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 Course) and 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)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/sister-morphine.html

(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 Ink, Listen 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

Year Zero ‘A Thing with One Face’ : Prescient Words of the Godfather Who Foresaw the Birth of Winston Smith.

To my mind, in literary terms, there are two epochs that begin with Year Zero. 

The first Year Zero I have mentioned a number of times in these posts – 1888 – defined by Nietzsche’s Umwerthung aller Werthe (Revaluation of All Values).

But rereading the October–December 1944 issue of Penguin New Writing I stumbled on a date whose similarly reduplicative digits reminded me that George Orwell had predicted Year Zero to be almost certainly 1944 for the Revaluation of All Values for a Generation  . . . for the citation refer to Chapter One of Nineteen Eighty-Four and Winston’s first entry in his diary . . . 

April 4th, 1984.                                                                                                     He [Winston Smith] sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. It must be round about that date, since he was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

So for Winston, the Epoch of The Last Man in Europe (being the dystopian novel’s original title) commenced no earlier than 1944.

How prescient, then, of Louis MacNeice to publish his Prayer before birth in that same year (in Penguin New Writing four years before the drafting of Nineteen Eighty-Four), almost you would think as a godfatherly charm against O’Brien’s vision of totalitarian tyranny : ‘If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face – for ever.’

The precursors of Winston’s future plight in Big Brother’s dystopia are truly remarkable . . . the threats to ‘freeze my humanity . . . . dragoon me into a lethal automaton’ . . . rats, truth drugs, and the ‘wise lies’ of propaganda . . .   and the lure of the elusive pastures of the Golden Country . . . and the menacing Man Who Thinks He is God . . .  

Prayer before birth

                             I am not yet born ; O hear me.
                             Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the
                                   club-footed ghoul come near me.

                             I am not yet born ; console me.
                             I fear that the human race may with tall walls wall me,
                                   with strong drugs dope me, with wise lies lure me,
                                         on black racks rack me, in blood-baths roll me.

                             I am not yet born ; provide me
                             With water to dandle me, grass to grow for me, trees to talk
                                   to me, sky to sing to me, birds and a white light
                                          in the back of my mind to guide me.

                             I am not yet born ; forgive me
                             For the sins that in me the world shall commit, my words
                                  when they speak me, my thoughts when they think me,
                                        my treason engendered by traitors beyond me,
                                             my life when they murder by means of my
                                                   hands, my death when they live me.

                             I am not yet born ; rehearse me
                             In the parts I must play and the cues I must take when
                                  old men lecture me, bureaucrats hector me, mountains
                                       frown at me, lovers laugh at me, the white
                                             waves call me to folly and the desert calls
                                                  me to doom and the beggar refuses
                                                         my gift and my children curse me.

                             I am not yet born ; O hear me,
                             Let not the man who is beast or who thinks he is God
                                   come near me.

                             I am not yet born ; O fill me
                             With strength against those who would freeze my
                                   humanity, would dragoon me into a lethal automaton,
                                        would make me a cog in a machine, a thing with
                                              one face, a thing, and against all those
                                                   who would dissipate my entirety, would
                                                          blow me like thistledown hither and
                                                               thither or hither and thither
                                                                   like water held in the
                                                                         hands would spill me.

                             Let them not make me a stone and let them not spill me.
                             Otherwise kill me. 

    Louis MacNeice                             
(1944)                             

Let them not spill me.
Otherwise kill me.

            

                

Finishing School for Versifiers, part 4: Acerbic censure (from the Saloon Bar) of that low brow poetic persona.

Well. I don’t know. More than four decades on and a voice from the Saloon Bar censures in one breath a generation of British poets for ingratiating themselves with their readers by presuming to adopt the persona of an habitué of the Public Bar.

So, in the Public Bar you’ll find Dannie Abse, Al Alvarez, Jack Clemo, Tony Harrison, Ted Hughes, Laurie Lee, Jeff Nuttall, Ken Smith . . . Oh, and who’s that on the coveted stool nearest to the fire? Why, Stevie Smith.

WH Auden and Stevie Smith together
in an Edinburgh pub during the 1965 International Festival.

Nomen est omen.

Who has ordained this class divide? 

Take a look at The Carnal Island by poet Roy Fuller, a novel published in 1970 that records subtly shaded literary exchanges between a young poet, James, and his idol, Daniel House, a celebrated WWI poet in his declining years whose animus towards his younger rivals soon becomes apparent during a probing interview . . . when Daniel explains his belief in nomen est omen . . .  

‘John House is a more plausible name for an English poet than Daniel House. I couldn’t have thought so in 1917 or whenever it was. Or perhaps I had the idea that a poetic reputation might damage my name as a barrister. Then when they asked me about it before painting my name at the entrance to chambers, I said, “Put J. D. House”. It never struck me that I could have published under that cognomen. But later on two initials became very fashionable. Perhaps thought to be businesslike, even proletarian. These days poets call themselves Chris and Sid. Daft. Can you imagine a poet of my age called Chris? But I shouldn’t say that. Perhaps in your poetic persona you’re “Jim Ross”.’                                  ‘Absolutely not.’                                                                                                ‘Very wise.’

From my files I’ve unearthed this photo . . . can you spot the odd man out?

Forename good, two initials bad?

Three haikus in homage to John Clare.

Skylarks but no sky.

The river hems the dawn mist,

a canvas unworked.

Children roam in masks.

In the shop window a sign,
which reads: MIRRORS MADE.

Seeing two blackbirds,

he was reminded to buff
up his Sunday boots.

Finishing School for Versifiers (part 3) In the bleak midwinter.

Listening once more – as is traditional with us – to the Festival of Nine Lessons and Carols broadcast on Christmas Eve from King’s College, Cambridge, I was forcibly struck by the bathos of the penultimate line of Christina Rossetti’s celebrated verse, In the bleak midwinter.

It was a jolt.

Christina Rossetti (1830-1894) 
English poet, in a chalk drawing by her brother, 
Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1866.

Principally, I am disturbed by the rôle of the Wise Men and the ‘part’ they play in the drama of the nativity, which for Christina Rossetti remains unstated other than that their presence at the stable was requested only to poorly serve the demands of her rhyme.

                                  If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part*;

Agreed, the effect of utter simplicity in choice of imagery makes this poem a favourite of children, yet, all the same, I genuinely believe our inner child feels seriously let down by the poetess’s failure to tell us what a Wise Man actually does.  I mean, of course, that the poetess’s explanation, so far as it goes, is entirely self-referential . . . like that wretched new secular Girl Guides Pledge, which instead of exacting from the novitiate the promise to ‘do my best, to love my God,’ the oath now asks no more than ‘I will do my best to be true to myself and develop my beliefs . . .’

No. I think rather more pastoral direction is due in Christina Rossetti’s peroratory exhortation to the poor that they should bring before the Christ Child their gift of Belief, when her Wise Men seem to be entirely content with poetical circumlocutions.


Penultimate Line Re-evaluated in Accordance with Christian Equitability. 

[ The entire poem, intact, save for the re-evaluated penultimate line . . . ]

                                  In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
                                  Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
                                  Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
                                  In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

                                  Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
                                  Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
                                  In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
                                  The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

                                  Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
                                  Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
                                  Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
                                  The ox and ass and camel which adore.

                                  Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
                                  Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
                                  But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
                                  Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

                                  What can I give Him, poor as I am?                       
                                  If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
                                  If I were a Wise Man, I would faith impart;
                                  Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

HRH Princess Margaret
President of the Girl Guide Movement
1965-2002 

 

*Note also: Simon and Garfunkel ‘I will comfort you / I'll take your part’ (Bridge Over Troubled Water).  

See also Re-evaluated Elizabeth Bishop:

Finishing School for Versifiers (part 1)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2012/03/catechisms-and-cliche-fatuous-minds.html

Finishing School for Versifiers (part 2)

http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2014/12/no-poetic-makeweights-thank-you-pastry.html
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 4)
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/02/finishing-school-for-versifiers-part-4.html
Finishing School for Versifiers (part 5)
https://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.com/2017/03/did-someone-call-for-recitation.html

The Ballad of the Needlemen

A Street Song of the Chartists, from June 1887,

the month of Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee.

Alton Locke, Tailor & Poet (1850) by Charles Kingsley,
a novel descriptive of the Chartist Movement and notable
for its indictment of ‘sweating practices’ in the tailoring trade. 

                It was a fine May morning when the Queen called all her Men: 
                ‘The Empress of the Sea and Shore bids ev’ry Warrior 
                To muster in your finery. Hurray my Jubilee!’ 
                ‘Gad! Fetch my bloody tailor!’ roared General Slaughtermore.

                So summoned from his Sweatshop lair the Tailor in despair
                Knocked, cap in hand, upon the Door where Fate held much in store.
                ‘Here mend my Scarlet Jacket for my best dress Uniform!
                ‘Be quick about it, damn you,’ swore General Slaughtermore.

                ‘But Debt there is, no small amount, you owe on your account,’
                The Poor Man begged his senior, who yelled, ‘I’ll have no more
                Of your impertinence! Be gone! And sweat ’til Tunic’s done
                Lest your Milords put to the Sword the Lower Order Hordes!’

                And so, dismayed, with Jacket frayed, the Tailor sped unpaid
                To Cellar floor where he deplored the Laws that scorn the Poor,
                ‘By Rogues we’re led to bow unfed to Queen, denied our Bread!
                Comrades, abhor this Man of Straw, General Slaughtermore!

                ‘My Lads, our Purse,’ the Tailor cursed, ‘is empty and, what’s worse,
                Our Plight’s ignored and set as naught; none spares a second thought
                For men as pale as Tailor’s Chalk that are by Hunger stalked,
                Who suffer Fraud so splendour gauds General Slaughtermore!’

                Such men must thence seek recompense. Denied their daily pence,
                They barter tawdry Rags well-worn with Shylock Usurers
                For Farthings paid to stay the Pain of Starving that’s profaned 
                By Evil’s most Outrageous Cause: General Slaughtermore!

                So through the Night, by Candlelight, they sewed, their Faces White
                With Morbid Thoughts of Cholera that no man should endure,
                Until the Dawn, their souls in pawn, they paused with fingers torn
                To ask wherefore was Squalor borne to vaunt Lord Slaughtermore?

                No clothes they had, they sat unclad, for Destiny forbade
                Them fuel and gruel, Fair Dues for All that each man sweated for.
                Among aigrettes and epaulettes, gold frogging and bad debts
                They sat forlorn, their hopes outworn, suborned by Slaughtermore.

                But then a deadly chill there crept into that room unslept,
                ‘Alack! Because a bed of straw is all we have that’s warm,’
                The Tailor said, ‘Let’s make our Bed from Cloth that’s Scarlet Red
                It’s Time we wore the Uniform adorning Slaughtermore!’

                So turn by turn, their Labours spurned, the men slept, for they’d earned
                The right to slumber dressed for Wars far worse than Soldiers fought 
                And so they lay, until a Maid arrived to fetch away 
                The Splendid Mended Uniform of Our Lord Slaughtermore.

Envoi

                In mansion grand, a gay riband was tied by fondest hand
                On hair that gloried the adorèd daughter of Slaughtermore.
                ‘For fun! A game!’ the child exclaimed. ‘The Coat of Papa’s fame,
                I’ll wear with skirts to frighten Nurse astride my rocking horse!’

                Thus Daughter straightway sealed Her Fate. Death Indiscriminate
                Sent Plague marauding Tailors Poor and Infant Eleanor.
                When dreaded Scarlet Fever’s bred in Scarlet Jacket thread
                Whom should we mourn as Maggots gnaw the Slain of Slaughtermore?

A Champion of Sweatshop Workers.

A close relative of mine and an incisive social historian reminds me that 1866 – one hundred and fifty years ago – saw the founding of the Amalgamated Society of Tailors and Tailoresses, and he draws interesting parallels between the reformist campaigns of the Chartist Movement and the polemics that scorch the pages of one of the most popular works of that great Champion of Sweatshop Workers, Charles Kingsley, whose Alton Locke, Tailor & Poet (1850) inspired the foregoing verses. The contemporary cartoon, above, is by the Punch artist, John Leech. 

This Ballad was prompted by the passage from Alton Locke cited below, a novel descriptive of the Chartist Movement with which Kingsley was involved in the 1840s, and notable for its indictment of 'sweating practices' in the tailoring trade. In this novel, Kingsley set out to expose the social injustices suffered by workers in the clothing trade, with the tale told through the trials and tribulations of a young tailor-boy.

The Testimony of a Tailor.

[From Alton Locke.] ‘Men ought to know the condition of those by whose labour they live [for they put on] their backs accursed garments, offered in sacrifice to devils, reeking with the sighs of the starving, tainted—yes, tainted, indeed, for it comes out now that diseases numberless are carried home in these same garments from the miserable abodes where they are made. Evidence to this effect was given in 1844; but Mammon was too busy to attend to it. These wretched creatures, when they have pawned their own clothes and bedding, will use as substitutes the very garments they are making. So Lord —’s coat has been seen covering a group of children blotched with small-pox. The Rev. — finds himself suddenly unpresentable from a cutaneous disease, which it is not polite to mention on the south of Tweed, little dreaming that the shivering dirty being who made his coat has been sitting with his arms in the sleeves for warmth while he stitched at the tails. The charming Miss — is swept off by Typhus or Scarlatina, and her parents talk about “God’s heavy judgment and visitation”—had they tracked the girl’s new riding-habit back to the stifling undrained hovel where it served as a blanket to the fever-stricken slopworker, they would have seen why God had visited them, seen that His judgments are true judgments, and give His plain opinion of the system which “speaketh good of the covetous whom God abhorreth”—a system, to use the words of the “Morning Chronicle’s” correspondent, “unheard of and unparalleled in the history of any country—a scheme so deeply laid for the introduction and supply of under-paid labour to the market, that it is impossible for the working man not to sink and be degraded by it into the lowest depths of wretchedness and infamy—a system which is steadily and gradually increasing, and sucking more and more victims out of the honourable trade, who are really intelligent artizans, living in comparative comfort and civilization, into the dishonourable or sweating trade in which the slopworkers are generally almost brutified by their incessant toil, wretched pay, miserable food, and filthy homes.”

Sartor Resartus . . . Thomas Paine, ‘the Rebellious Needleman’.

The use of the term ‘needleman’ (for tailor) attracted the notice of Thomas Carlyle whose 1836 novel, Sartor Resartus (meaning ‘the tailor re-tailored’), is supposedly an oblique nod to republican Thomas Paine, author of the Rights of Man, the revolutionary Carlyle dubbed ‘the Rebellious Needleman’. Paine was the son of a corset-maker and practiced in stay-making when young.

Elegant variation . . . a too ornamented pronominal substitute?

Ugh. Oh dear. The repetition of ‘Beverage’ . . . a wretched word that, in my view, has currency only in Her Majesty’s Department of Customs and Excise, as in, ‘Eligible articles for Alcoholic Ingredients Relief  [from Excise Duty paid] include beverages with an alcoholic strength not exceeding 1.2% alcohol by volume.’

                                           Elegant variation
                                           noun [ mass noun ]
                                           the stylistic fault of studiedly finding different ways 
                                           to denote the same thing in a piece of writing, 
                                           merely to avoid repetition.

A couple of examples suffice:

Kate [Fansler] had then produced from her carry-on luggage a flask containing Laphroaig (this was long before that delectable malt beverage became a stylish item in the United States) and had offered Patrice, name as yet unknown, a slug.

Sweet Death, Kind Death.

by Amanda Cross (1984) 

She turned, snatched the coffee from his hand and took two long gulps as the steam rising from the beverage misted up the freezing bathroom mirror.

Stasi Child

by David Young (2015)

. . . we are chiefly concerned with what may be called pronominal variation, in which the word avoided is either a noun or its obvious pronoun substitute. The use of pronouns is itself a form of variation, designed to avoid ungainly repetition; and we are only going one step further when, instead of either the original noun or the pronoun, we use some new equivalent. ‘Mr. Gladstone’, for instance, having already become ‘he’, presently appears as ‘that statesman’. Variation of this kind is often necessary in practice; so often, that it should never be admitted except when it is necessary. Many writers of the present day abound in types of variation that are not justified by expediency, and have consequently the air of cheap ornament. 

The King’s English 

H.W. Fowler (1908)