Thursday 8 March 2018

English Manners: the Gentle Art of Jew-Baiting . . . the Holy Terror and His Honour the Judge.

A gulf of ignorance – or more probably the detachment of an inbred disinterest – can go but only a little way towards explaining the seeming heartlessness of English satirists and respected fictionists in their characterisation of Jews as comic victims of ridicule in the first half of the 20th Century, their prejudices imbued, we may assume, with stiff-necked attitudes so often customary in the works of their 19th Century literary masters.

It’s a kind of Pavlovian response that is no better instanced than in this character sketch by the popular English novelist Henry Seton Merriman when exhibiting his deep-dyed hostility to one of his villains (1892).

He was dark of hair with a sallow complexion and a long drooping nose—the nose of Semitic ancestors. A small mouth, and the chin running almost to a point . . . He returned and stood at the table with slightly bowed legs—not the result of much riding, although he wore top-boots and breeches as if of daily habit—but a racial defect handed down like the nasal brand from remote progenitors . . . He knew that he only possessed one thing to risk, namely, his life; and true to his racial instinct, he valued this very highly, looking for an extortionate usury on his stake . . . Here again was the taint of the blood that ran in his veins. The curse had reached him—in addition to the long, sad nose and the bandy legs . . . for a Jew never makes a soldier or a sailor, and they are rarely found in those positions unless great gain is holden up.

The Old Bunch.

Like Anton Chekhov in his early drama, Platonov, even a modern master of sophisticated English prose can fall prey to reflexive prejudices as a product of an atavistic cultural inheritance. 

Consider, then, Evelyn Waugh in whose Vile Bodies (1930) there can be read ‘Dirty yid,’ spoken of a Jew by a struggling actress; indeed, there is also Waugh’s Scoop in which the foreign correspondents arriving in Ishmaelia are described as ‘All the old bunch,’ with the exclusion of just one reporter. Yes, and there’s a highbrow yid . . . but we don’t count him.’

For those who affect the condescending manners of the quintessential Mayfair Man-About-Town we should look no further than The Romantic Lady (1921) by Michael Arlen, a bestselling writer of Armenian origin. There is an offhand back-handed putdown of another émigré class in this character sketch : 

[He] had actively sat as member for __ since he was twenty-six, was now recognised as one of the leaders of the Opposition, and certain, in spite of his youth, of office at the fall of the Liberal ministry. It was after all, so original of him to be so clever and polished and dark and ambitious without being a Jew.
From his writings it’s clear that Michael Arlen cunningly adopted an English class consciousness and xenophobia to negotiate the exclusiveness of London’s high society. And, here, in this passage can be detected a kind of inverted antisemitism, which both praises the virtuosic outsider and condemns him.

Today we can spot this same knee-jerk cultural envy in the long-running cartoon strip in the satirical magazine, Private Eye, which lampoons London’s publishing houses whose founders, in many well known instances, were émigré Jews of exceptional brilliance who’d coupled their names with certain scions of the tweed-jacketed English County Gentry. Thus, Snipcock & Tweed.

The brass plate of Snipcock & Tweed may have slipped over time, but its significations still have a precarious hold on Britain’s collective unconscious . . . and stir half-forgotten guilty impressions from reading certain popular fictions in our youth . . .


Dateline for despatches from the Empire of Xenophobia.
So let’s take a look at these extracts from pages of hazy recall with their concordances to a DATELINE of world events at the time of publication as a sobering counterpoint. As Max Hastings writes in the same vein: 
‘Before the second world war, such [antisemitic] sentiments were commonplace, not least in the “Clubland Hero” thrillers of Buchan, Sapper and Dornford Yates. “Bolshevik Jews” were responsible for many of the villainous conspiracies frustrated by Richard Hannay, Bulldog Drummond and Jonah Mansell, before they gave the culprits a good flogging.’
Let us then begin with a quintessential Edwardian . . . because I intend this modest conspectus of hints and glints and glimpses to end with one.


The Un-Rest Cure.

We begin in the first decade of the 20th Century with Saki (H H Munro). 

           DATELINE 1911: The persecution from recurring outbreaks of 
           pogroms has driven over 2 million Jews to flee the Russian 
           Empire between 1881 and 1910. 

           “To-night is going to be a great night in the history of Christendom,” said Clovis. 
           “We are going to massacre every Jew in the neighbourhood.”
           To massacre the Jews!” said Huddle indignantly. “Do you mean to tell me 
           there’s a general rising against them?”
           No, it’s the Bishop’s own idea. He’s in there arranging all the details now.”
           But—the Bishop is such a tolerant, humane man.”
           “That is precisely what will heighten the effect of his action. The sensation will 
           be enormous.”
           That at least Huddle could believe.
           “He will be hanged!” he exclaimed with conviction.
           A motor is waiting to carry him to the coast, where a steam yacht is in 
           readiness.”
           “But there aren’t thirty Jews in the whole neighbourhood,” protested Huddle, 
           whose brain, under the repeated shocks of the day, was operating with the 
           uncertainty of a telegraph wire during earthquake disturbances.
           “We have twenty-six on our list,” said Clovis, referring to a bundle of notes. 
           “We shall be able to deal with them all the more thoroughly.” 
                                                                                                              [ The Unrest-Cure, 1911.]

Before they’re sorted out ...

Here, as we advance into the 1930s, ‘well-bred’ snobbery blends with not-so-subtle racial antipathy signalled by biblical allusion to the condemned and redeemed.

           DATELINE 1933: The Nazi Party assumes control of the German
           state and the SS establishes the Dachau concentration camp.
I put up at . . . a second-rate hole [in Paris] . . . It had two distinct clienteles . . . there was a sprinkling of English honeymooners . . . balanced by an equally large sprinkling of doubtful Semites; altogether a very well-proportioned mixture of sheeps and goats—like Judgement Day, you know, only before they’re sorted out.
[Risk by Margery Sharp, 1933.                  
From The Strand Magazine .]                 


They make everyone do jus’ what they like 
an’ send them to prison if they don’t.
Yes, the insular British can be blinkered to the point of ostrich-like self-deception, but what is difficult to accept, however, is the cold reality of an extraordinarily casual dismissal of human suffering by that favourite English schoolboy mischief-maker, William Brown, created by Richmal Crompton.

           DATELINE 1935: The antisemitic Nuremberg Laws for the Protection 
           of German Blood and German Honour are passed in Nazi Germany 
           by the Reichstag; together with the Reich Citizenship Law, which 
           declares that only those of German or related blood are eligible 
           to be Reich citizens.
‘What did you say they were called?’ said William.                       ‘Nasties,’ replied Henry, who as usual was the fount of information on the subject.                                                                 ‘They can't be called nasties,’ said William. ‘No one would call themselves a name like that. That mus’ be what people call them that don’t like them.’                                                          ‘No, it’s their real name,’ persisted Henry. ‘They really are called nasties. Nasty means something quite different in Germany.’                                                                                                ‘Don’t be silly,’ said William. ‘Nasty couldn't mean anything but nasty anywhere. What do they do?’                           ‘They rule all the country,’ said Henry, ‘an’ make everyone do jus’ what they like an’ send them to prison if they don’t.’                                                                                              ‘I’d be one of them if I was in that country,’ said William, ‘but I bet I’d find a better name than nasty.’                                    ‘I tell you nasty means somethin’ else in Germany,’ said Henry.                                                                                                      ‘Well, why can’t they say somethin’ else instead of nasty then?’ demanded William. ‘Haven’t they got any sense? What else do they do?’
                                                                                            [ William and the Nasties, 1935.]



‘The Effects from Transfusion of Jewish Blood.’

From the 1937 Year Book of a British Commercial College (Secretarial Shorthand and Typing), this ‘Joke’ is recorded ‘A man after a serious operation had to undergo a blood-transfusion, and the blood was given by a Jew, who was presented with £10. A few months later it became again essential for another transfusion and, after the sacrifice by the same donor, the man rewarded him with £5. Unfortunately, bad luck fell his way again and the same procedure took place, but this time the donor received nothing!’

            DATELINE 1937: Under the Reich, plans are laid to ban Jewish 
            doctors from treating non-Jewish patients, a ban effective in 
            July of the following year.

 

‘I must say we could do with a bit of Hitler here . . .’

That an Oxford Professor of Poetry, Cecil Day Lewis, could conceive in 1938, even as caricature, the callous views in the passage quoted, below, is all the more remarkable from the lover of a distinguished woman of Jewish lineage, Rosamond Lehmann, his mistress of a nine-year affair.

            DATELINE 1938: Exclusion of Jews by a new German decree closes 
            all Jewish-owned businesses. In desperation, Jewish parents send 
            their unaccompanied children abroad to escape Nazi persecution.
            The first Kindertransport arrives in Great Britain.

            A film executive introduces the novel’s protagonist to a starlet who complains
            of Weinberg, a producer, and takes to task one of Weinberg’s sidekicks, another
            imputed Jew who’s made advances to her. She protests all in a rush: 
‘I keep on telling Weinberg he must ring up the Embassy and have the man deported the country’s not big enough to hold both of us either he goes or I but of course all these Jews are in league I must say we could do with a bit of Hitler here though I do rather bar rubber truncheons and sterilisation . . .’
                                                                       [The Beast Must Die by Cecil Day Lewis 
                                                                                    writing as Nicholas Blake, 1938.]


‘A sub-Aryan called Cohen.’

And what are we to make of this unthinking character sketch in 1939 from a master practitioner from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Cyril Hare, once appointed to the office of the Director of Public Prosecutions before he was made a county court judge.

            DATELINE 1939: Germany’s occupation of Czechoslovakia begins.
            Germany invades Poland.  Persecution of Jews in Poland and     
            Czechoslovakia; all Jews in Nazi controlled territory forced to wear 
            the yellow star.
‘There’s no such person – in the office of Vanning, Waldron and Smith, anyway.’                                                                                                                            ‘How do you know?’                                                                                                  ‘I looked them up in the official list . . . I checked up on accountants as well. And there wasn’t a Vanning . . . Not a solitary one. So far as this crowd goes, the partners now are Waldron, Smith and a sub-Aryan called Cohen . . . ’
                                                                                        [Suicide Excepted, p.154. 1939.
                                                                                                                       by Cyril Hare,       
                                                                                    Judge Gordon Clark, 1900-1958]  

‘A modern Jewish colony provokes an outburst . . .’

A feted writer of children’s fiction, John Verney, an old-Etonian (see Harold Macmillan below) reveals in 1940, in letters home from Israel, residual prejudices from his schooldays. It is true that at that time, in the early days of WW2, this young English soldier would not have been deeply aware of the Shoah whose full horror was to be uncovered by Allied combatants in the latter days of the war.

            DATELINE 1940: In May, SS command establishes the Auschwitz 
            concentration camp (Auschwitz I) outside the Polish city of 
            Oswiecim, located in German-annexed Upper Silesia. 
            In November, German authorities order the Warsaw ghetto to 
            be sealed, confining more than 350,000 Jews (about 30 percent 
            of the city's population) in an area of about 1.3 square miles, 
A wounded dog bites any hand however friendly and to bite at something, at everything, became for me too often the means of relieving my feelings. A few weeks later the contrast between my own state and the sight of happy civilians leading a normal life in a modern Jewish colony provoked the following outburst:                                                                                 “The spring is fully upon us in a blaze of sunny days and sprouting grasses. The red mud everywhere has turned to green, the birds sing as never before, the anemones grow out of the concrete and the young repulsive Jewish male casts a furtive suggestive look at the young repulsive Jewish female as they walk together beside the plough.”                     In the mood I was then in, I am sure I would have written the same words had I found myself in Scotland instead of in Israel. 
                                                                    [Going to the Wars by John Verney 1955]
                                                                                   
Harold MacMillan, 
1st Earl of Stockton 
Eton (1906–10)


Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose . . .  
and so to the UK in the 1980s . . .   
to recall an Edwardian Etonian’s celebrated bon mot.  

[A telling extract from You can take the boy out of Eton . . . by Nick Fraser from The Guardian, 2005.]    

There have been a number of Etonian prime ministers, among them William Ewart Gladstone, and, in modern times, AJ Balfour, Anthony Eden, Harold Macmillan and Sir Alec Douglas-Home. More than half the members of AJ Balfour's 1902 cabinet were Etonians, but there were nine in Macmillan’s 1956 government and 11 in Douglas-Home’s.  Neither Ted Heath (cabinet-maker’s son) nor Margaret Thatcher (grocer’s daughter) displayed any conspicuous love for Eton. There were Etonians in Thatcher's first cabinet, but it appears that she didn’t feel easy in their presence. 

In 1983, she sacked four of the most prominent Tory Etonians, prompting Macmillan's snobbish (and anti-semitic) mot about there being more Old Estonians than Old Etonians in the cabinet. 

Last Word from T S Eliot at 5.55pm September 14th 1943, Wigmore Hall, London.

We know with certainty that at teatime, on an autumnal Tuesday in London, T S Eliot spoke these lines from his Gerontion:

            My house is a decayed house,
            And the jew squats on the window sill, the owner,
            Spawned in some estaminet of Antwerp . . .

During the WW2, over 20,000 of the Antwerp’s Jews perished in the Holocaust, rounded up between 1941 and 1942 by the Germans with the collaboration of the local police. 

In his TS Eliot, Anti-semitism and Literary Form Anthony Julius writes: ‘Eliot’s offence lies in his willingness to give offence, in his deployment of anti-semitic language. Eliot’s anti-semitic poetry is very deft . . .  Refusing either to acquiesce in, or to rail at, Eliot’s contempt for Jews, one strives to do justice to the many injustices Eliot does to Jews. This is what adversarial reading allows. It is an alternative to two kinds of silence: the coercive silence of censorship, the passive silence of the submissive reader. It combines resistance with respect.’

Post postscriptum: Cricket averages of consuming interest to Brits.

A British P.o.W. escapee, who was witness to the genocidal purges of the Nazi regime, explains:
“War crime!” sneered McIntosh. “I paid my first visit to Belsen in ’38, Major, when you people back home knew more about Hutton’s centuries than Hitler’s rest-homes for the Jews. Things were much the same then as they were later.”
Richard Pape. Fortune Is My Enemy (1957)           



For German literary antisemitism in 1944, see also

See also my father’s despatch from Paris in 1944



For a tragedy of a native German’s alienation in the face of the NSDAP’s inexorable rise to power incited by antisemitism see also my The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K at the South Bank Poetry Library



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)



Sunday 25 February 2018

Between life and death . . . January 14 1944 . . . Franz Lüdtke’s ‘Ostvisionen’ for Colonisation to the Baltic Coast

I write only the truth . . .

. . . how extraordinary while clearing the family attic, only last week, to find a copy of Goethe’s Faust, published in Leipzig (1920 Insel Verlag), and clearly a souvenir from my father’s duties ithe Psychological Warfare Division of SHAEF (General Eisenhower’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Expeditionary Force) when, during WW2, his rôle was concerned with the military intelligence to be gleaned from the closest scrutiny of captured enemy documents, the specialism of the G-2 Documents Section. 

Am I to believe that it was my father’s own copy, when between its ultra-thin pages I found the 1944 newspaper clipping of the poem you see in my photograph, snipped from the NSDAP’s Völkischer Beobachter?  I don’t think so. 

But I do believe my father retained the cutting as an intimate insight into the psyche of a committed Nazi who, by the precious fragment’s preservation within the covers of Goethe's magnum opus, had – even as the thousand year Reich trembled before the Allies – disclosed evidently his continuing blind allegiance to the romantic völkischen Nationalismus ideology of those demagogues pledged to Führer, Volk und Vaterland.

Oh come on! I hear you protest. Is it possible after seven decades to deduce so much from such meagre clues? I’ll answer in a moment but, first, the poem (according to my own perception of it at the moment it fell into my hands): 

                                       Between life and death

                                       Narrow our path whose hedges
                                       Wreathe destiny and sorrow.
                                       Narrow the highstrung bridges  
                                       That stretch from life to death now.
                                       While other lips were silent,
                                       Eyes spoke with our truer sight,
                                       Our wishes surge ascendent,
                                       Higher, freer in the light.

                                       We stride on hour by hour
                                       Seeking the half-seen footpath,
                                       Yet, from the fields’ young verdure
                                       Sprouts the new sown aftermath.
                                       Destiny? My own? And yours?
                                       Our fate is running like sand.
                                       Life and death a single course
                                       Aloft in the divine hand.

Zwischen Leben und Tod
by Franz Lüdtke

                                       Zwischen Leben und Tod

                                       Schmal unser Weg. Wir pflücken
                                       Kränze aus Glück und Not.
                                       Schmal die wiegenden Brücken
                                       Zwischen Leben und Tod.
                                       Unsere Lippen schweigen,
                                       Nur unser Auge spricht. 
                                       Unsere Wünsche steigen
                                       Höher, freier ins Licht.

                                       Stunde um Stunde schreiten
                                       Wir den helldunklen Pfad –
                                       Aber aus Ackerbreiten
                                       Sprießt die ewige Saat!
                                       Schicksal? Meines? Und deines?
                                       Schicksal verrinnt wie Sand.
                                       Leben und Tod sind eines
                                       In der göttlichen Hand . . . 


A proselytiser for the mystical recovery of a Greater Germany. 

In the divine hand . . .  In der göttlichen Hand . . .  well, the author of this poem, Franz Lüdtke, by these words evokes in my view the statement, some seven years earlier, pronounced by the Reich Minister for Church Affairs, Hanns Kerrl, in 1937: ‘There has now risen a new authority as to what Christ and Christianity is. This new authority is Adolph Hitler.’

Consider, then, the nature of Franz Lüdtke as an NSDAP propagandist, a passionate proselytiser for the mystical recovery of a Greater Germany that would see the Nazi ideology of Lebensraum realised by territorial expansion eastwards, absorbing Poland and encompassing the eastern borderlands that ran from the Baltic states to Transylvania and the Black Sea.

Consider Lüdtke’s Eastward-visionariness – his Ostvisionen – his conviction, as chief of the Foreign Policy Department of the Nazi party, that Ostlande could be recovered from Slavic thraldom for Großdeutschland by the Reich’s triumphant Eastern colonisation.

The significance of the marginal notations in Faust on page 201 by our unknown Nazi Goethephile should then become clear . . . for it is between pages 200 and 201 that Lüdtke’s valedictory poem was pressed by his devotee.


I want to build a thousand bridges.

For, as I removed the cutting of Zwischen Leben und Tod, I read beneath it Goethe’s text, the words of Mephistopheles addressed to Faust, singled out by a jagged pencilled bracket:

                                       Ich wollt indes wohl tausend Brücken bauen.
                                       Nicht Kunst und Wissenschaft allein . . .

                                       I want to build a thousand bridges.
                                       Not by art and science alone . . .

Is there not a mystical connexion intended here by the unknown German reader? Does not the reader of both Lüdtke and Goethe – precariously keeping the faith on January 14 1944, the very day the Wehrmacht are routed and their retreat from Leningrad begins – still believe that the Reich of a Thousand Bridges can yet endure, even though the path to victory crosses a measureless abyss in a treacherous murk – helldunklen – half-lit by enemy tracer fire. 

Notwithstanding this initial interpretation, I yet believe the mood of the poem is suggestive of an almost heretical admission by Lüdtke of leaderlessness insofar as destiny's path is half-seen.


An insinuendo . . . the lisping English reviled.

Further pencilled scribblings identified in Faust yield more of the unknown disciple’s steadfast völkisch-nationalistisch rationale; a rationale moreover coloured by the cultural refinement of Anglophobia and state instituted antisemitism. 

Page 166, for instance, has a marginal checkmark beside a text that leads to the mocking Goethean aphorism . . .

                                       So bringt der West den Schwarm . . .

                                      Und . . . [Sie] lispeln englisch,  wenn sie lügen.

. . . a double meaning that could suggest unholy fiends are set to bring a swarm of evil forces from the West and that they lisp like English when they lie.

Hence one speculates to propose that these characteristic marginal checkmarks against the ‘Swarm of Lisping English’ are pencilled there to draw attention to further significances for the German reader of 1944 . . . namely, the afflicted tongue of Moses, an archetypal speech defect that would doubtless resonate as a redoubled insinuendo . . . the lisp slander . . .  the sly variant of the gross blood libel that impugns Die Juden who allegedly rule England (see Juden beherrschen England, Nordland-Berlin, 1939, below), a revival a millenias-old shibboleth over which Nazified anti-semites could gloat.

A volume from my father’s collection of antisemitic propaganda brought back
from WW2 service overseas and, judging from the over-stamping on the
cover, this 1939 copy of Juden beherrschen England (‘Jews rule England’) was

an exhibit from a mission by T-Force, an operational arm of Twelfth Army
Group, possibly seized by them as evidence in indictments against war
criminals during the Nuremberg Trials at which my father was an
interpreter for interrogations.


Verso . . . the newspaper cutting.

I cannot refrain from adding a footnote

I write only the truth . . .

On the reverse of the Lüdtke poem cutting is a sneering dispatch from Ankara, dated the previous day, referring to the November 1943 Cairo Conference at which Roosevelt, Churchill and Tschiangkaischek determined the Allied position against Japan and the future of postwar Asia. The propagandist’s despatch begins: ‘The Germans must have tremendous power if the Allied military authorities, out of concern for the safety of Roosevelt and Churchill, found it necessary to make their meeting place a veritable fortress.’ 

There is a perverse irony, perhaps, in that usage of ‘Fortress’ when you consider that following defeat in the Desert war, in the very month of the Cairo Conference (November 1943), the Desert Fox, Field Marshall Rommel, his life shortly to end on the orders of Hitler, was appointed commander of Fortress Europe .

See also http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2018/05/scene-glimpsed-by-nietzsche-from-his.html


See also http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/rates-of-exchange-ici-francais.html



For a tragedy of a native German’s alienation in the face of the NSDAP’s inexorable rise to power incited by antisemitism see also my The Eleven Surviving Works of L v. K at the South Bank Poetry Library
http://poetrymagazines.org.uk/magazine/recordbfb6.html?id=9440



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)

Sunday 3 December 2017

Verifiable Proof of Englishness: my Citizenship ‘Associative Reaction’ Test Probes an Allusive Incomplete V.R.

As a Sussex-bred child, I’m sure I never imagined that – when we used to walk along the Weald ridgeway from the little village of Streat, past Plumpton Racecourse, to East Chiltington churchyard – I’d be entering a future where memories of that splendid grandstand view of the South Downs would prompt sombre ruminations on the values of cultural identity.

As it was, any apprehensions of today’s polarising debates on what it means to be English I’m sure were far from my mind because what entranced me most was the thought that the massive sylvan hanger that clung to the escarpment above Streat was the very embodiment of the Victorian mystery fiction I nightly devoured, thanks to a number of my grandfather’s bound volumes of the Strand Magazine I had made my own.

Explain? The massive ‘V’ on the Downs above Streat was planted in 1887 to mark Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. Composed of Scotch pine, spruce, larch, beech, sycamore and lime, this living monument to a queen regnant raised by a loyal yeoman farmer required 3060 plants at a cost of 12 pounds, 10 shillings and four pence, not including 38 pounds for labour. The outside measurement of each arm is 165 yards in length.  The width of each arm is 22 yards – that time-honoured distance, the twentieth of a quarter of a mile, the length of a cricket pitch (Sussex is the birthplace of adult cricket, cited in the early 1600s). The ‘V’ is one of the most loved landmarks within the South Downs National Park.

Local legend, I recall, had it that such were the fears of ever mounting expenditure the farmer abandoned his intention to complete the V.R. (Victoria Regina) of his original scheme, and settled for the pure symmetry of a commanding ‘V’, for which a future generation of austere minimalists is profoundly grateful.


Writ large.

It’s easy to guess why I was entranced. The incomplete ‘V’ reminded me of nothing so much as that characteristic passage in the case book of Sherlock Holmes I’d read so eagerly in the Strand Magazine for 1893, published six years after the farmer’s celebrations yet sharing the impulse towards the expression of an unquestioning monarchial devotion writ large with the means closest to hand . . . saplings in the farmer’s case, and in the case of Sherlock Holmes  . . .
  
[Watson deplores Holmes’s marksmanship.] I have always held, too, that pistol practice should be distinctly an open-air pastime; and when Holmes, in one of his queer humours, would sit in an arm-chair with his hair-trigger and a hundred Boxer cartridges, and proceed to adorn the opposite wall with a patriotic V. R. done in bullet-pocks, I felt strongly that neither the atmosphere nor the appearance of our room was improved by it.
The Adventure of the Musgrave Ritual
(The Strand Magazine 1893)


Yet, in my maturity, I begin to wonder whether my loyal citizenship test of Englishness does not require, after all, the further validation of an ‘Enhanced Positive Vetting’*, because I must confess my knee-high view of classic Victorian crime literature is now revealed to me to be simply the fancy of a purblind innocent who, unlike the jingoistic Holmes, hadn’t completely joined up the dots . . . . . .


Toffs as Drifters: Holmes and Raffles in the Strand.

The fog-cloaked London of the Strand Magazine’s crime fiction in the 1890s, as Sherlockians will be aware, harboured both the exploits of the private detective, Holmes, and the escapades of the notorious (yet also jingoistic) Raffles, gentleman thief, the incomparable protagonists created respectively by brothers-in-law Arthur Conan Doyle and E. W. Hornung. Yet, now with 20/20 hindsight, as I have hinted, isn’t it about time we took to task these two fictive toffs for masquerading as members of the Deserving Poor – ‘hansom cab-runners’, to be precise – to thus deny indigent workers their honest wage? 

The flippancy of their offence is all the more egregious when you consider that an unflinching social realist of the same decade, George Gissing, was also a stablemate of these feted authors at the Strand and, by contrast, had an entirely clear-eyed and empathetic view of the penniless drifters who followed cabs. A cab-runner** in those days was regarded as roughly identical with a criminal of the worst sort.  

As to the cold-blooded cynicism of Holmes and Raffles, I invite you to consider these extracts from their adventures in the guise of ‘horsey men out of work’, a subterfuge that exploited the advantages of cabmen as confidants. First, Holmes reveals to Watson his ‘amazing powers in the use of disguises’:   
‘I left the house a little after eight o’clock this morning in the character of a groom out of work. There is a wonderful sympathy and freemasonry among horsey men. Be one of them, and you will know all that there is to know . . . I then lounged down the street . . . and lent the ostlers a hand in rubbing down their horses, and received in exchange tuppence . . . I was still balancing the matter in my mind . . .  when up the lane came a neat little landau . . . It hadn’t pulled up before she [Irene Adler] shot out of the hall door and into it. I only caught a glimpse of her at the moment, but she was a lovely woman, with a face that a man might die for . . . “The Church of St. Monica, John,” she cried, “and half a sovereign if you reach it in twenty minutes.” This was quite too good to lose, Watson. I was just balancing whether I should run for it, or whether I should perch behind her landau when a cab came through the street.’ 
A Scandal in Bohemia
(The Strand 1891) 

A cab-runner in those days was regarded as
roughly identical with a criminal of the worst sort. 

‘Whip behind!’ 

Had Sherlock Holmes perched behind Irene’s landau, we wonder, would a street urchin have cried, ‘Whip behind!’ This, after all, was the customary exposure of free rides by stowaways on horse cabs. In the event, Holmes reverted to toff, flourished half a sovereign, and followed Irene in a cab. 

The rather more athletic A. J. Raffles, on the other hand, demonstrates, an even deeper immersion in the character of a ‘cab follower’, according to faithful sidekick, Bunny Manders:   
‘But surely you get some exercise? ’ I asked; for he was leading me at a good rate through the leafy byways of Campden Hill; and his step was as springy and as light as ever.                                                                                       ‘The best exercise I ever had in my life,’ said Raffles; ‘and you would never live to guess what it is. It’s one of the reasons why I went in for this seedy kit. I follow cabs. Yes, Bunny, I turn out about dusk and meet the expresses at Euston or King’s Cross; that is, of course, I loaf outside and pick my cab, and often run my three or four miles for a bob or less.  And it not only keeps you in the very pink: if you’re good they let you carry the trunks upstairs; and I’ve taken notes from the inside of more than one commodious residence which will come in useful in the autumn.’ 
The Rest Cure
(1905) 


‘V’ for le vice anglais?

A shilling or less!  Well, before you dismiss my notion of a certain blinkered condescension on the part of celebrated toffs playing at charades with the livelihoods of a desperate underclass, please consider the intriguing fact that Oscar Wilde, Conan Doyle and Hornung were close acquaintances, and Wilde was the reviled Accused at the centre of a cause célèbre of a notoriety that saw ‘illiterate boys’ called as witnesses in a trial in which Wilde was prosecuted on charges of gross indecency, mostly procured sexual encounters with young grooms and valets. From the witness-box the court heard the nature of Wilde’s inducements to those ‘illiterate boys’ to share debauches that indulged his taste for ‘feasting with panthers’, reportedly: ‘Bring your friends; they are my friends; I will not enquire too closely whether they come from the stables or the kitchen.’ 

Does the ‘V’ of my meditation on Englishness of this sort, then, stand for le vice anglais?

In fact, the often epigrammatic wit of both Holmes and Raffles is said to be founded by their authors on the quick tongue of Wilde yet, despite this brilliance, the unconscionable exploitation of London’s underclass in the fictions of Conan Doyle and Hornung casts a dismal shadow to remind us how fin-de-siècle decadence can pervade popular literature when a prosperous middle class readership conspires in suspending disbelief. As I have pointed out elsewhere, is not A Study in in Scarlet, 1886 (the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes), a title par excellence for the Decadent Movement, never mind the Whistlerian connotations?

Conversely, George Gissing, writing in his characteristic vein of socio-cultural observation of the poor, owed much, I suspect, to the findings of that guiding spirit of his youth, the social researcher and reformer, Henry Mayhew

So I must conclude that the measure of my Englishness is now most likely reduced to this: In the case of the Holmesian Übermensch versus the Mayhevian Untermenschen whose side do I take?  The Infallible Polymath or the Ruined Boys?


Just to earn a few pence. 

There were 1.2 million poor living in extreme squalor in the London of the 1890s, with malnutrition a scourge condemning nearly 500 of London’s poorest to starve to death in the capital annually . . .  so, when I think of the Baker Street Irregulars, those ragged, hungering, lice-ridden, barefoot street urchins (‘like so many rats’) engaged for a few pence by Holmes as his snitches, I believe I know the answer: 
‘V’ = Vanquished

*For an account of the rigours of ‘Enhanced Positive Vetting’, see A Singular Answer: Memories of an Interview with the Grey Men . . .  
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/a-singular-answer-memories-of-interview.html

**For a character sketch of cab-runners from George Gissing’s socio-cultural perspective, see . . . 
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2016/05/a-theory-of-literary-reincarnation.html




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, 
and Listen Close to Me (2011)





Friday 24 November 2017

Killers Slipping Through the Net: Murder in a Paranoid Nanny State . . . Christina James’s Fair of Face.

It will strike discerning readers of Fair of Face that the central problem confronting the major incident team, in Christina James’s new and totally gripping torn-from-the-front-page thriller of a double murder on a Lincolnshire sink estate, is their resigned surrender to compassion fatigue induced by the conduct of any number of unconscionable dependants of Benefits Britain they encounter within today’s dystopian underclass. 

‘Don’t be nesh,’ a suspect cautions an apparent accomplice who’s reluctant to enter the crime scene but, before this compelling account of seemingly motiveless malignancy is ended, the reader may be sure they too will share the cold dread that comes from uncommon knowledge of macabre and incomprehensible crimes . . . the killing of a sleeping infant and mother, and a mindless family massacre.


‘We cannot see into the mind of another,’ a celebrated Scottish judge once concluded before sentencing the accused to be hanged for an unusually inhuman murder. ‘The springs of action are hidden. Human personality is such a mysterious thing that one person can never enter into the personality of another. All we can do is judge them by their acts and conduct and by surrounding circumstance.’

His bleak summing-up can be taken as almost a formula for the psychological police-procedural crime novel, which as a genre withholds moral judgement and shuns an authorial point of view with no glib answers forthcoming in denouements that very often, far from unknotting the narrative, tighten the mystery with a further series of unexpected twists. In short, if we consider the prime suspect in any superior suspense novel as a notional conflicted ‘analysand’ in an unresolved case of psychotherapy, then the crime novelists who emerge as the most distinguished open-minded documentarians of contemporary anomic murder will be found to be adherents of that student of early psychiatry, Dr Chekhov, a literary social scientist who declared he had no ideology and no convictions yet denied he was an indifferentist.

Specifically, the objective yet compassionate Chekhovian crime novelist adheres to this author’s belief that what is obligatory for the writer ‘is not solving a problem, but stating a problem correctly.’ So . . . when the reader is faced with a vicious crime (described relativistically and not by an omniscient narrator), can one be certain of one’s own moral compass to judge?


Self-deception in a speckled mirror.

Such a novelist is Christina James, whose forensically scrupulous prose in her latest DI Yates novel, Fair of Face, the sixth in her crime thrillers, features a methodology that imitates the split-screen effect of diverse testimonies from both the crime team and their suspects and witnesses, all to some degree the depositions of unreliable narrators who are wanting in self knowledge. Even Detective Inspector Tim Yates is revealed as blinkered to his own bad habit of taking the credit for the successes of his loyal Detective Sergeant, Juliet, his ‘unofficial Girl Friday’ cast in ‘the nice tea lady role’, for whom equally there dawns a recognition of damaging character flaws, ‘I stare at my face in the speckled little mirror that hangs over the sink . . . I’m thirty-five years old and I’ve never understood less what I’m doing with my life.’ Loyal readers recognise that James is an astute anatomist of the dynamics of command.

These character flaws not only impede the investigation but are further exemplified by the blundering actions (‘mealy-mouthed do-gooding’) of a number of do-gooders from the Social Services, whose  prickly demarcation disputes between departments compound a bien pensant bureaucratic correctness that amounts to a virtual paranoia consuming the Nanny State. These passages of the novel are social satire of a high order, as if from the pen of a latter-day Zola to skewer petty officialdom’s buck-passing, which in this case fatally sets in motion the final tragedy. The character sketches of a professional child psychologist are the most acute: ‘She’s wearing a mid-calf dirndl skirt and a broderie anglaise blouse with huge puffed sleeves. Her thick blonde hair has been tied back with a piece of embroidered ribbon. She could pass for a very generously-proportioned Coppélia . . .  with an aggressive brand of altruism.’ 

It is to be this fierce self-deluding altruism of the ‘Responsible Adult’ that hinders the investigative interviewing and blinds the investigators in their race to identify the true criminal intent behind the crime.  

Crucially, the DS, Juliet, protests to the child psychologist: ‘You know I’ll have to interview her again. I’d be grateful if you could let me get through it without interrupting. You can see how important it is . . .’
[Child psychologist] ‘My job is to protect her interests.’ She’s gripping the iron bannister rail. Her knuckles are white. ‘If I think the interview is distressing her too much, or causing her to incriminate herself unfairly, I shall insist that you stop.’

(How vivid! The child psychologist ‘was wearing a floor-length red cotton tartan skirt and a jacket with a nipped-in waist (insofar as it was possible to nip in her waist) in a clashing tartan of purple and blue.’ A note to movie producers (and their costume department): the depth and quality of Fair of Face as a suspense drama is positively filmic, as is the intensely sharp focus on its dramatis personae. And for set designers the mise en scène of the death scene is a marvel of concision. ‘There’s not much furniture in the room besides the double bed and a small old wardrobe with an oval mirror set in the door. Otherwise, just a chair with a rounded back that might have started life in a pub. It’s heaped with clothes.’ Started life in a pub. A Jamesian line that fully expresses the desperate hardscrabble times and familial dysfunctionalism of her Provincial Noir milieu. Feckless ‘on-off fathers who wouldn’t take responsibility for their children.’)

In many ways this mapping of tensions between the individual and a paranoid society reminds one of certain polemical works of fiction by Heinrich Böll, his Brechtian-styled political critiques of governmental dogma and the herd mentality of state functionaries . . . in this instance, a paranoid bureaucracy of exhausted, overworked and often demoralised social workers, a breeding ground, as frequent headlines tell us, for errors to multiply. Certainly James’s austere but muscular prose recalls the calculated intention of Böll’s devastatingly incisive reporting style.

James’s striving for objectivity, with multiple viewpoints, deconstructing events with documentary footage, as it were, brings these societal tensions to life with a naturalism that mirrors the inconclusiveness and mysteriousness of quotidian existence and the violent psychical forces that can be unexpectedly unleashed at an underclass’s Ground Zero. 


Lessons will be learnt?

Mercifully, we do not hear the emollient cliché in this novel so often broadcast after tragedies of the gravity explored in James’s fiction; she, as a social realist disdaining sententiousness, leaves it unsaid. (‘It is better to say not enough than to say too much.’ Chekhov.) In real life, after such failures of the Social Services documented in Fair of Face, we are told that ‘lessons will be learnt’, but James’s ‘mealy-mouthed do-gooder’, in his defence, has this to say:  

‘That’s the problem, isn’t it? Every one of the people you mention was responsible for her physical or mental safety, or her day-to-day care, or some other fragment of her life, but no-one wanted to take on board what she had become.’

In other words, too much altruism makes do-gooders blind. It’s smother love. The Nanny State, in smothering, inadvertently kills. 


Predictive plotting.

Astonishingly, the events of James’s novel all too faithfully mirror certain notorious crimes recorded in the British tabloids (Sussex 1985 and Lincolnshire 2016) in so far as her narrative exhibits a very strange aspect indeed . . . the unexplained manifestation of predictive plotting. How is it, readers are going to ask, how is it that the grim epicentre of James’s crime novel – Spalding in South Lincs – was anticipated as the crime scene for a callow nihilistic murder in 2016 of a mother and child while they slept? Given that the gestation of a complex novel of some 300 pages, one would think, can be no less than eighteen months, never mind its production to publication (October 2017), how were the fictive crimes of Fair of Face foreseen, when the double murderers dubbed the ‘Twilight Killers’ killed in actuality in a remarkably similar manner in Spalding in April 2016? 

They say that you can make your own luck, but – the question remains – can a place make a crime? If this is the case, I would not want to be a denizen of Spalding with Christina James as my bard. Like Chekhov’s world, one enters a dimension of no neat answers.

For a view of the first of Christina James’s crime novels, In the Family (2012), the welcome debut of her Detective Inspector Yates series, see Eisner’s blog-post at:
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2015/07/christina-james-telling-detail-of-her.html

See also, ‘I am a Serial Killer Diarist’ . . . Unremarked Clues to Two Notorious Crime Sprees (John George Haigh and Colin Ireland) . . .


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, 
and Listen Close to Me (2011)