Showing posts with label Espionage. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Espionage. Show all posts

Friday 8 September 2023

Tyro Poets? Eton v Marlborough? (Finishing School for Versifiers, Pt.7.) Juvenilia

Breathes there a man with soul so dead
Who was not, in the Thirties, Red?
                                                               (G. Moor, New Statesmen, 1956.)
 
‘A lyric tongue and jaded Weltanschauung
  should be the glamour of young gentlemen.’ 
                                                           (Catherine Eisner, 2023.)
 
It struck me the other day, just as a sort of prosodic hypothesis, that two tyro poets with brilliant minds – near contemporaries and destined for notoriety in the British press – should surely have composed some specimens of juvenilia showing promise in their 1920s schooldays, since, in each case respectively, their mentors were poets – Edith Sitwell and poet-in-the-making Louis MacNeice.
 
The schoolboys? Brian Howard and Anthony Blunt.
Schools? Eton (BH), Marlborough (AB).
Schoolfriends? Harold Acton (BH), Louis MacNiece (AB).
Poetic milieu? Edith Sitwell (BH), John Betjeman (AB).
Universities? Oxford (BH), Cambridge (AB).

Anthony Blunt                 Brian Howard

In short, two aesthetes of their time – whose schooldays were devoted to the callow pursuit of attitudes – would later demonstrate there was substantially more to their avant-garde posturing than larking about as pasticheurs.

Of course, in all fairness, the early vocation of Blunt, a maths wizard, was never that of a poet yet the sensitivities of a poet were nurtured by his compeer, fellow Marlburian MacNeice, who encouraged him to make this rare attempt, never to be repeated . . .

Specimen extract. (By Blunt, age 17, Marlborough.)

The harsh green outline of the downs
Tight as a bow string
Strikes a discord in the sky.

This edge of the abyss
Is fixed immutable
Beyond the power of time
Or God . . .

By contrast, for young Brian Howard his acute self-awareness and self-deprecation granted powers of shrewd discrimination to a boy, who – at age 13 – could write to his mother that he feared he’d been cursed with a ‘fraudulent imagination’, an opinion at odds with his earliest mentor, Edith Sitwell, who was in awe of his precocity: ‘I see more remarkable talent and promise in your work than of any other poet under twenty . . .’  (with the exception of her brother Sacheverell, she adds, of course). Brian was discovered by Edith when he was sixteen, at which age he records he won the Junior Long Jump at Eton.

Specimen extracts. (By Howard, age 16, Eton.)

. . . the green ocean . . . the green ocean . . . like a towel-horse
painted in half . . . paperbags are significant
of the futility of the kosmos when they bob up and down . . .
yes, dripping, dripping and the sensations of sticking
plaster that won’t come off . . .
it’s Verdi (throttled with light lager) . . . like acrid little chopped
up canary wings, falling down in jerks and bursts and jangles out of
a blue-gilt sky . . . they trip along the long parallels of
dry, biscuity planking . . .

Immortal lines. ‘Four lips make a mouth.’

These imagistic aspirational pseudo-Sitwellian lines composed at Eton are from Brian’s Expression of Sea and Beach from the Pier Buffet and are precursors of his poem in the anthology, Oxford Poetry 1924 (co-edited by Harold Acton), which contains the not so inconsequential biscuity line:

(I wish I was back home in Philadelphia).
Why did the small queens run so hurriedly
just because I play Satie on my musical box
a little furtive music like the rubbing together of biscuits . . . 
 
And, of course, we are not alone in adoring the outré conversational chords of Satie so it is unsurprising that these 1924 poems (dismissed by Brian as ‘that bad derivative thing’) should appeal to Satie-lovers, and were considered ‘immortal lines’ by Betjeman, who cited them as ‘immortal’ for not only the biscuity acoustics of their vers libre music but also for Brian’s sensual phrase, ‘Four lips make a mouth . . .’
 
In my own view, there can be no doubt that Brian Howard, a schoolboy precociously drawn to the ‘Imagist’ vision, exhibited authentic synæsthesia . . . as of a (juvenile) alien Kosmonaut’s first encounter with the phenomena of our planet when assigned to a desperate search for sublime correlatives to match those of Worldlings.

Elementary utilitarianism denies adjectival fripperies.

A plutocratic pursuit by latent Leftists or Paper Marxists?

Of course, essentially, poetry in England at that time was a plutocratic pursuit since only the privately educated elect had the leisure of their privilege to garnish the utilitarian nouns of the People with the choicest of adjectival conceits packed in hampers sent from Fortnum’s. The Proles as poets – if there were such – perforce travelled light, sans adjectival fripperies, denied the luxury of excess baggage by the exigency of their voyaging in steerage.
 
Despite their dedicated posturing as champions of Ars Longa, the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War certainly could be said to have chivvied those two schoolboy pals, Blunt and MacNeice, briefly into becoming more than bystanders in a Rebellium Brevis, during which they both affected to be Communist-leaning sympathisers.
 
An affectation? When Blunt was asked by an interviewer whether he had gone to Spain in 1936 for political reasons, Blunt admitted, ‘I went to see the pictures, dear boy! The Prado is a Mecca for art historians . . . Oh, I was only a paper Marxist!’ Even his companion on that trip, Louis MacNeice, conceded: ‘In the long run a poet must choose between being politically ineffectual and poetically false.’ MacNeice later wrote that he never shared the idealistic impulse of many of his fellow writers and friends to be a Communist, ‘I joined them . . . in their hatred of the status quo.’ It’s true that, recalling Marlborough in their final year, Blunt also confessed his political naivety: ‘Politics was simply a subject never discussed at all, and what happened to be going on at that time in Europe was no concern of ours. Inflation in Germany merely meant that one could get an incredibly cheap holiday!’
 

The First Englishman to Foresee the Nazi Horror.

For Brian Howard, however, whose boyhood in high society was lived uneasily outside the unspoken English Jewish Pale (mid-20th Century, for instance, the ‘No Jews’ policy in many of London’s gentlemen’s clubs was well known), there had been an early introduction at Eton to not-so-subtle degrees of anti-Semitism from his schoolfellows. 

He was allowed no quarter in defence of his family name. ‘How is the Duke of Norfolk today?’ his classmates would taunt. He inveighed against his father – a fashionable art dealer — who, at birth, had presented him ‘. . . with an obviously false and pretentious name – not even adding the slight support of deed of poll.’ Shaped by such an upbringing, then, his precocious awareness of global political events fomenting the persecution of the Jews was matched only by his astonishingly mature assimilation of the most extreme avant-gardist cultural developments of the interwar years. 

And unsurprising, therefore, that the exotic Howard – tormented by doubt as to his Jewish identity – was, according to Erika Mann, ‘. . . probably the first Englishman to recognise the full immensity of the Nazi peril and to foresee, with shuddering horror, what was to come.’

(In 1939, Brian wrote in a poem published in June of Britain’s anguished apprehension under the shadow of the ‘Phoney War’: ‘. . . fingers crack like the prophecy of shooting.’ Indeed, a prophetic line.)

Two years earlier, when a shooting war broke out in Spain, with Nazi Germany taking sides against the Republican government, Brian Howard was to the fore in condemning espousers of the Fascist cause. Paradoxically, he found himself set against the Imagist hero whose ‘unsurpassable technique and poetic vision’ he had venerated in his schooldays. Ezra Pound wrote of the Civil War: ‘Spain is an emotional luxury to a gang of sap-headed dilettantes.’

Brian Howard wrote: ‘A people, nearly half of whom has been denied the opportunity to learn to read, is struggling for bread, liberty and life against the most unscrupulous and reactionary plutocracy left in existence . . . With all my anger and love, I am for the People of Republican Spain.’

Don’t call me comrade.

It is of course wholly simplistic to remind ourselves with 20/20 hindsight that, for the many fervent British anti-Fascists of the Thirties, it took the fatal aberration of a dewy-eyed idealism in the face of merciless dictatorships to finally convince them to ally themselves to Communism as the only acceptable countervailing champion of the People . . . a conversion to be regretted in disillusion soon enough. Moscow show trials and Stalin’s purges would irrevocably change their minds.

In this sense, it’s intriguingly significant that in 1936 W. H. Auden (who never joined the Communist Party despite complex social views apparent in his Thirties political writings) changed ‘Comrades’ to ‘Brothers’ in his poem of 1932, Comrades Who When the Sirens Roar.

Да здравствует сталинская конституция!
Long Live the Stalinist Constitution!

The trajectory of Blunt’s beliefs was to meet that same disillusion. Recruited by the NKVD just before the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War, he was swept up in the groundswell of anti-Fascism that had driven his contemporaries to support the Republican cause. (One’s enemy’s enemies are one’s friends.) Yet, as a young Cambridge don of cold-eyed didacticism, it’s more likely the superior role of ideologue tempted him to a decisive step further to take sides beyond the boundaries of Western Europe and sign up to the Soviet utopian dream, enlisted, however, more as a talent-spotter of Cambridge leftists from among promising undergraduates disposed to be suborned . . . fledgling spies destined for the heart of the British Establishment. 

Blunt at that time (early 1937) played the canniest game of poker insofar as his Russian handlers never permitted him to be a card-carrying member of the Communist Party.

Red propaganda laid on a bit too thick?

(Plus ça change . . . today, UK academics turn a blind eye to the increasing ideological threats posed by Chinese influence implicit in our universities’ acceptance of the ‘soft power’ that defines faculty funding issuing from autocratic strategists in Beijing. Students in fields of research such as advanced materials or quantum mechanics, or artificial intelligence or biotech, are particularly vulnerable to approaches by agents of hostile states.)

And as for High Treason and the betrayal of Britain by pinning his colours to the cause of the Soviet Union, Blunt answered, ‘We did not think of ourselves as working for Russia. We were working for the Comintern.’ Or to put it another way, is this the lofty intellectual’s claim to being an internationalist, to be ranked with Einstein, say, as a citizen of the world?

Incurable nostalgists.

But I digress, so let us quickly return to my modest attempt to correlate the parallel paths taken by a Marlburian Cantabrigian (Blunt) and Etonian Oxonian (Howard) towards our arrival at a cultural sensibility that can satisfy a 21st Century notion of a moralistic poetising aesthete, if such there be. In other words, ‘How does a writer, precipitated into a moral fog, remain forensically honest?’ (The term, ‘forensically honest’ was applied to a contemporary poet in my hearing the other day.)

For the answer, perhaps we should seek our True Oracle and Champion Skewerer of Communism – George Orwell. A dedicated polemicist and, indeed, a collector of polemical pamphlets, Orwell was also an unwitting pasticheur . . .

See Rural Bard or Faltering Palimpsestic Balladeer? https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2019/05/

When Orwell wrote the concluding couplet of an unfinished poem, the refrain must have persisted like an earworm from his days residing in Southwold, Suffolk  . . .

        When good King Edward ruled the land
        And I was a chubby boy.

Imitative (unwittingly?) of a celebrated early nineteenth century Suffolk versifier, Orwell’s poem reveals the incurable nostalgist who hankers for the belle époque certainties of his youth. As his biographer spells out, ‘He was, indeed, a revolutionary in love with the Edwardian era.’  

Can the same be said, then, of  Blunt and Howard, two cultural rebels yet, in reality, both cleaving to dreams of a ‘Golden Country’ (cf. Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four) while seismic political convulsions would somehow leave them unscathed?

See Prescient Words of Godfather Who Foresaw Birth of Winston Smith.  

Did Blunt, who had endangered the lives of one hundred and seventy-five thousand Allied servicemen, by betraying the secret of the D-Day landings to his Soviet masters, truly believe that he would return to a liberated Paris, cultural capital of the world, where the cognoscenti who had survived the Occupation would prostrate themselves at his feet? Indeed, did Blunt believe too that Paris was the eternal pleasure-dome of the fevered imaginings of Germany’s occupying troops, a belief expressed by Ernst Jünger – writer and decorated Wehrmacht captain and uninvited boulevardier of pillaged Parisian streets – in his denigratory observation, ‘One realises that the city was founded on the altar of Venus.’ 

Yes. One suspects Blunt shared the view of the Wehrmacht ‘tourists in uniform’ and, for him, Paris would always remain, as for Jünger, the cerebral sensualist’s first destination for intellectual R & R.

In Search of the Fourth Man by Catherine Eisner was published
in the literary journal, Ambit, issue 193, Summer 2008.
Particular reference is made to the avant-gardist photomonteur,
Helmut Herzfeld, a committed Communist, whose 1938 photo-
montage memorialising the victims of Guernica outstrips 
in its
passion 
the abstruse figurations of fellow-Communist, Picasso.
 

Commie-Tsars . . . Self-Elective Illiterate Minion-Dominions.

But then Blunt had convinced himself that he was serving the Comintern and not the Kremlin, hadn’t he? Never mind that even before the Occupation of Paris in 1940, Stalin had set his mind to ‘arming the people’ of France, with draft instructions from the Comintern to the French Communist Party, dated 11 June, providing for the creation of a ‘popular militia’*. It was proposed that French Communists living in Moscow be sent back to France ‘in order to raise up the people against the bourgeois traitors.’    

Perhaps Blunt, the Francophile and distinguished francophone, truly did believe la France éternelle and her cultural treasures would somehow survive her defeat for cherishment by world citizens under the benign patronage of the Comintern. (A new interpretation, perhaps, of what the Nazis derided as Kulturbolschewismus?)

Is that what Blunt truly wanted? Or had he a liking to be ruled by the Commi-czars of a self-elective illiterate minion-dominion such as the Rumania of Ceaușescu? Orwellian motto: ‘Ignorance is Strength.’

Der neue Wilhelminismus. The Answer?

Englands und Deutschlands akute Nostalgie? The coronation of Charles III earlier this year brought to mind the writings of the conservative monarchist, Friedrich Reck-Malleczewen, an anglophile, whose Diary of a Man in Despair (Tagebuch eines Verzweifelten: Zeugnis einer inneren Emigration) describes the rise from a shabby  ‘Furnished Room’ of ‘The-Man-with-the-Forelock’ and the domination of the Masses by a cabal of Industrialists and suborned generals from the early 1930s to the diarist’s summary execution by pistol shot (Genickschuss) in Dachau in 1945.

He writes: ‘Nationalism: a state of mind in which you do not love your own country as much as you hate somebody else’s.’ 

Reck concluded that to reconcile his own ethos to some semblance of civic rectitude required a return to Wilhelminism (Wilhelminismus) as the guarantee of peace when confronted with revolution of any stripe (Communism or National Socialism). He refers, of course, to Kaiser Wilhelm II, the last German emperor and King of Prussia, forced to abdicate at the end of WWI.

What a pity, then, we have missed our own chance to live under Wilhelminism now Charles III has the throne. Maybe his heir, our Prince William, could remedy this omission as a salve to the troubled American Collective Unconscious. Prince William is, after all, named as America’s most popular public figure ahead of Trump and Zelensky. Perhaps William could assure world peace in the guise of the Count of Nassau, and by assuming this stirring title accorded one of his ancestors, King William III of England, he’ll return to rule the Amerikaanse Hollanders in New York and any other province or state eager to welcome him, as though the events of 1776 had all been a dreadful mistake.

For another patrician anglophile’s social remedy, compare  
the Di Lampedusa Principle  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Di_Lampedusa_strategy 

It’s clear to me that those conflicted nostalgists, Blunt and Howard, would have found this monarchical parlour trick an agreeable expedient, each of them absolved of an overburdened conscience . . . Brian Howard’s guilt that his modest oeuvre had not been truly iconoclastic enough and that he’d be remembered merely as an unfulfilled worldling . . . Anthony Blunt’s guilt that by the rigidity of his ideological posture he had denied the legacy of his nationhood, the gravest of too many broken taboos whose ultimate sanction was a sentence of ignominy. . . to be stripped of his knighthood and removed as an Honorary Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge.  

The icy cerebrality of Blunt’s nature from his earliest undergraduate days can be measured by the occasion when the elite Cambridge debating society, the Apostles, met to vote on the question ‘Must art come from the heart?’ Both Blunt and Wittgenstein voted. Both were Trinity men. Both were mathematicians. One was a philosopher. One would be a spy. Blunt voted ‘No;’ Wittgenstein ‘Yes’. Needless to spell it out. Humanities versus Maths. Thought versus feeling. Blunt’s was the bloodless ideologue’s answer.

Yet, in the end, both Blunt and Howard slipped back – more or less resignedly – into the formalisms of the English culture that had bred them. Ideological Nimbys. Yes, revolution is all very well, but Not In My Back Yard. And looking back, doubtless Brian questioned whether his trail-blazing had truly been so far ahead of the ancien régime.

Brian Howard, a self-confessed failure, would still hold fast to the haughty manner defined by his penchant for classical axiomatic epigrams he’d striven to polish in his undergraduate years. Characteristically, Brian, a cocaine addict and a tuft-hunting colossal snob who toadied up to peers of the realm attending Oxford, had the ironic motto, ‘Put your trust in the Lords’ blazoned on a banner strung across his undergraduate rooms. Where, then, is the spirit of the 1937 barricades and of his championing of the ‘People of the Republic’ in his jaded oft-quoted remark, ‘Anybody over the age of 30 seen in a bus has been a failure in life.’ Did his witticism refer to the thirty-somethings of all Spanish peasantry?

In such a stratified society, did the coteries of Blunt and Howard ever collide? When the Communist ‘recruiter’ of Blunt, his close friend Guy Burgess, escaped to the USSR, a newspaper manhunt was launched, and by the strangest of coincidences, which made world headlines, it was Brian Howard, while partying in Asolo in Italy, who was mistaken for the missing Cambridge spy. One posturing, flamboyant Englishman is much like any other, one supposes, in the eyes of our detractors on the Continent.

And for Blunt in retreat maybe there was escape too; escape into the gentlemanly preoccupations of the quondam don, where could be found the consolations of his last great fixation: the convoluted brilliant mind of mathematician Francesco Borromini, the 17th Century architect of Roman Baroque . . . a fixation directed with ‘maniacal concentration’, we learn.

We can only guess and wonder at the attraction held by those complex Borrominian geometries that are seen to blur sharply-demarcated boundaries through transformational interpenetrations, charged with the power to resolve, say, the intersection of two opposing planes into a miraculously invisible conjunction. 

Mmm . . . yes, we can only guess at why such geometric ambiguities held such an attraction for Blunt.

A compulsion to study a great architect who can neatly resolve two opposing planes at an imperceptible conjunction? 

How emblematic of a man who could with such ease switch ideological hobby horses mid-stream, as it were, and serve simultaneously as a spy for Communist Russia and as a loyal liegeman of HM The Queen. Arise Sir Anthony Blunt, KCVO, knight of the realm and Keeper of the Crown’s Pictures . . . a liegeman who throughout his service during WW2 in MI5 passed over a thousand classified secret documents to his Soviet handlers, arduously memorised or copied under intense pressure and the constant threat of exposure.

For Blunt it was a moral imperative for which he would be harshly judged. It is a dilemma that faces any moralist seeking the strait gate and the single narrow path: How does one remain ‘forensically honest’? (But there is no path though the woods.)

As the Germans say, Du kannst nicht auf zwei Hochzeiten gleichzeitig tanzen. You can’t dance at two weddings at the same time.

Post-modern or Post-ironic Bobos?

Did I almost forget? In my notional prosodic contest between a Marlburian Cantabrigian and Etonian Oxonian, I conclude that Oxford won – thumpingly – by a length at Chiswick Bridge.
 
Today, in our self-referential postmodern world, one wonders whether Anthony Blunt, the Francophile, would have welcomed a France ruled by the cultural Comintern he foresaw. Probably. That’s because postmodernism – for Blunt – would be seen to have achieved the desired bloodless cultural shift by a new army of ideological warriors; warriors led by the cynical propagandising voice of a siren-like La Desapasionada he too would have undoubtedly followed.
 
France has a name for them, as you no doubt know: ‘Bobos’ . . . bourgeois-bohemians who are reactionaries at heart. The postmodernist writer Laurent Binet seems to believe in their creed of Po-Mo Oulipian fatuities. His ineffable unquestioning smugness is astonishing:
‘It is obviously impossible that I—son of a Jewish mother and a Communist father, brought up on the republican values of the most progressive French petite bourgeoisie and immersed through my literary studies in the humanism of Montaigne and the philosophy of the Enlightenment, the Surrealist revolution and the Existentialist worldview—could ever be tempted to “sympathize” with anything to do with Nazism, in any shape or form.’
 HHhH by Laurent Binet, 2013.                   

No. An adherent of Nazism? No. Never. But the French would no more abandon their communistic societal underpinning than they would enter Le Grand Steeple-Chase de Paris without a horse.  

For more Po-Mo Bobo fatuities, see Michael Haneke’s Amour and reflections on the dilatoriness of Paris’s plumbers:  

 

Last word

Or to be fair, should, perhaps, the last word on these thorny questions be that of a KGB officer from the Third Department of the USSR’s Foreign Directorate whose terse verdict on the convolutions of our well-bred disingenuous Cambridge spies was to dismiss them as: ‘Ideological shit.’

So very Oulipian . . . so very self-referential . . . so very
Borrominian those geometries of the mind that are
seen to blur sharply-demarcated boundaries through
transformational interpenetrations, charged with the
power to resolve the intersection of two opposing lines
of thinking into a miraculously ambivalent conjunction.
Oh. Hang on! Orwell had a term for it.
Doublethink: the act of simultaneously accepting
two mutually contradictory meanings as correct.
Doublethink: ‘The Mutability of the Past.’


 
 
The sources for these Oxbridge character studies can found in definitive biographies researched by two remarkable women, with each writer sensitively intuitive and diligently scholarly in tracing every passage of the lives of these extraordinary subjects . . .

Brian Howard: Portrait of a failure (1968) by Marie-Jaqueline Lancaster.
Anthony Blunt: His Lives (2001) by Miranda Carter.

See also a glimpse of the proto-Bright-Young-Thing of the 1920s, here, 
From an Unswept Floor . . .
 
See also another intimate view of Anthony Blunt, here.
Slaves to Seconal: Droguée Antonia/Anthony and the Fourth Man . . . https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html
 
*Afterthought: The success of ‘popular militias’ as an ideology was sustained long ago, of course, by the Gun Lobby of the USA, France’s hallowed friend of Liberty. There’s even a statue devoted to her. See Ellis Island 1902



Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. Within these disciplines Eisner’s fictions seek to explore variant literary forms derived from psychotherapy and criminology to trace the traumas of characters in extremis. Compulsive recurring sub-themes in her narratives examine sibling rivalry, rivalrous cousinhood, pathological imposture, financial chicanery, and the effects of non-familial male pheromones on pubescence, 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
 

See also
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1)
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2)

Friday 17 March 2017

Cold War Paranoia: the Real Thing . . . a Poisoned Brick Thrown from an Upper Window

As you may be aware from my occasional despatches from Stoneburgh Military Academy – the elite alma mater for generations of British Intelligence operatives – I have documented in a number of communiqués the insider’s view of our Applied Behavioural Science and Psychological Operations unit, PsyOps, and its analyses of notable Cold War players of the Great Game.
       Insights, for instance, into the politico-criminalistics of two legendary Cold War subversives, the profiling of MI6 double agent George Blake and the Soviet spy Anthony Blunt, may be read here . . .  
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/06/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-3-religio.html
Cold War grandstanding:
Soviet ballistic missile paraded in Red Square, Moscow.

Lessons learned from ideological grandstanding by Cold War warriors.

Agreed, Stoneburgh’s preoccupations with its established I.n.t.C.l.e.a.r. Intelligence Clearance criteria for the integrity of trainees entering the Service would seem, at first glance, to suggest a narrow academic purview that precludes the wider socio-cultural landscape. 
       That this is not so, you may be sure, is due to the perceptive application of Predictive Investigative Psychology techniques by the IOC (Intelligence Operations Courseand its close observance of the socio-cultural context when examining the lessons the ideological grandstanding by Cold War warriors can teach us.
       As I have shown, in the Blake/Blunt profiling, it is through the behavioural patterns of both active counter-espionage operatives and those rogue agents suborned and bribed by foreign powers, that the fatal inherited weaknesses by which agents can be compromised are exposed . . . for it is in the subject’s childhood – well, particularly in childhood – that extreme ideological beliefs are found to germinate and, with them, ideological paranoia.
Professor Weissener (Stoneburgh Military Academy’s lecturer on politico-criminalistics), June 2015: ‘It is my belief that deeply embedded ideology from a subject’s formative years can be awakened (or, in today’s terms, ‘radicalised’) by the very real hostile intent of enemy powers, so the greatest vigilance must be maintained to identify telltale signs or detect unguarded disclosures.’
       And lest you imagine that Cold War Childhood Paranoia is a state of mind beyond the reach of my empathic identification, may I tell you that, five years after the Cuban Missile Crisis, I was witness to an episode in the New York City borough of Queens that induced in me an authentic prickly sense of doom, revealed to me by a child’s-eye view of imminent annihilation falling from the sky.


‘Kids down the block say they wanna kill all the bad guys.’

In my view, then, those days of Cold War paranoia are not beyond retrieval.
       Which brings me to that day I set out with little Nathan for Corona Park, the day his mother was taken by his father to Mount Sinai hospital for her annual physical. Both second generation Polish-Americans, she was a store detective in the city and his father was the boss of a maintenance crew for Manhattan’s wooden water towers.
       So timid six-year-old Nathan was used to inclining his earnest bespectacled old-man’s face to study the New York skyline; an elevated inquisitiveness came naturally to him.
       ‘Them kids down the block.’ His small hand tightened in my clasp and he nodded in the direction of the apartment house on the corner of our avenue. ‘Real mean kids.’ He pointed to a third floor window and balcony. ‘Say they wanna kill all the bad guys.’
       ‘How’re they going to do that?’ I asked with a smile. (The two boys who lived on the third floor – Lee and Frankie – I knew to be aged seven and nine.) 
       Nathan pointed to the upper window.
       ‘Got stuff up there to be throwed down on the bad guys. Th’other day Frankie says as how he’s gonna fix ’em. The bad guys. Says as how them guys are gonna get throwed down on them eighteen hunnerd poisoned bricks.’


‘Weapons of mass destruction . . . satellites, celestial bodies, outer space.’

It follows, then, that I shall ask a not irrelevant quick question. Have you heard of the 1967 Titicut Follies (directed by Frederick Wiseman and filmed by John Marshall), a documentary masterpiece about the patient-inmates of Bridgewater State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, a Massachusetts Correctional Institution in Bridgewater, MA?
       Yes. A documentary film completed fifty years ago.
       Nineteen Sixty-Seven. A year I have cause to remember.
       1967. Churchill’s state funeral. Coffin borne on gun carriage. Muffled drums.
       1967. Communist China explodes its second atomic bomb.
       1967. The Vietnam War enters its twelfth year.
       1967. U.S. troop levels reach 463,000 with 16,000 combat deaths to date. 
       1967. Chinese shoot down two U.S. fighter-bombers outside Vietnam’s border. 
       1967. Massive pro-war and anti-war demonstrations in New York. 
       1967. The United States and the Soviet Union sign the Treaty on Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. This agreement bans weapons of mass destruction from orbiting satellites, celestial bodies, or outer space.

‘Stockpiling nuclear weapons is like kids with toys.’

Theatre of Cold War Paranoia.

The extended soliloquies of the inmates (some Vietnam vets) in the Bridgewater Hospital exercise yard are Pure Theatre, that is, the Theatre of Cold War Paranoia . . . a crazed exuberance of prophets and the possessed.
       The ex-vet seer Borges (above right) pronounces: 
‘America is a female part of the earthworld and she’s sex crazy. Her sexiness brings on wars like the sperm that is ejected by man; it’s by a woman in her own body. It has the same influence. But this is a gigantic pattern . . . stockpiling nuclear weapons is like kids with toys, they figure they got to start playing with those toys . . . They’re no good. They’re Judases. They’re money-changers. I’ll tell you one thing. Even Pope Paul is not without sin. Believe in him and the cardinals! I say he’s unworthy of being the pope of the world and I announce that the rightful pope is now Archbishop Fulton Sheen and the other one, Cardinal Spellman, so help me God. I, Borges, say so !’
      ‘Stockpiling nuclear weapons is like kids with toys.’ 
      As six-year-old Nathan predicted in the same year: ‘Got stuff up there to be throwed down on the bad guys.’

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)
(where the counterespionage operations of Stoneburgh may be read in Red Coffee)
and Listen Close to Me (2011)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/published-this-autumn-listen-close-to.html 
and A Bad Case (2015)
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/a-bad-case-and-other-adventures-of.html
(In the latter two volumes, Stoneburgh operatives feature in Lovesong in Invisible InkListen Close to Me and Inducement)
see also extracts from the Stoneburgh Files here:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/04/oreville-spy-campus-introduction-to.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/05/stoneburgh-spy-campus-pt-2-turnaround.html
and
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html
and for more insights on 
Anthony Blunt
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2013/10/slaves-to-seconal-droguee.html

Thursday 18 February 2016

Stoneburgh Spy Campus (Part 7): Criminal Psychogeography and Sexual Blackmail.

‘The French say there’s only one good thing to come out of Belgium and that’s the train to Paris.’
There was a ripple of appreciative laughter.
That was the opening salvo launched by Professor Hans-Jürgen Weissener (Stoneburgh Military Academy’s senior lecturer on politico-criminalistics) as I slipped into the lecture theatre with other latecomers and sought an empty seat at the rear of the aisle.
I observed that the lecture was well attended by top brass from Chatham House, supported by Intelligence specialists from associated Defence Staff Colleges and the Royal United Services Institute, who’d wedged in behind our NIGs (New Intake Group); it is a long-standing tradition that the IOC (Intelligence Operations Course) of their first semester kicks off with Weissener’s keynote address.
‘Consider this. Whether it’s Brussels or Liège or Molenbeek, from Zeebrugge to the Ardennes a comatose officialdom is perceived as tolerating a haven for paedophilia and child procuration in high places . . .  in other words – for those initiates new to the arcana of countersubversion operations – this host country, in which Nato and the European Union have each planted their strategic headquarters, grants hostile intelligence services the optimum conditions needful for their ideal hunting grounds productive of subornation and sexual blackmail . . .  specifically, the setting of honey-traps to ensnare corruptible prominent public officials privy to the secrets of the defence of the West.’
The darkened auditorium had grown silent. Inwardly, I registered a twinge of apprehension as I became aware that a decidedly unsavoury topic was to be essayed, which, to my certain knowledge, the professor had not hitherto broached for the IOC curriculum. I feared a challenge from the floor, and suddenly felt compelled to continue recording in my notebook his dark thoughts verbatim.



Necessity has no law.

And, yes, you’re right, I was thereby breaking the Chatham House Rule but, in my view, in this case, Necessitas non habet legem . . .
‘At such a grim prospect, it is our duty to reacquaint ourselves with the fundamentals of the Psychogeography of Espionage . . . because the dedicated agent in search of treachery would be wise to seek out those raffish haunts where the unwary rub shoulders with the demimonde: cafés, cocktail lounges, pubs, night clubs, private members’ drinking dens, shady second-rate hotels, Turkish baths, massage parlours, even the theatre crush bar . . . particularly the crush bar* . . .  since it is precisely at these places the targets of the hostiles are known to be stalked.’


Blackmailers’ tawdry haunts.
 
A safety-light on the dais glinted on the professor’s spectacles so we could not see his eyes.


Sybaritic Temptations on the Cheating Side of Town.

‘And don’t let us pretend we are unaware of the likely characteristics of the person of interest destined for an undercover sting. An embassy aide is invariably the most vulnerable candidate . . . from chargés d’affaires and junior attachés and cipher clerks to diplomatic couriers and the lower levels of office functionary, these are the opposition targets on our watch list – sheltered by the confidentiality of the diplomatic pouch – whose night-time pleasure-grounds secretly harbour the illicit activities that are their undoing.
‘Their own veniality is their downfall – and here’s a strange thing – there is an almost laughable predictability in the manner in which old hands in the diplomatic game will induct a new arrival – in his first foreign posting – with the customary guided tour of notorious fleshpots known for decades to generations of agents as a fledgling’s rite of passage on the Cheating Side of Town.
‘Few lines of enquiry are more fruitful than immersion in such a promising psychogeography, with the additional proviso that inclusion as a professed insider on the guest-lists of exclusive private parties – not to say orgiastic wild parties [nervous laughter] – will advance an agent’s penetration of a target’s private life more than any imposture as an habitué of louche nightspots ever will . . . soused or sober.’
There was a murmur of approval from the ranks. Any suggestion of a bar bill written off on expenses was reason enough for the half-attentive, drill-weary NIGs to snap alert and punch the air.



Party-goers with Outré Predilections.

Professor Weissener paused only to draw breath – and draw water from a carafe – before, undiscomposed, he sped on.
‘But if – as psychogeographers – we are to seek today for typical sites of such sexual predation, to uncover the hidden nexus between hostile agents and the emissaries of political power, then, in all candour, I must direct you to look at those monuments to anonymity built in the interwar years . . . cities-within-cities . . . I speak, of course, of the urban mansion blocks so fashionable in the 1930s – complexes of over one thousand self-contained apartments – built on the scale of ocean-going liners . . . and, like such luxury cruise ships – composed, as they are, of state rooms and steerage – these mammoth blocks of flats continue to afford infinite opportunities for clandestine pleasure-seekers to cross, unnoticed, the class divide and – figuratively speaking – mingle with the upper and the lower decks.’
The professor was now speaking without notes and had evidently hit his stride.
‘Coming nearer to our own day and current target locations I can find no better example than the monolithic Thames-side mansion blocks of London SW1. [Two visiting VIPs muttered with distinct unease.] Actors, playwrights, novelists, journalists, civil servants, peers, members of parliaments, call girls – and, indeed, certain intelligence personnel and nomenklatura from both sides of the Iron Curtain – have made these fortress-like communal dwelling places their home, addresses often known by us to be a magnet for discreet party-goers of more outré predilections, as well as politicians taking lodgings convenient for late-night sittings at Westminster . . . not to mention their convenience for nocturnal assignations involving certain other unnameable late-night recumbent attitudes.’ [Cue ill-repressed sniggers from the young NIGs.]
A brass hat harrumphed, and Colonel Rees-Sholter (director of T-FECS, the Task-Force for European Co-operation and Security) blew his nose with a theatrical flourish that made his displeasure unmistakably known.
‘I have no intention to moralise, but the fact that such places once harboured the traitor Lord Haw-Haw and fascist Oswald Moseley, and boasted as tenants the goodtime girls who precipitated the scandals that brought down Profumo – our Secretary of State for War, no less – is an illustration analogous to the evident threats our security services must confront in continental Europe.’
An eager young cadet raised his hand with the alacrity of a swot.
‘Wasn’t John Vassall – the naval spy, sir, who worked for the Soviets – arrested in that block at Apartment 807?’
‘Lamentably, that is correct, and my regret is intensified by the thought that in the very heart of London’s elite, expertly concealed in a secret drawer, was found not only a Praktina document-copying camera but a subminiature Minox with exposed 35mm cassettes recording over one-hundred-and-seventy classified Admiralty and Nato documents . . . the simple truth being that this clerical grade civil servant, who lived in high style on a modest pay rate while unaccountably possessed of wardrobes of bespoke Savile Row suits and made-to-measure gentleman’s silk shirts, had been sexually compromised by a Soviet provocateur when on the staff – may I remind you – of the Naval Attaché at the British embassy in Moscow. A classic blackmail fit-up of drunken revels with our dupe drugged and stripped and photographed in the naked embraces of homo-eroticists hired by the KGB.’
Another thunderous harrumph from a VIP was a hint with a crowbar that the professor studiously ignored.


London’s Fortress of Anonymity 1938
‘State rooms and steerage.’

Potential for Extortion in Continental Europe. 

‘So,’ Weissener continued grimly, ‘at a time of extraordinary upheaval in continental Europe and the prospect of mass movements of DPs [displaced persons], not unlike the crises of refugees and human trafficking at the close of two world wars, it can be here recorded as a fact of immense significance that such turbulent anarchic conditions are charged with the potential to sustain the unrestrained abuse of power, conditions which could become – if indeed they have not already become – the forcing-ground for child abduction and sex-slave rings and prostitution and extortion on a scale unseen since the first half of the last century.
There is no more insidious peril, in my own view, than that now menacing Europe’s supranational administrative institutions – located in the heartland of Belgium – and there is no more striking exemplification of that perilous state than the continuing historic recurrence of disturbingly characteristic crime scenes that define a unique psychogeography, a gravitational attraction that has warped a culture to contemplate unimaginable acts of sexual depravity, which over time have become symptomatic of a troubled nation . . . a nation tainted by multiple child kidnappings and the rape, torture, incarceration and serial murder of abducted young girls, a scandal of blackmail and sordid cover-ups allegedly implicating officials of the most senior rank at the highest levels of pan-European governance, judiciary and the political class.’
A brooding silence had descended on the gathering and Colonel Rees-Sholter** rose abruptly – his face had darkened, I noticed – and he withdrew hurriedly by the rear exit.


‘. . . attracts them with the prospect of gaudy aperitifs and pastries.’

‘Institutionalised’ Tolerance of the Molestation of Underage Girls.

Professor Weissener, Stoneburgh Academy’s most respected authority on Soviet counter-espionage and subversion, riffled through his notes to the final page.
‘That such all-pervading corruption of the sexually-compromised can be exploited by adversaries hostile to Europe’s democratic rule of law is a demonstrable fact, as my earlier cited cases indicate, but allow me to call your attention to some past occurrences of crime black spots – in this case those crime scenes re-emergent in the city of Liège that may be seen to inform the recurrences in the national psyche I refer to.’
Professor Weissener fixed his eye pointedly on Rees-Sholter’s empty chair and his mouth tightened with a bitter resolve.
‘This is no place to provoke controversy but I intend to do no more than view the facts. Facts that reveal what I would call a civic society’s “institutionalised” tolerance of the molestation of underage girls, dating back almost a century.
‘And may I say I speak on the incontestable authority of a venerated master criminologist, Nobel Prize nominee, and member of Brussels’s Royal Academy of French Language and Literature, who in his recollections of his schooldays writes quite nonchalantly about the seduction of underage schoolgirls in the parish of Saint-Pholien in the Outremeuse district of Liège at the time of the First World War.
‘As a schoolboy, he was acquainted with a sinister matricidal, homicidal second-hand bookseller, ponce and blackmailer, under the protection of the kommandantur of the occupying Germans, who bought school textbooks from the schoolboy for resale to fellow pupils. This bookseller . . .  

. . . used to stop young girls in the street and take them into his shop with its shutters closed . . . I can still hear the hoarse voice of a little girl, the daughter of a fruit and vegetable merchant: ‘You shouldn’t have let it happen!’ [With the response.] ‘He would have denounced me to the Germans . . .’ [At the same time in Liège, a pimp known to this memoirist . . .  while renting] a small pied-à-terre not far from the Girls Middle School, looks out for the pupils at the exit and attracts them with the prospect of gaudy aperitifs and pastries.
‘Later, in the early 1920s, the German mark catastrophically falls, in the “dizzy period” of hyperinflation when, as this informant remembers, “you counted marks in millions and billions.”
‘The exchange rate of the mark and franc meant Belgians crossing the border on the “Swindlers’ trains” to Cologne on wild shopping sprees saw “the prices changed every hour while you shopped . . .”
The memoirist is unjudgemental when he records . . .

And the women! . . . And the lads who looked for you, near the [railway] stations, to introduce you to their little sister! [From this eminent Belgian writer there are no more agonies of exculpation than . . . ] Should we seek an explanation in the times? Are there periods of more intense ferment or moments when unhealthy trends are occurring? . . . It was a time, please remember, when they arrested all the pupils in a secondary school because a little girl was dead, a little girl who had been taken off somewhere by her brother with some boys and used by them all as a source of experiences . . . a time when not a day passed without the suicide of an adolescent . . . . Under the [German] occupation, had the [bookseller] been able to satisfy without fear his passion for not yet pubescent girls?. . . satisfying his libido . . . in the back of the shop . . .  [Under the occupation] they taught us to cheat, swindle and lie . . . they taught us to take advantage of shady corners . . . 
Weissener unfolded a large handkerchief and, as he mopped his brow, surreptitiously wiped a tear from his eye. As I have mentioned in my earlier despatches, the professor was formerly an agent for the German Federal Intelligence Service, and he had once told me his father’s family had lost a fortune in savings in the disastrous crash of devalued currency that followed the First World War.

‘Should we seek an explanation in the times?
Are there periods of more intense ferment . . .’ 

A Little White Slave Trading.

‘So, in my own view,’ the professor’s voice was hoarse with suppressed emotion, ‘the conclusion is irresistible. Morally numbed by the decadence of post-war licentiousness, this Belgian Nobel Prize nominee as a witness to Belgian history is revealed as cooly unjudgemental in his regard for his friend, the pimp. For, as he concedes, the pimp in those amoral times was in the business of “a little white slave trading” and “capable of persuading a sentimental young girl to take a ship for the Americas . . . when all is said and done it’s all horribly banal.” ’
The safety light on the dais began to flicker urgently, and I saw the colonel making a ‘cut-throat’ gesture through the glass panel of the exit door. Weissener grimaced.
‘I am reminded that my allotted time is running away, so I shall hastily “fast forward” to the present day to ask the abrupt question, a question I continue to ask myself: “Is it true that there are, as our Belgian informant reminds us, unhealthy trends persisting that manifest themselves in the locus of a criminal psychogeography?*** And should we map those recurrences as an aid to our operations in counter-subversion?” You, as cautious and practical thinkers, will I am certain pursue the answer to this quandary calmly and dispassionately . . . for the persistence of a collective memory of degenerate criminality is one that warrants the most profound and extended study.

‘And I am uttering no special pleading with the false quantity of a shallow poignancy when I tell you now that, just a decade ago, in Liège, not more than a kilometer away, across the Meuse, from the church of Saint-Pholien – the neighbourhood of our Belgian belle-lettrist’s unprincipled reminiscences of prewar condoned child molestation – the bodies of two young schoolgirls no older than ten were discovered in a storm drain, raped and strangled. 
   ‘Might I add, I have it on good authority that Belgians are rated the worst drivers in Europe. By extension, then, defiance of convention may well come easily to them. (Nervous laughter from the floor.)
‘As I outlined at the beginning of my address, our purpose as psychogeographers and criminal profilers today is to continue to identify and monitor such urban sites of sexual predation and blackmail, to uncover the hidden nexus between hostiles and their potential victims in our pursuance of unconditionally denying predators the least opportunity for the vile exploitation of female sexual subjugation.’

At which point Professor Weissener, clearly keyed up by his distressing subject matter, bowed and sat down to be greeted with a cautious scattering of applause.

Stolen childhoods . . . adult toys from
Au Printemps Jouets 1916

The Stoneburgh Rule.

Only afterwards did I have certain reservations in defying the Stoneburgh Rule of Non-Disclosure with my intention to reproduce those unspoken passages of the professor’s notes that he had earlier asked me, as an NRG (Non Regular Personnel), to study for considerations of conformance to propriety, compassion and good taste.
  On the penultimate page of his lecture notes, he wrote: ‘When you consider that the great-grandfather of the brother-in-law of Her Majesty the present Queen photographed prepubescent schoolgirls covertly in Kensington, catching them unawares with his sly 45-degree camera, and the implications of the legitimacy of his possessing an estimated 30,000 images, some got with dubious motive, I am 
❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚❚ ❚❚❚❚ . . . ’ [Redacted by SMA webmaster.]

For Professor Weissener’s recent increasingly jaundiced views on the political convulsions in continental Europe, see: 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/01/stoneburgh-spy-campus-bar-please-burn.html



STOP-PRESS 28.02.2016 Professor Weissener has just telephoned me with news that London’s Sunday Times has today exposed the BND (Germany’s equivalent of MI6, their Federal Intelligence Service the Bundesnachrichtendienst) for placing one of Britain’s Privy Councillors (and the EU’s former foreign policy chief) under electronic surveillance. ‘Beware,’ Weissener cautions, ‘have a care when you throw out the trash; the snoops are delving into every garbage bin.’

STOP-PRESS 19.09.20
The Times reports Former British Diplomat Accused of Spying in Brussels: Belgium’s State Security Service warned of the threat stemming from foreign powers in the areas of interference and espionage. The report stated that because Belgium was home to both Nato’s headquarters and the EU ‘the scale of the threat is disproportionately big for a small country of barely 30,000 square kilometres and 11.5 million inhabitants.’



* A Bad Case  (2015), page 95, Inducement, see below . . . 
** Sister Morphine (2008), page 219, Red Coffee. A description of an encounter with Rees-Sholter is a candid snapshot: The colonel’s complexion was bibulous. The eyes that met and challenged hers were fierce and violet-blue but, fortunately, he preferred excessively young women so they got straight down to essentials brusquely. See below . . .
*** This reputation as a ‘locus of a criminal psychogeography‘ is actually reaffirmed by a recent Belgian-French ‘Simenonesque’ crime movie set in the environs of Liège, La Fille Inconnue (2016), directed by the Dardenne brothers, in which a Liégeois procures a teenaged girl, trafficked in Liège as a prostitute, to perform fellatio on his elderly father, a resident of a care home. So, evidently, even one hundred years after the events described by our Belgian belle-lettrist, in this particular quarter we sense there is no departure from a long-established pattern of everyday moral degradation.
  
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Catherine Eisner believes passionately in plot-driven suspense fiction, a devotion to literary craft that draws on studies in psychoanalytical criminology and psychoactive pharmacology to explore the dark side of motivation, and ignite plot twists with unexpected outcomes. 
see Eisner’s Sister Morphine (2008)