:
Quote:
Stressful transition is the key-note of our times. Unless all signs be faulty, we stand at one of those momentous crises in history when mankind moves from one well-marked epoch to another of widely different character.
Unquote.
Extremely prescient observation in 1922 while his study has been borne out in detail. The chapter titles give a clear outline of the contents:
1. The Burden Of Civilization
2. The Iron Law Of Equality
3. The Nemesis Of The Inferior
4. The Lure Of The Primitive
5. The Ground Swell Of Revolt
6. The Rebellion Of The Underman
7. The War Against Chaos
8. Neo-Aristocracy
As can be easily seen novelists such as Rider Haggard, ERB, Edgar Wallace as well as many others from 1890 to the 20s were grappling with the problems indicated by the chapter titles.
The natural tendency in humans is to be rather lax in mental activity. Precision calls for an active mentality and concentration. Not everyone is capable of this, yet, beginning in the nineteenth century such mental qualities were increasingly necessary. Such disciplines as Chemistry and Physics didn’t allow for personal vagaries or individual style. One couldn’t bend the disciplines to one’s own desires, precise measurements were necessary requiring mental concentration. A little bit off and who knows what might happen. In a way then the Overman and Underman were created. Either you could or you couldn’t and if you couldn’t you slipped beneath- an Underman. Higher civilization was impossible for you.
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Burroughs addressed this problem continually. In his character Tarzan he resolved the problem giving his creation a split personality, in a loin cloth he was one man, in a tuxedo he was another. Two separate gorillas in one and always a beast. In real life society split into two possibilities- the Over and Underman.
Worse still scientific methods were able to measure the ineffable, the unseen. In chemistry sub-tiny atoms were able to be detected and their sub-miniscule weights actually measured. Measurement is the bane of the Underman. A Mole contains 6,022 x 10 to the 23rd power of atoms, an incredible incomprehensible number that still might weigh 12 grams or less. Astonishing. Beyond the comprehension hence belief of the Underman. As the process can’t be seen it can’t be believed.
In human intelligence the Englishman Francis Galton began to devise measuring devices of intelligence in 1865 shortly after Darwin announced Evolution in 1959. Thus uncertainty about mental capacity was eliminated. As Stoddard calls it, The Iron Law Of Inferiority. Biology and measuring excluded something like eighty-five percent of the population from the ranks of the most intelligent. Without that high measurement of intelligence 85% of the population was automatically excluded from the possibility of higher attainment while at the same time being prejudged.
Big strapping fellows, all man, were relegated to manual labor while wimps like perhaps, John D. Rockefeller, became billionaires. Not right, the big strapping fellows said, but not measuring up in intelligence, which they couldn’t see, they were condemned to the shovel for life.
Intelligence measuring tests were improved between 1865 and 1920 although not as accurate as could be desired. Men entering the armed forces in WWI were an excellent testing group. Of 1,700,000 tested intelligence levels were fairly accurately determined. It was then discovered that only four and a half percent were very bright with another seven or eight percent bright, while the huge bulk were C+ to C- descending from there.
One imagines Burroughs read this with extreme thoughtfulness.
So, now as the bulk of the good things were going to those who could do, what were those who couldn’t do about it? The great issue since 1789 has been equality; the Underman demanded equality as a first condition. He could organize. He could sabotage. He could rage. And that is what the Underman has done.
The Communist Party was formed. And what was their chief demand? Equality. Absolute equality. As they couldn’t rise to a natural equality then the only other feasible solution was to bring the Superior intelligences down to their level. Thus they raged against that great equalizer, education. Screw science, screw physics, screw chemistry, screw biology. Who needed what you couldn’t see and that especially included intelligence measuring?
One of ERB’s bete noires was the I.W.W.- The Industrial Workers Of The World, syndicalists. Imagine his reaction when he read this:
Quote:
Viewed in the abstract, technical sense, Syndicalism does not seem to present any specially startling innovations. It is when we examine the Syndicalists’ animating spirit, their general philosophy of life, and the manner which they propose to obtain their ends, that we realize we are in the presence of an ominous novelty,- the mature philosophy of the Under Man. This philosophy of the Under-Man is today called Bolshevism. Before the Russian Revolution it was known as Syndicalism. But Bolshevism and Syndicalism are basically one and the same thing. Soviet Russia has really invented nothing. It is merely practicing what others had been preaching for years- with such adaptation as normally attend the putting of theory into practice.
Syndicalism, as an organized movement, is primarily the work of two Frenchmen, Fernand Pelloutier and Georges Sorel. Of course, just as there were Socialist before Marx, so there were Syndicalists before Sorel. Syndicalism’s intellectual progenitor was Proudhon, who in his writings had closely sketched out the Syndicalist theory. As for Syndicalism’s savage, violent, uncompromising spirit, it is clearly Anarchist in origin., drawing its inspiration not only from Proudhon but also from Bakunin, [Johann] Most, and all the rest of that furious company of revolt.
Georges Sorel
“Revolt!” This is the essence of Syndicalism: a revolt, not merely against modern society but against Marxian Socialism as well. And the revolt was well timed. When, at the very end of the nineteenth century, Georges Sorel lifted the red banner of Syndicalism, the hour awaited the man. The proletarian world was full of discordant and disillusionment at the long dormant Marxian philosophy. Half a century had passed since Marx first preached his gospel, and the revolutionary millennium was nowhere in sight. Society had not become a world of billionaires and beggars. The great capitalists had not swallowed all. The middle classes still survived and prospered. Worst of all, from the revolutionary viewpoint, the upper grades of the working classes had prospered, too. The skilled workers were, in fact, becoming an aristocracy of labor. They were acquiring property and thus growing capitalistic; they were raising their living standards and thus growing bourgeois. Society seemed endowed with a strange vitality! It was even reforming many of the abuses which Marx had pronounced incurable. When, then, was the proletariat to inherit the earth?
The Proletariat! That was the key word. The van, and even the main body of society, might be fairly on the march, but behind lagged a rear guard. Here, were, first of all, the lower working class strata- the “manual” laborers in the narrower sense, relatively ill paid and often grievously exploited. Behind these again came a motley crew, the rejects and misfits of society. “Casuals” and “unemployables”, “down-and-outs” and declasses, victims of social evils, victims of bad heredity and their own vices, paupers, defectives, degenerates, and criminals- they were all there. They were there for many reasons, but they were all miserable, and they were all bound together by a certain solidarity- a sullen hatred of the civilization from which they had little to hope. To these people evolutionary, “reformist” socialism was cold comfort. Then came the Syndicalists promising, not evolution but revolution; not in the dim future but the here and now; not a bloodless “taking over” by “the workers” hypothetically stretched to include virtually the whole community, but the bloody “dictatorship” of The Proletariat in its narrow revolutionary sense.
Here, at last, was living hope- hope, and the prospect of revenge! Is it then strange that a few short years should have seen revolutionary Socialists, Anarchists, all the anti-social forces of the whole world grouped under the banner of Georges Sorel? For a time they went under different names syndicalists in France, Bolshevists in Russia, I.W.W.s in America but in reality they formed one army, enlisted in a single war.
Now, what was this war? It was, first of all, a war for the conquest of Socialism as a preliminary to the conquest of society. Everywhere the orthodox Socialist parties were fiercely assailed. And these Socialist assaults were formidable, because the orthodox Socialists possessed no moral line of defense. Their arms were palsied by the virus of their revolutionary tradition. For however evolutionary and non-militant the Socialists might have been in practice, in theory they had remained revolutionary their ethics continuing to be those of the “class war”, the destruction of the “possessing classes” and the “dictatorship of the proletariat.”
The American economist, Carver, will describe the ethics of socialism in the following lines: “Marxian Socialism has nothing in common with idealistic Socialism. It rests not on persuasion, but on force. It does not profess to believe, as did the old idealists, that if socialism be lifted up it will draw all men to it. In fact, it has no ideals; it is materialistic and militant. Being materialistic and atheistic, it makes no use of such terms as right and justice, unless it be to quiet the consciences of those who still harbor such superstitions. It insists that these terms are mere conventionalities; the concepts mere bugaboos invented by the ruling caste to keep the masses under control. Except in a conventional sense, from this crude materialistic view there is neither a right or wrong, justice nor injustice, good or bad. Until people who still believe in such silly notions divest their minds of them they will never understand the first principles of Marxian socialism.
“Who creates our ideas of right and wrong?” asks the Socialist. “The ruling class. Why? To insure their domination over the masses by depriving them of the power to think for themselves. We, the proletarians, when we get into power, will dominate the situation; we shall be the ruling class; we shall determine who is right and wrong. Do you ask us if what we propose is just? What do you mean by justice? Do you ask if it is right? What do you mean by right? It will be good for us. That is all that right and justice ever did or ever can mean!
Unquote.
People ask what Burroughs believed? Was he a racist? Was he an anti-Semite? Well, Burroughs’ beliefs can be extrapolated from the above quote as well as Stoddard’s whole book. If Burroughs could have expressed himself concisely he would have written The Revolt Against Civilization. You don’t have to look any further.
There could be no more ardent anti-Communist, anti-Socialist, anti-IWW than ERB. The book was published five years after the Russian Revolution, a mere three years after the narrow quelling of the Communist disturbances of 1919 while in 1922 the Harding administration was putting the finishing touches on the suppression of that Communist revolution in the US. Make no mistake the crimes of 1919 were part of an American Bolshevik revolution. Things would not return to what Harding called normalcy but it would be a reasonable facsimile that would endure until the engineered great crash of 1929 opening the way for the Communist revolution of FDR in the US.
These were perilous times ERB was living in no less than those of today. One can’t be sure when Burroughs read Revolt but many of the same themes almost in quotation were employed in his 1926 novel The Moon Maiden. And from the Moon Maiden he went to the more sophisticated approaches of his great political novels from Tarzan At The Earth’s Core to Tarzan And The Lion Man.
As Stoddard thinks the Underman breeds at a very fast rate while the Overman limits his family the obvious consequence is that people of intelligence decrease rapidly in relation to the Underman. Of course Stoddard has all kinds of tables and charts to prove his point. As this was published in 1922 the results are heavily skewed to prove the English are the top of the heap; a result not uncongenial to Burroughs’ sensibilities.
One imagines that as of induction time in 1917-18 a great many of the recent immigrants at least had underdeveloped English language skills that affected the results but at this point it no longer matters; the general idea has been proved sound.
As we have a war between the Underman and the Overman and make no mistake, as far as Sorel and the Syndicalist/Bolshevik ideology goes it is a war to the knife, it may be asked what Stoddard’s formula for the Overman’s success might be.
This returns us to the Underman’s great fear that science, that is objective analysis supported by an array of facts will condemn him to the virtual condition of servitude. It might be surmised that this is an intolerable but inescapable conclusion unless education and science are destroyed reducing the more intelligent to the masses.
Stoddard then relying on Darwinian and Weismanian evolution and the notion of Eugenics introduced by Francis Galton resolves the problem by ending the reproduction of the ‘defective’ classes, that is, forced sterilization. Forced sterilization was actually employed. It is interesting that he never brings in the issue of race thus on the surface his book is neither racist for anti-Semitic. However as the book assumes that the superior intelligences are English or Nordic the text qualifies as anti-Semitic in Jewish eyes and hence has been placed on the Jewish Index Of Forbidden Literature.
One may be horrified at the Eugenic solution to the intelligence problem but one must be equally horrified at the Underman solution to their Overman problem. Liquidation is more horrifying than sterilization and Liquidation was employed by the Underman in Russia and will be employed again if they can consolidate their gains in the US and Europe today.
The problem is that while being founded in reality it is impossible in execution. The human mind is too subjective to be trusted with such a great responsibility. Many statues were placed on the books commanding forced sterilization and many such were executed.
Schools classes were organized based on supposed mental aptitudes. How objectively I will demonstrate by my own example. Until Jr. High in my home town schools did not systematically differentiate based on mental capacity, however at the end of the ninth grade just before I.Q. testing in the tenth there were three options, Trade School for those deemed not of academic ability, in other words destined for the labor force, and once in high school a division between business, that is white collar, and college prep. This was still a process of self-selection thus I signed up for high school however someone changed my papers to trade school.
Thus when I showed for classes at high school, I was told I was enrolled at trade school. Now, this was the fight of my life, and for it. I was told I was in trade school and to get out. I said I wasn’t leaving and sat down where I waited for four days for the situation to resolve itself. My argument was that the law required that I be given an education and it wouldn’t be at trade school. Whatever the behind the scenes machinations were I was reluctantly allowed to enter but they then insisted it would be business level while I demanded college prep. With an unexplained prescience I was told that I would never go to college so I should be in business. Nevertheless I won that struggle too.
I am sure that if enforced sterilization had been possible at the time I would have been compelled to undergo it.
Now, here’s the kicker. Came time for I.Q. tests and I placed in the upper four percent. I have no idea what the reaction to that was although my critics had to tone down their act. So human passions invalidated the whole Eugenic idea.
In other words there is no equable solution to this terrible human dilemma.
In that sense the solution offered by Aldus Huxley in his famous comic novel Brave New World is of some interest. In Huxley’s story he enlists science, chemistry, to produce different levels of mental competence. The zygote is nurtured in test tubes while at certain levels of development certain chemicals are introduced limiting the development of the fetus. Thus the labor problem is solved by creating classes only capable of menial tasks. The upper classes are bred like race horses to various degrees of excellence. Huxley was tongue in cheek to be sure but, actually the only solution to this otherwise insoluble problem.
Stoddard didn’t introduce any ideas to which Burroughs wasn’t already familiar and in agreement. At best Stoddard’s superb research and explication clarified ERB’s understanding for him. I don’t know how familiar he was with Georges Sorel. Today Sorel is unknown except to specialists although I am beginning to see his name pop up so with the Communist regime of Barack Obama perhaps the way is being prepared for Sorel’s extreme measures of exterminating the Overman.
At any rate I have come to the opinion that Richard Slotkin is correct in thinking the Burroughs had read and was in accord with both Madison Grant and Lothrop Stoddard. However Slotkin evaluates their work through the distortion of his own Communistic lens which is only valid to those of his point of view.
His view does not make Burroughs a racist or anti-Semite. It makes him an objective and accurate observer and analyst of the situation of his time. As indicated above Burroughs absorbed Stoddard’s information, that point of view and used it to create his wonderful works of the late twenties and first half of the thirties. If one bears Stoddard’s book in mind while reading those novels it will make them make great sense while presenting his view of the political and social situation
Of course the novels are not confined solely to dealing with these issues; Burroughs had a much more far ranging mind, both subjectively and objectively.
Stoddard’s The Revolt Against Civilization is a major study as relevant today as the day it was written. The last ninety years have only borne out his theses. The Revolt Against Civilization is well worth a read, perhaps two. At any rate you will have an accurate idea of Burroughs’ social and political beliefs.
Chaps 3,4,5: Marianne Faithfull: The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties
December 15, 2012
Marianne Faithfull: The Faerie Queene Of The Sixties
by
R.E. Prindle
Chaps. 3, 4,5
Chapter 3
Of all the performers of the Rock era Mick Jagger and Paul McCartney have been the most successful while I would give the nod of most successful to Jagger. One must admire the way he learned the ropes and then used them to strangle others as he had been strangled. Mick in his own way was the Midnight Rambler and the Street Fighting Man. Don’t think I blame him; you either rule or are ruled. But, one does have to live with the reputation one creates.
Mick began cultivating his image from the beginning. As this story concerns Mick’s relationship to Marianne I will concentrate on aspects of their sexuality. Andrew Loog Oldham made a movie of the Stones’ January 1965 Irish tour. Unfortunately he sold the rights to it along with the Stones 1963-70 master recordings to Allen Klein along with, by the way, the first Marianne Faithfull masters. Klein then became the Stones’ manager.
The movie disappeared into Klein’s archives to surface in November 2012 when the Klein estate released it to DVD. It can now be purchased as I did. The DVD features both the Abkco edit and Oldham’s original Director’s Cut.
Mainly a concert film it also features group member interviews and Richards and Jagger cutting up. While they were horsing around they appear to improvise a song with the lyric: I’d rather be with the boys than here with a stupid girl like you.
While Jagger has always cultivated an ambiguous image he has also announced a record of having had sex with four thousand or more different girls. That’s only eighty per annum over fifty years so I imagine that shows an admirable restraint. Yet, at the same time Mick has always been misogynistic while always seeking to emasculate or squash his closer women under his thumb. In fact Mick probably has a domination or emasculation complex. He may have rather been with the boys but in his competition with them he sought to emasculate or squash them too. One of the favorite forms of emasculation and domination is to take other men’s women from them.
Thus when he took Jerry Hall from Bryan Ferry he quipped he had to do it to save her from going through life as Jerry Ferry. One winces when one reads of Eric Clapton begging Mick not to take Carla Bruni from him. Mick even took one of Eric’s temps, Catherine James from him.
Mick And Chrissie
Mick And Chrissie Shrimpton
When Mick first enters the scene for Andrew Oldham he is in an alley fighting it out with Chrissie Shrimpton, the model Jean Shrimpton’s younger sister. If one reads more deeply into that situation it shows a very cruel sadistic streak in Mick, quite shameful in a celebrity of Mick’s first magnitude of brightness.
Chrissie began the relationship as a strong willed girl battered by and battering Mick. In that day before the change in sexual mores girls weren’t quite so sexually open so Chrissie didn’t want her parents to know she was shacking up with Mick. They insisted to Mick that they not. As a humiliation tactic to break the girl down he let it be known to her parents that in his eyes she was little more than a common whore and she and they should see it that way too as he was in fact shacking with her.
Gradually the monster beat her down completely destroying her self-respect then, more than publicly, he broadcast his triumph on records and over the radio with such songs as Stupid Girl and Under My Thumb which their whole circle knew referred to her. Dylan would later use the same tactic against Edie Sedgwick when he wrote Like A Rolling Stone to break her down.
Both Chrissie and her parents believed Mick and she were to marry but having crushed her beneath his thumb, as it were, with a toss of his curly locks Mick sneeringly walked away adding insult to injury. Cruel in this instance it became psychotic with repeated use.
Years after word got back to Mick that Chrissie had a bundle of his letters, and, now this is unforgivable, without a word to her he immediately set his attorneys on her threatening an expensive law suit while demanding she return his letters. Even though Chrissie had not intended to publish them, still shaking this long after Mick’s brutal treatment, Chrissie without delay forwarded her letters from Mick to him. Shameful.
Mick And Marianne
Mick And Marianne
Mick then turned his attentions to the Guinevere, the Ophelia, the Faerie Queene of pop music, our own Marianne. While I’m sure Mick was somewhat enamored with Marianne I’m also sure he had a couple ulterior motives. Marianne was married to John Dunbar at the time while living with Mick so Mick had the pleasure of emasculating and humiliating Dunbar.
At the same time I’m sure he was envious of Marianne’s fame which was probably greater than his at the time. No room in the spotlight for two. He couldn’t stand that Marianne was getting even more press than himself. Thus he undertook to destroy her career. In the process he emasculated her and humiliated her to an astounding degree.
Marianne and Mick were playing with psychologies in a very destructive manner. The events I am going to describe did incalculable damage to their psyches while altering the direction of their subsequent lives dramatically, especially Marianne’s. Of course, few people seem to realize they have a psychology or how it was formed, what expectations they devised. Those hopes and dreams were more especially dashed when they turned to drugs. That was certainly the case with Marianne.
I don’t know how seriously Marianne took her Medieval interest and reading but she was influenced by her Arthurian studies. Like the most or possibly rest of the generation she was also influenced quite heavily by Alice In Wonderland and Peter Pan, probably both books and movies.
The key for the generation in Peter Pan was his refusal to grow up or accept adulthood. It was quite fashionable at the time to pretend that you would always be young, keep in contact with your ‘inner child.’ I was a victim of the psychosis myself.
At any rate Marianne was influenced by all three. Thus, when she and Mick met she quizzed him extensively on his knowledge of King Arthur to see how much he knew as though that litmus test would seal his fate. Mick passed and Marianne moved in still married to John Dunbar. Thus her life clashed with her Catholic upbringing. At first Marianne had royalties coming in from her records enabling her to maintain a certain independence but gradually the royalty checks decreased making Marianne financially dependent on Mick.
At the same time Mick was under no obligations to Marianne and observed none. How this clashed with Marianne’s Arthurian expectations in an atmosphere of Peter Pan and Alice she doesn’t go into but there must have been a severe disappointment as Mick treated her as a mere possession.
While in California he was the object of desire for all the groupies including the doyenne Miss Pamela- Pamela Des Barres nee Miller- of Frank Zappa’s girl group the GTOs (Girls Totally Ornery or else in reference to the hottest car of the period, the GTO). Miss Pamela as well as the rest of the California groupies studied to come up with better and better more outrageous sexual thrills with which to astonish the boys in the band which easily surpassed the imaginations of the boys in the band including Mick.
Mick returned home and demanded of Marianne that she perform these tricks which astonished Marianne no less than Mick had been astonished. However she believed the tricks degrading. Marianne quite rightly refused to perform them.
But the repertoire of the boys in the band kept expanding so that the home girls were led to view new horizons. Group sex and that sort of thing became the norm.
As with all loosely knit movements or phenomena this sort of reputation brought more and more of the sado-masochistic libertine drug oriented element gradually forcing out the less inclined to sexual erotica just as bad money drives out good money. Rock and Roll became progressively more degenerate from 1964-65 on until it was disgraceful to be associated with it.
Mick and the Stones were leaders of this degeneration whether the Stones embraced sexual sado-masochism personally their public persona was based on it making them leading corruptors of youth and society in general. They did as much or more to change the sexual mores of the present than anyone. Their LP cover for Black and Blue was the apex of this very sado-masochistic misogynistic persona. The cover caused me all kinds of trouble in running my record store.
As one presents oneself so must one be.
Chapter 4
The Redlands Bust.
Many psychologically devastating events happened to Marianne in the years from 1967-70. It is very difficult from this perspective to evaluate some of them. One can’t tell how Marianne’s renunciation of her career affected her mind. After all in 1964-65 and 66 she went from just another teenager to superb success far beyond her expectations financially, while becoming the female idol of the youth of England and a phenom in the US- ultimately the Faerie Queen of rock and roll. That’s really only two short years until the Redlands bust.
In those two years she passed through several sexual transmogrifications. She went from virgin to the most outre of sexual practices. Its all very well to say that this was her decision but as Paul McCartney said of his own experience in Miles’ biography it was impossible for him to resist peer pressure, especially in the use of drugs. He was ‘forced’ to try heroin even though he was dead set against.
So peer pressure on Marianne and any young girl to be sexual ‘free spirits’ was impossible unless you were prepared to accept group rejection. The same with drugs that couldn’t be resisted so that when depression set in she ended up addicted to the greatest depression drug available- heroin. It was up to Mick to give what protection he could. Regardless of current sexual nonsense it us up to the man to guide his woman.
Now, the era began in relatively clean-cut innocence . It was never quite so white bread as it is depicted, trying to escape the sleaziness, even then, was no easy matter. Then as the decade wore on it all got worse, then it got disgusting. First pot, pills and amphetamines, then LSD that came on like a hurricane. LSD more than anything else conditioned you for cocaine that in at the end of the decade, at least on the West Coast where I was. Remember that there was no national consensus in the US
In 1964 or so when the ‘counter-culture’ hit in the Bay Area it was a very local manifestation not shared by the East Coast the Mid-West or even for that matter LA. LA was never hip in the way the Bay Area was. While the Beatles are credited with introducing long hair, when the Charlatans came down from Virginia City they had hair and they must have been growing it long before the Mop Tops showed up.
The West Coast could not tolerate New York groups. Mafia outfits like the Rascals nee Young Rascals and Vanilla Fudge made the West Coast puke. There really wasn’t any place for The Velvet Underground either. Of course the British groups that had their own sound that really couldn’t compete with that of say, The Doors, an LA group. The LA groups being more commercially oriented pretty much shoved the Bay Area groups aside, although were a couple of real successes. I don’t include freak groups like the Grateful Dead as commercial successes. Cults are cults.
But to the point, boy, LSD. Owsley Stanley kept the West supplied and how. By the time of Altamont and Stonewall the atmosphere was really foul. And then it got worse still.
About the time of the Redlands bust society and the police were losing their patience. Kesey and Leary had them terrified. The drug thing kept growing. When one says that marijuana was generational it is true only to the extent that a significant minority of the generation smoked it. The hippies were only a small and despised part of the generation but they, we, made a lot of noise and got a lot of notice. Without the radio, rock and corrupt record companies the Movement probably wouldn’t have broken the bounds of Bohemia. But, the time was ripe for the Bohemian conquest of America. That was led from New York, principally by Andy Warhol.
The records made the Bohemian life seem very glamorous. Thus the cops focused on groups where actually the greatest drug activity was located and the propaganda the strongest. As the groups began to make good and even big, very big, money they were the natural prey of the drug dealers. And don’t underestimate the role of LSD. The groups also chose to flaunt their drug use- ‘I’ve got to be free to put anything into my body and life I want to’, disdaining the law, the police and actually common decency. This was the case with the Stones and it’s the flaunting, not the use, that got them in trouble.
In 1967 they naturally were set up. Brian Jones in an interview, barroom chat actually, with News Of The World reporters boasted of his drug use. The journalists then attributed the statements to Mick, whether from ignorance or design I leave to your imagination.
When Mick read the article he was indignant. As I said, while Mick and the rockers thought they were big because of records, radio and TV they were actually socially marginal and not particularly appreciated. Musicians get no respect outside their own circle.
Rather than evaluate his situation, considering that he was doing drugs and everyone knew it thus making him an obvious target, he foolishly brought suit against the newspaper. You don’t have to be brilliant to know News Of The World wasn’t going to let that one fly. Hey! Hey! What’d I say! Mick was sleeping or day dreaming.
The police wanted to get England’s bad boys anyway. There may or may not have been collusion between the News Of The World and the police but the way the raid was conducted indicates there was.
Shortly before the bust some guy named Schneiderman drops from the sky with a brief case reportedly filled with whatever you required. Mick, Marianne and Keith and a couple others, I will mention in the next section, were having an LSD weekend at Keith’s house, the Redlands. Schneiderman insinuated himself into the party with his briefcase while probably being in the employ of the News informed them and they in turn notified the police.
For Schneiderman allegedly having a briefcase full of drugs there were remarkably few drugs in evidence at the bust. Jagger was booked only for possession of four pep pills bought legally in Italy, while Keith had no drug charges at all except for being charged with ‘knowingly’ providing a place where pot was smoked. Robert Fraser actually had heroin jacks of his own on him but Schneiderman produced nothing from his briefcase and indeed no drugs were visible in it when the police required him to open it. No drugs were seen only packaging that were assumed to contain drugs by the Bohemians. In any event he hopped the first flight to elsewhere.
While Marianne had no drugs concealed on her person her situation was the most tragic of all. The Faerie Queen would lose her official status.
When the cops came calling the crowd was of course flipped out on LSD but then that was always the danger; the cops would come calling when you’re least prepared to deal with them. Come on, this was just one of the hazards of using illegal substances. And naturally, you tend to be flippant, wise cracking and mocking. Very bad behavior in such a situation when maximum seriousness is the order of the moment. It’s not like everyone didn’t live in fear of being busted. They used to call it deep paranoia.
Marianne whose clothes had become wet from walking in the rain laid them out to dry dressing in nothing more than some sort of rug wrapped around her. Well, what is one to think of a nude woman amongst a bunch of men; what is this Dejeuner Sur L’herbe redux? Even if two thirds of them were screaming fairies as they were, how is one to know that and what to think?
It was said that Marianne let her wrap slip giving the coppers an eyeful. Of course the cops were square and the gang was hip but squares outnumber hips by a very large margin while as Roger Miller sings: Squares make the world go round. And a good thing too. Roger said that hips have too much water for their land; this was a gathering of pretty watery people. Oh, OK, my people, but folks you have to be realistic. That’s what hip means in my book.
And then someone probably at News Of The World concocted the story that Marianne had a Mars bar slipped between her legs and that Mick was grazing away at it. Preposterous, wouldn’t you think? Boy, now that was a blow that will getcha and you’ll be down for a long time too. As might be expected Marianne was devastated. Boy, that opened a lot of anfractuosities in her brain. A hit like two trains running in opposite directions at top speed on the same tracks over a two hundred foot high trestle. That’s a big crash and a long way to tumble, buddy.
It ended any hope Marianne may have had of appearing on a stage. Can you imagine stepping up to the microphone and being showered with Mars bars. Oh no, no,no, better to board a rocket ship for…oops…Mars.
Marianne and Mick may have thought they were handling it well but the bile and psycho-somatic reactions entering the sub-conscious aren’t so easily dismissed. This horror was merely added to their childhood fixations.
In the turmoil of the months succeeding this mind wrenching event fixations would only worsen. Of course the intent of the establishment was not so much to succeed in jailing them but making an example of them while hopefully destroying their careers. The bust should have been career destroying but for the generational gap. When a teacher chastises a student the other students smirk but don’t disown him. After busting Mick and Keith the establishment then went after the more fragile Brian Jones, the guy who got this whole thing rolling by shooting off his mouth. If the three could have been jailed they wouldn’t subsequently have been allowed to enter the US or so it seemed. No one could have forecast the incredible changes that were about to occur that essentially placed the Stones above the law.
Chapter 5
Enter Donald Cammell And His Movie Performance
One reads many amusing reasons for the incredible social disintegration of the sixties. One of the most preposterous to come to my attention is the notion that it was caused by lead poisoning.. There’s a hobby horse for you. While I couldn’t rule it out I think lead poisoning would be among the most obscure of reasons. No, the sixties was no more an aberration than was Hitler’s Germany; like the latter it was the result of long historical development, a part of psychological history.
If one reads a good deal with the purpose of understanding the historical background of the sixties things begin to take form. Then if one tries to make one’s intellect rise and float over the information gleaned from that reading patterns will form, a map of the past will appear. Then of course one notes nodes and axons, connections that require further reading and rereading what’s already been read so that a fair approximation of what happened can be more or less confidently stated. Much of it will be subterranean history that doesn’t make it to the history books.
Such is the psycho-sexual mind set that began to develop oh, say, about from 1890 on which a key node was from 1900 to 1920. Western understanding of the human mind developed fairly rapidly from the mid-eighteenth century rapidly gaining momentum after say 1860 and the spectacular doings at Paris’ Salpetriere mental hospital under the tutelage of the amazing Dr. Jean-Martin Charcot.
While his investigations were of a psycho-sexual nature they were not perceived as such except perhaps by a transient student by the name of Sigmund Freud. Sometime after Charcot’s studies toward the nineties people calling themselves sexologists, sex therapists and sex magicians began to appear.
Along with Freud who might be called a sex therapist two leading figures slightly earlier than he were the German Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902) and the Englishman Havelock Ellis (1859-1939). In the academic scientific or pseudo-scientific manner all three made their contributions although Freud managed to incorporate their discoveries or understandings into his system acquiring preeminence in the field.
Goerg Groddeck and Wilhelm Reich, two of Freud’s disciples also gained prominence in the sex therapist field.
On the religious or supernatural side the most prominent and influential of the sex magicians was the so-called Magus Aleister Crowley and his organization of the Golden Dawn.
With the exception of Krafft-Ebing all were out to overturn European sexual mores, designated disparagingly as Victorian. Of course there was never a time when men and women didn’t behave sexually because…well, how could they? The real goal then was to disturb prevailing sexual mores and replace them with sexual license. This essentially came to fruition in the 1960s when the influence of Freud and Crowley were at their peak. The two principal cultural nodes of the US, New York and Los Angeles, were flooded with European Jewish émigrés of the Freudian school while Aleister Crowley had established himself and his Golden Dawn in Los Angeles.
The corrosive sexual mores of Freud and Crowley were aided and abetted by the rise of the equally corrosive drug use and, of course, ‘lead poisoning.’
Our next object then is to discover who Donald Cammel might be.
Searching For Donald
Cammell is the central figure in this little drama so we will begin with him although even though the Stones biographers don’t delve into these other characters they are integral to the social scene of Mick, Marianne and Keith. It appears that Brian Jones, Bill Wyman and Charlie Watts served a peripherals to Mick primarily and Mick and Keith secondarily. Oldham tried to make himself a third but apparently was incompatible or other interests pulled him in a different direction. By ‘67 he would be out of the picture.
In Marianne’s biography she makes it sound like Cammell was a stranger to the group while actually he was well known to Bob Fraser, and Chrissie Gibbs who were at the Redlands bust and quite familiar with Mick, Keith and Marianne. They all knew each other before the movie began to be filmed.
Cammell was older than the three being contemporary with the first generations of rockers; he was born in 1934 in Scotland. He came from a well to do family immersed in the occult; his father actually knew Aleister Crowley and wrote a biography of him. One may then assume that his father was something of a sex magician as Marianne’s father was a sexologist. It was impossible to escape Freudian influences from at least 1920 through the fifties. So some reference to repression and the unconscious is inevitable.
Cammell’s father was likely familiar with Krafft-Ebing’s Psychopathia Sexualis with its emphasis on psychotic sexual practices. All the sexologists and magicians immersed themselves in bizarre sexual practices. If a reader counters that all sex is legitimate it shows how perverted he or she is. No argument from me, we know where each other stands.
As Cammell was born in ‘34, in ‘44 he would have been 10 and 20 in 1954. Thus he would have been aware of the war between the ages of 4, 5, 6, or so and 10 but perhaps in a muddled and uncomprehending manner but in ‘44 and ‘45 he would have been aware enough to partially comprehend. Certainly when the Big Baby turned Hiroshima to ashes in August of ‘45 something would have registered affecting his mind and outlook.
I was 7 in ‘45 and while I have a clear remembrance of VE Day I don’t have any recollection at all of the Bomb or if I do it had little or no significance to me. I have never had a horror of the A-bomb.
Obviously something other than lead poisoning affected the psyches of the crop of kids from ‘33-’34 to 1942-43. It may have had something to do with the total destruction of the world capped by the Bomb. What a terrific exclamation mark to the end of hostilities. What Cammell’s reaction to this destruction was isn’t clear to me while it probably wasn’t clear to himself.
After the war he experienced rationing during the whole of his teen years. He was probably less affected than others as he became prosperous in his teens on his own as a painter. He was successful as a portrait painter. From the pictures I’ve seen he was more than talented while possibly possessing genius. His mind already exhibited an extreme darkness with sexual confusion easily perceived.
Much of the following information comes from web sites such as the fabulous Another Nickel In The Machine that records the history of London, Sam Umland’s 60X50 and many others. I have not read Umland’s biography of Cammell as yet.
Cammell divorced his first wife and then married a very successful model, the American Deborah Dixon, moving to Paris where they both lived. Cammell apparently was supported by his wife.
Bored with painting, not unlike Andy Warhol, he began to take an interest in film. There is nothing like a movie to exhibit one’s sexual fantasies in real life; indeed a movie is a record of the unconscious. Cammell and Dixon were sexually compatible taking an interest in anything remotely copulatory. Cammell’s first few attempts at filmmaking were not successful or, at least, lacked box office magic.
Along with his lack of interest in painting and his attraction to the movies Cammell gravitated toward the pop world of rock and roll seeking out Jagger. Where was a sexual degenerate to turn? The bad boys of Rock, the Rolling Stones, Mick, Keith and Marianne at least. He found Mick and Marianne’s talked about sexual escapades irresistible. He was undoubtedly attracted by Mick’s dope legend also. Mick claims not to have been an excessive user of drugs, which may be true but I doubt there was anyone at the time who didn’t think he was a heroin addict and druggie par excellence.
As an artist Cammell was acquainted with Bob Fraser and that pop art crowd. Both he and Fraser were known to the infamous crime lords, the Kray Brothers. The Krays, of course, were homosexuals as were Fraser and Gibbs. Mick’s legend is that he is bi-sexual, at least, so there is no reason that he wasn’t sexually involved with the bunch in some manner.
Cammell and Fraser also knew the Satanist and sex magician, the American experimental film maker, Kenneth Anger, as did Mick and Marianne. Fraser introduced Anger to the underground film crowd.
In addition Anita Pallenberg knew Cammell from her pre-Brian Jones, Keith Richard days. She was shown the script in the south of France the year before filming began. So, unless I have seriously misread Marianne’s first auto-biography, Cammell didn’t just show up one day with a movie proposal; it was actually old home week.
Cammell did go on to make an additional three or four movies of which I have seen two, Demon Seed and Wild Side. The last movie has escaped my vigilance so far. Wild Side is a virtual remake or variation of Performance. Demon Seed that I will review in an addendum to Chapter 5 is actually a great movie handling a major sci-fi them to perfection.
Just prior to the beginning of filming in 1968 Mick impregnated Marianne. This is 1968 and if Marianne hadn’t been on the Pill she would have had a number of children now in addition to Nicholas her child by John Dunbar. The question then is why she allowed herself to get pregnant at this time. She was still married to Dunbar so one must think he must have suffered humiliation and emasculation to have another man impregnate his wife. Perhaps Mick’s emasculation genes or maybe just a drug haze.
At any rate Marianne was exiled to Ireland while filming was going on. One can only imagine the anxiety she felt separated from her lover in her condition. One doesn’t have to imagine; she suffered a miscarriage.
Point Blank
The Movie
In 1967 the English director John Boorman had filmed a movie that took
Cammell’s mind by storm. The movie was Point Blank starring Lee Marvin as the protagonist Walker. Cammell recommended that all the cast see the move and bear it in mind. It might be advantageous to review the movie here.
Point Blank was only Boorman’s second effort. Unsuccessful on release it has apparently become a cult classic. His movie is obviously a dream sequence or nightmare. Nothing is real. This indicated by the hero’s name of Walker. He has only one name, no first. No one even knows what his first name could be. The name seemed significant to me but I hadn’t a clue as to what it could mean. Well, you know, when the student is ready the teacher will appear. While writing this piece I was also reading Denis Machail’s 1941 biography of J.M. Barrie, the author of Peter Pan. There on page 190 was the explanation of Walker. Barrie had written a play titled Walker, London. That was a telegraphic address. Quote:
Two impudent jokes in one, the second even more mysterious then as it is now. For the word ‘Walker’ is still in the dictionary- “interjection (slang) expressing incredulity and suspicion of being hoaxed” but when was it last used? Not during the present century, one would say; yet before that there was a time when it was the very crystalization of Cockney humor. “Walker!” you said, to show that you could never be caught with chaff. It was the standard answer to the attempted leg pull. It was also one of those blessed with with which any comedian could bring down the house.
So now the viewer knows he is being hoaxed and can suspend belief. The plot involves Lee Marvin as Walker who takes part in a heist then is shot by his partner who runs off with Walker’s share or 93,000 and adding insult to injury Walker’s wife. The rest of the story involves Walker trying to retrieve his money forget the wife. The story is told through a series of frustrations to a paranoid Walker. So, we have a dream study of a frustrated paranoid.
The opening and closing settings are the same; the walking or exercise area inside Alcatraz prison. The joke seemingly being that one walks around and around, never getting anywhere while returning to the same place. Cry “Walker” and then start laughing like a Cockney at the joke.
Alcatraz, the Rock, is of course a small island in the middle of San Francisco Bay between the Golden Gate and the Bay Bridge. Established in 1934 it was closed in 1963, so the filming was done in a closed facility and before the Indians occupied the island claiming it as their heritage. The filming was done, then, in vacated premises.
As a dream story it concerns the psychic life of Walker. It’s all going on inside his head. The prison, castle or house represents the psychic the self so that Walker lives a bleak, barren, paranoid inner life.
A helicopter lands in the enclosure, picks up a package and leaves a bundle of money. Walker and his pal Mal (mal, French for bad) kill the messenger while robbing him. Walker is then examining an empty cell signifying his empty life when Mal with Walker’s wife looking on puts a couple bullets in him leaving him for dead while appropriating Walker’s share of the money and his wife. Thus we have some basic paranoia that, of course, might possibly be true. As his wife would say later, Walker just kind of left her cold.
Left for dead Walker somehow recovers while being compelled to take the only way off the island available to him- swim for it. Another grim joke as legend has it that no one who tried ever succeeded.
The rest of the story concerns surmounting the treachery and double crosses Walker encounters in trying to recover his money. He finds his wife, abandons her and takes up with her sister. While he seems a little obsessive-compulsive in the matter, the money in fact represents his lost identity, purpose in life or masculinity. The recovery of the money is central for his personality.
As in the Cockney joke whenever he shows up people exclaim “Walker!” If you’re in on the joke it might be funny. Angie Dickenson makes up the sex interest as Chris as there is no love interest. Just a four letter word in this movie. The three kingpins Walker must knock down are Carter, Brewster and Fairfax. Ironically Carter and Brewster are disposed of by their own team when Walker’s paranoia protects him while the others take the hit meant for him.
The actual climax takes place in Brewster’s house when Walker and Chris have spent the night together, the only consummated sex in the movie. As Walker is walking out the door Chris asks what her last name is. Walker doesn’t know and neither do we. Walker counters, seemingly weakly, does she know his first name. Either check mate or an uproarious joke to Cockneys. But as Walker in joke is a hoax or a put on then it doesn’t matter anyway. Dreams are like that, they follow a different logic than the waking mind.
The denouement returns to the opening at Alcatraz but now Walker is more canny staying out if sight. The drop is made, Brewster calls to him to come get the money. But, as when Walker was supposed to get the money from Carter, after he survived the assassination attempt, the bundle proved to be waste paper, Walker’s paranoia saves him again. A shot rings out and Brewster takes a long walk off a short pier never to return again. Now enter Fairfax who is the head man and the assassin who shot Carter and Brewster and would have shot Walker. Fairfax shouts Walker several times that in another century would have brought the house down.
Walker’s paranoia prevents him from taking what might be money in the bundle but is probably waste paper so that as the bundle of funny paper represents his ego he is left stranded in the haunted empty house of Alcatraz representing his mind for one presumes the rest of his life.
The movie was a box office failure, except for the few like Cammell but holds up well as a psychological thriller. That is what Cammell saw. So, now, he’s basing his own movie ‘Performance’ directly on Point Blank.
Performance
He gathers together essentially the ‘gang’ to make his movie. Even Deborah Dixon took part. He already knew and was friends with James Fox as was apparently Mick, cast as the criminal Chas. Cammell had known Anita Pallenberg in Paris where it is said she formed a brief menage a trois with Cammel and Deborah. Chrissie Gibbs was the set designer…Mick was an old friend, a few outsiders and Cammel had his movie.
Mick sent Marianne to Ireland for the duration. Keith who was shacking with Anita was so unhappy about Cammell’s pairing of Anita with Mick that he found it impossible to visit the set. Instead he brooded outside in his car sending Bob Fraser in to keep tabs until Cammell banned him from the set.
I can’t be sure that Cammell understood the Cockney meaning of Walker but he so admired the character that he based Mick’s role on Walker giving Mick the single name of Turner. No first name. Turner is also meant to be significant. A turner is a sort of acrobat. The word could also be used in the sense of changeling, or perhaps in the homosexual sense or turning a man gay. Turner does turn Chas. from a tough guy to a passive fairy, his sort of changeling. Turner changes the tough hoods into faggots. Probably then that is the meaning of the name. So maybe Cammell was in on the Walker joke.
As the movie is permeated by sex magic and sex as a sort of therapy the influence of Krafft-Ebing, Ellis, Freud and especially Aleister Crowley is very apparent. Kenneth Anger was around at the time while being known to all the participants thus reinforcing the Crowley connection.
All the sex therapists were concerned with aberrant sexual practices that the movie concentrates on. Cammell elaborates the sexual implications of Boorman’s Point Blank, while the decaying mansion obviously represent Cammell’s mind. In the end the sex therapy or magick doesn’t seem to work as Turner turns suicidal obsessed with a death wish.
Boorman’s crime angle comes in through Chas. In order for Fox to appear authentic Cammell actually required him to live the criminal life under the tutelage of a mobster, even to the extent of taking part in actual crimes. Of course, madness is the theme of the movie but even madness can go too far.
Chas. has offended the criminal chief, based on the Kray Bros., who has commanded a man hunt to track Chas. down. When he is located he is summoned to his execution. Turner says: Don’t leave me, take me where you’re going. Chas. says ‘You don’t want to go where I’m going.’ Turner: ‘Yes I do.’ Chas. then blows Turner’s head off, gets into the car and the car drives off, as he looks out the window we see Turners face. Thus the turning or change is complete as each becomes the other.
The version now available for purchase or rental is apparently much different from the original. While even the available version is violent and pornographic the original must have anticipated the current pornographic output of Hollywood . While I wouldn’t call Performance tame almost every movie you see today is as or more explicit. At any rate the movie has no redeeming moral value. If you want porn plain and simple, there it is.
The legend has it that the movie changed the lives of the participants. Perhaps so, but perhaps not. Michele Breton was already a lost child and stayed lost. Anita, no stranger to drugs moved into intense familiarity. James Fox, who was criminally mistreated by Cammell, gave up movies for ten years but he says he was already fed up with the seedy side of movie making so perhaps Performance just capped it. Keith? God, what can you say? Who was going to keep him from drugs? If Cammell was already inclined toward suicide he topped himself off in 1996 finally taking Keith’s advice.
But, now, Mick and Marianne. Mick was advised to play himself but Marianne wisely overruled that advice perhaps saving Mick’s sanity but still leaving him off balance. Marianne advised him to adopt some of the fey characteristics of Brian Jones’ character along with some of Keith’s tough guy stance. Not too difficult as that is the way Mick already appeared but it permanently shifted his personality in that skew. Nevertheless Mick has always remained supremely functional.
As to Marianne, how did she relate to Mick’s rejection of her by sending her to Ireland and the subsequent miscarriage of her child. That is a lot of psychological battering. I think that it is certain that as 1968 progressed she was already in a depression and sinking rapidly. While she was able to hold on for another year or so, by 1969 she would be spinning out of control as further events tested the strength of her mind.
Part II: Only The Strong Survive
April 3, 2012
Only The Strong Survive
Part II
An Examination Of Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid
As Created By Edgar Rice Burroughs
(Alternate Title: The Oakdale Affair)
by
R.E. Prindle
Part II
Into The Mysteries
(Some capitalization appears in the text that has no significance. For some reason it just showed up. I didn’t do it)
Young Burroughs With His Camera Eye
Burroughs does a good job in the Holmesian sense in this book enclosing mysteries within mysteries. The central mystery is who is committing the crime wave in Oakdale. Having learned from his mentor, Conan Doyle, Burroughs skillfully withholds details to enhance the suspense then disclosing them to reveal the mysteries. The organization of the scheme of crimes gradually unfolds to show that the real Oskaloosa Kid is one of the perpetrators. So we have a clever doubling of a sweet girl posing as the vicious criminal The Oskaloosa Kid. This is obviously a transfer of his Anima identity from the male De Vac/Oskaloosa Kid to the resumption of a female identity for his Anima through the fake Oskaloosa Kid/Gail Prim.
The girl who was seen with the criminals could have been Gail since she had disappeared without a trace never having arrived at her destination. Gail was not the girl seen with Reginald Paynter, who was robbed and murdered, and the crooks. That person was Hettie Penning who was ejected from the car speeding past the abandoned Squibbs place by the real Oskaloosa Kid. Thus symbolically De Vac/Oskaloosa Kid returns his Anima to Bridge/Burroughs.
As indicated Hettie Pening represents the dead early Anima of Burroughs who has here been resurrected. As in all cases of Burroughs representation of his failed Anima she appears to be a ‘bad’ girl but in reality is merely misunderstood. He compensates for himself.
Bridge himself is a mystery man and double. He is a hobo but with great manners and an excellent education. He is definitely a member of the Might Have Seen Better Days Club. The real club was organized by Burroughs when he served as an enlisted man in the Army in 1896.
In this case Bridge is in actuality the son of a wealthy Virginia aristocrat who has left home because he prefers a life on the road. In the framing story of a Princess of Mars Burroughs portrays himself in his own name as a Virginian. In reality Burroughs was declassed at eight or nine by John the Bully and by his father’s subsequent shuffling of him from school to school finally sending him to a bad boy school that Burroughs describes as little more than a reformatory for rich kids.
If one looks at his career he was on the move quite a bit. During his marriage he seldom lived in one house for more than a year or two then moved on.
Just as Bridge will assume his proper identity at the end of the novel so through his writing Burroughs has abandoned the shame of his hard scrabble years from 1905-13. In a sense he is assuming his proper identity with this novel.
Bridge and the Kid joining together at the fork in the road, one is reminded of Yogi Berra’s quip: When you come to a fork in the road, take it, in this case the less traveled dirt road.
I read word for word frequently dwelling on the scenes created. Burroughs is a very visual writer. Standing at the fork in a driving Midwest summer lightning, thunder and deluge storm they can hear the pursuing hoboes shouting down the road. Ahead of them is a dark unknown and a house haunted by the victims of a sextuple murder.
Indeed, Burroughs describes almost a descent into hell, or at least, the hell of the subconscious.
Over a low hill they followed the muddy road and down into a dark and gloom ravine. In a little open space to the right of the road a flash of lightning, followed one imagines by either the crash of deep loud rumbling of the thunder of perhaps if over head the sonic boom of the air splitting and closing, revealed the outline of a building a hundred yards (that’s three hundred feet, a very large front yard) from the rickety and decaying fence which bordered the Squibb farm and separated it from the road.
There are those who say Burroughs doesn’t write well but in a short paragraph he has economically drawn a verbal picture which is quite astonishing in its detail. The house is a hundred yards from the road. In the rain and muck that might be a walk or two or three minutes or more.
A clump of trees surrounded the house, their shade adding to the utter blackness of the night.
That’s what one calls inspissating gloom. One might well ask how any shade can add to utter blackness but one gets the idea. There is some intense writing thoroughly reminiscent of Poe but nothing like him.
The two had reached the verandah when Bridge, turning, saw a brilliant light glaring through the night above the crest of the hill they had just topped in their descent into the ravine, or, to be more explicit, the small valley, where stood the crumbling house of the Squibbs. The purr of a rapidly moving motor car rose above the rain, the light rose, fell, swerved to the right and left.
“Someone must be in a hurry.” commented Bridge.
There isn’t any better writing than that. Another writer can say it differently but he can’t say it better. Just imagine the movie Frankenstein or Wolf Man when you’re reading it. Burroughs did as well in less than the time it takes to show it.
A body is thrown from the speeding car a shot following after it. Bridge goes to pick up the body.
Thus the mystery and horror and terror of the dark and stormy night has been building. Bridge carrying the body which may or may not be alive asks the Kid to open the door.
Behind him came Bridge as the youth entered the dark interior. A half dozen steps he took when his foot struck against a soft yielding mass. Stumbling he tried to regain his equilibrium only to drop fully upon the thing beneath him. One open palm extended to ease his fall, it fell upon the uplifted features of a cold and clammy face.
Yipes! What more do you need? Cold and dripping, half crazed from fear, overwhelmed by the thought he might be a murderer the Kid’s hand falls on cold and clammy dead flesh. Bridge is standing there with maybe another dead person in his arms. The Kid is also aware that the murderous hoboes are hot on his trail.
If that doesn’t get you then somehow I think you can’t be got.
Not yet finished Burroughs builds up the tension. Striking a match from the specially lined water proof pocket of Bridge’s coat they find a dead man wearing golden earrings. Obviously a gypsy but while staring in unsimulated horror they hear from the base of the stairs of a dark dank cellar the clank of a slowly drawn chain as a heavy weight makes the stairs creak.
This is too much for the nerves of the Kid. Burroughs brilliantly contrasts the terror of the unknown in the basement with the fear of the dark at the top of the stairs. You know where that’s at, I’m sure, I sure do. In a flash the Kid chooses the unknown at the top of the stairs to the horror in the cellar.
What do you want?
The hoboes are still slipping and sliding down the descent into the ravine of the subconscious. Horror in front, terror behind. There is absolutely no place to hide. Nightmare City, don’t you think? How could anyone do it better? What do you mean he can’t write? Put the scenes in a movie and everyone in the theatre would be covering their eyes. Itd\ would be that Beast With Five Fingers all over again. Maybe worse. Never saw that one? Check it out. Peter Lorre. Terrifying. Of course I was a kid.
The clanking of the chain recreates an incident in Burroughs’ own life when he had a job collecting for an ice company. He called on a house and while he was waiting he heard the clanking of a chain coming slowly up the driveway. Waiting with a fair amount of trepidation he saw a huge dog dragging the chain appear. ERB backing slowly away forgot about the delinquent bill.
In this case the chain is attached to Beppo the dancing bear but Bridge and the Kid won’t know that until the next day.
They retreat into an upstairs bedroom. Here what Burroughs describes in capital letters as THE THING and IT pursues them. I remember two movies one called The Thing and the other It.
Just when the thing retreats the murderous gang of hoboes enters the house. Wow! Out of the frying pan and into the fire in this night of terrors as the lightning continues to flash and the thunder crash.
Discovering the dead man and as the bear begins moving again four of the hoboes flee while two who were on the staircase being trapped in the house flee into the same bedroom as Bridge, the Kid and the girl, Hettie. Shortly thereafter a woman’s scream pierces the lightning and the thunder then silences as the storm settles into a steady drizzle.
The rest of the night is one tense affair between the murderous hoboes and the Bridge and the girls. Not a moment to catch your breath.
In the morning when they go downstairs the mystery increases when they find the dead man gone and nothing in the cellar. If they’d had Tarzan along he would have not only been able to smell the bear but to tell whether if was black or brown.
After a brief confrontation Dopey Charlie and the General are driven off. Bridge’s relationship with the Kid is then deepened. Even though all the Kid’s reactions are repulsive to the manhood of Bridge he feels his attraction to the seeming boy growing stronger.
Not since he had followed the open road with Byrne, had Bridge met one with whom he might care to “pal” before.
This brings up an interesting hint of latent homosexuality. My fellow writer, David Adams has objected that in my analysis of Emasculation as applied to ERB is that he should have been a homosexual but wasn’t.
There are degrees of emasculation and there are various degrees of psychotic reaction to it. I don’t say and I don’t believe that ERB was a homosexual but there was a degree of ambiguity introduced into his personality by his emasculation. I have touched on this in my ‘Emasculation, Hermaphroditism and Excretion.’
Here we have another example of it as Bridge is experiencing some homoerotic emotion which is very confusing to him as he has never wanted a ‘pal’ before. In hobo lingo I believe a ‘pal’ has a homosexual connotation.
If Burroughs took his ‘inside’ information on hoboes from Jack London’s The Road then Bridge is the sort of hobo London describes as the ‘profesh’, the hobo highest in the hierarchy of hobodom. London always thought of himself as a quick learner, so one doesn’t have to award his statement too much credibility but Burroughs apparently took him at face value.
As London describes the ‘profesh’ he has been on the road so long he knows all the ropes. Unlike the unkempt bums he realizes the importance of a good front and always dresses neatly. But he is hardened and capable of committing any crime.
While Bridge is obviously intended to be a ‘profesh’ he is neither criminal nor does he dress to put up a good front.
Another category of hobo London lists is the ‘road kid.’ These are young people just starting on the life of the road. The ‘profesh’ would often take one of more of these road kids under his wing as his fag, as the British would say, or in Americanese, a ‘pal.’ In other words a homosexual relationship. Thus this displays ERB’s sexual ambiguity which David couldn’t locate in my psychological analysis of ERB’s emasculation. In this case the ambiguity will be resolved and explained when we learn that the Kid is the beautiful young woman, Abigail Prim, and both Bridge and Burroughs heave a sigh of relief.
Nevertheless ERB is discussing homosexuality in an open and natural way that couldn’t be missed by the knowing and which may be unique for its time. But then, remember that one of ERB’s hats in this story is that of the Alienist, so that in these pages we are deep into the psychological abstractions and Doyle’s mystery stories as influences.
Now comes the time for breakfast. Someone has to ‘rustle’ grub. We have already learned in ‘Out There Somewhere’ that Bridge doesn’t rustle food, he rustles rhyme. Nothing has changed. The Kid goes out to get breakfast and when she comes back with the goods, true to form Bridge bursts forth with several snatches from H.H. Knibbs which surprisingly the demure Miss Prim recognizes. What has she been reading?
How might this apply to Burroughs’ own life. Let’s look at it. Burroughs was enamored of How to books but in his heart he must have considered them a fraud. Willie Case will soon pick up his copy of How To Be A Detective which he finds completely inapplicable to his circumstances. He also has the good sense to throw the book away reverting to his native intelligence which may be a subtle comment on How To books by Burroughs.
ERB always considered himself of the executive class. After his humiliating experience trying to sell door to door he never attempted it again. Instead as a master salesman he preferred to write how to sales manuals for others to use as they went door to door selling his line of pencil sharpeners or whatever while he sat in the office waiting for orders. Hence in his own life he was the ‘rustler of poetry’ or manuals while others rustled grub in the door to door humiliation of the actual selling. Here the Kid will do the door to door gig. ERB always makes me smile.
In this case in what may be a joke the Kid just buys the goods from the homeowner reversing the roles.
There are those who insist Burroughs can’t write but I find his stuff wonderfully condensed getting more mileage out of each word than anyone else I’ve ever read. Just see how he describes breakfast.
Shortly after, the water coming to a boil, Bridge lowered three eggs into it, glanced at his watch (an affluent hobo) greased one of the new cleaned stove lids with a piece of bacon rind and laid out as many strips of bacon as the lid would accommodate. Instantly the room was filled with the delicious odor of frying bacon.
“M-m-m-m!” gloated the Oskaloosa Kid. “I wish I had bo- asked for more. My! But I never smelled anything so good in all my life. Are you going to boil only three eggs? I could eat a dozen”
“The can’ll only hold three at a time,” explained Bridge. “we’ll have some boiling while we are eating these.” He borrowed the knife from the girl, who was slicing and buttering bread with it, and turned the bacon swiftly and deftly with the point, then he glanced at his watch. “Three minutes are up.” He announced and, with a couple small flat sticks saved for the purpose from the kindling wood, withdrew the eggs one at a time from the can.
“But we have no cups!” exclaimed the Oskaloosa Kid, in sudden despair.
Bridge laughed. “Knock an end off your egg and the shell will answer in place of a cup. Got a knife?”
The Kid didn’t. Bridge eyed him quizzically. “You must have done most of your burgling near home,” he commented.
The description of the breakfast between the time Bridge looked at his watch and when the three minutes were up was delightfully done. I could smell the bacon myself while I especially like the detail of swiftly and deftly turning the bacon with the knife point. The knife seemed to have disappeared between the bacon and knocking the end off the egg.
Nice details aren’t they? You’d almost think Burroughs had actually done things like this for years. There’s enough blank spots in his life that he may have had more experiences of this sort than we know about. Take for instance the three days in Michigan between the writing of Out There Somewhere and Bridge And The Oskaloosa Kid. He says it took him twelve hours by train on four different lines to return to Coldwater from Alma. It is not impossible that he was hoboing back for the experience. He knew that he was going to write Bridge And The Kid next; might he not have been picking up local color?
Likewise in Bridge And The Kid he mentions the road from Berdoo to Barstow with seeming familiarity. Had he met Knibbs and the two embarked on a few days road trip as the expert Knibbs showed him some of the ropes?
I don’t know but there is something happening in his life which has not been explained.
Perhaps also the hoboism which appears in 1915-17 in his work when by all rights his success should have permitted him entry into more exalted social circles symbolized a rejection by so-called polite society. If so, why? Certainly the serialization of Tarzan Of The Apes in the Chicago paper must have raised eyebrows when people said something like: Is that the same Edgar Rice Burroughs who’s been tramping around town for the last several years?
After all people live in a town where a reputation is attached to them whether earned or not. In reviewing the jobs Burroughs had after he left Sears, Roebuck there is a certain unsavory character to them. Indeed, one employer, a patent medicine purveyor was shut down by the authorities while ERB then formed a partnership with this disgraced person. Where was Burroughs when the authorities showed up to shut the business down? I make no moral judgments. I’m of the Pretty Boy Floyd school of morality: Some will rob you with a six gun, some use a fountain pen. Emasculation is the name of the game.
It is certainly true that many, perhaps most, of the patent medicines of the time were based on alcohol and drugs therefore either addictive or harmful to the health. Samuel Hopkins Adams was commissioned by Norman Hapgood of Collier’s magazine to write a series of articles exposing the patent medicine business in 1906.
http://www.mtn.org/quack/ephemera/oct7.htm . A consequence of the articles may very well have been the shutting down of Dr. Stace. I think it remarkable that Burroughs didn’t distance himself from Stace at that time.
Even as Adams was presenting his research on patent medicines Upton Sinclair was exposing the hazards of the Chicago meat packing industry whose products were no less hazardous to the public health than patent medicines. Sinclair’s book, The Jungle, as well as perhaps Adams’ articles resulted in the Pure Food And Drug Act of 1906.
The products of meatpackers were so bad the British wouldn’t even feed them to their Tommies. That’s pretty bad.
So, if the Staces of the world were criminal and ought to be put out of business then by logic so should have the Armours and Swifts but what in our day would be multi-billion dollar industries don’t get shut down for the minor offence of damaging the health of millions.
One can’t be sure of Burroughs’ reasoning but his writing indicates that he was keenly aware of the hypocrisy of legalities. Perhaps for that reason he stuck by Dr. Stace.
However Stace was put out of business and the Armours and Swifts weren’t. While I applaud ERB’s steadfastness I deplore his lack of judgment for surely his reputation was tarred with the same brush as Dr. Stace.
When society figures may have asked who this Edgar Rice Burroughs was they were given, perhaps, a rundown on Dr. Stace and patent medicines as well as other employments that seem a little murky to us at present. I’m sure the ERB was seen as socially unacceptable. Thus Bridge who has lived among the hoboes has never partaken of their crimes so there is no reason for society to reject him especially as he is the son of a millionaire.
In any event ERB left Chicago for the Coast returning in 1917 then leaving for good at the beginning of 1919. Life ain’t easy. Ask me.
As Bridge, the Kid and the putative Abigail Prim were finishing breakfast the great detective Burton pulls up in front of the Squibbs place. Burton is obviously a combination of Sherlock Holmes and Allan Pinkerton. We have been advised of the Holmes connection in the opening paragraphs of this book. ERB describes Burton thusly:
Quote:
Burton made no reply. He was not a man to jump to conclusions. His success was largely due to the fact that he assumed nothing; but merely ran down each clew quickly yet painstakingly until he had a foundation of fact upon which to operate. His theory was that the simplest way is always the best way. And so he never befogged the main issue with any elaborate system of deductive reasoning based on guesswork. Burton never guessed. He assumed that it was his business to know; nor was he on any case long before he did know. He was employed now to find Abigail Prim. Each of the several crimes committed the previous night might or might not prove a clew to her whereabouts; but each must be run down in the process of elimination before Burton could feel safe in abandoning it.
That’s a pretty good understanding of Doyle’s presentation of Holmes. ERB did learn Holmes’ dictum that it was necessary to read all the literature on the subject to understand the mentality of one’s subjects. Burton did demonstrate some acumen in his arrest of Dopey Charlie and the General. He deployed an agent fifty yards below and fifty yards above to converge on the two criminals while he approached from the front. Either Burroughs had been doing some reading of his own or he picked up some experience or information from elsewhere.
Another keen point was when Burton went back to where the hoboes had been hiding to dig up the evidence they had concealed that would lead to their conviction for the Baggs murder.
It’s little details like these that always make me wonder where Burroughs picked up this stuff. He does it all so naturally but one can’t write what one doesn’t know. He must have been a curious man, good memory.
So Burroughs has a a pretty good understanding of the methods of Sherlock Holmes. It must be remembered that ERB was reading these stories as they first appeared not as we do as part of literature. Holmes, O.Henry, Jack London, E.W. Hornung, these were all fresh new and extremely stimulating with a great many references and inferences which are undoubtedly lost on us. Even in Bridge And The Kid ERB’s reference to the Kid’s bringing home the bacon is a direct reference to a quip the mother of the ex-heavyweight champion of the world Jack Johnson made just after he won the championship from Jim Jeffries: He said he’d bring home the bacon and he’s done it. I don’t doubt if many caught it then but I’m sure the phrase has become such a commonplace today that only a very few catch the reference and share the laugh.
Doyle’s stories such as A Study In Scarlet dealing with the Mormons and The Valley Of Fear dealing with the Molly Maguires would have had much more thrilling immediacy for ERB than they do for us. Also Burroughs has caught the essence of Holmes which was not so much the stories as the method of Holmes.
I have read the canon four times and while I could not reconstruct any of the stories without difficulty, if at all, maxims like- When you eliminate the impossible whatever remains no matter how improbable must be the truth. – have lodged in my mind since I was fourteen guiding my intellect to much advantage. So also the dictum to read all the literature. Not easy or even possible, but the more one has read the or read again the more things just fall in place without any real effort. You have to be able to remember, remembrance being the basis of all mind, of course. Holmes has been like a god to me.
If you wish to learn a source of Burroughs’ stories then all you have to do is apply the above methods; it will all become clear.
Burton moves the story forward as his appearance causes Bridge who isn’t sure what the status of the Kid and the putative Gail Prim is, elects to avoid the great detective even though they are friends.
The trio slip out the back into the woods following a track leading to ‘Anywhere’. Burroughs in a masterful telling catches the feel of a Spring day on a recently wetted trail littered with the leaves of yesteryear. Ou sont les neiges d’antan?
They come upon a clearing where a gypsy woman is burying a body. By this time Bridge has solved the mysteries of the previous evening.
The girls make noises upon hearing the clank of a chain in a hovel causing the gypsy woman to look around. Rather than spotting the trio she spots Willie Case hiding in the bushes who she drags out.
The gypsy woman, Giova, is as good a character as Bridge, the Kid, Burton and the hoboes, but my favorite of the story is Willie Case, the fourteen year old detective. While to my mind ERB presents Willie as a thoroughly admirable character, he nevertheless vents a suppressed mean streak not only on Willie but on the whole Case family.
ERB doesn’t let his mean streak show very often, it lurks in the background, but he lets it loose in this book. He must have been under personal stress.
He describes Willie as having no forehead and no chin, imbecilic traits, literally beginning with the eyebrows and ending with the lips. A freak of nature, a real grotesque. That means that Willie was a real ‘low brow’ as Emma accused ERB of being, even a no brow. Is it a coincidence that Emma called ERB a low brow or that the literati thought ERB wrote ‘low brow’ literature?
In point of fact Willie strikes me as an intelligent boy. He analyzes the situation always being in the right place at the right moment. Burton himself pays him a high but sneering compliment then cheats him out of the promised reward of a hundred dollars but in the manner McClurg’s published his books Burroughs was cheated out of a large part of his reward.
I don’t say that’s the case but if so it fits the facts.
In any event ERB treats the Case family meanly; they might almost be prototypes of Ma and Pa Kettle of the Egg and I or the meanly portrayed characters of Erskine Caldwell’s Tobacco Road. Jeb Case behaves very reprehensively at the lynching although once again he merely reported the facts that the Kid gave Willie. The Kid did tell Willie that he had burgled a house and killed a man. So, perhaps ERB created some characters that he could kick around as he felt himself being kicked.
And then we have the gypsy woman, Giova. She and her father are not only pariahs in general society as gypsies but because of her father they even have been cast out by the gypsies. Her father was a thief from both general and gypsy society. The former may have been laudable in gypsy terms but the latter wasn’t. They make, or made their living by thieving and cadging coins with Beppo, their dancing bear. Beppo of the evil eye.
Burroughs presents Giova as being sexually attractive with lips that were made for kissing, in echo of the refrain from Out There Somewhere. Here we may have a first inference that Emma was in trouble; the kind of trouble that would have ERB leaving her for another woman a decade or so hence. There are numerous rumblings indicating the trend not least of which was ERB’s fascination with Samuel Hopkin Adams’ novel, Flaming Youth of a few years hence and the subsequent movie starring Colleen Moore.
Bridge is now on the run with three women and a bear and he hasn’t done anything wrong to get into such hot water. One woman his emergent Anima, one, his rejected Anima, and the last a longing for a woman whose lips were made for kissing. Wow! This is all taking place in a ravine that opens into a small valley too.
All this has been accomplished in a compact one hundred pages. One third of the book is left for the denouement that Burroughs scamps as he usually does.
Giova decks them all out as gypsies which must have been an amusing sight to the Paysonites as this troop of madcaps complete with dancing bear in tow troop inconspicuously through town. Surprised they didn’t call out the national guard just for that.
As the story draws to a close ERB contributes a wonderful vignette of low brow Willie dining out at a ‘high brow’ restaurant called the Elite in Payson. The idea of Willie being conspicuous in a burg like Payson which we big city people would refer to as a hick town good only for laughs is amusing in itself. You know, it all depends on one’s perspective:
Willie Case had been taken to Payson to testify before the coroner’s jury investigating the death of Giova’s father, and with the dollar which the Osklaloosa Kid had given him in the morning burning in his pocket had proceeded to indulge in an orgy of dissipation the moment that he had been freed from the inquest. Ice cream, red pop, peanuts, candy, and soda water may have diminished his appetite but not his pride, and self-satisfaction as he sat down and by night for the first time in a public eatery place Willie was now a man of the world, a bon vivant, as he ordered ham and eggs from the pretty waitress of The Elite Restaurant on Broadway; but at heart he was not happy for never before had he realized what a great proportion of his anatomy was made up of hands and feet. As he glanced fearfully at the former, silhouetted against the white of the table cloth, he flushed scarlet, assured as he was that the waitress who had just turned away toward the kitchen with his order was convulsed with laughter and that every other eye in the establishment was glued upon him. To assume an air of nonchalance and thereby impress and disarm his critics Willie reached for a toothpick in the little glass holder near the center of the table and upset the sugar bowl. Immediately Willie snatched back the offending hand and glared ferociously at the ceiling. He could feel the roots of his hair being consumed in the heat of his skin. A quick side glance that required all his will power to consummate showed him that no one appeared to have noticed his faux pas and Willie was again slowly returning to normal when the proprietor of the restaurant came up from behind and asked him to remove his hat.
Never had Willie Case spent so frightful a half hour as that within the brilliant interior of the Elite Restaurant. Twenty-three minutes of this eternity was consumed in waiting for his order to be served and seven minutes in disposing of the meal and paying his check. Willie’s method of eating was in itself a sermon on efficiency- there was no waste motion- no waste of time. He placed his mouth within two inches of his plate after cutting his ham and eggs into pieces of a size that would permit each mouthful to enter without wedging; then he mixed his mashed potatoes in with the result and working his knife and fork alternatively with bewildering rapidity shot a continuous stream of food into his gaping maw.
In addition to the meat and potatoes there was one vegetable side dish on the empty plate, seized a spoon in lieu or a knife and fork and – presto! The side dish was empty. Where upon the prune dish was set in the empty side-dish- four deft motions and there were no prunes in the dish. The entire feat had been accomplished in 6:34 ½ , setting a new world’s record for red headed farm boys with one splay foot.
In the remaining twenty-five and one half seconds Willie walked what seemed to him a mile from his seat to the cashier’s desk and at the last instant bumped into a waitress with a trayful of dishes. Clutched tightly in Willie’s hand was thirty-five cents and his check with a like amount written upon it. Amid the crash of crockery which followed the collision Willie slammed check and money upon the cashier’s desk and fled. Nor did he pause until in the reassuring seclusion of a dark side street. There Willie sank upon the curb alternately cold with fear and hot with shame, weak and panting, and into his heart entered the iron of class hatred, searing it to the core.
The above passage has many charms. First, it is an excellent piece of nostalgia now, although at the time it represented the actuality, thus, as a period piece it is an accurate picture of the times. And then it is excellent comedy as well as a a parody as I will attempt to show.
One has to wonder if ERB really thought the Elite was a pretty fine restaurant. If so, one wonders where he took Emma and kids for a night out. Not too many gourmet Chicago restaurants served breakfast for dinner. Ham and eggs with mashed potatoes? Reminds me of the Galt House Hotel in Louisville where a ‘starch’ is served as a side dish. What exactly was this side-dish Willie wolfed- stewed tomatoes? The dessert prunes- dessert prunes?- was a nice touch too. Dessert for breakfast? Another nice quality touch at the Elite was the cup of toothpicks. Of course, those were the days cuspidors were de riguer so what do I know, maybe the Palmer House had a cup of toothpicks on the table too. I know they had cuspidors.
It does seem clear that little Willie was far down the social scale of little rural Payson. They had electric street lights, though. I’m not even from New York City but I would find the Elite, how shall I say, quaint and charming? Of course, New York City is not what it used to be either. Can’t fool me in either case; I’ve dined out in Hannibal. Good prices. Bountiful. Plenty of side dishes something that I’d never seen before.
I’m sure I’ve been in Willie’s shoes, or would have been if he’d chosen to wear them, too, so I have a great deal of sympathy for the lad. A man with a dollar has the right to spend where and as he chooses. Damn social hypocrisy!
In addition to the charm and light comedy ERB interjects a little parody of Taylorism and mass production into the mix.
For those not familiar with Frederick W. Taylor and his methods I quote from
http://instruct1.cit.cornell.edu/courses/dead453-653/ideabook1/thompson-jones/Taylorism.htm :
Taylor wrote “The Principles of Scientific Management in 1911. These principles became known as Taylorism. Some of the principles of Taylorism include (Management for Productivity, John R. Schermerhorn, Jr. (1991)):
Develop a ‘science’ for every job, including rules of motion, standardized work implements, and proper working conditions.
Carefully select workers with the right abilities for the job.
Carefully train these workers to do the job, and give them proper incentives to cooperate with the job science.
Support these workers by planning their work and by smoothing the way as they go about their jobs.
Taylorism which led to maximum efficiency also give the lie to the unconscious of Sigmund Freud, or at least puts it into perspective. If the twentieth century has been the history of the devil of Freud’s unconscious it has also been the century of the triumph of the god of conscious intelligence. The question only remains which will triumph.
One of the recurring themes in ERB’s writing of the period is efficiency. Indeed, a couple years hence he will write a book entitled The Efficiency Expert.
It was the age of efficient mass production which required standardized motions and produced terrific results where applied as at Henry Ford’s marvelously efficient factories. Ford brought the task to the worker in well lighted clean factory spaces at a level which required no time consuming, fatiguing and unnecessary lifting or bending. Plus Henry Ford blew the industrial world away by doubling the going wage for unskilled labor. He changed the course of economic history singlehanded. He achieved more than the Communists or IWW could have accomplished in a million years earning their undying enmity. He may in one fell swoop have defeated the Reds. They sure thought so.
But, go back and review how Willie organizes his repast for consumption. Taylor-like he eliminated all non-essential motions then with maximum assembly line speed-up he gets production into one continuous stream.
A comic effect to be sure but there is even more comedy in the parody of the assembly line and Taylorism. I’m sure ERB intended it just that way.
Willie may be a joke but there is a certain flavor to be obtained by filling a continuum of food, mouth and time. Such an opportunity for enjoyment may present itself once in ten years or so. Willie saw his opportunity and seized it which he does throughout the story. Willie is OK with me.
I have eaten that way but I now reserve the method for ice cream and highly recommend it. My last opportunity, they present themselves but rarely and can’t be forced, was several years ago when I was insultingly offered a half melted Cherries Jubilee. The dish was of a perfect consistency for assembly line consumption. I saw my chance and like Willie, I took it. I kind of distributed cherries and ice cream chunks in the creamy stew, got mouth in the right position and cleaned the bowl in sixty seconds flat, reared back gripping the bridge of my nose, honked a couple times as the freeze seized my brain and then took a few minutes for consciousness to return. One of the great natural highs in this drug infested time. I tell ya‘, fellas, they was all lookin’ at me but I am much beyond the iron of class hatred. If they can’t take a joke…well, you know the finish. So I think Willie Case did the right thing.
Clumsy waitress to get in his way anyway. Fourteen hours on the job was no excuse.
Willie didn’t feel guilt for too long though, for what ERB calls a faux pas, it put him in the right place at the right time to see Giova and her dancing bear fresh from Beppo’s own slops. How could ERB be so cruel to a dumb animal- the bear, not Willie-, one that was going to save the heroine’s life- both the bear and Willie.
After having had dinner and refreshments Willie still had 20 cents left from a dollar of which he spent 10 cents for a detective movie and had ten cents left over for a long distance phone call to Burton in Oakdale after he spotted Giova and her dancing bear when he came out of the movie theatre.
He followed Giova to Bridge and the girls, fixed their location then called Burton. Not only did Willie spot the fugitives but so did the four leftover bums. Dopey Charlie and the General were impounded for the Baggs murder while we will learn that the real Oskaloosa Kid and the putative Gail Prim remain as well perhaps as the true identity of L. Bridge.
Burroughs is full of interesting details. The hoboes are gathered in an abandoned electrical generating plant which had formerly served Payson but had been discontinued for a larger plant servicing Payson from a hundred miles away. We don’t know when that might have happened but electrical generation and distribution was relatively new. The consolidation into larger generating units was even newer. Samuel Insull, whose electrical empire collapsed about1938 had begun organizing distribution in 1912 when he formed the Mid-West Utilities in Chicago absorbing all the smaller companies such as this one in Payson obviously.
I find details like this the exiting part of reading Burroughs.
The murderous hoboes set out to rob and kill Bridge and the Kid while Sky Pilot and Dirty Eddie elect themselves to return the putative Gail Prim who we will learn is actually Hettie Penning, thus doubling ERB’s Anima figure and connecting the latter to the former.
One is put in mind of the Hettie of H.G. Wells’ novel In The Days Of The Comet. Both Hetties exhibit the same traits. While it may seem a slender connection, still, ERB has so many references to other authors and their works that the connection is not improbable. For obvious reasons ERB always insisted he had never read H.G. Wells. Wells? Wells, who?, but how could he not have?
Bridge and the girls would have met their end except that Willie Case’s call brought Burton on the run who arrives in time to save their lives. Unfortunately Beppo of the evil eye meets his end after having done Burton’s job for him much as Willie always did.
In between the girls, the ‘boes, Bridge and the coppers Burton has a full load so he drops Bridge and Kid at the Payson jail. Willie Case had not only solved the case for the ingrate Burton but saved the life of Gail Prim posing as the Oskaloosa Kid. In a heart wrenching scene little Willie seeking his just reward is cruelly rejected and cheated by the Great Detective. I don’t know, maybe I read too closely and get too involved. Or, just maybe, ERB is a great writer.
It’s all over but the shouting and along comes the mob howling from Oakdale for the blood of Bridge and the Kid. I tell ya, boys, it wuz close. Burton arrived in time but not before Bridge with a well aimed blow broke Jeb Case’s jaw. What did those Cases ever do to ERB I wonder?
In the end Hettie Penning is identified, clearing up that mystery. Burton is able to tell Bridge’s dad who has spent $20,000 looking for him that he is found. It may even have cost less for Stanley to find Livingston. Of course there was a lousy rail system in the Congo in Livingston’s time. Bridge is united with Gail obviously prepared to renounce the roving life. Thus the promise of Out There Somewhere is redeemed. Bridge has found his woman.
Thus on paper, at least, Burroughs is reunited with his Animus in gorgeous female attire. No more men in women’s clothes or women in men’s clothes.
2.
Bridge And The Kid is a very short book, only 152 pages in my Charter paperback edition of 1979 (Septimius Favonius BB #24. Charter didn’t see fit to include a date.) Although first issued in book form so late as 1937, it was reprinted in 1938 and 1940 so there must have been some early readers however when reprinted in 1974 there could have been few who remembered it.
My fellow writer, David Adams wrote a short review in the same issue #24 of the Burroughs Bulletin, October 1995, in which he also recognized the importance of this book to the corpus:
It may come as a surprise that anyone could possibly think of calling the novelette, THE OAKDALE AFFAIR, a major work of such a prolific writer as Edgar Rice Burroughs, but I found it to be such an animal…
I am unaware that any other than Mr. Adams and myself have reviewed the book. To sum up:
There seems to be an obvious connection to Jack London in the Bridge Trilogy (I prefer Bridge to Mucker because the latter draws reproving stares and no one today knows what a mucker is. It sounds slightly obscene.)
Mr. Adams, who is more of an authority on Jack London than myself, I’ve only begun to read London as a result of Bill Hillman’s series of articles in ERBzine, which posits a strong connection between Burroughs and London, and not the other way around, feels the novels have a great deal to do with London. The connection seems to be there but I have only begun to read London’s relevant or major works.
What ERB’s attitude towards London may have been which seems ambiguous isn’t clear. Burroughs never wrote about London and never mentions him explicitly. There are many points of disagreement between the two politically and socially. Burroughs does seem to have liked London and his work although what he read or when he read it isn’t clear. There are no London titles in his library.
The second major influence in the novel is the problem of hoboism connected with the IWW and labor unrest.
In the background Burroughs is working out his Anima/Animus problem.
The whole is framed in the form of a rather magnificent detective story patterned after Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories with a dash, perhaps a soupcon, of E.W. Hornung thrown in.
Attention should be paid to the psychological aspects.
Many of ERB’s favorite themes such as the efficiency expert are also thrown in. Nifty historical details like Samuel Insull’s electrical empire are added to the mix as well as Taylorism.
If anything ERB was too efficient, too economical in his use of words. The Book could easily have been fleshed out another sixty or hundred pages with no loss in the marvelous immediacy of the telling. If anything the story is too condensed. I found myself pausing over each description to recreate a mental image of the depiction. I was willing to do so and the personal reward was great. How much ERB was the creator of my vision of the story and how much my own as collaborator isn’t clear to me. Perhaps ERB just outlined the story ‘suggesting’ the scenario, expecting the reader to ‘customize’ the story as he reads along. This may be the first ‘inter-active’ novel. If so, Burroughs may be an even more innovative and greater writer than he is commonly thought to be.
Pt. II Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Accreted Personality
March 14, 2012
Part II
Edgar Rice Burroughs And The Accreted Personality
by
R.E. Prindle
Time may fly but life seems long. Long enough for circumstances to alter your personality more than once. Consider for instance the National Guardsman secure in job, wife and family who is jerked out of his ideal existence to take a tour of duty in Iran or Afghanistan, foreign wars which betray the promises of his enlistment which were to defend his home state. Do you think a personality change didn’t occur when he received his notice? If he was kept in for several tours of duty over a period of years so that his former existence doesn’t appear to him as a dream that took place in a parallel universe? And if he comes home without an arm or a leg or, perhaps, both, that he doesn’t suffer from reminiscences or have a dual or multiple personality. You can bet he does. Nor does your life have to be as hard as the National Guardsman for your own personality to acquire personality accretions over your lifetime, all of which are stored in your mind and may be reassumed at any time.
As I said in the first part, these various existential states don’t disappear, they become part of your reminiscences whether suppressed or remembered and as possible fixations or idees fixe they influence your daily actions.
So now, let’s turn to the life of Edgar Rice Burroughs to illustrate the idea of the accreted personality. Psychology is simple if you don’t make it complex by mystifying it. I hope I can make Burroughs’ story clear without unnecessarily complicating it. I will try to use Occam’s Razor judiciously.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, who would become very famous as a fiction writer, entered this world of pain of pleasure on September 7, 1875 in Chicago, Illinois. He was parented by George T. and Mary Burroughs, he of Anglo-Irish ancestry and she of Pennsylvania Dutch, that is say, German. Eddie always considered himself pure English at a time when being English meant something, a much depreciated coin these days.
George T. was an upright man who had been an officer on the Union side in the Civil War a scant ten years previously. George Custer had not yet gone down at the Little Big Horn nor was Sitting Bull yet starring in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West. George T. had two other sons, George and Harry, who were born just after the Civil War.
George T. was a whisky distiller while at this time the Whisky Trust was coming into existence. George T. was an independent sort who needed the Trust less than they wanted him. I don’t say the Trust was responsible but George T. was burned out. Chicago loved a good fire.
The relationship between Ed and his parents was not a warm one. His father made his life difficult, seemingly on purpose, while his mother seems to have been rather cold. Burroughs seldom mentions her nor were any of his characters named Mary, or George for that matter.
Nevertheless, born into a world of creature comforts with high expectations in a fine house on Chicago’s West Side with two Irish maids Ed began life in a happy state of mind walking down the street singing Zippity Do Dah or the equivalent. He stayed that way for about eight years until his first personality changing event occurred.
Eddie attended Brown School in his neighborhood. I haven’t been able to find out much about Brown but the schools stands out as special in Ed’s mind. The school had several prominent graduates one of which was the showman, Flo Ziegfeld. As Ziegfeld was Jewish it is quite possible the school was close to Maxwell St. Maxwell St. would figure prominently in Ed’s later novel, The Mucker.
One day when Ed was eight he found a big twelve year old Irish kid by the name of John belligerently blocking his way. It isn’t known whether he was walking with future wife Emma Hulbert or not but I suspect he was. At any rate John threatened to beat him up. Thoroughly terrorized Ed took to his heels and as he did so several suggestions entered his terrorized mind. To be in terror is to enter a hypnoid state in which all ones psychic defenses are lowered or discarded. Suggestions are easily fixated in your mind. Thus at the age of eight Ed’s original personality was submerged, he assumed his central childhood fixation. Not only was he emasculated on his Animus but, perhaps because he shamed himself in front of Emma, he transferred his Anima to John; he then set up John as his ideal of manhood wishing to be just like him.
The result was that John became his favorite name. In his future novels he named a disproportionate number of characters both good and bad John. His two key characters were both named John- John Clayton, aka Tarzan Of The Apes and John Carter of Mars. Both have the initials JC referring to Jesus Christ, one supposes. Thus on the masculine side their names commemorate John the Bully while on the feminine side Jesus Christ. Ed also wore a book under the assume name of John McCullough.
As Ed was shamed by running, defenses against cowardice are liberally sprinkled throughout his works with justifications for the advance to the rear maneuver, or running.
Particularly troubling to him was the occupation of his Anima by a male. Probably not very usual but given the limited range of responses available to humans, probably not that uncommon. But this result of the fixation was particularly troubling to him appearing in a succession of his initial output of the ‘teens.
The clearest exposition of the results of this fixation was reproduced in the pages of Ed’s second novel, The Outlaw Of Torn. The hero of the novel is a boy of Ed’s age on the street corner, who is the king of England’s son c. 1400 AD. The King has a quarrel with his fencing instructor, De Vac, who then avenges himself by kidnapping the son, Norman.
The scene is that Norman is playing in the garden under the watchful eye of his nurse/Anima when De Vac appears outside the garden gate- I. e. Ed’s mind- luring Norman to him. Norman has passed the gate when his nurse who had been chatting with another woman notices. She rushed through the gate where De Vac struck her dead. Thus his Anima was outside Ed’s mind when she was destroyed.
Now, this is the replication of a dream story. The meaning is that Norman/Ed was safe inside when De Vac/John caught him, as it were, with his pants down, killing and assuming the role of his Anima. The nurse represents his Anima or right brain which was then disabled.
So, as an eight year old boy Eddie has an emasculated Animus, left brain, and destroyed or shattered Anima, right brain. This has to be dealt with in some way so he can carry on and survive.
What Burroughs does then is create a myth to repair the damage as well as he can. De Vac now on the run with his prize who he must conceal takes Norman to a three story house in the slums of London built on stilts out over the water of the River Thames. The two live in this attic/mind for three or four years. During this entire period De Vac is dressed as an old woman. So, here we have the emasculated Animus combined with the dead Anima with the waters of the feminine flowing beneath the house, I.e. Burroughs’ self.
The two live this way for three or four years, Norman never leaving the attic. At the end of this period De Vac dons men’s clothes and takes Norman to a ruined castle in the Shires. The remarkable thing about this castle is that on one side, the right side, the roof has completely fallen in, can’t be used.
The interpretation is that Ed so identified himself with John that he had to put his own life on hold until he turned twelve, the same age John had been. At that point he recovered or began to recover some control of his Animus while his Anima remained destroyed.
De Vac then began to train Norman in the manly arts to be a killing machine to attain physical vengeance for De Vac on the King.
One can’t be sure of what effect the encounter had on his personality but the next year after the confrontation his father took him from Brown transferring him to an all girl’s school. George T.’s reason for this was that there was a fever going around and he wanted to protect Ed from it. How one would be safe from a communicable disease in a girl’s school isn’t clear so perhaps Ed’s father had another reason.
In Ed’s psychological state it is not unlikely that he went into a fairly serious depression while emasculated and crippled he may have become very effeminate. The placement in the girl’s school may have been one of disgust and to teach the boy a lesson to act like a man.
The humiliation on top of the emasculation was difficult for Ed to bear. He pleaded and pleaded to be transferred from the girl’s school. His pleas were heard although his father didn’t send him back to Brown but a couple miles across town to Chicago’s Harvard Latin School where Ed stayed through what would have been his Junior High years. During this period, the date isn’t clear, Ed fell off his bicycle banging his head against the curb; it isn’t known whether it was the right or left side. This left him dizzy and walking round in circles for three or four days, then the obvious effects disappeared. George T. then jerked him out the Latin School and sent him West to his brothers’ cattle ranch in Idaho. He doesn’t seem to have attended any school for the year he was in Idaho. However he learned to be a cowboy and had a great time.
Even without school the period was not without intellectual stimulation. George and Harry Burroughs were graduates of the Sheffield Scientific School attached to Yale University but not yet integrated with it, along with their partner Lew Sweetser. Sweetser was a fairly remarkable guy deeply interested in psychology when the subject was just beginning to assume its modern form.
William James had just published his two volumes on Psychology but I haven’t been able to discover who Sweetser’s teachers may have been at Yale. Departments of Psychology were rare at American Universities in the 1880s. However, as Sweetser apparently studied whatever psychology was available it seems certain that he would have been at least aware of Charcot’s experiments at the Salpetriere that were world famous. It is also clear that he was familiar with the idea of the sub- or unconscious. However much Ed may have retained, as he himself was relatively well informed on psychological matters when he began writing the foundations of his knowledge were probably formed at Sweetser’s knee.
Having left Ed in the wilderness for a year, George T. then moved him to the East Coast to Massachusetts’ Phillips Academy. Ed was now being moved around almost with the frequency of a military brat with its devastating personality consequences. Having consorted with a rough bunch of fellows for a year, Ed was now in an elite school without a great deal of preparation.
He was in Idaho at the end of Wyoming’s Johnson County War when the big ranchers squeezed out the small ranchers. Many of the small ranch soldiers whose shootings were classified as murders had fled to Idaho where Ed knew one or two; from the company of murderers, or killers at any rate, he was now in with a bunch of elitist schoolboys.
When his brothers had attended Yale their father had refused them an allowance that would have allowed them to associate with their richer school fellows as equals. If he continued the practice with Ed at Phillips then an extra burden was placed on the kid that would help explain his behavior. At any rate he assumed the posture of clown to gain acceptance while neglecting his studies. Naturally he was requested to leave.
Certainly he could have expected to return home and attend school in Chicago but this was not his father’s plan. His father enrolled him at the Michigan Military Academy outside Detroit billed as The Paris Of The West which is most laughable. This was the second great psychological trauma in his life adding another major accretion to his personality. Ed rebelled at being sent away again.
This was not merely rejection but also a condemnation of him by his father. As Ed saw the situation, with a great deal of accuracy, the Military Academy was just a holding pen for juvenile delinquents whose parents didn’t know how to handle them so they put them away in what was essentially an asylum or reform school where they could get some ‘discipline.’
Ed was horrified at these suggestions about himself coming from his own father. He rebelled at the rejection and its implications. He left the academy to return home or as his biographer Porges puts it, he ran away. George T. wasn’t going to put up with that. He collared Ed and dragged him back to Detroit, told him to stay put or…who can say or what? At any rate crushed and rejected Ed had no choice but to obey, but his mother and father died for him that day, slain by their own hand. Thus when Ed’s literary alter ego Tarzan came into existence in 1912 his parents had been slain by murderous apes and Tarzan was an orphan as Ed imagined himself.
General Charles King, Soldier and Author
Ed stayed at the Academy into 1896 when he was between twenty and twenty-one. He took the Commandant of the Academy, Charles King, as his surrogate father and mother. Because King was a captain in the Army, later a general, Ed decided he wanted to be an Army officer too. It is also noteworthy that King was a successful author of novels which Ed may have wanted to emulate when he too chose to become an author. One of King’s first novels was An Apache Princess while Ed’s first commercial effort was titled A Princess Of Mars.
Ed attempted in vain to win an appointment to West Point but failed. Then in 1896 while serving as an instructor at the Michigan Military Academy Ed foolishly abandoned his post choosing to join the Army as an enlisted man before the school term ended.
By now twenty years old his past with its many personality accretions had formed him. His original personality had been destroyed to be replaced by that caused by John. The accretions accumulated as he was shifted from school to school and West to East to MidWest leaving him dazed and confused while the final accretion of that youthful period was the devastating rejection by his parents all of which left him depressed and fatalistic. The high expectations of his childhood had been completely eliminated. The bright young boy had been transformed into a gloomy young man. But no former personality had disappeared; they all lived on in his unconscious where circumstances could revive any or all at the appropriate moment.
But, one is still alive and one must toddle on. Ed was not lazy or adverse to work. His intellectual interests were vast. He was a great wide ranging reader.
In the next part then, let’s turn to his personality forming accretions from reading and his general intellectual , social and political milieu.
I, Dynamo 